“Now?” said Christine, looking down at Valerie’s phone. After only one day without using one, it was jarring to look at the small lit-up screen.
“It’s short,” said Valerie. She clicked on an icon marked ISABELLA INTERVIEWS and handed Christine a pair of earbuds, which Christine obediently put on.
Valerie hit play, and a woman’s accented voice spoke into Christine’s ear. She sounded Spanish and tense. “I can give you a couple minutes but then I have to be back at my station.”
“What is your name and nationality?” Valerie’s voice said.
“Consuelo Fonseca. I’m Mexican. From Acapulco.”
“How long have you worked for Cabaret?”
“Six years.”
“Can you tell me a bit about your job?”
Christine heard an angry, scornful sound, a snort. “Sure. I’ll tell you a couple of things. We work sixteen-hour days for pathetic wages. Most of us, our contracts are being canceled at the end of this cruise.”
“They’re firing you?” came Valerie.
“Yeah. And you know why? So they can hire refugees to do the work we do, but for less money and longer hours. I’m talking desperate people, from Syria, Sudan. The owners of this company are shit. One of them is on board. I read an interview with him online where he said that the reason Third World workers like us are good at our jobs it that we’re culturally suited to them.” Her voice deepened as she imitated him. “ ‘The Filipinos always smile at the customers even when they’re tired from working so hard because they’re so happy and it’s such an honor to work for Cabaret. Workers from India are great like that too, always smiling, happy to work aboard these ships. Mexicans are the same. Always cheerful.’ ” She snorted again. “Look at me, so fucking cheerful. It’s bullshit.”
“So why did you stay with Cabaret all these years if the conditions are so bad?”
“Because there’s nothing for me in Mexico, no jobs, the economy is shit, and I’m sending money home and spending nothing. I don’t have time to spend money. I’m young and I can take it. My parents are depending on me. I need this stupid job. Like everyone else on board this ship. We all need these jobs.”
“But you don’t think they should hire these other workers? They need the jobs more than you do, even.”
“No. I don’t think that.” Consuelo’s voice was acid. “What I think is that they should stop treating us like slaves and not get rid of us to hire cheaper labor.”
“I get it,” said Valerie.
“So they’re dumping us and hiring desperate people, even more desperate than we are. Syrians running away from hell. Africans who will do anything to have a safe place to sleep, a tiny bit of money for their families. They’ll be treated like labor animals. It’s completely fucking wrong.”
“Wow.” Christine heard real surprise in Valerie’s voice. “I didn’t know that.”
“Okay,” said Consuelo. “I have to go now.”
There was a click. Christine took off the earbuds.
“That’s horrifying.”
“I know, right?” said Valerie. She finished her martini. “Want to go in the pool and lie on one of those big rafts?”
“In our clothes?”
“Why not? I’ll leave my phone here. No one will steal it.”
They arranged themselves head-to-toe on an empty raft, cradling their drinks. Christine kicked gently against the pool’s edge and sent the raft bobbing and floating into the middle. The surface of the water rocked and shimmered. Light from tiki lamps shot upward and dissipated in the still air. There were a few other people, dog-paddling with foam noodles, lounging on fat inner tubes, but no one paid attention to them. It was as if they were in a self-contained little bubble, a sanctuary of sorts. Christine looked down at her bare feet glowing like pale flat fish above the blue water, bobbing around with the bright neon purple and pink floating things. It reminded her of the aquarium, which gave her a fresh jolt of that same panicky, desolate feeling she’d had looking in at all those creatures in their tanks, reading all the plaques about the dying oceans. But there was something else too, something more immediate and personal. She felt a resurgence of the long-quashed yearning that had been awakened by her conversation with Miriam that morning.
