Thursday, 4:29 p.m.
Deck 9
There were, it seemed to Annie, too many people on the boat. At least if the whole thing toppled over now, everyone could swim the ten feet back to shore. It would make the local news, but it wouldn’t be a mass tragedy. Annie shuddered. If she was waiting for a subway and it arrived looking this crowded, she would let it pass and wait for the next one. The women on the lido deck were standing shoulder to shoulder, everyone in full sun. The DJ (“DJ Pancake!” he shouted every two or three songs, perhaps to remind the assembled that they were listening to the work of a human and not a playlist) kept up a steady stream of songs that everyone knew the words to: Madonna, Prince, Bon Jovi—the kind of soundtrack they played at baseball stadiums to keep people awake. Annie and Maira had come up early and grabbed two barstools at one of the tiki bars, but the space between them and the small metal stage had filled with Talkers, so many sweating bodies already burning in the sun.
All around the deck, homemade vinyl banners had been affixed to the metal guardrails—clearly hung by Talkers themselves. Was that allowed, to just decorate a ship? It seemed like it shouldn’t be. OnereadHola from Spain!and had cutouts of the guys’ faces superimposed on a Spanish flag, and the one next to it saidTalkers! Jennifer needs a kidney—are you a match?Annie had to read it several times to make sure she understood that a woman was literally looking for a kidney donor on a cruise ship, but there it was. Maira saw her take it in and said, “Oh, yeah. Last year, there was a match, so now people know it works.” She shrugged.
There were small roped-off sections for Talkers in wheelchairs, which Annie felt surprised by at first, and then felt ashamed at her surprise. Shame was the blanket feeling, overriding everything else temporarily. The shame of what she was doing, which had been couched in some form of giddy humor, of irony, of sisterly hijinks, now seemed naked and obvious. She was divorced, she was fifty, she was a hormonal mess on a ship of middle-aged women still lusting after their childhood crushes, she was working for a child who didn’t know the difference between a soprano and a mezzo, a child who probably thought Swatch watches would pay as much money as Rolex on an ad spend. Her sister wasn’t there to make it seem like a fun group activity. Alone, Annie felt deranged, like she was on an ice floe, floating away from civilization on purpose. It was a colossal mistake. She was stuck here now when she should be back in New York, doing things that made sense, like lying on the couch in her sweatpants, crying into her cat’s furry stomach.
“So this teenager is my boss now,” Annie said. “I can only imagine what that’s going to feel like. What kind of added value is she going to suggest, a group trip to Sephora to sample skin care products? Oh god, she probably would, and they’d love it. It’s going to be like that Robert De Niro movie—did you see that?” Annie could tell that Maira could only hear every fifth word, but Annie found that she couldn’t quite stop talking anyway. “It was actually a pretty decent movie.”
Maira was being a very good sport and going back to the bar to get them more drinks whenever they were through. Annie had learned some basic facts about her roommate so far: Maira was from New Jersey, like Boy Talk, and her cousin had gone to the same middle school as Terrence and Scotty. She worked part-time as a receptionist at an orthodontist’s office and had helped Scotty with his various endeavors remotely, a job she had clearly relished more than making children’s dentist appointments. She was married to a man named Gerry, she had three kids who were all grown up, and she had seen Boy Talk every time they’d ever been on tour and been on every cruise, the kind of habit that could certainly have paid for an extremely luxurious month in the south of France. She had a loud, brassy voice and an easy laugh, and if she was at all unhappy about rooming with a stranger, she didn’t show it. Annie was grateful for that.
Maira came back with two tall, curvy glasses of something called a Sexy Sunrise, which was not the sort of thing Annie usually drank, or ever even really considered in her life before, but it seemed that Sexy Sunrises were necessary. They were sweet and slushy and alcoholic, offering a slippery slope into oblivion. Annie had made it all the way to the bottom of the glass when DJ Pancake abruptly shut off the music, and a giant countdown began to flash on the jumbotron behind the stage. Women stood in the shallow pool just beneath the balcony, cheered, and held their drinks over their heads as if in offering. It reminded Annie of the final scene inDialogue of the Carmelites, where the nuns get decapitated one by one but are in such a frenzy they don’t even seem upset about it, so rabid is their devotion.
“You can get the next ones,” Maira said, then, when she realized what was happening, added “Oh shit!” Maira set down her drink and quickly patted her pockets to find her phone, which she switched on, recording a video. The numbers flashed on the screen—10,9,8, andthe crowd was screaming so loud that Annie cupped her hands over her ears. The woman next to Annie began to cry, and nothing had happened yet. When the clock hit0, everyone screamed even louder. Annie watched as Boy Talk appeared on the balcony just beneath the video screen. She’d meant to take out her phone to film a video for Katherine, but now it was too late—Boy Talk was already there. The sound was truly deafening. She’d packed earplugs, but they were back in the room.
