The Last Cruise

by Kate Christensen

  “What’s up tonight?” he asked Trevor. “There’s something going on, I can feel it.”

  “Oh yeah,” said Trevor. “I can’t keep the drinks going fast enough.”

  Mick caught the flicker of Trevor’s eyes toward the South African group. “So what’s going on?”

  Trevor gave Mick a measured look, assessing him, reading his loyalties. Trevor knew exactly what was up, Mick thought, but he wasn’t telling. Maybe because Mick was senior kitchen staff, so he was high enough up in the chain of command to be considered an outsider, or worse, management.

  “Bad day all around, I guess,” Trevor said, pouring. He set the squat brimming glass in front of Mick. The amber surface trembled slightly with the vibrations of the ship. He stepped back with his palms flat on the bar top. While Mick downed the new shot, Trevor sang in his high, trembling voice, “You go to my head, and you linger like a haunting refrain.” His lips made a soft purse on each “you” with a tilt of his head, as if he were blowing kisses at Mick.

  “Nice voice,” said Mick. “You should sing in the talent show tomorrow.”

  “It’s for passengers,” said Trevor. “Let all the old ladies do their thing.”

  “Crew can perform.”

  “What are you performing?” Trevor asked. “A striptease?”

  It was flattering to be flirted with like this. If only Trevor were a girl, Mick thought.

  “I don’t want to scare anyone,” he said. “I’ll wait until the Halloween show for that.”

  “There’s no Halloween show for us,” said Trevor quietly, his voice cutting under the hubbub. “You know Cabaret is canceling our contracts, right?”

  “I heard. That’s terrible.”

  “They didn’t cancel yours?”

  “Not that I know of.”

  “The rest of us, after this cruise, we’re done. Fired. Out of a job.”

  “I’m sure the other cruise lines will take you on,” said Mick. “Experienced workers? Isn’t everyone always expanding?”

  “Easy enough for you to say,” said Trevor, not flirting anymore.

  “I’m sorry,” said Mick.

  “Also easy for you to say.”

  “Listen,” Mick said. “I’m only a boss on this cruise. I got bumped up because they were short a man. Normally I’m with all of you, working under the same conditions, same hours, same pay scale. Don’t treat me like one of them. I’m not one of them.”

  Mick felt turbulence at his right elbow as someone jostled him, sliding onto the barstool next to his. He smelled that spicy scent she wore.

  “Hey,” he said to Consuelo.

  “Hey,” she said back.

  Trevor’s fluid expression immediately went jovial again. “What’s your poison?” he said like a noir-movie bartender, with a pretty good New York accent.

  “Give her whatever she wants,” said Mick. “She works with me, she works her ass off. I owe her.”

  “Yes you do,” said Consuelo. Mick could feel heat, perhaps from a recent hot shower, coming off her skin; her face looked scrubbed. Her hair was slicked back, and she’d rolled up her sleeves to reveal, or maybe show off, the tattoos on her sinewy, slender forearms: on one, a small blue Earth with the words EN PELIGRO DE EXTINCIÓN arched over it in Gothic script; on the other, CHINGA TU TIO SAM across a miniature of the old American army-recruitment-poster figure in his top hat; and above it, a simple cartoon Popeye-style ship’s anchor with a tiny, intricate monarch butterfly perched on it, whatever that meant. Beata, Mick’s little sister, had sported similar symbolic protestations. Seeing these tattoos on Consuelo made him miss her.

  Consuelo looked past him at the Greeks over in the corner and then flickered to the South Africans. “Trevor, what’s the word?”

  “Sad,” said Trevor. “Mick refuses to do a striptease for the talent show.”

  “I would pay him not to do one,” she said. She tapped a finger on the bar top while she thought. “Wine, please. Anything red, whatever.” She turned to Mick. “How’d it go upstairs? Did they like the food?”

  “I fucked up,” he said. “Chef was pissed.”

  She took a gulp of wine like a hungry animal at its trough. “What did you do?”

  “Talked too much.”

