Mermaids in Paradise - Lydia Millet (phonics story books txt) 📗

get me wrong—that’s patriarchal, completely—but we could put our heads together on the subject, see if we had a consensus.

Chip’s mother was seating herself again amongst her flock of Orange County dowagers, most of whose husbands had preemptively perished. Here you go, said those old, sweet geezers, I’ll go ahead and die, so you don’t have to do it first. Like opening the door for the ladies, I thought: gentlemanly. Chip had more relatives than I did, or, that is, his mother actively talked to them and knew their children’s names and sexes. My own parents, may they rest in peace, never really showed an interest in the whole fraternizing-with-relations thing—the second cousins, step-uncles by marriage. As far as I could tell while I was growing up, a relative, to my parents, was like Middle America to coastal dwellers: only existent in the abstract. That was why I was surprised to see the great-aunt from St. Louis had snuck in. The last time I’d seen her had been in a Christmas card photo.

I imagined Tanya had showed me some kind of potential guest list, and to get away from her I’d probably nodded.

“Remind me,” I whispered to Chip, amongst some clapping, “talk to great-aunt. Thought she was dead.”

I was telegraphing a bit—slurring, I admit.

“Your Aunt Gloria? From St. Louis?”

“Yes!” I cried, deeply impressed at his knowledge of the furthest, smallest, most insignificant branches of my family tree.

He patted me on the wrist.

“You already talked to her, babe,” he said. “On a couch. For like three quarters of an hour. You were telling her all about Gina. And the Ravage Room.”

I sat back, pensive, and held my water glass firmly.

I’D GONE WITH a dress that was more of a cream than a white, even toward the beige family—it didn’t have a white feel at all, really. Tanya almost vomited when she first saw the garment, apparently thinking her age group would view a non-white wedding gown much as they would a large sign reading I ALREADY PUT OUT. But by the time the big day rolled around she’d assimilated, trying to hide the outfit’s non-white identity by making sure none of the décor was white either. Creamy beige was everywhere, down to the tablecloths at the reception. Tanya was trying to trick the eye.

She even asked the photographer to go mostly for black-and-white pics: sepia tones, she said. She didn’t personally like that look, she was more of a primary-colors type, but she’d read in a wedding planner book that sepia was classy.

Like the trooper that she is, Gina took all the heat off anyway: when I refused to wear black, as she was goading me to, she bought as her own reception garb the kind of evening gown a hooker would wear in the Addams household. There were feathers involved, spraying over one shoulder like the black-and-red plumes of some fiendish hellfowl, and her spike heels were daggers pointing toward the floor. Gina enjoys high fashion, steeped as it is in irony. The excellence of a friend like Gina is that she’ll take the hit for bad behavior every time.

She didn’t wear the vampire dress to the ceremony, fortunately, where, as the so-called maid of honor, she agreed to wear something less funereal/whorish. But the ceremony itself was on the informal side of conventional—held in the gazebo of a well-landscaped garden overlooking the Palos Verdes bluffs, the ocean crashing below. Chip had initially wanted one of those Renaissance faire weddings, until I told him I’d rather get a Renaissance faire divorce. I could live with the gaming, I told him—though it was going to be a stretch, sustaining sexual desire for a mate with multiple cudgel-bearing avatars. Over time, the gaming would be a liability where my libido was concerned: I was already making a major exception for Chip by agreeing to share the remainder of my time on Earth with an active fantasy enthusiast.

Chip didn’t understand the psychology involved, didn’t see how his alternate life in the land of heroic centaurs could possibly be a turnoff, but he took my word for it. He accepted the fact that I was making an aesthetic sacrifice. So there was literally zero potential, I told him, for me to go even further and cultivate an attraction to a Renaissance faire husband. Not in the cards. You have to draw the line somewhere, and I personally draw that line well before wizards and bawdy wenches. I draw the line between medieval reenactments and me, and I draw it firmly.

So we looked pretty normal, I’d guess, standing there with the ocean behind us, our gazebo festooned, garlands in various places. Chip wore a charcoal suit and silver tie, and he looked very, very good. Chip’s the kind of man who might have been a male model, if he weren’t so innocently unaware of his own looks. He’s one of those rare people who actually go to the gym for pure enjoyment, not vanity. I felt fortunate, standing there, holding his hands, gazing at him. I thought, Well, I’ll be blowed. (If a ship’s captain can use that fine expression, I thought, then so can I.) I further thought: Few women have the kind of luck I do. And I wasn’t being sentimental. It was more of a statistical analysis.

Other than that, I can’t say a lot happened. A breeze blew the dry grasses along the bluffs, making them dip and sway. Music played. There was the sense, all around us, of the kind of momentousness that is also completely trite. We were at our wedding.

I was glad I’d limited myself to two flutes of champagne in the dressing room, and that Gina, a few feet behind me, had amused herself by getting her eyebrows dyed that morning instead of snorting the mound of fairly pure cocaine left at her house by a trust-fund grad student she’d recently stopped sleeping with. There was a pleasant quality to being balanced and calm,