She lifted her head. Being around Valerie’s fast-talking nervous energy made Christine aware of how slow and stolid she had become. She could feel Valerie’s brain working now, even when she was silent, the energy of her thoughts running ceaselessly. Christine remembered being that way, back in her old life. Now, there were whole swaths of time when her thoughts seemed to stop, when action took over completely and she became a functioning machine, carrying out her tasks. She thought with an odd, unaccustomed longing of her old walk-up apartment in New York, on Orchard Street, the sour, fecund smell of the old tenement stairwell; she remembered climbing up the four flights to her apartment’s battered front door in stylish leather boots, heavy plastic bags of groceries wrapped around both wrists. It was odd how real it felt to her, more real than the farm, as if her entire life since going back to Maine had been some sort of hallucination, as if she’d never left that life of late nights in bars and reading books on long subway rides and jostling through crowds of varied, interesting people.
She hadn’t been looking to escape from that life, not consciously. But one fall weekend, she had gone up to Maine to visit her parents in Standish, and incidentally to interview a farmer friend of theirs named Ed Thorne for a piece she was thinking of writing on the rising popularity of small organic farms in New England. She had driven her mother’s old Subaru over to Fryeburg on a clear, crisp day to find Ed heaping a pile of pumpkins into the back of his truck to take to the farmers market the next morning. As Ed liked to put it, it was love at first question; she sat on his porch all afternoon with him, drinking mead he’d made with honey from his own bees, and then sat all evening at his table, eating the dinner he cooked, food he’d raised and grown himself, and then she spent the night with him, and the next night, too. It was a relief to admit it to herself: she was tired of being broke, in debt, stressed-out about money and bills, the hustle of freelancing. Six months later, she left New York and moved back up to Maine to live with Ed. The piece never got written. That had been almost eight years ago.
“Val,” she said now, “I have to make a decision. Ed wants kids, and I don’t.”
Valerie sat up, rocking the raft, splashing them both. “You never told me that. What do you mean, you don’t want them?”
“I’m not sure.”
“But don’t you need them to collect eggs and harvest stuff and put wood on the fire?” Valerie laughed. “All I know is Little House on the Prairie.”
“I don’t want to turn into a mother,” said Christine. “My mother.”
“Listen, I get it, I don’t want kids either,” said Valerie. “At all. But if I were married and lived on a farm, I’d totally have them.”
“Sometimes I miss my old life.”
“You never loved New York, and you didn’t love journalism either. You were good at it, but you always said you hated the bias and slant and trashiness of it all.”
“Maybe so,” Christine said. She went silent, let the whole subject go, feeling disappointed and slightly depressed. She had expected Valerie to say something different; had wanted her to, even.
Someone jumped into the pool near them. Water sloshed into Christine’s ear and gin went up her nose. She coughed. The raft bobbed on the wake. Overhead, the Milky Way sprawled across the length of the sky, a violently lavish expanse of light, exactly as it did on clear nights in the sky above the farm, but it looked more dazzling and savage here. Christine felt a burst of wild, open excitement. Here she was, drunk on a raft in a pool on a ship on a dark ocean, thousands of miles from home. Anything was possible.
part two
THE FLOATING WORLD<
br />
chapter nine
Something had been happening to Miriam on this cruise. Maybe the Pacific Ocean had something magical in its ions, maybe its wind strummed her cells, Aeolian harp–like, and produced harmonies and frequencies she could feel but not hear. But she had been feeling a little giddy since the ship had left port.
It was Sasha.
While they performed the Rosamunde Quartet on their second night at sea, she had felt a leaping of their souls toward each other in midair, wafted by the music.
It was crazy to articulate it thus to herself. It was insane. She was the most sensible of musicians, the most determined to attribute the sweet power of a tremolo, the foreboding of a shift to a darker key, a melody’s progression from blitheness to awe, to the mathematical relationships between notes and the fact that the human ear and psyche were attuned viscerally to these things the way a dog’s ears picked up high-pitched noises and caused a tumult of barking. These music-fed emotions weren’t real, they were no more than notes, bowings, changes; sure, they conjured real feelings. But they didn’t themselves cause them.
