“Excuse me, Chef,” said Consuelo at his elbow. He found himself staring into a walk-in filled with seafood. He had been handling cool, firm mackerels one by one, as if he were still inspecting deliveries on the wharf before dawn. “I want to consult about the piggies.”
“Go ahead.”
“How can we get more flavor into them? I’m worried about the flash-brining.”
“The liquid smoke should do it.”
She handed him a skewer to taste. “Ham kebab,” she said.
He wrapped his molars around the back piece and slid the whole thing at once into his mouth. Fresh pineapple chunks interspersed with chunks of ham and drizzled with honey, then grilled. Salty, fruity, sweet, meaty—simple, but classic.
“Good,” he said. “Needs a splash of soy. Not too much, the meat is already salty.”
“Yes, Chef,” she said. “My team is working on pork belly sliders.”
“Something spicy on the sliders. What kind of bread?”
“No buns,” she said. “We’re breading and frying squares of pork belly, with pineapple and bacon in the middle, spicy mayo, toothpicks.”
“Okay,” he said.
She waited for an instant, as if she was expecting more of a reaction from him. Determined to bring her into line, he inclined his head to dismiss her. Immediately, she went back to her station.
The entertainment and cruise director, a tiny blond American with a silly name he instantly forgot, had been thrilled about the Hawaiian-themed launch-night buffet party. She’d passed Mick on to one of her staff, a young Korean American man named Park. “I love it,” he’d cried. “I will round up the tiki lamps!” Mick liked working with gay American entertainment staff, possibly because they liked working with him. He also, incidentally, liked being touched by American men, gay or straight. His job was lonely and hard and he didn’t have much physical contact with anyone, aside from bumping into people on the line accidentally. Entertainment people were demonstrative, theatrical, handsy. Mick knew that American men weren’t socially permitted to touch one another the way men in other cultures could as a matter of course. Straight American men were terrified of being perceived as gay. Gay American men were often careful to hide it on the job. But entertainment staff seemed looser, less worried about all that, though it was still an issue, Mick knew. So when they touched Mick, it felt extra tender, always slightly sexual with a whiff of nervousness, no matter what the toucher’s sexual orientation was. And the entertainment staff were separate from the hierarchy of the kitchen staff, although the two teams worked closely together, so Mick could relax around that crew without worrying about breaking protocol.
Park had a big, sweet face and a cuddly, bouncy personality. He was interchangeable with all the other American entertainment staff, male or female, that Mick had known through the years. They seemed to breed them in the Midwest in particular. Park was from Illinois.
“Joliet,” he’d said with unforced cheer. “Forty miles in distance but really a million miles in all other ways from Chicago. A prison town, used-to-be steel town, and I’m very glad to be out of there.”
He’d asked Mick about growing up in Budapest, and then Mick had mentioned Suzanne, the fact that he should have been with her in Paris right now. Something in his tone must have given away how lovelorn he felt, because Park had stroked his arm and assured him that true love was never smooth, and he himself was heartbroken right now over a crewmember who’d just broken up with him, and he was here, on the Isabella, so Park would have to avoid him for the next two weeks.
This meeting cheered Mick up quite a bit.
He picked up another mackerel and looked it in the eye. He envisioned a whole school of them, grilled, arranged in scalloped stacks on a platter of seaweed salad, garnished with pickled lemon rind and charred caper berries, drizzled with spicy aioli. So he wasn’t in Paris with Suzanne, so what? He was going to let himself have some fun on this cruise.
chapter five
“You’re really here,” said Valerie as she and Christine hugged by the ramp leading up to the boarding deck of the Queen Isabella. “I can’t believe I got you to leave the farm and fly all the way across the country.”
“Are you kidding?” said Christine. “I need a vacation like you would not believe.”
“Should we get on this thing?” Valerie asked, squinting up at the towering ship. People jostled around them to board.
“I can’t wait,” said Christine.
Valerie laughed. “You have to have fun the entire time, in fact I command you to. Seriously. This is a work trip for me. I need you to be my proxy.”
As they joined the slow line of passengers spilling up the gangway onto the ship, Christine stole a gander at Valerie’s impeccably urbane outfit. She wore a gray shirtdress with a white collar and black wedge espadrilles. In her bony cleavage nestled a pendant, a brass owl with glowing red garnet eyes. She wore stylish black glasses. Her short dark auburn hair curled against her neck. She was severely thin, even more so than usual. Christine felt like a bumpkin next to her.
“It’s so intense,” Valerie was saying as she checked her phone for messages, updates, texts. Her voice was staccato, clipped. Christine had forgotten what New Yorkers could be like, coming at you like hungry highly-strung wild animals, scanning for prey, chattering away. “The pressure I’m under, it’s crazy. And then the whole fuckup with my flight, I barely slept, and the guy next to me farted these toxic methane clouds the whole fucking flight. Oh my God, I can’t wait to unpack and take my shoes off. Oh look, a text from Julian. Like I care. And another one from, oh shit, I forgot that whole thing, okay, it’s okay.” She mashed at her phone with her thumbs.
Christine had met Valerie twelve years before when they’d started together, freshly arrived in New York, as assistants at Babe, a hip women’s magazine with a young, feminist slant. The magazine had folded after three years, but their friendship had endured. Christine was always the stable, responsible Maine girl who supported Valerie, perennially lovelorn, through multiple emotional crises. She invited Val to sleep over when she was heartbroken, and gave her advice and generally acted as her big sister, or even mother, or even, she’d often thought without resentment, stand-in boyfriend. Christine generally had boyfriends, but she always included Valerie, who had become her roommate, in movie nights and takeout meals. And Valerie had always given Christine a lot in return. She was dashing and fearless and intrepid. She forced Christine to try new things, be more ambitious, and push harder for what she wanted. In the past seven years, ever since Christine had moved back to Maine and married Ed, Valerie had remained Christine’s connection to her old life in New York, kept her in touch with the world of journalism, given her all the latest gossip. She’d allowed Christine to feel that she hadn’t completely dropped off the map. And in return, Christine had remained Val’s sounding board and solid shoulder—from a distance, but still and always there.
“How is Julian?” Christine asked. She felt oddly shy with her old friend as they unpacked in their tiny cabin, cramming their dresses onto hangers in the doll-sized closet, stowing toiletries on the little shelves in the minuscule bathroom. She hadn’t seen Valerie since last June. She’d forgotten how focused she was, how ferociously professional. Christine felt a mild queasiness at the thought of spending two intimate, close-quartered weeks together. There was hardly room to walk around their luggage, which they’d piled on the floor. The two beds were separated only by a little nightstand. The decor was ’70s-sitcom drab: beige and powder-blue patterned bedspreads, a small round table by the window with one chair, a long low laminated bureau below a painting of the ocean at sunset in lurid neon oil. Christine would have felt cramped alone in this room. Sharing it with Valerie, she suspected it would be possible only to sleep and shower here. Even that would be tricky.