Diary of a Radical Mermaid (2 page)

Okay, okay. I swiped it when she wasn’t looking. Here’s what she wrote:

“The Bonavendier sisters own Sainte’s Point Island and everything of importance in the town of Bellemeade, just across the bay. Lilith and her two sisters play with the village as if it were their pretty toy: the shops are exquisite, the bay front inn, WaterLilies, is a place of internationally renowned charm, and the marina along Main Street is a perfect combination of hardworking fishing boats and exotic little yachts. People swear a kind of enchantment comes over them when they visit the town. They gaze across Bellemeade Bay with wistful envy at the secretive island, which looks like a magical, wooded kingdom floating on the horizon. Look toward the other side of the world, people say, and you’ll see Bonavendiers.

“Sainte’s Point Island, enclave of the Bonavendier family since Revolutionary War times, is glamorous, notorious, alluring, and haunted by gossip. It is said every Bonavendier for two centuries has been born with webbed feet, always swims naked, can seduce anyone at will, is beloved by dolphins, and drinks like a fish. Vodka, preferably.

“Those rumors, as I’m coming to learn, are quite true.”

Isn’t that perfect, how Ali put it? Glamorous? Notorious? Yum. Drinks like a fish? Double yum. Your vices are our virtues. Delicious.

As Ali said, Bellemeade is a tiny, quaint, exceedingly rich little village perched on the Georgia coast near Savannah. If you look at a map of Georgia you’ll see that the coastline resembles the nubby fringe of a frayed scarf. There are hundreds of little coves, bays, inlets, and waterways — it’s a remarkable and sultry subtropical world of ancient history — Indians and pirates and brave Africans escaping slavery and bell-like Southern belles! — all sheltered by enormous maritime oaks dripping moss. If you know the right people you’ll be invited to the hidden mansions, the shaded lanes of the fishing villages, and the coves where some of the world’s richest Mers discreetly moor small yachts.

But you’ll rarely be invited to the private islands. A pretty string of them dot the waters off the Georgia coast, some no bigger than a glorified hummock, others vast enough to harbor all sorts of fascinating lives. Follow them up the continental coast and you’ll glide among the Outer Banks of the Carolinas, then on up into the cold beauties of the northeast, Long Island, Cape Cod, and the like. Only a few of the Georgia islands are public, and even the public ones are charming in their own way — St. Simon’s and the teensy islands around its gilded shores, and Jekyll, where we Mers have quite a history among the Rockefellers and other rich Lander clans who turned the whole island into their private playground during the early 1900s.

But the most amazing islands are privately owned, and the most amazing of them all is, naturally, Sainte’s Point, which is owned by Mers. The Bonavendier mansion is a marvel of antiques and acquired treasures. I say acquired, because, quite frankly, Mers have never been immune to a certain love for piracy, although the modern Bonavendiers eschew such crude and graspy behavior. Besides, with so much inherited money to spend, why bother with any contemporary yo-ho-ho-ing on the open seas? What fun is it to waylay some ugly modern ship chugging along with all the challenge of a floating metal box? What fabulous treasure would one steal? A Toyota?

As I am somewhat persona non grata in many of my usual world ports at the moment, Sainte’s Point is a lovely place to, well, let one say, it’s a lovely sanctuary where my, hmmm, controversial reputation for partying and meddling can take a little hiatus from deeper scrutiny of recent activities.

Or some shit like that.

* * * *

Dear Diary:

Okay, so much for discretion. Today I waltzed into my cousin’s fabulous jewelry shop in Bellemeade, and I announced, “I have a blog.”

To which my cousin replied, “Juna Lee, I believe plastic surgery will remove that kind of thing.”

Very funny. Tula Bonavendier is a wry snit, more smug than even the typical Mer, since she’s established herself as quite the high-end jewelry designer. Most Mers are content to live off the fortunes their families have amassed over the centuries, and most are players and wanderers, to say the least. But not Tula.

She’s as industrious as a crab in a garbage dump. You’ll see ads for her designs in almost every issue of Vogue and Vanity Fair, the stunning arrays of pearls and diamonds draped around the sleek necks of barely clothed models whose pouty cheeks are so sunken I wonder if they’ve had some molars pulled to achieve the look.

