The Last Cruise

by Kate Christensen

  “Probably not,” said Kimmi doubtfully. “But let me write down the words anyway.”

  chapter six

  Christine came downstairs after her epic nap on the deck chair to find Valerie still sitting at the little table, squinting at her laptop screen through her glasses, typing away. Christine stripped in the tiny bathroom and stood in the weak stream of water in the shower stall, which appeared to have been built for a medium-sized child.

  “You have such a nice body,” Valerie said as Christine came out of the shower and started dressing. “I’d kill for your boobs.”

  Valerie’s breasts were flat little bumps, but her body was lanky and narrow-hipped, the kind most women envied and yearned for. Anyway, she’d never had any difficulty finding boyfriends; she just had trouble staying interested in them for longer than two months.

  “You’re sexy and glamorous,” she told Valerie. “And I’m ordinary and always have been.”

  Valerie was still fixated, a frank and frankly sexless appraisal that made Christine feel like a cow at a state fair. “You have amazing arm muscles. Farming kicks the ass of going to the gym.”

  “Thank you,” said Christine with effort.

  A few minutes later, wearing her dusky rose shantung sheath, bare-legged and bare-armed, and a short string of seed pearls she’d found in a small Williamsburg thrift shop back in the 1990s, plus the strappy gold stilettos she’d worn at her own wedding, Christine climbed the grand staircase and wandered along the ship’s main promenade. Her hair was pinned up with another thrift-store find from her city days, a rhinestone comb sparkling on the back of her head. Her hands, which she’d had manicured in Portland the morning before her flight, looked totally unfamiliar with their well-shaped nails, pinkish gold. Her toenails were a darker shade of the same color, and her feet were weirdly free of calluses.

  She checked out her own reflection in a long beveled mirror hanging in the stairwell. She felt confident, not awkward anymore, thanks in part to Valerie’s compliments, which felt much less intrusive in retrospect. She felt like a woman. Gone were the mud boots, the dog-hair-bedecked jeans, fleece jacket and knit cap, the drab wool scarf that she joked with Ed had molecularly fused with the skin on her neck. Gone were the sloppy, country-girlish ponytail, the ever-present farmer’s smell of sweat, fingernails full of dirt. She had no evening chores, no canvas totes full of wood to bring in from the woodpile, no chickens or ducks or dogs to feed, no dinner to cook, no checklists or orders to look over, no runs next door to Steve and Molly’s farm for a quart of sheep’s milk and a quick hello. Too bad Ed wasn’t here to appreciate this. He loved to tell her in his understated way that she “cleaned up good.”

  Restless at the memory of the farm, she picked up a glass of sparkling something from a passing tray and took a sip: it was excellent, very dry. The long, burnished wood floor of the promenade glowed as the sconces and lights came softly on, and she stopped by one of the enormous windows to look out at the darkening ocean. Live old-style jazz tootled and honked on the warm breeze from somewhere not too far away; it was the kind of jazz she liked, swinging and danceable. She felt her shoulders moving in time, felt her whole body revved up with the heat of sensuality. The booze warmed her chest. She smelled cigarette smoke from somewhere nearby. Champagne fizzed in her nostrils while she moved loosely to the jazz and let the sea air slip around her skin.

  An hour later, Valerie was already waiting for her at the entrance to the fine-dining restaurant. “There you are!” she said. Christine peeked in and saw a long room with a high ceiling, chandeliers, ceiling fans with fat wooden paddles, potted palms, half-moon banquettes. She heard silverware on china, a hum of voices, music from a string quartet across the room, three elderly gentlemen and a lady. “Are you drunk? I hope you’re drunk. You’re fun when you’re drunk.”

  Once again, the irritation of being both scrutinized and appropriated by her friend returned. Christine tried to slough it off. “They’re having a luau in the buffet room, with ukuleles and steel guitar and three girls in leis singing old Hawaiian torch songs. And suckling pigs.”

  “You want to eat there instead? This place just has a geriatric string quartet and the decor is kind of snoozy. The menu looks great, though. They’re serving frigging squab. Pigeon. No joke.”

