“I wonder if you were a son of a bitch in your day,” Marjorie said. “I rather think so.”
“In my day? I’m one of the congenital ones.”
“No, you aren’t.”
“Don’t be fooled by my company manners, Marjorie. Of course it’s not my ‘fault,’ as we used to say in Psychology 1. I had rather bad nerves to start with, and they’re much the worse for wear. However, what with happiness pills, and the general calming effect of a ship, and your balmy influence, I think I’ve been pretty nice so far. With luck I may keep it up till we leave the ship, and then you’ll always remember me pleasantly. That’s something to work for.”
“Why?”
She was peering at his face, but the twilight was so dim that she could scarcely make out the features. He said, “Why, I’d enjoy believing there’s someone who thinks well of me. That’s all.” At that moment a long string of yellow lights came on overhead and broke the gloom. They were alone on the chilly glassed-in deck, except for one white-headed lady asleep far down the line of vacant deck chairs. Eden’s profile looked peculiarly familiar to Marjorie, as though she had known him in the Bronx in her childhood.
She said, after hesitating over the words for several seconds, “Mike, you’re Jewish, aren’t you?”
His head turned slowly, and the dark stony look of his face scared her. Then, as though at the flick of a switch, light and warmth flowed into his expression. “When did you decide that?”
“I don’t know. Maybe during the ping-pong game. I’ve felt it, rather than decided it, for several days.”
“Well, I don’t mind your thinking so. Just don’t go around saying so, please. It could prove a damned nuisance for me.”
“I won’t. Are you really in the chemical business?”
“Marjorie, shipboard acquaintances always shade the truth about themselves a bit, for one reason or another. I haven’t shaded it to any unusual extent. And now let’s get a long running start of martinis on the evening, shall we?” He threw aside his blanket and abruptly got out of the deck chair, extending his hand to her.
He played cards that evening, while Marjorie watched the movie. She then danced with a sheepish boy of twenty, travelling with his mother, who had been mooning at her all during the voyage but had never before worked up the courage to approach her. It occurred to her that at this boy’s age George Drobes had been a towering adult to her. Twenty, in a man, now was clumsy adolescence.
Eden gathered her up at midnight, and they went to the Verandah Grill. He was in remarkably high spirits; they danced, and then walked the decks, talking, until three. He woke her the next morning at eight by telephoning her cabin. “It’s our last day together. Don’t you want to make it full and beautiful? Get your bones out of the hay.”
“Dear me,” she yawned, noting that the weather was lovely again and that the ship was riding very steadily, “don’t tell me you’re going to get all romantic and dashing now that we’re practically in Europe. You should have fallen for me sooner. You bore me. I’m going back to sleep.”
“Get out of that bed.”
“Nothing doing. Coffee in bed on a ship is the most wonderful thing in the whole world. See you in about an hour. You’re a beast not to let me sleep, just because you’re an insomniac.”
She hung up, rang for the steward, and went to wash and comb her hair, carolling Falling in Love with Love. As she opened the door of her bathroom to come out, she heard Eden’s voice say, “There’s a man in the room.” She happened to be wearing her most fetching negligee, rust-colored silk and chiffon, passably modest. After a swift glance in the mirror and a pause to catch her breath she sailed out, brushing her hair and saying indignantly, “You’re too chummy by half, do you know? Get out of here before I call the steward.”
There was a coffee service for two on the bureau, with fruit, rolls, and an elaborate array of delicious-looking coffee cakes. He was in an armchair in the sunlight, calmly drinking coffee and munching on a blueberry muffin. His eyes looked tired. He wore a suit she hadn’t seen before, a beautifully cut navy-blue pin-stripe, and there was a new book in his lap. He was very much the diplomat again, she thought, or else she was actually falling for him and seeing him in a golden haze. There was a quality in his scarred ugly face that drew her strongly. The word she thought of to describe it—it seemed a stupid word—was goodness.
“Do you really want to throw me out? It’ll make a hell of a scandal,” he said. “It’ll take two stewards, and I’ll go kicking and yelling. This coffee is fine, much better than what we get in the dining room. Have some.”
