The Jetsetters Page 14

LEE PEELED HERSELF OFF the Marveloso deck chair and limped toward the center of the ship. Once you were inside, it was usually clear where the elevator was, and once you were in the elevator, you could orient yourself, at least laterally. The ship was a massive network of hallways and splendiferous event spaces. If you were okay with wandering, you could always find your way home. (It was funny that Lee thought of her cabin as “home”: it was the closest thing she’d had to one in a while.)

  But seriously, thought Lee as she used the rail to hold herself up, lurching along the outer deck—what if she got a job on the ship? Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad to join the Velvet Vibe dance troupe, or to be the female version of Bryson, organizing eighties Rock-N-Glow parties, tossing the foam die and yelling trivia questions. She could replace (or augment) DJ Neon!

  What this cruise needed, thought Lee, was a serious actor. Didn’t these people ever get tired of the rah-rah dance routines? Lee hadn’t been to any evening entertainment outside of a bar, but from what she saw on her cabin TV, the only performances in the Teatro Fabuloso were musical revues. How about Ibsen? Lee closed her eyes, allowing herself to remember her triumph as Nora in A Doll’s House her senior year of high school. The school paper had called her “arresting.”

  Lee stopped under the SkyRide and closed her eyes, speaking the lines from memory. “We must come to a settlement, Torvald. During eight whole years…we have never exchanged one serious word about serious things.”

  Lee opened her eyes, blinking. The port city (what country was it?) was surrounded by fortress walls with tiny oblong windows. It was even more magnificent than Rhodes.

  “During eight whole years,” Lee repeated, the lines springing forth from her memory, “we have never exchanged one serious word about serious things.”

  What did that even mean? What, indeed, was a serious thing? A woman headed out into the night on her own, like Nora? The fog of despair that had swallowed Winston, that Lee was afraid was enveloping her again?

  “Our home has been nothing but a playroom,” said Lee, the words bubbling up from the depths of her…her soul! “I have been your doll-wife, just as at home I was Papa’s doll-child.”

  A middle-aged jogger passed Lee, averting his eyes.

  It was time to take a break from men, Lee decided. Like Nora, Lee had been serving men for…well, for her whole life. As a kid, she didn’t know any better than to allow it; as an adult, she’d been courting it. Lee needed to figure out who she really was inside, in the place that had nothing to do with dewy skin and sculpted curves. She’d been given this trip to Europe, and she’d basically wasted it thus far, trying to seduce men, alienating her family, ignoring the cultural riches laid out before her. Here was a chance to do things differently. Lee vowed to try to open her mind to beauty. She’d been doing the same things for so long: auditioning, seducing, preening. What if she turned it around, and let the world try to win her for a change?

  In her cabin, Lee took four Advil and called room service. After a half hour or so, the porter, Paros, brought her tray. He set it down on her miniature coffee table and Lee thanked him. He hesitated, then said, “Your mother was concerned. I can contact the Maltese guide, if you’d like.”

  “Hmm?” said Lee, staring hungrily at her French toast.

  “Your family has begun their tour of Malta,” said the porter.

  “Malta?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” said the porter. “I can try to find your family’s whereabouts in Valetta, if you’d like.”

  “Oh, no thank you,” said Lee.

  Paros nodded, seeming disappointed in Lee. He stood before her, his hands behind his back, like a judgmental penguin. When would men stop evaluating her? When would she stop caring about what their assessment would reveal?

  She sighed. “Okay, okay,” she said. “Maybe I will join them.”

  “Wonderful!” said Paros. “I will call you in a moment.”

  The porter seemed awfully solicitous, thought Lee, but she guessed that was the point of a porter. She ate her buttery French toast and crisp bacon, showered, and dressed for invisibility in her baggiest jogging shorts and a big Splendido T-shirt she’d gotten for free in her welcome basket.

  The phone rang. “I have located your family,” said Paros. “I will be at your cabin momentarily, with a map showing you how to find them. Or I can accompany you, if you’d like.”

  “That’s really nice of you,” said Lee.

  “It’s my job, Miss Perkins,” said the porter.

  “Actually, can I ask you something else?” said Lee.

  “Of course.”

  “I’d like you to bring me a pregnancy test.”

