The Captain's Cabin

I hadn't set foot on the Atlantic Star in three years, and the bastard still recognized me. That's a stupid thing to say about a ship, but you know what I mean. The minute I walked up the gangway at six in the evening, engines humming under my shoes like a bass note that never ends, my body went into old habits. Left at the crew stairwell. Down two decks. Past the galley where somebody was yelling about a sauce.

The weird part was the keycard. I dug the old thing out of my coat pocket on the taxi ride over, mostly as a joke to myself, and when I tapped it at the crew deck door it blinked green like we were all still friends. Three years. They never wiped me off the system. Either that's sentimental or it's sloppy, and on a cruise ship it's almost always sloppy.

The captain's cabin is on the far end of deck four, wood paneled, quiet enough that you can hear the sea if the engines let you. I remembered the walk. My legs remembered the walk. I stopped outside the door, number 401, and did the thing where you breathe like a normal person before knocking.

"Come in," said Zoey.

She was standing by the porthole in a black dress that fit her the way her dresses always did, as if it had lost an argument and given up. Clipboard in one arm. Hair pulled back. Forty-eight years old and still capable of making me forget my own phone number.

"Danny," she said. Clipped. Professional. A voice you'd use to read a menu to a stranger.

"Zoey. Nice cabin."

"The captain's in Barbados until Tuesday. He owes me a favor." She looked at the clipboard. "You're on time. That's new."

"That's growth."

"Sit." She pointed at the piano, and there it was, a grand piano crammed into the corner like furniture nobody had planned for, sheet music scattered on top of it, three empty champagne flutes standing in a cluster like they'd been left by people who'd left in a hurry. Or left by one person drinking slowly and pretending it was company.

I sat on the bench. It was the right bench. My hands knew it.

"Here's how tonight works," she said, standing about six feet away, pen click, no pen click, just holding it. "This is an extended audition. No time limit. You play until I tell you to stop. If I say play, you play. If I say stop, you stop. If you can do that, we'll talk about whether the Atlantic Star has a job for you."

"No time limit," I said. "So this could go all night."

"It could."

"And if I say no?"

She didn't blink. "Then you take the elevator back down and you don't get the job, and I pour myself a drink and sleep fine."

"Good to know where we stand."

"Where we've always stood, Danny." She clicked the pen once. "Something from the American songbook. Your choice. Begin."

***

So I started playing Gershwin. "Someone to Watch Over Me," because I have a sense of humor about myself and it's not a good one. First eight bars were fine. Honest. By bar twelve my hands started doing the thing they do, that little tremor in the left one, and I was playing from muscle memory instead of playing from anywhere at all. You can hear the difference. The audience can't, usually. She could.

"Stop," she said, at what I later figured was sixteen bars.

I lifted my hands off the keys. "You said stop, I stop. See, I follow directions now."

"You sound like a man playing from memory," she said. She walked a slow circle around the piano, and I watched her shoes on the parquet. "Like the song is a photograph. Here's what I remember of Danny Everett, framed and hung. It's accurate and it's dead."

"Thanks. Very encouraging. Great audition so far."

"Play something ugly and true."

I laughed. It came out wrong, more bark than laugh. "Ugly and true."

"You heard me."

"Zoey, I've spent three years playing hotel lounges. Palm Court at the Meridian, four sets a night, dinner crowd. Ugly is not on the setlist. Ugly does not get you tips."

"Then play pretty and go home to the Meridian." She stopped circling and faced me across the piano. "You want this job back. Headliner. Your name on the marquee board by the pool. You don't get it by being accurate. I already know you're accurate, I signed off on your accuracy twelve years ago. Show me something I haven't heard."

My hands were still hovering over the keys and I noticed I was angry, actually angry, the real kind, the kind that starts in the back of the jaw. Three years of lounges. Three years of "Danny who? Oh, the cruise guy?" And underneath that, older and deeper, the thing about her, about us, about the report she filed and the way the security office looked and the way the captain, the old captain, said sorry, Danny, nothing personal, which of course meant it was entirely personal.

So I hit the keys. Hard. Wrong on purpose and then wrong on accident and then not wrong at all, some clanging thing in a key that doesn't exist, bass fist in the low register like I was trying to sink the ship. I played the firing. I played the six in the morning phone call from personnel. I played the two years of her, all forty-three to forty-five of her ages, the stairwell on deck eight, the champagne in this very cabin probably, the way she said my name when she wasn't being professional. I played the night I drank half a bottle of duty-free before the second show and fell into the drum kit at forty-nine years old in front of nine hundred passengers, which is a thing you do not get to un-fall.

