Thursday, December 10: At Sea without a Paddle

The internet has been down for two days. Apparently we were in a geographic dead zone where satellite transmission was impossible. When I discovered this early in the morning of that first day, Dennis was sitting very unhappily at the computer next to me. Common situations make for common bonds and he loudly lamented first the computer situation and then the situation of the world in general. A short, gnome-like little man with a British accent, he kept me occupied for the next twenty minutes with his complaints about the fall of the American empire and the rise of China, to which he’d been and, he said, “…had the power and the resources to do anything it wanted. Bulldozed the land,” he said, “just to build the blinking Olympic stadium. Displaced all those coolies, didn’t they?” I had trouble responding. And I had trouble getting him to stop so I could go on with my composing. Not only were there a lot of disappointed faces in the computer room that day but the Platinums were also unhappy: they didn’t get their morning paper. Quelle horreur. The first night the computers weren’t working, I passed the room on my way to cocktails and saw a man sitting in the room staring at a blank screen. I guess when you’re addicted to something, even the memory of it can be sweet. Once the computers come back on, I predict people camping out in the halls as though they were waiting for a Wal Mart sale or eager to buy tickets to a Bruce Springsteen concert. How we have become addicted to our communications. Personally, I prefer sugar.
Each day outside the Veranda, the restaurant where I have breakfast and usually lunch, a little Chinese waitress with braces on her teeth smiles and quietly announces to each passing guest the special for the meal. Today it was lamb chops. As I was finishing my fruit and scrambled eggs, with that best bacon ever, a couple at an adjoining table was just cutting into their chops. I asked how they were and she said, “Delicious.” I admitted that I couldn’t imagine having lamb chops for breakfast, and she said, “Oh, Phil. Live little.” Along with the “YES YOU CAN” taped up on the wall over my computer at home, “LIVE A LITTLE” may be all we need to get through life successfully. No. I’d add, “DO THE BEST YOU CAN,” something my mother always said each time I left her after a visit to her nursing home. “Be good, Mom,” I’d say. And she’d respond with, “I’m doing the best I can.”
I, too, am doing the best I can. After brushing my teeth (as a guest), I went back to the Veranda (as a host) to work the room, greeting the Solos and sitting with them for a minute or two so they wouldn’t feel abandoned. At some point in my life, I wanted to be a maitre d’, greeting the guests and helping them to feel included. Through the mists of fond nostalgia, I remember the old Avenue Restaurant – now long-gone – in Rehoboth, where a lady with a clip board clutched firmly to her breast would come out to the benches on the street and say, in her most commanding voice, “SMITH. PARTY OF FOUR.” What power she had! In my wanderings through the many tables in the Veranda, with my gentleman host pin clamped firmly to my own breast, I met Pat and Ben, who told me they were from Baltimore. “Where in Baltimore?” I asked, smiling broadly. “Oh, way at the end of Roland Avenue,” she responded, “in a place called Elkridge Estates.” We both shop at Eddy’s, in that “small world” phenomenon.
The Dragon Lady turns out to be a world-famous neurologist. She stopped me on our way to dance class and said I couldn’t ignore her. “You can’t pass without talking to me,” she said, in her most imperious manner. So what could I do? I talked to her. In the process, she recognized my Horner’s Syndrome – one of my eyes droops because of the condition – and told me of visiting Hopkins often for conferences. She dragged out her Blueberry and tapping madly away with a perfectly manicured red nail and her magnetic stylus as she was talking to me, she retrieved the date – late 2006 – and told me where she and her husband had dinner every night. She insisted on crowding my email address into her system and I agreed that the next time she and her doctor-husband are in town, I will introduce them to the best crab cakes in the world at The Prime Rib. Amazing how she can lift that little finger even when she’s entering data in her mini-computer.
