Mermaids in Paradise: A Novel

by Lydia Millet

  “See, Chip,” I said, “this matters, because, Chip, people are out there thinking they have to pursue the happiness, like it says in the Declaration of Independence or whatever, they think it’s not only their right but like their job, Chip. See? They think it’s their job. Those poor fools think they have to be constantly pursuing it! Of course they fail constantly, too, because the problem is it can’t be caught, you have to make it yourself! You have to just fabricate that feeling out of thin air! You get it, Chip? You have to conjure it like a white rabbit!”

  “Uh-huh,” said Chip. “Definitely.”

  “So the pursuit thing is a fool’s errand! A fool’s errand, Chip! The rat race! The push for richness! The pressure for success!”

  “No, yeah,” said Chip, but he was fumbling with the strap on the back of my camisole, mistaking it no doubt for something else.

  “You make it, Chip! You make it!”

  “Come on, let’s get you up against that tree,” said Chip. “The bark’s not too rough, is it, honey?”

  “You decide to feel happy. Sure it’s fleeting, but you can do it whenever you want to! Joy, Chip! You make it up out of thin air!”

  “I’ll make something up,” muttered Chip.

  And so forth.

  Well, the particular, perfect angle of my clarity slipped away, as clarity tends to. You know the rest. But it was enough that I’d had it. I would remember, I promised myself. Out of thin air, I whispered, in my mind. Out of thin air.

  PARTY AFTERMATHS HAVE never sat well with me. At least in this case we didn’t have to do the cleanup ourselves, plus we were leaving two days later on our honeymoon, so we had that to look forward to. Still, waking up the morning after the wedding, hungover, with the task of saying goodbye to out-of-town guests hanging above our heads—I didn’t love it. I fortified myself with aspirin and water chased by a nice, fresh bagel and coffee; Chip elevated his mood with a brief voyage to some pseudo-Celtic kingdom populated by slutty forest nymphs strumming on dulcimers.

  They lived in treehouses, with wooden footbridges swaying between them. Impractical, you may say, but nymphs don’t give a shit about practicality. Chip defended the slut-nymphs, if I’m not mistaken, with his bow and arrow as they came under attack from swarthy brigands.

  After that, we hauled ourselves reluctantly into day. Soon we were driving, making the round of the hotels.

  This was how it would be, I figured, from now on—the two of us side by side, discharging obligations. I considered asking Chip if he was disappointed, this next morning, if he’d thought being married would be more like the half-naked wood nymph community, more like the piercing of brigands’ hearts, less like just being in the car, sitting there, seeing the other cars, passing buildings.

  Next I thought: Well, sure, but no need to force the issue.

  It struck me that we’d probably never see some of these out-of-towners again, since families meet for weddings and then the next time, after the wedding get-together, memorial services. I wondered which of our friends would fall by the wayside, about which of them we would find ourselves saying, ten years down the road, When did we last see Kevin/Dave/Krishnamurti? Wait—no way—was it at our wedding?

  Hard to tell who would fade out of sight. But odds were that someone would. Perhaps many.

  We left my great-aunt for last on the list of stops, since I didn’t want to go. I was ashamed of whatever I might have said to her in my drunken confession. I didn’t know her, and I was ashamed of that too, though I couldn’t say why—it wasn’t like she’d ever reached out to me either, except for the surprising move of coming to my wedding. Her name was Gloria; she lived in a city. Or town or state. Lewiston, possibly. She’d been married to my mother’s uncle. He’d been in commodities—seeds. Maybe feeds. Something with sacks of grain, but where you never see or touch them. She had a skin tag on her neck the size and hue of a purple grape.

  I preferred to call in an excuse and let her slip quietly away to LAX, but Chip is annoyingly decent about appointments: he has an “honor code.” To Chip, blowing off a great-aunt from Louisville was a failure of ethics; to me, not blowing her off was a failure of intelligence.

  Sober, it was going to be hard to think of conversation topics.

  “It’s really too bad,” I said to Chip, “that you can’t just be honest about this stuff. Like, why can’t I say to her: Aunt Gloria, we don’t know each other from Adam, and chances are you’ll die soon, right? What are you, ninety-one? Eighty-three?”

