New Life

I spend my final morning in New York looking for places to fall. I find them everywhere. The space next to the toilet seems best. The shower has distinct possibilities, but being the roll-in variety and offering an impressive safety bar, it's not my first choice. In fact, by the time I am out of the room and eating an enormous Algonquin omelette, an egg epic, the perils seem to evaporate. They hit me outside on the sidewalk where fear gives my guts a worrying gastrointestinal twist. Surely I am not going to lose bowel control on the way to the drug store on 6th Ave., the one that sells shampoo and back scrubbers.

Pausing in the narrow aisle I stared dumbfounded at acres of hair treatment. Fluffing, shimmering, body-building, it is hard to know which shampoos are for men, which for women and if any are for me. In the end it doesn't matter. I buy deodorant instead. The fluorescent retail moment is just long enough to distract me from my own fear. I roll back to the Algonquin, try to take a late morning nap, give up, worry some more and finally summon the bellman to help me finish packing. Through the lobby doors I glimpse Vega Transportation's promised van. The lift descends in the accustomed way, the driver straps down my chair and jumps behind the wheel. 'Wait', I yell. I point out that he has belted the chair but not me. I am not wearing a seatbelt. He shrugs, buckles my seatbelt and careens off down Park Avenue. I lurch and sway as he dodges in and out of Sunday traffic. At times it feels like a chase scene from a Hollywood film. I'm only mildly terrified, though. There are better things to worry about. Although my ticket says 31 May, some of us could be on the Julian calendar, the others not. The ship looming in Red Hook at the southern end of Brooklyn might be a hijacked ship. Surely this is not going to work. I recall how assuredly Marlou separated the Cunard baggage labels in our hotel room, confident in their purpose, slipping each around a luggage handle. I find nothing certain or reassuring these days. I am all anxiety until a security guard in the Brooklyn terminal looks at my ticket and passport and waves me through. Once I am photographed and given my Cunard plastic ID card, things begin to seem possible. This is Sunday and Monday may follow. I'm not certain, and placing no money behind this.

My state room is enormous. The cabin attendant unpacks my bags. I obediently grab my life jacket and endure a lifeboat drill. I even squeeze in a brief walk up and down the corridor, crutch clicking. The elevator ride to the top deck, though, doesn't pay off the way it should. There's been a delay. A few stragglers are en route from Kennedy Airport, and the Queen Mary 2 is waiting for them. This seems preposterous, but the vast ship will slip into Southampton in the dead of night, 3:30 AM, so there's plenty of leeway. Unfortunately there's not much leeway for dinner. I have signed up for the early seating and find myself ordering a trout mousse while Brooklyn and its docks squat outside. We get going during the salad, and I miss the dramatic sailing under the Verrazano Narrows bridge with 12 feet of clearance for the smokestack. But I've done that. I've done this before, too, talking to a shrill middle-aged woman, the one to my right going on about her diet. She is in excellent physical shape, one must admit. But so is Jack LaLanne. I'm not sure why I have signed up for this dining room routine. I guess I thought I would meet people. I have. And the New Jersey shore is beginning to slip out of sight. I bid everyone goodnight and roll out to the deck.

Outside, everything is happening on two scales. In the foreground, slow water moves by. Red buoys rock in the current, their bells clanging. They're only a few yards away. Straight out from the ship is a point of land with a pile of something at its end. Behind us, the sun is setting in an ordinary, red sort of way, for this is not the West or the tropics where sunset is an event. The outline of New York looks like a child's cut out. The silhouette stands in a long black strip, gradually losing detail. I roll down the teak wood deck to the stern and find more people hanging off the railings, talking to each other, chatting about their lives while the scenery retreats.

I have seen the next day's bulletin. There is a singles group meeting tomorrow at 11:30 AM. It occurs to me that I am now a single. I am even a widower. I have been so many things in life, and this thought makes me tired. I could go to a singles group or I could read or just wander the ship. I don't know. I don't know why I can't sleep if I will ever be less tired than I am now. I head for bed. The cabin attendant reminds me to turn my clock ahead one hour. There's less time all the time, but there's lots of water outside, and something is moving.

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Getting up on the wrong side of the bed is nothing compared to getting down. When you're paralyzed on one side, there is a right side and a wrong side to everything in the world. The Queen Mary's bed is so much easier to enter from the right that, despite years of getting into bed on the left, I say screw it. Within moments I see the error in this logic. Maneuvering my paralyzed right leg under sheets that are tucked in securely on the right side proves almost impossible. Once the limbs are stowed, the bathroom light reveals itself to be burning like a beacon. I need the thing on at night to pee. Any one of these situations...loosening the sheets, adjusting the lighting...requires getting up, and this is unthinkable. I feel that I have never slept in my life.

