Mermaids in Paradise: A Novel

I. NEWLYWEDS

Chip picked out the destination for our honeymoon. He’d always wanted to take a cruise, just like Middle Americans. Middle Americans love cruises, Chip said ardently. Chip’s a romantic when it comes to the people of the Midwest, and also those dwelling along the Rocky Mountain front, the landlocked parts of the South, things like the Dakota area or what have you. Those places are somewhat mythic to Chip. He has what I suspect is a fanciful idea: people that live away from New York or L.A., D.C. or San Francisco, maybe in a pinch Boston or even Seattle — those people are modern-day pioneers.

The Middle Americans are resolute, Chip thinks, living by choice in that vast featureless space, that oddly irrelevant no-man’s land. They have their reasons, Chip believes, reasons we couldn’t understand, or moral fiber, possibly. To hear Chip talk you’d think every Nebraskan male knows how to put a horseshoe on a mule. They know how to bring forth grain from dirt, or what a combine harvester is. They get what happens to that brought-forth grain, the steps before the Cheerios. The women knit long underwear and are adept at fruit canning.

The best Middle Americans are like this, anyway, pretty much old-fashioned, according to Chip; their kids make charming toys from wooden boards, often with poking-out nails in them. Not only that, those children are delighted with the products of their ingenuity; they go ahead and play with them. Those children wave a splintered board and think of marvelous fairyland.

But Chip doesn’t want to travel there, in person, to Middle America — that wasn’t one of the honeymoon options. Chip’s a romantic, not a moron. You don’t have a Brentwood zip code and choose to spend your wedding vacation in Dayton. Literally no one does. From what I’ve seen, few people travel toward the middle of the country for personal reasons, unless a parent is dying. (The two of us won’t have to do that, since my parents, may they rest in peace, are interred in the Bay Area, Chip’s father was a deadbeat dad who left when he was ten, and Chip’s mother, more’s the pity, has a condo near here.) Chip just wanted to meet some of the hardy pioneers; he didn’t want to physically go to the puzzlingly dull places where they live. He feared the religious hysterics, in addition, who inhabit the boring wastes and can be alarming. They frighten a person, when gathered in groups or hordes. Or individually.

Chip talks about that quite a bit, when not gaming: the fact that honest Middle America, once plodding along reliably with combines for the menfolk, homemade preserves for the women and for the children some highly entertaining planks of wood, is now threatened by a growing subculture — a subculture so large it’s bigger than the rest of us, actually, which maybe means it’s not a subculture at all, says Chip with a worried aspect. That’s where the fear comes in.

The non-subculture is made of people who believe that fossils are a trick. These people are suspicious of biology and mortally offended by an ape. Also they’re angry about it.

On the one hand moral fiber, possibly, but on the other hand madness.

In any case I said no to the cruise idea. I couldn’t think of a worse prospect, a floating plastic city full of food-eating vacationers, with potential for massive water shutdown, decks to be littered with plump orange bags of human waste. Closed spaces, planned activities, nausea, the smell of greasy carbs; families wearing bright primary colors or even vibrant fluorescents, heaving themselves into a pool.

Among those families wearing flashy Day-Glo clothes, those clothes that actually assaulted your eyeballs with their hideous fluorescence, there’d have to be some victims of the morbid obesity pandemic; and with the possibilities of food poisoning, sewage overflow and tragic obesity, a cruise was something I couldn’t face. And so I went to Chip, I sat down beside him and took his hands and said: “Chip, I’m glad to be marrying you. But no cruise ships. Not a single one.”

So Chip moved on to other honeymoon concepts.

He found a French driving tour involving Maseratis and Formula 1 racecars, where pros would drive a newlywed couple many times around a racetrack, superfast. So fast their heads would have to be spinning, their innards turbulent. Not so auspicious, Chip, I said, for honeymooners, in my humble opinion. He ferreted out a “Peaks of the Himalayas” voyage next, with visits to monasteries, meditations and nosebleeds from the lack of oxygen up there.

I always think I would have been a monk, a nun or some other holy person, in another life. It turned out I was modern, well-dressed and fairly talkative, but that’s a quirk of timing. If I’d been born in the medieval part of history, I hope I would have been a monk or nun, quiet and wearing a certain mantle of wisdom.

I hope I would have used the time to think, possibly more than I do now, as a medieval-type person. I see myself singing in chapels, light streaming down on me. The singing of hymns, the kneeling down to pray, the walking with a proud, erect posture. I wouldn’t have been a peasant, I hope, busily sweeping mud off pigs, possibly dying while grunting as a baby’s head stuck out of me.

However currently I’m not a nun/monk, and neither is Chip, and chances are we’ll never be. I thought maybe the monks would turn out depressing, with their enlightened, humble existence. What came up for me, considering those Himalayan monks and the gonging sound of temple gongs, the gong, gong, gong, what I thought of was the suspicion a person might start to have, in the monkish setting, that marriage overall might be a bad idea. The inner peace a monk projects, combined with never having sex, I don’t know if that attitude is really honeymoon material.

You do hear about people — sure — who visit someplace Asian and scenic at a certain altitude, Asian or Indian, and then decide to go native. In one fell swoop they copy the whole Buddhist or yoga idea, they give away their worldly goods, move to a mountain hut where baths are taken in the snow and then pretend they never heard of home equity lines of credit or eyelash extensions. Next comes the cross-legged chanting, the wearing of loose and flowing robes, the eating of plain brown rice; some of them eat the rice just one grain at a time, holding that single grain in long, delicate chopsticks.

You hear about it and, despite your incredulity that a person would ever give up the bounty of our modern life, a minuscule part of you can almost see the seduction. Just minuscule, but still. I didn’t want to run the risk. I’ll take a pass on that serenity, I said to Chip, I’m just not in the mood for it.

I think, to be honest, Chip really wasn’t in the mood either, once he did more research and got an inkling that the monks wouldn’t be like monks in videogames. I think he’d been half hoping for monks with supernatural powers — at least flying kung fu. He first expected temples you could run through, surmounting obstacles and solving puzzles as you went. Then it began to seem as though extremely wise monks might be the best he could hope for, and I think at that point his interest waned.

Next he got pretty enthusiastic on the topic of a shark-feeding situation, a shark- and stingray-feeding package, with round-trip fare included, optimistically. You put on rubber fins and swim around with hostile marine life. Next came a thrill-seekers’ week-long Air Safari, where you jumped from high places such as airplanes and treetops, wearing harnesses clipped to parachutes or bungee cords. Plummeting, plunging, then bouncing; screaming, then laughing in relief at not yet being dead. No, Chip, honey, I said. Some other time though, we’ll do that.

My point was, I don’t need to be reminded I’m alive, I’m well aware of it. Catch me later, when I’m fifty, by then I may be on the fence.

Volcano bicycle camping, snowshoeing on glaciers, ruined Cambodian temples. All had their downsides, believe me. The volcano bicycle camping was too sweaty, I thought, we’d be so grimy in our tent at night, not showered, not fragrant, no clean linens; that also was not a goal of honeymoons, was it? And the glaciers — don’t get me started there. The glaciers had crevasses that could crop up suddenly, icy-blue traps of freezing death. And lonely! After I fell down the crevasse, crumpling a leg, splinters of bone confronting me, I’d sit there all alone in the darkness of the deep, cold earth. I’d sit there wracked with pain while frigid glacial meltwater washed over me, until, blessed release, I died of hypothermia.

I could picture Chip attempting a rescue, but finally it wouldn’t work. Chip’s not a mountaineer.

