The Last Cruise

by Kate Christensen

Genres: Literary Fiction; Women's Fiction

Synopsis

From the acclaimed PEN/Faulkner Award-winning author of The Great Man comes a riveting high-seas adventure that combines Christensen's signature wit, irony, and humanity to create a striking and unforgettable vision of our times.

The 1950s vintage ocean liner Queen Isabella is making her final voyage before heading to the scrapyard. For the guests on board, among them Christine Thorne, a former journalist turned Maine farmer, it's a chance to experience the bygone mid-twentieth century era of decadent luxury cruising, complete with fine dining, classic highballs, string quartets, and sophisticated jazz. Smoking is allowed but not cell phones—or children, for that matter. The Isabella sets sail from Long Beach, California into calm seas on a two-week retro cruise to Hawaii and back.

But this is the second decade of an uncertain new millennium, not the sunny, heedless '50s, and certain disquieting signs of strife and malfunction above and below decks intrude on the festivities. Down in the main galley, Mick Szabo, a battle-weary Hungarian executive sous-chef, watches escalating tensions among the crew. Meanwhile, Miriam Koslow, an elderly Israeli violinist with the Sabra Quartet, becomes increasingly aware of the age-related vulnerabilities of the ship herself and the cynical corners cut by the cruise ship company, Cabaret.

When a time of crisis begins, Christine, Mick, and Miriam find themselves facing the unknown together in an unexpected and startling test of their characters.

Release date: July 10, 2018

Publisher: Anchor

Print pages: 304

Sample

Part I: The Theater of Nostalgia

Chapter One

As Christine walked out of the air-conditioned terminal into the balmy, sweet air of Southern California, she inhaled sharply and started to laugh. She might as well have traveled to another planet. It was summer here. The air vibrated with sunlight. Bits of mica glinted in the pavement, making it sparkle. She walked through clumps of people with deep tans wearing shorts and sandals. When she looked down to steer her luggage cart over the curb, she caught a glimpse of the winter pallor of her own skin, dead white.

The cabbie helped her stow everything in his trunk. “You brought everything, I guess.”

“I’m going on a cruise,” she told him, trying to temper her giddy elation with apology. In the cab on the way to the hotel, she leaned her head against the back of the seat and watched the palm trees roll by. She wanted to drift on the fumes of the wine she’d drunk on the plane, lose herself in thought, but the cabbie was energetically chatty, with a musical but guttural accent she couldn’t place. He had shining black hair and chalky skin, and he was skeletally skinny. She decided he was a vampire, which added a dreamlike, sinister undertone to his chattiness.

He was also, apparently, a self-appointed ambassador to Long Beach. “We are the seventh-largest city in California,” he was saying. “We are the second-busiest seaport in the United States, as well as the Aquatic Capital of America. There are many boats to charter for excellent dolphin and whale watching. And the beaches. Five and a half miles. You have heard of Misty May-Traynor?”

Christine shook herself awake, trying to focus.

“Olympic gold medalist beach volleyball star?” He peered at her in the rear view.

“Right,” she said. She added, as if to justify her ignorance of this local celebrity, “I’m only here till tomorrow afternoon.”

“Go to the Aquarium of the Pacific,” he said, undaunted. “It is the second-most popular family destination in Los Angeles after Disneyland. And go aboard the Queen Mary.”

“I’m about to be on the Queen Isabella for two weeks.”

He was silent, possibly offended at her equating the two ships.

She asked, “How long have you lived here?”

“Eight years,” he said.

“Where are you from?”

“I moved here from Wisconsin.”

“I mean originally?” She peered at his medallion, but his name was obscured by the large plush whale affixed to his dashboard.

He went quiet again, as if she had made another faux pas, this one even worse. Christine had never met a cab driver in her life who was offended by this question, but of course there was always a first time.

In front of the hotel, under the porte-cochere, the driver reached back and took the money she handed him, and when she waved away the change, he nodded with aggrieved gratitude, not meeting her eye.

“I apologize,” she said, her door open, one leg out of the cab, her bag slung across her shoulder. “I shouldn’t have asked where you’re from. That’s none of my business.”

He finally looked directly at her with a small, tight smile. “I am from Wisconsin,” he told her. “Have a nice stay in Long Beach, ma’am.”

Christine had just turned thirty-six; she couldn’t help taking that “ma’am” as a small slap in the face. She glared at the oblivious driver, regretting the guilt-induced generosity of her tip, while a valet transferred her bags from the trunk of the cab to a wheeled cart.

The dim, high-ceilinged lobby looked like the interior of a modern bank, with a polished stone floor and a wall-long desk with several perky young corporate-looking people standing in a row behind it.

“Christine Thorne,” she told the young desk clerk, a plump blonde with a smoothly tanned, button-nosed face. “I have a reservation for one night. Under Valerie Chapin.”

