Кейт Кристенсен - The Last Cruise

“There’s always the return trip,” Valerie said.

Larry sucked on his cigar. The end sparked, ashes blew off in the breeze. “Oh, we’re just going one way. Getting off in Hawaii. Got to get back to work.”

Smiling, nodding, Valerie leaned into the warmth of his easy, mellow charm. “What kind of business are you in, if you don’t mind my asking? I apologize for not knowing.”

Christine listened with frank admiration. Valerie had always been so good at flattering powerful people, getting them to talk without knowing they were revealing anything. As a journalist, Christine had always been leery of intruding, thanks to the ingrained New England etiquette of minding your own business. And her native blunt honesty had likewise made it hard for her not to blurt out her real purpose in questioning them.

As Larry answered in broad and general terms, and Valerie asked another seemingly innocent question, Christine stared down at the water. She was drunk, she realized. Below the ship, the ocean looked like a rolling sheet of thick black oil. Electric light fell in choppy bands on its surface. She felt a cold, gripping sadness in the pit of her chest. It had come seemingly out of nowhere, like her reaction to the octopus in the aquarium. She hoped she could stave off these crises of hollow, trapped dread until she was back in Maine, planting seedlings, hatching chicks, again caught up in the cycle of renewed life.

Mick hadn’t meant to go on and on about his fucking youth in fucking Budapest in front of Laurens and the captain and senior officers and all those passengers. Walking out of the room in disgrace, he wanted to stab himself in the head. He had always prided himself on being adept at reading the people he worked for. He’d honed the skill growing up with his father, who was low-key and affable until he exploded in violence toward whoever or whatever was closest at hand. As a small boy, Mick had learned to identify unerringly the almost imperceptible signs of an impending tantrum. A twitch in his father’s lip presaged a punch in the head; if he asked a question, unthinking, and his father hesitated before answering and then spat a terse, monosyllabic answer, Mick knew to get out of his way until the next day, or he’d find himself shaken upside down a little later on. He was lucky, he figured; the hardest lessons, he got early, when he was young enough to absorb and use them as an adult. It had stood him in good stead in the world of professional kitchens, where chefs were as often as not broken in some way, damaged, or abused, or neglected, or bullied, or wrecked by drugs or alcohol, or hardened by being in gangs or prison, or all of the above. The abused became the perpetrator of violence; the bullied went on to crush the weak; the hardened went on to beat others down. It was the way of the species.

Mick was proud of his own self-control in kitchens. He didn’t throw tantrums. He didn’t hit people or tongue-lash them. He wasn’t a bully or a tyrant. But tonight, he’d lost his self-control. And, as always in his life whenever he got too cocky, too desirous of attention, too hell-bent on proving something, someone slapped him down. He thought of that someone collectively as “the gods,” but it always had a human face. When he was little, it was his father. Later it was chefs he worked for, women he wanted to impress. Most recently, it was Suzanne. And tonight it had been Laurens, the person whose respect he most wanted at the moment.

He fled from the room, his head hot and seething with shame. Finished with his work for the night, he went straight down to the crew lounge, still in his whites, since he’d put on spanking clean ones for the presentation upstairs.

The lounge was crowded. He stormed to the bar and ordered a shot of whiskey and a beer.

“Looks like someone had a bad night,” the bartender said. His name was Trevor; he was a Haitian room steward, slight and very young, with hooded eyes and skin so dark it glistened. Sometimes he sang along with the music on the PA in a trembling falsetto.

Mick downed the shot, took a long slug of the beer. “A little better now,” he said. “I’ll take another shot.”

He sat alone in the lounge watching the mafias converge, consult, conspire. Tonight it was primarily the Jamaicans, the Greeks, and the South Africans, with two Indian guys over in one corner, keeping to themselves and talking in low voices in what was probably Hindi. The groups had no apparent common currency; they sat apart, in discrete cliques as delineated as schools of fish, eight or so in each group, men and women, mostly young, healthy, good-looking. Normally, in and between these ethnic and nationalistic huddles, there was flirting, there was drunken but mostly good-humored posturing, there was loud talking, blowing off steam. Tonight was weird, like the first night had been. The conversations felt private, without theater, and the atmosphere in the room was tense, thick, loaded.

“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.