by Lydia Millet
MERMAIDS IN
A Novel
LYDIA MILLET
W. W. Norton & Company
New York • London
CONTENTS
I.
NEWLYWEDS
II.
HONEYMOON
III.
THE MURDER MYSTERY
IV.
GLORIOUS REVOLUTION
MERMAIDS IN
I.
NEWLYWEDS
Chip picked out the destination for our honeymoon. He’d always wanted to take a cruise, just like Middle Americans. Middle Americans love cruises, Chip said ardently. Chip’s a romantic when it comes to the people of the Midwest, and also those dwelling along the Rocky Mountain front, the landlocked parts of the South, things like the Dakota area or what have you. Those places are somewhat mythic to Chip. He has what I suspect is a fanciful idea: people that live away from New York or L.A., D.C. or San Francisco, maybe in a pinch Boston or even Seattle—those people are modern-day pioneers.
The Middle Americans are resolute, Chip thinks, living by choice in that vast featureless space, that oddly irrelevant no-man’s land. They have their reasons, Chip believes, reasons we couldn’t understand, or moral fiber, possibly. To hear Chip talk you’d think every Nebraskan male knows how to put a horseshoe on a mule. They know how to bring forth grain from dirt, or what a combine harvester is. They get what happens to that brought-forth grain, the steps before the Cheerios. The women knit long underwear and are adept at fruit canning.
The best Middle Americans are like this, anyway, pretty much old-fashioned, according to Chip; their kids make charming toys from wooden boards, often with poking-out nails in them. Not only that, those children are delighted with the products of their ingenuity; they go ahead and play with them. Those children wave a splintered board and think of marvelous fairyland.
But Chip doesn’t want to travel there, in person, to Middle America—that wasn’t one of the honeymoon options. Chip’s a romantic, not a moron. You don’t have a Brentwood zip code and choose to spend your wedding vacation in Dayton. Literally no one does. From what I’ve seen, few people travel toward the middle of the country for personal reasons, unless a parent is dying. (The two of us won’t have to do that, since my parents, may they rest in peace, are interred in the Bay Area, Chip’s father was a deadbeat dad who left when he was ten, and Chip’s mother, more’s the pity, has a condo near here.) Chip just wanted to meet some of the hardy pioneers; he didn’t want to physically go to the puzzlingly dull places where they live. He feared the religious hysterics, in addition, who inhabit the boring wastes and can be alarming. They frighten a person, when gathered in groups or hordes. Or individually.
Chip talks about that quite a bit, when not gaming: the fact that honest Middle America, once plodding along reliably with combines for the menfolk, homemade preserves for the women and for the children some highly entertaining planks of wood, is now threatened by a growing subculture—a subculture so large it’s bigger than the rest of us, actually, which maybe means it’s not a subculture at all, says Chip with a worried aspect. That’s where the fear comes in.
The non-subculture is made of people who believe that fossils are a trick. These people are suspicious of biology and mortally offended by an ape. Also they’re angry about it.
On the one hand moral fiber, possibly, but on the other hand madness.
In any case I said no to the cruise idea. I couldn’t think of a worse prospect, a floating plastic city full of food-eating vacationers, with potential for massive water shutdown, decks to be littered with plump orange bags of human waste. Closed spaces, planned activities, nausea, the smell of greasy carbs; families wearing bright primary colors or even vibrant fluorescents, heaving themselves into a pool.
Among those families wearing flashy Day-Glo clothes, those clothes that actually assaulted your eyeballs with their hideous fluorescence, there’d have to be some victims of the morbid obesity pandemic; and with the possibilities of food poisoning, sewage overflow and tragic obesity, a cruise was something I couldn’t face. And so I went to Chip, I sat down beside him and took his hands and said: “Chip, I’m glad to be marrying you. But no cruise ships. Not a single one.”
So Chip moved on to other honeymoon concepts.