  There was a pause, but the porter recovered. “Yes, ma’am,” he said.

  Lee hung up the phone and felt teary. It was something about the porter’s fatherly concern. How she wished she could call her father, the version of Winston she had once believed existed, the one who would help her out of jams, who would always have her back. The father she deserved. But Lee understood that this man was a fantasy. Her real father had been a depressive alcoholic. He’d taught her that fighting the fog was a losing battle. Oh, how Lee wanted to prove him wrong, to show that she was stronger, that she would find joy.

  Winston had been forty-seven when he fastened a necktie into a noose. She was thirty-eight now. Lee felt momentarily awed by her father: he had held on for nine more years.

  Lee put her palm on her belly, looking at the magnificent Grand Harbour. There was a knock at the door, and she stood.

  KIKO BROUGHT CHARLOTTE AND her family to his farmhouse and welcomed them into his living room. It was something to enter one of these buildings—a cavernous space with exposed limestone walls, piles of books by cozy chairs, and a couch with a blanket Kiko said had been crocheted by his mother. It felt like being inside a well-appointed grotto, a respite from the punishing heat.

  He brought cold cans of something called Kinnie from the kitchen. It was a weird soda, brewed (said Kiko) from bitter oranges and wormwood. Charlotte tasted it but shook her head. Kiko offered honey or cactus liqueur instead, gesturing to a bar cart in the corner, underneath a wooden guitar that had been hung on the wall as if it were a painting.

  “I’m fine with water,” said Charlotte. “Purified, please.”

  “I’m loving the Kinnie,” said Cord amiably.

  “Water for me, thank you,” said Regan.

  “What are you having?” asked Lee, who had joined them by the harbor. Paros had brought her directly to them, having contacted Kiko himself. What a peach! Lee had arrived looking pale and ill, but handsome Kiko, it seemed, had roused her. When they’d met, Kiko had gazed at Lee as if she were the bodily manifestation of a lifetime of dreams. Sex was in the air in Malta, Charlotte thought, admiring Paros’s buns in his starched white pants as he strode back to the ship.

  “I’ll have the cactus liqueur,” said Kiko, smiling. “Come, try. It’s called Zeppi’s bajtra. I have a fresh bottle in the kitchen. Follow me.”

  “I’ll wait here, but thanks,” said Lee. It was refreshing to see her checking out the art on the walls instead of the man in attendance. Lee had always had an eye; she’d once told Charlotte that her couch would look better along the south wall of the living room, and to Charlotte’s surprise, Lee had been absolutely right.

  “Is it too early for liquor?” said Regan.

  “When in Malta,” said Cord, standing to look at Kiko’s bookshelf. “Love this one,” he said, pulling out a copy of some tome called Infinite Jest.

  “I love that one,” said Kiko, reemerging with a platter of warm bread and cucumber-and-cheese salad. “What a wise person.”

  “Yes,” said Cord. “He was. But tortured, as well.”

  Kiko looked at Cord. “So I’ve read,” he said. “He had depression. A disease we don’t talk about here.”

&
nbsp; “We don’t talk about it much, either,” said Lee. She looked pointedly at Charlotte.

  “I’m not depressed!” said Charlotte.

  “No one said you were,” said Lee.

  “Then why are you looking at me?” said Charlotte, feeling annoyed. Leave it to her children to ruin a sunny picnic! Before Lee could answer, she said, “I always say, Look on the bright side. It’s a much better way to live,” she said. “Don’t you think, Kiko?”

  “Not everyone can be bright, Mom,” said Lee.

  “I don’t have any idea what you’re going on about,” said Charlotte, though of course she probably knew more about depression than any of them. After Winston’s suicide, she’d read many, many books—trying to understand, seeking a way to forgive herself. The books said it was a disease, that Charlotte couldn’t have saved Winston no matter what she’d done. Charlotte wanted to believe what she read. But she had never stopped blaming herself.

  “Let’s take the food to the garden?” said Kiko.

  “Yes, let’s!” cried Charlotte. The patio was shaded, somehow cool in the middle of the day. Kiko set a table with linen napkins and put out chilled bottles of pink Gellewza wine. “It tastes like strawberries,” he said. “Come, Charlotte,” he added, handing her a long-stemmed glass.

