The O. Henry Prize Stories 2011 (13 page)

Also, Maud spots her first whale, another omen. She spots two.

In the morning, early, the ship’s siren sounds a fire drill. Maud and Peter quickly put on waterproof pants, boots, sweaters, parkas, hats, gloves—in the event of an emergency, they have been told to wear their warmest clothes. They strap on the life jackets that are hanging from a hook on the back of their cabin door and follow their fellow passengers up the stairs. The first officer directs them
to the ship’s saloon; they are at Station 2, he tells them. On deck, Maud can see the lifeboats being lowered smoothly and efficiently and not, Maud can’t help but think, how it must have been on board the
Andrea Doria
—a woman, who survived the ship’s collision, once told Maud how undisciplined and negligent the Italian crew was. The first officer is French—the captain and most of the other officers are Norwegian—and he is darkly handsome. As he explains the drill, he looks steadily and impassively above the passengers’ heads as if, Maud thinks, the passengers are cattle; in vain, she tries to catch his eye. When one of the passengers tries to interrupt with a joke, the first officer rebukes him with a sharp shake of the head and continues speaking.

When the drill is over and still wearing his life jacket, Peter leaves the saloon, saying he is going up on deck to breathe some fresh air, and Maud goes back down to the cabin.

Of the eighty or so passengers on board the
Caledonia Star
, the majority are couples; a few single women travel together; one woman is in a wheelchair. The average age, Maud guesses, is mid to late sixties and, like them—Peter was a lawyer and Maud a speech therapist (she still works three days a week at a private school)—most are retired professionals. And although Maud and Peter learned about the cruise from their college alumni magazine, none of the passengers—some of whom they assume must have attended the same college—look familiar to them. “Maybe they all took correspondence courses,” Peter says. Since his retirement, Peter has been restless and morose. “No one,” he complains to Maud, “answers my phone calls anymore.” The trip to Antarctica was Maud’s idea.

When Maud steps out on deck to look for Peter, she does not see him right away. The ship rolls from side to side—they have started to cross the Drake Passage—and already they have lost sight of land. When Maud finally finds Peter, her relief is so intense she nearly shouts as she hurries over to him. Standing at
the ship’s rail, looking down at the water, Peter does not appear to notice Maud. Finally, without moving his head, he says in a British-inflected, slightly nasal voice, “Did you know that the Drake Passage is a major component of the coupled ocean-atmosphere climate system and that it connects all the other major oceans and that it influences the water-mass characteristics of the deep water over a large portion of the world?”

“Of course, darling,” Maud answers in the same sort of voice and takes Peter’s arm. “Everyone knows that.”

Peter has an almost photographic memory and is, Maud likes to say, the smartest man she has ever met. Peter claims that he would have preferred being a mathematician to being a lawyer. He is an attractive man, tall and athletic looking, although he walks with a slight limp—he broke his leg as a child and the leg did not set properly—which gives him a certain vulnerability and adds to his appeal (secretly, Maud accuses him of exaggerating the limp to elicit sympathy). And he still has a full head of hair, notwithstanding that it has turned gray, which he wears surprisingly long. Maud, too, is good-looking: slim, tall, and blonde (the blonde is no longer natural but such a constant that Maud would be hard put to say what her natural color is); her blue eyes, she claims, are still her best feature. Together, they make a handsome couple; they have been married for over forty years.

Maud knows Peter so well that she also knows that when he adopts this bantering tone with her, he is either hiding something or he is feeling depressed. Or both. Instinctively, she tightens her grip on his arm.

“Let’s go in,” she says to him in her normal voice. “I’m cold.”

In their cabin, the books, the clock, the bottle of sleeping pills, everything that had been neatly stacked on the nightstand is, on account of the ship’s motion, lying pell-mell on the floor.

