When I drifted into the student lounge just after lunch, the table where I usually played cutthroat hearts was full. I was hunting for a girl I'd never met but whose picture in the student handbook I found attractive. It showed a great smile, alert eyes, a full head of light hair, and shoulders to die for. Her name was Stacy.
Casual inquiry told me that Stacy hung around the card game, but I hadn't seen her there. The same casual inquiry revealed that her parents were 1940s B-movie actors. Her father actually had his own series on television until last year.
She was sitting with two other girls off to the side. "How's the game going?" I asked. One of the girls, who apparently also watched the game, said "Ron's winning as usual and they don't have you to fleece." They seemed to know that I was a junior faculty member. I blushed but agreed that I needed to improve my game.
I introduced myself and asked them their names. Anne, Stacy, and Mary introduced themselves. Where are you from? Do you like the ship? Did you see the Bay of Naples when we were there? Did you know what Lord Byron said about the view? Mary was more chatty than Stacy or Anne, but Stacy picked up on Byron the poet and I took off on that. Anne lost interest and moved on, but Mary stayed.
"Anyone for a Coke and watch the volleyball game?"
"Have a ball, but it's boring," said Mary.
But Stacy was game. I made a show of trying to keep Mary with us, but she was adamant. Stacy and I got our Cokes at the commissary and found room on a deck hatch to watch the tanned bodies.
Stacy's mother had offered her the chance to take this student cruise, a half-year sailing to 17 ports in Europe, Africa, and the Americas, as a present for her nineteenth birthday.
A sophomore at UCLA, she was undecided about her major but liked literature, particularly poetry. She didn't know about Byron and Naples but she had read Byron, Keats, and Shelley.
"Let's go up on the sun deck," I said. "We're losing the rays here." It wasn't that there were fewer people on the sun deck, but they were more spread out, so the chance for prying ears was less.
Stacy told me about her parents and their divorce. She had a younger sister and they lived with her mother in a huge "bungalow" in the Hollywood hills. Her mother had a second husband, a professional horseman whom even I had heard of. Stacy liked to ride.
"Have you tried to find a place to ride in any of the ports?" I prompted.
"No, how could I?"
"You have to decide what you want to do. These cities have an amazing amount to offer. All you have to do is ask the Advance Director for advice. So what do you do in port?"
"I take the tour of the city with everyone else, then a couple of us go shopping and sightsee. We like to go to nice restaurants."
"You could do more."
"You mean go drinking with the surfer boys? No thanks."
"No, I'm serious. As I said, pick out something that interests you about each port before you get there. The Advance Director will check with the tour company to recommend some place where you can ride, for example."
"I never thought of that." She paused and looked at her feet. "You must think I'm an airhead."
"No you're not. But you have to push yourself to take advantage of this trip. Is it a question of money?" That was kind of blunt.
"No, mom gave me my own American Express card especially for this trip. I can get cash with it as well."
"All right. The next port is Piraeus, outside of Athens. Let's go over to the library and see what we can find."
The ship's library was really a joke. While there was a librarian, she didn't take it seriously and there was usually no one there. Its largest holding was of outdated bound copies of U. S. Chamber of Commerce pamphlets. But it did have some travel books on Greece.
The four guidebooks provided nothing about horseback riding anywhere near Athens. We sat next to each other at the reading table as we thumbed through the books. At one point our legs touched and she didn't pull away.
We gave up and left. The sun was going down and I asked her when her sitting was for dinner. As it turned out, she was not on mine. I urged her to find something interesting for her time in Athens, that it was a shame to waste the experience.
I ran into Stacy in mid-morning the next day. As we walked along the deck I asked if she had given any further thought to our conversation.
"Yes, I did. Do you know why the Parthenon is such a wreck?" I had a pretty good idea but didn't let on.
"Nope. Do you?"
"Because the Ottoman Turks used it for a powder magazine and it blew up on them."
"You mean it just didn't fall into disrepair?"
"No. During the wars between the Christians and the Muslims they fought over Greece. Athens was occupied by the Turks and the Venetians bombarded the city. One of their bombs hit the Parthenon and ignited all the gunpowder there."
"That's really interesting. So are you going to go see it?"
"I'd like to," she said, and looked down at her feet.
"Let's go together. Game?"
"Yes, yes, that would be nice."
"C'mon, we can talk some more," and I walked toward the steps leading down to the deck where my cabin was.
Stacy hesitated, then followed me. I guided her toward my cabin, makinig sure she was the first through the various doors until we were at my cabin. I entered first, then motioned her inside.
"I'm sorry it's not more homey. They give the RA's inside cabins, but it's all mine." There were four bunks, three of which were fully made up and hooked upright to the wall. Housekeeping had made my bed. Aside from a sink, the only furniture was a built-in dresser with a closet above and a side chair.
I asked Stacy to take off her shoes and, like me, put them on the newspaper next to the door so that the road dirt didn't overrun the floors, which were seldom cleaned. I sat at the head of the bunk and motioned her to the only chair.
"Is your cabin any nicer?" I asked.
"Well, there are two of us, but only one top bunk, which is hooked to the wall, like yours. We've got a porthole where your fourth bunk is. We have two closets and dressers. And we've put some rugs on the floor, but they do get gritty."
"Yeah, I started taking off my shoes in college, because the snow and salt and sand just overwhelmed my dorm room. Dirt just makes a place feel, well, dirty."
I propped myself up with two pillows and lay back, facing her. I hoped she had done some more reading about Athens, but she wanted to talk about Byron's poetry from the Athens period of his life, where he wrote Don Juan, a long poem with enough erotic material to excite anyone.
After a while I began fidgetting, then sighed. "Stacy, would you pull the backscratcher out of my top drawer? I've got an unreachable itch." She retrieved it and walked over to me.
"Would you scratch right here," I said, rolling onto my belly and pointing to an inaccessible part of my back.
She used the scratcher tentatively, starting lightly. "Over here. Yes, that's it. Oooooh good. Can you switch to your fingernails? It would feel nicer." I snuck a peek at her face and saw uncertainty. I said "Please" and she sat down on the edge of my bunk and ever so lightly touched my back with her nails.
"Oh, that's nice, scratch harder, you're really good, thank you," I said, and just let her go until she seemed to tire. Then I turned on my side to face her.
"You're terrific. I'm glad you came here."
"I like talking with you, Peter. You know so much and you've been all over. I'm too mousy for my own good, and I'm afraid I'll never get over it."
"There are some terminal cases on board, that's for sure," I said. "But you're made of sterner stuff. Look at your mother. She bounced back from a divorce and found real love. You have to take a chance sometimes to succeed. If you fear failure you won't succeed. It's amazing how many second chances you can have if you risk in good faith."
