American Mermaid

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.Copyright © 2023 by Julia LangbeinAll rights reserved. Published in the United States by Doubleday, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.www.doubleday.comDOUBLEDAY and the portrayal of an anchor with a dolphin are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.Cover images: (Los Angeles, CA) Sean Davey/Aurora Photos/Superstock; (sky) Dane Robertson/ShutterstockHand-lettering and illustration by Grace HanCover design by Emily MahonLIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATANames: Langbein, Julia (Art historian), author.Title: American mermaid : a novel / Julia Langbein.Description: First edition. | New York : Doubleday, [2023]Identifiers: LCCN 2022021818 (print) | LCCN 2022021819 (ebook) | ISBN 9780385549677 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780593470145 (trade paperback) | ISBN 9780385549684 (ebook)Subjects: LCGFT: Humorous fiction. | Novels.Classification: LCC PS3612.A563 A84 2023 (print) | LCC PS3612.A563 (ebook) | DDC 813/.6—dc23/eng/20220725LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022021818LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022021819Ebook ISBN 9780385549684ep_prh_6.0_142879849_c0_r0 ContentsCoverTitle PageCopyrightDedicationPart I: Finding HerChapter 1Chapter 2Chapter 3Chapter 4Chapter 5Chapter 6Chapter 7Chapter 8Chapter 9Chapter 10Chapter 11Chapter 12Chapter 13Chapter 14Chapter 15Chapter 16Chapter 17Chapter 18Chapter 19Chapter 20Chapter 21Chapter 22Chapter 23Chapter 24Part II: High and DryChapter 25Chapter 26Chapter 27Chapter 28Chapter 29Chapter 30Chapter 31Chapter 32Chapter 33Chapter 34Chapter 35Chapter 36Chapter 37Chapter 38Chapter 39Chapter 40Chapter 41Chapter 42Chapter 43Chapter 44Chapter 45Part III: DrowningChapter 46Chapter 47Chapter 48Chapter 49Chapter 50Chapter 51Chapter 52Chapter 53Chapter 54Chapter 55Chapter 56Chapter 57Chapter 58Chapter 59Chapter 60Part IV: Up for AirChapter 61Chapter 62Chapter 63EpilogueAcknowledgments_142879849_ For all the mermaids out there(you know who you are) PART IFINDINGHER CHAPTER 1 The novel that I wrote begins with a woman in a wheelchair falling into the sea.It’s not a comedy. I wrote it alone in a studio apartment in New Haven, Connecticut, at a table on a rug that looked like it had been digested rather than woven. For three years I came home from teaching English to teenagers at Holy Cross, a secular public high school on Holy Cross Avenue, and wrote in an exhausted, anxious daze. I remember the night I started. I had bought a bottle of terrible wine after work. I was writing in my diary, then I was lying to my diary, then I wrote her. I saw her, I felt her: she was not a broken woman but a mermaid after all. Her fear of drowning filled me, and then, buoyed up in drunkenness, I felt my legs twitch with a long-forgotten muscle memory of swimming.—I lie on the giant white raft of my super-king bed, twenty stories up in an executive apartment that I’ve rented for the summer in Los Angeles. I wasn’t pretending to be an executive, and I’m embarrassed at being the wrong person for it. I have nothing but spare time here, as the time-efficient pod-coffee reminds me. I have nothing to scan on the scanner. This place was cheap because it’s in Century City, the uncoolest part of LA. You can see my building with others of its kind: architecturally, they are big-boned admin women in gray pantsuits. Unless I’ve undergone some kind of retinal bleaching in the California sunshine, I think the wall-size windows are made of sunglasses glass, the pervert kind that dim. I feel like a pervert, that mix of irresponsible pleasure and occasional shrugging disgust. Pleasure because I left my teaching job and I have my days free, disgust because of what I’m out here to do. Sometimes I push my nose against the glass wall and look down from my death-defying diving board at the unwalked pavement below, the only part of LA that could just as easily be Stamford, Connecticut. If it weren’t for the chilly stream of panic in my blood that runs on a loop like a corporate courtyard fountain, I’d forget where I was.—American Mermaid was published in December. I was a nobody—no babbling spectral internet persona, just a teacher—and I was told that I was lucky to get an advance of forty-five thousand. It seemed monumental, that sum, and I was grateful for the seventeen grand I pocketed after my agent nibbled and taxes chomped at it. Ten grand paid off my credit card debt. But even having seven thousand extra bucks was thrilling. Unallotted dollars not clothing me or housing me or drunk down inescapably on Friday at a bar three blocks from school.I was thirty-three and even with my extra money my legs were hairy and my workplace was dirty and it was fine. Then suddenly it seemed the whole world might melt and recool in a smooth new shape.In the spring, just a few months into the book’s publication, American Mermaid appeared on the Instagram account of a professional internet presence named Stem Hollander, an athletic charmer in his midforties with floppy blond hair and ten cheeky grins, whose humpy Segway salsa dancing gets millions of likes between endorsements of fair-trade avocados and weed-lobby Democrats. After Hollander, the librarians picked it up. Then, to my surprise, some national treasure on the Today show open-throat screamed about it too early in the morning. Thanks to her it was packed up and palleted to Costco, where I’ve seen it myself on a chessboard of hardbacks, a rook’s jump away from Dieting for Joint Health. I did a gimmicky magazine interview where I met a male journalist my age in a leather jacket in Atlantic City at a bar with live mermaid shows. Women with big naturals, their legs bound in plastic tail fins, pretended not to need to breathe, writhing on the other side of a scratched pane while we drank rum runners as if the Garden State Parkway weren’t five miles away. I cried and the journalist described it, which I think got me foreign sales in thirty-six countries.But Stem Hollander got it all started. He Instagrammed a picture of American Mermaid on his reclaimed marble nightstand. It was sandwiched between Balderdash, a book your uncle