Instead of a double bed, their cabin has two narrow bunks. The bunks are made up in an unusual way, a Norwegian way, Maud
guesses—the sheet wrapped around the blanket as if it were a parcel and tucked in. In her bed, Maud feels as if she were lying inside a cocoon; also, she does not dislike sleeping alone for a change. As if Peter could read her mind—he has an uncanny ability to do this sometimes—he pats the side of his bunk and says, “Come here for a minute, Maud.” Maud hesitates, then decides not to answer. She does not feel like making love—too much trouble and often, recently, sex does not work out, which makes her anxious and Peter anxious and angry both. Over their heads, on the wall, the public-address speaker crackles and a voice says: “Long before the poet Samuel Coleridge penned his ‘Rime of the Ancient Mariner,’ the albatross was a creature of reverence and superstition. The sailors believed that when their captain died, his soul took the form of an albatross. Of course I cannot speak for our excellent Captain Halvorsen, but I, for one, would not mind being reincarnated as an albatross.” In the bed next to Maud, Peter snorts and says again, “Maudie, come over here.” Maud pretends not to hear him. “By the way, my name is Michael,” the voice continues, “and in case you have not yet met me, I am your naturalist on board.” Peter says something that Maud does not quite catch although she can guess at the meaning. “The albatross has the largest wingspan—the record, I believe, is thirteen feet, three inches—and the oldest known albatross is seventy years old. When he is ten, the albatross goes back to where he was born to mate—” Maud tenses for a comment from Peter but this time he makes none. The public-address speaker crackles with static, “… feeds at night … eats luminous squid, fish, and krill.” Maud looks over at Peter’s bunk and sees that Peter’s eyes are closed. Relieved, she reaches up to turn down the volume on the speaker as Michael says, “The albatross will fly for miles without moving its wings, or setting foot on land. Soaring and gliding over the water, the albatross’s zigzag flight is determined by the wind.”

…

The captain’s cocktail party is held in the saloon—or, as Maud refers to it, Emergency Station 2. She is dressed in her best slacks and a red cashmere sweater, and Peter wears his blue blazer and a tie. The saloon is packed tight with passengers who are all talking at once. Right away, Maud orders a vodka martini at the bar while Peter has a beer.

“Take it easy,” Peter says, handing her the martini.

The ship’s motion is more pronounced. Maud hangs on to the edge of the bar with one hand and holds her martini glass in the other. Sometimes Maud drinks too much. She blames her age and the fact that she is thin and cannot hold her liquor the way she used to—not the actual amount she drinks. Standing in the center of the room, Captain Halvorsen is a tall man with thinning red hair; he smiles politely as he talks to the passengers. Maud guesses that he must dread this evening and the enforced sociability. Looking around the room, she does not see the darkly handsome first officer. A woman holding a golf club—which, at first, Maud thought was a cane—walks over to them and, standing next to Peter at the bar, orders a glass of white wine.

“If I am not mistaken, that’s a five-iron you have in your hand,” Peter says to her in his nasal voice.

“Yes, it is,” the woman answers. She is dark and trim and does not smile.

“Do you always travel with a golf club?” Peter, when he wants, can be charming and act completely entranced by what the other person is saying. If that person happens to be a woman, Maud tends to resent it even though she knows that Peter’s attention may not be entirely genuine. Peter continues, “By the way, my name is Peter and this is my wife, Maud.”

“I’m Barbara,” the woman says. “And, yes, I always travel with my golf club.”

“As protection?” Maud manages to ask.

“No,” Barbara frowns. “My goal is to drive a golf ball in every country of the world.”

“Oh.”

“And have you?” Peter asks. He does a little imitation golf swing, holding his bottle of beer in both hands. When, in the past, Maud has accused Peter of toying with people, Peter has accused Maud of misreading him.

“As a matter of fact, I have. Or nearly. Except for Antarctica, which of course is not a country but a continent, and a few African nations which are too dangerous. I began twenty years ago—”

Why?
Maud is tempted to ask.

“After my husband died,” Barbara says as if to answer Maud.

“Can you get me another martini?” Maud asks Peter.

That night, Maud cannot sleep. Every time she closes her eyes, she feels dizzy and nauseated and she has to open her eyes again; she tries sitting up in bed. To make matters worse, the
Caledonia Star
creaks and shudders as all night it pitches and lurches through a heavy sea. Once, after a particularly violent lurch, Maud calls out to Peter, but either he is asleep and does not hear her or, perverse, he does not answer her. To herself, Maud vows that she will never have another drink.

In the morning, at seven according to the clock that is on the floor—Maud has finally managed to sleep for a few hours—Maud and Peter are awoken by the now-familiar voice on the public-address speaker.

