Princess Charming Read online

  I flipped on the TV set that was mounted on the wall across from my bed. There were two channels, I discovered: CNN and the Princess Charming Channel. CNN, you know about. The Princess Charming Channel, you had to see to believe. Basically, it was a low-budget, twenty-four-hour-a-day infomercial hyping the amenities of the ship. When I happened to tune in that first time, they were broadcasting an interview with Captain Svein Solberg, a sturdy, blond man of Norwegian descent.

  “She is vithout qvestion da most beautiful ship on da seas,” Captain Solberg was saying of the Princess Charming without even a trace of a smile. “She has four main engines, mounted on rubber mountings for very little vibration. She also has six additional engines. Vhen she is at maximum speed at approximately tventy-von knots, she burns about eighty tons of fuel in tventy-four hours. The four main engines vere built in France, while the six auxiliary…”

  I know Scandinavians can be a touch on the unexpressive side, but this guy gave new meaning to the word “deadpan.” His delivery was so wooden, he could have been a ventriloquist’s dummy, filling in for the real Captain Solberg, who was, hopefully, much too busy maneuvering our vessel out of the path of sharks, leaky oil tankers, and flotillas of fleeing Haitians to sit and be videotaped for our in-room diversion.

  “I vill be announcing our position and da veather report tvice a day,” he continued. “Over da public address system. From da Bridge Deck. First, at noon. Den, at nine o’clock in da evening. Passengers are velcome to listen.”

  If you’re coming over the PA system, buddy, we won’t have a choice, I thought.

  And speaking of the PA system, just then, a voice came on advising us that, at four o’clock, we would hear the sound of the ship’s whistle—seven short blasts followed by one long blast—and would then be required to report to our “Muster Stations,” whatever they were.

  I searched the activities sheet, hoping for an explanation.

  “All guests should take the life jacket out of their closet, put it on, and proceed to their assigned station for the compulsory mustering,” it read. I gleaned that this was some sort of safety drill.

  I got up off the bed, found my life jacket, put it on, and modeled it in front of the full-length mirror on the back of the cabin door. It was a high-tech Mae West—the good old orange job but with a fancy inflating device.

  I suddenly remembered the lifeboat sitting outside my porthole and wondered whether any of the Princess Charming’s passengers had ever drowned during the voyage.

  No, I would have read about it, I reminded myself, being the media-obsessed public relations person I was. If a passenger had died of anything but natural causes, I would certainly have read about it in at least one of the six newspapers that were delivered to my apartment door by six o’clock every morning.

  I tried to laugh off my paranoia, just as Jackie would have. “Elaine, get real,” she would surely have said with an impatient but affectionate sigh, rolling her eyes. “Nobody gets killed on one of these things, except maybe at the blackjack table. Ha ha.”

  She and Pat showed up at my cabin in their life jackets just after the whistle sounded over the PA system. We were informed by Kingsley that our Muster Station was the Crown Room on Deck 5, one of nine—count ’em, nine—cocktail lounges on the ship. (I’m telling you: if your idea of a good time is getting and staying drunk, the Princess Charming is for you. They serve alcoholic beverages twenty-four hours a day. Between drinks, you can hang out at one of the ship’s daily AA meetings!)

  The actual mustering took ten minutes. About two hundred of us sat there in the Crown Room as a crew member spoke of what to do in case of an emergency. Nobody paid any attention, just like on airplanes. People were too busy flagging down waiters armed with trays of banana daiquiris.

  “Oh, look. There’s Henry Prichard,” Jackie said, poking me. “The car salesman from Altoona, remember?”

  “Sure, I remember.” Henry was standing by the door of the Crown Room, talking animatedly to three elderly couples, presumably pushing one of Chevrolet’s new, hot-off-the-assembly-line models. He looked as foolish as the rest of us did in our orange life jackets.

  Jackie was in the midst of getting up to invite Henry over to our table-for-four when another man claimed the empty chair.

  “This seat taken or is this my lucky day?”

