Mermaids!, page 21
It never occurred to him to wonder what was going through her mind. Not for a moment did he imagine that she might have less information on mermaids than he had, even while he yearned for more information on mermen.
"They make you do it," she said. "You just have to. I admit it; I lie awake nights thinking up new nasty names to call him. It makes him so happy. And he loves to do it too. The . . . things he says. He calls me 'alligator bait.' He says I'm his squashy little bucket of roe. Isn't that awful? He says I'm a milt-and-water type. What's milt, Mr. Smith?"
"I can't say," hoarsely said Smith, who couldn't, making a silent resolution not to look it up. He found himself getting very upset. She seemed like such a nice girl. . . . He found himself getting angry. She unquestionably had been a nice girl.
Monster, he thought redly. "I wonder if it's moonrise yet."
Surprisingly she said, "Oh dear. Moonrise."
Smith did not know why, but for the first time since he had come to the rock, he felt cold. He looked unhappily seaward. A ragged, wistful, handled phrase blew by his consciousness: save her from herself. It made him feel unaccountably noble.
She said faintly, "Are you . . . have you . . . I mean, if you don't mind my asking, you don't have to tell me . . ."
"What is it?" he asked gently, moving close to her. She was huddled unhappily on the edge of the shelf. She didn't turn to him, but she didn't move away.
"Married, or anything?" she whispered.
"Oh gosh no. Never. I suppose I had hopes once or twice, but no, oh gosh no."
"Why not?"
"I never met a . . . well, they all . . . You remember what I said about a touch of strange?"
"Yes, yes . . ."
"Nobody had it Then I got it, and . . . put it this way, I never met a girl I could tell about the mermaid."
The remark stretched itself and lay down comfortably across their laps, warm and increasingly audible, while they sat and regarded it. When he was used to it, he bent his head and turned his face toward where he imagined hers must be, hoping for some glint of expression. He found his lips resting on hers. Not pressing, not cowering. He was still, at first from astonishment, and then in bliss. She sat up straight with her arms braced behind her and her eyes wide until his mouth slid away from hers. It was a very gentle thing.
Mermaids love to kiss. They think it excruciatingly funny. So Smith knew what it was like to kiss one. He was thinking about that while his lips lay still and sweetly on those of Jane Dow. He was thinking that the mermaid's lips were not only cold, but dry and not completely flexible, like the carapace of a soft-shell crab. The mermaid's tongue, suited to the eviction of whelk and the scything of kelp, could draw blood. (It never had, but it could.) And her breath smelt of fish.
He said, when he could, "What were you thinking?"
She answered, but he could not hear her.
"What?"
She murmured into his shoulder, "His teeth all point inwards."
Aha, he thought.
"John," she said suddenly, desperately, "there's one thing you must know now and forever more. I know just how things were between you and her, but what you have to understand is that it wasn't the same with me. I want you to know the truth right from the very beginning, and now we don't need to wonder about it or talk about it ever again."
"Oh you're fine," John Smith choked. "So fine. . . . Let's go. Let's get out of here before—before moonrise."
Strange how she fell into the wrong and would never know it (for they never discussed it again), and forgave him and drew from that a mightiness; for had she not defeated the most lawless, the loveliest of rivals?
Strange how he fell into the wrong and forgave her, and drew from his forgiveness a lasting pride and a deep certainty of her eternal gratitude.
Strange how the moon had risen long before they left, yet the mermaid and the merman never came at all, feeling things as they strangely do.
And John swam in the dark sea slowly, solicitous, and Jane swam, and they separated on the dark beach and dressed, and met again at John's car, and went to the lights where they saw each other at last; and when it was time, they fell well and truly in love, and surely that is the strangest touch of all.