“Good morning, folks! It’s Michael! I hope you folks were not still sleeping! For those of you who are on the starboard side of the ship—that means the right side for the landlubbers—if you look out your porthole real quick, you’ll see a couple of minke whales.”

When Maud looks outside, the sea is calm and it is raining.

“Do you see them?” Peter asks from his bed.

“No,” Maud says. “I don’t see any minke whales.”

“Michael is lying to us,” Peter says, rolling over on to his other
side. “Be a good girl and give me a back rub. This mattress is for the birds.”

In the rubber Zodiac, Maud starts to feel better. The cold air clears her head and she is looking forward to walking on land. Behind her, the
Caledonia Star
rests solidly at anchor as they make their way across to Livingston Island. The passengers in the boat are all wearing orange life jackets as well as identical red parkas—when Maud inquired about the parkas, she was told that red was easy to see and made it easier for the crew to tell whether any passenger was left behind on shore. And had a passenger ever been left behind? Maud continued. Yes, once. A woman had tried to hide. Hide? Why? Maud had asked again, but she got no reply.

Holding her golf club between her legs, Barbara sits across from them in the Zodiac. Instead of a cap, she wears a visor that has
GOLFERS MAKE BETTER LOVERS
printed on it. Michael, the naturalist, is young, blond, and bearded, and he drives the Zodiac with smooth expertise. Once he lands the boat, he gives each passenger a hand, cautioning them: “Careful where you walk, the ground may be slippery. And steer clear of those seals,” he also says, pointing. “Especially the big fur seal, he’s not friendly.”

Looking like giant rubber erasers, about a dozen seals are lying close together along the shore; their beige and gray hides are mottled and scarred. Except for one seal who raises his head to look at them as they walk past—the fur seal no doubt—none of the seals moves. Maud gives them a wide berth and makes no eye contact; Peter, on the other hand, deliberately walks up closer to the seals and takes several photos of them.

A few yards inland, Maud sees Barbara lean over to tee up a golf ball. She watches as Barbara takes up her stance and takes a few practice swings. Several of the other passengers are watching her as well. One man calls out, “Make it a hole-in-one, Barbara!” The golf ball sails straight toward the brown cliffs that rise from the
shore; a few people applaud. Barbara tees up and hits another golf ball, then another. Each time, the sound is a sharp crack, like ice breaking.

Michael is right—it is slippery. Wet shale and bits of snow litter the ground; also there are hundreds—no, perhaps thousands—of penguins on Livingston Island. Maud has to watch where she steps. It would not do, she thinks, to break a leg in Antarctica or to crush a penguin. Like the seals, the penguins appear oblivious to people. They are small and everywhere underfoot and Maud feels as if she is walking among dwarves.

When Peter catches up to her, he says, “You think one of these penguins is going to try to brood on a golf ball?”

“Incubate, you mean,” Maud says. “You brood on a chick.”

“Whatever,” Peter answers, turning away from her. He does not like being corrected, and although Maud should know better by now, old habits die hard.

In the Zodiac, on the way back to the
Caledonia Star
, the wind has picked up and the sea is rougher. In spite of Michael’s efforts, waves slap at the boat’s sides and cold spray wets the back of the passengers’ red parkas.

“Tomorrow, we will see icebergs,” Captain Halvorsen promises during dinner. Maud and Peter are sitting at his table along with another couple, Philip and Janet. Philip claims to have been in the same college class with Peter and to remember him well (he alludes to an incident involving the misuse of cafeteria trays, but Peter has no recollection of it and shakes his head). Janet, a tall brunette with smooth olive skin and dark full eyebrows, is much younger; she never attended college, she tells Maud, giggling. She took up modeling instead.

“If the ice were to melt,” Captain Halvorsen tells Peter, “the water would rise sixty-six meters.”

“Isn’t a meter like a yard?” Janet asks. “I was never any good at math.”

Sitting next to Maud, Philip, who is in real estate, is describing the booming building industry in Florida, where he lives.

“The grounding line is where the ice mass begins to float,” Maud overhears Captain Halvorsen say. “In Antarctica, icebergs form when ice breaks away from large flat plates called ice shelves.”

“I read that the Ross Ice Shelf is the size of the state of Connecticut,” Peter says.