A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again (59 page)

²⁷
The single best new vocab word from this week:
spume
(second-best was
scheisser
, which one German retiree called another German retiree who kept beating him at darts).

²⁸
(this expression resembling a kind of facial shoulder-shrug, as at fate)

²⁹
(Though I can’t help noting that the weather in the Celebrity 7NC brochure was substantially nicer.)

³⁰
I have a deep and involuntary reaction to Dramamine whereby it sends me pitching forward to lie prone and twitching wherever
I am when the drug kicks in, so I’m sailing the
Nadir
cold turkey.

³¹
This is on Deck 7, the serious dining room, and it’s never called just the “Caravelle Restaurant” (and
never
just “the Restaurant”)—it’s always “The Five-Star Caravelle Restaurant.”

³²
There were seven other people with me at good old Table 64, all from south Florida—Miami, Tamarac, Fort Lauderdale itself.
Four of the people knew each other in private landlocked life and had requested to be at the same table. The other three people
were an old couple and their granddaughter, whose name was Mona.

I was the only first-time Luxury Cruiser at Table 64,
and also the only person who referred to the evening meal as “supper,” a childhood habit I could not seem to be teased out
of.

With the conspicuous exception of Mona, I liked all my tablemates a lot, and I want to get a description of supper
out of the way in a fast footnote and avoid saying much about them for fear of hurting their feelings by noting any weirdnesses
or features that might seem potentially mean. There were some pretty weird aspects to the Table 64 ensemble, though. For one
thing, they all had thick and unmistakable NYC accents, and yet they swore up and down that they’d all been born and raised
in south Florida (although it did turn out that all the T64 adults’ own parents had been New Yorkers, which when you think
about it is compelling evidence of the durability of a good thick NYC accent). Besides me there were five women and two men,
and both men were completely silent except on the subjects of golf, business, transdermal motion sickness prophylaxis, and
the legalities of getting stuff through Customs. The women carried Table 64’s conversational ball. One of the reasons I liked
all these women (except Mona) so much was because they laughed really hard at my jokes, even lame or very obscure jokes; although
they all had this curious way of laughing where they sort of
screamed
before they laughed, I mean really and discernibly screamed, so that for one excruciating second you could never tell whether
they were getting ready to laugh or whether they were seeing something hideous and screamworthy over your shoulder across
the 5
C.R., and this was disconcerting all week. Also, like many other 7NC Luxury Cruise passengers I observed, they all seemed
to be uniformly stellar at anecdotes and stories and extended-set-up jokes, employing both hands and faces to maximum dramatic
effect, knowing when to pause and when to go run-on, how to double-take and how to set up a straight man.

My favorite
tablemate was Trudy, whose husband was back home in Tamarac managing some sudden crisis at the couple’s cellular phone business
and had given his ticket to Alice, their heavy and very well-dressed daughter, who was on spring break from Miami U, and who
was for some reason extremely anxious to communicate to me that she had a Serious Boyfriend, the name of which boyfriend was
Patrick. Alice’s part of most of our interfaces consisted of remarks like: “You hate fennel? What a coincidence: my boyfriend
Patrick absolutely
detests
fennel”; “You’re from Illinois? What a coincidence: my boyfriend Patrick has an aunt whose first husband was from Indiana,
which is right near Illinois”; “You have four limbs? What a coincidence:…,” and so on. Alice’s continual assertion of her
relationship-status may have been a defensive tactic against Trudy, who kept pulling professionally retouched 4 × 5 glossies
of Alice out of her purse and showing them to me with Alice sitting right there, and who, every time Alice mentioned Patrick,
suffered some sort of weird facial tic or grimace where one side’s canine tooth showed and the other side’s didn’t. Trudy
was 56, the same age as my own dear personal Mom, and looked—Trudy did, and I mean this in the nicest possible way—like
Jackie Gleason in drag, and had a particularly loud pre-laugh scream that was a real arrhythmia-producer, and was the one
who coerced me into Wednesday night’s Conga Line, and got me strung out on Snowball Jackpot Bingo, and also was an incredible
lay authority on 7NC Luxury Cruises, this being her sixth in a decade—she and her friend Esther (thin-faced, subtly ravaged-looking,
the distaff part of the couple from Miami) had tales to tell about Carnival, Princess, Crystal, and Cunard too fraught with
libel-potential to reproduce here, and one long review of what was apparently the worst cruise line in 7NC history—one “American
Family Cruises,” which folded after just sixteen months—involving outrages too literally incredible to be believed from
any duo less knowledgeable and discerning than Trudy and Esther.

Plus it started to strike me that I had never before
been party to such a minute and exacting analysis of the food and service of a meal I was just at that moment eating. Nothing
escaped the attention of T and E—the symmetry of the parsley sprigs atop the boiled baby carrots, the consistency of the
bread, the flavor and mastication-friendliness of various cuts of meat, the celerity and flambé technique of the various pastry
guys in tall white hats who appeared tableside when items had to be set on fire (a major percentage of the desserts in the
5
C.R. had to be set on fire), and so on. The waiter and busboy kept circling the table, going “Finish? Finish?” while Esther
and Trudy had exchanges like:

“Honey you don’t look happy with the conch, what’s the problem.”

“I’m fine. It’s fine.
Everything’s fine.”