She growled, “Well, I suppose anything goes on a ship. I’ve never had breakfast with a man before while I’m in my nightgown. There’s always a first time.” She got into her bed. “You’ll have to serve me, though. Where did this stuff come from? All I ever order is coffee.”
“The steward’s an understanding soul. He’s my steward, too. Here.” He brought her coffee and a cake.
They ate in silence, and she found herself wishing that this moment would prolong itself for a week or so. After wrestling with a cautionary impulse, she told him this.
He nodded. “I needn’t tell you I feel the same way. It’s not merely that you’re so pretty—although that helps, of course. You make me feel comfortable, somehow. You’re worth several bottles of happiness pills.”
“Strange that you should say comfortable,” she said. “It’s the word that’s kept occurring to me. And yet I don’t know anybody who’s ever made me more uncomfortable than you have, every now and then.”
The lines of concentration appeared in his face. “Well, to tell you the truth, I barged in here to have a talk with you that’s overdue. But the hell with it. I couldn’t be more out of the mood. Some other time. Let me read you something by Thurber I came across last night, it’s side-splitting.”
He read very well, and the piece was excruciatingly funny. They both laughed themselves breathless. She said, “Lord, it’s a wonderful way to start the day, isn’t it, laughing like that? Beats a cold shower. Let’s go out on deck. I’ll dress. See you in a few minutes.”
“Right.” He got out of his chair as she jumped off the bed; they brushed each other in passing and the contact felt pleasant. “What on earth’s happening to you, kid?” she said to the mirror image that laughed and sparkled at her.
That whole day, their last day on the Queen Mary, was edged with gold. The sea was deep blue, the sunlight made sharp shadows on the decks, a breeze blew from the southwest smelling like flowers, and land birds cried and darted around the ship. The long broad wake of the Queen Mary stretched backward to the horizon, a trail of slick blue on the rough blue of the waves, like a visible ribbon of passing time. Dolphins rolled glittering by the ship all day. Everything they did was amusing and pleasant—deck tennis, talking with the captain (the weather-beaten god in gold and blue came down from the bridge and chatted with them on the sun deck for ten minutes, speaking as beautifully as George Arliss, and laughing heartily at Mike’s jokes), lunching picnic-style on the boat deck in the sunshine, swimming in the ship’s magnificently tiled indoor pool, listening to Mozart quartets in the salon at tea-time—the day seemed to go on and on, bright and clear and slow. In the cocktail hour, the bar being crowded, they ended at a table with Jackie May and his wife. The comedian, stimulated by Marjorie’s pretty face, made an enormous number of jokes, really funny ones, and she and Mike were almost helpless with laughter for half an hour. In fact everybody appeared agreeable that day to Marjorie; she even smiled at Hilda once and received a surprised, pleasant smile in return. When the sun set at last in a holocaust of scarlet clouds, spilling red gold on the purpling sea from horizon to horizon, Marjorie, standing at the rail beside Eden, felt close to tears—not because the day was over, but because the last moments were as perfect as the rest. She looked around at the vast ship, the great red and black funnels, the line of lifeboats falling into purple shadow, and it was as though her eyes we
re heavily printing the scene on her brain. She said to Eden, after they had been quiet for perhaps a quarter of an hour, and the red in the sky was almost all dulled to violet, “Why isn’t it always like this? For everyone?”
He put his arm around her shoulders. “It’s a nice sunset, but don’t get carried away. The whole world can’t go riding around on the Queen Mary.”
After a while she said, “Maybe this is just a shipboard acquaintance, but I think you’ll miss me a bit when it’s over. It can’t be so wholly one-sided.”
He said, “Marjorie, you have no idea how different, how incongruous, how unattractive shipboard friends look, once you’re back on the land. It’s unbelievable. Their clothes don’t seem to fit. They look fatter, and their manners are phony and pretentious. You don’t like the way they laugh. They’re Republicans if you’re a Democrat, and vice versa. Maybe you knew it on board ship, but it didn’t matter. Back on land it does. They like the wrong movies. They insist on taking you to a wonderful restaurant, and the food turns out lousy, and the waiter is rude, and the wine is vinegary, and the bread is stale. You can’t for the life of you think of anything to talk about, and the whole evening couldn’t be longer or more awful, and that’s the end.”
