Кейт Кристенсен - The Last Cruise

He shoved his hand into a box of asparagus on a waiting pallet. The stalks were damp. Any wetter and he’d have to reject them. He nodded at the forklift driver. It was almost five o’clock in the morning. The sky over the harbor was the color of eggplant. Inland, the horizon showed streaks of eggshell and cream. Everything looked like food to Mick; not edible, but in need of attention, quality control, prep. The air smelled like diesel exhaust. He felt as if he’d never be allowed to lie down and sleep again. His eyelids crackled with dry sand. His mouth was so parched he sucked his own tongue. Az Isten verje meg … he was thinking in Hungarian, he was so tired. He allowed himself to slump, standing with his eyes closed for five long, ticking seconds, a micro-nap, as his brain rebooted itself. Then he straightened up and got back to work.

A pallet of broccoli came by. He thrust a hand into a random box and felt the springy green firmness of a flower. In four days, it would be limp and browning. But for now, it was perfect. Thank God. He hated sending broccoli back; he always needed every stalk. Broccoli was the cornerstone of the plating garnishes, a staple of the salad bar, a key player in the vegetable-of-the-day medleys. He had a good idea of the Isabella ’s menu, but didn’t know yet precisely what it entailed. He’d find out soon enough. He had a meeting with the executive chef at 0730.

Normally, the job of overseeing the deliveries was done by the storekeeper, but this cruise was small and just a one-off, so they hadn’t hired one. Mick was one of three executive sous-chefs, working directly under the executive chef in either the one main restaurant galley or the buffet galley, he didn’t know yet which. He was usually a station chef, a line cook; this was a promotion. He suspected it was only temporary, since he was filling in for someone else, but if he did a good job, it wouldn’t go unnoticed. Nothing ever did on a cruise ship. Anyway, it was nice to be outside, on land. He’d spend enough time in the belly of this ship in the next two weeks. He might as well get all the fresh air he could in the meantime. Not that this air was particularly fresh.

He rummaged around and pulled an oyster out of a box marked WASHINGTON STATE. He fished a shucking knife out of his jacket and opened it, slurped the sweet-briny nugget from its bed. He scowled at the forklift driver as if it were possibly bad and shucked another one, making the guy wait. The second was as energizing as the first. He nodded at the driver and the pallet moved on.

That waitress last night, what had gotten into him? The look in her eye. She had run away and sent the other one over, the short dark one, and had stayed on the other side of the room. He was a drunk creep now. Fuck it. It had been too long since he’d touched a woman. He never got involved with anyone on a ship, not out of faithfulness to Suzanne, who had never been faithful to him, but because he didn’t have time or energy. Women on cruise-ship crews were young and luscious and decadent, for the most part. They drank and got stoned and slept around and had as much fun as they could, even though they were working the same long hard hours everyone else worked. He needed to fuck one of them soon. He needed Suzanne.

His hand snaked into a box on the next pallet and encountered a neatly packed row of rotund things with rough prickly skin and hard spiky tops. They felt like tiny magueys grafted onto the tops of miniature barrel cacti. They were fresh, firm and full of turgor. He thought of aloe, with its thin green slime, good for kitchen burns. But this wasn’t a succulent. Then all at once his mouth was filled with the memory of a fruit: juicy, tart, sweet, fibrous. He felt a powerful craving for grilled chunks, with pork, soy sauce, something spicy. Pineapples. The cruise was going to Hawaii: of course. He waved the pallet on.

The Isabella rose sleekly from the water, much smaller than the last ship he’d worked on. That had been a five-month stint on a vast white behemoth that accommodated four thousand passengers, most of them Americans who had opted for the package that included unlimited sodas from dispensers that read a chip in their ship-issued plastic cups. The ship itself mirrored the people on it, oversized, out of proportion, expelling ground-up food waste and treated sewage into the ocean, spewing colossal clouds of exhaust into the sea air, a giant pissing, shitting, farting beast. While the kitchens in its massive belly disgorged ton after ton of French fries, pizza, and grilled slabs of steak upward to be chewed and swallowed and deposited into smaller, individual massive bellies, belowdecks the foreign-born, mostly Third World crew worked long, hard days, slept little, ate little, gave themselves over to keeping this untenable system, the dream vacation, going.