Mers are magnificently built but not skeletal. We not only love spending inordinate amounts of time underwater, we aren’t much affected by even the iciest water temps. That kind of talent requires a lovely, softly dense layer of fat beneath our perfect skin — it’s quite the scientific marvel, not that we ever allow Landers to cop a peek at the cell structure under their microscopes. At any rate, we are lusciously endowed in more ways than one, and while we may pout to dangerous excess, we never look gaunt when we do it.

But back to Tula. She’s a tall, svelte redhead, a few years older than moi, though she’ll never admit it. I gauge her at about fifty, but of course, that means nothing in mer-person years. She looks thirty and is always adorned with the latest designer fashions and the wry grimace of a self-righteous nerd.

Tula spends a lot of her time trying to understand Landers, so she can sell them high-end trinkets. I think she’s been tainted by Lander attitudes, which are boringly anxious. Tula has never quite gotten over some Lander love affair from a few years back. Since I’m an expert on love and sex, let me say right now, with all fairness, that no Mer has any business diddling a Lander.

It only ruins the poor Lander, who becomes totally obsessed with the mer-person (a given), and it puts the Mer in a watery pickle since Landers, well, like land. They tend to want to move far from the oceans and live in high places where the altitude is atrocious. (Did I mention most Mers can’t tolerate heights?) Also, Landers are sweet but fragile. They keel over at young ages, compared to us. Who wants to be in her prime at only 70 or 80 and care for some decrepit old Lander whose hunky Lander appeal long ago disappeared behind hearing aids, skinny legs, and a subscription to the large-print edition of Reader’s Digest?

At any rate, don’t pay any attention to Tula.

On my blog-announcement day she was dressed in one of those coy, retro, Lily Pulitzer shifts, looking like a cartoon daisy with breasts. Only Tula could pull off a look like that with a straight face. Leaning on one of the polished display counters at her shop, she crossed one perfectly tanned webbed foot over the other perfectly tanned webbed foot — both feet clad in strappy little yellow sandals with tiny ruby anklets — and she eyed me as if I’d lost my mind.

“What do you intend to write about in this on-line diary, Juna Lee? All you do is shop and chase Eurotrash and throw parties.”

“Why, those credentials alone qualify me to write a trashy gossip column pretending to be social commentary. I could be a columnist for Vanity Fair.” (Always hit Tula where her ads live.) “I have a masters in writing from some university. I forget the name.”

Tula sniffed. “You got your degree by seducing professors.”

“I like shortcuts. But I am a writer.”

“So what are you going to write about in this computer diary?”

“Our people.”

Tula straightened ominously. “Please tell me that by ‘our people’ you mean servants, employees, maids, butlers. A sort of Upstairs, Downstairs blog?”

“I mean mer-people, and you know it.”

Tula rushed from behind the counter, scattering several of her large, slit-eyed, champion Persians. Her shop is large and elegant, filled with twinkling pink-crystal chandeliers and soft Impressionist paintings. The Monet was a gift to her great-grandmother from the artist himself. The Persians sleep on a Louis XIV divan on cashmere throws.

“Writing about us is an invasion of privacy!” she bellowed. “And a sacrilege! And very rude! Wasn’t the Trump incident enough trouble for you?”

“Oh, for godssake, I’m not writing about you personally,” I lied. “I’m just aiming for a little water-to-land detente, you know, a little understanding between the haves and the have-nots, webbing-wise—”

“It’s forbidden! Against the rules! Dangerous!”

I put hand on hip and pouted. “Oh? Because the Council says so? The Council makes recommendations, Tula, not laws.”

The Council, you see, is the Mer equivalent of the United Nations, only without diplomatic immunity and free parking passes. It governs merfolk everywhere, slapping hands when need be, sending very unpleasant people to scold the mullet-heads and rakehells of our secretive society, and, in general, making pompous, pain-in-the-ass pronouncements about Mer decorum and relations with Landers. I suppose without it some of our greedier, more maniacal Mers would run amok and take over the world, but aside from preventing a few loony Mers from killing off all the Landers and establishing worldwide domination, I don’t see why the Council is so tight-assed. Tight-toed. Whatever.

“I’m just having a little literary fun in the interest of public relations,” I said. “Besides, most Landers will assume my blog is fiction. Maybe I’ll become the Danielle Steele of Mer lore. Publish books. Have movies made. Be interviewed by Barbara Walters. Her great-great-grandmother was a Mer, you know. There are a few webbed toes hidden in that woman’s family closet. I think her tongue’s webbed, too. That explains a lot.”

