Mermaids in Paradise: A Novel

by Lydia Millet

  I didn’t want to call attention to my activities, though; I didn’t want to seem like a schemer, so I went on nodding and talking to the biologist while this was going on. Above the table’s edge I was normal, albeit feeling increasingly queasy; below it I was little more than a stuck-out limb with a sneaking, feely foot, making forays.

  When my toes finally touched the table’s main post I cast off my shoe and inched the toes up and down the post, looking for the telltale bump of a switch. Listening to the biologist I got distracted, though, so it took several moments for me to notice the post wasn’t as smooth as it should be, the post was in fact furry, and furthermore it was a leg.

  The leg extended from the Heartland man. He whipped his head around like it was being spun on its neck-stalk by a Linda Blair Satan.

  I was startled by the abruptness of the head spin and snatched my foot back with a speed that rivaled his.

  But it was too late. He was smiling at me. The Heartland husband thought I was making a pass at him.

  And here’s where I made my second mistake, because instead of coming clean and admitting I’d been looking for the anti-vomit button, I lost my way in confusion. There was a guilty look on my face, I know, as I averted my eyes in embarrassment from his strangely avid gaze. I had to reach out my bare foot a bit in his direction yet again, in order to snag the abandoned mule and tumble said mule back toward me with my toe tips. Then I wriggled the foot back into it.

  Making matters worse, I shifted my body neatly away even as I did this, recommitting my attention to the dismal future of parrotfish. For all the world as though I was either ashamed of my footsy overture or, worse, coy.

  My eye-contact avoidance convinced the husband, I believe. He knew me for the strumpet that I wasn’t.

  AS WE WERE leaving the restaurant, the Heartland guy got next to me while Chip strode ahead listening to the Bay Arean designer orate on the subject of high-end prefab sheds. The Heartland wife had gone to the restroom with the parrotfish expert, so her husband and I were, unfortunately, alone and bringing up the rear.

  “So, hey,” he said. “You don’t say much, do you?”

  “I say a lot,” I said. “Sometimes too much. Believe me. When so moved.”

  “But back at the table there, you let your twinkle toes do the talking.”

  For a second I thought the barkeep would get to clean my sick up after all.

  “Twinkle … ?”

  “I like them,” he said, in a fruity voice.

  I glanced down at the offending digits as we walked, needing somewhere to rest my eyes. They still sported their wedding pedicure; the nails were salmon-pink. Seen from a Heartland viewpoint, I guessed, they could be deemed trashy.

  “I’m a toe man,” he said, dropping the volume. “And yours are top-notch. Grade A. So hot.”

  “You’re kidding me,” I said. “Is this something—is there a hidden camera?”

  “A lot of people feel it’s not cheating if it’s the toes,” he went on, fruitier and juicier by the second.

  “So did Chip mention we just got married?” I rushed. “This is a great place for a honeymoon, I think. Don’t you? Really perfect.”

  “Many people say if it’s just the toes, anything goes. There’s an increasingly—call it liberal approach, since you’re from California, ha ha—to when it’s just the toes.”

  “Just the toes that what?” I said, and then regretted it.

  “That share intimacy,” he said. “Toe-genital intimacy.”

  “Oh my God,” I burst out, and practically stampeded over the Bay Areans in my haste to get next to Chip.

  As soon as he and I split off from the others to make our way along the lighted footpaths to our cabin, I gave him the lowdown. He seemed not to completely believe me, before I reprimanded him. Chip tries pretty hard to see the best in folks. But he came around when I supplied a few details, and he promised me we’d try to eat alone—at least in the evenings, when darkness was all around.

  “I’m not hanging out with that guy again,” I said. “I’m not sharing another meal with him. No meals of any kind. And no day trips either, Chip, because I know how you like to invite strangers along. Not him. He made me feel like my toes were prostitutes. Like my toes, Chip, were dolled up in Frederick’s of Hollywood. That’s not right.”

  “Your lips say no, but your toes say yes,” said Chip.

