Mermaids in Paradise: A Novel

by Lydia Millet

  “I doubt that, Chip,” I said. “Look, I know how much you’ve dreamed of making friends with the natives of the Heartland—discovering what makes them tick. I know that about you. But are you sure you’d get an accurate sense of them in this setting? Wouldn’t it be better on their home turf, in a way? Like, their natural habitat?”

  “But we never go there,” he objected, beating me on a technicality.

  “It’s such an artificial situation,” I persisted. “I mean, think of this resort as kind of a zoo. Consider the animals in zoos that stalk and pace, wishing to sink their teeth into a passing five-year-old’s carotid artery—or the others who, more the truth-in-advertising types, throw their own feces against the glass. I mean can we really know those animals, when we see them in prison like that? No, right? And isn’t all this”—I raised my hands to indicate the splendid hotel—“kind of the same, without the electrocuting fences and the misery? I just wonder if, meeting these people as tourists so far, far away from where they evolved, you’re coming anywhere close to getting the real Heartland experience.”

  When Heartland people vacation in the coastal cities, we’re certainly zoo animals to them, I was thinking. Despite the fact that it’s our native habitat, they ogle us as though we’re exhibits. Those Heartland tourists strap on their fanny packs like ammo belts. I’ve seen them trundling along the Walk of Fame, admiring the movie stars’ names on those pink terrazzo stars with their faces wreathed in smiles, then looking up and, on beholding average citizens, shutting those faces like barn doors.

  “It’s second-best, I totally see your point. But it’s only dinner, babe,” said Chip, and put a strong, smooth arm around me, nestling me in. He smelled his best smell. I don’t know how he does it—must be a mixture of soap and pheromones.

  I have my way of ending arguments, and Chip has his.

  So there we were, our first evening in the newlywed utopia, fresh from a dip in the warm, aquamarine ocean, sitting around a table with five strangers. I have to admit, the setting had that odd combination of the picturesque and the asinine you sometimes see in vacationland: the restaurant was built over the water, not jutting over it but actually on top. It had platforms like little islands, allowing groups of diners to float in the bay as they ate. Chip and the Bay Arean designer talked about the engineering that must have been required to build this marvel of tourist novelty.

  Meanwhile the “dining islands,” as the restaurant called them, made me feel seasick, bobbing around like that. I tried to believe in the romance of it all, and maybe I would have been able to if I’d been alone with Chip, candlelight shimmering over the gently lapping water of the cove as we drifted beneath the lavender sunset. But with all seven of us sitting there raising our forks to our faces (the Middle Americans, the film industry/decorators and the parrotfish expert) we seemed more like a flotilla of pigs. I noticed plenty of the other islands were tables for two. And here we were with our table for many, long enough for the Last Supper, practically. We were the biggest floater in the pond.

  The dining islands were mysterious, seeming to move around freely, yet whenever a waiter wished to serve us, bringing us near the home port to receive heaping platters of seafood, the ocean’s marvelous bounty deep-fried into oblivion. Then away we floated again, to gaze down, whenever we might wish, at a sea slug glistening on the sandy bottom.

  It struck me I should take a trip to the restroom, which thankfully had been built on solid ground, to rid myself of queasiness for a bit. So I made my excuses and stepped off the island onto one of the cunning raised pathways of white, broken shells, smoothed into softness by the tide, which ran like tendrils into the small bay where we floated. I struck out for the ladies’ room like I was fleeing a beheading, concentrating on not turning an ankle as I picked my way over the shells on my platform mules.

  I’d already drunk some wine and felt the pleasant, half-drunk turmoil of time passing, that rush of buzzed debasement/elevation that’s so perfect and delicate a balance. As I wound my way through the restaurant’s more landlocked tables I felt that swift bittersweet isolation, weightless and delighted—here I am, I thought, like all the others before and after me, my brother and sister drunkards, I salute you up and down the generations, from ancient Rome unto the palace of the future—those decayed palaces, those cities overgrown with the weeds and monuments sunk beneath the waves. I floated through my fellow humans in their multitudes—how sweetly, how thinly the blood ran in my veins!

