Do Not Become Alarmed(5)
Almost no one else seemed to be in black tie, which made Benjamin self-conscious, but Raymond wore a white dinner jacket. The spectacular tree in the central court was lit up, and there was carol-singing led by the performers. They stayed for a couple of songs, and Benjamin heard Nora, beside him in a red silk dress, singing the unfamiliar second and third verses.
“Are you a Christmas elf?” he asked her.
“My mother really loved a carol service,” she said, smiling. “Candleholders out of tinfoil, all that.”
At dinner, the kids were excited by the grown-up dining room and the attention of the stewards. The table staff seemed to approve of their formal clothes, which made Benjamin feel less embarrassed. And they did look good, the kids with shining faces. Liv wore a low-backed blue dress that showed off her swimmer’s shoulders, her short hair like a pale flame. Flat sandals for his sake, even though he’d told her he didn’t care.
When the kids fell asleep that night, Benjamin and Liv arranged presents from Santa under the potted palm in their cabin: new swimsuits, small toys, a few books, green and gold flip-flops. In the morning, Penny and Sebastian ran next door to show their haul to their cousins, who had comparable loot, by previous agreement.
Hector, the Argentinian fifteen-year-old, had been given a guitar and he played a few American pop songs in a deck chair, singing softly, sending Penny into a swoon. She liked saying his name as the Argentinians did, “ECK-tor,” rolling the r a little. She and Sebastian had a Guatemalan babysitter when they were younger, and a few weeks of Learn-in-Your-Car Spanish before the trip had uncovered a surprising facility, all these years later. She was a natural mimic.
Hector’s sister, Isabel, had a new bottle of green nail polish, and she painted Penny’s and June’s toes. Then Sebastian wanted his done, too. The Argentinian girl was irresistible, with her long sun-streaked hair. She and her brother had a South American sophistication, jaded and worldly. Marcus hung back and watched as Isabel leaned over the small toes, wiping away extra polish where she’d messed up. Benjamin guessed that Marcus wanted her attention far too much to seek it. The teens didn’t exactly court the adoration of the younger kids, but they seemed to enjoy it. There was no one their age on the ship.
Two unchanging sea days later, Benjamin lay on the made-up bed, enjoying the silence and reading the condensed New York Times on three sheets of printer paper. There was no cell service out here, and the expensive Wi-Fi was iffy. That was good for Liv—to be offline and away from the studio. Even when a movie got made, the path it took always sounded to him like a drug deal gone wrong. Lies, threats, incrimination, betrayal, last-minute bargaining, total lunacy. She needed a break. But Benjamin felt lost without his work. He turned on the cabin’s TV, looking for news.
Flipping channels, he saw a young woman in a stewardess’s uniform, with a black curtain behind her. She was olive-skinned, her hair pulled tightly back.
“It is very hard,” she said. “The work is very hard. The hours are long, and you are all day on your feet. When I finish, I am tired. I go back to my cabin. It is very small, and I share it with another girl. It is okay.”
An unseen interviewer asked her a question.
“My dream?” she asked. She looked startled and then thoughtful. “My dream is to find a job on land.”
The next subject was a slim Indian man with salt-and-pepper hair. He sat in a booth beneath a big still life painting.
“I used to want to be Picasso,” he said with a shy smile. “Or Matisse, you know? The struggle. When I was in art school, I wanted to be a great artist. And now—well.” He looked at the painting of a bowl of fruit behind him. “I do the still life paintings that hang in the extra-tariff restaurants. But I make a living as an artist, which is not easy to do. I remind myself of that.”
The door to the cabin opened and Liv walked in.
“Look at this,” Benjamin said. “It’s supposed to be a tour of the ship, and what everyone does, but they hate their jobs.”
She sat at the end of the bed to watch. A pink New Zealander on the screen was talking with ambivalence about the Kids’ Club.
“Why would they put this on the TV?” Liv asked.
“I don’t know!” he said. “Couldn’t they find one cheerful kid who wants to see the world? Or that Ukrainian girl who’s just happy not to be in Crimea?”
Liv watched the screen, and Benjamin knew she was thinking about their stewardess, Perla, who had three kids in Manila. “Perla’s on a nine-month contract,” she said.
“I know.”
“Imagine what she’s missing, not seeing them grow up,” Liv said. “Maybe the cruise line wants us to know that we should be hit by a bus, to even the score.”
“The bus?” he said. “The bus that goes around hitting people?”
She looked over her shoulder at him and her face went from serious to laughing. He loved watching it change. He had made his own tribe with her, a tribe of two, and then of four. He had not known, in his unmoored youth, if it would happen.
“Yeah,” she said. “The karmic bus.”
He put on an interviewer’s voice, and held the TV remote as a microphone. “We’re talking to a passenger next,” he said. “Tell me, madam, how does it feel to be the most desirable woman on the ship?”