Photo by Craig Carlson

The S.S. Azure Seas looks like a Love Boat story on this recent Monday afternoon. A bride and groom have just stepped from a black limo. White veiling shades her cheeks and blows out in the breeze off the choppy Pacific, past her narrow shoulders. She turns to the groom and smiles. Her nosegay flutters. These two are among the passengers queuing up in the reception area along Pier 93-A, Port of Los Angeles, in San Pedro. The Azure Seas soon will take them south to San Diego, then Ensenada, then back to San Pedro — four days and nights of a floating honeymoon.

Luggage stacks up, clerks take citizenship declarations, passengers select dinner sittings. Then, up the plank. At the ship’s gate the photographer snaps his flash. No time to stop, arrange features, or pose. Down hallways to the cabin, behind the steward, who switches on the lamp, bathroom lights, bedside radio, who presents champagne and two glasses, then snaps, turns, and leaves. The cabin’s built-in shipshapeness is decorated with white walls, blue carpeting, and orange spreads across which blue gulls, picking up carpet color, scatter and fly. The bed is firm.

Departure from San Pedro

Photo by Craig Carlson

At 3:15 p.m., in the Cafe Miramar, a 200-seat room in the ship’s aft, complete with bar, dance floor, tables and chairs, the bride and groom, Rick and Rita, married two hours earlier, host their reception. The ship’s captain, Dimitrios Mylonas, dark-bearded, forty-ish, shakes hands with bride, groom, and numerous guests. As a piano-bass-drum trio plays ‘‘Evergreen," the groom twirls the bride onto the dance floor. Her long skirt flares out, swirls in a half circle. The guests beam and cheer. The bride’s mother, a slender blonde, drops back her head to keep tears from running, dabs her eyes. Bride tosses nosegay; groom flings garter. A Love Boat story.

Twice a week this ship, 604 feet long and seventy-eight feet wide, pulls away from Pier 93-A and heads south. Fridays the Azure Seas sails directly to Ensenada, stays there through the night, and drifts slowly back up the coast in time to dock again in San Pedro early Monday morning. Just a few hours later, the ship is ready to go again, this time sailing first to the Broadway Pier here in San Diego, where she docks Tuesday morning, stays the day, leaves in the evening, sails to Ensenada, and docks amid the fishing boats. Thursday the Azure Seas begins a lazy cruise back up the coast and puts into port Friday morning. A few hours to reorganize and the cycle begins once again. The mass of passengers come and go, on and off the ship, Mondays and Fridays, like a surging tide; they pay from $375 (lowest cost of the short cruise) to $695 (long cruise, in the “Owner’s Suite”) per person to be among 750 others who will drink and gamble and dance and romance on the high seas.

Captain's cocktail party

Photo by Craig Carlson

On this day in February, 500 passengers form dockside. By five o’clock the curdle of clouds high above turns apricot, and people lie back or sit upright on deck chairs; they huddle at the rail, stroll the decks. Bouquets ruffle, corsages quiver. From the pier those staying behind on fry land wave hankies, hands, bob balloons. The wedding party tosses confetti streamers.

Passengers’ ages range from the twenties, especially among the dozen sets of newlyweds, to a great-great-grandmother in her nineties, wheeled by her seventy-year-old daughter. The majority are between midforties and late sixties. All of them look, sound pronouncedly lit up and lively. Smiles and glances between couples dominate, though sadness shades some faces. But at five that first afternoon, while the oompah-band tunes drift :ross decks, and waiters pass glasses adorned with tiny pink parasols, and confetti streamers drift like pastel corkscrews, almost no face does not laugh. And when the trombone, trumpet, bass viol, tenor sax, and snare drums root-a-ti-toot Sousa, a smile takes up the better part of every face. A red-haired woman with a pale chest in low-cut black says to her companion at the rail, “Le jazz hot, huh?” And he nudges, grins, and replies, “Par-tee time. ...”

Stateroom 537

Photo by Craig Carlson

The band revs up higher with "The Marine Hymn.” Heels up at the end of deck chairs, feet wriggle time. “Caissons go marching along” segues into “Anchors Aweigh.” The ship’s whistle reverberates, white ropes fall to shore, the gangway lifts, and brass bolts clank, setting the gate closed. At 5:05 p.m. the Azure Seas moves out. The vessel’s four steam turbines set the two propellers going about sixteen revolutions per minute. The deck vibrates. “I can feel it,” the pale-chested redhead says, hands at waist, “clear to here.”

The prow’s cut raises a flutter of gulls. A waft, briny and brisk, lifts up along decks, sprays the ship with smells like those from the shell of a just-opened oyster. The pier building recedes. “Go immediately to your cabins. Put on lifejackets. Return to muster stations,” passengers are told over loudspeakers. Orange jackets turn those assembled into a huge flock of robins. “Women and children go first,” the drill captain instructs. At the retort “I thought women’s lib changed that,” the captain winces.

Life jacket drill

Photo by Craig Carlson

A red whistle hangs from each lifejacket. Carl, in his seventies, wearing an orange-billed cap, says, “This is a great whistle. I got one for all three daughters and the wife, from the rape clinic in L.A. And this is a great cruise,” he tells the woman next to him. “I gotta like it. I’ve come four times. Best food anywhere.”

