Shawn at least put on the performance of someone who was enjoying himself during Photo Day. He cracked jokes and gave hard high fives. The rest of them were reduced to their physical forms and whatever they contained. Terrence would snap at people when he started getting tired, Scotty might make an off-color joke. Corey barely spoke or smiled, his disdain for the whole scene oozing out of his pores. Keith envied the women. They had to wait in line, sure, he’d seen themstretched across the hallways all the way to the end of the casino, three-quarters of the length of the ship, but when they were done, they could leave! They could go to the bar or the pool or back to bed and he would still be there, frozen, smiling, his back aching even with a sticky patch on it to try to relax his muscles into submission.
Someone with a walkie-talkie strapped to their shoulder handed Keith a cup of coffee, which he gratefully accepted. He was sitting on one of the comfortable sofas, watching as Bobby and Shawn talked on the foot-high stage on the other side of the room. Jonathan was cross-legged on the floor just to their left with his eyes closed, and Keith could see Bobby keep turning to check if Jonathan was still there, like he might be a figment of his imagination. There had been a Kabbalah guru some years ago who turned into an issue, but mostly Shawn’s strays went away on their own. Keith himself hadn’t gotten much of a sense of Jonathan yet—he was probably focused on Corey. People usually were.
Keith couldn’t hear what they were saying, but Shawn was gesturing with his hands and pointing at things. Scotty was on his back on the floor doing some stretches, his knees pulled into his chest. Corey and Terrence hadn’t shown up yet. The crowd outside the lounge was so loud that it sounded like a second ocean. Sometimes Keith wondered what would happen if they just threw open the doors and let the Talkers at them, like a Walmart on Black Friday. What would they do to him? Would they rip his body apart? At some point they would have to stop, when they drew blood and realized that he wasn’t actually any different than anyone else.
The coffee was too sweet, and Keith drank it anyway. Shawn jogged over and gave him a high five.
“Sup, sup, sup,” Shawn said, and humped the air. “We’re gonna crush it. Or it’s gonna crush us. Either way, gonna get crushed.” Shawn’s tolerance for Talker-induced pain was limitless, and sometimes Keith feltlike the more he hated a particular thing, the more Shawn enjoyed it, like they were on a seesaw.
“I already feel it,” Scotty called up from the floor.
Shawn leapt over Scotty’s body and started humping the air over his face.
“We get it,” Scotty said. “You’ve got fluid hips for an old man.”
“Age is just a state of mind,” Shawn said. He smiled, and his teeth gleamed. Keith envied his brother so much for the ease with which he moved through the world. Shawn was five years older than Keith, and sometimes Keith wondered if it had happened in those first five years, that someone had whispered a secret into Shawn’s ear, something that would have helped him have an easier time. It wasn’t true, of course—Shawn would have told Keith right away if there was some magic bullet. He would never have kept it to himself. It just wasn’t his way.
14
Friday, 10:26 a.m.
Deck 5
Maira knew how it all worked, thank god, and she helped Annie by doing some sort of prisoner swap to get her into Maira’s own photo group. As far as Annie could tell, the Talkers planned everything on the ship except for the actual concerts. They made their own costumes, they made their own souvenir bracelets and ChapStick holders and hair clips and ID card holders, and they traded them with or sold them to each other all weekend long. They also, crucially, organized themselves into groups of ten using countless spreadsheets and Facebook Messenger so that everyone knew who they were going to stand next to for the photo and wouldn’t have to scramble on the blessed day. Maira had asked who Annie wanted to stand next to, and Annie (Shawn?) had said “Anyone,” which made it easier. So many people were not willing to compromise.
Now that they were in the room, Annie understood. Talkers were giving out prizes—bottles of wine or fancy hand cream, a Boy Talk T-shirt, sometimes actual money—to people willing to fill the Terrence and Scotty spots. What an indignity, to give your entire life to something and to always be the last choice. Annie hoped it didn’t feel thatway on the inside. Maybe Terrence and Scotty didn’t know, but how could they not? If Annie’s eyes and ears, so new to this climate, could observe it so readily, then surely it was obvious to those on the inside.
