Schubert had undone her. Of course it would be Schubert. No other composer could slide his melodies straight into the heart so you wept without knowing why you were weeping. His music had the effect of the greatest poetry, of the most humane and beautiful and heartfelt words, but wordless, far more direct, elemental almost.
She got out of bed and silently put on her bathrobe. Pocketing her room key, she eased the door shut behind her and went along the corridor to the door that led out onto the walkway. Outside, she leaned against the railing and looked down at the dark ocean, watching small curlicues of whitecaps glowing in the still-dark early morning air.
The door opened. Someone came out onto the walkway and moved with purpose toward her. For a moment she feared it was Isaac, come to tell her to go back to bed, dammit, was she nuts, did she know what time it was, it was three o’clock!
But no, it was Sasha. She’d known he’d come out, she realized. He was wearing his bathrobe too. She looked at him, and he looked at her, and both their faces were alight, open, and smiling.
“Since Sonia died,” he said to her in a quiet voice once he was at the railing standing next to her, “I’ve begun to feel this way again.”
“This way again,” she repeated, as if she were asking, but she was really assuring him that she knew exactly what he meant. He had invited her into that strange, ardent, mysterious dance, and she had responded, had let her own playing answer him. But tonight wasn’t the first time he had sought her out in the Rosamunde.
All of a sudden, it all made sense to her, clearly, and even though it was nuts, illogical and absurd, she believed it.
The breeze was alternately brisk and balmy, cool with pockets of warmth, like a mountain lake. The hazy air looked as liquid as the salt water, and the ocean held as much light as the sky. To Christine, standing at the railing looking out to sea, the entire world was a blue-gold fantasia punctuated with spray, shaded with pastel colors and shadows. She hugged her bare arms, her hair blown by the mild salt wind, her eyes bedazzled by the sunlight on the diamond-bright sea surface that shimmered in glinting, changing points of color all the way to the horizon. The waves were a cohesive, unbroken sheet of heaving water, turned by the sun into pure light and reflection, gone shapeless with brilliance.
While Valerie worked, Christine drifted around the ship, doing as she pleased. She felt a distance between herself and everyone else on board, crew and passengers alike, almost as if she were invisible. She listened in on other people’s conversations. No one seemed to mind or notice. She felt encased in a shield that conferred absolute social solitude. It made her relaxed and jumpy at the same time, comfortably anonymous but uneasy at this enforced idleness, no one needing her, nothing to do but observe and think and indulge herself. In the open-air breakfast bar on the patio by the pool, she got a cup of coffee and a freshly baked pastry. She read her book in the shade of an umbrella to the sounds of splashing and laughter and conversations around her. She had finished A Handful of Dust and had exchanged it for A Passage to India. It was sheer luxury to reread literary classics. After a few hours, when she got hungry again, she ate lunch down in the buffet, a sandwich, a salad, a glass of wine. After lunch, she went up to the solarium at the very top of the ship and fell asleep in a deck chair. Her nap was wine-drugged, comatose, filled with exciting dreams. She awoke as the slanting afternoon sun sent a shadow creeping over her skin, sat up and slid her feet into her sandals and made her way down the stairs to the pool bar.
“Christine,” said the bartender, her new friend Alexei, reaching for the shaker, “how has your afternoon been?”
“Another perfect day,” she said, yawning, and they both laughed. “How are you?”
“Things could be worse,” he answered. He was elfin and pale, with a pouf of yellow hair. She worried about him, and what would befall him when this cruise was over. The recording of Valerie’s interview with that chef, Consuelo, now permeated every interaction she had with the ship’s workers.
“Do you like your job, Alexei?” she asked as he poured her martini into a glass.
“Making a drink for a beautiful woman on a beautiful ship at sea. Who would complain?”
“I hear they’re canceling all your contracts,” she said before she could stop herself.
He put her martini in front of her. “Yes,” he said. He didn’t ask how she knew. “But there are ten other cruise lines, maybe twenty. I’ll take a vacation and then I will get another job.”
She stared at Alexei’s face for any sign of panic or outrage, but his expression remained blankly benign. She took a gulp of booze and watched a group of adults in the pool playing water polo, splashing and dunking one another with vicious fun. She turned to face the ocean and watched the light on the sea surface, tracking the occasional cloud mass that sailed over the horizon to engulf the lowering sun before sailing on again.
She made her way along the deck and down the external staircase, two flights. The promenade was a wide, glassed-in, teak-floored hall that ran most of the starboard-side length of the ship, with double doors all along its inner wall that led to equally grand public rooms, the Starlight Lounge, the casino, the smoking room. The windows were multi-paned, gigantic, providing a glass barrier against the sea spray but no impediment to the view of the open ocean.
Now, the sun was dipping below the horizon through a misty curtain of faraway rain, staining the sky a lurid combination of intense cantaloupe pink and mango yellow that had just begun to fade. People strolled along in twos and threes, enjoying the sunset, doing laps. The light in the promenade was tinged with gauzy gold; it felt as if it came from the past, and Christine was sure she saw a ghost out of the corner of her eye, far down the promenade, and then another one, human-sized impressions of electricity in the air, kinetic disturbances of the light. Superstitiously, she felt that these imprinted echoes of long-gone people were good luck, and their eeriness somehow magically broke the slight unease she’d been feeling on this much-vaunted last cruise, with all its freighted symbolism and sentimental melodrama.
She turned back to the seemingly infinite parallel surfaces of the sky and water and let her eyes blur into a daydream. Soon it would be time to dress for dinner.
Scorching heat and sweat on his forehead and fiery steam and the fleshy demands of meat were a special kind of hellish earth-air-fire-water combo Mick dealt with every day and loved perversely, even the burns on his wrists and hands, the tiny abrasions and cuts and splashes of hot fat. He welcomed it all. It quieted his brain, this stainless steel inferno of raw and charred meat and the quick flash of knives.
For the first two days of the cruise he’d thrown himself into impressing Chef, keeping his hard-won respect, showing him he’d made the right decision. Laurens had confirmed the rumor Mick had heard: that he was leaving the industry after this cruise and opening his own restaurant in Amsterdam, of all the beautiful, fun, cool fucking cities.
“I’ll be hiring chefs to come and work for me very soon,” Laurens said. He was sitting behind his desk with his fingers steepled. His tone was noncommittal, cool. Mick, hovering in the doorway with that night’s menu for his approval, couldn’t tell whether Laurens meant he might be interested in hiring Mick himself, or whether he was speaking hypothetically about his plans.
“You’re currently looking for chefs, then?”
“I’m always looking for talented people who aren’t afraid to contribute to my vision,” said Laurens. “I want to be impressed. I want to feel inspired and excited. I want people I can trust to execute my ideas. It’s a rare quality I’m looking for.”