Some of the staff became recognizable — the thin-faced men serving at the buffet, the dance instructor, the lifeguards, and their corridor’s silent maid. They met another maid too — or at least saw her closely. They had taken a wrong turn after a fitness workout; wandering down a corridor, they came to a door labeled INFIRMARY. A long-haired girl with Indian cheekbones was sweeping the floor nearby.
“Hello,” Bella said. “How do we get to the swimming pool?”
No answer but a smile.
Robin repeated the question in Spanish.
The young woman leaned her broom against the wall and disappeared into the infirmary. A starched redhead came out. “Yes?” she inquired, and then gave brisk directions while the maid resumed sweeping. How beautiful she was.
Elderly Dr. Hartmann with his scrupulous goatee liked his own company. Bella had once spied him entering one of the restaurants; there, for the price of a dinner, he could sit at a table by himself. But he didn’t seem to mind her joining him in the library. In his cultivated presence she was ashamed to read her usual undemanding fare, so she was laboring through the stories of Thomas Mann, twenty pages or so every afternoon.
Every afternoon…For, unlike Robin, Bella needed to withdraw from the stimulation of the ship. So much noise — splashing, laughter, piped music, the clang of coins in the little casino. Luke’s talk, full of Latinate polysyllables. And worse: the outdoor buffet, the only place to have breakfast and lunch, had begun to sicken her soon after her first sight of its art-gallery brilliance. If only it were merely a picture it would have continued to please. But it was actual, tangible; it did not signify, it was. Real people with real stomachs jostled one another, and piled food onto their plates, and consumed the stuff, and returned for more — Robin did it; young Melinda too; the three ill-assorted women. The underweight Luke listened to Robin’s assessment of various pastries and followed her advice and then had seconds of his own choosing. Dr. Hartmann inserted forkfuls of omelet into his old mouth. Perhaps he needed the moisture. Perhaps he was determined to get his money’s worth. Meanwhile Bella grew helplessly abstemious. Dry toast for breakfast became all she could manage, a piece of fruit for lunch. A bit of main-dish chicken at night.
“Bella!” said Robin one dinnertime. “Are you okay? This veal is scrumptious! Try some.”
“I’m fine.” Obediently she speared a cube of repellent meat from Robin’s plate. “Yummy,” she lied.
One night a figure crept into her dream — familiar, but uncharacteristically placating. “Eat, darling!” her mother cried. “You’re supposed to diet, not starve.”
The next morning Bella created an edifice of waffles on her breakfast plate, and topped it with strawberries and whipped cream. But she couldn’t swallow more than a bite. “I have to…” she said, and left Robin and Melinda and Luke and managed to get to her room.
And there was the tiny woman, tightening the linen, smoothing the pillows. In another ten hours, during dinner, she or one of her mates would drop foiled candies onto these same pillows. Now she extended a hand toward the bathroom as if to say it was clean and ready.
“No,” Bella said. “I just want to lie down.” She did lie down. The woman stood still, perhaps puzzled. They looked at each other, one horizontal, the other vertical. One oversize, the other diminutive. One running a real estate office in preparation for operating a complicated enterprise, maybe a cruise line…the other skilled at cleaning people’s bathrooms. The maid was younger than she had seemed that first day. Her dulled face gave an initial impression of age, but she was no more than twenty. At last she resumed her work. She polished the knobs on the built-in drawers while Bella watched. She hung the cloth on a wheeled device that carried all her utensils and pushed the thing out of the room. At the door she again looked impassively at Bella. She did not say anything: not good-bye, or adios, or the Swedish ahyur, as some of the ship’s higher staff liked to do, imitating the yellow-haired officers and the rarely seen crew. Her language, whenever she did use it, would be one of those Indian ones, Chibchan, maybe, or Kuna. Yesterday afternoon in the library Dr. Hartmann had spoken of the languages. He said that certain ones were making a comeback and others were extinct, like the dodo.
“Dodo,” Bella giddily called; but the maid was gone.
After the library Bella usually went to the sparsely attended casino and played roulette and surrendered, as slowly as possible, the ten dollars she had allotted to this daily indulgence. But on the final afternoon of the cruise she skipped the library in favor of the beauty shop, where she endured an overenthusiastic shearing that exposed her long neck. Her earlobes looked huge; she covered them with turquoise clips she’d bought for her mother in the colonial port. Then she went to the casino. There she won four hundred dollars. It was a gradual process, this change of luck — win a little, lose a little less, win a little more — and she realized after a while that she was being helped, now and again, by nearly invisible signs from the croupier: a frown, a nod, a tiny shake of the head.
She found Robin and Melinda and Melinda’s family at poolside. “Look!” And she showed the roll of bills.
Robin raised a merry face. “Did you rob somebody?”
“She made a killing,” Melinda corrected. Then, because her brother was fretful, she joined him on his chaise.
“Oh, Bella!” Robin said. “Get yourself something wonderful. In the gift shop Luke bought a darling mahogany box…”
“No…I’ll pay myself back the amounts I lost. But the rest of this is the house’s money — the ship’s. Let the Golden Swan buy us a farewell dinner. At the French restaurant, or the Italian. Which do you prefer?”
“French!”
They wore their best clothing, which had until now hung in their tiny closet. Robin’s outfit was a bright blue shift ending at midthigh. Its shoulder straps had little bows. She looked silly and very sweet, Bella thought. Bella’s outfit was a gauzy black skirt, long but not so long as to conceal her ankles, and a black jacket. She wore high heels, and again the turquoise earrings — they seemed to be hers now. She looked fantastic, Robin told her.
Certainly Dr. Hartmann seemed to think something similar — he stood up when they entered Les Deux Fleurs, and gave Bella an intent look. “This afternoon the library was bereft,” he informed her.
Bella noted his tuxedo and wondered if he had expected something different from this cruise — something other than his usual solitude. She wondered too if her malnourished state was making her fanciful, or maybe even acute. She had already guessed that the ship had taken on cocaine in the narco port. There had been some quick feverish activity on the dock, and the person wearing the captain’s uniform was not the same man who had shaken her hand at the party.
There were familiar faces in the French restaurant. And while the cousins were sipping cocktails, the three women friends came in, the lawyer glamorously got up in red, the social worker in a silk pantsuit. The housewife, in sequins, looked game, looked brave…looked done for. Bella saw that the poor woman was ill — ill again—and she knew all at once that what the three women shared was disease, the same disease probably, a rare and desperate one. They had met in a hospital for some bold treatment, in a special hospital, maybe in a city strange to all of them. “Classmates? Not exactly,” the lawyer had said. Bella confided this intuition to Robin, who said, admiringly, “Of course!”