But this ship was a different animal entirely. He had learned from the brochure the office manager had handed him that the Queen Isabella had originated in a more elegant, scaled-down era, before cruise ships got put on steroids and turned into so-called “floating cities.” She’d been built in France in the early 1950s, renovated and refurbished in the 1970s, sold to Cabaret Cruises, an American company, and re-renovated and re-outfitted in 2002. She had just two raked funnels and only five decks from the waterline up, and carried a fraction of the thousands of passengers they crammed aboard those supersized monsters. Her lifeboats hung from davits, low down. Her curved stern swooped high over the water. Her bow rose at a sharp angle.

Mick had been told very little about this cruise, but he knew that it was the Isabella ’s last before she was retired: a two-week cross-Pacific jaunt that would take them to three ports of call in the Hawaiian Islands followed by a reverse trip back. The tone was meant to echo and imitate her first cruise in 1957: retro menu, classic cocktails, cabaret singers, jazz bands, string quartets, old movies, blackjack and baccarat in the casino. Everyone would be expected to dress for dinner. There was no Internet service, and no one under sixteen was permitted on board.

All of this Mick approved of, not because he hated contemporary music, or kids, or the Internet, or informal clothes, but because he loved cooking the classic old dishes from vintage menus: oysters Rockefeller, lobster Newburg, clams casino, steak Diane. He liked aspic. He liked Hollandaise sauce and champagne sherbet and avocado halves stuffed with shrimp salad; he liked real cocktails, martinis and highballs. He romanticized that time of honestly fancy food and drink, back before farm-to-table became an elitist idea claimed by the rich instead of what the peasants ate, before the magic tricks of molecular gastronomy with its emulsions and foams, before “craft cocktails” in Mason jars made with infusions and smoke and fey garnishes. Growing up in Budapest at the end of the twentieth century had been something like having a 1950s American youth. It felt familiar to him, cozy and civilized.

So he didn’t dread this cruise as much as he’d dreaded the last one. Two weeks of making food he knew, and then he’d finally get to see where things stood with Suzanne.

His hand was shoved deep inside of a box of onions, looking for the dry-papery rasp that meant they were fresh. He sniffed his fingers. There was a trace of mold. That was bad, but the onions felt okay. He’d get someone to sort them and use up the moldering ones fast. Another wave of exhaustion penetrated to his bones. He waited for it to recede. It didn’t. He stumbled and caught the edge of a pallet to keep from falling. Automatically, his hand found the inside of a box. Wet, slimy, and jagged. He pulled his hand back: broken egg. There was never just one. He was too tired to care, and it smelled fresh enough on his hand. He waved it through. The albumen tightened around his fingers as it dried. He fished a sanitary wipe from a pocket and wiped his hand clean, then fished out and put on the latex gloves he should have been wearing all along. Another pallet: iceberg lettuce. Images of wedge salads with bacon and Roquefort dressing rose in his mind, antic, dancing, plates tilted and spinning. He squeezed a few heads. They had crunchy heft and enough watery give. Okay then, on they went. Then his hand was inspecting a T-bone steak, prodding, massaging, pinching gently. He sniffed his latex-covered fingers, inhaling the mineral tang of flesh and blood. The water shimmered with fresh, early sunlight. A pelican was strutting along the dock. Everything kept closing in on his eyes, zooming dark then expanding again. Sleep, his brain commanded. He needed a catnap before his meeting with the executive chef, whose name he hadn’t been told yet. Otherwise he’d be incoherent and crazed-looking on his first day of work.