Mermaids in Paradise: A Novel (16 page)

“Who
does
have the power on the islands?” I asked Steve. “Do you know?”

Steve shook his head.

“
Is
there power?” he asked naïvely.

“There’s always power,” I said. You’d think a Freudian would know that better than anyone, but I kept my mouth shut on that point. “The question is who has it.”

“Whoever has the money,” shrugged Chip. “Right?”

We stepped off the dock and onto the white sand; we looked up at the buildings of the resort in front of us, stretching far out to the sides, along the beach, and quite a ways back, to where the soft hill of the park began to rise. We felt the comforting shape of their well-designed spaces, their welcoming lights.

BACK AT THE
Steve/Janeane cabana, the two men and I sat on the back porch and Janeane brought out a brownish pile of hippie-style grain, mounded low and flat on the serving plate like a dormant volcano. We all felt worried and restless, so the mood wasn’t great; soon after she sat down and we all began to eat, we were interrupted by a crisp knock on the cabana’s front door. I
flashed back to that morning, when Steve had knocked on our own door and brought me news of death. Then I abandoned my fork and ran to answer the summons, admittedly relieved to be clear of my quinoa mountain.

There stood someone I’d never seen before, a young guy dressed in business casual—I’d almost say dapper, except his tan was a few shades too deep. It crossed the fine line between handsome and pleather.

“Hey there—Mike Jantz,” he said, or it might have been Jans or Jams, the exact name was one of those small slivers of knowledge that slips through your fingers forever. “I’m with Paradise Bay Guest Services. Good evening!”

“What’s this about?” said Chip, coming up behind me—he too, I think, was eager to escape the quinoa.

“You must be our newlyweds in the Star Coral Cabana, am I right?”

At Paradise Bay all the cabanas have names; ours was Star Coral, the Freudian’s was Pearl Diver.

“That’s us,” said Chip, and cocked his head. “How did you know?”

“We try to give all our guests a caring, very personal service. I make sure I always know who’s who.”

“That’s nice,” said Chip, putting a hand on my shoulder.

“I apologize for interrupting your dinner,” said the tanned man. “It’s delicate, but we at Paradise Bay want to bring together all those who
were associated with Dr. Simonoff, who, as you know, has passed away. We want to make sure the guests who were associated with Dr. Simonoff are kept in the loop—that everything is done, from our end, to make sure your needs are met at this upsetting time.”

“We were associated too!” called Janeane, hovering at the sliding doors to the back patio. “We ate at the breakfast buffet together! Twice!”

“Talked about aphids,” said Steve modestly. “Pea aphids. These bugs self-detonate. Whole suicide bomber thing, they self-explode. To take out ladybugs.”

“Uh, sure,” said the tanned man. His tie, I noticed, seemed to depict fireworks on a maroon background. “That’s good to learn. Please join us, in that case. We’re gathering in the Damselfish Room in twenty minutes. We’ll send a buggy for you. I should go—doing my best to locate all the guests with a, you know, acquaintance or relationship. With the deceased.”

After I shut the door on him I couldn’t move for a minute. It was like I was paralyzed.

“Deb? Deb?” Chip was saying. “You OK there, honey?”

I didn’t like the way the pleathery man had said
deceased
. The texture of it was greasy, smarmy. Death was trivial, in that mouth. I felt dizzy.

Then I snapped out of it and nodded.

“Fine. Yeah. We should go.”

“Hmm—Damselfish Room,” said Steve, who’d also come in from the patio. He unfolded a dog-eared map that lay on the bar counter. “I’m pretty sure that’s—yeah. It’s way over on a far corner of the property. See? It’s where they do the nature
slideshows no one signs up for, the natural history talks. I went to one. A guy talked about lizards that jump like frogs. It’s in one of those futuristic hippie domes. What are they called?”

“Hydroponic?” said Janeane.

“Geodesic,” said Steve, nodding like they agreed.

“I’ve always wanted to see inside a dome like that,” said Chip.

THERE WASN’T ROOM
in the golf cart for all four of us so Chip volunteered to run beside the cart while Steve sat up front, squeezed in next to the buggy’s driver. This one wasn’t acting servile, I noticed—more casual. A relief. He and the Freudian started chatting about trivia; the driver couldn’t act fully servile, I guess, all thigh-to-thigh with Steve up there. The servile dynamic didn’t work smoothly, with two guys rubbing thighs.

At that point, with manly thighs rubbing—at that point even a servility professional has to throw in the towel.

It was just Janeane and me on the passenger bench in the back, left there to jiggle inertly. Janeane jiggled a good amount. What was it, I asked myself, about the jiggle that so captivated me? Then it occurred to me: this was a Gina thing, the small Gina that always traveled with me. Because Gina talked about fat quite a bit, in her career as an academic failure. She’d written an article once, which, she said, was published in a journal six people read, two of them exclusively while defecating.
It was called “Death and the Fat American.” I remembered her telling me about it over beers. Or maybe that was her ironic wine spritzer phase, where she ordered cantaloupe spritzers, sometimes pomegranate/honeydew.

Of course, I didn’t remember exactly what she’d said. The bar scene stayed with me more than the details of Gina’s monologue. That often happens. She did say there was the phenomenon of morbid obesity and then, as a separate matter of study, our cultural and individual responses to it, the response of the non-obese as well as the actual obesity victims. Obesity was a piece of death we carried constantly, she announced to me as she scanned the jukebox lists for “Don’t Stop Believing.”