Wouldn’t you know? Sasha and Olena do the rumba “international style,” said the Dragon Lady. This means that you start on the second beat, not the first, and you don’t work from a box step but from steps forward and back. I had to learn my favorite dance all over again. And spinning on a dance floor in Crocs is not such a good idea, especially when that floor is moving up and down. I never made it successfully through the whole routine because I couldn’t get my spin down fast enough from the chasse to be in position for open breaks. Oh well.
At some time around eleven, the captain came on the PA system to tell us we had just crossed the equator. “Did you feel the bump?” he asked. The captain is a joker. He laughed and said he couldn’t toast the group at the Seven Seas Society meeting – a cocktail party for those who’ve traveled with Regent before – because he was the designated driver. I suspect he just doesn’t like champagne. The dress was formal and everyone turned out in their finest. The Dragon Lady, resplendent in a spaghetti strap, red sequin gown, told me she was disappointed that more ladies were not “appropriate for the occasion.” But at my post, standing in the aisle and greeting couples as they stumbled to their seats – the ship is still moving – I thought the ladies looked great. The Afghan hound wore a black sequined gown with silver sequin stripes smeared vertically all over it, looking something like the sidewalk on Copacabana Beach. But the saleslady where she bought it should have told her that while her figure could handle the slimness of the shape, the open back was not becoming. Wrinkles are hard to hide. Libby wore a grey number with huge collaged flowers all around her neck. She looked a little like a walking garden. We learned that of the 600 plus guests aboard, 83% of them have traveled with Regent before. And fourteen of them are titanium, which means they’ve accumulated over 600 nights. Imagine. Almost two years of this. Not for me.
We had some trouble at cocktails and dinner. Shirley complained to Margot (with a T) that the seamstress team of mother and daughter should not be included in the Solo dinners. They weren’t paying guests, she said, and so shouldn’t share the largesse. Margot (with the T), who complains about everything, took the sentiment to management. Then Elsa called me to ask if the seamstresses were a problem and I told her, no; I was happy to accommodate them. “Well just be sure,” she said, “that when you’re making up the tables for dinner, they don’t get put at a table with Margot (with the T) or Shirley.” But given the desires (read demands) of the Solos, it’s very hard to place everybody where they want to be. And Heinz can never make up his mind, wanting to run everything but not running it efficiently. So I wound up at a table with the seamstresses – the mother is a slob and the daughter, while pretty, always exposes more of her breasts than strictly appropriate (which is why I suppose Shirley and Margot [with the T] dislike her – Patrick, who rambled endlessly on, licking his lips for emphasis and blinking his eyes when he thought he’d made his point, and Libby, the talent manager from New York. I agreed to take all the others so long as I could have Libby, who, despite her stern demeanor, is really bright and very funny. (Shirley doesn’t like Libby because Libby once extolled the virtues of Crystal – they even have a librarian, Libby said – and Shirley is very loyal to Regent. “Here,” Libby laughed and said, “I can’t bend over to look at the books at the bottom of the shelves, and I can’t reach the top ones, so I have to read what’s stored in the middle.”
On my way to bed, the couple with the huge library of dance steps they perform as gracefully as though they had skewers down their spines, stopped me to say they approved of my behavior. “Oh,” I said. “In what way?” They complimented me on asking Claudine #1, who was sitting alone in the lounge after dinner, to join Shirley and Heinz and me at our table. “I was only doing the best I can,” I said.
Early in the morning, I found Lorraine in the office and apologized to her for breaking policy by going to dinner in Prime 7 with Margot (with a T) and her group the night before. Lorraine was understanding and told me not to worry about it. “It’s a power thing with Margot,” she said. “And Margot is sometimes just a pain in the ass.” My sentiments, exactly. But I would change “sometimes” to “always.”
Heinz and I have reached one of those truces that never ends a war. He’s imperious and distant in his Prussian (although he’s Bavarian) way. And I just treat him as though I were his happy, but stupid, American puppy. It seems to work. But he can’t steal my last hanger with the wooden rod. That’s going too far.
If they play “Perfidia” one more time, I’ll scream. Stay tuned.