Mermaids in Paradise: A Novel

by Lydia Millet

  “If she even comes to the reception after this,” I said, to the passing street, “you better make nice. And you better hope she doesn’t sue the company for sexual harassment. Or emotional distress.”

  “Where’s my thank-you for the kickass party?” objected Gina, pretending to be hurt.

  Gina hears only what she wants to hear. So that night, already a little tipsy from the Plague Death experience, I drowned my sorrows over a bottle of good wine with Chip. Unlike so many other heterosexual men, Chip enjoys hearing a woman bitch at length about her acquaintances and friends—he’s fascinated by the daily machinations of the fairer sex. It’s not the details he’s interested in but the passion women bring to their interpersonal dissections. What amazes him the most, he often says to me, is how much we seem to actually care.

  “Don’t you get tired of it?” he asks. “How can you keep it all in your head?”

  I WENT INTO my office the next day with a sense of foreboding about Suzette, afraid she’d be presenting with PTSD. But as it turned out I didn’t have time to think about it: the numbers consult was a ruse so they could throw a surprise party for my nuptial occasion. Suzette was nowhere to be seen; I heard later she’d had a dentist appointment. (Was it my imagination, though, or were the orphans sadder and thinner than usual as I walked past her carrel, the bobbleheads bobbling with new mournfulness?)

  They’d made a waterfall of mimosas, a catered spread of baked goods and resplendent fruit platters evoking ancient Greece.

  After that the two days until the rehearsal dinner were a whirlwind of activity—the kind you remember too blearily to describe. There were the female-objectifying beauty rituals; the cathartic taboo-lifting of friends taking depressants and/or stimulants in my immediate vicinity and then expressing boundless affection for me; the token out-of-town family (mainly Chip’s) alighting at local hotels, some of them choosing budget establishments, others opening the ostentatious rooms of their luxury accommodations to large groups of guests.

  There was also the lingering presence of Chip’s mother, who benefits, in life as well as on special occasions, from the fact that Chip believes she’s sweet and funny and should be humored smilingly. Most other humans tend to see her as more of a wrinkled mythological harpy, old, partially digested worms smeared over her clack-clacking beak. Once she openly bragged to me that when Chip was a baby she made it a rule to embrace him once a week, rain or shine.

  Chip gazed at her beatifically when she said it, like hers was the gold standard of attachment parenting.

  It’s a wonder he emerged from that sharp-twigged, bespattered nest with both his balls intact. It’s a wonder he only flies off to dorky utopian dreamlands during the odysseys of his gaming, instead of 24/7 at a mental health facility.

  And yet, and yet—it’s oddly comforting that a Nurse Ratched harpy could raise a man like Chip. If a man like Chip can emerge sane and whole from eighteen formative years with a Nurse Ratched harpy, there’s hope of redemption for each and every one of us. There’s hope the sun may not burn out after all, some billions of years hence, transforming into a giant fireball that obliterates the planet.

  So I try to see his mother less as a malevolent, live person and more as a short, gnarled, wooden figure hulking in a shady corner of the room, a kind of totemic minor demon whose presence inoculates innocent folks against the purer forms of evil.

  Well, there was Chip’s mother—call her, say, Tanya, since that is her given name—following us both around and imbuing the atmosphere with a perfumed unpleasantness, but other than that it was pretty much how I’d hoped it would be. There was champagne, there were margaritas, there were blurry rites of passage. By the time the rehearsal dinner rolled around I’d literally forgotten Tanya was there, even though, technically, she was located four inches from my elbow. All the faces were good faces; there was no ugliness anymore. Ugliness had vanished with the acuter of my senses, ugliness had made an exit from the stage of my perception, and all I could see were smiles. Love was around me—of that much I was certain.

  Ellis made a long toast in his flowery, posh accent, quoting what must have been a famous British individual—Churchill or Kipling, someone like that, or maybe one of the war poets who wrote from the trenches about sad homosexuals dying. Even as he said it I had no idea what he meant; I was too busy relaxing. Gina, partly rebuffing him, said something about mad dogs and Englishmen that may have offended a great-aunt of mine, who bustled out loudly in the middle of her speech. My thought, watching the great-aunt go, was, Wow, I had no idea she was invited. My second thought was, Is she supposed to be alive? Hmm, hmm. Is that the one who lives somewhere?

