Slowly hauled toward adolescence, and later adulthood, as if by a weary stork eager to deposit me at the foot of some tall landfall that had the words “Begin here” written into rock, I made three more crossings, all between 1965, when I was twelve, and 1974, when after the death of my father I put aside money I’d earned on a poetry fellowship to sail alone from New York to Naples aboard the Leonardo.
While that crossing contained its share of half-boy, half-man adventures (I smoked pot beneath the starry Atlantic skies and made my way secretly to the very prow of the vessel, lying flat on my tummy as the wind all but ripped the clothes from my back), none of these waterborne adventures did much to furnish my credentials as a cruise man. Cruises were for those who had nothing left to aspire to. But in 1970, on a lark my father agreed to and subsidized a trip I had planned, and so I headed for Florida to board a ship that would take me to the Netherlands Antilles and other placid Caribbean ports. The vessel was the one-time Atlantic liner Cesare Augustus, designed and built in the late 1940s for both North and South Atlantic runs, for those eager to sail from Italy to Argentina. A modest ship, slow, pokey, and cruise-suited, it could not compete with the no-nonsense North Atlantic veterans I had come to know, among them the Île de France, the new France, the Leonardo, or later, in full adulthood, the two second-generation Cunard Line Queens, Elizabeth and Mary — both huge but in many respects also hugely antiseptic, the charm of their 1930s mothers gone with the tea-in-fine-china wind, an English wind that stood no chance before all things swift and casual.
By the time I got to the so-called QE2 and QM2 I was all too fully adult, and vaguely jaded. The New York-to-Southampton voyages left little memorable tissue since the days of being taken under someone’s wing as a child were gone.
It was mine, a literal rite of passage that seemed to me to have more in common with voodoo than an innocent birthday gift.
Even on the France and the Constitution with my mother, the days passed seemingly without a heartbeat. In fact, both those crossings were what I privately labeled Mother Missions, in which I’d been down to Europe to attempt to coax my mother back to a broken marriage. She did come back, twice, but perhaps traveling on a liner with me and not restoring our household was her true objective.
On the Leonardo in 1974, I spent a night alone outdoors on the sun deck railing, staring into dense fog while smoking cigarettes and listening to the fierce ejaculations of the liner’s fog horn. I might as well have been sailing through some version of a watery outer space, no one around, all asleep except on the bridge, my vigil a kind of self-styled poetic effort to assert eccentricity and bohemianism, since what other young man would persist in standing in such a place unmoving as if the silent commander of a dark universe.
I had grown into an illusion of myself as the ocean liner loner, a species of its own, a creature detached from normalcy, proudly so. But to understand how I arrived at this reckless and slightly lunatic sense of self, it’s important to flash back to my ten days aboard the tropical Augustus, a trip my father allowed me to take as part of a nineteenth birthday gift, though for all of the voyage I was seventeen.
What happened on that voyage, I never spoke aloud to anyone ever, nor did I choose even to allude to it in my writing. It was mine, a literal rite of passage that seemed to me to have more in common with voodoo than an innocent birthday gift.
Paperwork was necessary to allow a seventeen-year-old to travel alone, but my father obtained it diligently, and in early June 1970 I sailed from Port Everglades headed south. My father saw me off but from the moment I was aboard and alone, I styled myself as a man from a Poe story, a character teleported forward from the novel “The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym” — a book without which I did not wish to be seen, as if to hold it was proof of some personally deep strangeness no one could approach.
On the second day of my ship-walking explorations and peregrinations I met an American woman called Carol, twenty-four, very pretty (so far as I understood that term, as I had no girlfriend). She was a roving photographer who had made the trip to escape some sort of personal crisis she never elaborated on, and also to photograph the vessel’s approach to each island by predawn light.
This project of hers intrigued me, as did her camera, a Hasselblad, which sounded to me like a car from Weimar Germany. It might well have been, as things turned out, a car from the ’30s, mutated forward with an assist from Poe to come into contact with me.
