Floyd's wife was drop-dead gorgeous. She had silky blonde hair and spoke with the force of conviction. Her adamancy managed to banish deeply entrenched convictions that may have been held by the opposite camp, namely those of a sexist nature for she quickly revealed herself to be an exalted member of and a dyed-in-the-wool advocate for the rights of women. Her husband, a New York cop, said little but saw much. Floyd did allow his little boyish grin to break through one evening when Joe had transgressed by addressing Deborah as Debbie. Throught the meal, Floyd persisted on calling her Debbie. Deborah could almost be heard to say we are not amused. In fact it was easy to see that she was royally pissed off. Deborah, a prosecutor, who sailed close to the wind, gave the impression that she actually enjoyed sending hardened criminals up the river. She was a gal who took no prisoners. Joe was not abashed. He smiled his inscrutable smile and continue oblivious to her icy stare.
However, it must be said that Deborah had initiated the conversation by asking Joe a pasta question. Joe had merely responded.
"You have to add the pasta slowly, Debbie, so that the water does not go off the boil, even for an instant. That was your problem."
That was not Debborah's problem. I was sure. To the rest of us, from that point on, Deborah was Deborah, even to Floyd. Can you believe it? To Joe, she was always Debbie. For whatever reason, Joe was somehow able to pull it off. None of us could fathom why and we certainly were not about to emulate him although we did admire his stance.
Joe was an enigma, if not to himself, certainly to us. We almost never saw him on deck during the day, which I might have mentioned or on shore excursions. On those rare occasions, when we did encounter Joe, he would skillfully evade our invitation to join us. Joe, it seems, was determined to uncover little about himself. Deborah, in spite of her holier than thou attitude, was much more open. We had learned that it would be unwise to break the law in the state of New York because we could incur the risk of being prosecuted by her. At least with Deborah, one knew where one stood. What we found most annoying that Joe did not bother to create a persona for himself so that we would know how to relate to him, for all of us are our history. With Joe, there were no benchmarks. Joe was just Joe. Take him or leave him.
This omission created a vacuum. We rushed in madly to create a profile for him, one that the FBI would have been proud to possess. We did not, for a single moment, consider Joe capable of anything more nefarious than possessing the fortitude to forego the decadence of the pastry chef's chocolate creations relished by cruisers of the Caribbean. The fact that he was also able to deny himself the subtle pleasure of crème caramel
strength of character that was simply beyond our powers of comprehension. Of course the fact that he never participated in shore excursion, invariably organized by Deborah or even similary arranged après swim luncheons justified our concern.
By the second evening out, Joe had become a writer, but ony, you understand, after he had ordered a dessert for us to share and had dutifully departed. Before that moment, he had been just Joe, Pasta King, from Toronto.
"He is travelling alone because he is busy gathering material for a book about the lives of the rich and useless," Sharon said.
"It is possible," Deborah agreed. "Did you notice his involuntary sneer when he sampled tonight's linguini sauce?" she asked in her most incisive witness-withering demanding tone.
By the next evening, Sharon had changed her mind. "Definitely, a world-class pasta chef," she said.
"I know," Sharon said the next evening over her tidbit of Joe's créme caramel, hardly before poor Joe's back had decently been turned. She leaned forward and in a stage aside whispered, "Jewel Thief."