Lydia Millet - Mermaids in Paradise - A Novel

“Gina,” I said with some audible irritation, because Gina only intimidates me sometimes, “congrats. One down, thirteen to go. You really outdid yourself this time.”

“That woman’s got an actual PBR can stuck through her giant ear-pierce hole,” mused Gina. “You think it’s got any beer in it?”

“Seriously, Gina,” I said, shaking my head. “I swear.”

“Absinthe for everyone!” she cried.

Nearby stood our waitress, waiting for orders with tears of blood flowing from her eyes. She was wearing a skin corset, that is, a corset whose dozens of opposing hooks, between which dark-red-and-black silk fabric was stretched, went into her actual skin in two rows up and down her back. I stared at the hooks, goggle-eyed.

“First round’s on me!” crowed Gina. “Let’s raise a glass of the favorite drink of Aleister Crowley, the Great Beast! To Debbie and Chip! Absinthe for everyone!”

“Could I please have a wine cooler?” asked someone timidly.

“I’d like a Budweiser Chelada,” said someone else to the torture waitress. “Do you have Budweiser Cheladas? Those ones that come in cans?”

“Pimm’s Cup,” said my college friend Ellis, a good-looking dentist.

Ellis pretends to be a Brit, doing an accent he learned from Masterpiece Theatre , but his deal is he won’t admit he’s not English no matter what you say — despite the fact that his parents were born and bred in Teaneck, N.J. The mother chews enormous wads of bubblegum-flavored bubblegum. Though technically a prosthodontics specialist, Ellis is really more of a method actor. He never drops his English persona, going so far as to eat cottage pie, Marmite and large jars of pickled onions; he even leaves his bottom teeth slightly crooked. He makes annual trips to London, ostensibly to “see some West End theater” but really for language immersion, honing the accent. I think he tries to pass there, and where he fails he makes adjustments. The upshot is it works perfectly for him, here in the Golden State, where based on his Englishman status he sleeps with dozens of women.

No one was jumping onto Gina’s pretentious absinthe bandwagon. Everyone was annoyed they even had to be there in the first place, all they’d signed on for was a harmless bachelorette party and instead here they were at the Plague Death Tavern, where rooms off the main area had blood-dripping signs in visceral designs that read RAVAGE, BLACK TUMOR, and PUSTULE.

Also, the cover charge wasn’t nothing.

I sympathized with my guests, hell, I agreed with them, so that when it was Gina’s turn to make a bathroom run I smiled at their plan to get back at her. And when we did — before too long — file into the private space referred to as the Ravage Room, several of us were feeling better than we’d felt before, newly brimful of liquid courage.

A minute later the red lights in the Rav. Room changed to a purplish-blue and an amateur theatrical began, involving a peroxide-wigged woman in a white dress, behaving fakely innocent, and a muscular man, possibly garbed as some kind of primitive metalsmith, who wielded a battleax-like tool and seemed to have small nubs of horns implanted between his skull and his scalp. I couldn’t figure out what they were enacting, but I got the message that it was both purportedly twisted and achingly stupid.

“You’re kidding,” I groaned to Gina. “The pedophile theme? Really?”

“It’s tradition,” said Gina, smugly.

She wasn’t so smug a minute later, when the guy with horn implants turned his attention away from the pretend virgin and focused it on her. One thing about Gina is, she talks a great game and she’ll even walk the talk if she can do so in private, but she doesn’t like to be in the spotlight. It’s a secret weakness that can, if necessary, be turned against her.

The horned man in his satanic leather stylings had a piggy, solid kind of face on him, a face that signaled openly that he was a minimum version of a Homo sapiens —not unlike the gay male strippers we would have been watching if Gina were more of a Republican. And when he turned that dumb face on Gina, then knelt down and began lavishing attention on one of her feet, she turned red as a beet. Not only was he lavishing slavish, adoring attention on the foot, he actually slid one of her boots off and buried his face in her toes.

“Oh! No!” protested Gina, trying to shrink away. “I’ve been wearing leather all day with no socks on. Jesus, it’s gotta be — I mean—”

The horned man took a deep sniff, like it was manna from heaven. I watched her face closely as she struggled to regain her composure, reject her own unguarded, sincere alarm and reconstruct the ironic distance.

“. . totally rank,” she said faintly, as the panic faded and the irony returned.

It wasn’t much but it was enough to cheer most of us up just a smidge, so that we coasted through the remainder of the show with lighter attitudes. All part of life’s rich pageantry, I reflected, life’s rich pageantry.

For the next hour my mind wandered as I plotted how to mend fences with my coworker who had fled, the one with big-eyed bobbleheads. Technically I was her superior in the corporate hierarchy, earning several times what she did since she was a secretarial type. The contrast was stark at times, me with my spacious corner office and panoramic views of cityscape and sky while she worked in a shared cubicle out in the open. Her only view was of an old Accounting lech we called Tricky Dick for his habit of sliding his hands into his pants pockets while he was talking to you and then moving them around, furtive.

I don’t want to come off arrogant, but I’m not apologizing for it either: the kind of business I do comes pretty naturally to me. The Stanford MBA was pretty much a sleepwalk through the borough of Lazy Ass. We all have our skill sets, right? At least, some of us do. Some of us don’t, I guess.

Chip has plenty of skills, just different ones; he has me outclassed in at least six categories but he couldn’t perform a basic cost-benefit analysis on a supercomputer named Deep Blue. He’s great at other computer stuff, but nothing too financial. So I’ve got the corner office and I’ve got the decent salary, where Chip at his workplace, and my young coworker at ours, have their desks out there in the open like any Tom, Dick or Harry.

My point is, I had to stop by my office first thing in the morning — I had two days off before the wedding weekend, but I’d promised a colleague to look at some numbers for him on the way to my mani-pedi. And there she’d be, this sweet young woman fresh from her southern sorority, looking up plaintively from her cubicle populated by orphans with missing appendages to whom she, full of naïve hope, sent her hard-earned cash. She was trying to make for them a better world — even if eighty percent of her gifts did go to pay the admin overhead of a fundraising department in Chicago. And there I would be, too, the callous exec with no pictures of orphans tacked up at all, not one single orphan on my wall — just a defiantly ugly print of Hulk Elvis by Jeff Koons.

Me, the callous exec that had taken her to an S&M den, which she’d run away from, probably weeping. If that wasn’t a litigation scenario I’d never heard of one.

Plus which, I liked her quite a bit, though admittedly I only knew her because, before we both went on the patch — I was a light, social smoker but had promised Chip to give it up entirely — we used to slink out to the pre-cancer ghetto every day or two, with the comfortable solidarity of the self-condemned.

“Damn it, Gina,” I said in the cab home. “You screwed me this time. I work with that girl Suzette.”

“If you don’t have regrets after a bachelorette party,” said Gina, “you’re doing something tragically wrong.”