Chapter 7
There were, it seemed to Annie, too many people on the boat.
At least if the whole thing toppled over now, everyone could swim the ten feet back to shore.
It would make the local news, but it wouldn’t be a mass tragedy.
Annie shuddered. If she was waiting for a subway and it arrived looking this crowded, she would let it pass and wait for the next one.
The women on the lido deck were standing shoulder to shoulder, everyone in full sun.
The DJ (“DJ Pancake!” he shouted every two or three songs, perhaps to remind the assembled that they were listening to the work of a human and not a playlist) kept up a steady stream of songs that everyone knew the words to: Madonna, Prince, Bon Jovi—the kind of soundtrack they played at baseball stadiums to keep people awake.
Annie and Maira had come up early and grabbed two barstools at one of the tiki bars, but the space between them and the small metal stage had filled with Talkers, so many sweating bodies already burning in the sun.
All around the deck, homemade vinyl banners had been affixed to the metal guardrails—clearly hung by Talkers themselves.
Was that allowed, to just decorate a ship?
It seemed like it shouldn’t be. One read Hola from Spain!
and had cutouts of the guys’ faces superimposed on a Spanish flag, and the one next to it said Talkers!
Jennifer needs a kidney—are you a match?
Annie had to read it several times to make sure she understood that a woman was literally looking for a kidney donor on a cruise ship, but there it was.
Maira saw her take it in and said, “Oh, yeah. Last year, there was a match, so now people know it works.” She shrugged.
There were small roped-off sections for Talkers in wheelchairs, which Annie felt surprised by at first, and then felt ashamed at her surprise.
Shame was the blanket feeling, overriding everything else temporarily.
The shame of what she was doing, which had been couched in some form of giddy humor, of irony, of sisterly hijinks, now seemed naked and obvious.
She was divorced, she was fifty, she was a hormonal mess on a ship of middle-aged women still lusting after their childhood crushes, she was working for a child who didn’t know the difference between a soprano and a mezzo, a child who probably thought Swatch watches would pay as much money as Rolex on an ad spend.
Her sister wasn’t there to make it seem like a fun group activity.
Alone, Annie felt deranged, like she was on an ice floe, floating away from civilization on purpose.
It was a colossal mistake. She was stuck here now when she should be back in New York, doing things that made sense, like lying on the couch in her sweatpants, crying into her cat’s furry stomach.
“So this teenager is my boss now,” Annie said.
“I can only imagine what that’s going to feel like.
What kind of added value is she going to suggest, a group trip to Sephora to sample skin care products?
Oh god, she probably would, and they’d love it.
It’s going to be like that Robert De Niro movie—did you see that?
” Annie could tell that Maira could only hear every fifth word, but Annie found that she couldn’t quite stop talking anyway.
“It was actually a pretty decent movie.”
Maira was being a very good sport and going back to the bar to get them more drinks whenever they were through.
Annie had learned some basic facts about her roommate so far: Maira was from New Jersey, like Boy Talk, and her cousin had gone to the same middle school as Terrence and Scotty.
She worked part-time as a receptionist at an orthodontist’s office and had helped Scotty with his various endeavors remotely, a job she had clearly relished more than making children’s dentist appointments.
She was married to a man named Gerry, she had three kids who were all grown up, and she had seen Boy Talk every time they’d ever been on tour and been on every cruise, the kind of habit that could certainly have paid for an extremely luxurious month in the south of France.
She had a loud, brassy voice and an easy laugh, and if she was at all unhappy about rooming with a stranger, she didn’t show it. Annie was grateful for that.
Maira came back with two tall, curvy glasses of something called a Sexy Sunrise, which was not the sort of thing Annie usually drank, or ever even really considered in her life before, but it seemed that Sexy Sunrises were necessary.
They were sweet and slushy and alcoholic, offering a slippery slope into oblivion.
Annie had made it all the way to the bottom of the glass when DJ Pancake abruptly shut off the music, and a giant countdown began to flash on the jumbotron behind the stage.
Women stood in the shallow pool just beneath the balcony, cheered, and held their drinks over their heads as if in offering.
It reminded Annie of the final scene in Dialogue of the Carmelites, where the nuns get decapitated one by one but are in such a frenzy they don’t even seem upset about it, so rabid is their devotion.
“You can get the next ones,” Maira said, then, when she realized what was happening, added “Oh shit!” Maira set down her drink and quickly patted her pockets to find her phone, which she switched on, recording a video.
The numbers flashed on the screen—10, 9, 8, and the crowd was screaming so loud that Annie cupped her hands over her ears.
The woman next to Annie began to cry, and nothing had happened yet.
When the clock hit 0, everyone screamed even louder.
Annie watched as Boy Talk appeared on the balcony just beneath the video screen.
She’d meant to take out her phone to film a video for Katherine, but now it was too late—Boy Talk was already there.
The sound was truly deafening. She’d packed earplugs, but they were back in the room.
The men stood in a row, shoulder to shoulder—Shawn in sunglasses and a baseball hat, Scotty in short-shorts and clean white sneakers, Terrence chewing gum and doing finger guns at the crowd, Keith waving with both hands, his T-shirt riding up a tiny bit and revealing a slim band of skin.
There was something about that little strip of pale belly that seemed too intimate to Annie, and so she turned her head and didn’t see as Corey West joined them on the balcony with his arms crossed over his chest. The crowd lost their minds, the volume increased so much that the guys all had to laugh.
The men looked excited to be there, even standing in the hot, direct sun.
They were still handsome and fit—more so than most of the men Annie knew, at least on the outside.
“Are we mad at Corey? As a group, I mean?” Annie shouted into Maira’s ear. It was impossible to discern if anyone cared about Corey’s very public indiscretions.
“Honestly, no,” Maira said. “I mean, there’s a lot of talk about it in the Facebook groups, of course, but I think for the people who are here, no. Honestly, he could run someone over, and the Talkers would say That guy came out of nowhere.” The crowd cheered again, as if in agreement.
DJ Pancake handed Shawn a microphone, and his voice, so familiar to her still, boomed, “Who’s ready for the best weekend of their lives?
” That’s when Annie burst into tears. The tears bubbled up like a fountain and streamed down Annie’s cheeks.
It wasn’t demure crying, the kind that could be dabbed away with the corner of a handkerchief.
These came from somewhere deep, an internal cave system that Annie had never spelunked into, at least not in several decades.
Maira put a hand on her shoulder. “I told you,” Maira said.
Annie wanted to argue, to say no, it was the sun in her eyes and the Sexy Sunrise and having a millennial boss—No!
A Gen Z boss!—and going on her first vacation alone in her entire life.
She was crying for all those reasons, but seeing these men in person, it was the straw and she was the camel’s back.
Maybe it hadn’t been a mistake after all.
She had known that they would be there. That was the first question anyone asked when Annie begrudgingly told people where she was going—“Are they really going to be there?”—but in the moment, she was still surprised.
These men had woken up wherever they had woken up, they had ridden in airplanes and taxicabs and they crossed the trip-trap little bridge to this floating island where they were the only men in the world who mattered, and now Annie discovered that she too could not quite believe it despite having paid for the experience, like she’d fallen through the looking-glass into a world she hadn’t quite known existed.
Is this what Katherine’s life was like in Tucson, still full of childish wonder?
Katherine was a pediatric speech pathologist and spent her day readjusting small children’s mouths. It couldn’t be like this.