Antsy Floats (11 page)

“You want to order something?”

“Huh?” Then I realized I was sitting on a little red rotating stool in the fifties diner area, which was apparently a real fifties diner.

“Yeah,” I said, “gimme a chocolate shake. No, make that two. No, make that three.”

Then I spun myself in circles until I was so dizzy I couldn't drink any of them.

I'M VERY GOOD AT PRETENDING I DON'T CARE, BUT
when it comes down to it, I do and it ticks me off. Why do I always, deep down, feel responsible for the people around me? For instance: Every time I see my dad eat something I know isn't good for him, I think it'll be my fault if he has another heart attack, because I didn't say something about it. Or how about when my sister picks the most sarcastic, unpleasant girls in her middle school to hang out with; I think it's my responsibility to make them unwelcome in our house, because if I don't, what if she becomes just like them? Would that be my fault?

“It's called a martyr complex,” Ira once told me. “Since you're Catholic, you should probably ask yourself the Jesus question. You know, ‘What would Jesus do?' And then decide based on your conclusion.”

Well, I know what Jesus would do. He would suffer for everyone else's sins. So basically asking the WWJD question just makes a martyr complex worse. Believe me, I got enough of my own sins to suffer for; I don't need everyone else's.

•  •  •

I wanted to talk to Tilde. I wanted an explanation about those passports—but who was I kidding? No explanation would have made me feel any better. So although I looked for her, I didn't do a good job of it. I didn't use the passkey she gave me to get into Bernie and Lulu's room, because I didn't want to find her in the lifeboat laying out the passports next to all that stockpiled food. I didn't sneak belowdecks to get into the Viking ship chamber. I didn't know the combination to get in anyway.

Instead, I went back to our suites to find Old Man Crawley having a late dinner all by himself again. Very suddenly and very unexpectedly, I wanted to keep him company, like maybe I was feeling almost as alone as him.

When I asked if I could join him, he looked at me like I must be pulling some kind of trick. Then he finally said, “Pull up a chair.”

I sat down and looked at the spread of food. It was way too much for one man to eat. He had taken bites of several things, like the entire room service menu was his own personal box of chocolates.

“You can have whatever you like except for the crème brûlée. Touch that, and I pin your hand to the table with my steak knife.”

I wasn't hungry, since I had already eaten a full meal, but I picked at a plate of fettuccini anyway, and started eating it.

“If you're here because you're feeling sorry for me, you can leave,” Crawley said.

“Nah,” I told him. “I got done feeling sorry for you years ago. Right now, it's more like I'm feeling sorry for myself.”

“That's even worse.”

“Yeah, I know.” I sucked in some fettuccini, then said, “Maybe not feeling sorry for myself, but dealing with too much stuff in my head. And since I know you couldn't care less, being here seems like the best place to be right now. Low pressure, y'know?”

The idea that dining with Crawley was a low-pressure experience almost made me laugh. I guess everything is relative.

Crawley ate an extremely rare prime rib without speaking for a while, then he looked at me as I continued to stuff my face. Somehow I managed to down the entire plate of fettuccini in like five minutes.

I'm not good with long silences, so once my mouth was done chewing, I started to talk—but maybe got a little too revealing for comfort. Crawley was a man you didn't want to reveal anything to, since he could always find a way to use it against you at a later date, but I just couldn't shut myself up.

“Do you ever find yourself in a situation where all your choices suck, and there's nothing you can do about it?” I asked him.

“Yes,” Crawley said. “It's called politics.”

“Right,” I said. “But I mean your personal choices.”

“So do I.” Crawley held up his fork and waved it as he spoke like it was a magic wand with meat stuck on the end. “Did you know I once ran for mayor of New York?”

“You're kidding, right?”

He glared at me. “You find it hard to believe I was once an idealistic imbecile like you?”

“No,” I told him. “I find it hard to believe you'd get out long enough to run around the block, let alone run for office.”

He shook his head slowly. “I so despise your impertinence.”

“No,” I reminded him. “You love it.”

