Mermaids in Paradise, Lydia Millet [ebook reader 8 inch txt] 📗

she’d had a dentist appointment. (Was it my imagination, though, or were the orphans sadder and thinner than usual as I walked past her carrel, the bobbleheads bobbling with new mournfulness?)

They’d made a waterfall of mimosas, a catered spread of baked goods and resplendent fruit platters evoking ancient Greece.

After that the two days until the rehearsal dinner were a whirlwind of activity—the kind you remember too blearily to describe. There were the female-objectifying beauty rituals; the cathartic taboo-lifting of friends taking depressants and/or stimulants in my immediate vicinity and then expressing boundless affection for me; the token out-of-town family (mainly Chip’s) alighting at local hotels, some of them choosing budget establishments, others opening the ostentatious rooms of their luxury accommodations to large groups of guests.

There was also the lingering presence of Chip’s mother, who benefits, in life as well as on special occasions, from the fact that Chip believes she’s sweet and funny and should be humored smilingly. Most other humans tend to see her as more of a wrinkled mythological harpy, old, partially digested worms smeared over her clack-clacking beak. Once she openly bragged to me that when Chip was a baby she made it a rule to embrace him once a week, rain or shine.

Chip gazed at her beatifically when she said it, like hers was the gold standard of attachment parenting.

It’s a wonder he emerged from that sharp-twigged, bespattered nest with both his balls intact. It’s a wonder he only flies off to dorky utopian dreamlands during the odysseys of his gaming, instead of 24/7 at a mental health facility.

And yet, and yet—it’s oddly comforting that a Nurse Ratched harpy could raise a man like Chip. If a man like Chip can emerge sane and whole from eighteen formative years with a Nurse Ratched harpy, there’s hope of redemption for each and every one of us. There’s hope the sun may not burn out after all, some billions of years hence, transforming into a giant fireball that obliterates the planet.

So I try to see his mother less as a malevolent, live person and more as a short, gnarled, wooden figure hulking in a shady corner of the room, a kind of totemic minor demon whose presence inoculates innocent folks against the purer forms of evil.

Well, there was Chip’s mother—call her, say, Tanya, since that is her given name—following us both around and imbuing the atmosphere with a perfumed unpleasantness, but other than that it was pretty much how I’d hoped it would be. There was champagne, there were margaritas, there were blurry rites of passage. By the time the rehearsal dinner rolled around I’d literally forgotten Tanya was there, even though, technically, she was located four inches from my elbow. All the faces were good faces; there was no ugliness anymore. Ugliness had vanished with the acuter of my senses, ugliness had made an exit from the stage of my perception, and all I could see were smiles. Love was around me—of that much I was certain.

Ellis made a long toast in his flowery, posh accent, quoting what must have been a famous British individual—Churchill or Kipling, someone like that, or maybe one of the war poets who wrote from the trenches about sad homosexuals dying. Even as he said it I had no idea what he meant; I was too busy relaxing. Gina, partly rebuffing him, said something about mad dogs and Englishmen that may have offended a great-aunt of mine, who bustled out loudly in the middle of her speech. My thought, watching the great-aunt go, was, Wow, I had no idea she was invited. My second thought was, Is she supposed to be alive? Hmm, hmm. Is that the one who lives somewhere?

By that point Chip was nudging me to smile or possibly respond to his mother’s verbiage, which had the scent of Hallmark to it, so I waved at the assembled company much like an empress on a boat tour of the colonies. Beneath the tablecloth, one of my shoes was off and I wondered if a cat was licking my toes. A cat? Or was it a pervert? There’d been one like that at the Plague Death Tavern . . . you had to hand it to Gina, I thought, she knew what memories were made of. I hadn’t enjoyed it much at the time, no, enjoyment hadn’t occurred, at the Plague Death Tavern, but then again here I was, only a few days later and already reminiscing.

I should be sober, I thought, for the ceremony itself; for the ceremony, sobriety was the right choice. Later, at the reception, a person could drink to excess again. Although, now that I thought about it—Tanya was standing, raising her own glass, I hazily noted—was the wedding-ceremony sobriety not just another robotic nod to senseless tradition? A drunken bride would look bad for the patriarchy! Yes. If the sacrificial virgin is a staggering souse, not so good for the fleshly property exchange, awkward to think of babies: uncomfortable to picture child rearing, conducted by a staggering floozy.

But was I actually worried about that? Was Chip, even?

Chip didn’t have a subjugation agenda; Chip wasn’t a patriarch. In fact Chip liked the matriarchal animals, smart elephants and randy bonobos. He even liked the pregnant male seahorses we’d seen at the big aquarium in Long Beach. Chip was benevolent on gender issues, one of his sterling qualities. Sitting beside him at the table, I gave his hand a squeeze, thinking fondly of how, despite his muscular physique, he wasn’t the subjugation type. His mother’s beak was clack-clacking again: if I squinted I could imagine the crushed worms, half-eaten beetles peeking from her teeth . . . she was clacking the beak in my direction now, so I raised my glass toward her in a salute.

Maybe I didn’t have to be exactly sober for the ceremony, I said to myself—a few glasses—well, I’d check in with Chip on it. Not to get his approval to drink beforehand, don’t