Кейт Кристенсен - The Last Cruise

Miriam hadn’t had a romantic relationship with anyone since her divorce from Isaac. Maybe because of her ongoing yearning for Sasha, combined with their travel schedule and performing lives, she’d hardly had any sex at all, just a toss or two a decade or so ago with her sweet, helpful neighbor, Moshe Gross, and a brief affair with, of all people, her daughter-in-law’s uncle, Ira Goldstein, whom she’d met and flirted with at her first grandson’s bris. He was a cultured, intelligent man, courtly and generous and lusty. Their affair might have lasted, but he lived in Berlin, and neither felt like relocating, and Miriam traveled so much already, they couldn’t figure out how to meet often enough to sustain their feelings for each other. So that was that, it all fizzled out, pffft. They’d lost touch long ago.

It was nice, daydreaming over her glass of tomato juice and vodka about her past sex life. It allowed her to forget that she was worried about this upcoming cruise for a number of reasons, Isaac’s recent intonation issues and her own arthritis among them, Jakov’s backstage tantrums over tempi, about which he and Sasha had never agreed, and Sasha’s emotional fragility since his wife had died abruptly last spring of an aneurysm, which had caused him to miss the occasional entrance, something he had never once done in all these years. But the main thing she was worried about was playing the Six-Day War Quartet, a long and difficult piece that Rivka Weiss herself had written, on commission, for the Sabra Quartet last year. They hadn’t had a chance to perform it yet; this would be their first time. Rivka of course was going to be on the cruise, with her billionaire husband, Larry, who was one of the owners of the ship. And Rivka had made it known to them that she was excited to hear her quartet performed. The problem was that they had hardly had any time to rehearse it yet, and worse, “The Weiss,” as they called it, ominously, was spiky, dissonant, and contained a full fifteen seconds of silence during the Andante. Miriam’s second-violin part was full of tricky double-stops that were nearly impossible to play in tune, as well as scampering, atonal arpeggios that demanded intense concentration.

Miriam was sure her part had been written with a certain punishing vindictiveness. Rivka had never liked her, for some reason that Miriam couldn’t understand. But the Weisses had funneled a generous amount of money in the Sabra’s direction over the years. The quartet depended exclusively on Larry’s goodwill for their most lucrative yearly gig, the summer concert series at the Jewish Folk Art Museum. Their fees from that series alone paid Miriam’s apartment dues and expenses for the entire year. And Larry was on the Queen Isabella, the very ship they were sailing on. So they had to play the Weiss on this cruise, and they had to play it well, despite the piece’s extreme difficulty. And they probably had to play it more than once, because after the first performance, Rivka would have notes for them, no doubt. She always had critiques, elaborate, poetic, demanding, and impossible to obey: “The opening fifteen bars of the scherzo have to be drawn out, slowly, slowly, slowly, like pulled taffy, like a sigh, like the slow fall of water into a bowl from a great height.” That had been written on the actual score. It reminded Miriam of the vague, pretentious notes Debussy used to add to his music, smacking of insecurity and control issues. “Which one is it like?” she had snorted to Isaac. “The taffy or the water? Or the sigh?”

Miriam finished her drink and put her head back on her pillow and shut her eyes.

“Three more hours,” said Isaac in the direction of Miriam’s ear. He hadn’t spoken in a very long time. He coughed to clear his throat. The sounds of his rattling phlegm caused her to snap her eyes open and make an annoyed clucking sound, which made Isaac huff. “I’m choking,” he said.

“Choke quietly,” she said. “I’m trying to sleep.”

As Isaac continued gently snorting with the remnants of his choking fit, Miriam gave up on sleep and turned around to look through the crack in the seats at Sasha, directly behind her. He was awake and staring straight ahead, his face blank, sagging, his eyes dull. Such a handsome face, it made her so sad to see him like that, collapsed in grief. She wished she could cheer him up.

“It’s almost over,” she said. “We land in less than three hours.”

He didn’t respond. Was he going deaf? That would be a catastrophe.

She turned around again and opened her book, fretting.

The plane landed with a heavy jolt. Isaac clenched his fists on his thighs. Miriam reached over and took his hand. “We made it,” she said. He squeezed her hand, and like that they were friends again.

After clearing customs, the four of them walked a little stiffly out into the early evening sunshine, wheeling all their instruments and bags in various carts. While they waited on the curb for a cab big enough to fit them all, Miriam inhaled through her nose. The smell of this place was so familiar, so anciently known. She had been born and raised in Los Angeles, then schooled in New York City at Barnard and Juilliard, before she’d left Greenwich Village in the early ’60s as a young Zionist, all fired up with newfound political Jewish fervor, to make aliyah and live on a kibbutz. She’d lived in Israel ever since. Sometimes, though, she wished she could go back to Los Angeles, the city of her birth. But inertia, money, and the quartet had kept her in Tel Aviv. It was so easy to live there, with its beautiful climate and geriatric-Jew-friendly benefits. It was almost like living in Southern California, but better, because their water problem was figured out with desalination and recycling of gray water. And in Tel Aviv, she didn’t have to worry about earthquakes, landslides, fires, or tsunamis. The only thing she feared was the people, all the chauvinistic zealots and rioting hotheads. And given the choice, she preferred to live with the dangers she knew best, the ones she understood.

Still, her earliest memories were here. And it felt good to be back, smelling the smells of her childhood. She wished she could stay a few days instead of driving straight to Long Beach and getting on a boat tomorrow.

When they had stowed all their gear in the back of a minivan, with Jakov’s cello taking up half the back row of seats, they strapped in and the young Hispanic driver inched out into the thick LAX traffic.

L.A.’s freeways were not so familiar to Miriam; she hadn’t had a driver’s license when she’d lived in Los Angeles, or even in New York. That had come later, in the 1960s, in her early twenties, when she’d learned to drive in a jeep in the Sinai Desert. But she remembered driving all over the city as a little girl in her parents’ Chevrolet, stuck in the bench backseat between her two older brothers, cigarette smoke blowing on the hot breeze from the front seat. Her parents were always chain-smoking. She remembered her father’s bald head gleaming with sweat where his yarmulke didn’t cover, her mother’s brassy, stiff wig curls staying in place no matter how windy it got. Her father had been a high school math teacher. Her mother had been a pianist, and a very good one, who’d given up any chance of a career for the usual reasons Orthodox women gave up the idea of a career in those days. But she’d taught piano lessons in their Boyle Heights apartment.

All at once, Miriam was there again, in the old neighborhood. It came back in one whoosh of memory: their cool, sprawling second-story apartment in the Wyvernwood; dust motes swirling in the light near the projection booth when the movie started in the Brooklyn Theater; the Breed Street shul with its carved benches and painted murals and stained-glass windows; the B-line streetcar that rattled and jolted through the traffic and was so much fun to ride. She remembered hearing the Kol Nidre sung during the High Holy Days in her grandparents’ Wilshire Boulevard Synagogue with its beautiful domed, gold beehive ceiling, her stomach rumbling with hunger along with everyone else’s. She could hardly remember her bat mitzvah. She’d been so nervous. Daniel Fischel! He was there, and as she’d sung her haftorah portion, she’d looked up and met his eyes and almost forgotten her place.