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

and impeccably dressed, the goblin chittered on my shoulder—chittered unpleasantly.

How many times, I wondered, as the woman said words like mindfulness and fully present, had that Gina homunculus hitched a ride on me? I didn’t always like it, but I couldn’t shake it off, either. Chip and Gina were angel and devil on my shoulders, basically, and there were things I loved about them both. I went Chip’s way when I could—maybe prolonged exposure would encourage me. Gina insisted on judgment, an us-and-them mentality, while Chip, with his earnest friendliness, tried to lead me down the path of brotherly love.

But brotherly love was sometimes wrong.

Take the toe situation, I thought to myself.

When we were kids, Gina and I, and even through college, which we attended together, I’d had some creative ambitions. Young people often do. I wanted to write songs and also sing them for a living, had singer/songwriter fantasies. I took lessons, I wrote songs and forthwith I sang them; excitedly I made demo tapes, performed for myself in mirrors and in showers, concocted videos. Later I put on shows for others, at college bars and grungy yet pretentious cafes.

But finally Gina showed me the error of my ways, pointing out quite rightly that the world was full of singers already—showcasing the foregone conclusion of my artistic and professional failure. Don’t be a wannabe, said Gina impatiently. It was Gina who persuaded me to go the MBA route, whereby at least, she said, I could grow up to be a loser with money instead of a loser without it. And we’d be at the same school then, she said, because she planned to go to Stanford too and get her PhD. She wasn’t born to make money, she said, because to make money, one way or another, directly or indirectly, you had to build people up. She was born to cut people down, she said, and that’s what she was going to do. Criticize. Therefore: a PhD. But about the singing, we can always do karaoke, she said, we’ll go to karaoke bars whenever you want!

We’ll get wall-eyed. We’ll belt us out some Bee Gees shit.

Since then there’s always been a shadow Gina following me, even when the real Gina, in her physical body, is absent, such as during my honeymoon. (Gina, I happened to know from texts received on my cell phone, was enjoying her own honeymoon of sorts with Ellis, whom she’d decided to like for several weeks at least, she texted me, before bringing the hammer down. She also texted me that he was surprisingly good in the sack, you know, for a faggot. She said his Eurofag fashion sense meant he’d given her good advice on buying a new bag. Also, the décor of his apartment was actually half-OK, she reported, if you ignored the fake-punk boy-teen completely faggy Union Jacks. Other than me, all Gina’s closest friends are gay guys; she’s less a homophobe than a victim of Stockholm.)

I acquitted myself with a compliment on my way out of the restroom—you can distract a woman lickety-split with an unexpected piece of flattery about her appearance; it’s the interfemale equivalent of a sucker punch—and booked it past the Freud T-shirt in the hall, who was still rocking back on his callused heels in front of the 3D map like he was contemplating the Mona Lisa. I headed for the restaurant’s shining bar, figuring I could while away another five minutes waiting for a new drink before I had to step onto the nauseating island once again.

“Do you sell Dramamine?” I said, after asking for wine.

Startling me, the bartender whipped out a pill in a paper slip and ripped open the package. He dumped the contents neatly into a glass of seltzer and pushed the glass across.

“We get that all the time,” he said, and leaned over the counter, voice lowered. “I’m going to tell you this because I think you’re a fox. Don’t like to see a beautiful woman puke.”

“Uh—”

“And I don’t like to watch it being cleaned up, either. So here goes: there’s a switch you can flip under the table, on the central post that holds the table up. You find it with your foot. It’s supposed to be for emergencies, but if you want to stop that thing moving, just flip it. You saw how shallow it is out there—there’s a little anchor-type deal on the bottom of the island that drops and locks into the track. The hostess can override, and she will override eventually so you can get served and like that, but meanwhile you guys’ll stop moving.”

“Knight in shining armor,” I said sincerely. “Serious, here. Really.”

So I felt pleased on my return to the table, possessing the secret weapon as I did.

THE MARINE BIOLOGIST sitting next to me was a woman who loved fish. Fish in general, parrotfish in specific. They’re thick-lipped reef fish in bright colors; I saw some later, but at the time I didn’t know a parrotfish from a humphead wrasse. She was a parrotfish promoter, the biologist.

“You see that beautiful, fine white sand all around us?” she asked me, over dessert.

I nodded, though in the dark, to be precise, the beach sand had faded from our sight. Along the dark shore a row of tiki torches flickered orange.

“You’ve got the parrotfish to thank for that,” she said, and nodded emphatically. “Bioerosion. Major contributors.”

“Ah!” I said. “Bioerosion!”

“They eat the reefs! They make the sand! They chew it up and excrete it. A single parrotfish can make two hundred pounds of fine white sand per year.”

“I see!” I said.

“You like the beach? Then thank a parrotfish. That’s what I always say,” she went on.

She was eating a flan with gusto.

Still, I was happy to be talking to her, because the husband from the Heartland seemed to be at loggerheads with one of the Bay Areans, Chip standing by neutrally. The Heartland wife looked embarrassed, but the Heartland husband was sticking to his guns—something