  By that point Chip was nudging me to smile or possibly respond to his mother’s verbiage, which had the scent of Hallmark to it, so I waved at the assembled company much like an empress on a boat tour of the colonies. Beneath the tablecloth, one of my shoes was off and I wondered if a cat was licking my toes. A cat? Or was it a pervert? There’d been one like that at the Plague Death Tavern … you had to hand it to Gina, I thought, she knew what memories were made of. I hadn’t enjoyed it much at the time, no, enjoyment hadn’t occurred, at the Plague Death Tavern, but then again here I was, only a few days later and already reminiscing.

  I should be sober, I thought, for the ceremony itself; for the ceremony, sobriety was the right choice. Later, at the reception, a person could drink to excess again. Although, now that I thought about it—Tanya was standing, raising her own glass, I hazily noted—was the wedding-ceremony sobriety not just another robotic nod to senseless tradition? A drunken bride would look bad for the patriarchy! Yes. If the sacrificial virgin is a staggering souse, not so good for the fleshly property exchange, awkward to think of babies: uncomfortable to picture child rearing, conducted by a staggering floozy.

  But was I actually worried about that? Was Chip, even?

  Chip didn’t have a subjugation agenda; Chip wasn’t a patriarch. In fact Chip liked the matriarchal animals, smart elephants and randy bonobos. He even liked the pregnant male seahorses we’d seen at the big aquarium in Long Beach. Chip was benevolent on gender issues, one of his sterling qualities. Sitting beside him at the table, I gave his hand a squeeze, thinking fondly of how, despite his muscular physique, he wasn’t the subjugation type. His mother’s beak was clack-clacking again: if I squinted I could imagine the crushed worms, half-eaten beetles peeking from her teeth … she was clacking the beak in my direction now, so I raised my glass toward her in a salute.

  Maybe I didn’t have to be exactly sober for the ceremony, I said to myself—a few glasses—well, I’d check in with Chip on it. Not to get his approval to drink beforehand, don’t get me wrong—that’s patriarchal, completely—but we could put our heads together on the subject, see if we had a consensus.

  Chip’s mother was seating herself again amongst her flock of Orange County dowagers, most of whose husbands had preemptively perished. Here you go, said those old, sweet geezers, I’ll go ahead and die, so you don’t have to do it first. Like opening the door for the ladies, I thought: gentlemanly. Chip had more relatives than I did, or, that is, his mother actively talked to them and knew their children’s names and sexes. My own parents, may they rest in peace, never really showed an interest in the whole fraternizing-with-relations thing—the second cousins, step-uncles by marriage. As far as I could tell while I was growing up, a relative, to my parents, was like Middle America to coastal dwellers: only existent in the abstract. That was why I was surprised to see the great-aunt from St. Louis had snuck in. The last time I’d seen her had been in a Christmas card photo.

  I imagined Tanya had showed me some kind of potential guest list, and to get away from her I’d probably nodded.

  “Remind me,” I whispered to Chip, amongst some clapping, “talk to great-aunt. Thought she was dead.”

  I was telegraphing a bit—slurring, I admit.

  “Your Aunt Gloria? From St. Louis?”

  “Yes!” I cried, deeply imp
ressed at his knowledge of the furthest, smallest, most insignificant branches of my family tree.

  He patted me on the wrist.

  “You already talked to her, babe,” he said. “On a couch. For like three quarters of an hour. You were telling her all about Gina. And the Ravage Room.”

  I sat back, pensive, and held my water glass firmly.

  I’D GONE WITH a dress that was more of a cream than a white, even toward the beige family—it didn’t have a white feel at all, really. Tanya almost vomited when she first saw the garment, apparently thinking her age group would view a non-white wedding gown much as they would a large sign reading I ALREADY PUT OUT. But by the time the big day rolled around she’d assimilated, trying to hide the outfit’s non-white identity by making sure none of the décor was white either. Creamy beige was everywhere, down to the tablecloths at the reception. Tanya was trying to trick the eye.

