Кейт Кристенсен - The Last Cruise

Her first kiss had been with Daniel at the Brooklyn Theater. They were both fourteen, so it had been 1956… What was the movie…? Something very dramatic, with what’s-her-name, that’s right, it was Giant. Miriam could remember the taste of the butter from the popcorn on Daniel’s mouth. His hot hands on her waist. Her first love. That romance had ended when her family moved to the San Fernando Valley in the late 1950s, when the freeways were built through the old neighborhood and the Jewish population became increasingly leftist and radicalized. Miriam’s last two years of high school in the Valley had been dull, no boyfriend, a lot of schoolwork and practicing her violin and hardly any fun, because she was so focused on straight A’s and escaping to New York to start her real life. She had left at seventeen on a full scholarship to Barnard. So that was all, that was Los Angeles, it was all Boyle Heights for her.

And it was gone, all of it. Her parents and brothers were all dead. She had no family here anymore. When she’d gone back five years ago to visit her old neighborhood, she had found it so changed she didn’t recognize it. The Boyle Street shul had been abandoned and wrecked, graffitied, with pigeon feathers on the floor. The Brooklyn Theater, which had closed decades ago and been turned into retail stores, was razed, and now there was an empty lot there, unless they’d already built something else on top of it. And there were no more streetcars, not since the early ’60s.

The minivan had been crawling along the 405, but the traffic cleared as if by magic and they picked up speed and whipped along. Isaac, Jakov, and Sasha all looked completely farmutschet, three old men who’d just flown around the world. Miriam imagined she looked as tired as they did. The Kol Nidre was going around in her head now, that most sacred of prayers. She was imagining the version recorded by Itzhak Perlman and Cantor Yitzchak Meir Helfgot in 2012, so soulful, so moving for her to listen to, truly the embodiment of sacredness in music. Miriam thought Itzy and Yitzy (as she called them to herself) probably liked each other a lot, listening to the recording. You could always hear in the music how the musicians felt about one another. She knew that was true of the four of them.

“Los Angeles is so dirty,” said Isaac. He was sitting in the front, next to the driver. Miriam and Sasha sat in the forward passenger seats, and Jakov was in the back with his cello. “Such a dirty town. The air is brown, there’s trash everywhere.”

“That’s not true,” said Miriam. “The air’s been cleaned up a lot. Where do you see trash? Show me.”

“It’s not that I see it right now,” said Isaac, turning back to look at her. “I didn’t say I saw it right now. I’m making a general statement.”

“The water’s not so good either,” said Sasha. “What’s left of it…”

“Who cares?” said Jakov from the back seat. “We’re here for one night. Then it’s all ocean breezes and purified drinking water for two weeks. I read that cruise ships have the cleanest drinking water.”

“Cruise ships,” said Isaac. “All you hear about cruises lately is people getting sick because of other people not washing their hands after they go to the bathroom. I’d rather stay on dry land any day. I’d rather perform in a department store.”

“I like a cruise,” said Jakov. “The food is always good, and the audiences are usually too drunk to notice when you flub a note.”

“I never flub a note,” said Isaac. He coughed with agitation.

Sasha still wore the blank, sepulchral expression Miriam had noticed on the plane.

“Sasha,” she said now, “what’s wrong with you?”

“I’m dreading the Weiss,” he said.

“Oh, I was dreading it the entire plane ride.”

“I don’t think I can play it anymore.”

“ You can’t? I’m the one with the impossible part! Your part is all gliss and legato.”

“Is that what you think my part is? Have you ever played it?”

“The whole Weiss is unplayable,” said Jakov. “And unlistenable.”

“I like it,” said Isaac. “It’s exciting.”

“The Weiss is not exciting,” said Miriam. “It’s horrible.”

“So what should we do?” said Sasha. “Are we really going to play this thing on the ship?”

“If we don’t,” said Miriam, “Rivka will hate us, and Larry will never hire us again. But I’m okay with that if you are.”

“Of course we’re playing it,” said Isaac. “And we’ll play it well. Stop being such babies. We’ll rehearse it for the first few days and then we’ll play it one night in the middle of the cruise sometime.”

A dread-filled, resigned silence hung over the van. The cab came off the freeway and slid through the streets of Long Beach down toward the harbor. When they pulled up at their hotel, Miriam paid the driver with their business credit card and tipped him, squinting through her reading glasses at the damned machine. The display was hard to read when she was this tired. Yawning, holding their aching backs, they climbed from the minivan and stood blinking under the hotel’s porte cochere with their instruments and luggage. Swiftly, bellhops swooped in and collected everything, ushering them all into the lobby, toward the front desk.

Their four rooms were on four different floors. It was one of the stipulations they made when they traveled, along with airplane seats in different rows. Their booking agent had screwed up this time with the plane seats, but at least he’d gotten the hotel right. Up in her stark, drab room on the ninth floor, Miriam ran a bath and undressed. Just as she was about to sink into the warm water, her room phone rang, that ugly electronic bleating all the phones had now. The little screen on the bathroom phone identified the caller as room 1216. She picked up the handset, looking at her naked reflection in the mirror in the bright lights. Never had she looked older or uglier in her entire life. And she prided herself on keeping her looks into old age, and her figure, too. She was slender and her face was still pretty firm, but her reflection looked a hundred years old, wizened. What did they make these hotel lights and mirrors out of? It made her want to jump out the window. No wonder hotel windows didn’t open.

“Mimi,” said Isaac when she picked up, “can you come quick?” His voice was urgent, high. He spoke English.

“Where?”

“To my room. I need you to look at something.”

“I’m about to get in the bath. I’m falling down with exhaustion. Can this wait until tomorrow? Or can you get Jakov to come look at it?”

“I have something on my… my scrotum,” he said. “Jakov can’t look at it.”

“For God’s sake. You men are so delicate. He has one too, you know. It’s no mystery to him. What’s on your scrotum that you need me to come and look at it right this minute?”

“It looks like a cancer.”

“Go to sleep, Isaac. It won’t kill you before morning.” She hung up the phone and stared at it. Then she called the front desk. “Please hold all my calls,” she told the person who answered. “Especially from room 1216.”

She climbed into her bath and scrubbed herself well, ignoring all possible signs of skin cancer, although there were two or three suspicious-looking moles and an unhealed sore on her shoulder that she’d been a little worried about. She refused to be a hypochondriac like Isaac. She’d die of skin cancer first.

Mick stood on the dock watching as forklifts unloaded pallets into the Queen Isabella ’s delivery bay, to be picked up by other forklifts and cube-waltzed into her belly before being conveyed to the storage rooms below. He was still a little drunk, but he was an expert at working under the influence, any influence, for any length of time. He could work for thirty hours straight and put himself into a waking trance, drunk, stoned, or high, and never drop anything or miss a detail. His hands and his brain had struck an agreement: his brain did what it wanted, and his hands ran the show. That was how he survived this job.