Mermaids in Paradise by Lydia Millet (debian ebook reader .txt) 📕

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.”

“I didn’t say anything about regrets,” I said. “I said you screwed me, G.”

“Same thing,” said Gina, shrugging and scrolling on her phone.

I growled and lowered down my window, sticking my face into the wind doglike. Gina doesn’t accept responsibility; that’s not the way she rolls. She also doesn’t apologize. She says it’s a sign of weakness, like an animal peeing on itself.

They tried to teach us that in B-school too, but what can I say: at the end of the day, I choose to leave my powermongering at the office, where it belongs.

“If she even comes to the reception after this,” I said, to the passing street, “you better make nice. And you better hope she doesn’t sue the company for sexual harassment. Or emotional distress.”

“Where’s my thank-you for the kickass party?” objected Gina, pretending to be hurt.

Gina hears only what she wants to hear. So that night, already a little tipsy from the Plague Death experience, I drowned my sorrows over a bottle of good wine with Chip. Unlike so many other heterosexual men, Chip enjoys hearing a woman bitch at length about her acquaintances and friends—he’s fascinated by the daily machinations of the fairer sex. It’s not the details he’s interested in but the passion women bring to their interpersonal dissections. What amazes him the most, he often says to me, is how much we seem to actually care.

“Don’t you get tired of it?” he asks. “How can you keep it all in your head?”

I WENT INTO my office the next day with a sense of foreboding about Suzette, afraid she’d be presenting with PTSD. But as it turned out I didn’t have time to think about it: the numbers consult was a ruse so they could throw a surprise party for my nuptial occasion. Suzette was nowhere to be seen; I heard later