  I’m not that good with ages, once there’s a critical mass of wrinkles on a face it’s all the same to me.

  “And even if you don’t die shortly, we’re not going to see each other again because I’m not flying to Louisiana unless someone hijacks my plane. So let’s cut to the chase. What does it mean, really? This extended family thing? I mean why did you come? Why are you even here talking to me?”

  “Maybe if you don’t say that about her death coming,” suggested Chip mildly. “That might come off a little cold, I think. But you could maybe do the other part.”

  “Some people talk like that, don’t they? Some people have the guts to talk like that, I bet,” I said.

  “I don’t know if it’s guts,” said Chip.

  In my mind Aunt Gloria had turned into a bit of a battleax since the rehearsal dinner, judging me harshly for my indiscreet tales of black-plague-celebrating pseudo-bondage dens, but as it turned out she was a gentle bumbler. She said almost nothing of interest the whole time we sat awkwardly in her hotel room—once she looked for her bifocals for a painfully protracted five minutes, another time she offered us a dog-eared tourist brochure from a table. It was about an amusement park with giant bunny statues that celebrated Easter all year round, but Chip turned it over in his hands as though it were made of delicate filigree, nodding respectfully.

  After what seemed like an eon we walked her down to the lobby, where an airport shuttle van waited. She clutched her vinyl purse; Chip carried her luggage and tossed it up to the driver. Before she stepped in after it, she put out her hands and touched my shoulders, then cupped my cheeks. The hands were softly trembling, and when she smiled it was the saddest smile, and her eyes were watery.

  “You were the sweetest child,” she said.

  Then the doors folded closed and the van pulled away.

  GETTING ON THE airplane to the Caribbean I was nostalgic for the days of Eastern Airlines, how when I was a young girl, flying for the first time, the pretty stewardesses in frosted lipstick had smiled so much and been so kind to me. One of them had given me a plastic pin with wings on it, a cellophane-wrapped pack of cards for me to keep; she’d led me into the cockpit to meet the pilot, like a VIP. Those days were gone for sure—it was a wonder the surly flight attendants didn’t kick us in the shins as we boarded. One of them, a weak-chinned man with thinning hair, shot me a baleful look.

  I’d much rather have the frosted, buxom women, I thought. Did that make me a sexist? Was I some kind of gender traitor?

  “We’d get better service on a Greyhound, Chip,” I said.

  I’d been thinking how good Chip was, just good, ever since he’d made the right call on feeble Aunt Gloria. Chip was often correct, I was thinking, he often made the right call, whether by means of the cheerful optimism he always had, sound instincts or plain dumb luck. I felt a wash of terrible fondness for my tiny great-aunt, now—how often Chip showed me the good path, how often he took the edge off me.

  I’d started feeling downright grateful about the marriage arrangement, once my hangover was gone—almost as though I’d taken Chip for granted earlier, but now I wasn’t anymore. I say “oddly” because you’d think it would be the other way around: before the wedding, appreciation; after the wedding, complacency. But so far, the reverse seemed true. Chip held my hand as we sat there. I searched his face for signs of his own budding complacency, but didn’t find any.

  And as we waited for takeoff, the mid-sized aircraft stuffed to the gills,
tepid, fluorescent, with a kind of cattle-car vibe presiding, I almost understood—thinking back to air travel in the 1970s, when I was but a babe in the woods—my husband’s nostalgia for a fake-medieval wonderland of magical beings. It wasn’t the same deal, of course, my own stewardess memories being grounded more strictly in what many would call reality, but still, all at once the idea of a charming, lost past was resonating with me. Whether it was half-invented or cut from whole cloth, the point was: that other life, that other world of wonder and possibility, what a warm, golden glow it had.

  What a glow.

  II.

  HONEYMOON

  I’d never been to the Caribbean before. The closest I’d gotten to a tropical island was the Florida beaches, swarming with the retired and half-naked. But the British Virgin Islands were different. For one thing, seminude humans weren’t littering the sand; the turquoise bays were frequently deserted, the white sands smooth.

