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

dock and onto the white sand; we looked up at the buildings of the resort in front of us, stretching far out to the sides, along the beach, and quite a ways back, to where the soft hill of the park began to rise. We felt the comforting shape of their well-designed spaces, their welcoming lights.

BACK AT THE Steve/Janeane cabana, the two men and I sat on the back porch and Janeane brought out a brownish pile of hippie-style grain, mounded low and flat on the serving plate like a dormant volcano. We all felt worried and restless, so the mood wasn’t great; soon after she sat down and we all began to eat, we were interrupted by a crisp knock on the cabana’s front door. I flashed back to that morning, when Steve had knocked on our own door and brought me news of death. Then I abandoned my fork and ran to answer the summons, admittedly relieved to be clear of my quinoa mountain.

There stood someone I’d never seen before, a young guy dressed in business casual—I’d almost say dapper, except his tan was a few shades too deep. It crossed the fine line between handsome and pleather.

“Hey there—Mike Jantz,” he said, or it might have been Jans or Jams, the exact name was one of those small slivers of knowledge that slips through your fingers forever. “I’m with Paradise Bay Guest Services. Good evening!”

“What’s this about?” said Chip, coming up behind me—he too, I think, was eager to escape the quinoa.

“You must be our newlyweds in the Star Coral Cabana, am I right?”

At Paradise Bay all the cabanas have names; ours was Star Coral, the Freudian’s was Pearl Diver.

“That’s us,” said Chip, and cocked his head. “How did you know?”

“We try to give all our guests a caring, very personal service. I make sure I always know who’s who.”

“That’s nice,” said Chip, putting a hand on my shoulder.

“I apologize for interrupting your dinner,” said the tanned man. “It’s delicate, but we at Paradise Bay want to bring together all those who were associated with Dr. Simonoff, who, as you know, has passed away. We want to make sure the guests who were associated with Dr. Simonoff are kept in the loop—that everything is done, from our end, to make sure your needs are met at this upsetting time.”

“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