Something Rick and Strange
by
Randall Garrett and Avram Davidson
Avram Davidson, whose "The Prevalence of Mermaids" appears elsewhere in this book, is one of SF and fantasy's most distinguished authors, and has been widely hailed as one of the finest short-story writers of our times. (For a more complete biographical sketch, see the headnote to "The Prevalence of Mermaids." )
Randall Garrett is probably best known as the author of the popular "Lord Darcy" stories, which successfully blend the mystery story with fantasy (creating a detective who uses magic us one of his criminological tools), and which are set in an alternate twentieth century world where magic works and the Plantagenet Emperor John IV rules a widespread and prosperous Anglo-French Empire upon which the sun has never set. The "Lord Darcy" series includes the well-known novel Two Many Magicians, and the short-story collections Murder and Magic and Lord Darcy Investigates. Garrett is also the author, along with wife Vicky Ann Heydron, of the Gandalara Cycle series, consisting of The Steel of Raithskar, The Glass of Dyskornis, The Bronze of Eddarta, and, most recently, The Search For Ka. His short fiction has been collected in The Best of Randall Garrett.
Here—in what is, as far as we know, their only collaboration—Davidson and Garrett suggest that there is sometimes a cavernous gap between the Ideal and the Actual, but also that maybe you don't really know what you' re looking for until vnu find it. . . .
If Jack Wilson's curious voyage did not exactly reveal to him what song the sirens sang, it was satisfactory in other respects.
The specialist all too often finds that he has developed his taste to such a point that he is satisfied but rarely, and excited almost never. Since the recent trouble in Tibet, for example, it is impossible to get a really properly prepared yak roast. The smaller animal of the same name, from Sikkim and Nepal, is not only deficient in marbling, but is generally fibrous and watery. There are many long faces and rumbling bellies around the old Lhassa Club in Darjeeling nowadays.
Jack Wilson, however, is a seafood specialist, and for gourmets of this kidney there is a single ray of bright light shining through the foul fog of flaccid flounder fillets that are standard Friday fare throughout the country, a single escape route from curdled shrimp in greasy batter. Knowers and lovers of seafood will recognize at once that we refer to the J & M Seafood Grotto, a place containing not a single ketchup bottle, and whose very slices of lemon are not the coarse, ordinary sort, but the rare and delicate Otaheite variety, from a little grove somewhere in Georgia.
Pardon us; no. We will not tell you where the J & M Grotto is, beyond the fact that it is only a few hundred feet from the shore of the Pacific, at the aft end of a wharf somewhere between Coronado and Nootka Sound—which is enough shoreline for anyone to search. It is doubtful whether any true seafood man will tell you where it is, either, unless you are known to him, not only as a friend, but as a fellow aficionado.
Nor do the proprietors of the Grotto advertise; they do not want customers who cannot appreciate their savory wares, and they do not lack for those who do.
And no man appreciates those wares more than Jack Wilson.
He is not one of your Guide to gourmets. Wine-mumblers and all their arcane habble-gabble he classifies with Turkish water-tasters, tea-tipplers, and other nuts and phonies. Beer he regards as most appropriate to wash the hair of women of a certain class. Women—of all classes—he loves. Also, seafood.
Now, the love of seafood, like the love of women, can lead a man into strange situations, and Jack Wilson, who combined these loves in a very literal way, managed to get himself into a situation which . . .
It would be easier to begin at the beginning.
Jack loves the food at the J & M Seafood Grotto as much as, if not more than, anyone else; but ten years ago, the Grotto did not exist, and Jack spent a good deal of his time traveling on faerie seas and delighting in the fruits thereof. The War—in which he had done his part—had been over only slightly more than half a decade, and the world economy, insofar as pelagic goodies were concerned, had not yet returned to its prewar norm. Russian caviar, to be sure, had begun to trickle back into the world market, but, owing to the tragically unsettled conditions in Azerbaijan and the Trans-Kur, beluga fisheries in the western Caspian were a mere shadow of their former selves; and the good gray roe obtained from the capacious bellies of the sea-sturgeons which frequent the eastern reaches of that water lack, as all the world knows, a certain degree of delicacy.
There was some compensation in Jack Wilson's knowing a small, weathered shed near New Smyrna where smoked mullet—fit for gods and Texas oilmen—was to be had.
