Кейт Кристенсен - The Last Cruise

Restless at the memory of the farm, she picked up a glass of sparkling something from a passing tray and took a sip: it was excellent, very dry. The long, burnished wood floor of the promenade glowed as the sconces and lights came softly on, and she stopped by one of the enormous windows to look out at the darkening ocean. Live old-style jazz tootled and honked on the warm breeze from somewhere not too far away; it was the kind of jazz she liked, swinging and danceable. She felt her shoulders moving in time, felt her whole body revved up with the heat of sensuality. The booze warmed her chest. She smelled cigarette smoke from somewhere nearby. Champagne fizzed in her nostrils while she moved loosely to the jazz and let the sea air slip around her skin.

An hour later, Valerie was already waiting for her at the entrance to the fine-dining restaurant. “There you are!” she said. Christine peeked in and saw a long room with a high ceiling, chandeliers, ceiling fans with fat wooden paddles, potted palms, half-moon banquettes. She heard silverware on china, a hum of voices, music from a string quartet across the room, three elderly gentlemen and a lady. “Are you drunk? I hope you’re drunk. You’re fun when you’re drunk.”

Once again, the irritation of being both scrutinized and appropriated by her friend returned. Christine tried to slough it off. “They’re having a luau in the buffet room, with ukuleles and steel guitar and three girls in leis singing old Hawaiian torch songs. And suckling pigs.”

“You want to eat there instead? This place just has a geriatric string quartet and the decor is kind of snoozy. The menu looks great, though. They’re serving frigging squab. Pigeon. No joke.”

“This place looks great,” said Christine as a tall, gray-haired, stiff-backed gentleman in a crisp tuxedo approached to lead them to their table.

“My name is Sidney, and I will be your maître d’ for this cruise,” he said with a species of British accent. He seated them with thin-lipped formality, pulling their chairs out. “The wine steward will be over immediately.” As he unfolded their napkins for them with ceremonious precision, Christine took hers and draped it over her lap, afraid she was doing it wrong, almost expecting him to correct her. “Enjoy your dinner, ladies.” He bowed slightly from the waist and glided away. Christine was almost certain that she caught a glimmer of self-mocking amusement in his eye as he turned.

“The staff seem like actors in a play,” she said. “Like Upstairs, Downstairs, that old BBC show my parents watched. Downstairs is like backstage, where they get to be themselves.”

“A play,” Valerie repeated. “Christine, this isn’t romantic for them.”

“I know,” said Christine, wondering when Valerie had become so much smarter than she was. They’d been equals once, back when they were younger. Then Christine had gone home to Maine. “I was just babbling. I’m drunk, remember?”

But in fact, Christine wasn’t at all drunk, and she had no idea why she’d said that. To keep the peace, maybe. To prevent herself from snapping defensively at the friend who’d invited her on this cruise in the first place, to whom she felt uneasily beholden.

The menus were handwritten in black ink on rectangles of cream-colored stock. In addition to the squab, there were tartare de boeuf, Caesar salad, shrimp cocktail, oysters on the half shell with shallot mignonette, a vegetable Napoleon, and a few other classic dishes. It really was like going back in time. She could have been in a fine-dining restaurant decades ago in Boston, rubbing shoulders with bluebloods and Harvard professors. Her parents had taken her and her sister down a few times to expose them to “polite society,” as they called it, and Christine had loved it.

The wine steward arrived with an Aussie accent and a thick book full of names of different wines.

“I’ll have the house white,” said Christine. “As long as it’s not Chardonnay.”

“House red for me,” said Valerie. “As long as it’s not Merlot. One glass with dinner every night, two if I’m feeling racy. I seriously do not want to lose my shit on this cruise. You know how I love to lose my shit. It just leads to trouble of the sexual kind, and I have no time for that.”

“Wait, no action the entire time?” Christine said, laughing. “Are you not even checking out the men?”

“What men? Everyone’s paired up and over sixty. Luckily for us. You’re married to a farmer. And I’m married to my book.”

When the waiter returned to inquire about the young ladies’ desires for dinner, Valerie ordered the steak tartare and the squab, no starch. Christine eyed the menu for a moment, enjoying the choices, then settled on shrimp cocktail and steak Diane. “I’ll take her starch, too,” she added.

Valerie snorted. “Farmer,” she said.

Christine settled back in her cushioned chair, feeling lucky and glamorous. “So what did you learn today at school?”

Valerie pushed her glasses up her nose and fiddled with her bangs. “I’m trying to figure out the hierarchy,” she said. “It’s going to be hard to penetrate the crew and staff. They’re so separate from us when they’re not working, and passengers are definitely not welcome in their world. And while they are working, they never seem to have time to talk. Also, Cabaret is a really powerful corporation, so they don’t want to say anything that might jeopardize their jobs. I don’t know. I think what I have to do is find out where they hang out on their time off, when we get to Hawaii, and get drunk with them, or pretend to get drunk. That’s the only way I’m ever going to learn anything real. But I have to stay sober. Seriously.”

A few hours later, Christine found herself on the dance floor in the Starlight Lounge, chaperoning a brazenly tipsy Valerie. While Christine had been drinking steadily and enthusiastically all day, she had eaten well and paced herself and so had managed to keep her wits about her. Valerie, on the other hand, was drunk in the manner of someone who had been determined not to drink and then caved and gave herself over to it with precipitous abandon.

“You’re too gainfully employed for me,” Christine overheard Valerie saying to the man she was fake-ballroom-dancing with. He was a news photographer by day and video artist by night named Jake who, it turned out, lived three blocks away from Valerie in Brooklyn. He worked for a celebrity news-and-gossip website called PopRocks.com that Christine had never heard of.

“Hey,” Valerie said into Christine’s ear as she and Jake went waltzing by, “should I go make out with Jake in a lifeboat?”

Christine was entrapped in the determined arms of Jake’s colleague, Theodore, a serious, slightly pudgy journalist who was “actually a poet.” Christine was only dancing with him because Valerie had accepted for both of them. But Theodore was mistakenly flattered and intrigued, and Christine kept having to maneuver his eager body a safe distance from her own while he crooned along with “Blueberry Hill” into her ear in a not-bad baritone.

“I don’t care,” said Christine, laughing, but they’d already danced out of earshot.

“How about you?” Theodore asked. “Do you want to make out?”

Her wedding ring was apparently invisible to him. “I’m married,” she said.

“So am I,” said Theodore, pressing himself against her.

“Oh please,” said Christine, strong-arming him away from her. “Stop it, seriously.”

When the song ended, Christine went over to Valerie and tapped her on the shoulder. “I’m cutting in,” she told Jake, linking her arm in Valerie’s. “We have to go.”

Valerie let herself be pulled without protest out of the Starlight Lounge and up to the pool bar at the top of the ship. “Oh my God, Chris,” she said in Christine’s ear. “Thank you.”