  Inside was where the families with children or elderly members dined—the ones who feared some of their number might topple off the islands if they ventured out there, topple and quickly drown. I envied them their nausea-free location, as my buzz faded slightly. Along the corridor to the restrooms I passed an over-the-hill-looking man wearing bulky suede sandals on his hairy white feet, and my heart went out to him—some people have no sense of anything. That was the thought that came to me.

  He stood rocking back onto his heels, his hands linked idly behind his back, gazing at a map on the wall; I saw it was one of those cutesy 3D maps they print for tourists, showing poorly drawn pictures of buildings with banners like SUSIE’S SANDWICH SHOP written on them. Sweat stains were visible beneath his arms on the unfortunate T-shirt he sported, which bore on its wrinkled back the legend Freudian Slip: When You Mean One Thing and Say Your Mother.

  It was only a matter of time till Chip made friends with him.

  In the bathroom a similar-aged woman stood in front of the mirror, doing something to her eyeballs. Something with contact lenses, judging from the plastic paraphernalia on the sink counter. I could see at once she was a matched set with the Freud T-shirt, her hair a mixture of gray and brown, wearing a frumpy dress from some place Guatemalan or similar, Nicaragua, I don’t know, a place where underpaid women bend over wooden looms, honest and kindly, with their whole bearing giving the impression that they welcome a life of fruitless toil.

  A muumuu deal, it had embroidered flowers and a pear-shaped quality. I tried to like the outfit, though, as I beheld it—mainly to counteract Gina. Gina’s opinions rent out a space in my brain, and try as I might I can’t ever completely evict them.

  “Isn’t it gorgeous here?” the muumuu wearer half yelled at me, as I tried to sidle past into a toilet stall.

  “Mmm, hmm, wmm,” I said, or words to that effect. I don’t want to talk on my way in or out of the stalls. Not to a stranger, possibly not to anyone. It’s a moment for keeping your own counsel.

  As I peed I thought of how probably, when Chip made friends with the sweaty Freud T-shirt guy, I’d have to act pally with this woman, his bookend, who now wished to prattle on to me as urine streamed between my legs into the toilet bowl. Well, sure she did. Why not? I was a person; to go with my urethra, I had ears. Urethras were for peeing, ears were for receiving the random chatter of orbiting life forms. Her own life-form equipment included a mouth for talking from—a generous mouth above a muumuu of embroidered flowers, as it happened. Red, green, yellow, purple, and blue. Yes, she was a life form displaying other life forms and reaching out to even more life forms, willy-nilly. Out there, beyond the metal door, she was saying something about Pacifica or maybe spina bifida—I couldn’t hear past the rushing sound of pee. I wished she would stop, though.

  I’d known Chip long enough to predict when he would make friends with the strangers I’d spotted; what it came down to was simply whether the person in question would consent to talk to him. Because Chip was going to talk to them, it went without saying, so if the other party was also a scattershot, arbitrary extrovert like Chip, nine out of ten times they’d connect. And here was my answer, right in front of me: the woman, who had never met me before, was talking about spina bifida, or possibly the beer Pacifico, as I peed.

  And it was all for naught, I thought, as I loudly, deliberately flushed—on the subject of spina bifida I was a blank slate. No help to give. No expertise at all.

  There was a pregnant pause as I came ou
t, as though she’d asked me a question.

  “Sorry?” I said.

  “Have you been to the Baths yet?” she asked eagerly. “Amazing!”

  “I saw them in the ads,” I conceded, turning on a tap and beginning to wash my hands. I was still trying to evict Gina, or rather the goblin Gina, perched cozily on my shoulder and glaring down at the perfectly friendly woman’s shoes. Like her dress, they seemed to partake of a peasant motif, homespun or at least cheaply manufactured. They were fashioned of myriad strings of knotted leather or possibly vegan leather alternative, none too clean, flowers sprouting, tassels hanging, hither, thither and yon, tendrils of shoe twining around her ankles and up her calves like so many creeping vines in a movie where plants come alive. Or wait, plants are alive. But you know what I mean. The shoes were unflattering, with soles flat as pancakes that showcased the woman’s large, pale toes, the female equivalent of her partner’s; they were nosing out of the Jesus-style footwear like rows of eager hippos. Albinos.