  She even asked the photographer to go mostly for black-and-white pics: sepia tones, she said. She didn’t personally like that look, she was more of a primary-colors type, but she’d read in a wedding planner book that sepia was classy.

  Like the trooper that she is, Gina took all the heat off anyway: when I refused to wear black, as she was goading me to, she bought as her own reception garb the kind of evening gown a hooker would wear in the Addams household. There were feathers involved, spraying over one shoulder like the black-and-red plumes of some fiendish hellfowl, and her spike heels were daggers pointing toward the floor. Gina enjoys high fashion, steeped as it is in irony. The excellence of a friend like Gina is that she’ll take the hit for bad behavior every time.

  She didn’t wear the vampire dress to the ceremony, fortunately, where, as the so-called maid of honor, she agreed to wear something less funereal/whorish. But the ceremony itself was on the informal side of conventional—held in the gazebo of a well-landscaped garden overlooking the Palos Verdes bluffs, the ocean crashing below. Chip had initially wanted one of those Renaissance faire weddings, until I told him I’d rather get a Renaissance faire divorce. I could live with the gaming, I told him—though it was going to be a stretch, sustaining sexual desire for a mate with multiple cudgel-bearing avatars. Over time, the gaming would be a liability where my libido was concerned: I was already making a major exception for Chip by agreeing to share the remainder of my time on Earth with an active fantasy enthusiast.

  Chip didn’t understand the psychology involved, didn’t see how his alternate life in the land of heroic centaurs could possibly be a turnoff, but he took my word for it. He accepted the fact that I was making an aesthetic sacrifice. So there was literally zero potential, I told him, for me to go even further and cultivate an attraction to a Renaissance faire husband. Not in the cards. You have to draw the line somewhere, and I personally draw that line well before wizards and bawdy wenches. I draw the line between medieval reenactments and me, and I draw it firmly.

  So we looked pretty normal, I’d guess, standing there with the ocean behind us, our gazebo festooned, garlands in various places. Chip wore a charcoal suit and silver tie, and he looked very, very good. Chip’s the kind of man who might have been a male model, if he weren’t so innocently unaware of his own looks. He’s one of those rare people who actually go to the gym for pure enjoyment, not vanity. I felt fortunate, standing there, holding his hands, gazing at him. I thought, Well, I’ll be blowed. (If a ship’s captain can use that fine expression, I thought, then so can I.) I further thought: Few women have the kind of luck I do. And I wasn’t being sentimental. It was more of a statistical analysis.

  Other than that, I can’t say a lot happened. A breeze blew the dry grasses along the bluffs, making them dip and sway. Music played. There was the sense, all around us, of the kind of momentousness that is also completely trite. We were at our wedding.

  I was glad I’d limited myself to two flutes of champagne in the dressing room, and that Gina, a few feet behind me, had amused herself by getting her eyebrows dyed that morning instead of snorting the mound of fairly pure cocaine left at her house by a trust-fund grad student she’d recently stopped sleeping with. There was a pleasant quality to being balanced and calm, to not wobbling at all on my heels, to hearing with dull precision the droning voice of the officiant.

  Standing on the bluffs, I thought of where we were, Chip and I, and how beneath our feet was a tectonic fault block of seafloor sediments atop a submerged mound of metamorphic rock that had risen out of the Pacific beginning one to two million years before. I didn’t have an opinion about it, really, though it recalled me to an early class in geology, how the only part of that class I’d really enjoyed or retained had been the cross-sectional drawings of the layers of the Earth. I hoped there wasn’t anything symbolic in the fact that the ground beneath our feet was eroding. I thought of how it was impossible to form any particular impression at times like this; how, at a time like this, you had a tendency to think of yourself in the third person, if only fleetingly. I thought of not thinking.

  Shortly after that, the ceremony ended and we kissed.

  LATER, AT THE reception, Ellis and Gina hooked up. I hadn’t seen that one coming, since Gina ridicules Ellis openly for his faux-English identity and he calls her a stupid cow. Still, when you’re carried away on the romance of an evening, I guess, a cow can get less stupid. A fake Englishman can start to look like the real McCoy.