  She sipped. It was sweet and just the right amount of rancid. She tried to focus on the taste of the wine, to yank her brain from thoughts of Winston, how his face had looked almost peaceful in death, how terror had caused Lee’s limbs to tremble for days. How, when Charlotte found her in the bathroom, Lee’s lips were pulled back in a silent scream, exposing both rows of her even teeth. She’d been fourteen. The muscles in her swimmer’s arms had bulged as she held his body off the ground, but no strength could change what Winston had done.

  Kiko brought pastries, rabbit stew, beef with olives, and fresh stonefish seared with herbs and served with lemon. They feasted, surrounded by Aleppo pine trees.

  At one point, Charlotte watched as Lee emerged from Kiko’s tiny bathroom, drying her hands. Lee looked so young as she gazed around at the garden. She looked like the girl she’d been a million years ago, a happy toddler who danced ahead of Charlotte when they went for walks in Forsyth Park.

  Charlotte felt a wave of concern and love for her firstborn. When Kiko came to Lee’s side, pointing out a bird called a “wall creeper,” Charlotte was surprised to see Lee step away from him politely but firmly.

  Despite Lee’s newly demure persona (or perhaps because of it), Kiko seemed utterly smitten. Lee did look lovely without all her makeup and hairspray, her curves hidden beneath a gauche cruise-ship T-shirt.

  Regan, on the other hand, acted as if she were a graduate student prepping for an exam. She asked a lot of questions about the various occupiers of Malta, and Kiko answered animatedly. Charlotte’s head spun: Malta had been occupied by the Phoenicians, the Carthaginians, the Romans, the Vandals, the Goths, Romans redux, the Arabs, the Normans…at this point in history, Charlotte spaced out, but when she started listening again, Kiko was talking about the Knights of Malta. “The Turks forced them out of Rhodes, and so they came here,” he said.

  “Rhodes!” cried Charlotte. “We were just there.” It gave her immense pleasure to utter this statement. “Ah, Rhodes,” she added, a wistful aside she hoped to repeat frequently.

  “I love Rhodes,” said Kiko. “Did you visit the Palace of the Grand Master?”

  “No…” admitted Charlotte.

  “The Acropolis of Lindos?”

  “Um…” said Charlotte.

  “Did you go to the beach?” asked Kiko, smiling.

  “It was an awesome beach,” said Lee.

  Kiko laughed. “You’ll have to return,” he said. “Sometimes you need to stand in the footsteps of history, and sometimes, a day at the beach.”

  Regan was holding a pencil and a little notebook she must have bought somewhere. “And after the Knights of Malta?” she queried.

  “Apologies. Okay. Then France was in charge,” said Kiko, “and then Great Britain, until 1964, when we became independent. So you see, we’re a very important place.”

  “Amazing,” said Regan.

  “We have three hundred and sixty churches,” said Kiko. “How about it? Would you like to see one? St. John’s Co-Cathedral has two Caravaggio paintings! A quick trip, and then I return you to the port?”

  Charlotte picked up her glass, but thought of Father Thomas. How could she tell him she’d chosen pink wine over a famous cathedral? He had made her promise to invite him over for lunch and show him every one of her pictures. “You could make a slide show,” he’d suggested, his large hands gesturing. “I bet I could find one of those slide-wheel projectors in the basement. We could make European-themed hors d’oeuvres!”

  Sometimes, Charlotte thought that perhaps Father Thomas was even lonelier than she.

  Sighing, she set down the Gellewza. As if Father Thomas could hear her, she pronounced, “We’d love to tour the cathedral.”

  Kiko drove them back to Valetta in his VW convertible. Charlotte could feel sea-scented wind in her hair (and made a note to tell Father Thomas this very detail. Sea-scented wind!).

  The cathedral looked simple from the outside, with two bell towers, but the interior was so beautiful that Charlotte felt as if her brain were overheating. Baroque, Charlotte could appreciate, but this church was, as her granddaughters would say, bonkers. Every surface of the limestone walls was carved, painted, or gilded. Every inch inspired closer attention. It was the definition of glorious. But all this glory—it was almost a bit much. “Look at the floor,” whispered Kiko.