He found a French driving tour involving Maseratis and Formula 1 racecars, where pros would drive a newlywed couple many times around a racetrack, superfast. So fast their heads would have to be spinning, their innards turbulent. Not so auspicious, Chip, I said, for honeymooners, in my humble opinion. He ferreted out a “Peaks of the Himalayas” voyage next, with visits to monasteries, meditations and nosebleeds from the lack of oxygen up there.
I always think I would have been a monk, a nun or some other holy person, in another life. It turned out I was modern, well-dressed and fairly talkative, but that’s a quirk of timing. If I’d been born in the medieval part of history, I hope I would have been a monk or nun, quiet and wearing a certain mantle of wisdom.
I hope I would have used the time to think, possibly more than I do now, as a medieval-type person. I see myself singing in chapels, light streaming down on me. The singing of hymns, the kneeling down to pray, the walking with a proud, erect posture. I wouldn’t have been a peasant, I hope, busily sweeping mud off pigs, possibly dying while grunting as a baby’s head stuck out of me.
However currently I’m not a nun/monk, and neither is Chip, and chances are we’ll never be. I thought maybe the monks would turn out depressing, with their enlightened, humble existence. What came up for me, considering those Himalayan monks and the gonging sound of temple gongs, the gong, gong, gong, what I thought of was the suspicion a person might start to have, in the monkish setting, that marriage overall might be a bad idea. The inner peace a monk projects, combined with never having sex, I don’t know if that attitude is really honeymoon material.
You do hear about people—sure—who visit someplace Asian and scenic at a certain altitude, Asian or Indian, and then decide to go native. In one fell swoop they copy the whole Buddhist or yoga idea, they give away their worldly goods, move to a mountain hut where baths are taken in the snow and then pretend they never heard of home equity lines of credit or eyelash extensions. Next comes the cross-legged chanting, the wearing of loose and flowing robes, the eating of plain brown rice; some of them eat the rice just one grain at a time, holding that single grain in long, delicate chopsticks.
You hear about it and, despite your incredulity that a person would ever give up the bounty of our modern life, a minuscule part of you can almost see the seduction. Just minuscule, but still. I didn’t want to run the risk. I’ll take a pass on that serenity, I said to Chip, I’m just not in the mood for it.
I think, to be honest, Chip really wasn’t in the mood either, once he did more research and got an inkling that the monks wouldn’t be like monks in videogames. I think he’d been half hoping for monks with supernatural powers—at least flying kung fu. He first expected temples you could run through, surmounting obstacles and solving puzzles as you went. Then it began to seem as though extremely wise monks might be the best he could hope for, and I think at that point his interest waned.
Next he got pretty enthusiastic on the topic of a shark-feeding situation, a shark- and stingray-feeding package, with round-trip fare included, optimistically. You put on rubber fins and swim around with hostile marine life. Next came a thrill-seekers’ week-long Air Safari, where you jumped from high places such as airplanes and treetops, wearing harnesses clipped to parachutes or bungee cords. Plummeting, plunging, then bouncing; screaming, then laughing in relief at not yet being dead. No, Chip, honey, I said. Some other time though, we’ll do that.
My point was, I don’t
need to be reminded I’m alive, I’m well aware of it. Catch me later, when I’m fifty, by then I may be on the fence.
Volcano bicycle camping, snowshoeing on glaciers, ruined Cambodian temples. All had their downsides, believe me. The volcano bicycle camping was too sweaty, I thought, we’d be so grimy in our tent at night, not showered, not fragrant, no clean linens; that also was not a goal of honeymoons, was it? And the glaciers—don’t get me started there. The glaciers had crevasses that could crop up suddenly, icy-blue traps of freezing death. And lonely! After I fell down the crevasse, crumpling a leg, splinters of bone confronting me, I’d sit there all alone in the darkness of the deep, cold earth. I’d sit there wracked with pain while frigid glacial meltwater washed over me, until, blessed release, I died of hypothermia.
I could picture Chip attempting a rescue, but finally it wouldn’t work. Chip’s not a mountaineer.
