The Crossing
Seven nights at sea, where a man who arranges everything has nothing left to arrange, and reaches for a phone that is no longer in his pocket.
Brooklyn
The pier at Red Hook was cold with the first true cold of November, and the ship stood against it the way a building stands against a street, black and riveted and taller than anything has a right to be at the edge of the water. She stood beside me in a navy traveling suit with the wind off the harbor moving one loose strand of the pale gold hair, and I stood the way I always stand at the start of a thing, already holding the far end of it in my hand. The suite was confirmed months out. The car in Southampton was booked and the driver named. The flat in London had been opened and aired. Two envelopes rode in my breast pocket for the men who would need them at the two ends of the passage. I did not yet understand that a departure like this one removes something a man does not know he leans on, and that I would learn what it was four days later, in the middle of the ocean, when I reached for it and found my hand closing on nothing.
The car had come down through Lower Manhattan in the afternoon and across to the Brooklyn Cruise Terminal, which sits on a working pier with the cranes north of it and the warehouses south, the towers of the city we were leaving standing across the water like a thing already behind glass. I had arranged the crossing the way I arrange everything. It is how I have kept her safe, and it is how I have kept myself, and I have never examined which of those came first.
Her Highness wore the navy suit cut for the Atlantic and not for shore, her hair down and pinned back from her face, gloves she had not yet taken off. Her hair caught what light came off the water and gave back the pale gold it always gives back. A porter took the luggage. I gave the driver the second envelope. He understood it was not a fare.
We walked into the terminal through the door reserved for Grills passengers, into warm air and the smell of new carpet and the old smell of marine grease from the far door where the gangway began. A steward at the Grills lounge had the manifest an hour early and did not ask for the name on it. He bowed and took us through. The gangway itself was a long enclosed corridor that went out across the dock and joined the hull somewhere above us, and the moment one stepped onto it one was no longer in New York and not yet aboard, but in the in-between. The hull was a wall on our left, black and riveted, the plating thicker than a cruise ship carries because the QM2 is not a cruise ship. She is the last transatlantic liner in service, built to take the North Atlantic in November on its own terms.
The maitre d’ of the Grills met us at the threshold, shook my hand, spoke her title without being told it, and led us up. The suite was a long sitting room in cream and pale blue, the windows running its width and giving onto a private deck. Bedroom, dining room, a pantry, a writing desk with the ship’s stationery already laid out. Flowers in three low arrangements. Krug Grande Cuvee in an ice bucket, two glasses, a card from the captain. The daily program lay folded beside the flowers.
I did what I do in a new room. I found the telephone. I read the card that gave the bell code for the butler. I noted where the writing desk stood and where the light fell on it and where, on the deck, I would take a call if a call came. This is not a decision I make. It is a survey the body runs before I have told it to, the way another man’s eyes go to the exits. I have run it in the finest rooms in the world. I did not know I was running it now until Her Highness spoke.
“You are counting the doors,” she said. She had not taken off her coat. She said it without accusation, the way she says the true thing, and went out onto the private deck.
I followed. The deck ran along the stern and gave a view down to the working dock and across the harbor to the Statue of Liberty in the middle distance, small from this height, and beyond her the long gray of Staten Island. The wind off the bay was the November wind. She put her gloved hands on the rail.
“It is strange to leave this way,” she said. “No runway. No gate.”
“No.”
“Seven nights.”
“Seven.” I said it the way I say a figure I have already checked. I had the number the way I have every number, as a thing arranged. What I did not have, what I would not have for four more days, was any idea of what a number means when there is nothing inside it to arrange.
The butler arrived, gave his name and the bell code and the wine he would have ready, and withdrew with the manner of a man who had crossed the ocean several hundred times and had concluded long ago that the courtesy belonged to the ship and not to any passenger in particular. I poured two glasses of the Krug. At five o’clock, with no announcement, the horn sounded twice, so low one felt it in the chest before the ear, and the ship began to move, not as a boat moves but as a building begins to move against a current it does not yet need to argue with.
