The Talent Show Loaf

Ethel here, and I should say up front that I'm forty-four and have been living on the M.V. Meridian for five years now. I teach watercolor classes to passengers three days a week and spend the rest of my time in a cabin as small as a decent closet.

I want to talk about the loaf of bread, but first a little context, because it matters to how the whole thing went down.

Somewhere around my fortieth birthday I stopped dating. It wasn't a decision exactly. My last long-term thing ended amicably when I was thirty-nine, with a fellow teacher, and after that I just... didn't restart. What I did instead was develop a routine. Every night after the passengers cleared out of the lounge, I'd go back to my cabin, lock the door, and take care of myself with a patience I never managed with another person. Candles on the little shelf. The same playlist. Twenty minutes minimum, no rushing, no performing. It was tidy and predictable and it worked, and after a while I realized I'd built an entire private ritual where other people had relationships.

So anyway. Two weeks ago I decided to bake bread in the crew galley, which is against about three separate rules, and the loaf came out looking like something that had survived a maritime disaster. Lopsided, split down one side, dense as a cannonball. I was holding it up in the galley, laughing alone like a lunatic, and the idea just landed in my head fully formed. A talent show skit. Me, an art teacher, doing a ten-minute bit about a bread loaf that failed so badly it became art. I signed up that same afternoon.

Which brings me to Nigel Arthur. He's the network administrator, forty-one, been at sea eight years. I asked him to be my straight man because I needed someone to hold the loaf on a platter while I gestured at it, and he said yes before I finished the sentence. We'd flirted on and off for a couple of years. Nothing ever happened. Ship life is good at keeping things in a holding pattern.

The first rehearsal was on a Tuesday, in my cabin. He knocked at seven and I opened the door and the first thing he saw was the taxidermied seagull on my desk.

"Okay," he said, standing in the doorway. "That's new since the last time I was here."

"That's Dalton. He's a reference for a painting."

"He's terrifying."

"He's a teaching aid."

"He's a dead bird wearing an expression of judgment, Ethel."

I let him in, which took some doing because the cabin is crowded with taxidermy pieces, a stuffed pufferfish, two raccoons that aren't related but look like brothers, and a fox head I got at a flea market in Jakarta. He sat down on the edge of my bunk like a man visiting a museum of the strange.

We ran through the skit twice. It's basically this: I present the loaf, I explain its artistic virtues, Nigel holds the platter and occasionally interjects with disbelief. The comedy comes from me treating the bread like a serious artwork. It's dumb and that's the point. The talent show judges on this ship reward dumb.

On the third run-through, we were both trying to move around each other in about four square feet of open floor, and I turned to gesture at the loaf and he turned to reposition the platter and we collided. His hand came up, more or less by accident, and landed on my hip to steady us both. He moved it right away. But I felt it for a good ten seconds after, this warm spot through my shirt, and I had a jolt of curiosity so sharp it nearly made me say something stupid.

Instead I said, "We need more chemistry."

"That's your professional assessment?"

"I'm an art teacher. I know composition. We have no chemistry."

"We collided physically. That's chemistry adjacent."

"Adjacent doesn't win talent shows." I sat down on the bunk and thought for a second, and then I did something that surprised even me. I opened the drawer of my desk, under Dalton, and took out a small vibrator. It's plum colored, about six inches, nothing dramatic. "Here. Prop. For a different act."

Nigel looked at it. Then at me. Then at Dalton, like maybe the seagull could advise him.

"Is that a..."

"It's a prop," I said, and then, because lying seemed pointless, "No, it's not a prop. It's mine. I use it. Most nights, if you want the full itinerary."

He laughed, a real one, and sat back down. "Okay. Honest. Fine. Since we're being honest, I brought my own toy. I travel with it. Eight years at sea, you sort of have to."

"You brought it tonight?"

"It's in my bag. Silicone sleeve. It doesn't have a name, unlike your seagull."

"Dalton is a seagull with dignity."

"That thing has the face of a bird that saw something."

We kept going back and forth after that, and it got candid fast. He told me his routine, how he uses the sleeve lying on his back with some video or just his imagination, how it takes him a while because he likes to draw it out, which honestly tracked with everything I knew about him. I told him about my candles and my playlist and how I don't rush, and he said that sounded better than his method, and I said his method sounded fine, and we were both quiet for a second after that.

The thing I noticed was that neither of us was embarrassed. We were two adults, forty-four and forty-one, sitting in a cluttered cabin talking about masturbation like it was a scheduling matter. Maybe that's what eight years at sea does to a person. Maybe it's what four years of a careful solo routine does. We'd both gotten so used to doing this alone that describing it out loud was almost a relief.

"So the chemistry problem," Nigel said finally, turning the vibrator over in his hands like he was checking it for structural integrity. "Is your proposed solution what I think it is?"

"I don't know what my proposed solution is. I just know that we collided and my hip is still thinking about it."

"That's very poetic for an art teacher."

"I contain depths."

He set the vibrator down on the bunk between us, carefully, like it was evidence. "Here's where I'm at. I like you. I've liked you for a while, and the flirting has been going on long enough that we should probably either do something about it or agree to keep doing the bit."

"Which bit?"

"The flirtation. The bit."

"That's the thing I said about chemistry."

"You said chemistry about the skit."

"The skit is a metaphor, Nigel."

"For what?"