Not only physically, she rambled on in front of the jukebox—in terms of heart disease, the liquids pooling in the vast, giant bodies, the wrongness of any human being possessing ankles that could brush along the floor—but also spiritually/symbolically. Our fat was obviously our death, entombing us prematurely. But that’s not all, she said, there’s more! The passive, consumer posture of fatness was a perfect embodiment of our “object status,” I think that’s what she mumbled out, though I may have got it wrong.

Our life of abundance, our tragic lack of agency, our infinite foregone conclusion of abject uselessness—our fat was a death that went beyond death, Gina orated (as nearby men, with some belligerence, began to stare).

Fleetingly angry because the Journey song was not available, she settled for “Urgent.” A drunk guy stumbled over to us and
asked Gina to give him some sugar, please. She said
Fuck off
and he asked if her sister was less of a bitch than she was (leering at me).

I tried to cheer myself up, after these unpleasant ruminations, by watching Chip’s lean, muscled ass as he jogged effortlessly alongside (Janeane did too, I noticed). It was a solemn time, an anxious time, but we still had eyes and there was still Chip’s ass, running. His beige cotton slacks showed it off—the grounds of Paradise were dark by then, of course, but the golf cart had headlights and there were footlights at intervals along the path.

When I turned to Janeane to talk to her, after a minute, she moved her eyes away in a small, shifty motion, like they’d alighted on my husband’s ass purely by chance, and purely by chance were moving off that ass again.

“We’re going into a rainforest,” she announced. It was a couple of scraggly bushes. “Look! Thick vegetation, big, waxy leaves, giant, bulging flowers like penises, gonads, flowers are sex organs, you know that, right?” Her voice was rising in pitch and volume. “In the tropics they’re huge—what does that mean? They threaten you! Tropical flowers are rapists! It’s a
jungle!
Giant rapist flowers!”

“Are you worried about, uh . . .”

I trailed off. I didn’t know where to start.

“. . . flowers?” I struggled on. “Hey. Don’t worry about them. You know—no legs. They can’t run after you. To get raped by a flower you’d have to, like,
put
yourself on it. But by accident. But then how could—no. Plants can’t be rapists, I don’t think.”

I was getting a little obscure, a little nitpicking, thinking about it. The day had been bad—man. So bad. I felt delirious.

But it didn’t matter. Janeane had already moved on.

“She was murdered. I know it!” she squeaked. “I’m
sure
she was murdered. Alone in her bathroom. Naked! In the tub! He burst in and he murdered her. He probably had a knife! Or gun! He wanted to shoot her face off! That poor, poor, poor woman. So full of life! Like we are now! Alive!”

I nodded. Nancy
had
been alive.

“The murderer could still be nearby. Concealed. He could be lurking in the bushes!”

By this time she was rubbing her hands together anxiously—wringing them, I guess you could call it. But the cart was already slowing down; we’d passed through the bushes and come out into a small parking lot, at the end of which was a dome-shaped building, gleaming gray. The cart stopped.

Chip was instantly pleased by the dome. He pulled up short. He hadn’t broken a sweat, and he hadn’t had to listen to Janeane, either.

“Deb, we should get a dome home,” he enthused.

I sprang out of the cart, leaving phobic Janeane behind; I wasn’t equipped to comfort her. There were lights shining out from the dome’s windows onto the parking lot’s pavement, making it look blackly wet. Light fell on the clumps of red flowers Janeane had talked about (admittedly they
were
large, roughly the size and shape of butternut squashes). Chip and I passed them, with Steve and Janeane lagging, and went through the door into a room with yellowing botanical drawings on the
walls. It had to be some kind of disused educational facility. There was a small fleet of schoolroom desks near the back of the dome-shaped room, where the ceiling was low—wood, ink-stained children’s desks with chairs attached to them.

Some of the other members of our expedition were already sitting, legs awkwardly folded beneath the miniature desks. Some of them stood; some grazed along a foldout table against the wall. It bore a vat of coffee, a stack of plastic cups, and a couple of plates of cookies. I don’t know what I’d expected—a PowerPoint? Wreaths? There was a nondescript woman with a plastic name tag pinned to her lapel, wearing a long, Mormonish skirt and standing near the front of the room with her hands clasped.

“The gang’s mostly here,” said Chip. “Though I don’t see Riley the videographer. Still AWOL, I guess.”

“I hope he’s OK,” I said uncertainly.

“. . . glad you could make it tonight,” the Mormonish woman was saying. We’d already missed part of her spiel.

“. . . doesn’t feel like a safe space!” Janeane stage-whispered to Steve, nearly into our ears. She seemed to be gearing up to a panic attack. “How many bars does your cell have? Steve? Steve! How many
bars
?”

“We at Paradise Bay want to be sure that you, both our guests and members of our larger community, feel supported in this time of bereavement,” said the Mormonish woman.

It was her skirt, really, that made her a Mormon, an ankle-length floral thing a Mormon wife might wear; I couldn’t make out her name tag from where I stood.

“Here’s the thing,” said the old Navy SEAL, whose broad back I was looking at since he’d sat down in the front row. “We’re not buying the bathtub story.”

“Sir, my personal area is guest relations and community outreach,” said the Mormon. “Anything legal or technical—of course, you’d have to take that up with the police.”

“Don’t kid a kidder,” said the old salt. “I’ve been around the block. And back.”

“I’m sure you have!”

“I
live
here,” he went on. “The island cops? You’re joking, right? Those kids only take the job so they can dress up in the outfits. Not a man jack among them with half the sense God gave a Guinea baboon.”

“This is a time to come together,” said the Mormon. “Offer each other our mutual support. The healing can only really begin when we let go of the anger.”