Marjorie said, laughing ruefully, “Always, always? It seems unlikely.”
“Invariably. It’s a fact of nature.”
“Well then,” Marjorie said, “let me tell you, in case that ever happens, that you were a very nice illusion on the Queen Mary.”
“I should be saying the pretty things to you,” Eden said, “in a last all-out effort to make you.”
“Don’t bother,” Marjorie said. “Though Lord knows you look like a wolf to me, and have from the first moment—a gray wolf, the worst kind. If you’ve been giving me a line, I hope you’ve kept notes. You can ruin girls for the next twenty years with it. Isn’t it getting chilly?”
“I’ll miss you all right,” Eden said. “We’re never going to meet again, so there’s no harm in telling you that. I wouldn’t see you on land for a million dollars. I don’t know exactly what it is about you—you’re not like Anitra, really. She’s a scientist. You’re a—”
“A nobody,” Marjorie said.
Eden smiled, and took his hand from her shoulders. “You’re right. It’s damned chilly. All good things come to an end, especially sunsets. Time for dinner.”
There was a festive gold-lettered menu for the captain’s dinner, and the tables were full of fresh flowers. Eden ordered a vegetable salad, though the steward tried to tempt him with something more substantial. He was a short affable Cockney, and he had taken to treating Marjorie and Mike with knowing fondness, obviously assuming that they were having an affair. “Please use your hinfluence with him, Miss Morgenstern,” he said. “Make him try just a bit of the roast beef, won’t you? Just this once.”
“I’ll have the roast beef,” Marjorie said. “He’s hopeless.” She added when the steward was gone, “I guess that’s another mystery you’ll carry off the ship locked in your bosom. You’re probably a secret follower of Gandhi.”
“Let me be,” Eden said. “We vegetarians will inherit the earth. Between Hitler and Gandhi, how can we lose? We’ve got humanity bracketed.”
She ate a sumptuous dinner while he nibbled at the salad. “You really make me feel carnal,” she said. “I wish you’d break down and eat something gross—an egg or something.” He only laughed.
Later in the bar she said, “Well, I guess you make up for it with liquor.” He was downing a fourth double brandy, showing as usual no effect beside a slightly warmer tone when he talked. “I’ve never seen a guzzler like you. Noel in his best days, I mean in his worst, when he was going through some crisis or other, never equalled you. Bernard Shaw doesn’t drink, does he? I read somewhere in his books that he thinks alcohol is poison. You’re utterly inconsistent.”
“Sure I am,” Eden said. “Who says you have to be consistent? About the nicest thing God ever did was invent alcohol. He’s proud of it, too. The Bible’s full of kind remarks about booze.”
She drank quite a bit, and she didn’t remember much about the dancing except that it was heavenly. Around one o’clock in the morning they were on the boat deck, under a high blue-white moon which rocked slowly from one side of the colossal funnels to the other. The flower scent of the cold breeze had become stronger. There were a number of shadowy couples frankly necking here and there.
“Will you look at all the smoochers?” Marjorie said. “We’re a pair of old fuddyduds.”
“I don’t know. I think there’s something hugely comical about all these double shadows,” Eden said. “Blob after blob after blob. Each double blob quite sure that all this squirming in the dark is a clever night’s work, that they’re doing something they really want to do. When they’re all being shoved by body chemicals through a mindless mechanical process, like so many pairs of stuck-together frogs. Don’t you agree it’s funny?”
“Not at all,” Marjorie said. “In fact, at the moment you sound a little like a sophomore at a dance without a date.”
Eden burst into such a roar of laughter that several of the double shadows near them divided and straightened up. “If I were ten years younger and in any kind of mental shape,” he said, “I would give Noel Airman a run for his money. Let’s stay up till dawn and get all red-eyed and pallid and stewed, shall we?”
