“Oh, the boat, sure, no problem,” the cabbie said, grinning, then he put the car in gear and started up the street. A joker. Another joker. He’d probably learned his English at Cal State.
“Ask him how much,” Carolee said. No matter the exchange rate or the deals she finagled in the shops, she was sure they were getting ripped off, especially by cabbies. Before they’d left, she’d gone online to browse the travel sites and make detailed lists of dos and don’ts: photocopy your ID, leave your jewelry aboard ship, avoid fanny packs (“one-stop shopping” in the thieves’ jargon), dress down, talk softly so as not to broadcast your nationality, stay sober, carry a disposable camera ashore, and always get the price up front before you get into a cab.
“How much?” he said, or croaked, actually, deep from the well of his ruined voice.
“Oh, it’s not much,” the driver said, accelerating, “nothing really. Only a mile or so. I’ll give you a break, don’t worry.” And he mentioned a figure—in colones—that seemed excessive, even as Sten tried to do the math.
“Demasiado,” Carolee said automatically.
The driver, and he was a cowboy too, swinging into the next block with a screech of the tires, glanced over his shoulder and said, “Maybe you want to go back to the clinic? Maybe you want to wait for some other cab?” The car slowed, made a feint for the curb as if he were going to pull over and let them out.
“Demasiado,” Carolee repeated.
Raising his voice to be sure he was understood, not simply by the driver but by his wife too, Sten said, “Just drive.”
The first thing he did when he got back aboard and passed through the gauntlet of rhapsodically smiling greeters, puffers, porters, towel boys and all the rest of the lackeys who were paid to make you feel like Caesar returning from the Gallic wars every time you set foot on deck, was step into the shower. He should have deferred to Carolee, should have let her have first shot at it—and he would have under normal circumstances, but he was too wrought up even to think at that juncture. He’d thrown some money at the cabbie while she stood there on the pavement fooling with her hat and bag, then he took her by the arm and marched her up the gangplank and into the elevator and on down the hall to their cabin, impatient with everything, with her, with the lackeys, with the card key that didn’t seem to want to release the lock—and was this the right cabin? He drew back to glare at the number over the door: 7007. It was. And the card did work. Finally. After he’d tried it backwards, forwards and upside down and angrily swatted Carolee’s hand away when she’d tried to help—and why, amidst all this luxury and pampering, couldn’t they manage to code a fucking key so you could get into your own fucking cabin you were paying through the teeth for? That was what he was thinking, cursing under his breath, but then the light flashed green, the door pushed open and before Carolee could pull it shut he was already in the bathroom, stripping off his putrid shirt and sweaty shorts to thrust himself under the showerhead and twist both handles up full.
He must have stayed under that shower for twenty minutes or more, he who was always so conscious of wastage at home, who would bang impatiently on the bathroom door when Adam was a teenager and showering six times a day, who recycled and bought local and composted every scrap left on every plate in the house. But not now, not today. Now he needed to wash himself clean of the dirt of this godforsaken shithole he should never have come to in the first place. He lifted his face to the spray. Soaped up. Let the shower massage him, soothe him, coax him down off the ledge he’d been perched on ever since the bus had pulled into that mud lot. He was showering, all right? Was that a crime? When finally he did emerge, Carolee brushed by him without a word and locked the door behind her. An instant later she was in the shower too, the muted hiss of the water intimate and complicit.