After drill, the cruise director croons over speakers, “Meet at the Rendezvous Lounge, Promenade Deck, the ship’s largest room, at 5:45, for a welcome-aboard introduction.”

The introduction is razzmatazz — high-kick chorines, clunker end-rhymes. The dapper cruise director, in navy blazer and gray trousers, announces when the casino opens, when the bands play, when the Disco Deck cranks up, when dinner is served. He jokes: getting fat, getting laid, getting drunk. The “Singles Mingle” is urged on parties of one. Titters drift around tables and drinks are ordered.

Ensenada

Photo by Craig Carlson

In the Cafe Miramar, where bridegroom Rick twirled Rita, white stick-on labels printed “I’m Single Let’s Mingle” get pressed onto chests. Fifty people, more women than men, aged twenty-five to Carl’s seventy, wander about and order drinks. A few look timorous. The pale-chested redhead says, "I’m not single, but I thought I’d look.” A game called “Cinderella” commences as women toss one shoe to a heap on the dance floor. Men search for its match. Couples, joined by shoes, then dance.

The best-looking dancers’ white labels read Jerry and Jody. Jerry, wearing a pale-blue suit, tanned and graying, bulky-shouldered, stops and starts Jody, turns her, dips her dramatically, her chestnut hair sweeping the floor tiles. He executes stop-times that win vocal approbation from those watching. A young freckle-faced woman, hair in a tousle — Kim, her label reads — screams out, “Arriba, Jody! Arriba, Jerry! ” Jerry, Jody, and Kim are a trio, all from San Diego.

Ioannis Dourambeis

Photo by Craig Carlson

Next game: five men sit on chairs, five women stand in front of them. Each woman is handed three balloons. The man opposite her takes the balloon, blows it up, puts it on his lap. The woman sits hard, pops the balloon, passes the next. Kim is opposite Jerry. They blow two and break both. The third, after hard hops, won’t pop.

Fifteen minutes later Kim walks between Jerry and Jody into the Caravelle restaurant, where breakfast, lunch, and dinner are served at formal first and second sittings. Kim grabs the maitre d’, pulls him to a chair near the door, sits down, puts the balloon on her lap, and squeals, “Hey, sit on it, baby!” His face stays flat. Waiters’ mouths drop. The maitre d’ bows, offers Kim his arm, leads the threesome through the dining room.

Above the clattering of plates and chatter from 400 diners, Kim’s bullfrog-deep laughter drifts. Short, low gurgles, gargles of mirth, hit alto and spread. Over the next four days, Kim’s laugh will sweep along one deck, then down, fore and aft. Passengers will greet her, and her laugh: “Hi there, Minnesota!”

Owner's suite

Photo by Craig Carlson

After dinner, after the floor show, dancers find ballrooms, piano-bar aficionados sit at the baby grand in the Mayfair, and gamblers hit the casino, which only opens when the ship reaches international waters, several miles offshore, and which offers lucky chances at slot machines, blackjack, roulette, and craps. At midnight the Disco Deck opens for business.

Jody, Kim, and Jerry are in the Cafe Miramar by 10:00 p.m., at a ringside table. The room fills with drinkers, dancers, groups of four and six from dinner. From her home in La Mesa Jody Roberts manages “Floral Enchantment by Jody,” a service that contracts with San Diego restaurants and nightclubs to send evening-dressed women around tables with baskets filled with roses, mums, leis. “I don’t sell roses,” Jody says, projecting her voice in whispers above the four-piece band, “I sell romance.” New Year’s Eve is the biggest night for the service, Valentine’s among the worst. “They’ve already bought flowers, before dinner.” Not infrequently, someone buys out a basket for his date or to offer a flower to every woman at a bar. Jody is Jerry Leslie’s younger sister; his home near Lake Murray is not far from hers. They’ve been dancing together since high school, “but if I told you,” Jerry says, “how long ago that was, my sister would kill me.” Jody met Kim Waite, who came to San Diego before Christmas from the Twin Cities to look for work, when Kim applied for a job at her flower service.

Skeet shooting

Photo by Craig Carlson

Jody and Jerry, who find cruises great fun, had booked this cruise with a friend of Jody’s. The friend broke her shoulder while skiing. When Jody mentioned to Kim she was leaving the next week for the Azure Seas, Kim said, “I used to watch The Love Boat every morning back home.” Jody invited Kim. “When I heard I was going to be on a boat like this,” Kim says, “and then this afternoon when I saw it, I said, ‘I can’t believe it. It’s a fantasy.’ ” About her run-in with the maitre d’, she laughs her bullfrog rumble and says, “I didn’t know he was a maitre d ’. I don’t know anything about status. But it was a good time. We came on this ship to party. If somebody ’s going to sit like a lump on a log, too bad.”

Skip Cunningham looks like Sammy Davis, Jr. He is one among a group of entertainers performing on board ship this month. One female singer, a comedian, a magician, four women dancers, and a male-female dance team round out the group of solo acts. Cunningham sings “Everything Must Change” in an open-throated, clear voice. He dances, his taps raising sparks. The crowd in the Cafe Miramar applauds loudly. A magician cuts off hands.

