“And see what we got.”
In the faulty light he saw the liquid running one way across the floor and then reversing itself slowly, as if the horizontal had lost its mind.
“Enid!” he called with little hope as he commenced the sick-making work of stopping the leakage and getting himself back on track, and the ship sailed on.
Thanks to Aslan®—and to young Dr. Hibbard, an outstanding, high-caliber young man — Enid was having her first solid night’s sleep in many months.
There were a thousand things she wanted from life, and since few were available at home with Alfred in St. Jude, she had forcibly channeled all her wanting into the numbered days, the mayfly lifetime, that the luxury cruise would last. For months the cruise had been her mind’s safe parking space, the future that made her present bearable, and after her afternoon in New York had proved deficient in the fun department, she boarded the Gunnar Myrdal with her hungers redoubled.
Fun was being had buoyantly on every deck by cliques of seniors enjoying their retirement the way she wished Alfred would enjoy his. Although Nordic Pleasurelines was emphatically not a discount line, this cruise had been booked almost entirely by large groups such as the University of Rhode Island Alumni Association, American Hadassah of Chevy Chase (MD), the 85th Airborne (“Sky Devil”) Division Reunion, and the Dade County (FL) Duplicate Bridge League, Senior Flight. Widows in excellent health guided one another by the elbow to special mustering places where name tags and information packets were distributed and the preferred token of mutual recognition was the glass-shattering scream. Already seniors intent on savoring every minute of precious cruise time were drinking the frozen cocktail du jour, a Lingonberry Lapp Frappe, from schooners that took two hands to handle safely. Others crowded the rails of lower decks, the ones sheltered from the rain, and scanned Manhattan for a face to wave goodbye to. A combo in the Abba Show Lounge was playing heavy-metal polka.
While Alfred had a final pre-dinner session in the bathroom, his third session inside an hour, Enid sat in the “B” Deck lounge and listened to the slow plant-and-drag of someone’s walker-aided progress across the “A” Deck lounge above her.
Apparently the Duplicate League’s cruise uniform was a T-shirt with the text: OLD BRIDGE PLAYERS NEVER DIE, THEY JUST LOSE THEIR FINESSE. Enid felt the joke did not bear heavy repetition.
She saw retirees running, actually lifting their feet off the ground, in the direction of the Lingonberry Lapp Frappe.
“Of course,” she murmured, reflecting on how old everyone was, “I suppose who else could afford a cruise like this?”
The seeming dachshund that a man was pulling by a leash turned out to be a tank of oxygen mounted on roller-skate wheels and dressed in a pet sweater.
A very fat man walked by in a T-shirt that said TITANIC: THE BODY.
You’d spent a lifetime being waited for impatiently and now your impatient husband’s minimum stay in a bathroom was fifteen minutes.
OLD UROLOGISTS NEVER DIE, THEY JUST PETER OUT.
Even on nights with a casual dress code, such as tonight, T-shirts were officially discouraged. Enid had put on a wool suit and asked Alfred to wear a tie, although given his handling of a soup spoon lately his neckties were little more than cannon fodder on dinner’s front line. She’d made him pack a dozen. She was acutely conscious that Nordic Pleasurelines was deluxe. She expected — and had paid for, in part with her own money—elegance. Each T-shirt she saw was a specific small trampling of her fantasy and, hence, pleasure.
It rankled her that people richer than she were so often less worthy and attractive. More slobbish and louty. Comfort could be found in being poorer than people who were smart and beautiful. But to be less affluent than these T-shirted, joke-cracking fatsos—
“I am ready,” Alfred announced, appearing in the lounge. He took Enid’s hand for the ascent by elevator to the Søren Kierkegaard Dining Room. Holding his hand she felt married and, to that extent, grounded in the universe and reconciled to old age, but she couldn’t help thinking how dearly she would have treasured holding his hand in the decades when he’d stridden everywhere a pace or two ahead of her. His hand was needy and subdued now. Even tremors of his that looked violent proved to be featherweight in feel. She could sense the hand’s readiness to resume its paddling as soon as it was released, however.
Such travelers as were cruising without affiliation had been assigned to special dining tables for “floaters.” To the delight of Enid, who relished cosmopolitan company provided it wasn’t too snobbish, two of the “floaters” at her and Alfred’s table were from Norway and two were from Sweden. Enid liked European countries small. One could learn an interesting Swedish custom or Norwegian fact without being made sensible of one’s ignorance of German music, French literature, or Italian art. The usage of “skoal” was a good example. Likewise the fact that Norway was Europe’s largest exporter of crude oil, as Mr. and Mrs. Nygren from Oslo were informing the table when the Lamberts claimed the last two seats.
Enid spoke first to her left-hand neighbor, Mr. Söderblad, a reassuringly ascoted and blue-blazered older Swede. “What’s your impression of the ship so far?” she asked. “Is it really super authentic?”
“Well, it does seem to be floating,” Mr. Söderblad said with a smile, “in spite of heavy seas.”
Enid raised her voice to aid his comprehension. “I mean, is it AUTHENTICALLY SCANDINAVIAN?”
“Well, yes, of course,” Mr. Söderblad said. “At the same time, everything in the world is more and more American, don’t you think?”
“But you think this captures REALLY SUPER WELL,” Enid said, “the flavor of a REAL SCANDINAVIAN SHIP?”
“Actually, it is better than most ships in Scandinavia. My wife and I are quite pleased so far.”
Enid abandoned her inquiry unconvinced that Mr. Söderblad had grasped its import. It mattered to her that Europe be European. She’d visited the Continent five times on vacation and twice on business trips with Alfred, so about a dozen times altogether, and to friends planning tours of Spain or France she now liked to say, with a sigh, that she’d had her fill of the place. It drove her crazy, however, to hear her friend Bea Meisner affect the same indifference: “I’m so sick of flying to Kitzbühel for my grandsons’ birthdays,” et cetera. Bea’s dimwitted and unfairly gorgeous daughter Cindy had married an Austrian sports doctor, a von Somebody who’d garnered Olympic bronze in the giant slalom. That Bea continued to socialize at all with Enid amounted to a triumph of loyalty over divergent fortunes. But Enid never forgot that it was Chuck Meisner’s big investment in Erie Belt stock on the eve of the Midpac buyout that had helped fund their mansion in Paradise Valley. Chuck had become board chairman of his bank while Alfred stalled in the Midpac’s second echelon and put his savings into inflation-prone annuities, so that even now the Lamberts could not afford Nordic Pleasurelines quality unless Enid dipped into private funds, which she did to escape going mad with envy.
“My best friend in St. Jude vacations at Kitzbühel, in the Austrian Alps,” she shouted, apropos essentially of nothing, in the direction of Mr. Söderblad’s pretty wife. “Her Austrian son-in-law is tremendously successful and owns a chalet there!”
Mrs. Söderblad was like a precious-metal accessory somewhat scuffed and tarnished by Mr. Söderblad’s use. Her lip gloss, hair color, eye shadow, and nail polish rang changes on a theme of platinum; her dinner dress was of silver lamé and afforded good views of sun-toasted shoulder and silicone augmentation. “Kitzbühel is quite beautiful,” she said. “I have performed many times in Kitzbühel.”