  I noticed right away that I liked it.

  As we motored in on a ferryboat from the airport, which was on a nearby island named Tortola, I pictured pirate ships anchored in the bay. In my mind’s eye I saw the pirates drinking rum in a carefree fashion on the shore, their Jolly Rogers rippling in the breeze, the great sails on their ships billowing. The sleeves of the pirates’ white shirts also billowed, fallen open over muscular chests. This was the kind of thing, I knew, Chip also liked to imagine—how dashing our fellow humans might once have been, in bygone days, even the criminals.

  Chip said there was good rum nearby—not far away grew the sugarcane, of whose byproducts that famous rum was made—and we would partake of it. From our resort, a former yacht club with cabins built onto a hillside overlooking the sea, we would visit the Baths, a boulder-strewn shallow-water grotto. We would swim and snorkel. We would receive pampering services. We would be drink swillers and food eaters.

  “This is what I was talking about,” I told Chip approvingly, as a servile-acting individual drove us over the resort grounds in a rickety golf-cart rig. Side by side in the back, we jiggled inertly like the human cargo that we were. “This is a honeymoon scenario!”

  “Whatever makes you happy,” said Chip, and smiled at me.

  It was a shame the whole world didn’t resemble this resort, I thought fleetingly as, still jiggling inertly, we passed the immaculate landscaping and fragrant flowers brimming from Japanese-influenced rock gardens—that would be nice. Was it so much to ask? How hard could it be? Yes, yes, there were some obstacles, but still—thinking of how the whole world didn’t look like this resort, I felt faintly aggrieved.

  The golf cart ascended a steep paved path and then halted in front of a scenic dwelling with wraparound covered porches and resplendent greenery.

  “Your cabin, sir,” said the servile individual to Chip.

  The manservant addressed his master, not me; he respected the hierarchy, the very reason for his job. Was there a difference between truly being servile and just pretending to be? I asked myself. Servility was the pretense of being a servant, wasn’t it, I answered me, but at the same time, you actually were a servant. The damn thing was the pretense of itself.

  I’d make a note of that conundrum, I’d bring it up to Chip when he was bored. There was the problem of service and servility, and then the problem of human cargo. Some people were paid to act servile, others paid out to be human cargo, the burden borne by the payee. Chip and I had paid for the privilege of others’ service; therefore, on the back of a golf cart, we sat and jiggled inertly.

  I thought of where the fat was, in this world, and particularly in our home country. In fact the fat was mostly settled on the poor people, the poor and the working class. The poor and the working class jiggle inertly, I thought, more than the middle-class people like Chip and me. We jiggle inertly on vacation, though neither Chip nor I is per se fat—still, what fat we do have jiggles, much as inanimate cargo shifts. In short we have some pretty inanimate qualities. In the past, the fat of the human world settled on kings, queens and a few wealthy merchants. But they didn’t have fast food back then. Fast food turned the fat balance upside down, at least in our country. In our country the rich and middle class are thin now and the working poor jiggle inertly—or no. The poor jiggle, but not inertly like the rich. The poor jiggle overtly.

  Plus also there’s the fact that, among the tragically, morbidly obese in our nation, especially the white people, many are also religious hysterics. There seems to be a link, statistically, between the obesity epidemic and the religious hysterics, morbid obesity and extreme right-wing politics, and then again between those politics and stupidity, or at least “low educational achievement.” What’s more, many of these aspects are also linked to what Chip liked to call Middle America. What can the meaning of this dark pattern be?

  I didn’t pretend to understand it—whether the hysteria was caused by the fatness or vice versa was a mystery to me.

  This is your honeymoon, I told myself. Try not to think of the fat tragedy. Try not to think of the thin tragedy either, don’t think of the starving millions or the young middle-class girls with self-loathing. Try not to think of tragedy at all, the vile bookends of the fat/thin tragedy. Don’t let it nestle in your mind there, as it tends to, curled cozy like a squirrel. When you go home, then you can think of tragedy. Plenty of time for that.

