Mick’s knees softened very slightly with relief. “Mustard, garlic, soy sauce, rosemary, olive oil,” he said.
“Good,” said Laurens.
Mick inhaled a full lungful of air for the first time, he felt, since the captain’s table dinner. His future was not wrecked. He’d overreacted: his ancient lizard brain had sent him into a fight-or-flight response to grave danger when there was, in reality, none. This was the downside of growing up with his father. Mick could pick up signals, but he couldn’t always interpret them correctly, since his internal decoder had been calibrated for his father alone. And he no longer existed for Mick, except in the past.
Consuelo had slipped back to her station. Laurens moved over to watch her stirring bacon, carrots, and onions in butter. Without looking over directly, Mick could sense her bristle at Laurens’s approach and then relax again as he moved on to Miguel. Between Mick and Consuelo, the air roughened slightly with turbulence caused by Laurens’s presence, then all at once it calmed down and everything was okay. Mick had no idea why. He went on putting together his marinade, but now he felt like himself again.
Miriam awoke from the deepest sleep she’d had in what felt like years to find herself in her and Isaac’s bed. It was late afternoon already. In the first instant of full consciousness, she discovered that she was naked. Worse, she seemed to be entwined around Isaac, her body curled around him, her front pressed to his back and her legs snaked around his, and he, horror upon horrors, was also naked. Then she awoke fully and nuzzled her face into the back of Sasha’s neck.
After their rehearsal in the chapel, Isaac had moved all his things across the hall and down four doors, and Sasha had done the reverse. The two old men were as gracious about it as possible. They tried very hard to banish awkwardness with as many jokes as they could tell, Isaac expanding on the theme he’d struck earlier about how miserable Sasha would be with Miriam and how glad he, Isaac, was to finally see her handed off to another man, and Sasha riffing with mild self-deprecation on his own lack of worthiness to take on such a formidable woman. Miriam laughed inwardly to overhear these two men discuss her, for the sake of their ancient friendship and Isaac’s pride, as if she were a valuable prize (Sasha), a cross to bear (Isaac), and a force to be reckoned with (both). Jakov had absented himself, wisely, and was sitting with Larry and Rivka in the buffet. The lunch special was beef Wellington, and Jakov had professed great excitement about this.
“Brioche crust, it said on the menu!” he said as he headed off to the dining room.
As for Miriam, she and Sasha fell into bed together as soon as the move was made. It was exciting, but also a bit anticlimactic. They did not have sex; they were both too overwhelmed with emotions and the strangeness of this and the newness of each other’s bodies and the beauty of falling in love so late with someone so well and deeply known, yet also unknown. It was an afternoon of sighs and gazes, caresses and embraces, many words, many silences, and a few brief spells of guilt over Sonia and Isaac. But those didn’t last long. For God’s sake, who had time to bemoan former spouses?
“Boker tov, yalda yafa,” Sasha muttered now.
“It’s the middle of the afternoon, and it’s Miriam,” she whispered. “Not your wife.”
He chuckled. “Did you think I was Isaac, just now?”
“For one terrible instant. So I didn’t want to give you that same shock, although for you, I know it wouldn’t have been terrible.”
She could feel his penis. His “cock”? It was hard, anyway, and she was glad of that. Starting tonight, they’d get to sleep together for the rest of the cruise, maybe the rest of their lives. When they got back to Tel Aviv, who knew what would happen. She had her place in the high-rise with Isaac several floors above her, and Sasha had his and Sonia’s house in Jaffa, but it would make more sense financially, as the quartet retired, for them to join forces. Also, she wanted to live with Sasha. Miriam had never been averse to getting ahead of herself, especially in financial and practical matters.
“Did you fall back to sleep?” Sasha asked. “Wake up, I miss you.”
She laughed. She loved him so much. “Where do you want to live after the cruise, when we get back home?”
He didn’t hesitate. “With you. Can you come to my place? We can’t live near Isaac. We should get married, anything you like.”
Her chest warm with joy, she said, “As a proposal, it’s maybe a little casual. But as a proposition, I accept.”
A little while later, they got out of bed and dressed without showering, looking at each other’s bodies with childlike curiosity and unabashed love.
“I remember in the 1970s, at the Dead Sea,” said Sasha. “Remember? You wore that black bathing suit. So sexy! Like Sophia Loren. For Sonia’s sake I had to look away. You look exactly the same to me now. I can’t believe I finally get to see you like this. I finally get to sleep with you.”
She waved away the compliment, laughing.
“Tonight,” he said seriously. “Tonight, I promise to make love to you. Don’t worry, I still can. With you, I can do anything.”
Dressed, their hair combed, but without any other attention to their appearance, they ventured into the hallway hand in hand. They didn’t say so, but they both hoped they could spare Isaac the sight of them together, so soon.
Isaac was nowhere to be seen. But there was Rivka Weiss, of all people, coming toward them along the hallway, wearing a tailored white silk pantsuit, her hair impeccably mussed under a broad white hat.
Miriam saw her first, then Sasha. Then Rivka saw the two of them, coming out of the same stateroom hand in hand, looking rumpled in the manner of people who have been naked together carnally and recently. People who, in Rivka’s eyes, had absolutely no business doing so.
“Oh!” she cried, her sculpted eyebrows raised as high into her taut forehead as her recent Botox treatments would allow, which wasn’t very. “Where is Isaac? I was—I was just looking for him. To see if he wanted to take a walk along the promenade before the talent show.”
“Good evening, Rivka,” said Miriam calmly. “I have no idea where Isaac is, I’m sorry.”
“All right,” said Rivka, still looking askance at Miriam.
“By the way, we got divorced more than twenty years ago,” Miriam added in her own defense, but Rivka didn’t hear her. She had dashed off on her spidery legs, teetering on her wedge sandals, fleeing from the sight of these wicked adulterers, from such insurrection on the part of her very own musicians.
When Christine and Valerie arrived just after dinner, the air-conditioned Starlight Lounge was already half full of mostly gray heads and hands fanning programs, chattering voices rising from the small tables and semicircular booths. The lounge was a large interior room with no windows; it was on the promenade deck, but it felt underground, louche. The small raised stage had a sparkly linoleum floor that resembled ersatz starlight, its blue faux-velvet curtains parted, footlights beaming upward. Waiters circulated with trays held high, serving fancy, colorful cocktails in giant glasses garnished with tiny paper parasols and wedges of exotic fruit. Paddle fans turned overhead.
The talent show wouldn’t start for a while, but there were plenty of people to watch in the meantime. The other passengers had proved to be an odd and entertaining group, Christine thought: mostly older American couples, the usual suspects on any cruise, but there was a wide variety even in this normally homogeneous assemblage: a gaggle of California hippies; several well-preserved glamour babes and their younger male companions; a few dignified black couples who looked out of place only because they were so well dressed and conservatively elegant compared to everyone else; and quite a number of gay pairs, both male and female. There were also, of course, a number of fat, pinkish human adults in mass-produced clothing, but fewer of these than Christine had expected, because she had expected an entire boatful.