Shipside Ensenada

Photo by Craig Carlson

The ninety-year-old great-great-grandmother, a pink azalea pinned in ridges of white curls, is wheeled in by her daughter. “Sit,” Kim invites.

“Have a Baileys with cream,’’ she suggests to the great-great-grandmother. “You’ll like it.”

Necks have craned, heads turned, watching waiters wheel trolleys into the buffet area. The first night’s midnight supper showed off hams gilded by an ormolu of brown sugar syrup, smartened with pineapple and clove, steaming at each cut; Swedish meatballs; three-bean salad embellished with Spanish onion rings; potato salad under pimiento daisies; sweet gherkins, dills, black and green olives; trays of cheese, ham, turkey; a flourish of carrot and celery sticks set in parade through crushed ice all along the buffet line; bread, rolls; a 200-egg pyramid, peeled and paprikaed; watermelon, cantaloupe, strawberries; and pastries . . . layer cakes festooned and tasseled with frostings, pastilles, dragoons and cheesecakes under berries glazed to red patent sheen, petit fours. “They look like music boxes,” a woman says, laying a petit four on her plate.

Kim Waite, Jody Roberts, Jerry Leslie

Photo by Craig Carlson

After the buffet, couples drift back to the casino, to the piano bar, to bed, down to the Disco Deck. The small dark room throbs with Marvin Gaye’s “Sexual Healing.” The Korean waiter, when asked about his family, says, “Wife and children, mother and father are in Seoul. Next year, I go back.”

The stars twinkle. Cloud bands drift past the moon. No lights show from shore. The waves slap. Wind blows.

Tuesday, 6:00 a.m. outside San Diego, dew wets the decks. Cold sweat sits on railings, on the wooden boxes set along rails that read Do Not Throw Cigarette Butts Overboard. Water, slate gray before sunrise, rolls out flat, wrinkles, lies flat. Stripes of sky, between high narrow bands of cirrus, are gray. The Azure Seas dawdles, rocks.

Do Not Disturb hangs off cabin doorknobs, and the yellow-lit hallways are noiseless. A crewman swabs dew. One couple — she in sailor hat pulled over her ears, he in a plain blue baseball cap — walk- rapidly without looking at one another. Two joggers circle, go up ladders, down ladders. Their shoes thump the deck.

Passengers photo gallery

Photo by Craig Carlson

The Cafe Miramar, where twelve hours earlier the Singles Mingle elicited whoops and broken balloons, where the band lured dancers with love songs, where Cunningham’s taps sparked, is now dark. Black vinyl hoods the vibraphone. Light-emitting diodes glitter in a twenty-foot-wide smoked gray plexiglass circle above the dance floor.

Curtains cover windows and portholes. Stale cigarette smoke, liquor, beer smells, sit flat. One curtain, pulled back, hooks rasping in the still room, lets in first light. The light beams along chrome rims of chair backs, settles in a column across round wood-laminate tables, sofas, printed carpet, and stops at the bar.

Coffee, sweet rolls, and cereal will be served, buffet-style, at 6:30. Waiters talk low in a language or languages not English. They spread out trays, bowls, plates, cups, cream and sugar, lemon slices, Danish pastries, muffins, grapefruit halves, a three-foot-wide crystal bowl of bananas, oranges, apples, green grapes. They lay out a bowl of butter pats on crushed ice, containers of yogurt, bowls of jelly.

Photo by Craig Carlson

The morning people, on deck by 6:15, gaze to sea, sky, to gulls, to one another assessingly. Every few minutes one looks through portholes on doors into the buffet, watching for coffee pots. When coffee comes, its aroma dominates sea and engine odors, the men’s Bruts, English lavenders. Talk becomes louder, and laughter punctuates the air. “We turned in early,” one freshly-coiffed woman says to a sweatsuit-garbed couple. “The bed just looked so good.”

Bob, who is married and in his late-thirties, manages an Alpha Beta store. He stands outside the Miramar in his gray Nike sweatshirt every morning but the last, smoking Winstons and waiting for coffee. “I came on this cruise to get away. My wife’s asleep. This is the best time of the day. I’m a night person and a morning person. When I was a produce manager, I’d go to sleep in the banana room for forty-five minutes. I could get up early, stay up late that way.” Bob has been in the grocery business for twenty-one years. “It’s changed,” he says, “but in the last two years is the biggest change. Eighty percent is due to the economy and twenty percent to concern for health. We have one eighteen-foot shelf, just for salt-free food. But this is great," he says, his right hand, glittering with a pave diamond, gesturing out toward the west, “just to get away.” Pete, sixty-five, heavy set, red marble cheeks, chain-smokes Pall Malls lighted with a Zippo. He rubs back creamy, wide-set waves above his ridged forehead and talks about three heart attacks and his wife, “back home running the business in L.A. Hell, she does it better than I ever did. Now I play golf and come on these. I’ve been on two already this year, and I’m scheduled for two more. I get up at five, six o’clock at home, crush my goddamn Shredded Wheat, go to the golf course, drink a Bloody Mary. I’m an a.m. drinker. The wife’s a p.m. drinker. We do our own thing. But I need a woman to cook for me, even if the romance is gone. I like cruises,” he says. "You don’t have a radio or the TV to forecast your day. You don’t know what you have. So I say to myself, ‘It’s just like every other goddamn morning, I hope.’ ”

Sun shines, full out, at nine, as the Azure Seas pulls into its San Diego dock. A brochure suggests the zoo. Sea World, the Wild Animal Park, Seaport Village. Half the passengers disembark, half go up to the pool deck.

