Valerie gave a hard snort of a laugh. “That is so over.”
“Why?” Christine asked, although she was secretly unsurprised. “I thought you liked him.”
“Do you want the short version or the long one?”
“Long, please,” said Christine. She was still feeling shaky from her weird experience at the aquarium, and Valerie’s serial tales of romantic failure were generally entertaining, if increasingly worrisome, since she seemed to be getting simultaneously lonelier and less practical in her choices of men, as far as Christine could tell from her e-mails. In truth, it pained Christine that Valerie’s dim view of men was so reliably and regularly confirmed by the accused themselves, as if she had an unerring instinct for finding the ones who conformed to her low expectations.
“Actually, it’s short no matter how I tell it,” said Valerie. She didn’t look at Christine. She was concentrating on arranging a dress on a hanger, and her voice was clipped, so Christine couldn’t gauge her feelings. “It was a disaster. The end. I need to conserve my energies. I’m not good at anything except work. And masturbation. No more men, Christine, I mean it.”
Valerie was right: she was very good at her work. At thirty-two, in addition to running her own successful news and culture website, called PaperCuts.com, she had recently published a New York Times Magazine cover story exposing “the shadowy world of hidden workers in the new global economy,” as the tagline summarized it. She’d been approached by a handful of interested editors in the weeks after it ran. She was in the process of signing a six-figure deal to expand her piece into a book.
“Your life couldn’t be going any better, it seems to me,” said Christine.
“On paper it couldn’t,” Valerie said. She closed the closet door, nudging it with her hip to make it stay shut. “Okay. You go up to the sail-away party and I’ll stay here and type my notes.”
“Notes?” said Christine. “What notes?”
“I talked to a crewmember while I waited for you on the dock. He told me about the system they have for sorting the luggage and delivering it to each cabin and suite.” While she talked, Valerie pulled out her laptop and set it up on the little desk by the balcony door.
“You already conducted an interview?”
Valerie’s tone softened. “With Orpheus. What a name. He’s Jamaican. He has a dreamy accent, they all do. No one on the crew is American, he also told me. They’re all foreign-born. And the ship itself is registered in Panama for tax purposes even though it’s American-owned.”
There was a knock on the door. Christine was closest, so she opened it. A young black man in a uniform stood in the doorway with a wheeled cart, which held a champagne bottle in a silver ice bucket, a small shiny gold box, and a cream-colored envelope. “For Miss Valerie Chapin,” he said, pronouncing her name with a lilting accent.
He wheeled the cart in and wedged it between the two beds.
“What the hell,” said Valerie, flinging herself across Christine’s bed and plucking up the card. “It’s from my new editor. ‘Dear Valerie, bon voyage, work well, best, Lisa.’ God, how thoughtful, I like her already. Although ‘best’ is not my favorite sign-off. So corporate. But whatever.”
The steward hovered. He was small and slender and very pretty, there was no other word for him. His short black hair was neatly parted on the side, but one tiny cheeky spit curl was pasted against his temple, and a diamond chip glittered in one nostril.
“My name is Trevor,” he said, addressing Valerie. “I’ll be your room steward for the voyage. Please inform me of all your needs and requirements, and I will do my utmost to fulfill them.”
Christine had been fumbling desperately in her pockets for a bill of some kind to tip him, knowing she had nothing.
“Trevor,” Valerie said, putting out a hand to stop Christine. “You get your tip at the end, right? That’s how it works?”
He gave one brief flutter of his long lashes, a butterfly’s flick of surprise. “Correct, ma’am,” he said.
“If you call me ‘ma’am’ one more time, you’re not getting a dime,” said Valerie. While she talked, she opened the small gold box on the cart and plucked out a truffle and handed it to Christine. “It’s ‘mademoiselle’ from now on. I love your accent. Where are you from?”
“Haiti, mam’selle,” said Trevor.
Christine caught a glint in Valerie’s eyes, the rapacious intentional charm of a wolf espying a lone Bambi in the woods. “Do you have a minute, Trevor? Can I ask you a few quick questions about your job for a book I’m writing? Sit here, it’ll only take two minutes, and then you get to be in a book.”
“Okay, mam’selle,” said Trevor, perching with dainty obedience in the armchair.
Christine left Valerie with her subject and went out into the stuffy narrow hallway, which was as ugly as their cabin: blue-and-gold patterned carpet; embossed, swirled gold wallpaper; fan-shaped sconces with bright bulbs blazing in them. She skirted passengers going in and out of their staterooms, dodged stewards with carts, climbed some stairs, and finally burst out of the stairwell and inhaled the fresh air. As she climbed an outdoor flight of metal stairs, the ship’s horn let out a blast. The engines rumbled underfoot. The ship gave a lurch, and just like that, the Queen Isabella set off.
Christine joined a crowd of people standing at the railing. She watched as the Port of Long Beach fell back into a blue haze, saying an unsentimental but ritualistic-feeling goodbye to the pelicans, the oil rigs, the shipping-container cranes, the harbor, the aquarium, and the grand old Queen Mary, soaring so much higher than the Isabella; her black-capped funnels were among the last sights Christine saw before they were truly at sea.
On a small stage by the swimming pool, a jazz trio struck up a snappy rendition of “Take Five.” Uniformed waiters appeared with trays of retro snacks. As they went by, Christine scored a Ritz cracker spread with pimiento cream cheese, then a pig in a blanket, and then an oyster broiled in its shell, smothered in green sauce and breadcrumbs. Soon she’d make her way to the bar and order a very dry and icy martini with three fat olives on a toothpick, and later she’d meet Valerie at the restaurant for a fancy dinner, and she wouldn’t have to cook it herself or pay for it, and she could wear one of the dresses she’d brought, and high heels, and she’d put her hair up. She could indulge and not feel guilty. Ed wasn’t here to look askance at the wastefulness of it all, to wonder aloud what the point was. There was no point, really. And that was enough for Christine at the moment. As she looked around for the next tasty morsel, she remembered that eating was supposed to be the entire point of a cruise; the whole commercial venture was predicated on the simple equation of appetites and their satisfactions. Unable to muster any argument with this, she gave herself over to it, letting her perceptions and appetites coexist happily.