“Iechyd da,” said Sidney, in Welsh, presumably.
“Egészségére,” Mick replied. It felt good to speak Hungarian. They clinked glasses and drank. Mick rolled the whiskey around his tongue.
“How is your crew?” Sidney asked. “How many do you have left?”
“Five or six, but they’ve gone off somewhere. I also have a few passengers helping out. Well, lately just one. There’s not much to do.”
“Yes. I’ve noticed her.” Sidney held his cigarette away from his face, pinched in a leisurely way between thumb and forefinger as he watched the burning end.
Mick nodded. “Christine. She’s okay.” He took out another cigarette and lit it. He felt his head fogging up, his eyelids heavy with sleepiness, the whiskey, the unexpected intimacy with this intimidating person.
“You’re shagging her, right?” Sidney said.
Mick looked at Sidney, surprised. “She’s married.”
“Don’t tell me you’ve never shagged a passenger before.”
Mick looked at Sidney with equal disbelief. Fraternization, especially sexual affairs, between crew and passengers was strictly forbidden. Only the captain and officers got away with it on a regular basis.
“Have you?” Mick asked, trying not to sound as shocked as he felt.
Sidney burst out laughing at this question, whose answer was evidently so obvious he couldn’t be bothered to answer it, which made Mick laugh too.
“Did you know,” Mick said, “that every Cabaret crewmember I’ve ever met is terrified of you?”
“Well, clearly not enough of them, or the fuckers wouldn’t have walked out on me.” Sidney took a nip of whiskey and sucked it through his teeth with a grimace of pleasure. “Though I guess it was coming eventually, the way they’re treated, poor bastards.”
Mick shrugged. “It’s the system. We all live with it. Didn’t you start out at the bottom and work your way up?”
“In a way,” said Sidney. “I was a merchant marine, before I retired to the soft life of cruise ships. I worked for Caledonian MacBrayne, the Scottish ferry company. A rough life in hard boats on cold and stormy seas. I worked winters as a hotel waiter. This is my retirement plan, a cushy job on cushy ships. Well, I’ve always hoped to die on a ship. It’s the only way to go.”
“I hope it’s not this one,” said Mick.
“Cheers to that,” said Sidney, filling their glasses again and downing his. He put his elbows on the table as if he were hunkering down in a dark little pub. “Actually, she’s a grand old beauty, the Queen Isabella. Reminds me of—” He paused, cocked an ear. “Hear that?”
Mick listened for a moment, heard nothing. “What am I supposed to be hearing?”
“A plane,” said Sidney. “It’s the airdrop.”
chapter twenty-one
Down in their cabin, Christine put on her green bikini and waited by the open balcony door in the hot breeze, staring at the ocean longingly, while Valerie changed out of her black bikini into a black one-piece and stood looking at herself from various angles in the mirror, changed back into the bikini again, put on lipstick, wiped it off, draped herself in a gauzy sundress, and reapplied her lipstick.
They climbed down into the ship’s belly. As they went along the “B” deck corridor, Christine saw a light ahead and heard voices, muted, almost drowned out by a series of groans and clanks that seemed to come from the ship’s frame. The door to the engine room was propped open. Amid the blackened rows of steel pipes and tubing descending, ringed by catwalks and threaded with steel staircases, Christine saw several men huddled on a platform. They were wearing headlamps and holding tools, conferring in low voices near a wall panel of gauges and dials, the glass smeared black with char.
“Hello,” Valerie called down into the depths.
“Hello,” came a few voices. “Who’s there?”
“Passengers,” said Valerie.
Christine squinted in the glare of their headlamps. The man nearest her was old, tall, stooped over in a crouch, holding a wrench. She recognized Sasha, Miriam’s friend from the talent show. “Are you fixing the engines?” she asked.
“We’re banging our heads against the pipes,” came a voice from somewhere below.
“It keeps us busy,” said Sasha. “If we could just get the desalinator to run. We’re waiting for some parts to arrive.”
“Well, good luck,” said Christine.
