Mermaids in Paradise: A Novel (5 page)

“Seriously, Gina,” I said, shaking my head. “I swear.”

“Absinthe for everyone!” she cried.

Nearby stood our waitress, waiting for orders with tears of blood flowing from her eyes. She was wearing a skin corset, that is, a corset whose dozens of opposing hooks, between which dark-red-and-black silk fabric was stretched, went into her actual skin in two rows up and down her back. I stared at the hooks, goggle-eyed.

“First round’s on me!” crowed Gina. “Let’s raise a glass of the favorite drink of Aleister Crowley, the Great Beast! To Debbie and Chip! Absinthe for everyone!”

“Could I please have a wine cooler?” asked someone timidly.

“I’d like a Budweiser Chelada,” said someone else to the torture waitress. “Do you have Budweiser Cheladas? Those ones that come in cans?”

“Pimm’s Cup,” said my college friend Ellis, a good-looking dentist.

Ellis pretends to be a Brit, doing an accent he learned from
Masterpiece Theatre
, but his deal is he won’t admit he’s not English no matter what you say—despite the fact that his
parents were born and bred in Teaneck, N.J. The mother chews enormous wads of bubblegum-flavored bubblegum. Though technically a prosthodontics specialist, Ellis is really more of a method actor. He never drops his English persona, going so far as to eat cottage pie, Marmite and large jars of pickled onions; he even leaves his bottom teeth slightly crooked. He makes annual trips to London, ostensibly to “see some West End theater” but really for language immersion, honing the accent. I think he tries to pass there, and where he fails he makes adjustments. The upshot is it works perfectly for him, here in the Golden State, where based on his Englishman status he sleeps with dozens of women.

No one was jumping onto Gina’s pretentious absinthe bandwagon. Everyone was annoyed they even had to be there in the first place, all they’d signed on for was a harmless bachelorette party and instead here they were at the Plague Death Tavern, where rooms off the main area had blood-dripping signs in visceral designs that read
RAVAGE
,
BLACK
TUMOR,
and
PUSTULE
.

Also, the cover charge wasn’t nothing.

I sympathized with my guests, hell, I agreed with them, so that when it was Gina’s turn to make a bathroom run I smiled at their plan to get back at her. And when we did—before too long—file into the private space referred to as the Ravage Room, several of us were feeling better than we’d felt before, newly brimful of liquid courage.

A minute later the red lights in the Rav. Room changed to a purplish-blue and an amateur theatrical began, involving a peroxide-wigged woman in a white dress, behaving fakely
innocent, and a muscular man, possibly garbed as some kind of primitive metalsmith, who wielded a battleax-like tool and seemed to have small nubs of horns implanted between his skull and his scalp. I couldn’t figure out what they were enacting, but I got the message that it was both purportedly twisted and achingly stupid.

“You’re kidding,” I groaned to Gina. “The pedophile theme? Really?”

“It’s tradition,” said Gina, smugly.

She wasn’t so smug a minute later, when the guy with horn implants turned his attention away from the pretend virgin and focused it on her. One thing about Gina is, she talks a great game and she’ll even walk the talk if she can do so in private, but she doesn’t like to be in the spotlight. It’s a secret weakness that can, if necessary, be turned against her.

The horned man in his satanic leather stylings had a piggy, solid kind of face on him, a face that signaled openly that he was a minimum version of a
Homo sapiens
—not unlike the gay male strippers we
would
have been watching if Gina were more of a Republican. And when he turned that dumb face on Gina, then knelt down and began lavishing attention on one of her feet, she turned red as a beet. Not only was he lavishing slavish, adoring attention on the foot, he actually slid one of her boots off and buried his face in her toes.

“Oh! No!” protested Gina, trying to shrink away. “I’ve been wearing leather all day with no socks on. Jesus, it’s gotta be—I mean—”

The horned man took a deep sniff, like it was manna from
heaven. I watched her face closely as she struggled to regain her composure, reject her own unguarded, sincere alarm and reconstruct the ironic distance.

“. . . totally rank,” she said faintly, as the panic faded and the irony returned.