The picturesque ruins in Cambodia were a better alternative, but I happened to read a blog by a Canadian who visited Angkor Wat, got dengue fever and bravely survived it. But then she slipped on a rotting mango and snapped her neck like a winter twig. It might have been a hoax, I wasn’t sure, you never know with blogs: in this case the blog started quite normally, one of those travel blogs you see so many of, and she talked about the dengue fever, she took pictures, even, of both the ancient impressive buildings and her dengue fever rash (labeling the contrast “Macro/Micro”), and put up blog posts every day. Then for a couple of days there wasn’t any new entry, and then someone purporting to be her sister typed in a sentence saying she was deceased.

Anyway, hoax or no hoax, it’s all the same to me, isn’t it, in one sense, since I was never going to meet the blogger in real life anyway. Still it soured me on the ancient temples of Cambodia, or Khmer, as they apparently call it, I knew I’d be there eyeing mangoes suspiciously. The memory of the travel blog woman, first stoical, then dead, would make me wonder about other maverick fruit, sudden misadventure generally.

Chip yearned for daring exploits; I didn’t so much yearn as just not want to have any. My vision of a honeymoon involved some relaxation, possibly spa treatments. I suggested he could do his adventure on a separate trip, a trip for bachelors — or men, at least, supporting his final bachelor days, wanting to flex their muscles, commit some acts of bravado. They didn’t have to be unmarried themselves, although, let’s face it, the trip would be more exciting if they were.

Chip’s very friendly, most everyone agrees on that, but still he doesn’t have what you might call a group of close friends — not exactly. He has pals he plays racquetball with, he has his coworkers, and he does some multiplayer online games with guys from college who live in other cities.

One of the racquetball players is an anger-management student, that is, he goes to seminars on anger management, to learn to manage his anger. Chip says the racquetball can get a little edgy because of this, when the managing isn’t going smoothly. I ask Chip why he even plays with him, he shrugs and grins. His name was in the racquetball pool at Chip’s gym, Chip picked him at random and got into the habit so now he doesn’t want to disappoint the man. You have to wear goggles in racquetball anyway, Chip said, or you could lose an eye. I said, But Chip, aren’t there some other places an angry racquetball could hit? Do you wear goggles on those too?

Just your typical Nutty Buddy, says Chip.

This guy, Reznik, he really likes to win whereas Chip’s mostly playing to get a good workout in, so Chip hits energetically till near the end and then he misses on purpose. Still though, he didn’t want Reznik managing anger at his bachelor party.

Chip’s coworker buddies, well, in terms of other men there’s Sandy, which sounds like an easygoing blond woman but is actually a man and not a blond at all, and there’s Tariq. Sandy is delicate, a germaphobe who buys his antibacterial hand gel in bulk — probably not the type for derring-do. Tariq is married to a woman his family sent to him. He’d never met her before the day of their wedding but the two of them are stuck like glue. He doesn’t go on trips, or even out to restaurants. He’s more of a homebody. You’ll see him at office functions, but only because they’re mandatory. He’ll be the one over beside the water cooler, holding a nonalcoholic beverage and smiling nervously. The unasked question in his mind is, Can I go? You see it when you look at him.

Chip likes Tariq a lot, he admires him; he always mentions Tariq when the talk turns to Arabs and terrorists. Then it’s “Tariq tells me,” and “according to my man Tariq.” If anyone has a negative word for an Arab, a Muslim or that situation there, Chip rises to their defense. He trots out Tariq to show that not all Arabs are religious hysterics. We have them too, is what he likes to say, each country has its own hysterics, doesn’t it, its own growing majority of straight-up insane people? Let’s throw them all together on an island, a big one like Australia or they wouldn’t fit, and then take bets.

Chip’s usually hamming it up at that point, admittedly. He likes to play the fool, sometimes, likes to act less intelligent than he is. It makes other people feel more intelligent than they are, and then they find themselves liking him. Liking him quite a bit.

Look at the fundamentalists we have, says Chip, they may not put incendiary devices in their body cavities but they get up to their own shenanigans. They try to gaslight the whole culture, claiming the dinosaurs were here last week, going around to the museums — when they come into the cities — and scoffing at a T. rex skeleton.

Chip says he talked to a guy once who insisted T. rexes hung around in pilgrim times, hiding behind the trees so Founding Fathers didn’t see them, probably — slapping their tails at Pocahontas, stepping on teepees and roaring.

Not all Muslims even believe women should live in sacks, says Chip: sure, we all know that in some sandy, oily countries women walk around wearing baglike garments over their whole bodies, including their faces, with just a slit over the eye region, because without that slit you’d have these women bumping into things and breaking their noses. In those countries the women look like boulders, walking around like that. Long boulders, Stonehenge style. Crowds of these women in their dark sacks are like a field of oblong rocks.

Of course, it’s not a bad look, those dark robes, says Chip. Although the face covering, he could do without that. Chip’s confused about why the women agree to the face-covering part. Seems punitive, says Chip, pretty hard to rub your nose, if you needed to for an itch, though on the upside, it wouldn’t matter at all to have a piece of food stuck in your teeth. Those women don’t need to worry about that ever.

He’s an open guy, but he’s been reluctant to bring up the face-covering issue with Tariq, rightly fearing it might offend. He’ll ask Tariq about the politics, but not so much the face-covering.

Tariq’s a paragon of virtue, he does the prayers, he kneels on a small rug, and his wife doesn’t dress in sacks or look out of an eye slit; she wears regular U.S. clothing — though, since I’m being honest here, she could use some fashion tips. I know because I met her one time at an office party; it was St. Paddy’s Day, and people were lurching and weaving around vats of green punch and beer, floating shamrocks and leering cardboard leprechauns. There’s no one Irish who works at Chip’s company, the closest they ever got to Ireland was making fun of Riverdance, but Chip’s boss says it’s a U.S. holiday now and the point of it is License to Drink. But Tariq doesn’t drink and neither does his wife, so at the St. Paddy’s Day party she stood beside him at the watercooler, wearing that same trembling smile. It begged us all to release her. Just let us go now, please, that smile said. Please and thank you. I do not wish to be at this “party.”

It was a bittersweet situation, I guess, because I looked at her and even as I knew exactly what she was thinking, I also knew she wouldn’t be released — no, she would hover painfully for at least another ninety minutes before she was set free. Everyone has to stick around, at these office parties, until Chip’s boss, drunk as a lord, blearily notices their presence and marks it on his list of reasons not to arbitrarily fire them. She would hover there politely, her eyes as dark and wide as a deer’s, trying to fathom the vulgar customs of her adopted country.

If Chip could, I’ve thought sometimes, he’d carry Tariq around with him for showing off when the talk turns to terrorists, since Tariq’s a guy who’s attractive and very warm. He smiles a lot; with Tariq you almost wish he’d hang out more, he seems like such a sweetheart. But Tariq has other fish to fry and by the time Chip’s bragging about him, he’s off being his usual homebody.

Then for Chip’s college friends, you’ve mainly got Rocket, Eight-ball and BB3 (short for Beer Bong Three, as I recall). In their day those guys liked to tie one on and get into a hazing mentality, which could work well in a bachelor party setting. But Rocket tweaked his back on a mechanical bronco in a bar and doesn’t do much physical these days, Eight-ball is in recovery and avoiding old patterns, and BB3’s afraid of velocity. He doesn’t travel much. That’s a phobia of its own, I guess, the fear of velocity; BB3 doesn’t get into anything that goes faster than walking. If he gets into a car and it speeds up past about 5 mph, he starts to squeal like a four-year-old on helium. Chip says he pictures an impact, can’t help it. Even a bike ride is too much for him, if BB3 gets on a bicycle he immediately pictures his face pulpy. No skin on it at all.