As she followed Valerie along the corridor, the smell of old smoke began to dissipate. A stream of fresh air poured toward them. Christine saw daylight ahead, and soon they emerged into a long, narrow room lined with shelves and cabinets and lockers. At the far end, double doors were propped open, leading to stairs down to a small platform extending from the ship’s hull, hovering just above the surface of the ocean.
A small crowd of people were already there, looking down with excitement at the calm, still, light-dappled water. The air was soft with spray and haze.
“Look at this,” said Theodore to Christine. He gestured outward. “It’s our new swimming pool, the biggest in the world!”
He wore old-fashioned olive-green swim trunks that came almost down to his knees. His bare chest was hairy. So he was older than she’d thought, maybe even her own age. Many of the younger men had waxed, hairless chests and wore tight-fitting trunks, neon and bright. The women all wore stylish and no doubt expensive bikinis. Their bodies were soft and unmarked and well nourished, somehow unformed, even the ones obviously honed in the gym, without a shred of wildness or aggression. If they had been stranded in the woods with a signal instead of in the remote ocean, Christine thought, they would have gotten out their iPhones and searched for YouTube tutorials on how to start a fire, how to build shelter, which plants were safe to eat, how to catch a fish. And they would have survived just fine, no doubt.
“I’ve never swum in the middle of the ocean before,” said someone nearby, sounding nervous.
“Me neither. This is cool.”
Theodore was the first to jump in. He cannonballed, went under, and emerged with a roar, his fist raised in triumph. “It’s great!” he yelled at the people still standing on the dock.
Others gamely jumped in with shrieks and splashes.
“Oh Jesus,” said Valerie. “I’m dizzy just thinking about it.”
“Don’t think,” said Christine. “Once we’re in, we’ll be fine.” She held her breath and jumped. Underwater, with her eyes shut, she experienced a brief moment of horrified panic, thinking about how deep the water was below her, stretching miles down into the darkness. Then her head bobbed up and she took a breath, looked around at the sparkling surface of the rocking, gentle bath. She began to move her limbs with pleasure through the salty sunlit water, cool enough to tingle on her skin.
There was a splash beside her, and Valerie was in too, her hair streaming with seawater, her eyes soft without her glasses.
Christine frog-kicked around in a leisurely breaststroke. In the hazy brightness and hot light she saw bobbing human heads, and above, more people on the ship, crowding the upper decks, looking down at the swimmers. She passed a floating plastic bottle, probably thrown overboard from the Isabella. Then another. She thought of the invisible cloud of trillions of disintegrated plastic micro-bits interspersed throughout the water, inseparable from it, part of it, like smog infiltrating air. She had seen so many online news stories, TV shows, documentaries that cataloged and exposed humanity’s unstoppable destruction of the oceans with images of vast gyres of trash, miles-long oil slicks, bleached and dying coral reefs, seabird stomachs full of deadly plastic, whales and dolphins entangled in fishing nets, algae blooms. She had absorbed all this information with a sense of helpless, grief-sickened rage. It reminded her of reading horror novels as a teenager, unable to look away, sucked in, a stifled scream in the pit of her stomach, eyes shocked wide.
“Hey, Val,” she said.
“Hey, Chris,” said Valerie, scissoring her legs and making snow angels with her arms, her hair spreading around her head. “I kind of wish I’d brought my shampoo down. My scalp is so itchy.”
“Why did you pick this cruise?”
“What do you mean?”
“Why didn’t you take a cruise on a new megaship instead? With Wi-Fi?”
Valerie did a couple of slow underwater horizontal jumping jacks while she thought about this. She looked like a giant pale, smooth starfish. “I thought it would be good for me to give up the Internet for a while. I was so wrong.”
“Wrong about giving up Internet, or picking this cruise?”
“Well, this cruise was obviously a colossally bad choice. To put it mildly. But what I really learned is that life without the Internet is not very interesting. I just feel like I’m missing out, I’m not in touch, I’m off in some slow lane. What’s wrong with being online all the time? It’s not like anything is happening anywhere else. Take this cruise. String quartets. Old people. Stuffy food. The library is full of old books no one reads anymore.”