Jerry stretches on a deck chair near the pool. It’s almost noon and the sky is clear. Sweat glistens on his body, and he says, “I am a little shaky today. . . . The Love Boat did wonders for the cruise business, on both coasts.”

This makes Jerry’s twenty-third cruise. Fifty-three now, he has three grown children, six grandchildren, and a hundred-year-old grandmother. He was married thirty-three years; his wife died last year. “We did most of those twenty-three cruises together.”

The first night out Jerry “played blackjack, danced. We used to go to Las Vegas three or four weekends a year for a helluva long time, and I’ve had very good luck. I’m a pretty good gambler with their [the house’s] money, but I don’t press my luck. I just broke even last night.”

Kim, perky for someone who danced until three and wandered the decks until five, asks the poolside waiter, “Could I have something without booze, like ice water?” Kim was married at sixteen and has two daughters, eight and five. “When times got hard in the Twin Cities and I couldn’t get work,” she says, “I came West.” She now lives in Rancho Bernardo. “I’ve done more in the three months I’ve been in California than I’ve ever done in my whole life. I’m a hick, I tell people. But I like to party. I like to see people have a good time. I always go for the beginning and stay to the end." Jody, half asleep on the next deck chair, sits up, rubs her brown arms with coconut-scented lotion, and says, “You sure do!”

The way down from the pool deck to the Cafe Miramar leads past the gym. Two men talk as they work out with pulleys. The room smells of sweat, aftershave, bourbon.

Out on Broadway Pier, the Azure Seas, posed against city buildings and blue sky, looks particularly white, trim, tidy. Visitors and passengers and crew walk up the plank onto the ship, and down, heading to Broadway and into downtown San Diego. Two crew members, address books open, stand talking on pay phones.

Broadway Pier, with its bushes, palms, park benches, pay telephones, water fountains, and public bathrooms open from 6:00 a.m. to 10:00 p.m., offers a refuge for street people. A man in his late twenties, jeans legs tied under his knees with bandanas, sits on a concrete bench looking up at the Azure Seas. He holds a plastic sack, tied in a knot, filled with heels of bread. He mutters, coughs, spits. An elderly, shaky man sits at the bench’s other end. “So the Queen of England’s coming,’’ he says to the younger. “I seen her twice on TV. She’s mighty ugly.’’ The younger man shifts two benches over. “I had me a yacht, in Australia, yes I did,” the old man tells the air. “A big one. Used to sail her right into here, yes, sir.”

The captain may be king of the ship, but the chief engineer, who holds the same maritime rank and wears the same four stripes as the captain, “keeps anything with a motor running,” says the Azure Seas' chief engineer, loannis (“They call me Johnny . . .”) Dourambeis, in strongly accented and eloquently spoken English. “Refrigerators, clocks, the engines, the icemaker in the bars, the AC-DC, the plumbing, the electric mixers . . . everything.” There are twenty engineering officers, Dourambeis says, all Greek. Greek is the language spoken in the engine room of the Panamanian-registry Azure Seas; it’s “the language of the engine room,” Dourambeis grins. Men of other nationalities working there — Korean, Mexican, Anglo — learn enough Greek to get by. The engineering officers’ homes are in Greece. They live aboard ship, leave occasionally for one or two hours, and are on duty twenty-four hours a day. They return to Greece for six weeks to two months every six or seven months.

Dourambeis stands, in midafternoon, at the Broadway pier, looking at his ship. A big man through shoulders, chest, and stomach, and short, with generous features that change rapidly, and wide brown eyes that sparkle with topaz flecks, Dourambeis wears white snap coveralls except when he joins the captain’s table. Then he dresses in tuxedo, studs, cufflinks, starched shirtfront, black patent shoes.

On a day much like this sunny and warm Tuesday in San Diego, he recollects, when he was chief engineer for the S.S. Emerald Seas, his ship was in Key West. At dockside he recognized a face. “But I knew I had never seen the face on board my ship. I see tens of thousands on these, and this face, I knew I had seen somewhere else. I wanted to find out where. My curiosity was terrible. The man walked up to me. He asked, ‘Are there tours of this ship?’ and I said, because I was so haunted by wondering, ‘I will take you through.’ 1 did. Then as we walked back out onto the dock, we introduced ourselves. I say, ‘I am the chief engineer,” and he says, ‘Oh, and you took the trouble to show me through,’ and then he says, ‘I am Tennessee Williams.’ So that was why I knew his face, whose plays are great plays that I go to see in New York, great plays like our plays in Greece.” Then Dourambeis reads off the names of Greek playwrights: Aeschylus, Aristophanes; he reads the titles of the great tragedies: Agamemnon, Choephoroi, Eumenides. He talks of “my great hero, Kazantzakis,” and then begins to trace the Greek etymology of English words.