  “This place looks great,” said Christine as a tall, gray-haired, stiff-backed gentleman in a crisp tuxedo approached to lead them to their table.

  “My name is Sidney, and I will be your maître d’ for this cruise,” he said with a species of British accent. He seated them with thin-lipped formality, pulling their chairs out. “The wine steward will be over immediately.” As he unfolded their napkins for them with ceremonious precision, Christine took hers and draped it over her lap, afraid she was doing it wrong, almost expecting him to correct her. “Enjoy your dinner, ladies.” He bowed slightly from the waist and glided away. Christine was almost certain that she caught a glimmer of self-mocking amusement in his eye as he turned.

  “The staff seem like actors in a play,” she said. “Like Upstairs, Downstairs, that old BBC show my parents watched. Downstairs is like backstage, where they get to be themselves.”

  “A play,” Valerie repeated. “Christine, this isn’t romantic for them.”

  “I know,” said Christine, wondering when Valerie had become so much smarter than she was. They’d been equals once, back when they were younger. Then Christine had gone home to Maine. “I was just babbling. I’m drunk, remember?”

  But in fact, Christine wasn’t at all drunk, and she had no idea why she’d said that. To keep the peace, maybe. To prevent herself from snapping defensively at the friend who’d invited her on this cruise in the first place, to whom she felt uneasily beholden.

  The menus were handwritten in black ink on rectangles of cream-colored stock. In addition to the squab, there were tartare de boeuf, Caesar salad, shrimp cocktail, oysters on the half shell with shallot mignonette, a vegetable Napoleon, and a few other classic dishes. It really was like going back in time. She could have been in a fine-dining restaurant decades ago in Boston, rubbing shoulders with bluebloods and Harvard professors. Her parents had taken her and her sister down a few times to expose them to “polite society,” as they called it, and Christine had loved it.

  The wine steward arrived with an Aussie accent and a thick book full of names of different wines.

  “I’ll have the house white,” said Christine. “As long as it’s not Chardonnay.”

  “House red for me,” said Valerie. “As long as it’s not Merlot. One glass with dinner every night, two if I’m feeling racy. I seriously do not want to lose my shit on this cruise. You know how I love to lose my shit. It just leads to trouble of the sexual kind, and I have no time for that.”

  “Wait, no action the entire time?” Christine said, laughing. “Are you not even checking out the men?”

  “What men? Everyone’s paired up and over sixty. Luckily for us. You’re married to a farmer. And I’m married to my book.”

  When the waiter returned to inquire about the young ladies’ desires for dinner, Valerie ordered the steak tartare and the squab, no starch. Christine eyed the menu for a moment, enjoying the choices, then settled on shrimp cocktail and steak Diane. “I’ll take her starch, too,” she added.

  Valerie snorted. “Farmer,” she said.

  Christine settled back in her cushioned chair, feeling lucky and glamorous. “So what did you learn today at school?”

  Valerie pushed her glasses up her nose and fiddled with her bangs. “I’m trying to figure out the hierarchy,” she said. “It’s going to be hard to penetrate the crew and staff. They’re so separate from us when they’re not working, and passengers are definitely not welcome in their world. And while they are working, they never seem to have time to talk. Also, Cabaret is a really powerful corporation, so they don’t want to say anything that might je
opardize their jobs. I don’t know. I think what I have to do is find out where they hang out on their time off, when we get to Hawaii, and get drunk with them, or pretend to get drunk. That’s the only way I’m ever going to learn anything real. But I have to stay sober. Seriously.”

  A few hours later, Christine found herself on the dance floor in the Starlight Lounge, chaperoning a brazenly tipsy Valerie. While Christine had been drinking steadily and enthusiastically all day, she had eaten well and paced herself and so had managed to keep her wits about her. Valerie, on the other hand, was drunk in the manner of someone who had been determined not to drink and then caved and gave herself over to it with precipitous abandon.

  “You’re too gainfully employed for me,” Christine overheard Valerie saying to the man she was fake-ballroom-dancing with. He was a news photographer by day and video artist by night named Jake who, it turned out, lived three blocks away from Valerie in Brooklyn. He worked for a celebrity news-and-gossip website called PopRocks.com that Christine had never heard of.

