Mary pulled back. “Stop?” If one word could make her sober in an instant, that was it. Her carelessness fled. She shook her head as hard as a dog does to rouse itself.
“Stop.”
“Just stop.”
“Yeah.”
“For how long?” Mary demanded.
Yalulah didn’t answer, she didn’t have the answer.
“I don’t even know that they’ve consummated it,” she said.
“Don’t be stupid.”
“I don’t, and neither do you.”
“Well, if they didn’t, it’s only a matter of time. And what about Pearl?” Mary kept on. “Is she gonna just stop, too?”
“Pearl will do what we tell her.”
“Bullshit.”
“We’re the adults. We can handle Pearl. We are only as sick as our secrets,” Yaya said, throwing one of Mary’s favored NA sayings at her. “And now it’s not a secret; it’s in the light now. We can handle anything in the light of God.”
“Is that why you came here? To tell me that?” Mary’s hands were tingling. She flexed them and looked at them like they belonged to someone else.
“No, I missed you. I miss us. All of us,” Yalulah pleaded.
“The age of consent in California is eighteen.”
“In Canada, it’s sixteen.”
“Fuck Canada.”
“Oh, please, Miss Manners, were you a virgin at seventeen?”
“That’s not the point.” Mary’s voice was rising. “I lost my virginity at thirteen. I got raped at fifteen, and I fucked half of Venice and a good chunk of Los Feliz by the time I was sixteen. Shit, maybe that is the point.”
“Baby, baby, shhh … In 1889, the age of consent was fourteen. That’s all I’m saying. It’s relative, and kind of arbitrary.” Yalulah remained even and calm, marshaling factoids to her defense. “Man’s law, not God’s. Man’s law guesses and changes, God’s law remains, immutable and sacred.”
“Jesus, Yaya, it’s like you use God when you need him and psychology when you don’t.”
Yalulah nodded in agreement as if to say, yes, that is exactly what I am doing. “He could marry her. I know that’s not the fairy tale; it’s not the optimum situation, and I know most of the world would look down on that, on him and on them, on all of us, but since when have we cared about what most of the world thinks? Fuck them. And God knows, it’s probably what Jackie would want.”
Mary felt herself falling through the air, but soberly; she wanted to hold on to something. That something was usually Yalulah, but not Yalulah right now, anything but Yalulah right now. “You’re a mother.” Mary said it like a curse.
Yalulah did not blink. “Yes, I am, but I am not her mother, and neither are you, and he is not her father and I’m asking you to think about it. There’s nothing ‘wrong’ with it. It’s not real incest.” That dread word had been spoken and could not be unspoken. They stared at each other silently in tacit acknowledgment that there was no going back from here—from that utterance a new world born. Mary could think of some things wrong with it.
“Listen to yourself, Yaya. You just said ‘real incest.’”
“I know what I said.”
“Is that how he talks about it?” Mary asked.
“He doesn’t talk about it directly.”
“What’s he said, indirectly?”
“He hasn’t said anything, Mary. This is my interpretation. I think he’s confused, and scared, and maybe ashamed of himself, and feels like he’s being punished. I think he feels it’s more of a modern hangup. Probably feels this is how Bible Man did it. Probably thinks Joseph Smith would have no problem with it. He’s a good man, Mary—”
“I know he’s a good man,” Mary cut her off. “Yaya, please…”
“I think he will defer to you. To your feelings. To your cultural bias.”
“Fuck me, did you say ‘cultural bias’?”
“Yes.”
“Is that what he said?” Mary asked angrily. Yaya nodded. Mary was not at all sure she was telling the truth. She couldn’t imagine Bronson saying that. He didn’t talk like that.
Yalulah was hell-bent on making inroads, but didn’t want to press too hard right away. She could sense Mary at her limit for this at the moment. There was time. Mary would come around. “Think about it, Mary?” she pleaded. “We’ll have each other.” Oh.
“Right.”
“I’ll visit again soon, baby.”
Mary nodded. “I’ll think about it,” she lied; well, she would think about it, all right, but not the way Yalulah wanted her to. Yalulah kissed her again; Mary didn’t like the smell of her all of a sudden, something stale and off. Mary tried to hide this sudden repulsion and attempted to relax herself by welcoming the warm feelings of the Percocet back inside.
“Are you okay? All good?” Yalulah asked, lamely trying to play along, putting a Band-Aid on a gunshot wound.
“Yup,” Mary said, and she started dancing again. “We good, Yaya. We good. All good.” Mary laughed, pulling away farther, Ukrainian dancing, and flashing signs she didn’t know the meaning of.
18.
WHILE YALULAH AND MARY communed secretly in Rancho Cucamonga on a cool, early December night, Bronson rode out to his new sacred place in the desert, where they had relocated the three graves after Maya’s intrusion, to commune with the dead, and his God. His head was throbbing, as it had been for hours. The light of day caused a searing pain behind his eyes that would have sent a man with less work and will to bed with the shades drawn. The darkness of night brought a modicum of relief.