The good news is that I get a full six hours of slumber, more than I have had in a long while. I'm still woozy, but life seems possible. The cabin attendant helps me get my shoes and socks on. I'm out doing my hallway crutching by 10 AM. The morning has had its horrors, of course, each frustration amplified by mood and fatigue. There was the knock-on-the-door horror. An attendant was arriving with breakfast on a tray, and I was in the shower, having mistimed, misjudged and misspoken. I fell into the wheelchair, rivulets of water rolling down my legs, dropped a towel over my crotch and opened the door for some unseen member of the crew. Which led, within minutes, to the milk horror. Boiling water in a pot. Teabags. Bran flakes. All breakfast components present and accounted for, except for milk, the latter being in square juice-box containers. Am I really going to take this plastic straw and stab the opening? Yes, and having punched a hole in the silly thing, milk squirted off in odd streams and unpredictable angles best known to men with aging prostates. I kept squirting the table. I grabbed a washcloth, mopped up the mess and had another go at it. I cursed myself all the way. I tried not to. I know this is one of those psychological tendencies to avoid. I'm doing my best.

The best of the Queen Mary is visible from Deck 7. On that level, just beneath the life boats, passengers promenade around the ship's circumference on a teak walkway. Few were promenading this morning. The sun was sparkling, the ocean rolling by and a June Atlantic gale blowing straight off the Arctic. It was bracing, as the British would say. Being poorly braced in my light sweater, I gave up soon enough. The wind was strong enough to make opening the outside door difficult. I was happy to be inside. What to do? I had brought along a book, but finding a quiet place to read in a wheelchair requires some ingenuity aboard this ship. For a place that so readily inspires contemplation, the Queen Mary is a remarkably extroverted environment.

Am I a single? No, I am a solo.

That was the name of the 11:30 gathering in the aft nightclub. Passengers traveling alone are cordially invited.... Of course I am not a solo, not traveling alone, and so not in touch with reality that it was essential I turn up. A good 40 people had managed to do the same. The sub-assistant-auxiliary entertainment director wandered about with a wireless mike, telling us that she was Anita, and we may have met her before aboard the QE2, and there are all kinds of ways for solos to become duos and trios and, doubtless quartets and full ensembles. But here we are, each taking the mike and saying our recreational purpose and how we wish to share it. I can see how Alcoholics Anonymous would drive one toward sobriety. Anita is passing around a clipboard, and we are all adding our names, just in case one soloist wants to invite another. I am chatting to Noreen. She is from Bradford, Yorkshire, and I ask her about the South Asian population and the condition of the mills. She is impressed with my knowledge. I am impressed with my knowledge, though it is sadly out of date. The South Asians are getting along. The mills are shuttered, as mills are everywhere but China. As for Noreen, she is returning from a visit with her brother in New Zealand. How was New Zealand? Lovely, she tells me.

To make our social way about the Queen Mary we will need one of these, Anita explains. She is holding up a copy of the ship's daily bulletin. 'This is your Bible', she says. The ship bulletin announces the evening cabaret singer, making much of his Frank Sinatra repertoire. It explains how to use the laundry facilities, offers amusing tidbits about navigation and generally boosts things shipboard. It is not a Bible it is devoid of Mosaic law, burning bushes or anything similar. I want to point this out and tell Anita to lighten up, but instead I attend to my fellow soloists.

The middle-aged woman to my left are also from Yorkshire, and they acknowledge each other in the taciturn way of Northerners. I know they are actually being friendly, but they prove difficult to draw out. Besides, Noreen is quite talkative. I tell her that last night's dinner experience was unrewarding. She tells me that her husband died 17 years ago and would have loved this ship. Noreen sighs. Have another go, dear, she advises. You never know about people, do you? I ask her about the buffet. Wouldn't it be easier to eat there without dressing and making dinner table small talk? She considers this. She had breakfast alone on the westbound ship until she realized that this was necessary. Tell the maître d', she says, that you want to be seated with people. Any meal, she says. Just tell him. I'm thinking about the spraying milk carton and the dismal feel of bran flakes and tea without Marlou. She has told me a good thing, Noreen. And I have done a good thing by turning up. The microphone is still going around. Each person says what they enjoy doing. Dancing seems most popular. I cringe at this, but not too strongly. Women outnumber men by a ratio of about 10 to 1. And I can't help admiring the way these solo middle-aged women bravely state their love of dancing and travel and, in the right sort of way, themselves. They are here, and I am here, and each in our own way is showing a bit of courage.