  How could she not look at the floor? Marble angels and skeletons were inlaid below her feet. “We are standing on over four hundred tombs,” said Kiko. “They tell a story, the story of the inevitability of death, and the rapture of the afterlife.”

  Charlotte was silent, overwhelmed. Lee came and stood next to her. “What do you think?” she asked.

  “It’s so sad,” said Charlotte. She couldn’t bear the thought that she wouldn’t feel rapture in the precious years she had left, that she’d have to wait until she was dead.

  “But hopeful, too,” said Lee, putting her arm around her mother. “Rapture sounds good to me.”

  It felt wonderful to have Lee next to her. Later, when she went over every moment that led Lee to perch on her balcony high above the ocean, Charlotte would curse herself for not saying something else in this moment. What if she had said, “There’s rapture right here” or “Lee, I love you.”

  What if she had said, “Please don’t leave me”?

  But no, Charlotte had said, “Rapture does sound nice, I suppose.” She wasn’t thinking. She’d had no idea. She’d simply wanted to say something, while her daughter was listening.

  CHARLOTTE HAD VISITED ITALY with her parents when she was small, but all she could remember about the entire trip was standing in a chilly bathroom beside her mother. Louisa (in Charlotte’s memory) turned to her and said, “I was not crying. Now go and give your father a kiss.”

  Charlotte remembered leaving the bathroom, running through a dim restaurant, flying toward her father, who wore a suit and did not look up.

  And now, more than sixty years later, she woke again in Italy. Well, near Italy, anyway. In Italian waters. Ah, bellissimo!

  “I am here with a coffee,” said Paros, from the hallway.

  Charlotte froze, frantically teasing her sleep-flattened hair in the mirror, rummaging uselessly in the drawer for a brush. “Um…?” she said.

  “I’ll leave it here and come back later for the tray, Mrs. Perkins.”

  Charlotte exhaled. “Thank you!” she called. When she’d heard his footsteps fade, Charlotte brought the pot of coffee and a raspberry Danish (what a wonderful surprise!) to her balcony, felt the Italian breeze on her face. She
reached for what she thought was the bill, but saw a handwritten note instead:

  Homer wrote in the Odyssey that a many-headed monster (SCYLLA) guarded the entrance to the Strait of Messina and ate sailors who tried to approach…and that the whirlpool CHARYBDIS waited for vessels…Luckily the Splendido Marveloso has already safely docked. I love the view of Sicily and the Calabrian coast and I hope you have a wonderful day.

  Yours,

  PAROS

  Charlotte gripped the note. She wanted sex, it was true, but Paros’s attentions were exposing a deeper need: she yearned for love. She had spent her mornings alone—or with imaginary lovers—for so long. She had not allowed herself to imagine the deep satisfaction of reaching out in the night to touch a warm body next to her own.

  Charlotte sipped her coffee and gazed at the rocky coastline, the deep green hills, clouds like smoke. How lonely it was to have no witness to her life. No one to guard her passage into slumber, no one to know that she had made it through the night.

  HOW COULD THIS BE Cord’s first trip to Italy, the worldwide mecca for fashionable, carb-eating gays? It was a crime that he wasn’t here with Giovanni. Instead, Cord was with his mother and sisters, boarding a motor coach helmed by a very enthusiastic woman named Diana. “Buon giorno!” she cried, as soon as they and about a dozen other cruise ship passengers were seated. “Buon giorno! This, it means hello in Italian. Can-a everybody hear-a me?”

  She spoke into a microphone with the volume turned way up: everyone could hear her.

  “Isn’t this exciting?” whispered Charlotte, who sat behind Cord and Regan, popping over the seat like a Lilly Pulitzer–clad jack-in-the-box.

  “Thrilling,” said Cord. He was freshly showered and bleary-eyed. The night before, he had stayed up playing Texas Hold’em, drinking cappuccinos until his hands shook. He’d missed the Friends of Bill W meeting (code for Alcoholics Anonymous—Bill W had founded the program) and his scheduled call with Handy. He had been sober for two days and counting but had scarcely slept, his mind catastrophizing and trying to find a path from where he was now to a wedding ceremony in his mom’s backyard.