The man nodded, and Keith felt like he was getting away with something, being on his own.
—
The elevator was the swiftest route, but he didn’t want to risk being caught in a small, enclosed place, and so Keith headed for the aft staircase. It was two flights down to the fifth floor, where the shops were. The stairway was empty, and Keith’s heart was beating fast. He wasn’t doing anything wrong, but he would be caught by someone all the same, and sometimes that went badly. From the hall around the atrium, Keith could see that there were a decent number of Talkers at the bar on the third floor. Someone had taken the vinyl banner of Corey, so it was just the four of them standing there, stone-faced, staring down. He paused for a minute in between his own giant face and Shawn’s and rested his elbows on the railing.
Opposite the bar on the floor below, on a stage the size of a manhole cover, a young woman was playing the guitar. She was pretty, with long wavy hair and blue jeans, and her fingers worked quickly on the strings. None of the Talkers were paying attention to her, but there were a few young men standing nearby—clearly crew from one part of the ship or another, their arms crossed. They were listening.
When the woman began to sing—a song he couldn’t quite identify—Keith realized that though the woman was singing in English, it was clearly not her first language. It was like the song had been put through Google Translate, leaving all the American cadences on the cutting room floor. Her voice was deeper than he expected, and richer. She tapped one foot on the small platform, and Keith found that he was tapping his too. The Talkers kept talking, their back to this singer, andKeith wanted to shout down,Hey, pay attention, but if he had, they would have taken out their phones and started filming him. They would have run up the staircase. They would have drowned her out completely.
No one ever talked about the music.
There had been a time when music magazines (when there were music magazines, period) felt obligated to saysomethingabout Boy Talk, but they hadn’t said anything kind. It was always some snarky dude with a goatee and a closet full of black T-shirts talking about the saccharine lyrics and the bubblegum melodies. If anyone understood fans, it should be guys like that. They were the same as Talkers, devoted to their gods, whether it was Morrissey or Robert Plant or Kurt Cobain or whoever. They knew every note just like the Talkers did, but somehow the things they loved were worthy of their deep consideration and Boy Talk wasn’t. You could practically hear them sharpening their knives. And that’s if Boy Talk was lucky enough to be included. Talk show hosts would ask for funny anecdotes (“And then your dog!!! Was barking!!! But Barbra Streisand was at the next table!!”) and might give an easy compliment, but that wasn’t the same as respect. The studio audience always lost their minds anyway because the Talkers showed up every time.
Here was what Keith wanted, even now, after so many years: He wanted people to listen to the music. No matter what Corey thought, Keith did care about his voice. It was deeper now, with more of a texture than it had had when he was young. Keith liked the way older voices sounded. Neil Young, Bob Dylan, Van Morrison, Johnny Cash! There was more there—more understanding, more life. He was proud of those early records, but those were only snapshots of a moment in time. They were his baby pictures, and what he was now—what he could be now—was different. Keith didn’t know if it was better or worse, but he came by it honestly.
Steffani didn’t even like it when he sang anymore. She didn’t like it when he touched her, when he was just trying to be playful, when they were both reaching for something in the fridge. Steffani loved him, he thought, in the way that she loved one of her cousins or the brother she liked the least. Someone who’d always been around. Someone she could count on in an emergency. That wasn’t nothing—a number to call, an SOS. But it wasn’t the same as a marriage. Not a good one, at least.
The woman had made it to the chorus. It was an Adele song; Keith recognized it now. She threw her head back when she got to the big notes, and the sound escaped into the air, diffusing her powerful voice into the space above her, where it floated, floated, floated up to Keith. He was crying again. Her voice was so big. The song was so good. God, it was nice to remember that songs could do that. The woman finished, and he clapped. No one on the ship had come to see this woman sing. Keith didn’t know her name or where she was from or what she did on board when she wasn’t playing the guitar to a row of people’s backs. She was singing because it moved her. Anyone could see that. Because she had something inside that needed to come out. This was what songs could do. It was the same as a poem, a painting, a dance. The sound wasn’t just a sound; it was an expression of the parts of yourself that words couldn’t describe.
The young guys watching her clapped too. One of them put two fingers in his mouth and did a wolf whistle. Keith almost never saw live music anymore. He wondered what she was going to play next. If no one else had been on the ship, Keith would have walked down the stairs, gotten closer. She looked like someone who knew a lot of songs. He did too. There had to be some overlap.
“Um,” a voice said, close to Keith’s ear. He straightened up and turned around, and there were three Talkers standing in a tiny clump right behind him. The leader was jittery and beaming. “Hi,” thewoman said. She was small and round with a pink, shining face. “I thought that was you.” The women behind her giggled.
“It’s me,” Keith said. He pulled down his mask, caught.
She held up her phone and raised an eyebrow. “Can we?”
He nodded and ducked his head down next to theirs while she snapped a photo with an outstretched arm.
“Okay, guys, see you later,” Keith said, and as he hurried toward the sundry shop, he heard the women begin to trill.
“Can I borrow your phone?” Keith asked the woman behind the counter at the shop. The ship’s operator clicked a few buttons and then connected his call. The Talkers weren’t coming in, but they were accumulating outside. Sarah picked up on the first ring.
“Help,” Keith said.
36
Sunday, 12:35 p.m.