  I smelled the man before I actually saw him—he was soggy with some ghastly cologne. He was exactly what I had envisioned when Jackie first suggested we take a cruise—a man old enough to be my father with teeth to match. You know what kind of teeth I’m talking about: the kind that make clicking noises; the improbably white, straight kind that sit in a glass at night.

  “So? How ’bout it? Am I joining you lovelies?” he said, even though he had already made himself quite comfortable. His eyes darted from me to Pat to Jackie, as if he were waiting for one of us to act overjoyed to see him. But we were merely wondering why he was the only one in the Crown Room who wasn’t wearing his life jacket.

  “What do I need a life jacket for? I swim like a fish,” he bragged when Jackie posed the question. After getting a whiff of his breath, I had a hunch that he drank like one too. “Anyhow, the orange didn’t click with my outfit.”

  No, but it certainly would have “clicked” with his hair, which was a shade I would call Strom Thurmond Orange and was held in place with enough spray to paralyze a small animal. As for the “outfit,” it consisted of white loafers, white slacks, and a pale blue silk shirt unbuttoned to his navel to expose a thicket of gray hair and a half-dozen gold chains on which hung several religious amulets. He was a cruise ship cliché. I was sure he was oblivious to the image he projected. As I cared deeply how people perceived me and was in a profession in which image was everything, I envied him to a certain extent.

  “Lenny Lubin,” he introduced himself. “Of Lubin’s Lube Jobs.”

  He said he was in the automotive business and told us that if we were ever in Massapequa, Long Island, and needed an oil change, we should stop in.

  “You ladies alone?” he asked suggestively.

  “No, we’re together,” I said matter-of-factly. What is it with men anyway?

  Lenny Lubin snickered, the way my ex-husband used to whenever I’d suggest we rent Thelma and Louise.

  “I meant, no husbands or boyfriends?” said Lenny. “Three lovelies like you?”

  Jackie laughed. “You want to know if any of us is available, is that it, Lenny?”

  He wagged an arthritic finger at her. “You’re the little vixen in the group, huh?” He smiled, showing us his Chiclets.

  “That’s me. The little vixen,” Jackie snorted.

  “What about you, Lenny?” Pat said, dipping her toe in the conversation for the first time. “Are you traveling alone on the cruise?”

  “As alone as a man can be,” he said, hanging his head in a pathetic attempt to elicit our sympathy. “My wife threw me out about two months ago.”

  “She did?” I said, feeling an immediate sisterhood with the estranged Mrs. Lubin.

  “You got it,” said Lenny. “I make a mistake—one tiny mistake—and you know what she does? She tosses me out like so much garbage.”

  “What was the one tiny mistake?” I asked, secure in the knowledge that, when you go on vacation, perfect strangers very often feel compelled to volunteer their whole life stories, particularly the more sordid chapters.

  “You wanna know? You really wanna know?” asked Lenny, looking each one of us in the eye. It was a rhetorical question. We all knew he was going to tell us no matter what we said.

  I glanced at my friends at that moment and sighed. There we were in the Crown Room of the Princess Charming, stuffed into our life jackets, tired, hungry, hot. I didn’t really want to sit and listen to some drunken old blowhard’s sob story and I assumed that Jackie and Pat didn’t either. Personally, I wished Lenny had done us all a favor and chosen to play golf in Palm Springs instead of taking a cruise to the Caribbean.

&n
bsp; “Yes, we’d really like to know about the one tiny mistake that drove your wife to ask you to leave,” said Pat, surprising me. Perhaps her therapy really was emboldening her, since she was not only shedding her shyness but drawing another person out. Unfortunately, what her therapist had neglected to tell her was that some people don’t warrant drawing out.

  “My one tiny mistake was that I slept with my wife’s sister,” Lenny confessed, looking not the least bit penitent.

  “You call that a tiny mistake?” I asked.

  “You should see the sister,” he said. “Not even five feet tall.”

  Lenny laughed so hard he began to wheeze, but when none of us even cracked a smile, he said, “Hey, that was a joke! A bit! A setup! Whattsamatter with you lovelies? You leave your funny bones at home or something?”