Too, ever since the Kuomintang government had lost the Mandate of Heaven (except for Formosa, Matsu, and Quemoy), the small but suavely flavored shrimp—some say they are prawns, but no matter—found only at the spot where the Gulf of Po Hai disembogues into the Yellow Sea, were no longer to be had at any price. At least, not at any price Jack Wilson was prepared to pay.
Cost was of little consequence to him; he was of what are tritely described as "independent means," which is to say he could spend much, much money without engaging in the tedious task of working for it.
So it was that, except for the thalassic victuals indigenous to the Communist-controlled areas of the world, Jack was not forced to rely on the vagaries of the export-import trade; whither went the wind and water, there went Wilson. Manga-reva knew him, and the shoals of Capricorn. The great sea-turtle's watery epithalamion enchanted him, and so did its green soup. In a tiny fishing village on the coast of Dalmatia, whose name contained seven letters, six of which were consonants, he discovered and delighted in a small, pink squid seethed in its own sepia. He found four wonderful ways of preparing the rare and tiny mauve crab of the Laccadive Islands, all of which required il lo be sautéed in ghee. He learned that baccalà—that dried codfish which, in shape, texture, and, for that matter, flavor, is not unlike an old washboard—when prepared with cibbolini, sea-urchin sauce, and olive oil of the first pressing, will take the mind of even a Sicilian signoretto off the subject of nubile servant girls, for a short time.
And he was infinitely appreciative of that exquisite forcemeat of pike, whitefish. and carp, lovingly poached in court bouillon, which the dispersed of Minsk and Pinsk have made known to continents and archipelagoes alike as gefilte fish.
Let it not be thought, though, that Jack Wilson's entire field of endeavor to satisfy the inner man was circumscribed by his search for gustatorial novelties or staples in the seafood line. Seafood was his specialty. But he shared with all men those tastes in which all men worthy of the name delight. However, although Jack was well-versed in venery and found it enjoyable, invigorating and worthwhile, it presented little challenge. A man who possesses reasonable intelligence, an amiable disposition, excellent health, a pleasing countenance, and a six-figure bank balance seldom really needs to chase women.
That Our Jack had never married was due to nothing so juvenile as "not wanting to give up his freedom"; nor did he have any basic objection to the institution as such. He felt, with some mild degree of certitude, that he would—some day—marry, and from this prospect he had no urge to shrink. But . . . somehow . . . whatever it was that he was looking for in a wife, he had yet to find a woman who seemed to have it.
He recalled the Mexican aphorism that "one must feed the body in order that the soul may live in it"; and, hence, food—and its preparation and consumption—always seemed to him to partake of a spiritual as well as a physical and social quality. An intelligent and appreciative interest in victualry made, in Wilson's view, all the difference between dining and mere feeding. The more a woman showed a genuine interest in the food he chose for the two of them, the more genuine was his own interest in her; an extra dimension was supplied their friendship Alas! for the ugly advance of ready-mixed, frozen, tinned, and pre-cooked rations: Jack Wilson had rarely met a woman who was his equal in the kitchen, and few who were not infinitely his inferior.
Wilson's peregrinations were usually aboard his own vessels—for, as a lover of the dolphin-torn sea itself, he possessed a diesel-powered yacht fully capable of braving a stormy Atlantic—and it can be realized that many a weekend, and sometimes many a week, was passed with pleasure and profit on the bosom of the deep. And the one thing he never disclosed to any one of the fine selection of prime cuties which he had squired over seven or eight seas was that he was looking for something more than perfection in a woman.
As a matter of plain fact, he was looking for a mermaid.
Wilson was quite certain that the mermaid legend was no legend at all, but simple truth. There had been too many sightings, too many reports from widely scattered spots over the earth's seas, over too many centuries of human history, to doubt that such beings had once swum the seas of the planet. And, as far as Jack Wilson was concerned, they were still swimming them. (For that matter, he had an equally unshakable faith in the actual existence of the sea serpent—but, then, he had no desire to find a sea serpent.)
It is not to be thought that Jack actually thought of marrying a mermaid; that would perhaps have been carrying things a bit too far, especially for a man of his fastidious tastes. He did not even particularly desire to make love to a mermaid, although the sheer physical mechanics of the process interested him in a semi-scientific sort of way. What Wilson was actually pursuing was a dream of beauty. A beatific vision.