Still, she could not account for the exalted joy she felt from the opening notes of the first movement. She felt as if the music itself were lifting her soul from her rib cage and transporting it somewhere overhead, where it met Sasha’s soul in a dance. That was the part she couldn’t explain; she didn’t believe in souls, let alone that they could just fly, willy-nilly, from the breasts of elderly violinists, and encounter each other somewhere above their heads.
And yet, it had happened. It felt as real to her as her feet felt on the floor. She turned to her right as she played and looked at Sasha, and he turned to his left and looked over his fingerboard at her, and they both raised their eyebrows at the same time as if to say, Yes! This is an odd thing that our souls are dancing together overhead! But they are!
So she wasn’t imagining it.
They had played this quartet more times than she could remember. It was one of Schubert’s greatest quartets, the full expression of his genius; it was imbued with the composer’s humane and profoundly emotional melodic voice. The conversation between the four instruments was a lamentation and a rejoicing at the same time, sorrowful but light. “Schöne Welt, wo bist du?” the first movement asked. “Beautiful world, where are you?” Her second-violin part moved restlessly around the median, as if questioning, and Isaac’s viola and Jakov’s cello undergirded her. Sasha’s melodic first-violin part was sure and true, as if he were leading them all together into a leap of faith that if they played this piece through to the end, they would find it, the beautiful world. He soared up toward it.
Miriam soared with him, left her body and herself behind and willfully went with him somewhere, where the two of them were conjoined in a twisting dance…Honestly, nothing like this had ever happened with any other piece of music. It was too much. Maybe it was the setting, the light, the romance of the ship. They were playing in the open air, up on the top deck, near the blue-green lit-up swimming pool, under a starlit sky, in candlelight, with torches lit, potted palm fronds rustling and the ocean wind scouring the ship’s surfaces with its salt-rasping tongue. In the dim light, Miriam saw her old friends as if they were young again. All their faces looked awake, sharpened, excited. She knew hers did too.
And there it was again, Sasha’s gaze, seeking out and meeting hers as he played unerringly. They both knew these parts by heart. His eyes were reassuring and playful and full of love, and she felt her own eyes answer him. It was that night again, the one so many decades ago, the night she’d felt herself falling in love with him the first time they’d played the Rosamunde. The feeling hadn’t gone away since then; it had just been in abeyance, held in reserve somewhere, invisible.
Long into the early morning hours after that performance, Miriam lay in bed, too thrilled to sleep, listening to her ex-husband’s gentle snoring, not bothered by it at all. She was happy to be awake, happy to be a violinist, happy to be on the Pacific Ocean again, her natal sea, the ocean that felt most like home to her. But she wasn’t thinking about the ocean. She could only think of Sasha, how kind he was, how graceful and determined, how handsome his face had looked tonight in the starlight and candlelight. He had been so unhappy since his wife died. He’d been a shadow of himself. Tonight, he had come back to her, the Sasha she’d always loved.
She loved him, and she always had.
The thoughts she was having! Like a silly young girl. She’d never had these thoughts about Isaac, and he was her life’s mate, the father of her beloved children. Sure, she had loved him when they were younger, even though he hadn’t made her heart do flips. They’d always been friends and partners, making a life side by side, until they’d eventually started fighting all the time and gotten sick of each other and ended the whole thing. He’d never made her swoon, never given her these crazy, ridiculous thoughts of souls and dances and exaltation. She’d never felt this way about anyone, ever. Except, of course, for Sasha.
Well, here they were on a ship together, maybe for the last time in their lives, or one of the last times, since the quartet would not be able to perform for much longer; their minds and bodies were all failing in various ways. That night may have been the last time they would ever play the Rosamunde, their final performance.