“Don’t lie. Honey with that face who could lie. Frank am I right? This is a person with a face incapable
of lying. Is it the potatoes or the conch? Is it the conch?”

“There’s nothing wrong Esther darling I swear it.”

“You’re
not happy with the conch.”

“All right. I’ve got a problem with the conch.”

“Did I tell you? Frank did I tell her?”

[Frank
silently probes own ear with pinkie.]

“Was I right? I could tell just by looking you weren’t happy.”

“I’m fine with
the potatoes. It’s the conch.”

“Did I tell you about seasonal fish on ships? What did I tell you?”

“The potatoes are
good.”

Mona is eighteen. Her grandparents have been taking her on a Luxury Cruise every spring since she was five. Mona
always sleeps through both breakfast and lunch and spends all night at the Scorpio Disco and in the Mayfair Casino playing
the slots. She’s 6' 2" if she’s an inch. She’s going to attend Penn State next fall because the agreement was that she’d receive
a 4-Wheel-Drive vehicle if she went someplace where there might be snow. She was unabashed in recounting this college-selection
criterion. She was an incredibly demanding passenger and diner, but her complaints about slight aesthetic and gustatory imperfections
at table lacked Trudy and Esther’s discernment and integrity and came off as simply churlish. Mona was also kind of strange-looking:
a body like Brigitte Nielsen or some centerfold on steroids, and above it, framed in resplendent and frizzless blond hair,
the tiny delicate pale unhappy face of a kind of corrupt doll. Her grandparents, who retired every night right after supper,
always made a small ceremony after dessert of handing Mona $100 to “go have some fun” with. This $100 bill was always in one
of those little ceremonial bank envelopes that has B. Franklin’s face staring out of a porthole-like window in the front,
and written on the envelope in red Magic Marker was always “We Love You, Honey.” Mona never once said thank you for the money.
She also rolled her eyes at just about everything her grandparents said, a habit that quickly drove me up the wall.

I
find I’m not as worried about saying potentially mean stuff about Mona as I am about Trudy and Alice and Esther and Esther’s
mute smiling husband Frank.

Apparently Mona’s special customary little gig on 7NC Luxury Cruises is to lie to the waiter
and maître d’ and say that Thursday is her birthday, so that at the Formal supper on Thursday she gets bunting and a heart-shaped
helium balloon tied to her chair and her own cake and pretty much the whole restaurant staff comes out and forms a circle
around her and sings to her. Her real birthday, she informs me on Monday, is 29 July, and when I observe that 29 July is also
the birthday of Benito Mussolini, Mona’s grandmother shoots me kind of a death-look, though Mona herself is excited at the
coincidence, apparently confusing the names
Mussolini
and
Maserati
. Because it just so happens that Thursday 16 March really
is
the birthday of Trudy’s daughter Alice, and because Mona declines to forfeit her fake birthday claim and instead counterclaims
that her and Alice’s sharing bunting and natal attentions at 3/16’s Formal supper promises to be “radical,” Alice has decided
that she wishes Mona all kinds of ill, and by Tuesday 14 March Alice and I have established a kind of anti-Mona alliance,
and we amuse each other across Table 64 by making subtly disguised little strangling and stabbing motions whenever Mona says
anything, a set of disguised motions Alice told me she learned at various excruciating public suppers in Miami with her Serious
Boyfriend Patrick, who apparently hates almost everyone he eats with.

³³
(Which, again, w/ a Megaship like this is subtle—even at its worst, the rolling never made chandeliers tinkle or anything
fall off surfaces, though it did keep a slightly unplumb drawer in Cabin 1009’s complex Wondercloset rattling madly in its
track even after several insertions of Kleenex at strategic points.)

³⁴
This on-the-edge moment’s exquisiteness is something like the couple seconds between knowing you’re going to sneeze and actually
sneezing, some kind of marvelous distended moment of transferring control to large automatic forces. (The sneeze-analogy thing
might sound freaky, but it’s true, and Trudy’s said she’ll back me up.)

³⁵
Conroy took the same Luxury Cruise as I, the Seven-Night Western Caribbean on the good old
Nadir
, in May ’94. He and his family cruised for free. I know details like this because Conroy talked to me on the phone, and answered
nosy questions, and was frank and forthcoming and in general just totally decent-seeming about the whole thing.

³⁶
E.g. after reading Conroy’s essay on board, whenever I’d look up at the sky it wouldn’t be the sky I was seeing, it was the
vast lapis lazuli dome of the sky
.

³⁷
Pier 21 having seasoned me as a recipient of explanatory/justificatory narratives, I was able to make some serious journalistic
phone inquiries about how Professor Conroy’s essaymercial came to be, yielding two separate narratives:

(1) From Celebrity
Cruises’s PR liaison Ms. Wiessen (after a two-day silence that Tve come to understand as the PR-equivalent of covering the
microphone with your hand and leaning over to confer w/ counsel): “Celebrity saw an article he wrote in
Travel and Leisure
magazine, and they were really impressed with how he could create these mental postcards, so they went to ask him to write
about his Cruise experience for people who’d never been on a Cruise before, and they did pay him to write the article, and
they really took a gamble, really, because he’d never been on a Cruise before, and they had to pay him whether he liked it
or not, and whether they liked the article or not, but… [dry little chuckle] obviously they liked the article, and he did
a good job, so that’s the Mr. Conroy story, and those are his perspectives on his experience.”