  “Or something,” I said.

  “Well, then it’s time to lighten up. How about some drinks, huh?” Lenny snapped his fingers, which were as bejeweled as his neck, wrists, and chest, and when the waiter didn’t drop everything and rush right over, Lenny tried whistling at him. I nearly died.

  Eventually, the waiter made it over to our table, and before we could beg off, Lenny had signed for a round of daiquiris.

  “This is cozy, huh?” he said, downing his drink in one gulp, which left him with a yellowish, thoroughly unappetizing milk mustache. “Now, I told you lovelies my name. How ’bout telling me yours?” he slurred.

  Jackie did the honors. Then Lenny played a little game. He pointed at each one of us and tried to remember which name went with which face, finally getting it right on the fourth or fifth try. He then explained, unsolicited this time, that he and his wife were separated but that it was he who had done the throwing out. “She was getting on my nerves,” was the reason he gave. “Once a nag, always a nag, ya know?”

  He reached up to pat his orange hair, which had hardened to the texture of cotton candy, and as he did, the gold bracelets on his wrist clanged together like wind chimes.

  “She never stopped ranting and raving about money,” he ranted and raved as we tried to look riveted. “I didn’t make enough, not for her. So one day, I says to myself, ‘That’s it.’ I drove over to the neighborhood bar, had a couple of drinks, came home, and told her to pack up and get out if she didn’t like what was in my wallet.”

  A couple of drinks, I thought. It was probably more like a couple of dozen and, from the look of things, poor Lenny hadn’t stopped since.

  “So—how about another round?” he said after glancing at the empty glass in his hand. He failed to notice that we’d barely touched our drinks.

  “Can’t,” said Jackie, getting up from the table. “It’s almost time for this baby to shove off. We want to watch the departure from upstairs on Deck 8.”

  Bless you, Jackie, I said silently, until I realized what was coming next.

  “Why Deck 8?” Lenny asked.

  “Our cabins are on Deck 8,” Jackie and Pat said simultaneously. I would have to have a talk with them, I vowed. They were as good as handing our room keys out to every Tom, Dick, and Horny on the ship.

  “Deck 8, huh? Too bad,” Lenny leered. “I’m on Deck 9, the Commodore Deck. In a suite.” Deck 9 was where the really big, expensive staterooms were located. Either Lenny Lubin’s wife was mistaken about his lack of funds or he wasn’t being completely forthcoming with her—or us.

  Pat and I rose from the table, Pat tucking a Crown Room cocktail napkin into her purse. For the kids.

  “How about later, you lovelies?” Lenny said, his mouth forming a mock pout at the mere thought of being left alone. “After dinner? The four of us could have a couple of nightcaps in the disco, huh? I’m some dancer. I can do a helluva Hustle.”

  I loathed discos, but even I knew that the Hustle was about as in vogue as men who called women “lovelies.”

  “Didn’t you hear what I said?” he asked as we gathered our things and began to waddle away from the table in our life jackets. “I said, you should see me do the Hustle.”

  “We already have,” I said, and we all bid Lenny farewell.

  3

  I felt the ship move.

  I was standing in one of four dressing rooms in the Perky Princess, the women’s boutique Kingsley had told me about, when the Princess Charming pulled away from the pier and began her voyage to the Caribbean.

  I checked my watch. It was five o’clock. We were right on schedule.

  As the ship chugged gently onward, I said a silent goodbye to terra firma and prayed the trip would turn out better than I feared.

  “How are we doing in there?” the saleswoman shouted to me from the other side of the curtain.

  “We’re doing just fine,” I lied. I had just tried on my eleventh dress. It, like the ten before it, did not fit.

  “Let me know if you need another size,” she said and disappeared.

  Another size, I thought as I stared at my reflection in the mirror. I don’t need a dress in another size. I need a body in another size.

  I sighed as I looked at myself. I was almost six feet tall and 118 pounds. Too tall for the petites, too thin for the misses sizes. The dreadful magenta number I had on at that very moment fit me around the bust and shoulders but was so short it barely made it past my crotch.