Miriam had to get up out of bed and breathe the fresh air and stand outside and look out at the ocean; her whole skin was tingling, her mind was encased in a bubble that wanted to float out of her skull. The music had ended, but the feeling remained. After being a professional musician for more than half a century, the idea that music might cause something real to happen, might inspire feelings that were true and actual, was a revelation to her. She had heard it could happen, but she’d never believed it, no more than she’d believed in religious visions or near-death tunnels of light or astrological predestination. She was rigorously pragmatic. She was empirical, grounded, and above all else, skeptical.
Schubert had undone her. Of course it would be Schubert. No other composer could slide his melodies straight into the heart so you wept without knowing why you were weeping. His music had the effect of the greatest poetry, of the most humane and beautiful and heartfelt words, but wordless, far more direct, elemental almost.
She got out of bed and silently put on her bathrobe. Pocketing her room key, she eased the door shut behind her and went along the corridor to the door that led out onto the walkway. Outside, she leaned against the railing and looked down at the dark ocean, watching small curlicues of whitecaps glowing in the still-dark early morning air.
The door opened. Someone came out onto the walkway and moved with purpose toward her. For a moment she feared it was Isaac, come to tell her to go back to bed, dammit, was she nuts, did she know what time it was, it was three o’clock!
But no, it was Sasha. She’d known he’d come out, she realized. He was wearing his bathrobe too. She looked at him, and he looked at her, and both their faces were alight, open, and smiling.
“Since Sonia died,” he said to her in a quiet voice once he was at the railing standing next to her, “I’ve begun to feel this way again.”
“This way again,” she repeated, as if she were asking, but she was really assuring him that she knew exactly what he meant. He had invited her into that strange, ardent, mysterious dance, and she had responded, had let her own playing answer him. But tonight wasn’t the first time he had sought her out in the Rosamunde.
All of a sudden, it all made sense to her, clearly, and even though it was nuts, illogical and absurd, she believed it.
* * *
*
The breeze was alternately brisk and balmy, cool with pockets of warmth, like a mountain lake. The hazy air looked as liquid as the salt water, and the ocean held as much light as the sky. To Christine, standing at the railing looking out to sea, the entire world was a blue-gold fantasia punctuated with spray, shaded with paste
l colors and shadows. She hugged her bare arms, her hair blown by the mild salt wind, her eyes bedazzled by the sunlight on the diamond-bright sea surface that shimmered in glinting, changing points of color all the way to the horizon. The waves were a cohesive, unbroken sheet of heaving water, turned by the sun into pure light and reflection, gone shapeless with brilliance.
While Valerie worked, Christine drifted around the ship, doing as she pleased. She felt a distance between herself and everyone else on board, crew and passengers alike, almost as if she were invisible. She listened in on other people’s conversations. No one seemed to mind or notice. She felt encased in a shield that conferred absolute social solitude. It made her relaxed and jumpy at the same time, comfortably anonymous but uneasy at this enforced idleness, no one needing her, nothing to do but observe and think and indulge herself. In the open-air breakfast bar on the patio by the pool, she got a cup of coffee and a freshly baked pastry. She read her book in the shade of an umbrella to the sounds of splashing and laughter and conversations around her. She had finished A Handful of Dust and had exchanged it for A Passage to India. It was sheer luxury to reread literary classics. After a few hours, when she got hungry again, she ate lunch down in the buffet, a sandwich, a salad, a glass of wine. After lunch, she went up to the solarium at the very top of the ship and fell asleep in a deck chair. Her nap was wine-drugged, comatose, filled with exciting dreams. She awoke as the slanting afternoon sun sent a shadow creeping over her skin, sat up and slid her feet into her sandals and made her way down the stairs to the pool bar.
“Christine,” said the bartender, her new friend Alexei, reaching for the shaker, “how has your afternoon been?”
“Another perfect day,” she said, yawning, and they both laughed. “How are you?”
“Things could be worse,” he answered. He was elfin and pale, with a pouf of yellow hair. She worried about him, and what would befall him when this cruise was over. The recording of Valerie’s interview with that chef, Consuelo, now permeated every interaction she had with the ship’s workers.
The Last Cruise Page 11