Nothing specific happened to BB3 to cause this, Chip tells me, he just woke up one morning frightened of velocity.

So in the end Chip couldn’t get a group organized. Instead he signed up for an extreme half-marathon in the mud with obstacles — barbed-wire fences, tunnels you slither through on your belly, flaming bales of hay and 10,000-volt electric shocks.

But for the honeymoon, we decided, we’d go in a simpler, more tropical direction.

I’M GETTING AHEAD of myself, though, skipping ahead to honeymoons when Chip and I weren’t even married yet. Chip’s training for his race took up a few hours every day, at first just mornings and then evenings too; at times he’d come home bleeding from the earholes, with dirt leaking from his nose. He had one elbow in a sling, then fractured toes; his kneecaps were scab pancakes. He called it “necessary toughness” and told me men who finished the race often got the name of it tattooed on their biceps.

We had the bachelor party issue decided, so the next thing was my side of the schedule. I’d never been a fan of bridal showers, or baby showers either, really. A shower of any kind seems like a place for brain deficiency — women squeal during those showers, squeal at the sight of trivial objects. A bridal shower features frilly underwear to make the new wife look more like a prostitute; a baby shower peddles frilly bonnets you drape around a newborn’s face to make it look less like a garden gnome. I skipped right over the shower option to its faux-raunchier counterpart the bachelorette party, whose most revolting facet is the name bachelorette. I’m as fun as the next California gal, or try to be at least, but what I don’t appreciate is the infantile aesthetic. Lacy frills, voluntary brain deficiency and words like bachelorette, what they add up to, let’s face it, is basically an infantile or possibly pedophile aspect.

I’ve got no problem with the male-stripper custom. It’s a conundrum though, or maybe a complicated joke — sometimes I’ve thought the whole thing is 100 percent gay, style-wise, with all those middle-aged women smiling and clapping as though the gay male spectacle was just exactly what they came out for. Because let’s face it, in most cases the stripper dance moves are cruel and unusual punishment, for your typical straight woman. Other times I’ve thought maybe the moves aren’t gay at all, maybe they’re designed to be embarrassing. Maybe no one likes them. Maybe the point of them is male abasement, female pity/superiority. Could that be it?

Thankfully, none of my friends insisted on the stripper theme. They were OK without strippers, also without a gigolo.

Once I knew I was safely clear of the acrylic talons of the sex industry I handed the planning over to my maid of honor, Gina D. She wasn’t a maid of honor in the traditional sense, after all she’s a grown woman, as many of us are, nowadays, who choose to get married. There isn’t a maid around. The only one who called her a maid of honor was Chip’s mother, who I could write a book about. Chip’s mother also called me “the bride,” just every chance she got. As in “Well here’s the blushing bride!” when I walked in the front door in gym sweats with dark armpit stains, lugging five heavy bags of groceries and a case of beer. Or “Is the bride a little bit under the weather?” when she heard me in our bathroom during a bout of Thai-restaurant food poisoning. She said that through the bathroom door, where she hovered while I was in there making noises like a chimpanzee screaming.

But she was my second in command, Gina D. — my best friend from way back and my wedding lieutenant. I call her Gina D. because when we met, in seventh grade, there was another kid named Gina, Gina B., and so we used their last initials. But they were oh so different, those two Ginas. Gina B. later became a successful quilter. Her quilts are everywhere, at least, if you’re the type that visits community centers, women’s art cooperatives and crafts conventions. If you’re a person who notices quilts, you’d certainly notice hers. Hard to miss them. The quilts have quotes, such as, for instance, I dream of giving birth to a child who will say to me: “Mommy, what was war?”

Gina D., though, is starkly opposed to quilts — really to most things that are handmade. She openly despises pottery. I saw her laugh in a potter’s face. I was relieved she didn’t spit; to Gina D. the stink of earnestness is worse than rancid milk. Gina D. wants household items to be mass-produced, ideally of a polymer, and if they’re not she tries to throw them out. One time she walked through my kitchen and trashed three items in five minutes flat: a potholder decorated by another friend of mine’s kid, a floral apron sewn by a long-gone great-aunt and a glazed ceramic planter I really kind of liked.

She’s funny, Gina D., with a carrying personality that makes you half forget she’s harshly obliterating your possessions. Everything’s performance art with her, she lives in a world of irony. If a gesture’s not ironic, why make it at all, is her philosophy. Gina’s a failed academic — at least, that’s what she calls it. Last time I checked she made a decent salary and had tenure in American Studies.

Gina claims the term failed academic is redundant. That’s why she uses it.

She promised me no male strippers, ironic or otherwise. Gina’s the type who, left to her own devices, would have to raise the stakes on male stripping — regular male strippers would never be enough for her, she’d shake her head in boredom at that idea, instantly dismissing it. Gina would have to get some paraplegic ones or maybe amputees. And she’d probably end up making out with at least one of them in a broom closet. Gina’s got game.

She and I brainstormed awhile, with her arguing at first for a pilgrimage to the theme park Dolly Parton owns. She said the infantile or pedophile aspect of weddings made Dollywood the perfect place to go — a whole family amusement park, with millions of visitors a year, based on the image of a woman known for abnormally huge breasts. The whole thing doesn’t fit together unless you factor in its standard deviation, what Gina calls SD. SD is the perversity of everyone, Gina says, which everyone totally ignores. “We’ll fly on the wings of an eagle,” she quoted (Gina loves to quote). “Dollywood, sweet promised land of giant breasts,” she rhapsodized, “the land of friendly, singing breasts. Land where the large breasts sing.”

Gina is fond of perversion, although, since her fondness is ironic, you can’t pin her down for being an actual pervert. Quite probably, you’ll never know. That’s the hard part with irony. But I said no to Dollywood; we’re keeping it local, Gina, I said. Chip would be heartbroken if I went without him to not only an amusement park but also Middle America. Tennessee has to count as that; the name of the town is Pigeon Forge. Meanwhile Chip would be clambering over spirals of razor wire. He’d feel left out, and I couldn’t do that to him.

“I’ll take a rain check,” said Gina D. briskly. “Oh, I know — we’ll go when Chip’s busy doing his midlife thing. There’ll be a free week in there, maybe a few, while you’re deciding if you should go the couples therapy or divorce route.” She flicked on her phone, opened the calendar. “Hmm, seven years. I’m putting a reminder in. Back to the party, then. You sure about the travel ban? Because Precious Moments^™ has its own chapel in Missouri.”

WHILE GINA WAS planning my party, my almost-mother-in-law was also making plans: Chip had asked me to let her help. Chip’s an only child, and his mother had retired the previous year from what was, as far as I could tell, a Nurse Ratched-type position. She worked at an old folks’ home where, before she left her job, we used to drop in on her sometimes; I saw some elderlies who quaked at the sound of her footfall. Around the time of our engagement and wedding her main hobby was going to hear motivational speakers, and after each one of them she’d bear some pearls of self-help wisdom home to share with Chip and me. Chip’s mother brings motivation to the table, that’s for sure. She buckled down to setting up our reception, and if she wasn’t bringing me a swatch of this it’d be a forkful of something else.

I told her that I didn’t want certain so-called traditional aspects of wedding receptions, that is, the aspects that are repulsive. No feeding each other wedding cake, for instance, then mashing it around the oral region like giant babies. Strict pedophile/infantile thematic. Also no disturbing miniature bride and groom dolls perched upon the cake with glassy smiles, a serial killer’s dream of love.

