Mermaids in Paradise: A Novel (14 page)

Though I knew it was embargoed, and I didn’t plan to share the pic with anyone, I wanted a shot for my records. So I took one, on the sly.

We circulated and talked around the sparse furniture and the dramatic displays of cut flowers, one of us posted as a sentinel at the doorway to make sure the secret video went unseen by others’
eyes. No strangers were allowed. We ordered more and more drinks via room service, through happy hour and into the sadder ones; we ordered individual drinks, then later whole bottles, which arrived on the golf carts with a generous surcharge. The servile young men dismounted from the cart and brought trays to our door.

Once or twice there was a scuffle at the threshold, a member of the party who wanted to smuggle in a loved one or friend. The Heartland man, for instance, was turned away by Nancy for trying to sneak in his wife; I think I hid my pleasure quite smoothly. Later a large man stationed himself outside our door, a large man in a flowery shirt. He was a hotel janitor by day, moonlighting for us in a freelance capacity, Chip told me, as a bouncer. That parrotfish expert had outsourced our security.

I can’t say my fellow party guests were above average, in terms of charisma, intelligence or conversational ability, but I felt like the mermaid sighting was bringing us together, creating a buzz of enjoyment—until I hit a wall around two in the morning and wanted nothing more than to fall into bed. But that option wasn’t available to me; our guests were still milling, tripping, laughing. The bearded old salt had taken up residence in the room’s puffiest chair, where he regaled his listeners with stories of diving deep into dangerous shipwrecks to “lay charges.” He’d blown up many a vessel in his day, it seemed, ranging from “amphibious assault ships” to “minesweepers.” He told stories of diving in Truk Lagoon, where a ghost fleet of Japanese ships lay filled with human skulls.

At that point I happened to glance at the bathroom door and saw
the drunken Fox News spearfisherman rummaging in my tampon box. I watched the spearfisher rummage, I took it in stride, and then I cruised over there, casually interrupting him. You don’t really get to ask why, when you behold a thing like that, but the politeness vs. curiosity dilemma can be tense.

The spearfisher snatched his hand out of the box when he saw me coming; as I led him out of the bathroom he made small talk about mer-people’s gills—claimed he’d once known a guy from Montreal, a regular human who had a vestigial gill himself. Right on his neck, where the mermaids’ gills were. It sometimes leaked a clear substance.

“Actually that would most likely have been a pharyngeal slit,” said Nancy, appearing with her eyebrows. “Or groove. Not a vestigial gill. A layperson might call it a birth defect.”

“I don’t get it,” said Chip, who’d detached himself from old Navy guy. “Why do those mermaids even
have
gills? I mean wouldn’t they be marine mammals? I mean they have breasts, right? And hair. So aren’t they, like, mammals? Like sea lions and dolphins? Those guys don’t need gills. So why would mermaids?”

“It’s very exciting!” cried Nancy. “Of course, gills are far more efficient than lungs at extracting oxygen. They have to be. It’s hard to breathe seawater. Less oxygen in water than air. Gills could have been an evolutionary advantage for the mers. Particularly if they have lungs too. They may have both, in fact. It’s not impossible.”

“The ‘mers’?” I asked.

“
Mer-people
could be read as a colonialist term,” explained the biologist. “Racist and hegemonic. It’d be my own proposal that, until we learn the culture’s own name for itself—assuming the culture
has
language
qua
language, which is a major leap—we shorten our label to
mer
, or
mers
, plural. It’s relatively value-neutral. Just the French word for
sea
.”

“Huh?” said the tampon fisherman. “French? Why goddamn French? They should be
flattered
we’re calling them people! It’s a goddamn compliment!”

“Well, imagine a highly intelligent race of eels . . .” said the biologist.

“No, man,” the fisherman interrupted. “I don’t
want
to.”

“. . . and when these intelligent eels discovered our own species,” the biologist went on, “they then referred to us as
land eels
. Would that seem like a compliment to you?”

“I wouldn’t take it
personally
,” said Chip.

“Makes no sense. We don’t look like an eel,” said the fisherman.

“My anthro colleague knows this stuff better than I do,” admitted Nancy.

I guess the sensitivity racket was mostly for the humanities.

We heard a crash and turned—it was the man from the Heartland, who must have snuck in, without his wife this time, when I wasn’t paying attention. Like the spearfisher he’d been nosing around in my business, it looked like, because he was squatting in the open closet, where my clothes were, and as I drew closer I saw an iron from the top shelf had fallen. He was
prodding the top of his head with two fingers. Our clock radio lay entwined with the iron on the carpet, two black cords spiraling.

“What the hell?” said Chip, and dashed past me.

Sure enough, I saw from somewhere behind Chip’s shoulder, the man was holding one of my shoes. It was a Jimmy Choo. I knew now I wouldn’t wear it on this trip; it had a four-inch heel and there wasn’t enough pavement.

Chip snatched it away from him.

The man’s other hand was bloody from his scalp, which had a bloody dent in it made by the point of the iron. My shoe trembled slightly in midair as Chip looked down at the guy, unsure of his next move.

