Lydia Millet - Mermaids in Paradise - A Novel

Hard to tell who would fade out of sight. But odds were that someone would. Perhaps many.

We left my great-aunt for last on the list of stops, since I didn’t want to go. I was ashamed of whatever I might have said to her in my drunken confession. I didn’t know her, and I was ashamed of that too, though I couldn’t say why — it wasn’t like she’d ever reached out to me either, except for the surprising move of coming to my wedding. Her name was Gloria; she lived in a city. Or town or state. Lewiston, possibly. She’d been married to my mother’s uncle. He’d been in commodities — seeds. Maybe feeds. Something with sacks of grain, but where you never see or touch them. She had a skin tag on her neck the size and hue of a purple grape.

I preferred to call in an excuse and let her slip quietly away to LAX, but Chip is annoyingly decent about appointments: he has an “honor code.” To Chip, blowing off a great-aunt from Louisville was a failure of ethics; to me, not blowing her off was a failure of intelligence.

Sober, it was going to be hard to think of conversation topics.

“It’s really too bad,” I said to Chip, “that you can’t just be honest about this stuff. Like, why can’t I say to her: Aunt Gloria, we don’t know each other from Adam, and chances are you’ll die soon, right? What are you, ninety-one? Eighty-three?”

I’m not that good with ages, once there’s a critical mass of wrinkles on a face it’s all the same to me.

“And even if you don’t die shortly, we’re not going to see each other again because I’m not flying to Louisiana unless someone hijacks my plane. So let’s cut to the chase. What does it mean, really? This extended family thing? I mean why did you come? Why are you even here talking to me?”

“Maybe if you don’t say that about her death coming,” suggested Chip mildly. “That might come off a little cold, I think. But you could maybe do the other part.”

“Some people talk like that, don’t they? Some people have the guts to talk like that, I bet,” I said.

“I don’t know if it’s guts ,” said Chip.

In my mind Aunt Gloria had turned into a bit of a battleax since the rehearsal dinner, judging me harshly for my indiscreet tales of black-plague-celebrating pseudo-bondage dens, but as it turned out she was a gentle bumbler. She said almost nothing of interest the whole time we sat awkwardly in her hotel room — once she looked for her bifocals for a painfully protracted five minutes, another time she offered us a dog-eared tourist brochure from a table. It was about an amusement park with giant bunny statues that celebrated Easter all year round, but Chip turned it over in his hands as though it were made of delicate filigree, nodding respectfully.

After what seemed like an eon we walked her down to the lobby, where an airport shuttle van waited. She clutched her vinyl purse; Chip carried her luggage and tossed it up to the driver. Before she stepped in after it, she put out her hands and touched my shoulders, then cupped my cheeks. The hands were softly trembling, and when she smiled it was the saddest smile, and her eyes were watery.

“You were the sweetest child,” she said.

Then the doors folded closed and the van pulled away.

GETTING ON THE airplane to the Caribbean I was nostalgic for the days of Eastern Airlines, how when I was a young girl, flying for the first time, the pretty stewardesses in frosted lipstick had smiled so much and been so kind to me. One of them had given me a plastic pin with wings on it, a cellophane-wrapped pack of cards for me to keep; she’d led me into the cockpit to meet the pilot, like a VIP. Those days were gone for sure — it was a wonder the surly flight attendants didn’t kick us in the shins as we boarded. One of them, a weak-chinned man with thinning hair, shot me a baleful look.

I’d much rather have the frosted, buxom women, I thought. Did that make me a sexist? Was I some kind of gender traitor?

“We’d get better service on a Greyhound, Chip,” I said.

I’d been thinking how good Chip was, just good , ever since he’d made the right call on feeble Aunt Gloria. Chip was often correct, I was thinking, he often made the right call, whether by means of the cheerful optimism he always had, sound instincts or plain dumb luck. I felt a wash of terrible fondness for my tiny great-aunt, now — how often Chip showed me the good path, how often he took the edge off me.

I’d started feeling downright grateful about the marriage arrangement, once my hangover was gone — almost as though I’d taken Chip for granted earlier, but now I wasn’t anymore. I say “oddly” because you’d think it would be the other way around: before the wedding, appreciation; after the wedding, complacency. But so far, the reverse seemed true. Chip held my hand as we sat there. I searched his face for signs of his own budding complacency, but didn’t find any.

And as we waited for takeoff, the mid-sized aircraft stuffed to the gills, tepid, fluorescent, with a kind of cattle-car vibe presiding, I almost understood — thinking back to air travel in the 1970s, when I was but a babe in the woods — my husband’s nostalgia for a fake-medieval wonderland of magical beings. It wasn’t the same deal, of course, my own stewardess memories being grounded more strictly in what many would call reality, but still, all at once the idea of a charming, lost past was resonating with me. Whether it was half-invented or cut from whole cloth, the point was: that other life, that other world of wonder and possibility, what a warm, golden glow it had.

What a glow.

I ’d never been to the Caribbean before. The closest I’d gotten to a tropical island was the Florida beaches, swarming with the retired and half-naked. But the British Virgin Islands were different. For one thing, seminude humans weren’t littering the sand; the turquoise bays were frequently deserted, the white sands smooth.

I noticed right away that I liked it.

As we motored in on a ferryboat from the airport, which was on a nearby island named Tortola, I pictured pirate ships anchored in the bay. In my mind’s eye I saw the pirates drinking rum in a carefree fashion on the shore, their Jolly Rogers rippling in the breeze, the great sails on their ships billowing. The sleeves of the pirates’ white shirts also billowed, fallen open over muscular chests. This was the kind of thing, I knew, Chip also liked to imagine — how dashing our fellow humans might once have been, in bygone days, even the criminals.

Chip said there was good rum nearby — not far away grew the sugarcane, of whose byproducts that famous rum was made — and we would partake of it. From our resort, a former yacht club with cabins built onto a hillside overlooking the sea, we would visit the Baths, a boulder-strewn shallow-water grotto. We would swim and snorkel. We would receive pampering services. We would be drink swillers and food eaters.

“This is what I was talking about,” I told Chip approvingly, as a servile-acting individual drove us over the resort grounds in a rickety golf-cart rig. Side by side in the back, we jiggled inertly like the human cargo that we were. “ This is a honeymoon scenario!”

“Whatever makes you happy,” said Chip, and smiled at me.

It was a shame the whole world didn’t resemble this resort, I thought fleetingly as, still jiggling inertly, we passed the immaculate landscaping and fragrant flowers brimming from Japanese-influenced rock gardens — that would be nice. Was it so much to ask? How hard could it be? Yes, yes, there were some obstacles, but still — thinking of how the whole world didn’t look like this resort, I felt faintly aggrieved.