  The Gina goblin wanted to torch the sandals. Failing that, the goblin wanted to take the sandals, along with the chunky ones worn by the Freud T-shirt man, and nail them up on an offensive sign. HIPPIES GO HOME, something like that. Mean-minded and impeccably dressed, the goblin chittered on my shoulder—chittered unpleasantly.

  How many times, I wondered, as the woman said words like mindfulness and fully present, had that Gina homunculus hitched a ride on me? I didn’t always like it, but I couldn’t shake it off, either. Chip and Gina were angel and devil on my shoulders, basically, and there were things I loved about them both. I went Chip’s way when I could—maybe prolonged exposure would encourage me. Gina insisted on judgment, an us-and-them mentality, while Chip, with his earnest friendliness, tried to lead me down the path of brotherly love.

  But brotherly love was sometimes wrong.

  Take the toe situation, I thought to myself.

  When we were kids, Gina and I, and even through college, which we attended together, I’d had some creative ambitions. Young people often do. I wanted to write songs and also sing them for a living, had singer/songwriter fantasies. I took lessons, I wrote songs and forthwith I sang them; excitedly I made demo tapes, performed for myself in mirrors and in showers, concocted videos. Later I put on shows for others, at college bars and grungy yet pretentious cafes.

  But finally Gina showed me the error of my ways, pointing out quite rightly that the world was full of singers already—showcasing the foregone conclusion of my artistic and professional failure. Don’t be a wannabe, said Gina impatiently. It was Gina who persuaded me to go the MBA route, whereby at least, she said, I could grow up to be a loser with money instead of a loser without it. And we’d be at the same school then, she said, because she planned to go to Stanford too and get her PhD. She wasn’t born to make money, she said, because to make money, one way or another, directly or indirectly, you had to build people up. She was born to cut people down, she said, and that’s what she was going to do. Criticize. Therefore: a PhD. But about the singing, we can always do karaoke, she said, we’ll go to karaoke bars whenever you want!

  We’ll get wall-eyed. We’ll belt us out some Bee Gees shit.

  Since then there’s always been a shadow Gina following me, even when the real Gina, in her physical body, is absent, such as during my honeymoon. (Gina, I happened to know from texts received on my cell phone, was enjoying her own honeymoon of sorts with Ellis, whom she’d decided to like for several weeks at least, she texted me, before bringing the hammer down. She also texted me that he was surprisingly good in the sack, you know, for a faggot. She said his Eurofag fashion sense meant he’d given her good advice on buying a new bag. Also, the décor of his apartment was actually half-OK, she reported, if you ignored the fake-punk boy-teen completely faggy Union Jacks. Other than me, all Gina’s closest friends are gay guys; she’s less a homophobe than a victim of Stockholm.)

  I acquitted myself with a compliment on my way out of the restroom—you can distract a woman lickety-split with an unexpected piece of flattery about her appearance; it’s the interfemale equivalent of a sucker punch—and booked it past the Freud T-shirt in the hall, who was still rocking back on his callused heels in front of the 3D map like he was contemplating the Mona Lisa. I headed for the restaurant’s shining bar, figuring I could while away another five minutes waiting for a new drink before I had to step onto the nauseating island once again.

  “Do you sell Dramamine?” I said, after asking for wine.

  Startling me, the bartender whipped out a pill in a paper slip and ripped open the package. He dumped the contents neatly into a glass of seltzer and pushed the glass across.

  “We get that all the time,” he said, and leaned over the counter, voice lowered. “I’m going to tell you this because I think you’re a fox. Don’t like to see a beautiful woman puke.”

  “Uh—”

  “And I don’t like to watch it being cleaned up, either. So here goes: there’s a switch you can flip under the table, on the central post that holds the table up. You find it with your foot. It’s supposed to be for emergencies, but if you want to stop that thing moving, just flip it. You saw how shallow it is out there—there’s a little anchor-type deal on the bottom of the island that drops and locks into the track. The hostess can override, and she will override eventually so you can get served and like that, but meanwhile you guys’ll stop moving.”

  “Knight in shining armor,” I said sincerely. “Serious, here. Really.”