  I hit him for deadpanning, but it was weak. Still, the words of the toe man haunted me as I tried to fall asleep. I thought to myself: Are my toes sluts? Were my toes asking for it? It kept me up after Chip had fallen asleep, even, because I worry about these questions. In the broadest sense, of course, no woman should have to worry about whether her toes are asking for it—in the most lofty, the most righteous sense. But on the other hand, in the more narrow, specific context of personal choice, was I responsible for debasing my own toes? Were the toes, in essence, fashion victims, like those newborns with lacy headbands strapped around their craniums, fluffy rosettes affixed, to broadcast femaleness? To function as blaring signs that read: I am a female baby, what so many call a “girl”; moreover, it is absolutely vital to my parents that even perfectly indifferent passersby should know this instantly. For that reason, and that reason alone, I have been tagged with this most hideous adornment.

  Had I visited that kind of sad, pimpish outrage on ten innocent dactyls?

  It wasn’t till the next morning, when I woke up to the sound of steadily plashing waves, and then the sight of Chip bringing me my morning coffee with his shirt off, that I felt completely nausea-free again. I sat propped up on the pillow, drinking my coffee, watching the fan whir overhead, and I reassured myself. The toenails were pink. That was the whole story.

  We set off for the Baths not long after, where we spent the morning walking between gray, wet boulders, on top of boulders, and beneath boulders. There were narrow crevices to walk through, sand beneath our feet; there were ropes to hang onto as we climbed; there were wooden ladders. It was a group of boulders, with the ocean washing in and washing out again. That was the situation there.

  We sat on top of a boulder, just the two of us, and looked out to sea one time; after that Chip kissed me on the sand, an inch or two of tide lapping at our legs. I had sand on my calves, sand on my knees, and I thought how much I enjoyed the sight and texture of sand on skin, how satisfying it could be to roll the grains beneath my fingertips, two sleek expanses of my skin with sand between them. One day, I ruminated, that skin would be wrinkly. That skin would be baggy as a pachyderm’s, and possibly gray, too. The sand wouldn’t be as satisfying then.

  “You think we’ll still like sex when we’re old, Chip?” I asked romantically, while one more time we boulder-sat.

  “I’ll take me some Viagra,” said Chip. “I don’t care. I’ll pop it like vitamins, if need be.”

  “I’ll be all wrinkled, like an elephant.”

  “Me too.”

  “Wrinkles get a bad rap. Don’t they,” I said.

  “If you think about it, what’s a wrinkle or two,” agreed Chip.

  “I think it’s probably an evolution, reproduction-of-the-fittest type thing. I mean we probably want to mate with wrinkle-free people so they’re still fertile, for one thing.”

  “Good point,” said Chip, nodding.

  I was contented, sitting there with him. And yet I had a sense that nothing was happening—that nothing, possibly, would ever happen to me again.

  Curiously it was then, sitting on our boulder, looking out to sea and thinking of being elderlies together, that we caught sight of a small powerboat churning into the harbor from the direction of the reefs. In that boat was a newly familiar figure: the parrotfish expert. She wore a black wetsuit and stood looking off the bow, a kind of rigid tension in her posture; when the boat passed close enough that we could see each other better she jumped up and down, waving wildly. She was yelling, but I wasn’t able to hear the words. Then the boat veered toward the docks.

&nb
sp; “That’s weird,” said Chip. “She didn’t seem the excitable type, so much, when we first met her. Did she, Deb?”

  We got down off the rock and strolled along the intertidal zone toward the marina. We weren’t in a hurry—we held hands, we held our shoes in our other hands, we looked for crabs and shells, scooping up water and wet sand onto the top flats of our feet, then letting it trail off. It wasn’t long at all, though, before we saw the parrotfish expert again, and this time she was running toward us. She still had her wetsuit on, which made her run in a held-back, goofy-robotic way that looked like a form of slow torture. But she was doing it anyway. That expert was determined. And it was a sight worth seeing.

  By the time she got up to us, though, she was huffing and puffing so hard I thought she might be having an attack. The biologist could hardly breathe, much less speak. But she waved us away and bent over, hands braced on her thighs, catching her breath. She shook her head when we asked if there was anything she needed, just shook her head, struggling to breathe. Finally she wrestled the breathing under control and straightened up, her face beet-red. Her cheeks and forehead still bore the deep, bruising marks of a snorkel mask, which made her look deformed.