  Actually, as I said to Chip when we passed them dry humping behind a port-a-john, something about the hookup made a certain sense; Gina loved the inauthentic and the absurd, and Ellis was both of those. In turn, though you couldn’t call Ellis ironic—his Englishness was the most heartfelt thing about him—his life was definitely a gesture, and Gina may have briefly mistaken it for an ironic one.

  All in all it was a good party. The band was fun, the food was tasty, the weather held and the drinks didn’t run out (Chip had wisely bought ten extra cases of wine in case his mother’s estimate turned to be too meager—check. His mother’s cheap to the point of felony. To her it’s more moral to steal something than pay too much for it).

  Suzette from the office showed up with no obvious psychic scars and seemed to enjoy herself, talking for long periods, Chip told me, with an ex-military cousin of his from Duluth. Although Chip and I got away with no cake-on-face smearing, not everyone was so lucky: a cohort of Chip’s coworkers used the dregs of the cake in a food fight of their own. The fight was instigated by Chip’s drunken boss, who as far as I knew had invited himself to the reception.

  Thankfully that was in the wee hours, after most of the more fossilized guests had already left. Gina took footage of the hijinks “for the capsule,” as she always says. (For as long as I’ve known her—I’m talking, since seventh grade—Gina’s been amassing the contents of a time capsule for future inhabitants of Earth to see, she says, why our civilization tottered and fell. She’s always threatening to put some artifact of me in there; when I get on her bad side she prints out one of my emails.)

  Chip and I were exactly where we wanted to be. We drank, we laughed, we danced—and I was reminded how I’d first fallen for Chip, out on the town after our five-minute encounter at the speed-dating session: he’s a great dancer who’s never embarrassing. It’s shocking in a heterosexual white man, and far more so if you add gamer to that list of adjectives. I thought of his elegant moves—as I gazed at him making them—as his mother’s one gift to me, because when he was a child she’d forced him to take ballroom dancing lessons, out of some antiquated notion that one day he’d have to escort the great-granddaughters of slaveholders to debutante functions. As a social climber, she wanted to be prepared for that eventuality.

  Well, the debutantes never materialized, and the lessons tortured him while he was a baseball-and soccer-playing boy, but they proved useful in the end, imbuing him with an easy grace he was later helpless to suppress—though he might have preferred to be seen doing a grudging, apathetic shuffle.

  I had myself a small moment of clarity under
the stars, walking out from beneath our soaring beige tent after midnight, Chip with his arm slung around my shoulders. He’s a tall man, Chip, about six foot three. Is this what happiness is? I asked myself, and the answer seemed to be: basically, yes.

  It came to me that we might be asking too much, often, with this pursuit of happiness deal. We acted like happiness was a consumable good, stashed on a shelf too high to reach. But at midnight on my wedding day, coming out from under that beige tent with its various garlands dangling, I saw that happiness was a feeling, not a deliverable. We pursued it all our lives as though it were a prey animal we needed to pin down, shoot and eat. But all it was was a feeling—a feeling! It rose from us, from nowhere else; the thing did not arrive all wrapped up like a gift. No use waiting for home delivery. Not coming. No tracking number to look up. You had to open the door and step out into the street.

  It made me feel free, to realize that. The Big Happy was not an achievement. It wasn’t a goal.

  It was just an emotion.

  Chip didn’t see my point. I guess he’d already known it. That’s the thing with these moments of clarity, you have one, you get psyched, and then it turns out the person standing next to you already knows the thing. Your newfound clarity’s old news to them. They act like every six-year-old had that knowledge in hand long before you, that’s how minor your clarity is. Other people are a letdown, when it comes to clarity. And sure, technically I had to admit, happiness is an emotion isn’t a groundbreaking discovery. And yet: knowing this and knowing this are not the same.

  I wasn’t willing to let go of the moment right away; I was determined to show Chip that the clarity meant something. At times, when it comes to telling my thoughts to Chip, I’m like a dog with a bone. Chip’s more than a sounding board to me; Chip is the universal ear. That’s the job of a spouse, isn’t it? You find someone to be your universal ear. So I’m a dog with a bone when I have an idea, a dog that keeps on gnawing/talking until Chip accepts the bone/thought as the big gift that it clearly is.