  So I felt pleased on my return to the table, possessing the secret weapon as I did.

  THE MARINE BIOLOGIST sitting next to me was a woman who loved fish. Fish in general, parrotfish in specific. They’re thick-lipped reef fish in bright colors; I saw some later, but at the time I didn’t know a parrotfish from a humphead wrasse. She was a parrotfish promoter, the biologist.

  “You see that beautiful, fine white sand all around us?” she asked me, over dessert.

  I nodded, though in the dark, to be precise, the beach sand had faded from our sight. Along the dark shore a row of tiki torches flickered orange.

  “You’ve got the parrotfish to thank for that,” she said, and nodded emphatically. “Bioerosion. Major contributors.”

  “Ah!” I said. “Bioerosion!”

  “They eat the reefs! They make the sand! They chew it up and excrete it. A single parrotfish can make two hundred pounds of fine white sand per year.”

  “I see!” I said.

  “You like the beach? Then thank a parrotfish. That’s what I always say,” she went on.

  She was eating a flan with gusto.

  Still, I was happy to be talking to her, because the husband from the Heartland seemed to be at loggerheads with one of the Bay Areans, Chip standing by neutrally. The Heartland wife looked embarrassed, but the Heartland husband was sticking to his guns—something about global warming. He said it seemed to be nature—that various Ice Ages, also, had taken place now and then, and the warming was a non-Ice Age.

  His logic went: It has been colder before, and now it will be warm. The film-industry Bay Arean, enraged by this, was raining thunder upon him.

  Meanwhile the Heartland wife and the other Bay Arean were making small talk off to one side, trying to take the edge off any free-floating climate-change aggression with harmless domesticity. The Bay Arean designer recommended air plants for the Heartland living room, which could be placed in clear-plastic globes that dangled from shelves or light fixtures. They required no soil. You watered them with a spray bottle, he told her; couldn’t be easier. The Heartland wife received this wisdom with earnest nods.

  Presently Chip latched onto a couple of words in the Bay Arean filmmaker’s angry tirade—the words carbon dioxide, I picked up—and used them to launch a friendly digression. Chip plays the fool to make peace, often, as well as to make people like him, and in this case he asked if carbon dioxide was the gas from car tailpipes that killed depressed people. If so we should reduce it, Chip
suggested with modest buffoonery, absolutely—no one should die in a garage. Least of all a person who’s goddamn depressed. In my garage, went Chip’s transitional patter, there’s a garbage can that smells, some old strips of moldy carpet and an aging Nissan Sentra. Is that a fitting sunset to a life?

  This led to a lighthearted discussion of which cars would be the worst to die in, with “minivan” leading, and the conversation was thus steered into the social safe house of irony.

  All of this I heard in the background, in pieces, as the parrotfish expert enthused about how coral went in the fishes’ mouths and white, tropical sands came out their ass-ends. We wouldn’t have the tropics as we knew them—with highly visible reef creatures swimming over a pale background in water that looked turquoise—if not for parrotfish and other “bioeroders,” she chin-wagged to me. The tropics would look very different with no white sand, wouldn’t they, and without the reefs and their nibbling fish that sand would disappear, said the biologist. In fact, she elaborated, gesturing at the Bay Arean off to her left, what he was talking about, the warming, the rising acid of seawater, all that would kill the parrotfish, she said, in the event that it continued.

  “… generate models with fairly narrow margins of error,” she was saying through her final mouthful of crème caramel—because by then I’d realized it wasn’t a flan, strictly speaking. “Of course those models have been completely disregarded. Because, as I’m sure you know, an effective political response to the science, on the time frame needed, was always an impossibility.”

  I was thinking of flipping the table switch, because the truth was that most of the wine glasses and beer pitchers were still full at our table and we wouldn’t be leaving that table and hitting dry land anytime soon. Yet once again nausea was rising in me, as we floated past a two-top where a poorly dressed couple seemed to be dipping fried squid rings into a pot of onion-scented sauce. I felt around with my foot for the center post of the table, but all I got was air; I was near the end of the table. So I had to scoot my chair over a few inches, then a few more, to come within range of the central post.