  “Hey,” Valerie said into Christine’s ear as she and Jake went waltzing by, “should I go make out with Jake in a lifeboat?”

  Christine was entrapped in the determined arms of Jake’s colleague, Theodore, a serious, slightly pudgy journalist who was “actually a poet.” Christine was only dancing with him because Valerie had accepted for both of them. But Theodore was mistakenly flattered and intrigued, and Christine kept having to maneuver his eager body a safe distance from her own while he crooned along with “Blueberry Hill” into her ear in a not-bad baritone.

  “I don’t care,” said Christine, laughing, but they’d already danced out of earshot.

  “How about you?” Theodore asked. “Do you want to make out?”

  Her wedding ring was apparently invisible to him. “I’m married,” she said.

  “So am I,” said Theodore, pressing himself against her.

  “Oh please,” said Christine, strong-arming him away from her. “Stop it, seriously.”

  When the song ended, Christine went over to Valerie and tapped her on the shoulder. “I’m cutting in,” she told Jake, linking her arm in Valerie’s. “We have to go.”

  Valerie let herself be pulled without protest out of the Starlight Lounge and up to the pool bar at the top of the ship. “Oh my God, Chris,” she said in Christine’s ear. “Thank you.”

  Behind the bar stood a tiny, pale, dark-haired woman. “I am Natalya,” she told them in a flat bored voice, placing napkins in front of them as they seated themselves on two stools in the center of the bar. “I am happy to serve you. What’s your pleasure tonight?”

  “I’m already drunk,” said Valerie. “So I think I’d better take it easy.”

  “Really?” said Christine.

  “Fuck no,” said Valerie. “I’ll have a martini, very dry, stirred, straight up, olives. Let’s do this.”

  Christine laughed. “Make that two.”

  A moment later, with casual flips of her wrists, Natalya set two brimming martini glasses on the napkins in front of them. “Enjoy,” she said in her dead voice.

  “Cheers,” Valerie said, knocking her glass against Christine’s, and licking the booze off her wrist. Christine chewed a big, hard, gin-soaked green olive and looked around at the hanging strings of light, the rustling palm fronds, the surface of the pool, shimmering and rocking. She felt the ship underneath her, light but solid, felt its buoyant forward momentum from the powerful engines firing many stories below. Because of Valerie, she had been thinking all night about the workers who kept the ship running for all the vacationers whose pleasure came at their expense. But she was unable to feel terribly guilty about it at the moment. The olive left a rich, oily, salty film on her tongue that made her instantly crave another one. She took a gulp of the icy martini. It went down her gullet as smooth and hard as liquid glass.

  “Natalya,” said Valerie, a little too loudly.

  “Yes,” said the bartender from the shadows. “Another round?”

  “Not yet,” said Valerie. “I’m wondering if you have time to talk to me about your job. I’m a journalist. I’m writing a book about workers. I’m on this cruise to collect stories from the people who work on this ship. I’m not here for fun.”

  “You look like you are here for fun,” said Natalya. Her tone was insolent. “I am sorry but I have no time for talking.” She had been standing idly, gazing out at nothing, but now she picked up a rag and began to swab the bar top.

  “See?” Valerie murmured to Christine. “They don’t want to talk to me. Oh well. Who can blame them? I wouldn’t want to talk to me either.”

  Christine gave her a little nudge of pretend agreement. They both laughed.

  * * *

  *

  Mick was almost done shaping the sausage patties. Next to him in the cold room, Consuelo was slicing strips of bacon with a long, sharp knife and layering them in a shallow stainless steel pan. Their breath steamed in the air. They had been discussing the night’s weak spots, strengths.

  “Nice job on the sliders,” he said now. “They couldn’t get enough of them.”

  “Thanks, Chef.” He felt her swell with pride. Its warmth filled the space between them. Good. He had systematically beaten her down through the night. Now he had her; she was on board.