We passed the Statue of Liberty on the starboard side, lit by the late sun, and then the Verrazzano came at us, long and low, and from the deck one watched the funnel clear the span with the involuntary attention one gives any large thing passing under any larger thing. The bridge slid over. And then the Atlantic opened ahead, gray-green and very wide, with no land on the horizon except a thin line of Long Island going away on the port quarter. By sundown the line was gone. I stood at the rail longer than she did, and when I came in I checked, out of habit, that my telephone had found no signal, and told myself it did not matter, and did not yet know that I had already begun to reach.
The Dressing Gong
At six o’clock a steward walked the Grills corridors ringing a small bell, the same bell rung on Cunard ships since before the war. It was not loud. It did not need to be. The passengers it was meant for knew what it meant.
I bathed and dressed slowly, the way one dresses when there is no train to catch and no car in the street. The butler had laid out the evening clothes and pressed the trousers in the afternoon. The dinner jacket was midnight, not black, because my tailor cuts midnight for evening; it reads as black under candlelight and as something deeper under a ship’s cold light, and he has been right about it longer than I have kept count. I wore the collar open under it, the way I wear it, and the mother-of-pearl studs down the shirt, and plain rounds at the cuff, the kind that do what a cufflink does on a ship, which is to disappear.
But dressing was the trouble, and I did not see it as trouble yet. Dressing is arranging. It gave my hands something to arrange. When I had finished, and there was nothing left to arrange, I stood at the window with the black Atlantic going past and felt, for one thin moment, the specific discomfort of a man holding a full glass and no reason to raise it. I put it down to the strangeness of the first night out. I was wrong about that, too.
Her Highness came out of the dressing room in black. The dress was long, sleeveless, the back cut to the small bones at the base of her spine and no further, the front a long unbroken column with a single line at the collarbone. Her hair was down, brushed once, no clip. Small earrings. She wore the thin gold watch on her left wrist that does not belong with evening clothes and that she keeps on anyway, the private thing she does not take off. She had put on no necklace. The throat was bare. She had settled, on the first night, on a register for all seven and would not escalate it, because there was nowhere to escalate to. That is a discipline. I recognized it, because it is mine. I did not yet see that hers came from strength and mine came from fear.
“Ready?” she said.
“I am.”
The Queens Grill sits at the stern of Deck 7, a single-deck room lit, in any meaningful sense, by the table linens and the silver. The maitre d’ had our names before we reached him. He led us to a table on the starboard side, the linen heavy, a low lamp with the Cunard crest stamped in brass on the base. The sommelier came. The waiter came. A Grills dinner runs at the pace the ship has chosen and not the pace the diner sets, and one sits down and understands that the next two hours have been arranged for, and allows them to be.
That was the trap of it, and I walked into it grateful. The two hours had been arranged for, by someone else, and I did not have to build them. I began, without deciding to, to build them anyway. I asked the sommelier a second question he did not need. I noted the table two over and the couple at it and the exits behind them. She had a clear consomme, then the Dover sole off the bone. I had oysters from a bed I know on the Long Island shore, the last American oysters before we would not see another for a week, and then the beef Wellington, the version one remembers, the pastry browned at the seam and the meat pink at the center. She tasted the beef from the fork I passed her and closed her eyes once and opened them. The Burgundy was one I had asked the sommelier about by note in the afternoon. He had remembered.
After dinner we walked through to the Queens Room, the great double-height ballroom with a parquet floor laid in a long curve and a band shell at one end. The orchestra played the standards as they are meant to be played, slowly, brushes on the snare, the bandleader a man in his sixties who no longer needed the music. We did not dance. We took two chairs at the edge of the floor. She watched the dancers. I watched her, and under the watching I was aware, the way one is aware of a low sound behind a wall, of a thing in me with nothing to do.
We took the lift up. The butler had turned down the bed. The card on the table said the clocks would not go forward tonight; the change would begin on the second night out. She unpinned her hair at the dressing table without looking up. I undid the collar in the mirror, and then, because my hands wanted an errand, drafted in my head a message I could not send to a man in another time zone about a thing that did not need me, and caught myself, and stopped.