Chip’s mother wasn’t happy about this, of course, she feared the opinions of the other relatives, some of whom would be hailing from Middle America or Orange County. I shouldn’t say she feared, on second thought, since Chip’s mother has never been one to frighten easily; more like she shared their views and stoutly wished us to conform to them. People don’t even perceive the standard deviant quality of wedding receptions — to them it’s cute, the cake-on-face smearing, the frozen serial killer dolls with tiny startled eyes and pink slashes where the mouths should be. Not for one second is your wedding-going public bothered by things’ actual meanings — and by public I mean those women who pass amongst each other all the information about what weddings and receptions should be, spattered across the generations like so much female deodorizing spray across the shelf at a Walgreens. These women are the clear standard-bearers of the nuptial industry a.k.a. basic wedding perversion.

To them a wedding theme is “starry night,” “angel” or “antique vanilla.” Yes, they firmly believe vanilla is a theme, along with warm yellow, mauve and tangerine. To them the sight of a full-grown man and woman mashing white-frosted cake into each other’s nostrils and chin pores is traditional plus heartwarming. If it were tradition to eat human intestines at wedding receptions they’d garnish the plates with curls of spleen. When these ladies happen to glance at the food-ravaged faceholes during the cake-on-face smearing and feel a shiver of revulsion, they simply disregard that shiver and smile as though, somewhere within the floral centerpieces, iddle fairies are giggling.

Gina maintains the standard deviance is Freudian. To her, breastfeeding is non-ironic, earnest and the child-raising equivalent of making macramé wall hangings; also to her, all children wish to nurse at their mothers’ breasts until the age of at least six, and not being able to do so makes standard deviants out of them. Gina’s not bothered by her own conflicts of opinion, though: another benefit of the irony position. You can be a walking pastiche of opinions, if you’re deeply committed to irony. If Gina is drunk she’ll get even more into it, telling all those who care to listen — and many who would prefer not to — how our free nation is a carnival of stunted mental growth. “Arrested adolescence? We wish,” she’ll slur loudly, Gina, my wedding helpmeet, when she’s in her cups. “We never made it out of elementary school, buddy.”

It’s not always clear what Gina’s referring to.

Chip’s mother kept trying to shoehorn items into the reception, slip in repulsive elements without me noticing. For instance, party favors such as star-shaped fairy wands with a label on them inviting guests to WISH UPON A STAR. When I said no to that one she left me five messages, each one more indignant. Then she wanted bottles of bubble bath with swans on top, their necks disturbingly entwined; then a white-silk flower with CONSIDER THE LILIES stamped on the stem in gold.

I told her no favors, since Chip and I had passed beyond that phase. We were adults, I told her calmly but firmly: when we attended a party we didn’t expect to go home with sparkle-filled bouncy balls or a handful of Tootsie Pops. We were no longer impressed, like so many gentle natives on the wrong end of a cargo-cult trade, by the magical wonder of the monogram. Black and silver matchbooks, floaty pens, even high-priced cake knives or serving spoons engraved with Jon & Minky or Dick & Billy left us completely unmoved. My personal impulse, upon receiving such items as a guest, was to hurl them into the nearest trash can as soon as I exited the function.

No, we were perfectly pleased to leave a party empty-handed, our blood alcohol content somewhere above.08.

BY THE TIME the various events fell into place, my party was slated for the day after Chip’s race. He’d need some time to recover before the ceremony, with morphine derivatives for pain. Then the rehearsal dinner and then, on a Saturday in late July, our small ceremony and reception.

It wasn’t going to be easy to spectate, at the mud marathon, but I drove with him anyway; the course had been set up at a ski resort in the San Bernardinos. Once we were up there in the pines, checked into our hotel room, I took a shower while Chip listened to rabble-rousing music with his earbuds in. Then we went outside and I watched as runners milled around at the starting line for what seemed like an eternity, stretching, high-fiving, chugging sports drinks and eating astronaut food.

The weather wasn’t sunny, in fact a thunderstorm was threatening, which seemed to please those extreme sportsmen and sportswomen: they sought every encumbrance possible. Many would happily have run the distance on hot coals. A number sported rubber bands around the thick parts of their arms or rings from multiple piercings — rings that, I imagined, could easily get snagged on the barbed- or razor-wire entrapments and rip off a lobe or a nipple. Several participants bore large ink designs from previous years’ events, one on the top of his shaven head; I saw two others comparing mud-race burns and scars, one on the neck, the other across the ribs.

“Chip,” I said — as Chip, standing on one leg like a stork, pointed and flexed the airborne foot repeatedly, writing the alphabet upon thin air with his toes to loosen his ankle—“are you completely sure? I’ve got a great idea. How ’bout you just don’t do this race, and we can tell everyone you did?”

“I’m not going to wuss out,” protested Chip. “Babe. Babe! Are you kidding?”

“It wouldn’t be wussing,” I said. I hated the thought of Chip with a tattoo on his head. Till death do us part, and all, but with the head tattoo I wasn’t sure. It didn’t appeal to me. “Not in the least. This would be more like, you doing me a solid.”

“Now honey,” said Chip, de-storking his muscular legs and coming over to put his arms around my waist, “I know you support me taking this on. It’s going to rock. It’ll totally rock, OK? You’ll see.”

When I first met Chip, on a speed-dating lark that Gina dragged me to as an ironic gesture after I’d gone through a bad breakup, I had the impression he was a handsome guy but seemingly indifferent. It turned out he wasn’t indifferent at all; when Chip gets a far-off look in his eyes it’s not coldness, it’s more like an echoing. He forgets what’s in front of him sometimes, does Chip — goes to a dreaming place, a dreaming environment. In that land flags are flying over tall-grass meadows; men are Vikings, women like ornaments on the prows of ancient ships, their hair long and wavy. Chip’s a dreamer and if he could, he’d make the world a place where questing videogames became reality, where he could wear breastplates and a deep battle horn would sound over the white-peaked mountains and lush green valleys. Stags leaping in the woods; fording of streams by warriors and their warhorses, decked out in glorious regalia; possibly mythological creatures.

But if you can’t make the world into a videogame, and if you’re not a full-on geek but fifty-percent jock too, I guess the next best thing is a mud marathon.

“I do support you, Chip,” I sighed. “Just — would you do something for me? Don’t get a head tattoo. Look at that guy. With the name of the race beneath that stubble on his scalp? He looks like he’s here to kill minorities. Chip, I don’t favor a man with head tattoos.”

“You’ve got my word on it, sweetcheeks,” said Chip. He disentangled himself from my embrace and returned to his warmup/stretching routine.

“Chip,” I went on, as he storked on his second leg and peeled back the wrapper on an energy bar that looked like something dark nestled in cat litter, “you know, while we’re on the advisability subject, I sometimes have a thought. My thought is that, with the planet at seven billion people and counting, hundreds of millions in abject poverty, my concern is that extreme sports are maybe a red herring. If people want to put so much effort into testing their toughness, if they want to prove they’re not afraid of hardship, why not travel as Good Samaritans to famine-ridden or war-torn countries? Or for the rebel, punk-rock types, maybe bomb missile factories? You know — do something productive?”

“Huh,” said Chip, looking surprised and a little worried as he chewed the protein bar with his mouth open. “Man, Deb. Should I not have booked the honeymoon package for Virgin Gorda?”

“Honey, my point is—”

But the pre-starter sounded then, a five-minute warning. Chip gulped down his soy protein, kissed me, took off his ultra-featherweight jacket, adjusted the tube on his backpack hydration kit (giving it a practice suck or two) and the angle on his headlamp, and made for the starting line. I raised my phone and called out to him as he went, snapping a picture when he turned to smile at me. He looked like a combination football player/spelunker/Green Beret, his broad grin a Cheerful Chip special.