Tula groaned and shook her head. “Why don’t you do something useful, instead? Like take up water polo.”

“I tried. The horse keeps drowning.”

“Very funny.”

“I want to write about our people. It’ll be fun. And harmless. You’ll see.”

“I predict the Council will send someone to string you up by your webbing until you behave.”

“The Council has far more important items on its agenda than little old me and my blog. They’re obsessed with UniWorld Oil trying to take over the planet. My little blog is a trifle.”

Tula sighed and looked unconvinced. “I don’t like the smell of this fish, Juna Lee. You’ve gotten yourself into trouble, before, but this time —”

“Oh, shut up and sell me something pretty.” I smiled, went over to a counter, then cooed in delight. “That little diamond tennis bracelet with the platinum setting will do. Put it on my account.”

Tula rolled her azure eyes (and no, it would not be accurate, nor interesting, to call them simply ‘blue’). Anyway, rolled her azure eyes and went behind the counter to fetch my bracelet. “You don’t even play tennis,” she said. “Out of the water, you’re as graceful as a beached whale.”

“Kiss my blubber,” I replied with great drama, then took my bracelet and marched out.

Lilith
Chapter
3

Of course, it didn’t take long for word about my diary to reach Lilith. About two nanoseconds, to be precise. You don’t want Lilith mad at you. Picture Katherine Hepburn in her prime, with webbed toes, two yards of wavy auburn hair, and a Southern accent that could melt a martini olive. That’s my great-aunt.

As I’ve said, she’s seventy but that doesn’t mean a thing in Mer terms. You wouldn’t peg her at more than forty — and that’s sans any nipping and tucking. She rules the Bonavendier clan and all its subsidiaries, which are spread far and wide. More than a thousand Mers revere Sainte’s Point Island as the Mer equivalent of Buckingham Palace, the Statue of Liberty, and Hyannis Port all rolled into one. (Jackie Kennedy had the most discreet Mer family background, by the way. No surprise. Such style. Such intelligence, such class!)

Lilith called me back from a shopping trip in Atlanta on a sultry afternoon decorated with puffy Gulf Stream clouds and warm spring waves. I left my car in Bellemeade and swam across to Sainte’s Point. It’s an easy swim from Bellemeade, no more than a mile, give or take a small shark or two. The local dolphins chirped at me like disgusted sisters. Dolphins are so full of themselves. “Oh, puh-leeeze, it’s only a blog,” I chirped back.

After I dried off, wound my red hair up in a hefty braid, and donned a sweet silk sheath with darling little hand-painted Moroccan sandals, I made my way up the stone walkway from the island’s docks and boat house. There had been a good deal of hubbub at Sainte’s Point lately, what with the elaborate wedding of Ali to Griffin Randolph in the works, but there was a lull in the prenuptial preparations that day. At the sight of me, the household staff — two plump, angelic brothers and a sister — clutched their hearts and staggered about in feigned horror.

Annoying little Tanglewoods. They were only Landers, but generations of their family’s spellbound service to the Bonavendiers had given them a Mer-like capacity for appalled attitudes and prissy social judgment. “Just a blog,” I flung at them, and hurried by.

In her elegant, sun-filled office, Lilith looked up from an exquisite Russian czarina desk Napoleon shipped home to Josephine during that foolish little trek toward Moscow. Josephine was one of us, by the way. Such a naive child, though understandably caught up in owning lovely jewels and gilded etageres. How foolish to fall in love with a Lander in general and a midget megalomaniac in particular.

My great-aunt frowned at me. I gulped. Lilith looked frighteningly at home behind an empress’s desk.

“I hear from Tula,” she said, “that you’re writing some kind of computerized journal about us, for the whole world to read.”

I sank down on an overstuffed French divan with all the drama of a wounded artiste. Me, that is, not the divan. “Go ahead and scold me. Tell me I’ll be in trouble with the Council again.” I swooned on the divan with the back of one hand against my forehead. “Never mind that I’m a serious writer and scholarly Mer historian, not to mention the daughter of your third cousin once removed —”

“If only you’d channel your melodrama into an acting career, Juna Lee.” She smiled, all shrewd eyes and cool mouth, catlike. “You could be the host of one of those reality shows. I have the perfect name for it. All Wet.”