  “Chef is a fucker.” She drank greedily again.

  “He’s all right. It was my fault.”

  “No,” said Consuelo, “he’s a tyrant.”

  “He has to be. It’s part of his job.”

  “No, he’s worse than most. Control-freak asshole.”

  “Are you drunk already? You can’t say that to me. I’m your boss, technically.”

  “Fuck that,” she said. “Outside of the kitchen, no one is my boss. And after this cruise, I have no job.”

  She was still sparking with heat, but now it struck him that the source was internal. It was anger. Not at Mick, but at something connected to him, associated with him, his temporary executive power. Flames crackled in her skull and shot their light out through her eyes. And it wasn’t only Consuelo he was feeling it from. Even Trevor’s flirting with him held a flash of insubordinate aggression under the fawning sweetness.

  Mick reached along the bar and picked up someone’s abandoned cigarette pack. Trevor raised an eyebrow, but went on washing glasses without a word, so Mick took one of the cigarettes and lit up.

  There was a dark thing growing here in the crew lounge, like smoke from a damp, slow-burning dirty fire, expanding into a choking fog. Mick didn’t like it. And he didn’t share it. The Isabella was, so far, a pretty good ship to work on, with an American captain and officers and a small passenger list and good conditions, except for the crew’s quarters, which were damp and moldy, but how much time did anyone actually spend in their tiny dark room except to sleep? So they were being let go, so what? They’d find jobs on other ships. Cabaret wasn’t the only company, not by a long shot. This entire crew could apply to Disney, Royal Caribbean, Holland, Princess, Carnival, Norwegian, any of the other fleets, and they might even find better pay and conditions.

  But of course it was tough to have to find a new job. Mick hoped he still had a job with Cabaret after this cruise. His dream life in Amsterdam with Laurens was probably out of the question now. But even if his contract was terminated along with the others’, he would roll with it, start planning for what to do next; he would waste no time being angry, fomenting resentment. He would go out with his head up, professionally. That was how he functioned. As long as he had a job, he did his work as well as he could and banked his paychecks. But of course he was lucky, compared to his coworkers. Many of their countries had been through revolution, coup, oppression, dictatorship, poverty, war, upheaval. Mick had been born during the end of Goulash Communism, Hungary’s mild version of Soviet rule. Budapest had been dubbed “the happiest barrack.” By the time he was old enough to notice his surroundings and form memories, the ravages of the war had largely been repaired, and Hungary had made a calm and seamless transition to democratic voting. As a teenager, Mick had hung out with his friends at the Moscow Square subway station in his Tisza shoes, feeling hip and retro, all of them freely mocking the uncoolness of the Soviet era while fetishizing its remnants and relics as newly chic. School trips took children to Memento Park to see “Stalin’s Boots” while teachers tried to educate them about the former communist regime that had already given way to a free market economy. They’d been lucky. They all knew it. It was good to be Hungarian, to live in their beautiful peaceful city while just to the south, armies fought bitter inter-ethnic wars and everything collapsed and splintered. Now, of course, Hungary’s government was sliding into autocracy, but Mick wasn’t there to experience it. His homeland was a faraway place, existing only in memory.

  “So where are you going to go after the cruise ends?” he asked Consuelo. Trevor had gone off to pour vodka for a kn
ot of dour, pale Russians. “What’s your plan? I assume you’ve got a plan.”

  “Of course I have a plan.”

  “Another cruise line?”

  She looked sidelong at him and spoke carefully. “I’m done with cruises.”

  “Are you going back to Mexico?”

  “I’m going to get famous.”

  “Right,” he laughed. “That’s an excellent plan.”

  “That’s my plan,” she said, unsmiling, forceful.

  “How are you going to get famous?”

  “You’ll see me on TV.”

  Mick stared at her. Then he grinned, not taking the bait. Right, of course, this was how she joked. He stood up, yawning. “My curfew is now. Good night.”

  “Noches,” said Consuelo. “Hasta mañana, boss.”

  “Don’t go,” Trevor called along the bar. “I almost had you.”