Chip’s a positive guy, one of the things I value about him. Events don’t tend to get him down for long. He cries a lone man-tear now and then, when he sees a commercial with starving babies or remembers watching the planes hit the buildings — Chip doesn’t have a problem showing emotion — but he snaps out of it before he reaches a level that’s maudlin. Chip snaps right out of it and switches into basketball, World of Warcraft or having-sex mode. He’s quite accomplished at all three.

The hotel had screens set up where spectators could watch the feed from various cameras positioned along the route; I wasn’t sure, though, how to pick Chip out of the rest of the crowd. He’d tied a bright bandanna loosely around his neck, colored a putrid yellow-green, but it would soon be brown as Chip got mud-covered and then it would cease to distinguish him. I bought myself a drink at the ski resort bar and sat down to watch the proceedings.

The first obstacle was ropes over a pond; the runners had to walk along thin ropes strung slightly above the surface of the water, one rope per runner, like a tightrope, plus a second rope to hold on to above their heads. Several of them splashed down in rapid succession. They were falling readily from those ropes, dropping like flies. Meanwhile I slowly drank my margarita, there in the ski resort bar. There was abundant salt on the rim of the glass, and I liked that; I liked the margarita quite a bit, I realized pleasantly, as the extreme athletes balanced, then wavered wildly, as they splashed into the pond and struggled to climb out again, covered in scum.

Yes, I nodded to myself, the margarita was tasty.

Between leisurely sips I tried to make out Chip on the large screen, Chip balancing on a narrow rope or toppling into the chilly, brackish water, but I really couldn’t see him, and in the end it wasn’t worth the effort. There were so many men on those ropes, so many strong, tough men out there exemplifying toughness — surely these men were heavy as iron, with that muscle mass on them, and yet to me it almost seemed as though their bodies were puffy, as though they might suddenly rise into the air, borne heavenward like so many man-shaped muscle balloons. . a few woman balloons, here and there, but mostly it would be men.

I ordered a second margarita, then, thinking of a future time when muscular man-balloons might rise into the air, eventually popping. By the time I focused again, the ropes-over-a-brackish-pond obstacle was history and they were just running in a pack, a crowd of heads moving up and down, bobbing, some with wide grins — a pack of humanity. Some wore glued-on handlebar mustaches or Scottish kilts, others were painted all over their bodies in various colors, resembling zebras, tigers or indigenous tribesmen. One joker wore a Louis Quatorze wig.

The running part was, to me, tedious. I recalled someone saying people had perished, during other mud marathons — and more than one, even. Some people perished, in the course of proving their toughness: well, so it went.

It was a rumor, anyway; Chip said the paper they’d made him sign was purely a gimmick, a legal form known as a death waiver.

Someone remarked that it would be another ten minutes until the second obstacle, so I decided to take a walk outside to look at the party prep. The organizers were throwing a big bash after the race, with live bands and plenty of alcohol, where tattoo artists would put a tattoo on a runner’s head for less than fifty bucks. I walked across the grounds — I’d poured my second margarita into a plastic cup and carried it with me — and glanced into some of the body art tents, thinking fearfully of Chip’s scalp. A guy like Chip, if he’s in a triumphal mood, can be tempted. He’s not a rock, Chip, in the heat of the moment, when it comes to aesthetic decisions; he’s fallible. Chip’s only human. He never claimed not to be.

I saw photos displayed of armpit work, photos of naked-chested people raising their arms above their heads, and in those armpits were tattoos. In one pair of armpits there were grinning skulls, while in another two large eyes popped out to look at the viewer, one in each pit. They seemed to be the eyes of snakes, perched balefully on scaly lids. One man had women’s legs tattooed in his fishbelly-white armpits — a pair of disembodied legs in garter stockings and red high heels, one leg-pair per armpit. The legs were spread wide, one pointing up the inner arm, the other down the ribs, to reveal betwixt them both a nest of springy armpit hair.

I turned away from the tattoo tent, feeling one’s idealism might be sullied there. Before I left the area, though, a tattoo artist called out and propositioned me, jauntily offering his body-scarifying services free of charge if I would be a little more outgoing. Although I felt gratified and waved amiably, I wondered if my jewelry had been a factor in the attraction. I’ve heard that, on a male finger at least, a wedding band can be an enticement, alluring as a loaner puppy. Was it the same with engagement rings? I thought of asking the tattoo artist this question, since surely there could be no harm in it, but when I turned around, my plastic cup newly drained, he’d already gone to ground.

I got back to the screening room in time for obstacle number two, called “Radioactive Jacuzzi” (although, as far as I know, there were no actual particles of thermonuclear fallout). It was a wriggle on the stomach across a long vat of ice cubes, with barbed-wire netting close above them. This time I really would have liked to catch a glimpse of Chip; he’s always been sensitive to cold. He doesn’t eat ice cream, even, claiming it freezes his brain near the forehead. But once again I failed to spot my soon-to-be husband: there was too much humanity, it all looked the same to me and I lacked the necessary patience. Instead of squinting and studying those figures of athletes, I bellied up to the bar.

And so it went: obstacle, drink, obstacle, drink. The men and several women ran through lines of flame; they carried logs up hills on their shoulders, abraded their knees and elbows climbing through massive corrugated pipes, and scaled treacherous vertical surfaces. As they became exhausted, injured and covered in mud I threw back margaritas, added some nachos to the mix. I flirted with several other spectators, even got my palm read by someone taking methamphetamines; it was oddly relaxing, even luxurious. A girl with blue fingernails did numerology, while off in the corner a group of wholesome, rich-looking men wearing Harvard letter sweaters chanted ominous runes in some foreign and possibly ancient tongue. . the point was, it was a party scene, and we the audience even forgot what we were there to watch, after a while. Few of us even glanced over at the screens; it was like being at a party on election night, supposedly “watching” the “returns.” We paid no attention to the faint sounds from the speaker system — squeals, screams, and bells ringing repeatedly.

I drunk-dialed Gina on my cell; she’d been passingly interested in seeing the mud marathon and Chip had invited her, but as it turned out she had a scheduling conflict — free tickets to a special showing of an old Karen Carpenter movie. Now, tipsy and at loose ends, wanting Chip to be finished so he could join me at the after-party, I hit the speed dial. It was the intermission in the Carpenters movie so I gave her the room rundown. That’s what Gina calls it when you’re surrounded by people you don’t know in a social situation and feel compelled, whether under the influence or straight lonely, to dial a friend and callously describe the other people at the scene. I meandered out to the finish line eventually, with Gina still on the phone; in the lobby of the theater she was talking to me rapidly, even as a random hipster guy tried to persuade her to go with him to a glow-in-the-dark tap dance show.

“It’s a critique of Bush v. Gore,” she said.

And then I saw Chip, though at first I barely recognized him. I’d promised him to snap a cell phone pic, a photo of him completing the mud marathon, and so that’s what I did. I raised my phone. He was beaming with joy through the mud plastered over his eyebrows, cheeks and chin, a Stevie Wonder look. But as he ran toward the finish line, right through the final obstacle, his arms raised to greet me, just beaming like a child, he got an electric shock. I think the wires hit him across the lip; maybe the tongue. His mouth was open for the smile. I saw him jerk back like a spastic.

Then he crossed the line and was with me: he shrugged off the shock, hugged me and lifted me off the ground, making me filthy. Soon he collapsed in a heap, and when he recovered it was time to celebrate.