It is difficult to tell the Carol story, since even fifty years later I do not entirely understand how its chemical makeup came to be. We were, in fact, beneath any pretenses, fairly benign, she a Latin teacher in Wisconsin, I a boy about to come of age who thought of himself as poetic but in the end was simply a freckle-faced pretend adult trying to appear like a cross between Humphry Bogart and Gérard de Nerval.
And maybe that was it, or part of it: she knew both iterations of me, could speak of them, and also had a fondness for Poe, in particular how his macabre Baltimore mind (or the mind that emerged from that Baltimore) resembled ancient mythological minds.
So it was that I befriended Carol, becoming something of a film and satchel carrier, spending long hours watching her move around the ship morning, day, and even night, seeking unique angles and determining to what extent light would help or vex her work, since Caribbean light played quivering tricks on anyone who tried to capture its innards, and how it played its game of shadows and light among the many seemingly hopscotched islands, small capricious bits of earth that only pretended to stand still. Whenever it wants to, Carol once told me, though we were not sailing there, Haiti can pick up a suitcase and move west by twenty miles. It has that in its genes.
I pondered this remark long enough to feel that Carol was in my genes, or that some part of her was rubbing off on the many impressionable acres of my mind, and yes, my body.
We’d meet daily, and when I wasn’t with her I felt bereft, something I knew a Poe-like man shouldn’t feel. He should instead be on the lookout for the impending apocalypse.
In then-Dutch Guyana we made an excursion together into a sliver of jungle she photographed madly, ignoring the rain that soaked us both and left us with our clothes clinging to our bodies like glue. The crew on the launcher that took us back to the ship, two young Italian sailors, stared at her avidly. I did not know exactly why but I wanted them to stop.
Enough, I said, and spent the night on a deck chair on the port side as steaming heat broiled my bones. The next day I spent alone, trying and failing to get to the engine room. It was time to end this odd veneration of Carol.
The next day I also made myself scarce but she found me, reading a book of poems by Lawrence Durrell, and asking me, when she saw the book, if Justine had left her mark.
Justine, a character in the book, had in fact left a deep mark, teaching me about the early contours of lust, and I blushed that Carol would say this.
How the next few days unfolded remains a Haitian blur, midway between voodoo and island shifting, all I knew suddenly displaced.
It began when we met after dinner on A-Deck and I followed her up top, where lying down, she wished to shoot into the sky, juxtaposing the liner’s smokestack and the rising moon. I did no more than kneel beside her.
Until she turned toward me, the camera shifting across the top of her body, its mooring she dislodged gently from her neck, and Carol, twenty-four, from Wisconsin, kissed me, seventeen, from Poe-land.
I curled back, startled, but she played on this retreat to push my back against a railing and kiss me even more deeply. I responded by instinct only.
We went out to look at the moon. Under it, I finally found the courage to return by choice to her lips.
She spoke only one line, “I want more of you,” a line I understood in theory only. But Carol from Wisconsin was now aboard the Weimar car of the mind and there would be no immediate end to what was happening. Not even my silly remarks about Poe’s broken love life held any interest to Carol, not at that moment, a moment I imagined, as if from some film I’d seen with my father, would end in a small room. And it did, her cabin.
Inside, she did not touch me, instead disassembled the camera and placed the film on racks the way you might hang clothes. Her room, in fact, was less a stateroom than a darkroom, her equipment here and there. When I backed away from her moving around I ran into the pole of a tripod, which cut into my skin, leaving a small blotch of blood on my lower back.
No, this was not a movie. She did not say, Let me take that off for you. She dipped instead to her knees, lifted the Lacoste shirt, and licked the blood from the wound.
Her hands were slack, her mouth on my back, until they came to their own set of demands, holding me fast and turning me toward her.
The room, I remember, was stiflingly hot and my shirt drenched. Her blouse also. And when she lifted it off I smelled her and time chose that time to stop.
What is a writer obliged to write and not to write in such circumstances, in retrospect, in search of lost time? I don’t know.
Her mouth was an oval-sized pout, as it looked to me then, and it behaved as if taking on the character of someone behind a camera viewfinder, examining, zooming, moving in, making sounds, but these were not clicks.