The men stood in a row, shoulder to shoulder—Shawn in sunglasses and a baseball hat, Scotty in short-shorts and clean white sneakers, Terrence chewing gum and doing finger guns at the crowd, Keith waving with both hands, his T-shirt riding up a tiny bit and revealing a slim band of skin. There was something about that little strip of pale belly that seemed too intimate to Annie, and so she turned her head and didn’t see as Corey West joined them on the balcony with his arms crossed over his chest. The crowd lost their minds, the volume increased so much that the guys all had to laugh. The men looked excited to be there, even standing in the hot, direct sun. They were still handsome and fit—more so than most of the men Annie knew, at least on the outside.
“Are we mad at Corey? As a group, I mean?” Annie shouted into Maira’s ear. It was impossible to discern if anyone cared about Corey’s very public indiscretions.
“Honestly, no,” Maira said. “I mean, there’s a lot of talk about it in the Facebook groups, of course, but I think for the people who are here, no. Honestly, he could run someone over, and the Talkers would sayThat guy came out of nowhere.” The crowd cheered again, as if in agreement.
DJ Pancake handed Shawn a microphone, and his voice, so familiar to her still, boomed, “Who’s ready for the best weekend of their lives?”That’s when Annie burst into tears. The tears bubbled up like a fountain and streamed down Annie’s cheeks. It wasn’t demure crying, the kind that could be dabbed away with the corner of a handkerchief. These came from somewhere deep, an internal cave system that Annie had never spelunked into, at least not in several decades. Maira put a hand on her shoulder. “I told you,” Maira said. Annie wanted to argue, to say no, it was the sun in her eyes and the Sexy Sunrise and having a millennial boss—No! A Gen Z boss!—and going on her first vacation alone in her entire life. Shewascrying for all those reasons, but seeing these men in person, it was the straw and she was the camel’s back. Maybe it hadn’t been a mistake after all.
She had known that they would be there. That was the first question anyone asked when Annie begrudgingly told people where she was going—“Are they really going tobethere?”—but in the moment, she was still surprised. These men had woken up wherever they had woken up, they had ridden in airplanes and taxicabs and they crossed the trip-trap little bridge to this floating island where they were the only men in the world who mattered, and now Annie discovered that she too could not quite believe it despite having paid for the experience, like she’d fallen through the looking-glass into a world she hadn’t quite known existed. Is this what Katherine’s life was like in Tucson, still full of childish wonder? Katherine was a pediatric speech pathologist and spent her day readjusting small children’s mouths. It couldn’t be like this.
Annie turned to the women standing around her. Comparison was deadly, every woman who’d survived middle school knew that—but Annie couldn’t help it. It was a sea of bodies, and she was in the middle of it, a single drop of water. Some of the women were thin and some were heavy, but they were all three-dimensional, complete with cellulite dimples and waggly upper arms and soft bellies, bellies that haddone the work of carrying children, of living full, complicated lives. Just like Boy Talk had left their mysterious adult selves behind on the mainland, so had these women—husbands, children, jobs, problems—and now they were transformed into whatever had come before. Their original forms. Annie’s body was healthy. She went to the YMCA and rode a stationary bike; she walked around Central Park. Not one person on this ship would make her feel like her body should look any different than it did, and that made her feel weightless and beautiful. They were all weightless and beautiful. The company should have printed that on the brochures. Maybe the cruise lines would hire her, and she’d suggest it. Know your demographic, that was the most important rule of marketing.
Annie squinted at the five men. Terrence looked strange, now slightly grizzled and sinewy, but the other four had somehow retained the core of their charm, even as they’d gone from soft-cheeked teenage boys to whatever this was. She suddenly had so many questions for her sister, information that Katherine would be spilling over with—what the hell had these guys been doing since she stopped paying attention? When had Shawn started to look like this, and were those really his teeth? Were they all married? Did they have families? Annie had been expecting them all to look the same as the last time she saw them, whenever that was. It was actually such a feminine way to go through the world—people commenting on your looks, strangers pawing at you, people projecting their sexual fantasies on you while you were just trying to do your job.