  Down in his quarters, Mick undressed and took a shower, then fell into his lower bunk, naked except for a pair of clean underwear. The room was cramped, like all crew quarters: two bunks, small bathroom, old carpet, sallow fluorescent lighting, no window. His roommate was a chef on the all-night galley crew, room service and breakfast prep. As management, Mick should have had his own, larger room, but no matter; he and his roommate almost never saw each other. There was nowhere to store anything, so they pulled clean clothes out of their duffel bags, which were crammed against the wall, and shoved dirty laundry into the corner. This was how Mick had lived for years. He was used to it. By the time he got into his hard narrow bed, he was tired enough to sleep standing up in a cold rainstorm. This low down in the ship, below the waterline, there was little movement, but the hum and vibrations of the engine were ever-present. For Mick, it was like a white noise machine, a sleep aid that masked late, drunken, loud voices in the hallway, the throb of music from the room next door, every sound but the ones in his own private dreams. Over the years, he had grown to like sleeping underwater, the wild ocean just a hull’s width away, just an inch or two, from his dreaming head.

  * * *

  *

  Late that night, after the captain’s table dinner, Miriam and Sasha stood outside by the railing, feverishly kissing. He was so tall, her neck bent backward. It made her even dizzier. His bristly cheek chafed her smooth one. His teeth knocked against hers. His body felt young and urgent. Her hands went under his shirt, and she pressed her hot palms on his flanks while his hand snaked into her dress to cup her breast. She swooned. They hadn’t had sex yet, but they were like a couple of teenagers all of a sudden. Miriam felt that if she couldn’t lie naked in a bed next to Sasha soon, she might explode. She was fifteen again, a young girl in an old woman’s body.

  They badly wanted to tell the others, because they very badly wanted to switch bedrooms. Miriam was hoping Isaac would agree to move over and bunk with Jakov in the stateroom with two single beds so she and Sasha could share the stateroom with the big bed. But that meant Isaac would have to leave his place by his ex-wife’s side so she could sleep with his colleague and friend instead. They were, technically, divorced. But somehow that didn’t matter. Miriam didn’t know how to tell Isaac. Sasha didn’t know how to tell Jakov, who had nursed a long crush on Miriam himself, in spite of the continued existence of his own very devoted wife, Devorah. Miriam couldn’t believe Isaac didn’t see the sparks shooting off her skin, didn’t notice the lusty fire in her eyes, didn’t feel the new passion raging in her.

  Miriam had known Sasha for her entire adult life, but now she realized she’d hardly known him at all. He seemed deeply mysterious to her, this man she’d worked and traveled with for more than forty years. She knew he was handsome, he was kind, he could be bossy, he was a brilliant violinist, he was occasionally overcome with emotion, especially when he played Schubert, and he had loved his wife and still loved their three children. She knew he’d grown up in Brooklyn in an Orthodox household. She knew he’d rebelled against his father after graduating from the Mannes conservatory and had become a lefty political activist for a while before emigrating to Israel, and shortly afterward had met Sonia, who became his wife. Miriam had always liked her, but she was a tough bitch, with good reason. Her parents and older brothers had all been killed in the Holocaust. She had been hidden as a child by a generous, heroic family in France until the war was over. Then she’d been sent to her Polish aunt, who’d miraculously survived Auschwitz, and who had brought her to Israel as a young girl.

  Sasha had always been devoted to this force of a woman, but something had always pulled him to Miriam, she knew, just as she had always been pulled to him. Their spouses were so different from them. And they were the same kind of person, both of them practical and responsible on the outside, but inside they were frustrated romantics.

  They whispered all these things, and so many more, into each other’s ears and necks and mouths, embracing on the deck for hours. As they ran their hands over each other’s bodies, Miriam felt how much strength was still there, how much juice and vigor. They laughed with giddy joy. And then they wept with how much time had been wasted, and was gone forever.

  “Finally,” said Sasha.

  “At last,” Miriam echoed him.

  “I’ve loved you all along.”

  “I’ve loved you, too.”