Dourambeis was bom in Skiathos, a small island in the Aegean Sea, in 1931. At twenty-two he joined the Greek Navy, at twenty-five he went on a Belgian ship as a junior engineer. In 1963 he began eight years with the Eastern Cruise Lines on the S.S. Evangeline, then in 1966 went to that line’s S.S. Emerald Seas, and now is chief engineer for the S.S. Azure Seas. Dourambeis gets home to Athens twice each year, telephones his family several times a week. He has two daughters and one son, and his wife, he says, “makes my ouzo.” He is buying an apartment building in Athens. When he gets old, he says, his son and daughters can all live near him then, if they want.

“Love Boat” love, he says, has changed in twenty years. “Not so much romance, not so much holding hands. It wasn’t like this when I began. People then, oh, they made so much love. They sleep on decks, holding hands, smiling. They dance, so beautifully, so gracefully. They waltz. The women, they dress beautifully. Now there is no more joy. People have so many problems now. They have so much more catastrophe. Twenty years ago, there was more emotion, more deep feeling. In my country, we have so many kinds of love. We have philia, the love between brothers and sisters and friends. We have eros, the love of romance, of sexual feeling. We have agape, spiritual love. Now there is not, anymore, here, this deep feeling in love.”

Dourambeis has met Jeraldine Saunders, the woman who wrote the original book. The Love Boat, and he has, in his cabin below deck, a signed copy. He says, ‘‘There are no stories in her book about the chief engineer.” The Love Boat, a romantic TV comedy seen by more than 20 million people each week, follows a dramatic formula first used 2500 years ago in Greece. The plot has changed little since then. Estrangements and problems are overcome by love. Reconciliation and resolution mark the happy endings. By Shakespeare’s time the places where romantic comedy unfolds are typically forests or islands, places at a distance from the quotidian world. Forest, island, the ship in The Love Boat, are posited as a better and ideal world, inspiring to and informing the real world, but not as a utopia, a fantasy world that can never be. The happy endings of romantic comedy, and The Love Boat, do not so much impress audiences as true, but as desirable, as how things ought to be. Romantic comedy’s finales, like The Love Boat's, are celebrated with weddings, nuptial banquets, community feasts. Real life, everyday existence, “Monday,” it is hinted, will begin again after the curtain rings down, but it will then be a life redeemed by this holiday time-out, transformed to something better. As many characters in the plot as possible are included in the happily-ever-after. “Tragedy excludes. Comedy includes,” one literary critic writes.

Against the blue of the sea, the Baja coastline, under moon and stars — sailing so far out no lights from land can be seen, on a white ship that looks small on the vast Pacific — The Love Boat, with a plot whose turn of the screw is love, solves problems that niggled in Aristophanes’ time, in Menander’s, in Shakespeare’s.

At 4:00 p.m. the ship’s gate locks. The Azure Seas begins to roll, its engines to haul. At the dock, the shaky old man waves the ship good-bye with a gray hat. San Diego’s taller buildings take on sun and glow. A passing sailboat toots. Sun sets on massing cumulus, turns the white a custardy pink, a rosy clabber, beneath which copper-colored narrow shreds drift. “It’s your typical West Coast sunset,” a man says, reading Sophie’s Choice. “Pretty.”

At 6:15 p.m., the captain’s reception opens in the Rendezvous Lounge. Women are urged “to enjoy wearing your best,” and men “to wear dark suits, a tie, a tuxedo, if you wish.” Kim, Jody, and Jerry sit in the Cafe Miramar, drinking, waiting for the snaking line to the captain to shorten. Jody, bare-shouldered in a shimmery silver-gray gown, says, “Ready to go again!” and Kim, laughing, agrees. Jerry, who says he likes to dress up, wears a burgundy crushed-velvet dinner jacket. “I won it,” he says, “in a poker game.”

From the stage inside the Rendezvous Lounge, an orchestra plays “My Love Is Here to Stay,” then “A Pretty Girl Is Like a Melody.” The tunes mix with small talk, glasses clicking, ice against crystal. Two hundred fifty or so passengers are seated, on sofas, at tables, along the bar. Another 250 to 300 are still in line. As each passenger enters, the captain shakes hands. The ship’s photographer snaps a picture. “I’ll buy mine,” one passenger says, “to keep people from looking at it.” The pale-chested redhead resurfaces. Asked where she’s been keeping herself, she says, “The casino. Then, bingo. Somebody won $137. I’m gonna say ‘Hi’ to this captain, eat my dinner, and get right back.’’

After dinner Dourambeis, spruce in his tuxedo, looks across the Cafe Miramar toward blonde Marilyn, sitting on a bar stool, long legs crossed at the ankle. “A woman alone,” he says. “It makes me so sad.”

