Free Mermaids in Paradise: A Novel by Lydia Millet Page B

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 alittle 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 about global warming. He said it seemed to be nature—that various Ice Ages, also, had taken place now and then, and the warming was a non-Ice Age.
    His logic went: It has been colder before, and now it will be warm. The film-industry Bay Arean, enraged by this, was raining thunder upon him.
    Meanwhile the Heartland wife and the other Bay Arean were making small talk off to one side, trying to take the edge off any free-floating climate-change aggression with harmless domesticity. The Bay Arean designer recommended air plants for the Heartland living room, which could be placed in clear-plastic globes that dangled from shelves or light fixtures. They required no soil. You watered them with a spray bottle, he told her; couldn’t be easier. The Heartland wife received