  I thought back to my adolescence, to the years when I towered over the boys and was, therefore, ostracized by the “in” group and never invited to their makeout parties. I was gangly and awkward and I hated myself, even though my father kept assuring me that tall was beautiful. As I grew older, I came to terms with my body. Sort of. I told myself I was willowy, statuesque, model-ish. Not model-ish like Cindy Crawford or Claudia Schiffer; model-ish like those homely types you see in the more avant-garde fashion magazines and think, How did they ever get to be models? Over time I discovered that, while I wasn’t beautiful, I did have a certain attractiveness; that if I spent enough money and shopped at the right stores I could not only find clothes that would fit me; I could find clothes that would flatter me.

  The Perky Princess, however, was not such a store. Its merchandise was ridiculously flashy—loud colors, shiny fabrics, lots of gowns with spaghetti straps; merchandise for women who change clothes six times a day and parade around cruise ships in an attempt to impress people they’ll never see again.

  But beggars can’t be choosers, as they say. I couldn’t spend the next three days in the skirt and blouse I’d been wearing since six o’clock that morning. No, I had to buy something at the Perky Princess. I ended up with three god-awful dresses that were much too short and made me look like a cross between a hooker and a middle-aged woman who can’t adjust to the fact that she’s no longer a “chick.” The best news was that the boutique had a small sporting goods section and, even more miraculously, a pair of running shoes in my size.

  I bought the sneakers, some shorts, and a couple of Princess Charming T-shirts, fled the store with all my belongings, and headed for the elevator. I pushed the up button. The elevator arrived almost immediately, and when it did, I stepped inside, faced front, and illuminated the button marked Deck 8, all without even noticing that there was someone else in there with me. It wasn’t until the doors of the elevator kept opening and closing owing to some momentary mechanical problem that the person revealed himself.

  “Try pressing the close door button.”

  I jumped when I heard the voice. I’d been so lost in thought (What would everyone on the ship think of me in my Perky Princess purchases?) that I hadn’t even considered the fact that I would most likely not be riding to the eighth deck alone. Not on a ship with 2,500 passengers.

  The voice belonged to a young man, who was leaning against the back, mirrored wall of the elevator. He was sandy-haired, pony-tailed, and in his early-to-mid-twenties, and was dressed in blue jeans, Reeboks, and a very colorful Hawaiian shirt.

  I nodded and did as he suggested, pressing the close door button. After a few tense moments, the elevator finally began to ascend.
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  “Been shopping?” said my companion as he eyed me.

  “Yes, the airline lost my luggage,” I explained.

  “Bummer,” he commented. “Total bummer. You probably took this cruise so you could veg out, get mellow, the whole enchilada, and then they lose your bags and you’re fucked, right?”

  “That’s it exactly,” I said, sensing I was in the presence of a dude. A dude with a ’tude. I pressed the Deck 8 button again, just in case I’d forgotten to.

  “Hey, that’s cool,” said the man.

  “What is?” I asked.

  “That we’re on the same floor, Deck 8. It’s cool when you meet someone in a totally random way and then it turns out that your living spaces intersect.”

  I smiled at the alleged “coolness” of it all as we continued to ride up together.

  “I’m Skip Jamison,” he volunteered. “From New York. City, that is.”

  “Elaine Zimmerman,” I said. “And you’re right: our living spaces do intersect. I’m from New York too. City, that is.”

  “I knew it. Your energy is very Manhattan,” he said. “Very ‘Don’t touch me.’”

  “Thank you,” I said, not knowing what else to say. “Are you a veteran of these cruises?” Something about Skip suggested that he might be. Perhaps it was the shirt.

  “No, I’m a total virgin. Normally I’ll hop an Airbus when I have to go down to the islands, but I really needed to chill out this time. So I said to myself, ‘Fuck the flying. Take a cruise.’ Sometimes you need a meltdown before doing business in the Caribbean. The pace is nice and slow there, nice and mellow, and if you’re not used to it, it can sort of freak you out.”