Several women seemed to have already begun their Sexy Sunrise journeys for the day. Maira held aloft an orange flag, the kind tour guides use to shepherd clumps of people through busy city streets. This was what Annie had always imagined cruise life to be—following a herd of fellow tourists though the ruins of Pompeii, everyone in a khaki sun hat, everyone taking pictures. It was just the same, only the classical antiquities were still alive, still breathing, still thrusting.
Soon other women began to come to them—“I’m a Scotty,” one woman said, presenting herself. “I’m a Corey,” said a positively giddy redhead wearing a shirt with Corey’s face on it, and then she pointed to a glum-looking man trailing behind her. “And he’s a Terrence.” Maira, of course, was standing next to Shawn. There was no point to organizing a group if you weren’t going to get what you wanted.
“Let’s get on line,” Maira said when they had seven out of ten. “The rest will find us. I’m writing to them on Messenger.” Maira had told Annie that they were in the ADA section of the line, a much shorter line that was whisked into the room faster than the rest, because she was blind in one eye and then winked at Annie with what she assumed was the good eye. Maira waved her phone with the hand not holding the flag. The group shuffled over to the end of the line and got comfortable. Every now and then someone from JackRabbit would walk the length of the line and announce, “Groups of ten! Groups of ten! Only complete groups!” as if the Talkers needed reminding. It was comforting, having someone else be in charge.
The line moved forward, past the window, into a tight bottleneck, and then all Annie could see were Talkers. An ocean of women. The hall was hot, and Annie started to sweat. Some women had portablefans and passed them around. These women had thought of everything. When Claudia had gone to summer camp, there had been a printed list—six pairs of underwear, four pairs of shorts, a canteen, a sleeping bag, bug spray, etc. Annie thought about how long the packing list for the cruise would be if done properly. She felt the sweat dripping down her neck and between her breasts. Annie was wearing her dressy black sweatpants and a clean cream-colored T-shirt, and she worried the sweat would soon begin to show. It wasn’t going to be abig sweat, that’s how she thought of them, the waves of heat that took over her whole body and left her dripping, but it also wasn’t nothing. So much of being a woman was learning to live with new physical realities.
Annie often thought that men—specifically Chris, her ex-husband, but other men too—would be fundamentally improved as human beings if they had to spend a single year living in a female body. If Geoff had been a woman, he never would have demoted her! It might not have been true, but it felt true. What did a twenty-three-year-old know that she didn’t? Annie knew more now than she ever had—she knew things in herbones. She also knew that she didn’t know everything! Did Kayla knowthat? That Google didn’t have all the answers? Kayla also didn’t know how much her own body would change. The bleeding, the clots, the cramps. She might know some of those, sure, and the pressure, the external gaze, the judgment. That all arrived at puberty, if not sooner. But the changes! To think—to be a man, all you had to do was survive puberty. Annie’s body had changed at twelve, then again when she was pregnant, then again after Claudia was born, and then again more recently, into whatever she was now, a woman in her final form. That wasn’t counting the weight gain and weight loss of her twenties and forties, the widening of her feet! Feet! Men had no fucking clue. The heat also made her angry. One of the women standing next to Annie handed her a small purple fan, and the relief she felt wasso gratifying that Annie let out a moan. She couldn’t believe a twenty-three-year-old was going to tell her what to do.
“I know, right?” the woman said. “This line is crazy. They need to figure this out better.” She snapped her gum. “I’m in your group. Keith.”
Annie looked at the woman—and all the women surrounding her. They were done up, with hair freshly straightened or curled and mascara and eyeliner and lipstick. The woman who had handed her the fan was wearing a peach-colored sundress, tight across the chest, with spaghetti straps. Annie had been thinking about this all wrong. It wasn’tmeetingBoy Talk, it wasn’t an opportunity for conversation. It was about the photograph, about sayingYes, I’ve met them twenty times, or whatever Maira had said. These were pictures that would last forever, pictures of the moment that everyone had been waiting for, when the noise and the screams and the crowds all fell away, when the distance fell away, and those five men were standing right next to you with no barrier or boundaries except the ones inside their skin.