“Two queen beds?” said the woman, whose name was Rhonda, according to her nametag.

“That’s right. My friend’s arriving late tonight.”

“No problem. I’ll just need a credit card and I.D. please.”

Christine fished out her card and driver’s license and handed them over.

“Wow,” Rhonda said. “You’ve come a long way. Must be cold back there in New Hampshire.”

“I actually live in Maine. Well, right on the border. For some reason, my mail comes through the New Hampshire post office, so that’s officially where I’m a resident. But I’m really from Maine.”

“Is there that much of a difference? Winters are shorter in Maine, or what?”

Christine gave her a look of gentle admonishment, the same look the cabbie had given her, she realized. Maybe all Americans were touchy about their provenance. “They’re just different, I guess,” Christine said. “But I’m definitely a Mainer. Six generations on my father’s side.”

Rhonda was looking at her with a vacant expression of bright interest that suggested that another guest was standing behind her, waiting. She handed Christine a key card. “Will you be needing assistance with your bags?”

“Yes please,” Christine replied, looking back at the valet with mild embarrassment. She wasn’t used to people carrying things for her, but those bags were heavy. For a moment, she feared she didn’t have enough cash after the cab fare to tip him. Then she remembered the five she always kept stashed in a side pocket of her shoulder bag; she’d put it there years ago, back when she still lived in New York. She’d never had to use it before.

“So what’s the weather like back east right now?” said the valet as they stood side by side in the elevator. He had the gravelly voice of a heavy smoker, which struck her as odd, since she didn’t think people smoked in Southern California.

“It’s cold and wet,” she said. “We call it mud season.”

“Here, it’s summer year-round,” he said. “I get sick of it, to be honest. Well, only a little.”

In room 712, he set her bags down professionally, one on the luggage rack, the other aligned with the closet door.

“Many thanks,” she said, handing him her emergency fiver.

“Thank you,” he said.

She kicked off her sturdy walking shoes (brand-new Merrills, free of mud) and padded in bare feet to the window to slide open the stiff drapes. Across from her was a painted mural of a pod of whales or dolphins swimming on the side of an enormous building; maybe that was the famous aquarium. She’d ask about it tomorrow. She owed the cabbie that much, she supposed. Even though he’d called her “ma’am.”

Standing in front of the full-length mirror, she appraised herself honestly. Maybe she did look middle aged, or at least unfashionable, here in this place of eternal youth and glamour. The cream-colored pedal pushers and long-sleeved black T-shirt that had looked spiffy at the Portland Jetport had felt rural and frumpy the instant she’d stepped off the plane in L.A.; almost all the women in the airport wore yoga pants, stretchy low-cut tops, and wedge sandals. And her body, which was serviceably strong, youngish, and healthy, all she needed in Maine, had likewise begun to feel bulky and sexless next to all these super-slender Cali babes with their turbocharged boobs and butts like clenched fists of muscle.

Her cell phone buzzed.

“Hey,” she said, picking it up and flopping onto the bed. “How’s Sukey?”

“On the mend,” came Ed’s voice. “She ate her dinner without a fuss and took a good crap outside just now, no diarrhea. How was the flight?”

“Long. I treated myself to some wine. They make you pay for everything now. I had a salad, too. Kale.” They both laughed. They grew mountains of the stuff every year.

“It’s so quiet here,” he said. “When are you coming home, again?”

Home, Christine thought with a funny, fond internal quailing.

Ed Thorne was ten years older than Christine, slight and handsome, with a square jaw and a small nose and bright blue eyes in a long face. In the early days, when they’d first fallen in love, he’d been so passionate, he had surprised her with his lustiness, his excitement, his desires and sexual openness. But they had quickly become a pair of oxen, yoked together, a farmer and his wife. This past year, she’d been distracting herself from Ed’s yearning for kids with impossible fantasies about one of their apprentices, a local boy named Tom who slouched around the farm bare-chested in falling-down jeans that showed the waistband of his boxer shorts. He drove Ed nuts with his inefficiency while he drove Christine nuts in a wholly different way with his pouty bee-stung lips and sculpted biceps.

“I’ll be back before you even notice I’m gone,” she said.

“Sure,” he said. “How’s the weather?”

“Weirdly warm. It feels wrong. But I love it.”

“How’s Valerie?”

“I haven’t seen her yet. She’s on a late flight from New York. Won’t be here until midnight or something. I’ll probably be sound asleep by then.”

She yawned and heard him yawning on the other line. It was three hours later there, dark already, and he’d been awake since before dawn, as had Christine. She pictured him alone with the dogs, looking absently at his solitary reflection in the big window by the woodstove, the house creaking in the cold, settling in for the night.

