Lydia Millet - Mermaids in Paradise - A Novel

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.

“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 ?