  “In the reef!” she said breathlessly. “You’ve got to come with me! I have to show you! I saw them!”

  “Those colorful fish you like so much?” asked Chip, genuinely interested.

  She shook her head rapidly, emphatically.

  “Mermaids! There are mermaids! Mermaids are swimming in the reef!”

  SHE WAS DISTURBED, of course—we hardly knew the woman. Maybe it was a schizoid deal, we figured, or maybe a drug problem, we didn’t have all the info yet, but the situation had to be handled humanely. If there’s one thing Chip is, it’s game. He’s game for almost anything, and so much the better if, later, it might make good material for an anecdote to tell at a party.

  So he humored the delusional scientist, and I went along with it cheerfully—because, of all the people we’d had dinner with, she was the only one I kind of liked. That meant that, after Chip, she was my favorite person for a thousand-mile radius.

  She said she’d booked a 7 a.m. seat on a snorkel boat, and it turned out she was the only one booked for that slot, so the boat’s captain took her out to the reef by herself, muttering something about swimming in pairs. But he didn’t want to give her money back; it was just snorkeling after all—child’s play. So he took her by herself, without a second paying customer. And that was how she came to see the mermaids. The boat captain hadn’t seen squat.

  We were sitting in the boat ourselves by that time, being ferried back out to the reef. She’d offered the captain more money for the second trip; she talked a blue streak while we were motoring. Also she ran around collecting parts of wetsuits for us to wear, a top and bottom for Chip and a one-piece suit in my size. I obliged her by changing in the boat’s tiny bathroom, enjoying the privacy; I figured we might as well get a free snorkel out of her sad mental incapacity.

  The night before, when I’d been assuming she was sane—an absentminded type, but with all the usual marbles—I’d viewed her as a normal, if geeky, woman. Now she took on a kind of homeless aspect to me. I studied her face trying to pick out signs of that unhinged quality. She didn’t tweeze her brows: well, that one was inconclusive. A crazed person might tweeze or might not tweeze—might pick the brows off hair by hair, even get rid of them in one fell swoop like those women you see who shave off their brows on purpose, then pencil them on again, making you wonder: grotesquely ironic? Or ironically grotesque?

  If I looked at her brows for too long, they started to seem like centipedes. I was afraid they might start moving their legs. And they had so many!

  Nancy, the biologist, wore no traces of makeup, which I’d first thought signaled a feminist: laudable. I like a touch of lipstick and a subtle brown eye shadow myself—I rationalize it as less an attempt to attract males than as a kind of ritualistic tribal decoration/shamanistic warding—but I also enjoy the rare sight of a naked face. Still, now, with the insanity rearing its head, I wondered if the no-makeup thing was less a stance than a sign of neglect. Maybe Nancy was the type who wore her underwear for weeks on end, or stored her cut-off fingernails in jelly jars.

  Apparently there was a sunken airplane on the reef, a small plane from long ago, and Nancy said she’d been slowly following a princess parrotfish as it weaved among the corals and then, out of the corner of her eye/mask, had seen something far larger flash through one of the holes where the airplane’s door used to be. Excited to think she might have her first local encounter with a shark or large ray, she abandoned the fish and swam cautiously over to the rusting plane. It was there that she saw it: the tail. Only the tail was visible inside the plane, from her vantage point, she said, until she swam up close and stuck her head around the brown and corroded metal door edge.

  And that was when she realized that the tail, covered in silvery scales, was surmounted by a humanoid torso. Atop that sat a neck, and finally a head, out of which long hair grew—modestly, and a little too conveniently, covering the impossible creature’s breasts.

  “What color was her hair?” asked Chip, like it mattered.

  “Yellow!” said Nancy. I couldn’t tell if she was indignant or just enthusiastic.

  “Of course it was yellow, Chip,” I said.

  “I don’t know about of course,” retorted Chip. “There are multiplayer games I do where mermaids have blue hair. Green. Even purple.”