After they rang off, she lay on the bed for a while, holding the warm phone in her hand. She stretched out luxuriantly. She wasn’t used to having a whole bed to herself. Ed flailed and twitched and rolled over in the night, waking her up, and then it always took a while to fall back asleep because she was nervous that he would jostle her again. She closed her eyes, sighing with tiredness. The mattress was nice and firm, and the pillowcases were starchy and fresh-smelling. Valerie wouldn’t be here for hours.

She was just falling asleep when her stomach growled loudly and woke her up. That airplane-issue kale salad had been hours ago. Suddenly hungry, she got up and slid back into her shoes and put her key card into her bag. Down in the lobby again, she found the bar, a scattering of mostly empty tables tucked into a corner on the other side of the escalators that went down to the restaurant. She chose a corner table on a soft banquette, lit by the evening sun. Her body told her it should be dark by now, and that she shouldn’t be hungry. She felt a pleasant jetlagged sense of unreality.

The man sitting alone at the next table gave Christine a quick once-over; she could feel his stare although she wasn’t looking at him. To her relief, he looked away again, having evidently deemed her not worthy of interest. So she glanced back at him. She had the brief impression of a chesty, muscular body, a pugnacious nose, dark short hair. He looked like a stevedore, like he no more belonged in this fancy hotel than she did. No doubt he had reached the same conclusion about her.

She ordered a margarita, no salt, and fish tacos.

“Good choice!” said the waitress, who was so pretty and well-built Christine had to take her in in sections: sleek muscular upper arm, aquiline nose, silky highlighted long hair, starfish eyelashes.

“Great,” said Christine, smiling up at her.

The air felt liquid with permanent warmth. The people seemed liquid too. The bar felt like an aquarium. Inland Maine was all granite and hemlocks and interesting weather; its people were rugged workers, private, without artifice. Here, languid bodies displayed themselves openly. People spoke and laughed as if cameras were following them.

Her next-table neighbor was looking at the waitress too, but more pointedly, in a way that suggested intention.

“Are you going on that cruise?” the waitress asked Christine. “The Queen Isabella?”

“How could you tell?” Christine asked with a laugh.

“Lucky guess,” said the waitress.

“I’m going on that cruise,” the man next to Christine said. He had an accent similar to her cab driver’s, eastern European undergirding fluent English. “I was just called in at the last minute.”

Christine turned to look at him, frankly this time, since he’d spoken: a knuckle of a nose, dark eyes, strong jaw, and a hungry expression.

But he wasn’t speaking to Christine. He was looking up at the waitress.

“Well lucky you too then,” she said.

“May I have another beer, please?” he asked.

”Sure. Where are you from? Your accent.”

Wisconsin, Christine almost said.

But the man said, “Budapest. I’m Mick.”

“Laura,” the waitress told him.

Christine opened her book so she wouldn’t appear to be eavesdropping. It was some long, engrossing thriller she’d found in the used book bin in her local supermarket, along with a few other mildly interesting-looking castoffs she’d stockpiled and managed to fit into her bursting luggage.

“So are you excited for the cruise?” Laura was saying to Mick.

“No. I’m a cook, so I spend the whole time down in the galley, I hardly get any air, and I don’t get to talk to people much. It’s basically a long lonely time at sea for the workers on board.”

“That sounds hard,” Laura said. “Wow. I hope they pay you well.”

Christine heard genuine warmth in her voice and wanted to warn her: Don’t tempt a starving man with raw meat.

Sure enough, Mick succumbed. “Maybe you’d like to have a drink with me later, that would be great.”

“Oh,” Laura said. “Thanks, but I can’t.”

She took his empty glass and began to move off.

“Also, I’d like a hamburger,” he said.

“And how would you like that?”

“Very rare, please.” He held her there by the force of his eye contact. Christine could feel it without even looking at them. “I just arrived from another cruise,” he said. “I thought I was going on vacation. Then the office calls and says, ‘Hey Mick, the other guy can’t do it, you gotta help us out, it’s a special, a one-off, we need our best chef.’”

His American accent was spot-on. It made Christine wonder whether the Hungarian thing was a fake, to impress Laura.

 “Well, that sucks,” said Laura. “I hate it when I have to cover for someone and I’ve made plans already. But you know, it’s the job, right?”

“You know exactly what I’m talking about,” said Mick. “You really can’t have a drink later? Just a quick one. I have to be at the docks at four.”

“I have plans already,” said Laura, the warmth drained from her voice, shading into formality. “But thank you.”

“Yeah,” said Mick, “I should have figured.”

“Well, I’ll be right back with your beer and burger. And your margarita!” she said to Christine as she walked off.

“Thanks,” said Christine, glancing up and looking quickly back down at her book. Mick sat very still, staring after Laura. She could feel how fixed his mind was. Maybe he was drunk. Of course he was drunk. She hoped Laura would be careful when she got off work.