The piece had no name and no form and about ninety seconds in I stopped caring whether she liked it, which is when it got good, or at least honest. I was sweating. The last chord I just held down with my forearm, all the dissonance ringing until it died in the wood paneling.

Silence. Engines. Sea.

"Well," I said, breathing hard. "That was ugly."

Nobody said anything. I looked up and Zoey had moved. She was closer now, standing at the corner of the piano, and her face had changed. The clipboard was down on the couch. The cold appraisal was gone and what was in its place I recognized, because I'd seen it before, a lot, mostly on this ship. Hungry is the word. She was looking at me like I'd just done something dangerous in front of her and she hadn't decided whether to be alarmed or pleased.

"Keep playing," she said. Her voice wasn't clipped anymore. It had gravel in it. "Quieter. And take off your jacket."

I should have asked what the jacket had to do with the audition. To be honest, I did think about asking. But my hands found the keys again, something low and slow this time, the anger draining out and leaving whatever's underneath anger, which is usually just want, and I shrugged the jacket off my shoulders one arm at a time without stopping the left hand. It fell on the floor behind the bench.

"That's better," she said.

"Is this standard audition procedure?"

"Don't be clever. Clever is the photograph too."

She came around behind the piano. I heard her heels stop, then felt her hand on my shoulder, light, right where the muscle ties into the neck. My fingers stumbled on a note and she made a small sound, almost a laugh.

"You're rusty," she said.

"Three years of hotel pianos will do that."

"Play through it." Her thumb moved a little, an inch of pressure. "Again. From the top of the slow part."

I played it again. The porthole behind her had gone fully dark, just grey-black sea and the ship's own lights smeared across it. Somewhere two decks down the dinner service was starting and a thousand people were deciding between the chicken and the fish, and up here the entertainment director of the Atlantic Star was standing behind me with her hand on my shoulder telling me to play it again, and again I played it, and the third time through she said, quiet, almost against my ear, "There he is."

I stopped. Both hands flat on the keys this time, dampening everything.

"Zoey," I said. "What is happening right now?"

"An extended audition," she said. "No time limit. I told you that at the door."

"That's not an answer."

She came around the side of the piano and stood in front of me, close enough that I had to look up a little from the bench, which she knew, she always knew the geometry of these things. "No," she said. "It isn't."

"Zoey." I wiped my hands on my trousers. "Three years ago you filed a report that ended my career, and now you're giving me notes on my posture in the captain's cabin. I'd like some idea of what I'm walking into here."

"You're walking into an audition, Danny. That's all this is."

"That's not all this is."

She looked at the porthole, then back at me. "No," she said again, slower this time. "It isn't."

"Then say what it is."

"The report I filed was true. You were drunk. You fell into a drum kit in front of nine hundred people," she said it flat, like reading a menu. "I'd do it again."

"I know you would. That's why I'm still angry and also still sitting here."

Something moved at the corner of her mouth. Not quite a smile. "Take off the shirt."

"Zoey."

"You've got an undershirt under it. I know because I've seen you out of a tuxedo before, on deck eight, in a stairwell, when we were both younger and dumber." She was forty-three then, forty-four, forty-five, and I was the one who kept saying we should be careful, and she was the one who never pretended to be careful once. "Take off the shirt. I need to see your shoulders working if I'm going to evaluate your playing, and I need you uncomfortable, because uncomfortable is where you're honest. You just proved that."

I stood up and unbuttoned the shirt. There's no dignified way to do that in front of your ex. You just do it and hope your undershirt has no holes. Mine did not, thank God, and thank the ship's laundry service, whoever they are. I laid the shirt over the piano lid and sat back down.

"Better," she said. "Play the slow part again."

I played it. Her hand came back to my shoulder, then slid down my arm while I was mid-phrase, fingers pressing at my elbow, guiding it down an inch.

"Your left hand rushes when you're nervous," she said. "It always did. Keep the elbow quiet."

"You remember that."

"I remember everything about your hands. That was sort of my problem, wasn't it." She moved my wrist a quarter inch. Lingering. Absolutely lingering. "There. Now again."

I played it again. The ship groaned somewhere below us, that deep hull sound, like the