In the end I was able to prevent him from getting a tattoo, but only by the skin of my teeth. As I’d predicted, he ultimately declared he wanted one — not a head tattoo, he knew he couldn’t shave his head before the wedding, but maybe a back-of-the-neck adornment. He saw the other extreme athletes taking swigs of whiskey and going under the needle; with a few beers to his credit Chip turns into a joiner, that’s his way, and soon he longed to top off his own effort with a marking ritual too. He joined the tattoo line and requested that I catch his branding on my phone’s video.

Instead of debating the merits, I had to distract him. I lured him out of the line, then led him into a dark stand of trees and had my way with him. That’s how it works with Chip: you have to skip the preliminaries and bring out the big guns. You don’t waste your time, and his, with words and sentences.

Argument’s a dull blade, when it comes down to it, and I like to be efficient. We both left the party satisfied, me because I’d pulled out a last-minute win on the inking crisis, Chip because he was drunk, certified tough and newly laid. There’s not much more a man like Chip asks for.

Or any man, possibly.

THE NEXT DAY he was pretty achy; he had a long bath, popped some muscle relaxants and did the couch potato thing, gaming. By the time I left for my Ball-and-Chain Party, as Gina was calling it, he had a bowl of popcorn at his elbow, a console on his lap and was gazing wide-eyed at the large screen, where one of his many avatars flew into a fanciful moonrise/sunset on a steampunk zeppelin, pulled by a team of elegant purple dragons.

Gina had found the perfect venue for the festivities — perfect for her, at any rate. The rest of us were just along for the ride. She had us meet her at a generic wine bar, probably so that no one would instantly bail; then we trooped over to the nightspot, Gina in the lead. It was instantly obvious I hadn’t gotten clear of the sex industry after all: this was some kind of Goth, medieval-bloody S&M fetish club with the tag line “The Decadent Seduction of a Horrific World.” I was glad I hadn’t invited members of the older generation, though it did give me a bit of pleasure to ideate Chip’s mother entering the place.

There was a band playing dirge-like atonal music whose singer had multiple studs sticking out of his cheeks Chia Pet-style; in cages hanging from the ceiling, ghoulishly clad people danced in zombie-style slow motion. Holes were strategically cut in the dark, shining costumes they wore, which made them resemble enormous spiders, albeit with hanging or popping characteristics. On the walls played grainy, obscure movies of what seemed to be morgue attendants plying their trade; and then, of course, there were your basic whip scenarios, masks and black latex.

“At seven we have the Ravage Room booked,” said Gina. “A private show. Just for us.” The prospect filled me with creeping dread — at that point I would have welcomed a few basic, beefcake male strippers — but I ordered a drink and played it casual, as Gina demanded. One woman in our party, the only person I’d invited from my office, was openly terrified, eyes darting around like those of a hunted herbivore. She said she was feeling sick, slunk off to the bathroom, and did not return. I felt bad and made a mental note to reach out to her when I went back to work; she had photos of poor kids tacked up on the walls of her carrel whom (she believed, at least) she was sponsoring with monthly payments to a multinational charity. Seated atop her computer were several “cute” bobbleheads.

“Gina,” I said with some audible irritation, because Gina only intimidates me sometimes, “congrats. One down, thirteen to go. You really outdid yourself this time.”

“That woman’s got an actual PBR can stuck through her giant ear-pierce hole,” mused Gina. “You think it’s got any beer in it?”

“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?

By that point Chip was nudging me to smile or possibly respond to his mother’s verbiage, which had the scent of Hallmark to it, so I waved at the assembled company much like an empress on a boat tour of the colonies. Beneath the tablecloth, one of my shoes was off and I wondered if a cat was licking my toes. A cat? Or was it a pervert? There’d been one like that at the Plague Death Tavern. . you had to hand it to Gina, I thought, she knew what memories were made of. I hadn’t enjoyed it much at the time, no, enjoyment hadn’t occurred, at the Plague Death Tavern, but then again here I was, only a few days later and already reminiscing.

I should be sober, I thought, for the ceremony itself; for the ceremony, sobriety was the right choice. Later, at the reception, a person could drink to excess again. Although, now that I thought about it — Tanya was standing, raising her own glass, I hazily noted — was the wedding-ceremony sobriety not just another robotic nod to senseless tradition? A drunken bride would look bad for the patriarchy! Yes. If the sacrificial virgin is a staggering souse, not so good for the fleshly property exchange, awkward to think of babies: uncomfortable to picture child rearing, conducted by a staggering floozy.

But was I actually worried about that? Was Chip, even?

Chip didn’t have a subjugation agenda; Chip wasn’t a patriarch. In fact Chip liked the matriarchal animals, smart elephants and randy bonobos. He even liked the pregnant male seahorses we’d seen at the big aquarium in Long Beach. Chip was benevolent on gender issues, one of his sterling qualities. Sitting beside him at the table, I gave his hand a squeeze, thinking fondly of how, despite his muscular physique, he wasn’t the subjugation type. His mother’s beak was clack-clacking again: if I squinted I could imagine the crushed worms, half-eaten beetles peeking from her teeth. . she was clacking the beak in my direction now, so I raised my glass toward her in a salute.

Maybe I didn’t have to be exactly sober for the ceremony, I said to myself — a few glasses — well, I’d check in with Chip on it. Not to get his approval to drink beforehand, don’t get me wrong — that’s patriarchal, completely — but we could put our heads together on the subject, see if we had a consensus.

Chip’s mother was seating herself again amongst her flock of Orange County dowagers, most of whose husbands had preemptively perished. Here you go, said those old, sweet geezers, I’ll go ahead and die, so you don’t have to do it first. Like opening the door for the ladies, I thought: gentlemanly. Chip had more relatives than I did, or, that is, his mother actively talked to them and knew their children’s names and sexes. My own parents, may they rest in peace, never really showed an interest in the whole fraternizing-with-relations thing — the second cousins, step-uncles by marriage. As far as I could tell while I was growing up, a relative, to my parents, was like Middle America to coastal dwellers: only existent in the abstract. That was why I was surprised to see the great-aunt from St. Louis had snuck in. The last time I’d seen her had been in a Christmas card photo.

I imagined Tanya had showed me some kind of potential guest list, and to get away from her I’d probably nodded.

“Remind me,” I whispered to Chip, amongst some clapping, “talk to great-aunt. Thought she was dead.”

I was telegraphing a bit — slurring, I admit.

“Your Aunt Gloria? From St. Louis?”

“Yes!” I cried, deeply impressed at his knowledge of the furthest, smallest, most insignificant branches of my family tree.

He patted me on the wrist.

“You already talked to her, babe,” he said. “On a couch. For like three quarters of an hour. You were telling her all about Gina. And the Ravage Room.”

I sat back, pensive, and held my water glass firmly.

I’D GONE WITH a dress that was more of a cream than a white, even toward the beige family — it didn’t have a white feel at all, really. Tanya almost vomited when she first saw the garment, apparently thinking her age group would view a non-white wedding gown much as they would a large sign reading I ALREADY PUT OUT. But by the time the big day rolled around she’d assimilated, trying to hide the outfit’s non-white identity by making sure none of the décor was white either. Creamy beige was everywhere, down to the tablecloths at the reception. Tanya was trying to trick the eye.

She even asked the photographer to go mostly for black-and-white pics: sepia tones, she said. She didn’t personally like that look, she was more of a primary-colors type, but she’d read in a wedding planner book that sepia was classy.

Like the trooper that she is, Gina took all the heat off anyway: when I refused to wear black, as she was goading me to, she bought as her own reception garb the kind of evening gown a hooker would wear in the Addams household. There were feathers involved, spraying over one shoulder like the black-and-red plumes of some fiendish hellfowl, and her spike heels were daggers pointing toward the floor. Gina enjoys high fashion, steeped as it is in irony. The excellence of a friend like Gina is that she’ll take the hit for bad behavior every time.