Still not a word from Carol. Only the carefully but wildly quick canvas of small kisses that lingered on my lips and went further south, until she pulled toward, I tripped, she laughed, and I fell almost squarely into her.
This is when she spoke, holding my head and whispering gentle wishes and intentions in a language I’d never before heard. Caressing male topography was clearly not new to her. Don’t be afraid, she finally said. It happens.
The it was lost to me but she was not, our mutual probing now engaged and no longer in doubt.
I had once seen my mother’s nipples while she dressed in her private room. She’d seen me peeking, I was eight, and slapped me, hard. This time I was not slapped. This time I was invited, and made into a boy with sounds created to imitate hers, since I was new to this soaked outland.
In all, we spent several hours in that room, all sounds muted, and when she’d had her fill of me, also something new, she kissed me, dressed, stuck her sticky perspiring hand in mine, and together we went out to look at the moon. Under it, I finally found the courage to look down from that object and return by choice to her lips, and she smiled, and the rite was complete. At least that night’s rite.
There were others. There was more instruction in the ways of camera management and canal engagement. There were forays on ship and in body. There was the line, You know, after this you’ll never see or hear from me again, which I ignored.
So it was that I failed my first test in romance, such as it was.
On the day of our disembarking in Florida, where my father was waiting, we had a “date” to meet on the sun deck for a last set of shots she wanted of the sea and land, shots she had taken by the thousands but never included me in one. This I remembered only later.
But she was not on the sun deck or anywhere else. The ship had docked at 6 a.m. and she had apparently arranged a personal disembarkation thanks to a flirtation with one or more of the Italian sailors.
Carol was gone very early, someone told me when I asked.
I did one thing and one thing only. I went to B-Deck and told the steward there I had left a book in her room, and he let me in. The room hadn’t been made. I pretended to look all over, especially around the corners of the mattress. I smelled her, hard, took it, and left.
I met my father, Poe in hand as when I had left.
How did it go? he asked.
I paused.
I read a lot. I learned. I saw islands. It was nice. And I cut myself on the back, it even bled a lot, but then it stopped.
My father nodded. He hailed a taxi. We headed for the airport.
For decades I told my friends my first kiss came at seventeen (true), my first experience with a woman at twenty-two (false). But it was a story to which I stuck vigorously, with a liar’s complete assuredness.
Now, silent since 1970 and an old man, or nearly, I am silent no more — the inner need for such intimate silence gone with my eyesight — and wonder, still tasting a residue from that time, just how those shots of the smokestack and moon came out, or if she ever in fact developed them, as if by doing so she would have also in some way developed the memory of our nights.
I boarded the Augustus at age seventeen and, in B-movie style, left it at eighteen, a life as yet unshaped ahead of me, a life that I recognize now all began with a Hasselblad, both car and camera made in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
Though boyishness persisted, and in some ways remains even now, about a boy had ended.
Also at an end was the age of the liner. I had come of age on its deathbed. By 1975 the historic transatlantic companies of France and Italy had closed, most of their vessels parked and awaiting dismantling. As with dinosaurs, the climate, this time economic, could no longer support them. Cruise lines took their place and created mammoth bulbous vessels that dispensed with the rakish qualities of the Atlantic breed. They were, are, and remain cattle carts, the jumbo jets of trips centered on entertainment only. Luca had foreseen all this as we awaited the sail-by exchange a few years before. Like many other washed-up Atlantic titans, the MS Cesare Augustus was sold to Asian concerns that turned them into hotels. The original Queen Mary remains sadly parked in California while the SS United States, the greatest American liner ever built, dies a slow and rusty death in Philadelphia, where it has been anchored for decades as preservationists try to save it. The Augustus managed to stay alive as a hotel for half a century after my moon and Hasselblad. In 2011, at age fifty-one and moored in the Philippines, the one-time luxury liner-turned-hotel was finally scrapped, and these days all that’s left of those days are bits and pieces of memorabilia, and the words, like these, of memory itself.