Christine laughed. “Philistine.”
“I am not,” said Valerie, but she laughed too. “The ocean feels smaller than it used to. Everything feels smaller. Doesn’t it? Or is it just me?”
“It’s just you,” said Christine.
They were silent awhile, suspended there together while tiny waves lapped at their skin. Christine looked up at the Isabella, feeling like an explorer or an astronaut who’d left the mother ship, ventured away for the first time, and was looking back at it from the void of space. Seen from here, the ship looked small and alone, the only shelter and protection for these hundreds of souls who clung to her creaky old frame. But she also looked reassuring, human-scaled in all that depthless blue, elegant and starkly white in the sunlight, all her curves and stacked terraced decks soaring above the sea surface.
She was aware all of a sudden of music coming from an upper deck of the ship. Two stringed instruments, it sounded like, playing a fugue-like duet that burst on the still, hot air in gusts of notes, liquid and rippling, orderly, resonant, civilized. Under the music, she heard another sound. The engine of a plane, far off. She heard yells behind her and turned to look at the platform. Several uniformed crewmembers were inflating a yellow life raft. As the engine noise grew, drowning out the music, she watched, treading water, as a big cargo plane approached and banked, circling the ship. Then a square door in its rear opened and a large red crate attached to two parachutes came floating down, landing with a splash a few hundred feet away.
As a second crate fell down she heard cheers, whistles, whoops, and yells all around her, as if they were all refugees in a camp or victims of a natural disaster, watching FEMA or NATO trucks arrive with water and bags of rice. As the crew launched the raft and began to row out to the bobbing crates, Christine could feel, vicariously, how exhilarating it must be for them to be headed somewhere, in charge of their own small craft, with a tangible reward awaiting them, not so far away. The plane flew off, its sounds fading to a faint drone, then a buzz, then an echoing memory of an engine. She thought of Mick in the galley, his joy and relief at getting all this food.
* * *
*
A chain of workers took boxes out of the two crates on their floating pallets and passed them one by one from the loading bay up to the main galley. Mick stood by the main galley pass, inspecting each box as it arrived. He thought of his predawn food inspection, before the cruise had begun, on the docks of Long Beach so long ago, the oysters and broccoli, steaks and pineapple. This time it was whole wheat sandwich bread, peanut butter, power bars, packages of dried fruit and nuts, baby carrots nestled together like squat orange fingers. Crewmembers came in waves, with box after box, walkouts working together with Mick’s team as if they had been one crew all along. Mick heard snatches of singing, laughter, shouted banter in English, Spanish, a couple of other languages he didn’t recognize. Consuelo and Jean-Luc joined the chain, humping boxes up the stairwell, conducting periodic quality-control checks to make sure no one filched anything. It all felt surreal, after Mick’s morning of near-solitary stasis in the galley, as if he were standing in the midst of a whirlwind ballet of coordinated and kinetic goodwill, as if the plane had miraculously caused everyone to forget his or her own personal grievances and share eagerly in the communal good fortune of them all.
“Heavy one,” said Camille as she maneuvered backward through the doors. She dumped her box on the floor and went out again as Mick sliced it open and found it packed with cans of milk.
“This one goes in the breakfast stash,” he told a walkout named Kalyani, who had just hustled up behind him. He knew her from the prep station, back in the old days. “With the cereal boxes.”
“Milk,” said Kalyani with mock-scorn. “Who drinks milk?” She gave him a brief frank grin, which seemed to acknowledge that the walkouts had given up, come back to the fold. About time, thought Mick.
“Babies,” said another walkout named Chita, breezing in with a fresh box and dropping it with a dramatic sigh as if it weighed a hundred pounds.
As Mick stood up, bracing himself for the next box, he felt a hand on his shoulder. “Do you need any help?”