  Oh, they were glorious, those headlong passionate hours.

  But how would they tell Isaac? And Jakov, too. If Jakov had been the one whose wife had died, he would have charged right at Miriam like a lusty bull. But his wife was still alive, that lively, opinionated woman who cooked like a dream, hence Jakov’s girth. So Jakov couldn’t blame Sasha or begrudge him or Miriam their happiness, but he wasn’t going to be thrilled to hear the news of their love affair.

  And Isaac—he’d never had to share Miriam with another man. The two short-lived affairs she’d had, he’d never known about because she’d protected him from knowing. She’d been discreet for his sake, and also for their children’s, although when she’d recently confided in her daughter, Rachel had applauded. Rachie had always gravitated to Sasha, even as a squinty-eyed, impatient, precocious little girl. Sasha had always known how to talk to Rachel. He’d never condescended to her. He’d treated her as if she were his equal, his contemporary. Miriam realized with a whole new rush of happiness that her daughter would be over the moon about her and Sasha, her skeptical sour-patch of a daughter who was never over the moon about anything.

  “Let’s tell them in the morning,” said Sasha. “It’s time.”

  “At rehearsal,” said Miriam. “I can’t wait another minute.”

  “Neither can I.”

  “I’ll say it,” said Miriam. “I’m the one who has to. You leave it to me.”

  After they parted in the hallway in front of her door with one last lingering kiss, Miriam got into bed and lay awake the rest of the night while Isaac snored beside her. At dawn, to avoid facing him, she got up and fetched some coffee and paced along the promenade until it was time for their rehearsal.

  When she arrived at the chapel, Sasha was alone practicing his part for Rivka’s piece. Without the rest of the instruments to give it a context, it sounded even weirder, even uglier, as if he were a teenager screwing around with atonal dissonances, trying to annoy his mother.

  “My darling,” he said.

  Her chest felt like a giant slow bubble was rising in it, just because of the sound of his voice and the sight of his familiar but suddenly thrilling face.

  He put his violin down and stood up and embraced her. The feel of his hands firm on her waist, his warm breath against her temple, made her press her face to his.

  “You look as beautiful still as you ever have,” he said with amazement as they pulled apart, smiling at each other.

  “So do you,” she said. “As handsome.”

  They kissed slowly, with their mouths open, breathing hard.

 
; “We’d better stop,” she said, chuckling. “They’ll be here any minute. They shouldn’t walk in on us before we tell them.”

  Sasha sat in his chair again, picked up his violin, and noodled around while Miriam got hers out and tightened and rosined the bow, tuned the strings, put on her reading glasses.

  Isaac arrived first, and then Jakov. Miriam felt her hands shaking slightly at the sight of them. Her heart thudded as she put her violin down and looked at Sasha. He looked steadily back at her, willing her to be the one to say it. It had to be her.

  She and Sasha had been speaking in English. But now she said in Hebrew, “Jakov and Isaac. I have to tell you something. Sasha and I have fallen in love.”

  “What was that?” said Isaac with a confused expression. He’d been staring into his viola case, lost in thought, as he often was in the mornings.

  Jakov had heard Miriam just fine. He stared at her, and then at Sasha, and then at Isaac. Then he looked back at Miriam with a fierce expression. “Say it again,” he said. “Go on.”

  “Sasha and I have fallen in love,” she repeated. It was much easier the second time. She was so relieved, she felt like laughing, but she restrained herself. It would be so impolite to Isaac, whose befuddled vague expression was shifting, sharpening, comprehending, and then in an instant, trying to compose itself into dignity, acceptance, pride.

  “Mazel tov,” he said to Sasha, and then in English, “She’s nothing but a headache.”

  All three of them burst into laughter, but Jakov was scowling. “This is unprofessional,” he said. “This isn’t good. You’re acting like a couple of idiots. Please stop it. You’re old and you’re losing your minds.”

  Isaac cradled his viola against his stomach and caressed its curves with his thumb. “Jakov,” he said, “surely this is my battle to fight, not yours.”