Finally, (7), know that an unshot skeet’s movement against the vast lapis lazuli dome of the open ocean’s sky is sun-like — i.e. orange and parabolic and right-to-left — and that its disappearance into the sea is edge-first and splashless and sad.
1600h. — 1700h.: Lacuna.
1700h. — 1815h.: Shower, personal grooming, third viewing of the heart-tweaking last act of Andre, attempted shower-steam-rehabilitation of wool slacks and funereal sportcoat for tonight’s 5
C.R. supper, which in the ND is designated sartorially “Formal.” 131
1815h.: The cast and general atmospherics of the 5CR.’s T64 have already been covered. Tonight’s supper is exceptional only in its tension. The hideous Mona has, recall, opted to represent today as her birthday to Tibor and the maître d’, resulting tonight in bunting and a tall cake and a chair-balloon, plus in Wojtek leading a squad of Slavic busboys in a ceremonial happy-birthday mazurka around Table 64, and in an overall smug glow of satisfaction from Mona (who when The Tibster sets her cake down before her claps her hands once before her face like a small depraved child) and in an expression of blank tolerance from Mona’s grandparents that’s impossible to read or figure.
Additionally, Trudy’s daughter Alice — whose birthday, recall, really is today — has in silent protest against Mona’s fraud said nothing all week to Tibor about it — i.e. her own birthday — and sits tonight across from Mona wearing just the sort of face you would expect from one privileged child watching another privileged child receive natal treats and attentions that are by all rights her own.
The result of all this is that stony-faced Alice and I 132 have tonight established a deep and high-voltage bond across the table, united in our total disapproval and hatred of Mona, and are engaging in a veritable ballet of coded little stab-, strangle-, and slap-Mona pantomimes for each other’s amusement, Alice and I are, which I’ve got to say is for me a fun and therapeutic anger-outlet after the day’s tribulations.
But the supper’s tensest development is that Alice’s mother and my own new friend Trudy — whose purslane-and-endive salad, rice pilaf, and Tender Medallions of Braised Veal are simply too perfect tonight to engage any of her critical attention, and who I should mention has, all week, made little secret of the fact that she’s not exactly crazy about Alice’s Serious Boyfriend Patrick, or about his and Alice’s Serious Relationship 133 —that Trudy notices and misconstrues my and Alice’s coded gestures and stifled giggles as signs of some kind of burgeoning romantic connection between us, and Trudy begins yet once again extracting and spreading out her purse’s 4×5s of Alice, and relating little tales of Alice’s childhood designed to make Alice appear adorable, and talking Patrick down, and in general I have to say acting like a procuress… and this would be bad enough, tension-wise (especially when Esther gets into the act), but now poor Alice — who, even though deeply preoccupied with birthday-deprivation and Mona-hatred, is by no means dim or unperceptive — quickly sees what Trudy’s doing, and, apparently terrified that I might possibly share her mother’s misperception of my connection with her as anything more than an anti-Mona alliance, begins directing my way a kind of Ophelia-type mad monologue of unconnected Patrick-references and Patrick-anecdotes, all of which causes Trudy to start making her weird dentally asymmetric grimace at the same time she begins cutting at her Tender Medallions of Braised Veal so hard that the sound of her knife against the 5C.R.’s bone china gives everybody at the table tooth-shivers; and the mounting tension causes fresh sweatstains to appear in the underarms of my funereal sportcoat and spread nearly to the perimeter of the faded salty remains of Pier 21’s original sweatstains; and when Tibor makes his customary post-entrée circuit of the table and asks How Is All Of Everything, I am for the first time since the educational second night unable to say anything other than: Fine.
2045h.
CELEBRITY SHOWTIME
Celebrity Cruises Proudly Presents
HYPNOTIST
NIGEL ELLERY
Hosted by your Cruise Director Scott Peterson
PLEASE NOTE: Video and audio taping of all shows is strictly prohibited. Children, please remain seated with your parents during shows. No children in the front row.
CELEBRITY SHOW LOUNGE
Other Celebrity Showtime headline entertainments this week have included a Vietnamese comedian who juggles chain saws, a husband-and-wife team that specializes in Broadway love medleys, and, most notably, a singing impressionist named Paul Tanner, who made simply an enormous impression on Table 64’s Trudy and Esther, and whose impressions of Engelbert Humperdinck, Tom Jones, and particularly Perry Como were apparently so stirring that a second Popular Demand Encore Performance by Paul Tanner has been hastily scheduled to follow tomorrow night’s climactic Passenger Talent Show. 134
Stage-hypnotist Nigel Ellery is British 135 and looks uncannily like 1950s B-movie villain Kevin McCarthy. Introducing him, Cruise Director Scott Peterson informs us that Nigel Ellery “has had the honor of hypnotizing both Queen Elizabeth II and the Dalai Lama.” 136 Nigel Ellery’s act combines hypnotic highjinks with a lot of rather standard Borscht Belt patter and audience abuse. And it ends up being such a ridiculously apposite symbolic microcosm of the week’s whole 7NC Luxury Cruise experience that it’s almost like a setup, some weird form of journalistic pampering.
First off, we learn that not everyone is susceptible to serious hypnosis — Nigel Ellery puts the C.S.L.’s whole 300+ crowd through some simple in-your-seat tests 137 to determine who in the C.S.L.’s crowd is “suggestibly gifted” enough to participate in the “fun” to come.
Second, when the six most suitable subjects — all still locked in complex contortions from the in-your-seat tests — are assembled onstage, Nigel Ellery spends a long time reassuring them and us that absolutely nothing will happen that they do not wish to have happen and voluntarily submit to. He then persuades a young lady from Akron that a loud male Hispanic voice is issuing from the left cup of her brassiere. Another lady is induced to smell a horrific odor coming off the man in the chair next to her, a man who himself believes that the seat of his chair periodically heats to 100 °C. The other three subjects respectively flamenco, believe they are not just nude but woefully ill-endowed, and are made to shout “Mommy, I want a wee-wee!” whenever Nigel Ellery utters a certain word. The audience laughs very hard at all the right times. And there is something genuinely funny (not to mention symbolically microcosmic) about watching these well-dressed adult cruisers behave strangely for no reason they understand. It is as if the hypnosis enables them to construct fantasies so vivid that the subjects do not even know they are fantasies. As if their heads were no longer their own. Which is of course funny.
Maybe the single most strikingly comprehensive 7NC symbol, though, is Nigel Ellery himself. The hypnotist’s boredom and hostility are not only undisguised, they are incorporated kind of ingeniously into the entertainment itself: Ellery’s boredom gives him the same air of weary expertise that makes us trust doctors and policemen, and his hostility — via the same kind of phenomenon that makes Don Rickles a big star in Las Vegas, I guess — is what gets the biggest roars of laughter from the lounge’s crowd. The guy’s stage persona is extremely hostile and mean. He does unkind imitations of people’s U.S. accents. He ridicules questions from both the subjects and the audience. He makes his eyes burn Rasputinishly and tells people they’re going to wet the bed at exactly 3:00 A.M. or drop trou at the office in exactly two weeks. The spectators — mostly middle-aged, it looks like — rock back and forth with mirth and slap their knee and dab at their eyes with hankies. Each moment of naked ill will from Ellery is followed by an enormous circumoral constriction and a palms-out assurance that he’s just kidding and that he loves us and that we are a simply marvelous bunch of human beings who are clearly having a very good time indeed.