Incompetent Abroad: Luxury Cabin Fever
The miracle of America’s founding isn’t that the Mayflower pilgrims succeeded in carving a civilization out of a wilderness but that they were able to spend 66 days in close quarters crossing the Atlantic without killing each other.
Just four days into our voyage along the same route—and pampered like Roman emperors in the opulent embrace of the Queen Mary 2—my two younger brothers and I are already snapping at each other like rabid ferrets.
In an earlier blog, I described how small our cabin is, and that’s all true. But since we’re rarely in it at the same time except to sleep, it’s still a pretty ritzy cell: satellite television, an internet connection, maid service twice a day, room service around the clock, a safe and a refrigerator and enough drawer and closet space to satisfy the Kardashians. OK, maybe one of the Kardashians.
And yet there is fraternal friction. Roger and David want me to drop what I’m doing so the maid can make her rounds according to her own schedule. I point out to them that she is there for my convenience—not me for hers—and that I am willing to put up with unmade beds and stacks of dirty coffee cups if it will allow me the concentration a sensitive mind needs to flourish. They tell me—rather uncharitably, I think—that I look like an unmade bed and that if squalor is the seedbed of my creativity I should have stayed at my dump in Nashville. Normally, I would end this torment by making an indignant exit and slamming the door. Alas, our cabin door works automatically and closes with a whisper. I must revise my body language to counteract these posh surroundings.
Then there’s the matter of the sea itself. When the hell will it end? I look out on the same waves and the same cloud patterns that have taunted me since our departure, and I say to the elements, “I get it! Enough with this wild beauty! Show me a car, a tree, some definitive sign of the season. Is this all you’ve got?”
Yesterday, Roger and I were invited to the bridge to witness the pilots steer this floating metropolis of 2516 passengers and 1311 crew. Again my expectations were dashed. I thought I’d see a steering wheel the size of a bank vault door. Instead there were compact stations that looked like computer games.
The only plus was that David was not with us to prattle endlessly about how he learned to navigate his pontoon boat. Do not assume, though, that he hasn’t found other ways to annoy me. In this regard, his imagination is boundless. He spent the afternoon bludgeoning me with his political views (which seemed to have been formed in a wrestling cage) and reminiscing about his beloved Penn State football team, a subject I find less riveting than commentaries on gravy. But he really outdid himself at dinner. There we were again joined by the two German lovelies I spoke of before. Roger and I had prepared ourselves to dazzle them with our wit. But David, as is his custom, took a more furtive route. Before Roger and I could finish our lettuce, he was leaning into the Teutonic blonde seated beside him and whispering into her exquisite ear about frolics in the Black Forest, barge trips down the Rhine and the incomparable beauty of Munich’s Hoffbrau House. He seemed not at all ashamed of the fact that his only acquaintance with Germany was ten minutes spent on Google. The blonde was enchanted, and I experienced a sensation that might best be described as jealously. His dominion will be short-lived, I promise you that.