The vision was compounded partly from the stuff that dreams are made of, but it included, as well, some of the more memorable features of some of the more memorable women whom Wilson had known intimately. And it happened that each of these hauntingly lovely items in his mind had likened in some way to the treasures of the sea itself, recasting poetry to do so:
Full fathom five my true love glides . . .
His true-love had, to begin, long sun-blonde hair the color of the golden sands of Trincomalec (Merrilyn Madison, whose tresses remained in his mind long after the grace-notes of her body had blended pleasantly with the symphony of a score of others.) His true-love had teeth like a perfectly matched set of the finest Bahrein pearls (The Contessa Delia Gama; he chose to forget that those teeth had a particularly nasty bite). His true-love's eyes were as blue as the Bay of Naples on a summer's day (Marya Amirovna, whose eyes, like the sea, shifted to gray when a storm was gathering). Her skin was as milky white as the waters which lave the beach at Saipan (Kirsten Jonsdotter, tall, majestic, and passionate). Her bosom was magnificently bifurcate and tipped with coral (Amy, Duchess of Norchester; she of the cool manner and the hot blood). Her . . .
But enough.
Now, each of these women had been, in her own way, as nearly perfect as anything merely human can be. Yet each had failed to satisfy him for long, not because of the presence of any particular flaw, but by the absence of some indefinable quality. And so, in Wilson's mind, over a period of years, his vision of the mermaiden had come to assimilate all the perfections of the women he had known, plus that definition-defying something.
He did not, on an intellectual level, consider that every mermaid would resemble his vision. He reasoned that such creatures must vary, one from the other, much as non-pinniped females do. But in his secret imagining—deep, deep, down, full fathom five—he knew that his mermaid would be the perfect one.
Alex MacNair, captain of the Lorelei, Jack Wilson's yacht, neither believed nor disbelieved in mermaids. He was perfectly willing to believe—if he saw one—but, left to himself, would not have walked to the side to look. Mermaids, he felt, were, like lurlies and kelpies, out of his province. His task was to captain a seagoing vessel. The uses to which that vessel was put were the province of the owner, and Captain MacNair was quite happy with such a division of labor and responsibility. And as for any picturesque devotion to Old Scotland, he limited that to a deep fondness for Ballantine's Twelve Year Old.
He had only once made the mistake of slighting his employer's dream-hobby. It was in Portau-Prince, early in Jack's enthusiasm. "Captain MacNair! Look! A trawler off New Zealand sighted a mermaid, according to the paper!"
The captain had politely taken the proffered journal and read the item slowly, decoding the almost 18th Century elaborateness of the French prose with deliberation while Jack fidgeted at his side.
"Ah!" MacNair said finally, looking up. "Interesting. Very interesting. I tell you what it probably was, Mr. Wilson. Very likely they spotted a dugong. Or a manatee. That's what it was." And he held out the paper as the patronizing smile slowly withered on his face.
"Captain," said Jack, his tone the only chill thing that Haitian noon, "have you ever seen a dugong?"
"I have, sir."
"And your eyesight is good?"
"Twenty-twenty, Mr. Wilson."
"Then tell me: Would you ever mistake a dugong for a mermaid? Does a dugong look like a beautiful woman to you?"
MacNair considered his recollection of the dugong. It was somewhat larger than a grown man, and much more visibly mammalian than—say—a porpoise or a whale. From the waist down, the ichthyoid tail, with its horizontal flukes, might have some likeness to the tail of a mermaid, but—from the waist up?
The flippers could never be mistaken for arms, certainly. And that bald, bulging head, with its swollen face and deep-seated eyes and its bristly, lumpy, divided upper lip certainly did not resemble anything human at all.
"Now that I think on it, Mr. Wilson," MacNair conceded, "I do not believe that any sober person could mistake a dugong for a pretty woman."
"Exactly! Not even the most depraved sailor would, or could, make such a mistake."
