“Hear, hear,” said the captain, who had freed himself from his underling and now stood next to Kimmi, holding his own glass up. “Welcome, everyone. Cheers.”
Two of the waiters flung open the tall double doors at the end of the lounge, and Christine walked with everyone else into the small dining room. She gazed around. The arched ceiling was painted sky blue with a few fluffy clouds, its rim edged in gold leaf. The walls were paneled in bamboo. Amber-colored teardrop sconces protruded at intervals. The long table down the middle of the room was draped in white linen and set with china, silver, and crystal, tall white tapers burning in candelabras. Next to each plate, Christine saw a hand-lettered place card and an individual glass bud vase containing a single white peony in full bloom. Open French doors led out to a balcony beyond the sideboard and small bar. Warm air blew in and made the flames flicker.
“Dude, we’ve been slumming it till now,” said Valerie, lifting a bud to her nose. “Finally, the VIP treatment.”
The Sabra Quartet played in an alcove. Miriam gave her violin a little dip in greeting when Christine caught her eye.
* * *
*
The quartet had agreed on the sweetly gorgeous, deceptively simple Borodin for tonight’s program, followed by Rochberg’s modern offbeat variations on Pachelbel’s overplayed Canon, and then the Tchaikovsky as a digestif, because it was exciting and sparkling and energetic and would send everyone away in a good mood. These three quartets were easygoing staples of the Sabra’s repertoire, not too taxing for any of them, which was all to the good, because both Isaac and Jakov claimed they’d come down with mild stomach bugs. Miriam suspected it was just a touch of seasickness, pure and simple, but they both adamantly denied it, as they always did, on every cruise.
During the Borodin’s first movement, the dinner guests drifted into the dining room with the captain and senior officers. As Christine walked in, Miriam ogled her admiringly, noting how well she carried herself. The green dress suited her figure, and she had the height and the curves to carry it off and the broad shoulders to offset the strapless bodice. And the girl next to her, the friend who had brought her on the cruise, what was her name? Nicole? Melanie? Valerie. She looked exactly the way Miriam had expected her to look, based on Christine’s brief description of her: slinky, audacious, twitching with self-regard. Miriam watched her position herself vis-à-vis Christine and flick a glance at her friend, a quick naked dart of some pure emotion that was almost certainly envy.
Miriam could empathize. She herself had been sexy as a young woman, a “dish” as they called it back then, but she’d never been a beauty; she’d always known it and had focused on cultivating both style and moxie, and not worrying too much about her looks themselves. And as she got old, she accepted the double-edged necessity and luxury of fading away into the background to observe invisibly, as she was doing now. Had she been beautiful, she would have mourned the loss. Instead, she had achieved over her lifetime a cheerful, confident ease in herself that felt, in old age, like female triumph.
As the first movement ended, Miriam watched Larry Weiss come into the dining room, tall and imposing in a tuxedo, with Rivka tottering on his arm in very high heels and a fitted cream-colored sparkly dress, the usual gauzy scarf fluttering over her bony shoulders. The Weisses as a matter of course glanced over at the quartet with impersonal, proprietary affection, but did not, apparently, notice Miriam watching them. Larry went over to the bar while Rivka and Valerie introduced themselves and stood chatting. To Miriam, watching from afar, they seemed to be two of a kind: ambitious, shrewd, stylish women. Rivka, like Valerie, had a dramatic, near-skeletal chicness that offset her own odd looks. But unlike Miriam, she had refused to accept invisibility in her old age, and she was rich enough to have the luxury of any and every mitigating means available. Her armor included plastic surgery, a subtly youthful coif, flowing scarves, eye-catching jewelry. Like Valerie, she was all tautness and attitude. Both of them caught and held attention like bare fishhooks hung with glittering lures.
Sasha lifted his violin and glanced to his left. As she had done for fifty years, Miriam turned to the right and caught his eye, the signal. As the corner of his mouth lifted slightly, she almost melted with love, but, always professional, she only nodded back at him slightly, as did Jakov and Isaac to her left. Instantly, the quartet was a unit, coalesced. Sasha brought his violin down to bring them all in, and the scherzo began.
