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

to not wobbling at all on my heels, to hearing with dull precision the droning voice of the officiant.

Standing on the bluffs, I thought of where we were, Chip and I, and how beneath our feet was a tectonic fault block of seafloor sediments atop a submerged mound of metamorphic rock that had risen out of the Pacific beginning one to two million years before. I didn’t have an opinion about it, really, though it recalled me to an early class in geology, how the only part of that class I’d really enjoyed or retained had been the cross-sectional drawings of the layers of the Earth. I hoped there wasn’t anything symbolic in the fact that the ground beneath our feet was eroding. I thought of how it was impossible to form any particular impression at times like this; how, at a time like this, you had a tendency to think of yourself in the third person, if only fleetingly. I thought of not thinking.

Shortly after that, the ceremony ended and we kissed.

LATER, AT THE reception, Ellis and Gina hooked up. I hadn’t seen that one coming, since Gina ridicules Ellis openly for his faux-English identity and he calls her a stupid cow. Still, when you’re carried away on the romance of an evening, I guess, a cow can get less stupid. A fake Englishman can start to look like the real McCoy.

Actually, as I said to Chip when we passed them dry humping behind a port-a-john, something about the hookup made a certain sense; Gina loved the inauthentic and the absurd, and Ellis was both of those. In turn, though you couldn’t call Ellis ironic—his Englishness was the most heartfelt thing about him—his life was definitely a gesture, and Gina may have briefly mistaken it for an ironic one.

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