She didn’t wear the vampire dress to the ceremony, fortunately, where, as the so-called maid of honor, she agreed to wear something less funereal/whorish. But the ceremony itself was on the informal side of conventional — held in the gazebo of a well-landscaped garden overlooking the Palos Verdes bluffs, the ocean crashing below. Chip had initially wanted one of those Renaissance faire weddings, until I told him I’d rather get a Renaissance faire divorce. I could live with the gaming, I told him — though it was going to be a stretch, sustaining sexual desire for a mate with multiple cudgel-bearing avatars. Over time, the gaming would be a liability where my libido was concerned: I was already making a major exception for Chip by agreeing to share the remainder of my time on Earth with an active fantasy enthusiast.

Chip didn’t understand the psychology involved, didn’t see how his alternate life in the land of heroic centaurs could possibly be a turnoff, but he took my word for it. He accepted the fact that I was making an aesthetic sacrifice. So there was literally zero potential, I told him, for me to go even further and cultivate an attraction to a Renaissance faire husband. Not in the cards. You have to draw the line somewhere, and I personally draw that line well before wizards and bawdy wenches. I draw the line between medieval reenactments and me, and I draw it firmly.

So we looked pretty normal, I’d guess, standing there with the ocean behind us, our gazebo festooned, garlands in various places. Chip wore a charcoal suit and silver tie, and he looked very, very good. Chip’s the kind of man who might have been a male model, if he weren’t so innocently unaware of his own looks. He’s one of those rare people who actually go to the gym for pure enjoyment, not vanity. I felt fortunate, standing there, holding his hands, gazing at him. I thought, Well, I’ll be blowed. (If a ship’s captain can use that fine expression, I thought, then so can I.) I further thought: Few women have the kind of luck I do. And I wasn’t being sentimental. It was more of a statistical analysis.

Other than that, I can’t say a lot happened. A breeze blew the dry grasses along the bluffs, making them dip and sway. Music played. There was the sense, all around us, of the kind of momentousness that is also completely trite. We were at our wedding.

I was glad I’d limited myself to two flutes of champagne in the dressing room, and that Gina, a few feet behind me, had amused herself by getting her eyebrows dyed that morning instead of snorting the mound of fairly pure cocaine left at her house by a trust-fund grad student she’d recently stopped sleeping with. There was a pleasant quality to being balanced and calm, to not wobbling at all on my heels, to hearing with dull precision the droning voice of the officiant.

Standing on the bluffs, I thought of where we were, Chip and I, and how beneath our feet was a tectonic fault block of seafloor sediments atop a submerged mound of metamorphic rock that had risen out of the Pacific beginning one to two million years before. I didn’t have an opinion about it, really, though it recalled me to an early class in geology, how the only part of that class I’d really enjoyed or retained had been the cross-sectional drawings of the layers of the Earth. I hoped there wasn’t anything symbolic in the fact that the ground beneath our feet was eroding. I thought of how it was impossible to form any particular impression at times like this; how, at a time like this, you had a tendency to think of yourself in the third person, if only fleetingly. I thought of not thinking.

Shortly after that, the ceremony ended and we kissed.

LATER, AT THE reception, Ellis and Gina hooked up. I hadn’t seen that one coming, since Gina ridicules Ellis openly for his faux-English identity and he calls her a stupid cow. Still, when you’re carried away on the romance of an evening, I guess, a cow can get less stupid. A fake Englishman can start to look like the real McCoy.

Actually, as I said to Chip when we passed them dry humping behind a port-a-john, something about the hookup made a certain sense; Gina loved the inauthentic and the absurd, and Ellis was both of those. In turn, though you couldn’t call Ellis ironic — his Englishness was the most heartfelt thing about him — his life was definitely a gesture, and Gina may have briefly mistaken it for an ironic one.

All in all it was a good party. The band was fun, the food was tasty, the weather held and the drinks didn’t run out (Chip had wisely bought ten extra cases of wine in case his mother’s estimate turned to be too meager — check. His mother’s cheap to the point of felony. To her it’s more moral to steal something than pay too much for it).

Suzette from the office showed up with no obvious psychic scars and seemed to enjoy herself, talking for long periods, Chip told me, with an ex-military cousin of his from Duluth. Although Chip and I got away with no cake-on-face smearing, not everyone was so lucky: a cohort of Chip’s coworkers used the dregs of the cake in a food fight of their own. The fight was instigated by Chip’s drunken boss, who as far as I knew had invited himself to the reception.

Thankfully that was in the wee hours, after most of the more fossilized guests had already left. Gina took footage of the hijinks “for the capsule,” as she always says. (For as long as I’ve known her — I’m talking, since seventh grade — Gina’s been amassing the contents of a time capsule for future inhabitants of Earth to see, she says, why our civilization tottered and fell. She’s always threatening to put some artifact of me in there; when I get on her bad side she prints out one of my emails.)

Chip and I were exactly where we wanted to be. We drank, we laughed, we danced — and I was reminded how I’d first fallen for Chip, out on the town after our five-minute encounter at the speed-dating session: he’s a great dancer who’s never embarrassing. It’s shocking in a heterosexual white man, and far more so if you add gamer to that list of adjectives. I thought of his elegant moves — as I gazed at him making them — as his mother’s one gift to me, because when he was a child she’d forced him to take ballroom dancing lessons, out of some antiquated notion that one day he’d have to escort the great-granddaughters of slaveholders to debutante functions. As a social climber, she wanted to be prepared for that eventuality.

Well, the debutantes never materialized, and the lessons tortured him while he was a baseball- and soccer-playing boy, but they proved useful in the end, imbuing him with an easy grace he was later helpless to suppress — though he might have preferred to be seen doing a grudging, apathetic shuffle.

I had myself a small moment of clarity under the stars, walking out from beneath our soaring beige tent after midnight, Chip with his arm slung around my shoulders. He’s a tall man, Chip, about six foot three. Is this what happiness is? I asked myself, and the answer seemed to be: basically, yes.

It came to me that we might be asking too much, often, with this pursuit of happiness deal. We acted like happiness was a consumable good, stashed on a shelf too high to reach. But at midnight on my wedding day, coming out from under that beige tent with its various garlands dangling, I saw that happiness was a feeling, not a deliverable. We pursued it all our lives as though it were a prey animal we needed to pin down, shoot and eat. But all it was was a feeling — a feeling! It rose from us, from nowhere else; the thing did not arrive all wrapped up like a gift. No use waiting for home delivery. Not coming. No tracking number to look up. You had to open the door and step out into the street.

It made me feel free, to realize that. The Big Happy was not an achievement. It wasn’t a goal.

It was just an emotion.

Chip didn’t see my point. I guess he’d already known it. That’s the thing with these moments of clarity, you have one, you get psyched, and then it turns out the person standing next to you already knows the thing. Your newfound clarity’s old news to them. They act like every six-year-old had that knowledge in hand long before you, that’s how minor your clarity is. Other people are a letdown, when it comes to clarity. And sure, technically I had to admit, happiness is an emotion isn’t a groundbreaking discovery. And yet: knowing this and knowing this are not the same.

I wasn’t willing to let go of the moment right away; I was determined to show Chip that the clarity meant something. At times, when it comes to telling my thoughts to Chip, I’m like a dog with a bone. Chip’s more than a sounding board to me; Chip is the universal ear. That’s the job of a spouse, isn’t it? You find someone to be your universal ear. So I’m a dog with a bone when I have an idea, a dog that keeps on gnawing/talking until Chip accepts the bone/thought as the big gift that it clearly is.