Deck 9
Annie was hungry again, sort of. Her body wasn’t reliable in the way it used to be. Her period, her mood, her stomach, her desire. The household had been through puberty so recently, and so Annie knew what it was when it started to happen, sooner probably than friends of hers who assumed they’d be fertile forever.Fertile, like a cornfield, like a purebred dog, like a young wife in some religious sect. What she really meant wasyoung. Annie had never thought of herself as young, even when she had been, but regardless, the road to menopause felt like she was being forced to walk the plank into a school of sharks. Final. It was helpful to think of women she knew who had gone through it, women who were not dead: Meryl Streep, Cher. Probably lots of women much younger than them, too, but it felt impolite to guess. It was always this way—by the time you got used to something, it was already over. Sleepaway camp, high school, marriage. A cruise, even.
The buffet was quiet. She’d sworn it off, but Maira was right: It was so convenient. Annie decided that she was going to get a snack, she wasgoing to take a walk, she was going to play bingo, she was going to docruise stuffbecause she was probably never going to get on a cruise ship again if she could help it. Certain Talkers were highly visible—local celebrities—and Annie kept tabs on them. The woman with dyed red hair who danced alone in the pool every night, shaking her ass with the vigor of a twentysomething. Annie liked her. The couple with buzz cuts who wore matching rainbow flags around their shoulders every night. The woman who kept sending death stares to Maira, her hair simultaneously wet and crispy-looking, and her small posse of frowning women in neon T-shirts. Greg. He’d been hard to miss, but now he was everywhere she looked. She’d seen him on the deck, she’d seen him at the bar by the casino, she’d seen him with an arm around another woman’s waist. That was a new feeling. It wasn’t jealousy precisely, and it certainly wasn’t only pride but some combination of the two. Sure, Annie was embarrassed that her roommate (a stranger) had seen a man (also a stranger) going down on her, but also, there had been a man going down on her, and that wasn’t nothing. Annie had imagined her vagina like a gate standing guard in front of an abandoned house, overgrown vines holding the iron shut. It was a relief to know that there weren’t any vines. Everything still worked—she still worked.
There was a gigantic pink hunk of roast beef underneath a spotlight, glowing like it was the sixth member of Boy Talk. She couldn’t remember the last time she had roast beef, a food from a previous century.Why the hell not?she thought. Annie slid a small slice onto her plate, and then another. It was cool in the air-conditioning, but Annie wanted to be warm, so she took her plate of roast beef and went through the sliding glass doors onto the sunny lido deck. It was strange to be there in the daytime. This was what it was made for. If she and Claudia had been on the cruise together at any point during Claudia’slife, this is where they would have been—in the pool, going down the water slide, stretched out on a deck chair reading a book—and for a minute, Annie wished that Claudia were there. She would have looked at the whole thing with an anthropologist’s eye. What were the social mores of this ancient civilization? Who were these gods that the aging women worshipped so, and what did they get in return for their devotion?
Her daughter would know what Annie should do about work. Annie could practically hear Claudia’s indignation—she’d known Geoff since she was a small child and had once wet her pants while sitting on the rug in his office. What a gift, childhood—to be allowed to transgress and then to be forgiven. Annie had changed, too, over the last fifteen years, but could anyone see it? They could see the outside, of course—her softer profile, her graying hair—but they couldn’t see all the changes that had gone on inside. She was in a maudlin mood, and Annie felt herself bumping up against everything around her, all the up-tempo music, all the bright colors. Where was the Marlon Brando room, for when you just needed a minute to howl your pain and frustration and confusion into the darkness?
Annie’s current thought was to put on a suit and some actual high heels, the kind she only wore to weddings, and march into Geoff’s office like some kind of Business Woman. If Maira could tell people to drop dead, maybe Annie could push back a few inches. She would deliver her demands—a better title, more pay, respect—and then cross her arms and wait. There would probably be applause from some of the younger women in the audience, and the young gay men, though not Kayla, who would be cowering in the corner, making a TikTok about how office life sucked. Annie wasn’t worried about Kayla—not in this fantasy and not in reality either. Kayla would be fine because Kayla had her entire life ahead of her. There were so many things that Annie had agreed to as a young person that she wouldn’t agree tonow—her marriage, for one, but also a million smaller things. The ill-advised pixie cut of her early thirties. The friends who hadn’t kept up their side. Dinner at 9 p.m. A shot of tequila. It all sounded fun, but it hadn’t beenfor her. Or it wasn’t for her now. What Geoff had offered was also not for her now. Maybe she wouldn’t wear heels. Maybe she wouldn’t march in there at all—people were supposed to be afraid of the telephone now, but Annie wasn’t. Annie loved the telephone. Maybe she would just pick up the phone and tell Geoff thanks, but no thanks. Quit. That’s what Maira would do. Quit! It was a beautiful word, actually, sharp and short, like a knife.
There was an empty lounge chair near the tiki bar. It was funny to see the bar in the daylight. It reminded Annie of when they turned on the lights at a bar at the end of the night, how everyone scurried like cockroaches out into the dark street. She sat down, one leg on either side of the chair, and plunged her fork into the roast beef. It was delicious. If she was being honest, one of her favorite parts of the cruise was that she hadn’t cooked a single meal in days. Cooking for one was a math problem Annie had yet to solve. Recipes that required too much effort seemed like a waste of time; recipes that produced a whole sheet pan or casserole dish of something seemed like a waste of actual food. She ate leftovers, of course, but one meal often lasted so long that it felt like punishment. One lasagna would haunt her fridge for three weeks. She would learn. She was learning.
“Last call for bingo!” A woman in an American Cruise Lines uniform walked by waving bingo sheets.
“I’ll play!” Annie said.
The woman swiped Annie’s card and handed her three flimsy bingo sheets and a felt-tipped marker. Annie took another bite of the roast beef.