A Boy Talk song started to play and the men jogged down a staircase and then reappeared on the stage at the center of the deck, only ten feet from Annie’s stool. The men split off, each of them pointing their eyes and hands toward a different section of the crowd. Keith was closest to the tiki bar, and he waved at them—at her, sure, she supposed, but at all of them, as a group, as a synecdoche, as therepresentatives of every girl who had ever loved Boy Talk in the history of the world. Keith Fiore smiled more widely than she’d ever seen him smile in his life, and Annie couldn’t help it, she smiled back as if he was looking straight at her, like she was smiling at a child staring out the window of a departing school bus. It was an involuntary reaction, exactly the way she’d felt when she took Claudia to Disney World when she was seven—when Mickey Mouse waved, it hadn’t felt like some twentysomething Floridian actor in a furry suit was waving at them, it had been goddamnMickey Mouse, and she and Claudia had both squealed with delight. Katherine would have been jumping up and down, hysterical. Annie was surrounded by Katherines. Annie felt like a chaperone, mostly, except for the tears, which had stopped. Keith jogged over to the other side of the stage, and suddenly it was Shawn and Scotty, their arms thrown over each other’s shoulders, and everyone screamed more—it wasn’t just seeing Boy Talk or hearing their voices, this crowd wanted totouchthem, and Annie saw the poster over her childhood bed, and this man standing in front of her, and it felt impossible that they were the same, a mathematical improbability, but a good one.
The ship’s horn blared, and clouds of black smoke billowed from the exhaust pipe behind the screen. TheAmerican Fantasywas moving away from the dock. The men weren’t singing, though each of them now held a microphone—a song played over the speakers, and they were singing along without holding the mics to their mouths, off and on, clapping their hands, pointing to the crowd. It reminded Annie of dancers at a bar mitzvah—it was their job to pump up the crowd and to be the objects of lusty screams. Scotty came close to the edge of the stage and unbuttoned his shirt, revealing a totally hairless torso that looked like an aging Ken doll, all smooth tan bumps. Annie covered her eyes with her hands—it was too much to take in. Maira was singing along, but Annie didn’t know the words, or she didn’t at first, but after about a minute, she had most of them. Maira was swiveling herhips to the beat, and Annie let her chin nod along. The song was about dancing, or about dancing as a metaphor for sex, and the guys were dancing, and the women on the deck were dancing, everyone in their safe, separate areas, all of them propelling the ship away from Miami and into the ocean, where they could finally be alone together.
8
Thursday, 6:57 p.m.
Deck 7
Keith had gone back to his room after the sail-away party—they had a little while to chill before the Quiz Show, and the rule on the ship was to take a rest whenever the opportunity presented itself. He’d forgotten to put on sunscreen, a rookie mistake, and his ears and neck had gone bright pink in the hour they’d been on the deck. Keith was tired, and he was hot, and they were only getting started. The Talkers weren’t complaining, though, so he shouldn’t either. “Talker Stalkers” was what Scotty called them when he was in a bitchy mood—Steffani too. Keith hated when they said that. The women were crammed together like fish in a tin, and they were paying to do it. They were paying for Keith’s entire life; he didn’t want to call them names. The Talkers were his people, and they were having fun. Keith just wished he was having as much fun as they were. He finished one cigarette and lit the next with it, end to end. One of the women had looked him straight in the eye and shouted, “Show me your tits!” which didn’t even make sense, because he didn’t have tits, unless what she meant was that he had put on weight, which was true. It hadn’t sounded likean insult, or at least it didn’t seem like the woman had meant it as an insult, but there they were. Welcome to the cruise.
Steffani thought the Talkers were freaks and told him so whenever she had the chance, but Keith knew better. Boy Talk was Tinkerbell, and the Talkers were clapping until their hands hurt, the only thing keeping them flying through the air. Without them, he was just a guy who had barely gotten his GED. Good-looking, maybe. Talented, maybe. Those things were subjective, and both seemed to decrease with age. Rich, in comparison to the people he grew up with, sure, even though Shawn was always telling him that he wasn’t letting his money work for him. When Keith let himself think about what his life would have been like without the group, it was too depressing, even for him, the blackest cloud imaginable, both because he knew he wouldn’t have had any of the success alone and also that the group could have thrived without him just as easily. The Keith girls could have been Jack girls, or Trevor girls, whoever girls. It was a weird way to think about your own life, that it didn’t have that much to do with you, but even if it was just dumb luck, Keith loved to sing the songs the Talkers wanted to hear. The kinds of musicians who would laugh at that had probably never had a hit song. It was like plugging the entire room into an electric socket. Him too. When it worked, there was no feeling like it. Keith tried not to think about what he wanted because it just made things more complicated. Not at home, not with the guys. If he didn’t want anything outside of what he had, everything was fine. He wasn’t going to be the one to ruin a good thing.
Keith checked his phone. Service was supposed to be terrible at sea, but the Boy Talk route was so short—Miami, Bahamas, Miami, a small loop in the shape of a deflating balloon—that his cell phone worked pretty well the whole time. He called Steffani and she didn’t pick up. He called Madison and she didn’t pick up. He knew better than to leave messages. They’d both text him later on, that was theirway; like mother, like daughter. When Madison was small, she had loved Boy Talk—the old pictures, the songs, the dances. Steffani had always poked fun, but now Madison was worse. She made TikTok videos of herself pretending to throw up with Boy Talk playing in the background. Madison had hundreds of thousands of followers, more than Boy Talk did on their official account. Keith slid his phone back into his pocket.