The picturesque ruins in Cambodia were a better alternative, but I happened to read a blog by a Canadian who visited Angkor Wat, got dengue fever and bravely survived it. But then she slipped on a rotting mango and snapped her neck like a winter twig. It might have been a hoax, I wasn’t sure, you never know with blogs: in this case the blog started quite normally, one of those travel blogs you see so many of, and she talked about the dengue fever, she took pictures, even, of both the ancient impressive buildings and her dengue fever rash (labeling the contrast “Macro/Micro”), and put up blog posts every day. Then for a couple of days there wasn’t any new entry, and then someone purporting to be her sister typed in a sentence saying she was deceased.
Anyway, hoax or no hoax, it’s all the same to me, isn’t it, in one sense, since I was never going to meet the blogger in real life anyway. Still it soured me on the ancient temples of Cambodia, or Khmer, as they apparently call it, I knew I’d be there eyeing mangoes suspiciously. The memory of the travel blog woman, first stoical, then dead, would make me wonder about other maverick fruit, sudden misadventure generally.
Chip yearned for daring exploits; I didn’t so much yearn as just not want to have any. My vision of a honeymoon involved some relaxation, possibly spa treatments. I suggested he could do his adventure on a separate trip, a trip for bachelors—or men, at least, supporting his final bachelor days, wanting to flex their muscles, commit some acts of bravado. They didn’t have to be unmarried themselves, although, let’s face it, the trip would be more exciting if they were.
Chip’s very friendly, most everyone agrees on that, but still he doesn’t have what you might call a group of close friends—not exactly. He has pals he plays racquetball with, he has his coworkers, and he does some multiplayer online games with guys from college who live in other cities.
One of the racquetball players is an anger-management student, that is, he goes to seminars on anger management, to learn to manage his anger. Chip says the racquetball can get a little edgy because of this, when the managing isn’t going smoothly. I ask Chip why he even plays with him, he shrugs and grins. His name was in the racquetball pool at Chip’s gym, Chip picked him at random and got into the habit so now he doesn’t want to disappoint the man. You have to wear goggles in racquetball anyway, Chip said, or you could lose an eye. I said, But Chip, aren’t there some other places an angry racquetball could hit? Do you wear goggles on those too?
Just your typical Nutty Buddy, says Chip.
This guy, Reznik, he really likes to win whereas Chip’s mostly playing to get a good workout in, so Chip hits energetically till near the end and then he misses on purpose. Still though, he didn’t want Reznik managing anger at his bachelor party.
Chip’s coworker buddies, well, in terms of other men there’s Sandy, which sounds like an easygoing blond woman but is actually a man and not a blond at all, and there’s Tariq. Sandy is delicate, a germaphobe who buys his antibacterial hand gel in bulk—probably not the type for derring-do. Tariq is married to a woman his family sent to him. He’d never met her before the day of their wedding but the two of them are stuck like glue. He doesn’t go on trips, or even out to restaurants. He’s more of a homebody. You’ll see him at office functions, but only because they’re mandatory. He’ll be the one over beside the water cooler, holding a nonalcoholic beverage and smiling nervously. The unasked question in his mind is, Can I go? You see it when you look at him.
Chip likes Tariq a lot, he admires him; he always mentions Tariq when the talk turns to Arabs and terrorists. Then it’s “Tariq tells me,” and “according to my man Tariq.” If anyone has a negative word for an Arab, a Muslim or that situation there, Chip rises to their defense. He trots out Tariq to show that not all Arabs are religious hysterics. We have them too, is what he likes to say, each country has its own hysterics, doesn’t it, its own growing majority of straight-up insane people? Let’s throw them all together on an island, a big one like Australia or they wouldn’t fit, and then take bets.
Chip’s usually hamming it up at that point, admittedly. He likes to play the fool, sometimes, likes to act less intelligent than he is. It makes other people feel more intelligent than they are, and then they find themselves liking him. Liking him quite a bit.
Look at the fundamentalists we have, says Chip, they may not put incendiary devices in their body cavities but they get up to their own shenanigans. They try to gaslight the whole culture, claiming the dinosaurs were here last week, going around to the museums—when they come into the cities—and scoffing at a T. rex skeleton.