  Mick was dying for a cigarette. He only smoked after his shift these days. Consuelo stacked the last neat, thick bacon slice and sealed the pan with plastic and slapped a strip of tape on it and took a Sharpie from her apron pocket and marked it with “Bacon,” her initials, and the date. She stripped off her latex gloves and trashed them while Mick finished the last little meat patty, sealed and marked the pan. His gloves came off; he flexed his fingers, ready to get out of the kitchen and head for the crew lounge to throw himself into a chair, light up, and crack a beer. His crew would work for a few more hours, and the night service crew was just arriving for their shift, but his work was done until 0600 tomorrow morning. He thought ahead, mentally making Hollandaise. He hated fucking brunch. The worst meal ever invented. Including fucking high tea. Forget it. It was a good idea not to think one second beyond that first long, slow, cold, bubbly gulp of beer prickling in his nose, that first inhalation of smoke piquing his lungs.

  Consuelo followed him out of the cold room, expertly dodging the other cooks rushing around, the old kitchen dance. On his way out Mick said his good nights, checked everything again, but there was nothing else for him to say or do tonight; they’d had their post-closing meeting already, the ones who were done, and Paolo was in charge of the night crew, thank God. Mick knew him from other cruises; he was Argentinean, a fruit bat, a prima donna, but a hard worker and solid under his theatrics and tantrums.

  In the locker room, he and Consuelo stripped casually, without looking at each other. Aprons and jackets went into the laundry bin, checked pants followed, clogs and neckerchiefs went into their lockers; then, standing back to back, they silently dressed in jeans and black T-shirts. He slipped on the leather jacket Suzanne had given him and turned around to see Consuelo, identically dressed, in the mirror.

  “Nice outfit,” he said, laughing.

  Consuelo flicked a quick grin at him, already moving on to wherever she was going—a date, judging by the look on her face, shining and expectant, wide awake. She was in her mid-twenties, twenty-seven at the oldest. Mick remembered being that young, only seven or so years ago, but it felt like decades. The endless supply of energy, the boundless anticipation.

  “Buenas, Chef,” she said, and was out.

  In the staff lounge, he went to the bar and ordered a bottle of ice-cold Belgian beer and closed his eyes and shivered as the first chug went down his parched gullet. He was badly dehydrated from his hangover earlier, the stress of this new setup, forgetting to drink water through his shift. He drank again. The beer was almost gone already.


  He knew that smoking was allowed on the Isabella as part of this cruise’s late-’50s retro theme, but Mick wasn’t sure that extended to the crew. He didn’t care at the moment. He fished his pack of cigarettes out of his jacket pocket, tipped one out, stuck it in his mouth, and flicked his lighter.

  There were three distinct groups of people in here, the various mafias converging at the end of their work shifts, none of them Hungarian, as usual. He heard Jamaican-accented English from the crowd nearest the door, Spanish against the wall, and Russian in the corner. He looked around for an empty chair, flopped into the one nearest him, leaned back, and closed his eyes.

  “Hey.”

  It was Consuelo, giving his shoulder a light tap as she moved past. He caught a whiff of her perfume, some spicy combination that smelled like cloves, musk, and a flowery depth, but not sweet, a deeply carnal smell.

  “Hey,” he said back, squinting up at her.

  She kept moving past him, lithe and focused as a fillet knife. He watched as she went over to the Spanish-speaking contingent and thrust herself into their midst, then he reminded himself that she worked on his station, and he was her boss, and he shut his eyes again.

  The staff lounge was traditionally the place on any ship where the crew came to unwind, if they were lucky enough to have one. Crew lounges often got crowded and wild, with half-naked dancing, drugs, fights, heavy-duty make-out sessions. In the lounge, you could do what you wanted, because management usually stayed away. Apart from the crew mess where they ate their meals, drinking here and working out in the crew gym were the only two social release valves the workers had during their time at sea, when there was no shore leave. This bare-bones room with its makeshift bar and motley assortment of chairs and tables, mismatched castoffs and discarded leftovers, was the only place on the entire ship where they were allowed to drink besides their quarters, which were too small for more than a few people to fit into. But at least the lounge had plenty of alcohol. The dank, dark, cramped little gym next door with its two treadmills, one elliptical machine, two weight benches, and a smattering of suspiciously moist yoga mats was much less appealing.