  No sooner had we settled ourselves in the beautiful rooms—where breezes wafted from huge French doors and there were enormous ceiling fans, on top of the natural seaside air currents, fashioned handily of picturesque woody fronds—than another servile professional entered. This one was female, bearing a tray upon which stood frozen drinks and a spray of gargantuan flowers. She walked sinuously in from the terrace, where the reeds of our palapa rustled in the wind, and Chip and I gazed at her like she was Eve in the Garden of Eden. Not in the sense of being tempted by the snake and bringing about the fall of man—no. More in the sense of embodying a primordial womanly grace, with her darkish, gleaming complexion and earthen-toned sarong. With her high cheekbones, bright eyes and regal bearing, she wore the servility lightly, as though it weighed nothing.

  I wouldn’t blame Chip, I thought, I wouldn’t blame him at all.

  But Chip had eyes mostly for me, as soon as he hefted his long-stemmed, fruit-adorned cocktail glass, trying not to flinch at its excessive femininity, and thanked the Ur-woman.

  It wasn’t that I felt like less of a woman, next to her; more, less of a human. She was the one who bore the burden, I was the one who jiggled inertly, and the burden looked better on her than the jiggle did on me.

  “Were we supposed to tip?” Chip asked after she left.

  “Yes,” I said, though it hadn’t occurred to me before. “Yes! We have to tip! And the other guy, too. We just insulted them, Chip, by not tipping. It’s like we slapped that beautiful woman right across the face.”

  We resolved to tip twice as hard next time we saw her—unless she was replaced by another majestic female being paid to act servile, which we hoped she wouldn’t be. We prided ourselves on loyalty.

  I wanted to ask Chip if he thought the fact that the whole world doesn’t look like a beautiful resort was just a question of money—grinding poverty vs. repugnantly excessive wealth. Was it just money, or was money not really the main problem? For instance, I often hear it said that people don’t starve because there’s not enough food in the world, they starve because the food’s not always in the right places. Is it the same way with beauty? Is there, in fact, plenty to go around?

  But we got involved in other actions, it was our honeymoon, after all, not some kind of policy debate forum, it was high time for fornication, so we got that out of the way.

  Or no, it wasn’t fornication anymore, I realized—we were married. Disappointing.

  I HADN’T THOUGHT of people, when I thought of our tropical-resort honeymoon, and the initial pure, scenic expanse of beach sands had encouraged me to continue not thinking of them. But as it turned out there were some
other people at the resort. And wherever there are people, Chip will talk to them.

  We’re not the same, in that regard. Chip possesses a wealth of interest in his fellow man, harbors a fascination with his own species, whereas I tend to see the prospect of small talk and tedium. It’s not that I don’t like people overall; I just like to personally select the ones I spend time with. I favor screening techniques that don’t involve random proximity.

  Chip’s more of an equal opportunity converser.

  Even before the first night rolled around—roaming the grounds as I napped and showered—he’d made friends with no fewer than five people including two couples: a same-sex and a homely. He sketched them out for me: they were two well-dressed men from S.F., broadcasting an artsy quality, one in home furnishings and the other in the independent film industry; a spinster biologist specializing in reef fish; and a quiet, nerdly heterosexual duo celebrating some anniversary, whom Chip took under his wing no doubt because they were, as he put it, “from the Heartland.”

  “What’s the Heartland, Chip?” I asked him right off, because the moniker has always puzzled me.

  “The place in the truck and beer commercials,” said Chip promptly. “Where they like New Country, isn’t it? Those guys that sing about proud to be an American, where at least we know we’re free?”

  “It’s the at least part that’s genius,” I said.

  “It’s kinda defensive,” agreed Chip.

  “But anyway, I don’t think that’s the definition,” I demurred. “I mean some people in New Hampshire like New Country too. They like it a lot, I bet.”

  “Yeah, huh,” said Chip. “I bet they do.”

  “But New Hampshire’s not the Heartland, is it?”

  “That’s true,” said Chip. “Or—I don’t know. Can you have a Heartland that’s kind of spread out, maybe?”

  “Maybe the Heartland is spread out,” I mused dreamily.

  “Sweetie, you’ll like talking to them. You’ll have fun. They’re really interesting.”