* * *
*
Christine found herself seated between Tye the Yale historian and a dashing chief officer named Tom. The captain sat at the head of the table flanked by Rivka Weiss and Cynthia Perez, with Kimmi at the foot between Larry Weiss and Philip the hotel director, a slender man who had a voice so deep it sounded like a foghorn. Christine had been sure at first that he was just putting it on to be funny, but he’d kept it up all night.
All four of the ship’s top-ranking officers were American, white, male, ostensibly Christian, and ostensibly straight, although of course you never knew. And all of tonight’s guests were a mixture of black, Hispanic, female, Jewish, and possibly gay. Christine noticed this with the same half-conscious bemusement with which she speculated about the waiters. Were they Filipino, Mexican, Malaysian, or Dominican? They were all dark-haired and -skinned, but according to Valerie, Cabaret hiring practice dictated that there couldn’t be too many people from the same country, or who spoke the same language, to prevent them from organizing against their working conditions. So Christine deduced that Cabaret deliberately hired a variety of similar-looking waiters who spoke different languages, which she found disturbing on several levels.
The waiters, wherever they were from, moved efficiently around the table with hand-lettered menus, pouring wine. “Oh, lobster thermidor,” said Tye Blevins on Christine’s right. “They served it once in New Haven. An even blacker black tie event. It’s cool. It comes right in the lobster shell.”
The muted, entangled, melodic sounds from the stringed instruments, the wafting heat from the candles, and all the wine made Christine feel overheated. She slipped off her shawl, intending to drape it over the back of her chair, but a waiter was there at her elbow to take it. “Let me know when you’d like to have it again, miss,” he said very quietly.
As the salads were served, iceberg wedge with Roquefort dressing, Christine glanced at the head of the table and met the captain’s eyes. She realized with a flattered rush that his gaze felt frankly lustful. She leaned forward with feigned innocent absorption in what James was saying across the table from her, to show off her cleavage. Inwardly, she was laughing at herself for being so blatant, but she was totally unable to resist this temptation. The captain’s blue eyes looked hot and glinting when she darted a glance back to him to see whether he was still watching. All through the dinner, as she ate the luscious lobster dish and drank her wine and made conversation with everyone around her, there was a thin, buzzing wire stretched tightly between her and Captain Jack, so tightly that if one of them leaned back, the other felt the pull. Christine allowed herself to enjoy this even as her wedding ring shone on her left hand. She was far from her husband, in the middle of the ocean, and this was harmless, for God’s sake.
At the foot of the table, Larry Weiss had assumed control of the conversation. His voice was penetrating, sharp as a radio. Christine had never met a billionaire before. She wondered if they all, like Larry, existed in this weird ultra-concentrated, individually wrapped atmosphere. It was nothing he said or did. He was understated and subtle. But his abstract, intangible assets somehow magnetized him, transferred themselves to his body itself, so he was able to be rich and powerful without doing anything. He seemed preternaturally relaxed. He laughed, a full, genuine laugh, ringing and merry and warm, and for some reason, against Christine’s own will, she laughed along with him although she hadn’t heard the joke. It was impossible not to.
Between the en
trées and dessert, Kimmi stood and dinged her wineglass. The table went quiet. “Ladies and gentlemen, allow me to present to you the chef whose cuisine you’ve been enjoying on this cruise—coming to us from Brussels, Belgium, Chef Laurens van Buyten!”
A pale, slight, bespectacled man swathed in white materialized behind her from out of the candlelight.
“Thank you,” said the chef, formally, in a clipped, accented voice. “It is nice to see you all. I am very honored and delighted to be the executive chef on the famous Queen Isabella for her last voyage.” He paused with professional calm for the patter of applause, then went on. “I have brought Chef Miklos Szabo to talk a little bit about one of the dishes we’ve made for you tonight.”