He weighed the idea, and the hint of a smile showed behind his perpetual frown. “I love despising it; there's a difference.” He blotted his mouth with his napkin and continued. “The agoraphobia came later—but in my youth, I was foolish enough to think I could change the world, or at least the city. I thought I could fix things with an honest hand, telling people what they
needed
to hear, not what they
wanted
to hear.”

He leaned back, thinking about a political campaign that went on long before I was born. “‘You want strong unions and high wages?' I told people. ‘Fine, then you have to be willing to pay a lot more for services. You want lower taxes and less government?' I told them. ‘Fine—but you better be willing to live with lousy public schools and even longer lines at the DMV.' I painted for everyone–the left and the right—the best picture I could of the consequences of their choices.”

“Did you win?”

Crawley shoved a miniature potato into his mouth and ground it down to nothing. “Of course not. The guy that told people what they wanted to hear won, and for the next four years the city went to hell in a handcart.”

“Sorry,” I said.

Crawley started in on his crème brûlée. “I wasn't. Because I learned a valuable lesson: Don't waste your breath on others because they will always disappoint you. Take care of yourself. And that's exactly what I did. I became a model of rational self-interest. Ayn Rand would have been proud!”

“Ann who?”

“She wrote
Atlas Shrugged
. Look it up.”

“Not gonna happen.”

“I'm not surprised. At any rate, my decision to invest in myself made me obscenely rich, and my success became my revenge.”

“Revenge against who?” I had to ask.

“Everybody,” he said, like it was obvious.

Crawley was always saying bitter stuff like this. It usually didn't bother me, but today I was feeling unsettled in more ways than one.

“Yeah, but what did all that money get you?” I asked. “Sure, you're rich, but you've gotta throw your own birthday party, because no one else will—and you have to make people come. And even then, you're sitting here all by yourself.”

“Not by myself,” he said, and then he leveled his spoon at me. “You're here.”

Whether it was the conversation or the stuff in my head or spinning circles on the teen lounge bar stool, whatever the reason, I felt both my dinners deciding that they could do better than sit in my stomach and saw their golden opportunity for a grand exit.

It happened so quickly I didn't even have time to excuse myself. I got up and raced to the bathroom, trying to push the door open and realizing a second too late that I needed to pull, not push. I only got the door halfway open before everything I ate over the past few hours came out the way it came in.

There are lots of cute euphemisms for puking your guts out—y'know, like “tossing your cookies”—but this was no cookie toss, let me tell you. It was more like when they yell
“Pull!”
at a skeet shoot. It was more like the Olympic discus throw, and this was a world record hurl.

I'd like to say it was, at least, in the general direction of the toilet, but the toilet was the only part of the bathroom spared. And it just kept on coming, wave after wave. Too much information, I know, but I'm all about sharing.

I was on my knees now. My vision was filled with black spots, because I hadn't been able to breathe for the longest time. Finally, when I stopped retching and began to catch my breath, I saw Crawley standing in the doorway behind me holding his cane and giving me a look. It wasn't the usual look. This was one I didn't know. I was ready to be cursed at and yelled at and told what a waste of biological material I was. But instead Crawley stepped in and handed me his glass of Perrier.

“Here,” he said, “the carbonation will help settle your stomach.”

“Sorry, Mr. Crawley,” I said, still gasping for breath. “I'll clean it up, I promise.”

“Don't be ridiculous. That's why we have concierge service.” And he called for the suite attendant, while I did my best to clean myself up, at least.

“Now we're even,” he said as I came out of the bathroom, putting his hand on his hip to remind me what he meant.

“Yeah, I suppose so.”

Two years ago, he had fallen in his bathroom, almost breaking his hip. He was helpless and hated the fact that he was. Yet no matter how much he screamed and cursed at me, I still helped him. I had shown compassion, and he was furious—not because I had shown it, but because he had needed it.