“No,” Marilyn says, flipping back heavy blonde hair, ‘ ‘I didn’t come here to meet a man. You can’t make that happen. I look at these couples,” she gestures toward tables, “and I don’t see so many sparks flying. Then I look at some couple holding hands under the table and I think, ‘Why not me, Lord?’ But I got on a career track. If I let up, I lose out. I was talking to the third purser this morning. She’s cruised five years. ‘It’s a good place,’ she told me, ‘for reflection. But you really have to know who you are.’ Then she talked about purple sunsets over the Persian Gulf. ...”

On these four-day cruises, it is better to be in love, or compatible, to have your problems solved. If you are alone, shy, and don’t have the easy gregariousness needed for Singles Mingles, then it hurts to see couples holding hands and doting on one another’s eyes. People who don’t get along, that shows too. Even with all the shipboard action, many couples look weary of one another by lunchtime, and sharp words, spoken softly and in haste, escape the attempt to hide them.

Ensenada, seventy-five miles down the Baja coastline from San Diego, hoves unto view by sunrise on Wednesday morning. Joggers make rounds. Morning coffee drinkers peer into Cafe Miramar portholes, waiting. Tin roofs dot low coastal hills, turn yellow as sun rises. Holes open up in heavy clouds, and an azure sky shows.

At breakfast in the Caravelle, two couples, buttering blueberry muffins, practice counting in Spanish. “I’ll never remember,’ ’ a thirtyish blonde, a retired PSA stewardess, tells her table companions. “They’re pretty honest, making change,” the man across from the blonde says, “and in our terms, it’s not that much money anyway. I tell my wife here, ‘So what if you lose a couple of bucks in the fray? It’s all part of the game.’ ”

“The clothes, the blouses especially, look good when you get them, but they don’t wash. So if you buy a dress,” his wife tells the blonde, “take it to the dry cleaners.”

When the purser’s assistant walks behind the reception desk at nine o’clock, a dozen passengers are already waiting to ask questions. She hands out maps of Ensenada, explains the rate of exchange, marks on one map her favorite seafood restaurant, and says, “Well, I’ve never suffered any ill effects after eating there.” By 9:30 twenty passengers walk down the plank to beige Dodge vans, waiting to take them on the fifteen-minute ride to Ensenada.

By 10:30 the Azure Seas' passengers greet one another on Ensenada’s narrow sidewalks. Kim and Jody shop for Kim’s daughters and for a dress for Kim to wear that night when she sings in the ship’s talent show. The violinist from the ship’s mariachi band, which plays poolside and strolls through the Caravelle at dinnertime, is buying pink-frosted cakes in a bakery. Jerry walks to Hussongs’. "I hate to shop,” he says. “I could play golf, but I’d rather drink Cuervos.”

It’s lunchtime, and parties are returning to the ship carrying Kahlua, outsize sombreros, blankets, baskets, pinatas. Thirty people in the theater watch Paul Newman in The Verdict. The women who will perform Polynesian dances at the talent show practice in the Rendezvous Lounge. Kim meets with Steve, the ship’s pianist, to run through “Country Roads.” “If Steve says I shouldn’t go on,” Kim says, “I won’t.” Jody says, “You’ll be great.”

Rick and Rita, the newlyweds, sit in the Cafe Miramar, talking. "We had the ceremony in the Wayfarer’s Chapel and the reception here. Everything was done for us," Rita says. “We thought a shipboard reception would be nice for our guests.”

“It was different,” Rick says, “not the usual VFW hall thing, and nice to wave good-bye and not have to catch a plane.”

The couple met in 1972. “We’ve been together for eleven years,” Rita says, “so we didn’t rush into anything. We met at work in L.A. I was a vault teller and he was my supervisor.” They agree it was love at first sight, “or attraction at first sight,” Rita explains.

“I noticed her immediately,” says Rick, “and she claims she noticed me.

“I used to get large cash shipments,” Rita adds, “and I’d have him come in to verify them.”

Rita is regional vice president in charge of five branches of a savings-and-loan corporation. Rick is a banker with a large commercial house. “It’s been nice to wait this long,” Rita says.

“We’ve devoted our energies to our careers, and I’m not sure we’d have had that energy if we’d married earlier.”

“We’ve had lots of fun gambling, and we’re a little bit ahead. They’ve got slot machines, blackjack, craps,” Rick says. Most people, the couple explains, place two-dollar bets, but “some were putting twenty-five to fifty dollars on a hand.”

At 5:00 p.m. the gangplank goes back up. The ship starts the slow, nonstop cruise back toward L.A. The horizon looks rosy. The ship rips open scents of sea grasses, seaweeds, fish. The prow cuts the green swells. Three passengers, leaning against the rail on the Promenade Deck, lift champagne glasses, toast the falling sun.

Passenger talent shows are cruise tradition. Some come prepared. Others, like Kim, see Passenger Talent Show Wednesday Night, then sign up. By nine Wednesday night, the Rendezvous Lounge is crowded. The cruise director patters. Kim’s hand shakes. She drinks water, looks to the lap of her new pink dress. Her profile sets determinedly. “I wish I didn’t need these,” she says of the lyrics she has written out on ship stationery.

