“Lobster thermidor,” Mick began without any pleasantries or preamble, and with an accent so slight he could almost have been American, “was invented in 1894 in a restaurant called Marie’s in the theater district of Paris. Tonight, I used the recipe by the late Julia Child from her book Mastering the Art of French Cooking, in honor of the era when the Queen Isabella was built.”
“Thank you very much, Chef Mick,” said Laurens van Buyten during the ensuing applause.
“I’d like to add,” said Chef Mick, who appeared to Christine to be trying to impress his boss, “a small story of when I was a young student, in Budapest.”
Laurens’s face remained impassive, but Christine thought she detected a very slight but clearly displeased flare of one nostril.
“To pay for my university, I learned to cook from the chef at the Eszterházy Restaurant, which was part of the Hungarian Folkloric Theater. Chef Viktor taught me to serve lobster thermidor over buttered egg noodles, a Hungarian touch. Tonight, I have done the same in his honor. I hope you have all enjoyed it.”
Laurens clapped Mick on the shoulder with one hand. “Thank you, Chef,” he said. “Please save your private memoirs for old age.”
Mick grimaced at the low murmur of laughter from the table and made a hasty, apologetic gesture that Laurens ignored. Then he was gone, banished to the galley, Christine surmised, in disgrace for stealing his boss’s show and overstepping.
“And for dessert,” Laurens said, “we have a classic that was a great hit in the 1950s, back when the Isabella was first built… Baked Alaska, or la surprise du Vésuve à la Julia Child.”
The lights were dimmed. To even more applause, the battery of waiters streamed in, each one carrying a tray on which a meringue had been set aflame. The scent of burning rum filled the air.
By the time the diners had looked up from their plates with near-universal expressions of childish happiness, the chef had gone.
“And finally,” said Kimmi, “I would like to present Tameesha, who hails from our very own home port of Los Angeles, California.”
Tameesha stood with her hands by her sides, her head thrown slightly back and her eyes closed.
Even Christine was familiar with her two or three enormous hits; they were as impossible to forget as advertising jingles, repetitive tuneless ditties, half spoken, half intoned with Auto-Tune through electronic effects. She had always assumed that Tameesha couldn’t sing, was just all attitude and provocation.
But instead she started crooning “You Send Me,” by Sam Cooke, in a tender, full-throated, easygoing voice, as familiarly as if she’d been singing it for years. Her face was filled with a kind of pleasure Christine had been missing for a long time in her own life: the joy of allowing her full self to come out, not holding anything back.
When she had finished, bowing at the vigorous applause, the captain handed around a box of cigars. Christine took one, and then, when several of the men wandered out to the balcony to smoke, she and Valerie got up and joined them. The night air was soft and clean and salty. The moonlight made a gleaming path on the dark waves that ran far below with a low calm murmur. Christine and Captain Jack glanced at each other again, but it was friendly now; the flirtation had run its course. It couldn’t go anywhere but to ground. Oh well, she thought, feeling half disappointed, half relieved.
“It’s nice to meet you, sir,” said Valerie, walking straight up to Larry Weiss. “This is a great ship.”
“Thank you,” said Larry as he turned to face Valerie, leaning against the railing, rolling his lit cigar in his long fingers. “Yes, my wife has a bit of a sentimental attachment to it. This is our anniversary cruise. We own a perfectly nice private yacht, but I think she prefers the Isabella.”
“It’s definitely peaceful,” said Valerie. “It’s amazing how far away from everything we are, out here.”
“It’s an escape,” Larry agreed. “No cell phone service, for one thing. I’m usually on three of them at once, all day every day. I feel helpless without my earpiece. But I could get used to it.”
“There’s always the return trip,” Valerie said.
Larry sucked on his cigar. The end sparked, ashes blew off in the breeze. “Oh, we’re just going one way. Getting off in Hawaii. Got to get back to work.”
Smiling, nodding, Valerie leaned into the warmth of his easy, mellow charm. “What kind of business are you in, if you don’t mind my asking? I apologize for not knowing.”
Christine listened with frank admiration. Valerie had always been so good at flattering powerful people, getting them to talk without knowing they were revealing anything. As a journalist, Christine had always been leery of intruding, thanks to the ingrained New England etiquette of minding your own business. And her native blunt honesty had likewise made it hard for her not to blurt out her real purpose in questioning them.
As Larry answered in broad and general terms, and Valerie asked another seemingly innocent question, Christine stared down at the water. She was drunk, she realized. Below the ship, the ocean looked like a rolling sheet of thick black oil. Electric light fell in choppy bands on its surface. She felt a cold, gripping sadness in the pit of her chest. It had come seemingly out of nowhere, like her reaction to the octopus in the aquarium. She hoped she could stave off these crises of hollow, trapped dread until she was back in Maine, planting seedlings, hatching chicks, again caught up in the cycle of renewed life.
chapter eleven
Mick hadn’t meant to go on and on about his fucking youth in fucking Budapest in front of Laurens and the captain and senior officers and all those passengers. Walking out of the room in disgrace, he wanted to stab himself in the head. He had always prided himself on being adept at reading the people he worked for. He’d honed the skill growing up with his father, who was low-key and affable until he exploded in violence toward whoever or whatever was closest at hand. As a small boy, Mick had learned to identify unerringly the almost imperceptible signs of an impending tantrum. A twitch in his father’s lip presaged a punch in the head; if he asked a question, unthinking, and his father hesitated before answering and then spat a terse, monosyllabic answer, Mick knew to get out of his way until the next day, or he’d find himself shaken upside down a little later on. He was lucky, he figured; the hardest lessons, he got early, when he was young enough to absorb and use them as an adult. It had stood him in good stead in the world of professional kitchens, where chefs were as often as not broken in some way, damaged, or abused, or neglected, or bullied, or wrecked by drugs or alcohol, or hardened by being in gangs or prison, or all of the above. The abused became the perpetrator of violence; the bullied went on to crush the weak; the hardened went on to beat others down. It was the way of the species.
Mick was proud of his own self-control in kitchens. He didn’t throw tantrums. He didn’t hit people or tongue-lash them. He wasn’t a bully or a tyrant. But tonight, he’d lost his self-control. And, as always in his life whenever he got too cocky, too desirous of attention, too hell-bent on proving something, someone slapped him down. He thought of that someone collectively as “the gods,” but it always had a human face. When he was little, it was his father. Later it was chefs he worked for, women he wanted to impress. Most recently, it was Suzanne. And tonight it had been Laurens, the person whose respect he most wanted at the moment.