It wasn’t much but it was enough to cheer most of us up just a smidge, so that we coasted through the remainder of the show with lighter attitudes. All part of life’s rich pageantry, I reflected, life’s rich pageantry.

For the next hour my mind wandered as I plotted how to mend fences with my coworker who had fled, the one with big-eyed bobbleheads. Technically I was her superior in the corporate hierarchy, earning several times what she did since she was a secretarial type. The contrast was stark at times, me with my spacious corner office and panoramic views of cityscape and sky while she worked in a shared cubicle out in the open. Her only view was of an old Accounting lech we called Tricky Dick for his habit of sliding his hands into his pants pockets while he was talking to you and then moving them around, furtive.

I don’t want to come off arrogant, but I’m not apologizing for it either: the kind of business I do comes pretty naturally to me. The Stanford MBA was pretty much a sleepwalk through the borough of Lazy Ass. We all have our skill sets, right? At least, some of us do. Some of us don’t, I guess.

Chip has plenty of skills, just different ones; he has me outclassed in at least six categories but he couldn’t perform a basic cost-benefit analysis on a supercomputer named Deep Blue. He’s great at other computer stuff, but nothing too financial.
So I’ve got the corner office and I’ve got the decent salary, where Chip at his workplace, and my young coworker at ours, have their desks out there in the open like any Tom, Dick or Harry.

My point is, I had to stop by my office first thing in the morning—I had two days off before the wedding weekend, but I’d promised a colleague to look at some numbers for him on the way to my mani-pedi. And there she’d be, this sweet young woman fresh from her southern sorority, looking up plaintively from her cubicle populated by orphans with missing appendages to whom she, full of naïve hope, sent her hard-earned cash. She was trying to make for them a better world—even if eighty percent of her gifts
did
go to pay the admin overhead of a fundraising department in Chicago. And there I would be, too, the callous exec with no pictures of orphans tacked up at all, not one single orphan on my wall—just a defiantly ugly print of Hulk Elvis by Jeff Koons.

Me, the callous exec that had taken her to an S&M den, which she’d run away from, probably weeping. If that wasn’t a litigation scenario I’d never heard of one.

Plus which, I liked her quite a bit, though admittedly I only knew her because, before we both went on the patch—I was a light, social smoker but had promised Chip to give it up entirely—we used to slink out to the pre-cancer ghetto every day or two, with the comfortable solidarity of the self-condemned.

“Damn it, Gina,” I said in the cab home. “You screwed me this time. I
work
with that girl Suzette.”

“If you don’t have regrets after a bachelorette party,” said Gina, “you’re doing something tragically wrong.”

“I didn’t say anything
about
regrets,” I said. “I said you screwed me, G.”

“Same thing,” said Gina, shrugging and scrolling on her phone.

I growled and lowered down my window, sticking my face into the wind doglike. Gina doesn’t accept responsibility; that’s not the way she rolls. She also doesn’t apologize. She says it’s a sign of weakness, like an animal peeing on itself.

They tried to teach us that in B-school too, but what can I say: at the end of the day, I choose to leave my powermongering at the office, where it belongs.

“If she even
comes
to the reception after this,” I said, to the passing street, “you better make nice. And you better hope she doesn’t sue the company for sexual harassment. Or emotional distress.”

“Where’s my thank-you for the kickass party?” objected Gina, pretending to be hurt.

Gina hears only what she wants to hear. So that night, already a little tipsy from the Plague Death experience, I drowned my sorrows over a bottle of good wine with Chip. Unlike so many other heterosexual men, Chip enjoys hearing a woman bitch at length about her acquaintances and friends—he’s fascinated by the daily machinations of the fairer sex. It’s not the details he’s interested in but the passion women bring to their interpersonal dissections. What amazes him the most, he often says to me, is how much we seem to actually
care
.

“Don’t you get tired of it?” he asks. “How can you keep it all in your head?”

I WENT INTO
my office the next day with a sense of foreboding about Suzette, afraid she’d be presenting with PTSD. But as it turned out I didn’t have time to think about it: the numbers consult was a ruse so they could throw a surprise party for my nuptial occasion. Suzette was nowhere to be seen; I heard later 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?