The director calls, “Kim.” She walks onstage, turns, faces the darkened room, stage lights staring up at her, spots pouring down onto the white flower in her shining hair. “. . .Country roads, take me home, to the place I belong ...” She does not lose a word and sings out to Jerry, to Jody who kneels at the sidelines, snapping flash-cubes. The audience claps exuberantly. “That’s right, Minnesota,” a man calls out, rousing more applause. Sitting back in her chair, Kim is quiet, while Tahitian dancers perform, an Italian aria is sung, and love songs drift by on indifferent voices.

By eleven that evening, after the talent show, the faces of the four couples at a table in the Cafe Miramar turn grave. The couples are all wearing jogging suits and cardigan sweaters; they are all over sixty. They talk about the change in love, in marriage. ‘‘They don’t work at it,” a woman says, ‘‘not like we did. It never occurred to me I could get out of this.” She touches her husband’s arm. Murmurous laughter travels around the table.

‘‘Before they say, ‘I do,’ ” her husband says, “they are already thinking about divorce, about ‘Well, what if?’ Our oldest son got married, twenty-four years old and out of college, good job, had two kids, and ten years later got divorced. My God. ‘We’re still friends,’ he tells us. ‘She’s the mother of my sons, isn’t she? ’ and then he tells his mother here, ‘We still go out to dinner.’ What I want to know from him is why, if they’re still friends, they aren’t still married? I thought that was it, you know, staying friends. But not now, they want this constant oom-pah, oom-pah, this fly me to the moon, or it’s no good anymore.” The six people look down onto the pink paper parasols from drinks lying around the table. The band plays, ‘ ‘After the loving, I’m more in love with you . . .I’ll sing you to sleep, after the loving. The love on your face is so real it makes me want to cry.” Nobody at the table talks.

“Cheer up, guys,” another of the women says, lifting her glass. Her husband motions over the red-jacketed waiter, who has stood nearby, twirling the tray on his index finger. “We’re working on number thirty-nine,” he says after the round of drinks is ordered, “and taking one day at a time, waiting for the big one, number fifty. We’ve got good years ahead. I know it.”

In the galley, midmoming Thursday, two men kneel on the brick floor and chip an eagle from ice for that night’s farewell dinner. The galley, says the assistant steward, “is within two hours of being a twenty-four hour operation.” The noise is terrible: clashing, thudding, clanking pot lids and pans; spoons whacking against metal bowls; clattering electric mixers three times the size of those used in home kitchens, mixing egg whites for that night’s baked Alaska meringues; the whir and slap of ventilation fans; whining fluorescent light hum; dishwashers rumbling and glasswashers rumbling at a higher pitch; dough mixer lugging and straining. The lights set into the low ceiling give a silvery sheen to stainless steel surfaces on work carts, counters, stovetops, kettlesides, sinks; they make silver moons of the bottoms of the pots hanging from pothooks. Some forty men, dark-skinned and small, from Jamaica, Honduras, the Philippines, Greece, Australia, the Fiji Islands, from all the countries in Southeast Asia, dressed in white jackets and white caps, their hands in see-through latex gloves, move quickly, quietly across the red brick floors. Aromas, magnified many times by the quantity of food, rise separately out of each area, into a column, then mix. On the stoves potatoes boil for that night’s potato salad. Ten feet away onions are chopped, and garlic. Another two feet away, lemons and oranges, grapefruit and pineapple are peeled and sliced. At the far end bread bakes, yeast dough rises, sponge cakes are being slid from oven trays.

“We prepare over 30,000 meals weekly,” the assistant steward says, talking above the kitchen clatter from the desk inside his small office. The walls are lined with menus, staff schedules, recipes, calendars put out by food suppliers. “That’s 4000 meals daily, not including deck service, such as tea and cakes, morning bouillon, afternoon tea, sandwiches and snacks served in cabins. We make over 4000 canapes from scratch every week. Some ships use catering services, but we do everything here. No microwave ovens. We have eighty-two galley employees who work around the clock. That includes our own bakery staff. Everything from bread, Danish, dinner rolls, cheesecakes, pies, layer cakes, muffins, to birthday cakes. Very few canned or prepared foods are used aboard. Down below now, we are redoing our 9700 square feet of provisions stores, which houses ten walk-in refrigerators about the size of an average bedroom. We’re doing that to enable the ship to go to entirely fresh fruits and vegetables that are in season. The majority of foods we purchase — meat, produce, dairy — is all fresh now, and all of it comes from U.S. ports.

“Then, in addition to passenger service, for our crew we prepare many special dishes. We sometimes have thirty-one different nationalities working aboard. So at any given time we may be serving Indian curries, Italian, Filipino, Jamaican, Spanish, Honduran, Mexican food, and of course American hot dogs and hamburgers. We use 2000 pounds of rice weekly for the crew alone. I eat on both sides. You’re here seven days a week, you get tired of the passenger menu, which is the same every week, with changes made for what’s in season.

“A week’s shopping list for full-capacity voyages costs approximately $70,000.’’ That lists reads: 2200 pounds New York steak; 800 pounds ground sirloin of beef; 2400 pounds prime ribs of beef; 800 pounds pork; 450 pounds lamb; 750 pounds bacon; 580 pounds ham for breakfast; 2900 pounds poultry; 1350 pounds lobster; 224 gallons of milk and cream; 1680 dozen eggs (that’s more than 20,000 eggs); 187 gallons of ice cream and sherbet; 700 pounds butter; 238 cases fresh fruit; 8900 pounds fresh vegetables.