And there was that guy Christine had seen in Long Beach, in the hotel bar. He was swathed in white like his boss, but he was as different-looking from him as one European white man could be from another of roughly the same age. Laurens looked like someone who’d been bullied and teased in school and was touchy and sensitive because of it. Mick, by contrast, was broad-chested and pugnacious-looking. He looked like he could have been doing the bullying.
“Lobster thermidor,” Mick began without any pleasantries or preamble, and with an accent so slight he could almost have been American, “was invented in 1894 in a restaurant called Marie’s in the theater district of Paris. Tonight, I used the recipe by the late Julia Child from her book Mastering the Art of French Cooking, in honor of the era when the Queen Isabella was built.”
“Thank you very much, Chef Mick,” said Laurens van Buyten during the ensuing applause.
“I’d like to add,” said Chef Mick, who appeared to Christine to be trying to impress his boss, “a small story of when I was a young student, in Budapest.”
Laurens’s face remained impassive, but Christine thought she detected a very slight but clearly displeased flare of one nostril.
“To pay for my university, I learned to cook from the chef at the Eszterházy Restaurant, which was part of the Hungarian Folkloric Theater. Chef Viktor taught me to serve lobster thermidor over buttered egg noodles, a Hungarian touch. Tonight, I have done the same in his honor. I hope you have all enjoyed it.”
Laurens clapped Mick on the shoulder with one hand. “Thank you, Chef,” he said. “Please save your private memoirs for old age.”
Mick grimaced at the low murmur of laughter from the table and made a hasty, apologetic gesture that Laurens ignored. Then he was gone, banished to the galley, Christine surmised, in disgrace for stealing his boss’s show and overstepping.
“And for dessert,” Laurens said, “we have a classic that was a great hit in the 1950s, back when the Isabella was first built…Baked Alaska, or la surprise du Vésuve à la Julia Child.”
The lights were dimmed. To even more applause, the battery of waiters streamed in, each one carrying a tray on which a meringue had been set aflame. The scent of burning rum filled the air.
By the time the diners had looked up from their plates with near-universal expressions of childish happiness, the chef had gone.
“And finally,” said Kimmi, “I would like to present Tameesha, who hails from our very own home port of Los Angeles, California.”
Tameesha stood with her hands by her sides, her head thrown slightly back and her eyes closed.
Even Christine was familiar with her two or three enormous hits; they were as impossible to forget as advertising jingles, repetitive tuneless ditties, half spoken, half intoned with Auto-Tune through electronic effects. She had always assumed that Tameesha couldn’t sing, was just all attitude and provocation.
But instead she started crooning “You Send Me,” by Sam Cooke, in a tender, full-throated, easygoing voice, as familiarly as if she’d been singing it for years. Her face was filled with a kind of pleasure Christine had been missing for a long time in her own life: the joy of allowing her full self to come out, not holding anything back.
When she had finished, bowing at the vigorous applause, the captain handed around a box of cigars. Christine took one, and then, when several of the men wandered out to the balcony to smoke, she and Valerie got up and joined them. The night air was soft and clean and salty. The moonlight made a gleaming path on the dark waves that ran far below with a low calm murmur. Christine and Captain Jack glanced at each other again, but it was friendly now; the flirtation had run its course. It couldn’t go anywhere but to ground. Oh well, she thought, feeling half disappointed, half relieved.
“It’s nice to meet you, sir,” said Valerie, walking straight up to Larry Weiss. “This is a great ship.”
“Thank you,” said Larry as he turned to face Valerie, leaning against the railing, rolling his lit cigar in his long fingers. “Yes, my wife has a bit of a sentimental attachment to it. This is our anniversary cruise. We own a perfectly nice private yacht, but I think she prefers the Isabella.”
“It’s definitely peaceful,” said Valerie. “It’s amazing how far away from everything we are, out here.”
“It’s an escape,” Larry agreed. “No cell phone service, for one thing. I’m usually on three of them at once, all day every day. I feel helpless without my earpiece. But I could get used to it.”
“There’s always the return trip,” Valerie said.
Larry sucked on his cigar. The end sparked, ashes blew off in the breeze. “Oh, we’re just going one way. Getting off in Hawaii. Got to get back to work.”
