Richard Mason - History of a Pleasure Seeker

Piet did not trust the notion of an elevator. “I’ll walk, thank you.”

The staircase was flanked by pillars of painted marble. Across the ceiling nymphs with very little on were being pursued by muscular Tritons. At intervals in the balustrade the line’s shell and crossed L s were pricked out in gold. The ship was empty, and the absence of chatter and clattering heels heightened the impact of its magnificence. Piet paused on the second landing under the great gilt clock. As it struck the hour, he climbed the last flight to find Didier waiting for him, flushed but grave. He nodded and led Piet beneath a dome of turquoise and gilt to a table set for one by the stage.

The Eugénie ’s director of music believed in taking his audience by surprise. The instant the last dessert plate was cleared, while the room was still full of talk and laughter, he lifted his baton and plunged it into darkness. Piet had never seen Carmen , but knew it from the first high-spirited leap of the overture. A surge of gaiety swept the room. Accustomed to provincial orchestras heard from the cheapest seats, Piet had no notion that a group of musicians might make a sound as rich and subtle as that achieved by the Eugénie ’s band.

The stage filled with handsome men in uniform. Albert Verignan employed well-known singers for the solo roles, but stewards with musical training doubled as members of the ship’s chorus. Piet recognized some of them from Didier’s tours of duty. A young woman appeared in a blue dress with dark plaits over her shoulders. He could not see her face as the soldiers surged round her, lustful and impudent. They were touching her and pulling at her dress; for a moment there was danger beneath the music’s catchy jollity. “Who are you looking for, my beauty?” sang their leader.

“Me?” She had an exceptional voice. When the crowd parted Piet saw that she was about his age, with a finely wrought face and devilish eyes. She announced that she was looking for a brigadier named Don José.

It was Stacey Meadows’ habit to address this line directly to one of the gentlemen sitting closest to the stage. She offered no intimate favors but was not above accepting devotion and pawnable trinkets from the men who occupied the Eugénie ’s grandest suites. To be met by the bold, delighted stare of Piet Barol separated this night from the many others on which she had reprised the role of Micäela, a country girl too innocent to interest her, sent by an officer’s mother to give him a message and some money and a kiss. As the soldiers begged her to stay with them, she resisted with dazzling indignation. They threatened. One singer pressed his body against her, in contravention of the limits imposed at her insistence during rehearsals, and she freed herself emphatically while delivering a blazing B flat.

Piet Barol was transfixed. He watched her flee the stage, and the vague desire that had been mounting for days flared explosively. To touch a young woman! To use all he had learned from Jacobina on someone his own age! The possibility ignited his senses. He was suddenly aware, more deeply than he had been before, of the marvelous room; of the enthralled, well-dressed crowd, as it slipped beneath the music’s sorcery. How splendid to be where he was!

He knew the opera’s piano reduction intimately. To hear it played by musicians of distinction was a revelation. A crowd of children appeared, to general applause — so extravagant, so typical of Verignan, to bring fifteen adorable infants halfway around the world for a few scenes in an opera. Then the girls from the cigarette factory sauntered on, barely dressed, limbs and necks glistening with oil. A crowd of young bucks pursued them as a number of male passengers intended to do directly after the curtain call. Carmen’s entrance unleashed a roar of recognition and welcome. Germaine Lorette was in her late forties, squat and thickset, with a large nose and a voice of astonishing, undulating power. She moved with such arrogance there was nothing ridiculous in the handsome youths begging her to love them.

Piet had accompanied many amateur mezzo-sopranos as they tried their hands at “L’Amour Est un Oiseau Rebelle.” Lorette’s insolence was riveting. She picked a flower from her corsage and tossed it at Pierre Lauriac, the tenor playing Don José. He was twenty years younger than she and as in awe of her as the crowd was. The promise of sex filled the room; radiating from Carmen’s scorching glance, reviving the audience’s recollections of the cigarette girls’ smooth, oiled limbs, and their exquisitely made-up mouths singing of sweet cigar smoke and the transports of lovers.

An unspoken “when at sea” rule was taken for granted by all but the strictest watching moralists, and a glorious lasciviousness took hold of them, preserved from vulgarity by the music’s sophistication. Across the darkened room knees pressed against neighboring knees, hands clasped beneath tables. Even couples who had been married twenty years smiled at each other and were charmed by one another’s faces, lit by the soft red light of the shaded lamps.

Sitting at the captain’s table, bored by his fashionable companions and glad to be silent at last, Jay Gruneberger saw with pleasure that the strapping young man who never came to meals had made an exception tonight. He shifted his chair to get a clear view of him. Piet’s lips were slightly parted and the rosy light made his cheeks shine like a farm boy’s. Jay looked for the blond one and found him staring at his dark friend. Didier’s face had forgotten its professional neutrality. Oh to be young and in love, Jay thought.

Didier hardly heard the music and took no interest in the figures on the stage. He was in a state of quiet ecstasy. To have followed Piet on his adventure and rescued him from tourist class, to have brought him here and given him the gift of an opera, made him immensely proud. His gaze flickered occasionally over the tables, but no one had the temerity to interrupt Germaine Lorette’s first aria. Otherwise he looked only at Piet.

Stacey Meadows returned. During her brief absence from the stage she had artfully heightened her makeup, and when she reached for Don José, she was standing several feet to the left of where she was meant to be, right before Piet’s table. “Your mother sent me,” she said.

“Tell me of my mother!”

The duet began, tenor and soprano standing alone on the empty stage. Unlike Germaine Lorette, Stacey Meadows did not overpower her partner. As she told him she was his mother’s faithful messenger, Piet had to look away. Nina had sung him to sleep with these words as a child. “Tell him his mother dreams of him night and day, that she misses him and hopes for him,” Stacey sang. “She forgives him and is waiting for him.” Her voice soared over the shimmering violins as she promised to give Don José the kiss his mother had sent him.

But Piet did not see her deliver it.

He was in tears.

Pierre Lauriac took a deep breath. “I see my mother!” Sharing the stage with Germaine Lorette had unnerved him. He was trying too hard and the tightness in his throat made every leap perilous.

Piet’s shoulders began to shake. He had chirruped the part as a little boy, but only as a man had he come close to achieving its true beauty. “Even from afar my mother protects me.” Lauriac was close to Piet’s age and standing not five feet away. The words summoned Nina, pale but frivolous in the hours before her death, making light of the pains in her chest. Piet’s eyes met Stacey Meadows’, who was pleased to see that the power of her performance had made this handsome stranger weep. It added sensitivity to his outward advantages. She turned to Don José, annoyed to have an imperfect partner at such a moment, and smiled so reassuringly that his singing dramatically improved.