A thin drip of red trickled its way down the toe man’s forehead, so slow it seemed glacial. I had a sense of losing control, of borders fading loosely into fuzziness.

“Uh. You OK, man?” asked Chip, craning his neck to see the gouge.

The toe man nodded dazedly, then abruptly rose and zigzagged around us, through the living room and out the front door.

“Huh,” said Chip. “Hope he doesn’t have a concussion or something.”

I shrugged inwardly. I had no patience for the guy’s injuries, incurred during his shoe fondling. He hadn’t received them defending our free nation. He didn’t deserve a Congressional Medal of Honor.

I turned to the oglers loitering.

“Sorry, but it’s time for us to turn in,” I announced. The drinking
and annoyance had finally emboldened me. “Chip and I are going to hit the sack now. We’ll see you again tomorrow. And thanks for coming, though.”

IT SHOCKED ME
to see, when I struggled out of bed the next morning all headachy to answer a vigorous pounding on our door, that the man who stood there—visible through one of the large picture windows as I tottered out of the bedroom in my skivvies, nothing but a camisole and boyshorts—was the guy from outside the restaurant men’s room, two nights ago, who’d been wearing the Freudian slip T-shirt.

He wasn’t wearing the T-shirt now, but still I recognized him.

“What is it?” I asked, opening the door creakily. It felt like five minutes had passed since I collapsed into bed. I couldn’t have cared less that the Freud guy was seeing me half-naked and unkempt; all I cared about was sleep.

“I came to tell you, because I think you’re friends with—that is, I have some news, the news is bad, you might want to sit down, even? Can I come in?”

“Uh—”

“Thanks,” said the guy, whose face was bland, snub-nosed and friendly. It was mournful, too, mournful as an old hound.

He sat right down on our couch himself, quite heavily.

“I’m sorry to tell you this, but I thought you should know they found a body this morning. A—a person died. A woman.”

“What woman?” I said, snapping awake.

“The one you’ve been spending time with. We—I saw you together at the restaurant, with your husband I guess? Her name is Nancy. A Dr. Nancy Simonoff.”

I sat down then myself, all the way to the carpet. My knees somehow gave out on me.

Chip stumbled out of our bedroom in even less underwear, rubbing his chin stubble.

“What did you say?” he asked. “Someone is
dead
?”

“Sorry. The resort wasn’t sending anyone to let you know—I thought someone should—personally—I was just there, see, I was on the grass near her casita, we’re just a couple casitas down and like every morning I was practicing on my yoga mat—”

“Who?
Who?
”

“Nancy,” I said robotically.

I wasn’t looking at Chip, but he must have sat down too, on the sofa near the Freud guy, and we were silent there, three rocks. Feeling surreal the way you do. In shock, or whatever.

“I don’t believe it,” mumbled Chip.

“A drowning, is what I heard,” said the Freud guy gently. “It’s not official yet.”

“But she was a great swimmer!” said Chip.

“In her bathtub,” said the Freudian. “Because they didn’t bring her in from the pool or the ocean, they brought her out of her casita. It’s how I even know any of this. I heard an EMT say
drowned
.”

“Drowned in the bathtub? Like . . . suicide?” said Chip.

“No way,” I said.

“Never,” said Chip.

“I only talked to her a couple times,” said the Freudian, “but I’d have to agree it doesn’t seem likely. She was very, um, enthusiastic. She wasn’t a patient, but still—I’d never have pegged her for suicidal depression.”

I realized he might actually
be
a Freudian. Or something like it, in the therapy arena. Beyond the pun on the T-shirt.

“And she barely drank either,” said Chip. “She ate a lot but didn’t drink. Last night she was stone-cold sober.”

We sat.

“I mean.
Murder?
” asked the Freudian.

We sat.

BY THE TIME
Chip and I were dressed and hygienic, cold water splashed on our faces and teeth brushed with haste and vigor, the press had arrived. It was a strictly small-time crowd compared to the ravening media hordes back home, but it came on the heels of the police so it felt like a minor invasion—a white van with a satellite dish; two pretty women in pancake makeup who must be reporters; cops teeming. That is, there were a couple of cops in uniform, there was hotel security, and there were some official men in jackets and ties, of unknown identity. And then there were the other guests, passing, standing, gawking—the guests, gathering in small groups, craning their necks, whispering nervously and/or with ghoulishly titillated interest.

The police didn’t look like the cops we were used to—these
ones had a faintly British, formal look. But the crime scene tape was universal.

We felt ourselves drawn to the Freudian’s cabana, as close to the furor as we could be. He’d invited us to go over there, before he cleared out of our own cabana so we could get dressed. Each of us felt disbelief that Nancy had stopped breathing. We couldn’t imagine it. We didn’t need to use our imaginations, technically—I get that—because apparently it was real, but sometimes you can’t imagine the facts.

First there’d been mermaids and now this. We wanted sanity.

Walking across the grass, between the palms, we caught sight of someone from the diving party, the substitute teacher, face stricken, lost as a child. We had nothing to tell him, no words to clear things up, so we just shook our heads at him, our bodies still heavy; he shook his head at us.