The cabin attendant came, saw the mess, and called for an assistant because this was a two-man job. They made the place spotless and even sprayed some magic deodorizer so you couldn't even tell it happened. To my surprise, Crawley tipped the two suite attendants generously. “Less money for my son when I die,” he told me.

I lay sprawled on the sofa, afraid to move for fear that some stray crouton that got left behind might suddenly want out, too.

“Thank you, Anthony,” Crawley said to me after the attendants had left. “Thank you for the most entertaining evening I've spent on this cruise.”

“You're welcome, I guess.”

Once I felt I could stand without my legs giving out, I went back through the adjoining doorway to my own suite, which was still empty because everyone else was out having a good time. As I left, it occurred to me that what goes around really does come around. The compassion I showed Crawley two years ago had returned to me. I mean sure, in the moment, Crawley talked proudly about looking out for number one, but when it came down to it, it was kindness and generosity toward others that put some occasional joy in his life. He just needed a good excuse to show it.

And it also occurred to me how easy it was to overthrow life's most bitter lessons with just a little bit of compassion.

•  •  •

I will admit Old Man Crawley's advice on selfishness was very sound, if you wanted to end up like Old Man Crawley. I didn't. And I didn't think that was why Crawley liked to have me around. See, I was like his human Rubik's cube. No matter how predictable he said I was, he still couldn't solve me no matter how much he twisted me around. I was never afraid to tell him what I really thought, and sometimes what I thought was more on target than his philosophy.

“You have common grace,” he once told me. “Accidental insight. And God help us all if you ever realize you're not as stupid as you think you are.” He had only said that to me once. I think that telling me I wasn't as stupid as I thought was the closest thing to a compliment he ever gave me. I held on to that and brought it out on those occasions when I felt seriously dense.

I'm not as dumb as I think I am.

But if that's the case, why do I end up in such obnoxious situations?

After losing both my dinners, I went up to the highest point of the ship. It had to be close to midnight now, but the ship was still alive with activity. Way up here, though, I felt a little separated from it all. Above it all, in a very literal sense. The spot was a little outdoor sundeck wedged between the two giant spherical radar antennae that someone brilliant had painted to look like golf balls. I swear, they put lounge chairs everywhere on cruise ships, because any spot that got direct sunlight was a prime ray-soaking zone.

There were about a dozen lounge chairs on this little deck—totally empty except for a couple who were all over each other. I looked at them just long enough to determine that they were not Lexie and Gustav. Beyond that, I had no interest in them. They, however, seemed a little embarrassed to have me lying out on a lounge chair just a few chairs over from theirs.

“Do you mind?” they asked. “We were here first.”

“Like I give a flying gerbil's butt,” I told them.

Eventually they took their saliva wars somewhere else, leaving me alone with my thoughts.

My first thought was how great it would be to bring Tilde up here and do the exact same thing with her that the fluid-exchanging couple had been doing. It irked me that my thoughts went immediately there. People always say guys only have one thing on their mind. That's not exactly true. It's just that the “one thing” doesn't move out of the way for other thoughts. It's like a giant boulder in a river that everything else gotta go around.

My second thought was that maybe for just this week, I could take Crawley's advice and be small-minded enough to selfishly enjoy the cruise. I could forget about everything, hang out with Howie, and find ourselves a clique among the many other kids on board, being a blissful ignoramus until it was time to go home.

My third thought was how my second thought was making me want to throw up again. I'm very skilled when it comes to making things harder on myself.

“Aren't you cold without a jacket, Enzo?”

Very rarely am I caught completely off guard, but hearing Tilde's voice so close to me—and so close to the things I had just been secretly thinking about her—made me jump. The lounge chair fell back from the sitting-up position to the reclining position with a loud clatter, leaving me flat on my back. I lay there without moving as if I meant to do that.

“It's the Caribbean,” I told her. “It's like ninety million degrees, even at night. Why would I need a jacket?”

“Because it's chilly in the wind, isn't it?”

And now that I thought about it, she was right. I was relieved that she didn't get arrested in Jamaica but angry that she was involving me in something that left me in way over my head.