Кейт Кристенсен - The Last Cruise

Park had a big, sweet face and a cuddly, bouncy personality. He was interchangeable with all the other American entertainment staff, male or female, that Mick had known through the years. They seemed to breed them in the Midwest in particular. Park was from Illinois.

“Joliet,” he’d said with unforced cheer. “Forty miles in distance but really a million miles in all other ways from Chicago. A prison town, used-to-be steel town, and I’m very glad to be out of there.”

He’d asked Mick about growing up in Budapest, and then Mick had mentioned Suzanne, the fact that he should have been with her in Paris right now. Something in his tone must have given away how lovelorn he felt, because Park had stroked his arm and assured him that true love was never smooth, and he himself was heartbroken right now over a crewmember who’d just broken up with him, and he was here, on the Isabella, so Park would have to avoid him for the next two weeks.

This meeting cheered Mick up quite a bit.

He picked up another mackerel and looked it in the eye. He envisioned a whole school of them, grilled, arranged in scalloped stacks on a platter of seaweed salad, garnished with pickled lemon rind and charred caper berries, drizzled with spicy aioli. So he wasn’t in Paris with Suzanne, so what? He was going to let himself have some fun on this cruise.

“You’re really here,” said Valerie as she and Christine hugged by the ramp leading up to the boarding deck of the Queen Isabella. “I can’t believe I got you to leave the farm and fly all the way across the country.”

“Are you kidding?” said Christine. “I need a vacation like you would not believe.”

“Should we get on this thing?” Valerie asked, squinting up at the towering ship. People jostled around them to board.

“I can’t wait,” said Christine.

Valerie laughed. “You have to have fun the entire time, in fact I command you to. Seriously. This is a work trip for me. I need you to be my proxy.”

As they joined the slow line of passengers spilling up the gangway onto the ship, Christine stole a gander at Valerie’s impeccably urbane outfit. She wore a gray shirtdress with a white collar and black wedge espadrilles. In her bony cleavage nestled a pendant, a brass owl with glowing red garnet eyes. She wore stylish black glasses. Her short dark auburn hair curled against her neck. She was severely thin, even more so than usual. Christine felt like a bumpkin next to her.

“It’s so intense,” Valerie was saying as she checked her phone for messages, updates, texts. Her voice was staccato, clipped. Christine had forgotten what New Yorkers could be like, coming at you like hungry highly-strung wild animals, scanning for prey, chattering away. “The pressure I’m under, it’s crazy. And then the whole fuckup with my flight, I barely slept, and the guy next to me farted these toxic methane clouds the whole fucking flight. Oh my God, I can’t wait to unpack and take my shoes off. Oh look, a text from Julian. Like I care. And another one from, oh shit, I forgot that whole thing, okay, it’s okay.” She mashed at her phone with her thumbs.

Christine had met Valerie twelve years before when they’d started together, freshly arrived in New York, as assistants at Babe, a hip women’s magazine with a young, feminist slant. The magazine had folded after three years, but their friendship had endured. Christine was always the stable, responsible Maine girl who supported Valerie, perennially lovelorn, through multiple emotional crises. She invited Val to sleep over when she was heartbroken, and gave her advice and generally acted as her big sister, or even mother, or even, she’d often thought without resentment, stand-in boyfriend. Christine generally had boyfriends, but she always included Valerie, who had become her roommate, in movie nights and takeout meals. And Valerie had always given Christine a lot in return. She was dashing and fearless and intrepid. She forced Christine to try new things, be more ambitious, and push harder for what she wanted. In the past seven years, ever since Christine had moved back to Maine and married Ed, Valerie had remained Christine’s connection to her old life in New York, kept her in touch with the world of journalism, given her all the latest gossip. She’d allowed Christine to feel that she hadn’t completely dropped off the map. And in return, Christine had remained Val’s sounding board and solid shoulder—from a distance, but still and always there.

“How is Julian?” Christine asked. She felt oddly shy with her old friend as they unpacked in their tiny cabin, cramming their dresses onto hangers in the doll-sized closet, stowing toiletries on the little shelves in the minuscule bathroom. She hadn’t seen Valerie since last June. She’d forgotten how focused she was, how ferociously professional. Christine felt a mild queasiness at the thought of spending two intimate, close-quartered weeks together. There was hardly room to walk around their luggage, which they’d piled on the floor. The two beds were separated only by a little nightstand. The decor was ’70s-sitcom drab: beige and powder-blue patterned bedspreads, a small round table by the window with one chair, a long low laminated bureau below a painting of the ocean at sunset in lurid neon oil. Christine would have felt cramped alone in this room. Sharing it with Valerie, she suspected it would be possible only to sleep and shower here. Even that would be tricky.

Valerie gave a hard snort of a laugh. “That is so over.”

“Why?” Christine asked, although she was secretly unsurprised. “I thought you liked him.”

“Do you want the short version or the long one?”

“Long, please,” said Christine. She was still feeling shaky from her weird experience at the aquarium, and Valerie’s serial tales of romantic failure were generally entertaining, if increasingly worrisome, since she seemed to be getting simultaneously lonelier and less practical in her choices of men, as far as Christine could tell from her e-mails. In truth, it pained Christine that Valerie’s dim view of men was so reliably and regularly confirmed by the accused themselves, as if she had an unerring instinct for finding the ones who conformed to her low expectations.

“Actually, it’s short no matter how I tell it,” said Valerie. She didn’t look at Christine. She was concentrating on arranging a dress on a hanger, and her voice was clipped, so Christine couldn’t gauge her feelings. “It was a disaster. The end. I need to conserve my energies. I’m not good at anything except work. And masturbation. No more men, Christine, I mean it.”

Valerie was right: she was very good at her work. At thirty-two, in addition to running her own successful news and culture website, called PaperCuts.com, she had recently published a New York Times Magazine cover story exposing “the shadowy world of hidden workers in the new global economy,” as the tagline summarized it. She’d been approached by a handful of interested editors in the weeks after it ran. She was in the process of signing a six-figure deal to expand her piece into a book.

“Your life couldn’t be going any better, it seems to me,” said Christine.

“On paper it couldn’t,” Valerie said. She closed the closet door, nudging it with her hip to make it stay shut. “Okay. You go up to the sail-away party and I’ll stay here and type my notes.”

“Notes?” said Christine. “What notes?”

“I talked to a crewmember while I waited for you on the dock. He told me about the system they have for sorting the luggage and delivering it to each cabin and suite.” While she talked, Valerie pulled out her laptop and set it up on the little desk by the balcony door.