“I feel nervous,” Annie said. “Is that normal?”
The woman waved a hand. “Oh, yeah. My first cruise, I barfed. I mean, I was kind of seasick, but mostly it was just nerves. It’s so crazy that they do it. Most people don’t on cruises this size. I went on a Bon Jovi cruise with my husband, and he didn’t do it, not with everyone. You had to pay extra. Of course, all these crazy bitches would pay more anyway. So I don’t know. Who are you standing with?”
“Scotty,” Annie said. She hadn’t thought about Scotty at all—she hadn’t considered the actual moment when he was in front of her, that she would have to open her mouth and speak. What did she think about Scotty Sanchez, as a person? He was gay,the gay one, which seemed like it must have been hard, as a closeted teenager in the 1980s. Now he was selling vitamins and face creams in what seemed like a multilevel marketing scheme, which was either sad or predatory if notboth. At least in her corner of the marketing world, she was just trying to sell people nice things, not trying to bury them in debt. Scotty wasn’t married, Annie didn’t think. She didn’t know what she could say to him—something about the weather. Katherine would have known—maybe he had a dog or a favorite basketball team. Of course, Annie wouldn’t need to say anything at all.
“I stood next to Scotty once,” she said. “He’s so nice.” This was what they all said. They couldn’t all be nice, the men, could they? That seemed statistically unlikely. What did nice mean in this context, anyway? They were men at work.
Annie hadn’t told anyone other than Maira about what had happened at the magazine. What had happened? She hadn’t been fired. She’d been put on an ice floe, that’s what it felt like. The kids called it “quiet quitting,” when they just stopped doing their jobs. Maybe this was the opposite—a soft firing. All around her, Talkers were putting on lipstick in small compact mirrors and their front-facing cameras. Annie had brought some of her ancient makeup—a tube of lipstick and a small jar of foundation that she’d had for a solid decade—but she hadn’t thought to put any on before she’d left her cabin. This would be like running into Boy Talk while she walked to the grocery store—come as you are. She wondered if they were done up too, in their concert clothes with makeup on, or if they would be like her, tired and just out of bed, dressed in whatever they happened to step into. The line lurched forward a few feet, and they all took a step, thousands of brides waiting to walk down the aisle.
Maira lowered her flag and said, “Okay, let’s get in order, girls.” On board this ship, they were always girls. Being a woman came with so many responsibilities, and this temporary demotion felt like having a very pleasant lobotomy. There was no mental load aboard theAmerican Fantasy, an American fantasy all its own.
Every so often, the door swung open, and a security guard steppedaside to let a group of Talkers pass over the threshold. One group of women wearing captain hats and matching T-shirts that saidShip happenslet out a collective gasp when the door opened, and then it was Annie’s turn to walk in.
Her eyes went to Shawn first. He was laughing, his perfect-toothed smile wide and bright. Annie watched as Shawn elbowed Corey in the stomach, and Corey pretended to double over and then hooked Shawn in a loving headlock. The Talkers loved any proof that the guys were having fun, even if they were also behaving in ways for which the women would have scolded their children. Keith was wearing sunglasses even though they were indoors. Shawn and Keith and Scotty all lookedsmall. Living in New York, Annie was used to seeing actors on the street, and this was the same—looking at people who you were used to seeing ten feet high or on a stage and realizing that they were not ten feet high but just ordinary human-size. Not just human-size but actually, truly human. It shouldn’t have been a revelation, but it was.
Now women buzzed around them like honeybees looking for a flower, hugging and scooching down the line. Scotty couldn’t have stood more than five foot six in his chunky sneakers. Terrence was lankier than he’d been as a teenager and wore long baggy shorts that made his calves look like toothpicks. Corey West was tall and broad, and next to the others, he looked like some kind of action hero. It seemed like an error in putting together a boy band, having one so much bigger, but then Annie remembered that when Corey had joined the band, he had been a child, a head shorter than everyone else. No one ever really knew what the future held.
