Voyage of emptiness
CROSSING THE ATLANTIC
IT'S A TRIP -- as people used to say -- to make the Atlantic crossing on the Queen Mary II. After our long Italian vacation, the pretty drive through France, and after the shocking expense of downtown London ($140 cab ride in from Heathrow), it is an almost psychedelic experience to cross the ocean on what amounts to a floating luxury hotel.
Last night was a formal night on board: The women were required to wear gowns and the men tuxedos or dark suits. Dinner was a choice of lobster tails, chateaubriand, or pasta with truffle sauce, followed by the kind of desserts you couldn't possibly work off by making rounds of the seventh-floor jogging deck. In addition to the team of impossibly friendly waiters ("What would you like, my love?" they say to our daughters), there is a balding, bespectacled Brazilian sommelier who looks like he once played bass for The Talking Heads, and who served us an unforgettable bottle of Barolo.
We had worried, before boarding, that we'd be out of our depth when it came to things like a fancy wardrobe and household income. My wife and daughters and I are here, after all, courtesy of a travel book contract, not a trust fund, and will return home to big credit card bills, not servants in waiting. The Cunard brochure exacerbated this worry by offering lines like "But it is you, dressed in formal wear worthy of royalty . . ." and going on about the special people who make this crossing.
But the truly rich have their own levels, higher up, and their own eating places, and so it's only in the pub over a glass of Guinness or in the casino at the roulette wheel, that we've occasionally encountered what Ford Madox Ford called "the saving touch of insolence" that sometimes goes with great wealth. (I spent part of the trip rereading his masterpiece, "The Good Soldier.") In fact, most people on board are middle-income retirees having the vacation of a lifetime or families with kids taking advantage of the discount you get for flying one way and sailing the other.
We've met some interesting people, and seen a whale spout or two and some dolphins, but I have to say that, for a person used to large helpings of solitude and open spaces, the luxurious crossing has left me feeling claustrophobic and atypically on edge. Even with the three swimming pools, the golf simulator, and the morning and evening promenades on deck seven, I feel restless and overfed.
But there is, for me, a dimension to the experience that goes beyond the delicious meals and small physical discomforts. More than 100 years ago, my mother's mother came to America from London, on a boat without chateaubriand and swimming pools. And my father's parents sailed from Naples, in steerage, as teenagers. I have been thinking of them almost every hour we've been on board.
It is the greatest of American clichés to assert that they made their arduous journeys in search of a better life for themselves and their descendants. But it is also true. I imagine that I see my grandparents' spirit in the serving staff, a thousand of them, from places like India, Estonia, Brazil, Ukraine, Turkey, the Philippines. They are making the kinds of sacrifices that feel unimaginable to me: leaving a mate and young children on the other side of the world for nine months at a time.
Materially, at least, even a middle class American family like my own already enjoys the life those people are working toward. With our house, our cars, our trips, our good schools and good doctors, we inhabit their dream landscape, and that of my grandparents. Some of us send up a prayer of gratitude to ancestors who made a much rougher voyage on this same sea, whether 100 or 300 years ago.
And others don't. I have seen a few people go from high tea to blackjack, from asparagus risotto to the champagne bar, and the way they eat, the way they speak to the staff and each other, the way they stand at the freshly lacquered rail and stare out at the Atlantic emptiness, seems to me to be sending out a cry not of gratitude but of quiet desperation. "Is this all there is?" their faces seem to say. And that, as Ford Madox Ford put it, that sorrowful emptiness inside the shell of luxury, is the saddest story of all.
Roland Merullo is a guest columnist. His next novel, "Breakfast With Buddha," will appear in October. 