He turned to see who it was and almost gasped aloud. Christine wore a sea-green bathing suit. Her hair streamed over her shoulders. She was so close, he could smell saltwater, feel the waves of coolness coming off her. A long piece of hair had stuck to her neck like a tendril. She was gorgeous, muscular and fit from physical labor, a real woman with breasts, hips he wanted to rest his hands on, strong shoulders and thighs. He had to blink a few times.
“There’s nothing to cook,” he managed to say. He could still feel the cool weight of her hand on his shoulder though she’d taken it off. “It’s all ready-to-eat stuff.”
“We went swimming,” she said. “It was amazing. You should go.”
“I can’t swim.” He had never admitted that to anyone before. And certainly not to a woman he was attracted to.
“Oh, come on,” she said warmly. “Why not?”
“I never learned. No one taught me. I know, it’s stupid.”
She didn’t hesitate. “I’ll teach you.”
“I’m a bad student.”
She laughed, eyes sparkling. “You’re sure you don’t need help down here?”
He wanted to kiss her. “No,” he replied. “I’m okay, you can take the rest of the day off, too.” Why had he said that, when he meant and wanted exactly the opposite? “But maybe I’ll see you later, upstairs,” he added.
“Okay,” she said, already on her way out, over her shoulder. “See you later.”
He watched her go, the smooth bare skin of her strong back above her lovely round American ass, cupped by her bikini bottoms. He’d been so oblivious before now. And she’d been wearing baggy shorts and T-shirts.
“Hey, cabrón.” Consuelo snapped her fingers in front of his face. “Quit drooling and check this out.”
He realized his mouth was hanging open a little. As the woman of his dreams vanished through the swinging doors, he looked down at a box Consuelo was pointing at, packed with cans of crabmeat.
“Who’s your girlfriend, Chef?” She grinned at him.
“None of your business,” he said, but he grinned back at her.
The next two boxes held dozens and dozens of croissants. Mick chuckled and shook his head. Seriously? Fucking pastry? His earlier solitary depression had lifted, and he now felt all his senses and forces gathering behind one clear and definite thought: I want Christine. No more regrets about the life he could have had or fear of the gods punishing him for overreaching. There was no going back. And there were no gods. Fuck it, he thought. I don’t care if she’s married. I want her. I want to have what I want, for once in my life.
<
br /> * * *
*
Miriam stood in line near the pool with her paper plate and fork. When it was her turn, the beautiful Indian girl behind the table gave her a scoop of bean salad, which had chunks of some kind of pink meat in it, sweaty-looking, lurid. Miriam waved away the sandwich, a croissant with a white paste. She hated fish salad, unlike every single other Jew she’d ever met. If she had to eat fish, she wanted a filet.
“Can I please have just a plain croissant?” she asked the very tan Australian boy who was handing them out. Her voice sounded creaky, plaintive to her own ears. “Maybe two?”
She took her food over to the old breakfast nook. It was a mess. Most of the deck chairs there had been converted to beds, heaped with sheets and pillows. But there was Christine, sitting sideways on the only uncluttered chair with a plate perched on her knees. Miriam didn’t feel much like company right then, but it was too late to pretend she hadn’t seen her.
“Hello, Christine,” she said. “Can I sit with you?”
“Miriam, hello!” Christine moved over and Miriam sat next to her with her own plate balanced on her knees, and looked dubiously at those glistening chunks of meat.
“How is it?” Miriam asked.
“Not bad, if you like beans,” said Christine. She wore a sundress and sandals and looked fresh and clean and absurdly healthy, her hair windblown and sun-bleached. “And croissants with crabmeat.” She took a bite, chewed. “Actually, this may be the best sandwich I’ve ever had in my whole life.”
Miriam plunged her plastic fork into the bean salad but couldn’t bring herself to eat it. The people around her seemed happy with their food, as if they were homesick kids at summer camp opening care packages full of treats from their mothers. Even Christine seemed thrilled. Miriam felt like a curmudgeon, ungrateful and depressed.
The Last Cruise Page 25