Lydia Millet - Mermaids in Paradise - A Novel

“We were associated too!” called Janeane, hovering at the sliding doors to the back patio. “We ate at the breakfast buffet together! Twice!”

“Talked about aphids,” said Steve modestly. “Pea aphids. These bugs self-detonate. Whole suicide bomber thing, they self-explode. To take out ladybugs.”

“Uh, sure,” said the tanned man. His tie, I noticed, seemed to depict fireworks on a maroon background. “That’s good to learn. Please join us, in that case. We’re gathering in the Damselfish Room in twenty minutes. We’ll send a buggy for you. I should go — doing my best to locate all the guests with a, you know, acquaintance or relationship. With the deceased.”

After I shut the door on him I couldn’t move for a minute. It was like I was paralyzed.

“Deb? Deb?” Chip was saying. “You OK there, honey?”

I didn’t like the way the pleathery man had said deceased . The texture of it was greasy, smarmy. Death was trivial, in that mouth. I felt dizzy.

Then I snapped out of it and nodded.

“Fine. Yeah. We should go.”

“Hmm — Damselfish Room,” said Steve, who’d also come in from the patio. He unfolded a dog-eared map that lay on the bar counter. “I’m pretty sure that’s — yeah. It’s way over on a far corner of the property. See? It’s where they do the nature slideshows no one signs up for, the natural history talks. I went to one. A guy talked about lizards that jump like frogs. It’s in one of those futuristic hippie domes. What are they called?”

“Hydroponic?” said Janeane.

“Geodesic,” said Steve, nodding like they agreed.

“I’ve always wanted to see inside a dome like that,” said Chip.

THERE WASN’T ROOM in the golf cart for all four of us so Chip volunteered to run beside the cart while Steve sat up front, squeezed in next to the buggy’s driver. This one wasn’t acting servile, I noticed — more casual. A relief. He and the Freudian started chatting about trivia; the driver couldn’t act fully servile, I guess, all thigh-to-thigh with Steve up there. The servile dynamic didn’t work smoothly, with two guys rubbing thighs.

At that point, with manly thighs rubbing — at that point even a servility professional has to throw in the towel.

It was just Janeane and me on the passenger bench in the back, left there to jiggle inertly. Janeane jiggled a good amount. What was it, I asked myself, about the jiggle that so captivated me? Then it occurred to me: this was a Gina thing, the small Gina that always traveled with me. Because Gina talked about fat quite a bit, in her career as an academic failure. She’d written an article once, which, she said, was published in a journal six people read, two of them exclusively while defecating. It was called “Death and the Fat American.” I remembered her telling me about it over beers. Or maybe that was her ironic wine spritzer phase, where she ordered cantaloupe spritzers, sometimes pomegranate/honeydew.

Of course, I didn’t remember exactly what she’d said. The bar scene stayed with me more than the details of Gina’s monologue. That often happens. She did say there was the phenomenon of morbid obesity and then, as a separate matter of study, our cultural and individual responses to it, the response of the non-obese as well as the actual obesity victims. Obesity was a piece of death we carried constantly, she announced to me as she scanned the jukebox lists for “Don’t Stop Believing.”

Not only physically, she rambled on in front of the jukebox — in terms of heart disease, the liquids pooling in the vast, giant bodies, the wrongness of any human being possessing ankles that could brush along the floor — but also spiritually/symbolically. Our fat was obviously our death, entombing us prematurely. But that’s not all, she said, there’s more! The passive, consumer posture of fatness was a perfect embodiment of our “object status,” I think that’s what she mumbled out, though I may have got it wrong.

Our life of abundance, our tragic lack of agency, our infinite foregone conclusion of abject uselessness — our fat was a death that went beyond death, Gina orated (as nearby men, with some belligerence, began to stare).

Fleetingly angry because the Journey song was not available, she settled for “Urgent.” A drunk guy stumbled over to us and asked Gina to give him some sugar, please. She said Fuck off and he asked if her sister was less of a bitch than she was (leering at me).

I tried to cheer myself up, after these unpleasant ruminations, by watching Chip’s lean, muscled ass as he jogged effortlessly alongside (Janeane did too, I noticed). It was a solemn time, an anxious time, but we still had eyes and there was still Chip’s ass, running. His beige cotton slacks showed it off — the grounds of Paradise were dark by then, of course, but the golf cart had headlights and there were footlights at intervals along the path.

When I turned to Janeane to talk to her, after a minute, she moved her eyes away in a small, shifty motion, like they’d alighted on my husband’s ass purely by chance, and purely by chance were moving off that ass again.

“We’re going into a rainforest,” she announced. It was a couple of scraggly bushes. “Look! Thick vegetation, big, waxy leaves, giant, bulging flowers like penises, gonads, flowers are sex organs, you know that, right?” Her voice was rising in pitch and volume. “In the tropics they’re huge — what does that mean? They threaten you! Tropical flowers are rapists! It’s a jungle! Giant rapist flowers!”

“Are you worried about, uh. .”

I trailed off. I didn’t know where to start.

“. . flowers?” I struggled on. “Hey. Don’t worry about them. You know — no legs. They can’t run after you. To get raped by a flower you’d have to, like, put yourself on it. But by accident. But then how could — no. Plants can’t be rapists, I don’t think.”

I was getting a little obscure, a little nitpicking, thinking about it. The day had been bad — man. So bad. I felt delirious.

But it didn’t matter. Janeane had already moved on.

“She was murdered. I know it!” she squeaked. “I’m sure she was murdered. Alone in her bathroom. Naked! In the tub! He burst in and he murdered her. He probably had a knife! Or gun! He wanted to shoot her face off! That poor, poor, poor woman. So full of life! Like we are now! Alive!”

I nodded. Nancy had been alive.

“The murderer could still be nearby. Concealed. He could be lurking in the bushes!”

By this time she was rubbing her hands together anxiously — wringing them, I guess you could call it. But the cart was already slowing down; we’d passed through the bushes and come out into a small parking lot, at the end of which was a dome-shaped building, gleaming gray. The cart stopped.

Chip was instantly pleased by the dome. He pulled up short. He hadn’t broken a sweat, and he hadn’t had to listen to Janeane, either.

“Deb, we should get a dome home,” he enthused.

I sprang out of the cart, leaving phobic Janeane behind; I wasn’t equipped to comfort her. There were lights shining out from the dome’s windows onto the parking lot’s pavement, making it look blackly wet. Light fell on the clumps of red flowers Janeane had talked about (admittedly they were large, roughly the size and shape of butternut squashes). Chip and I passed them, with Steve and Janeane lagging, and went through the door into a room with yellowing botanical drawings on the walls. It had to be some kind of disused educational facility. There was a small fleet of schoolroom desks near the back of the dome-shaped room, where the ceiling was low — wood, ink-stained children’s desks with chairs attached to them.