“See, Chip,” I said, “this matters, because, Chip, people are out there thinking they have to pursue the happiness, like it says in the Declaration of Independence or whatever, they think it’s not only their right but like their job, Chip. See? They think it’s their job. Those poor fools think they have to be constantly pursuing it! Of course they fail constantly, too, because the problem is it can’t be caught, you have to make it yourself! You have to just fabricate that feeling out of thin air! You get it, Chip? You have to conjure it like a white rabbit!”

“Uh-huh,” said Chip. “Definitely.”

“So the pursuit thing is a fool’s errand! A fool’s errand, Chip! The rat race! The push for richness! The pressure for success!”

“No, yeah,” said Chip, but he was fumbling with the strap on the back of my camisole, mistaking it no doubt for something else.

“You make it, Chip! You make it!”

“Come on, let’s get you up against that tree,” said Chip. “The bark’s not too rough, is it, honey?”

“You decide to feel happy. Sure it’s fleeting, but you can do it whenever you want to! Joy, Chip! You make it up out of thin air!”

“I’ll make something up,” muttered Chip.

And so forth.

Well, the particular, perfect angle of my clarity slipped away, as clarity tends to. You know the rest. But it was enough that I’d had it. I would remember, I promised myself. Out of thin air, I whispered, in my mind. Out of thin air.

PARTY AFTERMATHS HAVE never sat well with me. At least in this case we didn’t have to do the cleanup ourselves, plus we were leaving two days later on our honeymoon, so we had that to look forward to. Still, waking up the morning after the wedding, hungover, with the task of saying goodbye to out-of-town guests hanging above our heads — I didn’t love it. I fortified myself with aspirin and water chased by a nice, fresh bagel and coffee; Chip elevated his mood with a brief voyage to some pseudo-Celtic kingdom populated by slutty forest nymphs strumming on dulcimers.

They lived in treehouses, with wooden footbridges swaying between them. Impractical, you may say, but nymphs don’t give a shit about practicality. Chip defended the slut-nymphs, if I’m not mistaken, with his bow and arrow as they came under attack from swarthy brigands.

After that, we hauled ourselves reluctantly into day. Soon we were driving, making the round of the hotels.

This was how it would be, I figured, from now on — the two of us side by side, discharging obligations. I considered asking Chip if he was disappointed, this next morning, if he’d thought being married would be more like the half-naked wood nymph community, more like the piercing of brigands’ hearts, less like just being in the car, sitting there, seeing the other cars, passing buildings.

Next I thought: Well, sure, but no need to force the issue.

It struck me that we’d probably never see some of these out-of-towners again, since families meet for weddings and then the next time, after the wedding get-together, memorial services. I wondered which of our friends would fall by the wayside, about which of them we would find ourselves saying, ten years down the road, When did we last see Kevin/Dave/Krishnamurti? Wait — no way — was it at our wedding?

Hard to tell who would fade out of sight. But odds were that someone would. Perhaps many.

We left my great-aunt for last on the list of stops, since I didn’t want to go. I was ashamed of whatever I might have said to her in my drunken confession. I didn’t know her, and I was ashamed of that too, though I couldn’t say why — it wasn’t like she’d ever reached out to me either, except for the surprising move of coming to my wedding. Her name was Gloria; she lived in a city. Or town or state. Lewiston, possibly. She’d been married to my mother’s uncle. He’d been in commodities — seeds. Maybe feeds. Something with sacks of grain, but where you never see or touch them. She had a skin tag on her neck the size and hue of a purple grape.

I preferred to call in an excuse and let her slip quietly away to LAX, but Chip is annoyingly decent about appointments: he has an “honor code.” To Chip, blowing off a great-aunt from Louisville was a failure of ethics; to me, not blowing her off was a failure of intelligence.

Sober, it was going to be hard to think of conversation topics.

“It’s really too bad,” I said to Chip, “that you can’t just be honest about this stuff. Like, why can’t I say to her: Aunt Gloria, we don’t know each other from Adam, and chances are you’ll die soon, right? What are you, ninety-one? Eighty-three?”

I’m not that good with ages, once there’s a critical mass of wrinkles on a face it’s all the same to me.

“And even if you don’t die shortly, we’re not going to see each other again because I’m not flying to Louisiana unless someone hijacks my plane. So let’s cut to the chase. What does it mean, really? This extended family thing? I mean why did you come? Why are you even here talking to me?”

“Maybe if you don’t say that about her death coming,” suggested Chip mildly. “That might come off a little cold, I think. But you could maybe do the other part.”

“Some people talk like that, don’t they? Some people have the guts to talk like that, I bet,” I said.

“I don’t know if it’s guts,” said Chip.

In my mind Aunt Gloria had turned into a bit of a battleax since the rehearsal dinner, judging me harshly for my indiscreet tales of black-plague-celebrating pseudo-bondage dens, but as it turned out she was a gentle bumbler. She said almost nothing of interest the whole time we sat awkwardly in her hotel room — once she looked for her bifocals for a painfully protracted five minutes, another time she offered us a dog-eared tourist brochure from a table. It was about an amusement park with giant bunny statues that celebrated Easter all year round, but Chip turned it over in his hands as though it were made of delicate filigree, nodding respectfully.

After what seemed like an eon we walked her down to the lobby, where an airport shuttle van waited. She clutched her vinyl purse; Chip carried her luggage and tossed it up to the driver. Before she stepped in after it, she put out her hands and touched my shoulders, then cupped my cheeks. The hands were softly trembling, and when she smiled it was the saddest smile, and her eyes were watery.

“You were the sweetest child,” she said.

Then the doors folded closed and the van pulled away.

GETTING ON THE airplane to the Caribbean I was nostalgic for the days of Eastern Airlines, how when I was a young girl, flying for the first time, the pretty stewardesses in frosted lipstick had smiled so much and been so kind to me. One of them had given me a plastic pin with wings on it, a cellophane-wrapped pack of cards for me to keep; she’d led me into the cockpit to meet the pilot, like a VIP. Those days were gone for sure — it was a wonder the surly flight attendants didn’t kick us in the shins as we boarded. One of them, a weak-chinned man with thinning hair, shot me a baleful look.

I’d much rather have the frosted, buxom women, I thought. Did that make me a sexist? Was I some kind of gender traitor?

“We’d get better service on a Greyhound, Chip,” I said.

I’d been thinking how good Chip was, just good, ever since he’d made the right call on feeble Aunt Gloria. Chip was often correct, I was thinking, he often made the right call, whether by means of the cheerful optimism he always had, sound instincts or plain dumb luck. I felt a wash of terrible fondness for my tiny great-aunt, now — how often Chip showed me the good path, how often he took the edge off me.

I’d started feeling downright grateful about the marriage arrangement, once my hangover was gone — almost as though I’d taken Chip for granted earlier, but now I wasn’t anymore. I say “oddly” because you’d think it would be the other way around: before the wedding, appreciation; after the wedding, complacency. But so far, the reverse seemed true. Chip held my hand as we sat there. I searched his face for signs of his own budding complacency, but didn’t find any.

And as we waited for takeoff, the mid-sized aircraft stuffed to the gills, tepid, fluorescent, with a kind of cattle-car vibe presiding, I almost understood — thinking back to air travel in the 1970s, when I was but a babe in the woods — my husband’s nostalgia for a fake-medieval wonderland of magical beings. It wasn’t the same deal, of course, my own stewardess memories being grounded more strictly in what many would call reality, but still, all at once the idea of a charming, lost past was resonating with me. Whether it was half-invented or cut from whole cloth, the point was: that other life, that other world of wonder and possibility, what a warm, golden glow it had.

What a glow.