“Sure,” Marjorie said. “Aren’t the bars all closed?”
“Step this way.”
Hilda, the blonde, and Thaler were coming up the stairway to the boat deck as they came down. Eden stepped aside to let the two Germans pass in silence. It was an awkward moment. At the door of his cabin Eden hesitated, reaching in his pocket for the key, and looked thoughtful. “I have a sudden positive memory that I didn’t lock this door.” He turned the knob and the door opened. His glance at her was sharp and worried. “I always have had a suicidal absent-mindedness. No doubt all the crown jewels are missing. Well, come in.”
He looked around the room restlessly, but it was all in order: the bed turned down, a single pink reading lamp lit at his bedside. “How do you like brandy and tap water?”
“My favorite drink.”
He snapped on his short-wave portable radio. After a moment of humming the loudspeaker came to life with the shouting of a harsh strong hysterical voice in German. Mike turned the sound down. The voice, barking and screaming, was interrupted by frightening crowd roars. Marjorie said, “What’s that?”
“What do you think?”
“Hitler?”
“Hitler.”
“Two o’clock in the morning?”
“It’s a record.”
Marjorie regarded the radio with wide eyes, listening to the voice. She couldn’t quite believe she was hearing it. “Turn it off.”
“Gladly.”
He kept looking around the room as he mixed the drinks. He went to the shelf of books over the desk and stared at them; opened the desk drawers one by one, and leafed through papers and folders. The lines of his face became sharp and deep. “Marjorie, I’m pretty tired, after all. Let’s call it a night, shall we?”
“Throwing me out? Can’t I finish my drink?”
“Take it with you. Take the bottle.”
“Catch me walking through the ship with a bottle of brandy! No, thanks—”
He slammed a drawer shut so hard that books piled on the desk tumbled to the deck, spilling little papers from among their leaves. The papers rolled on the deck, curling like shavings. A stream of bitter frigid obscenity burst from his lips as he scooped at books and papers with both hands, dropping to his knees. Marjorie put down her drink and stood, shocked and terrified, staring at him. In a few moments he sat in the chair again, the books and papers helter-skelter in his lap, and returned her stare. His face had a greenish cast, his eyes were white-rimmed, his scar looked like a fresh purple gash. She came to him hesitantly and touched his face. “Mike, what’s the matter?”
&n
bsp; He stood and, one after another, hurled the books across the room at the door. He flung himself on the bed face down, burying his face in the pillow. Marjorie realized in amazement that she was hearing stifled screams. He kicked his legs. His body writhed. She had to suppress a wild impulse to laugh; the sight was as ridiculous as it was dreadful. She thought of fleeing from the room but she couldn’t. Her hair prickled, her mouth went dry, she shuddered violently, but she stood where she was. “Mike! Mike!” He did not answer; but in a minute or so he became still. He rolled over and sat up then, his eyes glassy. He staggered to the bathroom, and she saw him take a hypodermic needle from a black case before he convulsively kicked shut the door.
She threw the brandy and water into an empty pitcher, poured straight brandy, and gulped it. Sinking into an armchair, she lit a cigarette and waited, her body racked by an occasional shiver.
It seemed a long time before he came out, though the cigarette was only half smoked. He looked better, but still fearfully pale. He was in his shirtsleeves, and he had taken off the black tie and stiff collar, so that he looked half undressed. He shook his head at her and smiled wretchedly. From the shelf of medicines near the bed he took down a bottle of dark brown capsules. He peered at her face for several seconds, holding the bottle in a wavering hand. “Well, I was meaning to talk to you anyway.” He took two capsules; slipped into a maroon dressing gown that lay on the bed, lit a cigar, poured brandy for himself, and settled in a chair opposite her. In that small space of time he recovered astoundingly. Color returned to his face; the hand that held the cigar was steady; and the fingers of the other hand lay relaxed on the arm of the chair, not drumming, and not trembling in the least. He said, “I’ve probably shocked you out of a year’s growth,” and his tone was pleasant and even.