Kim, hauling her oversized sombrero, gets to the pool by 11:00 Thursday morning. The wind blows hard. The mariachi band plays. Kim tosses her hat in front of the trio, squeals, “Arriba! Arri-baa!” and dances circles around the sombrero.

Jody covers her bare legs with a blue towel. Jerry says, “I wouldn’t want to be young again. Too many pains. Too many dues.” He talks about having “been in love, twice. Once with a lady for thirty-three years, nowadays with a woman who lives in L.A. But it’s geographically impossible,” he says.

“She has a good job, and I’m too old, too set in my ways to sell a house, a business, to move away from my family.”

“I sang that song the first time a couple of weeks ago in a beer bar,” Kim says about “Country Roads.” “It was the first time I ever sang with a mike. I couldn’t hear myself, but everybody kept telling me I sounded great.” She says about the food on board the Azure Seas, ‘ ‘I couldn’t ever cook so much and have it turn out this way. At home I did all-day cooking. Homemade chicken noodle soup, roll out the dough and cut the noodles, stew the chicken. Homemade bread, cinnamon rolls, Parker House, finger rolls, I did it all.”

She shows pictures of two neatly dressed children. She left her girls with their father, from whom she was divorced, when she came West. “He could afford to feed them, and I couldn’t anymore. I want to get them out here, soon. But it would be nice, too, to go back home to the Cities and be somebody. I want to make a career for myself, be able to give my girls something.

“Times are very bad in Minnesota. My mother worked ten hours a day in the same place for nine, ten years. She worked all her life to feed us five kids. Then she got laid off and she can’t even find a minimum-wage job. When I was with my kids and the bills came around, my oldest kid’d get out her piggy bank, say, ‘Here, Mom, take what you need.’ It was all pennies, but it’s the thought that counts. Reagan’s taking from people on welfare to give more to those who already have more. People here on welfare don’t have the problems they have back home. In Minnesota, with the cold, electric bills are twice as high, gas bills are triple or double. It’s bad. There’s not a lot of high-class people like there are here in California. In Minnesota they’re just people who are down to earth, they just want food on their table. Reagan cuts them off. That’s wrong. Nancy Reagan’s sitting in that White House with $50,000 worth of goddamn china and we’re sitting here without a plate to eat off of. That turns my stomach. I think of the dresses she wears. I haven’t bought clothes since junior high. Until Jody bought me that dress yesterday, I never had a new dress.

“If I won a lottery tomorrow, I’d give a lot of it away. What I’d do is build what I’ve always wanted, an old-fashioned log cabin, with a big living room and a basement for a freezer with half a beef. The cabin would be set down in the middle of a forest of trees and some land you could keep two or three steers on, so your meat supply is always there. But it’s a fantasy, this boat. I can’t believe I’m here.”

The water is troubled, the sky turning green midaftemoon Thursday. In the Mayfair, the ninety-year-old great-great-grandmother sits, sipping tea from china cups. The cruise director and two assistants drink tea and plan the night’s farewell show. The light, coming through the Mayfair portholes, breaks up and shatters across the room as clouds pass fast over the four o’clock sun. Outside in a cul-de-sac next to the rail, a couple, drinking Bud and eating oatmeal cookies, watches the water. The wind picks up to fifteen knots. Deckmen move chairs, take in trays. Waves lift into three-foot-high curls, green-blue, then foam pale jade, then ivory, then form a white ridge, like the rough salt on the rim of margaritas, finally breaking and falling down into the current.

Dinner that night is lobster and steak. Every frill. The mariachi band strolls by tables, champagne corks pop. A line of fifty waiters carries trays of flaming baked Alaska into the quickly darkened dining room. “Ooooohs” fill the room, then applause.

Bags must be stacked outside doors by 6:30 on Friday morning. Dancers leave the dance floor earlier than on the past three nights, and fewer persons line up for the midnight buffet. Carl sits alone in a comer, his tray pulled up before him. “I’m getting my last meal of the day,” he says. Kim talks of getting ‘ ‘pictures of everyone we met on the cruise.” She says, “I’ve been making notes of everything we did. To remember.” “Tomorrow,” Jody says, “I need to see if my leis are in from Hawaii.” Jerry has a golf tournament on Saturday. He sighs. “These girls,” he says, indicating Kim and Jody, “sure can party.”

Friday morning, the clouds part, holes show in the sky. No joggers come out. The group of morning people fills out with near-strangers, dressed in suits, dark dresses, and high heels, crowding the dockside windows in the Cafe Miramar. A man in beige trousers, jacket, brown-figured tie, looks toward Los Angeles’ docksides and says, “There is no question, looking out there, that you are back in the US of A. There’s no comparison, anywhere, with this.” He turns to his wife, a small woman wearing navy blue, and says, “Let’s go down to breakfast. I’m going to eat one more meal before it’s back to lettuce and yogurt.” She leans into the window, gazes down into swirling water. “It’s over with,” he says to her. “Come on. Let’s go.”