The cabins in the Serenity Suite were nice—cream-colored walls and carpets, with a bedroom and a sitting room and a decent-size balcony. At home, Keith slept in the guest room. They still called it the guest room, even though he slept in it every night, and when they had actual guests, they stayed in the small cottage behind the pool. Steffani didn’t want a divorce, that’s what she said. Keith had always liked Steffani’s bluntness—even as kids, she’d told him exactly what she wanted and what he should do. Dr. Robert said it wasn’t uncommon, that appeal. Steffani also said that she never wanted to have sex with him again, which Keith thought probably wasn’t true, because it was the one thing they did together that would make her stop complaining about what he was doing. Every few months, Steffani would come down to the guest room in the middle of the night and pull his boxers down and ride him for a little while and then tell him to lick her until she came, but she always went back to her own bedroom—their bedroom—afterward. That was what Keith liked the most about having sex with his wife, more than the orgasm, that it meant that even Steffani hadn’t necessarily made up her mind. Maybe when Madison left for college, Steffani would actually want a divorce. Some of their friends had done that. Then the dads were booted off to shitty apartments, and the kids probably only saw them on holidays. Keith didn’t want to get a divorce, not really, not most of the time. He wanted to sleep next to his wife in the bed that she put sixteen pillows on every morning and threw onto the floor every night. She was beautiful andtough and loyal as hell, and just like the band, he didn’t think he would ever be the one to quit. Steffani didn’t believe in therapy, and she’d been raised Catholic, and so they were in a gray zone, that’s what they called it. Being on the ship wasn’t easy, but at least it wasn’t gray.
The guys were supposed to report to the greenroom at seven so they could all be whisked together to the theater for the Quiz Show, which they did mostly so everyone would actually get there on time. After the sail-away party, at which they did nothing but smile and wave, the Quiz Show was the easiest. No singing, just trivia they knew or didn’t know, it didn’t matter. Shawn was competitive and always wanted to win, but if the Talkers who got picked to play were happy, Keith was happy. There was no fighting onstage, not ever. Everyone smiled the whole time, ear-to-ear cheesy grins. The JackRabbit people called it “touchable,” meaning it made the Talkers feel like they were touching the band, even though they weren’t. It was weird to feel so grateful for the Talkers and to also want them as far away as humanly possible. Shawn didn’t feel that way. Shawn spent hours every single day responding to messages from strangers. He left comments on Talkers’ Instagram accounts. He would pay for everyone’s lunch at Papa Fiore’s if there were enough Talkers there. If Keith walked into a restaurant and saw fifty Talkers, he would turn around and hurry back to his car.
Keith pulled the door open and stepped into the hallway, colliding with Corey West.
“Hey there,” Corey said. They had all been cute kids, more or less, most of them with fucked-up teeth, but around forty was when the guys had started to change. Maybe Steffani was right about his forehead—for years she’d been trying to bring him to her Botox doctor for some his-and-hers injections, as if that were romantic. Dr. Robert said that Keith put too much pressure on himself to stay the same, that everyone changed, but he wasn’t looking at Corey. Keith knew the truth—fat Elvis made people feel things, and it wasn’toh good, the passage oftime comes for us all. Corey’s skin was tight and poreless, his cheekbones were sharp. His hair was shorter than usual, but it was still thick and dark brown. He’d hooked his sunglasses onto the neck of his white T-shirt. His face didn’t look like it was made of molded plastic like Scotty’s did or frozen like Shawn’s forehead. Corey just looked better than the rest of them. He’d gotten veneers like Shawn, like all of them except Terrence, but Corey’s had been necessary after he’d chipped a bunch of his teeth in “an accident in Brazil.”
“Hi,” Keith said. He pointed toward the greenroom. “Shall we?”
Corey put his hands in prayer position. “Thank you.” He gestured for Keith to walk in front, but Keith shook his head and let Corey go first. People—not just the Talkers—liked to believe that the guys were together all the time, hanging out at each other’s houses like teenagers, but of course that wasn’t true. They all had kids, except for Scotty, and spouses or exes and pets and friends, and only Keith and Terrence were still in Jersey full-time. Shawn’s rambling, supersized house was in Orange County, and Scotty lived in West Hollywood, which might as well have been two hundred miles apart. Corey went back and forth between Manhattan and Silverlake, or at least Keith thought so. He had a wife (though they were separated) and an ex-wife and a baby with each, two little girls who were beautiful like their parents and would be too young to understand anything for a long, long time. Keith saw his brother the most, but even that was usually on FaceTime. Shawn often called at six in the morning, when it was still the middle of the night in California, because he didn’t sleep much and he hated wasting time. Sometimes he woke Keith up, already in midsentence.
