We came aboard the Seabourn Pride and were immediately surrounded by an attending staff, something I’m not used to but could probably learn to like. What’s not to like about having anything you want any time you want it? That’s life aboard the Pride.
The Captain’s name is Bjarne Larsen. How Swede it is. He said that should anyone go overboard we should throw into the water a life buoy or anything else that floats. It would be really embarrassing to make a mistake and throw something after a drowning person that proved not buoyant. I amused myself with cartoons of my own making, which is a lifelong habit. Had I learned to draw I’d connect the habit to something outside myself. As it is, the habit just makes my sense of humor seem sometimes odd.
The cruise is expensive, though in this economy the prices have been slashed to the point that it’s affordable to those not so rich. Our first formal dinner at the cruise director’s table confirmed that the favored subject of conversation among the passengers … at least the ones dining with us … is travel. And not just travel, but expensive travel.
We struck a conversation with a couple of older people from Scotland, and our looking out at the Hong Kong high rises reminded the man of their having lived in a high rise once, though not very high, where the wind whipped around it because of convection currents.
Trying to be engaging I mentioned that when I moved to San Francisco in 1980 the winds used to blow freezing fog up the avenues off the ocean, but that in recent years it has been much milder. “I have to tell you,” he said, “that we don’t buy this global warming thing.” Even talking about the weather seems to have become socially perilous.
At our first dinner, we were seated with a couple from Los Angeles. Roy made his money in air conditioning and his wife, I think her name was Lalla, but I’m not sure I heard it correctly, spends at least some of it on jewelry. I think jewelry is a throwback to a time when one wore one’s wealth, and it was contained in rare trinkets. Manhattan Island was bought from the natives with beads, so I have heard. My mental cartoonist furnished a caricature of a woman wearing earrings made out of American Express cards.
Our dinner with the cruise director and eight other people was pleasant but lacking excitement, as, like I said, the conversation around me at least focused on sea cruises and expensive accommodations. I recalled a conversation with Joseph Henderson in which I expressed some feelings of inadequacy around a situation I was in with a German intellectual I was dating. I felt like a rube around her friends and wondered if I should break it off and find something more culturally comforable.
He said that what I was having trouble with was not being as knowledgeable about European culture as are Europeans, but that this is to be expected, and they generally don’t know all that much about American culture, either. “When I used to be at dinner with the Darwin family I felt the same way,” he said. He married into the family; I think it was a granddaughter. “They knew nothing about the Dakotas,” he said “so that gave me something to talk about.”
One of the people I especially liked was an American from Florida. At first I felt pushed by him, as he was trying to get me interested in signing some kind of letter to the head of Seaborne, urging that we get the Super Bowl beamed aboard the ship. I didn’t really want to do that once I realized it would be about three in the morning here when it broadcasts. I’m trying to shift my internal clock away from being awake in the middle of the night and I don’t intend to shift it back if I succeed, even for the Super Bowl.
The reason I liked him (his name was Tevis) was that his irreverence was in perfect juxtaposition to the English conversation about hotels and high end travel. After talking to Linda awhile he turned toward me and asked, “You hear about the black boy who said, ‘I don’t want a rich woman; I just want one that works steady?” It was so off kilter with the proper behavior of the English that I had to like him for providing the ballast.
“I know that guy,” I said.
Linda is certainly a different breed than the women of inherited leisure. “She’s a woman who understands how to run a hot plant,” I said. Later there was some conversation about San Francisco, and from those who aren’t in San Francisco it’s almost always something about gay people. For those who live there it almost never is, and so it comes as a surprise. The fish don’t pay much attention to the water.
“I think there’s something queer about gay people,” Tevis said. I didn’t laugh because I wasn’t sure that it was a laugh line. I almost said, “And something fairly odd about the rest of us when you scratch the surface,” but censored it. I wasn’t sure my dinner guests found themselves odd at all, and the surface was for the most part expertly lacquered to resist scratching. But I was sorry I hadn’t laughed because the point isn’t to let people know what you think in such a situation, but to make them feel comfortable.
“That was a joke,” he said, “but it went over like a lead balloon.”
After dinner Linda told me that Tevis is eighty-five years old, and that he was speculating on whether the woman on my left, who was very attractive, was wearing a bra. I would have guessed him at least ten years younger. I hope when I’m his age, I’m that energetic.