Chip says he talked to a guy once who insisted T. rexes hung around in pilgrim times, hiding behind the trees so Founding Fathers didn’t see them, probably—slapping their tails at Pocahontas, stepping on teepees and roaring.
Not all Muslims even believe women should live in sacks, says Chip: sure, we all know that in some sandy, oily countries women walk around wearing baglike garments over their whole bodies, including their faces, with just a slit over the eye region, because without that slit you’d have these women bumping into things and breaking their noses. In those countries the women look like boulders, walking around like that. Long boulders, Stonehenge style. Crowds of these women in their dark sacks are like a field of oblong rocks.
Of course, it’s not a bad look, those dark robes, says Chip. Although the face covering, he could do without that. Chip’s confused about why the women agree to the face-covering part. Seems punitive, says Chip, pretty hard to rub your nose, if you needed to for an itch, though on the upside, it wouldn’t matter at all to have a piece of food stuck in your teeth. Those women don’t need to worry about that ever.
He’s an open guy, but he’s been reluctant to bring up the face-covering issue with Tariq, rightly fearing it might offend. He’ll ask Tariq about the politics, but not so much the face-covering.
Tariq’s a paragon of virtue, he does the prayers, he kneels on a small rug, and his wife doesn’t dress in sacks or look out of an eye slit; she wears regular U.S. clothing—though, since I’m being honest here, she could use some fashion tips. I know because I met her one time at an office party; it was St. Paddy’s Day, and people were lurching and weaving around vats of green punch and beer, floating shamrocks and leering cardboard leprechauns. There’s no one Irish who works at Chip’s company, the closest they ever got to Ireland was making fun of Riverdance, but Chip’s boss says it’s a U.S. holiday now and the point of it is License to Drink. But Tariq doesn’t drink and neither does his wife, so at the St. Paddy’s Day party she stood beside him at the watercooler, wearing that same trembling smile. It begged us all to release her. Just let us go now, please, that smile said. Please and thank you. I do not wish to be at this “party.”
It was a bittersweet situation, I guess, because I looked at her and even as I knew exactly what she was thinking, I also knew she wouldn’t be released—no, she would hover painfully for at least another ninety minutes before she was set free. Everyone has to stick around, at these office parties, until Chip’s boss, drunk as a lord, blearily notices their presence and marks it on his list of r
easons not to arbitrarily fire them. She would hover there politely, her eyes as dark and wide as a deer’s, trying to fathom the vulgar customs of her adopted country.
If Chip could, I’ve thought sometimes, he’d carry Tariq around with him for showing off when the talk turns to terrorists, since Tariq’s a guy who’s attractive and very warm. He smiles a lot; with Tariq you almost wish he’d hang out more, he seems like such a sweetheart. But Tariq has other fish to fry and by the time Chip’s bragging about him, he’s off being his usual homebody.
Then for Chip’s college friends, you’ve mainly got Rocket, Eight-ball and BB3 (short for Beer Bong Three, as I recall). In their day those guys liked to tie one on and get into a hazing mentality, which could work well in a bachelor party setting. But Rocket tweaked his back on a mechanical bronco in a bar and doesn’t do much physical these days, Eight-ball is in recovery and avoiding old patterns, and BB3’s afraid of velocity. He doesn’t travel much. That’s a phobia of its own, I guess, the fear of velocity; BB3 doesn’t get into anything that goes faster than walking. If he gets into a car and it speeds up past about 5 mph, he starts to squeal like a four-year-old on helium. Chip says he pictures an impact, can’t help it. Even a bike ride is too much for him, if BB3 gets on a bicycle he immediately pictures his face pulpy. No skin on it at all.
Nothing specific happened to BB3 to cause this, Chip tells me, he just woke up one morning frightened of velocity.
So in the end Chip couldn’t get a group organized. Instead he signed up for an extreme half-marathon in the mud with obstacles—barbed-wire fences, tunnels you slither through on your belly, flaming bales of hay and 10,000-volt electric shocks.
But for the honeymoon, we decided, we’d go in a simpler, more tropical direction.