  “This wasn’t an MOG,” said Nancy, a little prudishly.

  “So what did she do?” pressed Chip.

  “Put out that cigarette!” said Nancy sharply, turning to the boat captain. “Please! I suffer from asthma!”

  “Nancy?” I chimed in as the captain, looking resentful, flicked his cigarette over the side of the boat, thus littering. “So what did the mermaid do?”

  “She swam away! She was quick. Really quick,” said Nancy. “I followed, but I was a lot slower. But I saw there were others like her. I saw their shapes in the water before they got away from me. A pod, if you can call it that. It was a pod of mer-people.”

  “Well, if they swam away,” said Chip gently, “they may not be there when we get there. I want you to be prepared for that. We won’t judge you, Deb and I, if we can’t find them this time. You know—no judgment.”

  “None at all,” I said. “I’m sure they don’t stay for long. Once they’ve been spotted. I mean, they must be secretive types, right? Or people would have known about them long ago.”

  “We do know about them,” said Nancy.

  “But I mean, know they were real,” I said.

  “Colossal squid,” said Nancy.

  “Pardon?”

  “Well, they were ‘mythic’ too, till recently. Then their bodies were found, dead and floating. Finally one was caught live. Forty feet long. Weighed one thousand pounds. The oceans are very deep, you know. The last frontier. Still largely unexplored. New discoveries happen daily, new species are identified all the time. Maybe this is a similar situation.”

  There was no reasoning with a deranged marine biologist. I nodded agreeably.

  Before long the captain was throttling down and Nancy was eagerly pulling on her fins, positioning her mask.

  “Come on, come on!” she urged, as Chip and I struggled with our own masks and fins. And then we followed her off the side of the boat, which had a slide built into it. Swoop and splash.

  I have to say it was gorgeous down there, a place where beauty clichés came true. Light filtering, colorful blobby formations, glamorously decorated fish flitting about—all in all it was exactly what you’d hope it would be. Chip and I followed Nancy, waving our flippers steadily. She turned out to be much better at the freedive thing than either of us; Chip had to be impressed.

  Again and again she dove, fishlike. Or seabird-like, possibly.

  Chip tried to copy her after her first few dives, when she turned her goggly, tube-
sucking face toward us and made a gesture of impatience. Seemed like she didn’t know what we were up to, snorkeling around on the surface, wimpy. I could tell Chip felt he had to rise, or rather dip, to the challenge. Chip’s fit but he’s no scuba diver; I hoped he wouldn’t get the bends. I didn’t even try to dive deep, myself—I had a mild case of swimmer’s ear. So I floated, waggling my flippers as Chip did his best, coming up to breathe through his tube, then dipping down again and again in the parrotfish expert’s wake.

  The airplane was maybe twenty feet under. You couldn’t even see into its decrepit cockpit from up at the surface, where I was. But no yellow-haired mer-people must have been languishing there, because Chip shook his head when he got back up to me. He stuck his head out for air, then came back under and gave me a slow-motion headshake.

  But Nancy didn’t give up easily. She kept on going, round and round the reef, to each new nook and cranny, then out past the reef to a cluster of underwater rocks. The variety of fishes thinned out and there were fewer of the bright, darting ones and more of the flattish, dull-colored numbers camouflaged by sand. I was waiting to signal to Chip that I was heading back to the boat—I thought I’d get a drink of water, take off the borrowed wetsuit and put my feet up for a while—when down beneath me, where he and Nancy had most recently dived, came a silvery explosion of bubbles, a confusion of flippers. Streams of froth surged up and made it impossible to see anything but white.

  I hoped they hadn’t met with a jellyfish or been barracuda-bit. As I peered down and saw nothing, I ideated blood and teeth, severed digits bobbing and leaking crimson in the surf, like in so many shark movies. I started to feel panicky as the cloud of bubbles in the water beneath me refused to clear, and finally decided to freedive down—my swimmer’s ear be damned. What if Chip was caught on something and running out of air? What if the crazed biologist had suddenly attacked him? There could be anything happening, below that blinding screen of turbulence.