Am I going to the Commodore's cocktail party, my cabin attendant asks when I return? My automatic answer, no, catches in my throat. What the hell? If I'm going to dress for dinner I might as well have a fucking drink beforehand. It is not easy to be on my own or disabled on my own or bereft on my own. And somehow contained in this circumstance is my mysterious anger at myself, hard to understand and difficult to stop. 

In one of my favorite shipboard spots, the mahogany coffee bar, I order a double latte, a small shrimp sandwich and a view of the shimmering Atlantic. The coffee is served French style, in a drinking bowl. I should request a different container, but I am too proud. Still, I imagine the consequence of coffee spillage. Only this morning I discovered that for a month-long trip my bags contain a single pair of blue jeans. I am wearing those jeans now, and even having made it past the coffee's danger zone for pants staining, a succession of shrimp have fallen on my lap. Mentally, I berate myself. Still, there is no diluting the effect of the solos. I turned up, added my name to the ranks and faced my social fears for the day. I may pay my compliments to the Commodore. And this afternoon I will spend time in my room.

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I decide at 4:30 PM to phone my cabin attendant, Benjam, and get some help with my evening attire. He's off duty, but his Ukrainian understudy appears, Christina. No way, she makes it clear, is she going to mess around with my underwear. What to do? Talk to the purser's office. I roll there, have a chat, and rounding the corner to the mile-long hallway leading to my room, two cabin attendants appear. Nothing like presenting oneself live, quadriplegic and in a wheelchair to drive home the disability point to the purser. These guys have been dispatched to get me dressed, and get me dressed they do. Dark suit, as prescribed, white shirt, almost ironed. Into the shoes, and here things stall. The shoes are new, admittedly stiff, but I had expected to get them on. No way. The Bulgarian cabin attendant has gotten my plastic brace into the shoe, but not my foot. I smile sheepishly. Do they know the story of Cinderella? The Bulgarian and his Filipino companion both shake their heads. Finally, by hammering on my knee, my foot makes it into the shoe, but a fierce pain rockets up my leg. Take it off, I say. The Bulgarian cannot get the shoe off fast enough.

Things don't work out. New shoes fail you. We make do. I am deciding to wear the shoe without the brace. But the Filipino wants me to see something. My mobile phone charger, its cord wound tight, has tumbled out of the toe of the shoe where it was efficiently packed.

I have on a black suit, even a black tie, but my black shoes, purchased because they are the only ones in Northern California that fit, prove something of an embarrassment. They are German walking shoes, crisscrossing laces prominent, and they give me the general appearance of a guy wearing a suit who is about to run a marathon. I cringe and curse myself for never having it together. The black shoes are a black mark I must live with. Never mind the Commodore's cocktail party. I'm not sure where it is on deck 3. And I don't know why the guy calls himself a Commodore. Captain would do. The captain goes down with his ship. The Commodore sells Schweppes bitter lemon. Screw him.

The dining room is opening late, and I join a queue of people in evening dress. We look exceedingly sharp, even me in my black running shoes. This must be one of the few social affairs at which I have actually arrived early. Inside, the waiter seats me at the far end of the table, my table #56. This is the wheelchair accessible end, but the first diners have gathered at the other end. I do my best to converse over the three-seat gap, but this is how it is, the wheelchair guy at one end of the table, everyone else at the other. I ask the waiter to pull some chairs away so I can sit closer. He tells me there's no room. I eyeball the table arrangement and decide there is plenty of room. I'm about to ask my fellow diners to shift some chairs for me. For by now we have ordered, the dinner hour is well underway, and the others at our table are not turning up. They refuse, instead moving their places closer to mine.

Some small person inside me wants to cry...with gratitude for being accepted, relief for not being shunned...I don't know. The guy next to me turns out to be a sociology professor recently retired from NYU. His wife is shrill as ever, but I decide this is a superficial matter of style, a New Yorker. The man seated across from me also turns out to be a retired prof. He's a Classics guy. We have a wonderful talk, the four of us. It was worth all the effort to get into my clothes. It was worth identifying myself as a solo. I am not alone, and now culminating this day of effort, I have put together a quartet. With dinner over early, I still have to put together an evening. There is an annoying nightclub act in the ship's theater, but I put together a much better substitute. A harpist, a very good one, is playing in one of the bars. Her music delights me, and having put together an evening, I may just be able to put together a new life.