Smiling, nodding, Valerie leaned into the warmth of his easy, mellow charm. “What kind of business are you in, if you don’t mind my asking? I apologize for not knowing.”
Christine listened with frank admiration. Valerie had always been so good at flattering powerful people, getting them to talk without knowing they were revealing anything. As a journalist, Christine had always been leery of intruding, thanks to the ingrained New England etiquette of minding your own business. And her native blunt honesty had likewise made it hard for her not to blurt out her real purpose in questioning them.
As Larry answered in broad and general terms, and Valerie asked another seemingly innocent question, Christine stared down at the water. She was drunk, she realized. Below the ship, the ocean looked like a rolling sheet of thick black oil. Electric light fell in choppy bands on its surface. She felt a cold, gripping sadness in the pit of her chest. It had come seemingly out of nowhere, like her reaction to the octopus in the aquarium. She hoped she could stave off these crises of hollow, trapped dread until she was back in Maine, planting seedlings, hatching chicks, again caught up in the cycle of renewed life.
chapter eleven
Mick hadn’t meant to go on and on about his fucking youth in fucking Budapest in front of Laurens and the captain and senior officers and all those passengers. Walking out of the room in disgrace, he wanted to stab himself in the head. He had always prided himself on being adept at reading the people he worked for. He’d honed the skill growing up with his father, who was low-key and affable until he exploded in violence toward whoever or whatever was closest at hand. As a small boy, Mick had learned to identify unerringly the almost imperceptible signs of an impending tantrum. A twitch in his father’s lip presaged a punch in the head; if he asked a question, unthinking, and his father hesitated before answering and then spat a terse, monosyllabic answer, Mick knew to get out of his way until the next day, or he’d find himself shaken upside down a little later on. He was lucky, he figured; the hardest lessons, he got early, when he was young enough to absorb and use them as an adult. It had stood him in good stead in the world of professional kitchens, where chefs were as often as not broken in some way, damaged, or abused, or neglected, or bullied, or wrecked by drugs or alcohol, or hardened by being in gangs or prison, or all of the above. The abused became the perpetrator of violence; the bullied went on to crush the weak; the hardened went on to beat others down. It was the way of the species.
Mick was proud of his
own self-control in kitchens. He didn’t throw tantrums. He didn’t hit people or tongue-lash them. He wasn’t a bully or a tyrant. But tonight, he’d lost his self-control. And, as always in his life whenever he got too cocky, too desirous of attention, too hell-bent on proving something, someone slapped him down. He thought of that someone collectively as “the gods,” but it always had a human face. When he was little, it was his father. Later it was chefs he worked for, women he wanted to impress. Most recently, it was Suzanne. And tonight it had been Laurens, the person whose respect he most wanted at the moment.
He fled from the room, his head hot and seething with shame. Finished with his work for the night, he went straight down to the crew lounge, still in his whites, since he’d put on spanking clean ones for the presentation upstairs.
The lounge was crowded. He stormed to the bar and ordered a shot of whiskey and a beer.
“Looks like someone had a bad night,” the bartender said. His name was Trevor; he was a Haitian room steward, slight and very young, with hooded eyes and skin so dark it glistened. Sometimes he sang along with the music on the PA in a trembling falsetto.
Mick downed the shot, took a long slug of the beer. “A little better now,” he said. “I’ll take another shot.”
He sat alone in the lounge watching the mafias converge, consult, conspire. Tonight it was primarily the Jamaicans, the Greeks, and the South Africans, with two Indian guys over in one corner, keeping to themselves and talking in low voices in what was probably Hindi. The groups had no apparent common currency; they sat apart, in discrete cliques as delineated as schools of fish, eight or so in each group, men and women, mostly young, healthy, good-looking. Normally, in and between these ethnic and nationalistic huddles, there was flirting, there was drunken but mostly good-humored posturing, there was loud talking, blowing off steam. Tonight was weird, like the first night had been. The conversations felt private, without theater, and the atmosphere in the room was tense, thick, loaded.
The Last Cruise Page 13