He knelt first at the graves of his two dead children, Carthage and Nauvoo. He thanked God for the short time he had spent with them. He put his hand on Carthage’s marker and did his best to recall the bodily form his “first estate” had taken. Carthage had been stillborn of Jackie, her third and last child, and her only child with Bronson. Jackie had held her dead boy in her arms for hours, talking to the perfect, little lifeless form, and having the kids come to say hello and goodbye to the baby brother they had been expecting. Only after each child had said their piece, only then had Jackie allowed Bronson to take their baby away. That was Jackie’s way, to meet everything head-on, eyes open. If Delilah had been the spur to Bronson’s faith, Jackie was its rock and its seal. She presented with tumors for the first time just a few months after losing Carthage.
Now Bronson moved to touch Nauvoo’s grave. Nauvoo had come out of Yalulah a half-formed thing herself, riddled with multiple deformities. She never ate, never took the breast. Terrified, Yalulah put this unfortunate babe to her breast, but the tiny mouth refused to latch on and suckle; as if she knew better, that it would only prolong her agony. Yalulah could plainly see that medicine could not save this poor baby, and she was deeply ashamed that in her heart, unspoken, she prayed for the child’s suffering to be brief. She had no idea how to care for such a thing. It was a horrible blessing when Nauvoo starved and succumbed after a few days. But Bronson would save her soul nonetheless. Nauvoo’s soul would not be deformed. Her first estate was perfect from God. He would perform a baptism of the dead for Nauvoo and Carthage. Death was nothing to a man with his beliefs, but a moment in time, time that did not really exist. Just the pause between an inhalation and an exhalation. Yalulah had been shattered by Nauvoo’s birth, her faith rocked more than she would ever let on, her anger at God commensurate to her faith, but she gave birth to Palmyra thirteen months later, and then Ephraim and Alvin and Little Joe, and they had all moved on, as they say, as best they could. God took Nauvoo away, but He gave them so much more, so much more health and fertility and abundance, as if in apology.
Bronson was secretly racked with doubt for not seeking medical attention for the births and babies, or for Jackie. He was also concerned that Maya or that Janet Bergram would find out now about the buried children and accuse him of some modern crime. But this was God’s will. He had trusted in God’s will, and Nauvoo, poor Nauvoo, poor, half-made-up, small-headed
, innocent Nauvoo—nothing, he was sure, could have saved her. He put his hand on the marker under which the infant bones lay, caressing the stone as if it were flesh, as if it could feel, and he began to weep. “Nauvoo,” he said over and over to his baby girl. “Poor Nauvoo, poor, sweet Nauvoo.” He then moved on to Jackie’s grave.
He met Jackie at the Los Angeles California Temple in Westwood, which he’d begun to frequent shortly after his “worthiness” interview with Elder, while he was still puzzling over how to square his newfound landowning wealth and newfound faith with the hard-partying Hollywood stuntman he’d been. Elder greased the wheels for him to worship there (as far as possible from the elder Elder in Utah, of course). Bronson dug the fact that the church was built on a huge parcel of land, a million square feet, that the silent-movie star Harold Lloyd had purchased for a movie ranch in the 1920s. The conversion of the land itself from movie ranch into a Mormon church seemed to foreshadow and mirror exactly his own path.
Jackie, thirty at the time, and still sporting the sculpted thighs of a college tennis player (third singles, first doubles at BYU), had started up a conversation with Bronson in that friendly, outgoing Mormon custom. He had seemed out of place to her, in a good way. As opposed to the soft, fish-belly white, bespectacled sixty-year-old seeming forty-year-old men that populated most of her working day at the Church, Bronson was tan and strong, vital. She thought he was beautiful and rare as a movie star. Jackie had been raised a Mormon in Salt Lake and had left for Los Angeles for a new start when her marriage ended. Just two months after giving birth to her twins, Pearl and Deuce, she had discovered her college sweetheart husband in bed with another young Mormon man. She asked no questions. Jackie closed the bedroom door and filed for divorce. She was like that, irrevocable.
As she packed her bags, she told her husband that she would take the children and he would not hear from her or them again. In shock, and maybe relieved, he had not argued. She had a law degree she’d never used and got herself a tiny apartment in Westwood and a clerk-type job for the Church itself. She was getting back on her feet when she met Bronson, but she lived with the constant fear that her ex would one day have a change of heart and try to track her down and take away her kids. Eventually, she knew, she wanted to disappear more completely to ensure that from ever happening.
They were both isolated from their former selves. Jackie knew no one in Los Angeles. No longer drinking, Bronson lost the common denominator with his running crew and hung out with his stuntman Hollywood fraternity less and less. Alone together, they folded into each other, rarely leaving each other’s side. They were equals, student and teacher for each other. With her Utah pedigree in the church, she gave his faith depth and legitimacy; with his newly converted enthusiasm, he reinvigorated her sleeping love of God, and reinforced any belief that might have been weakened by her husband’s betrayal. Bronson and Jackie soon went deeper into the differences between Smith’s original, revolutionary vector and institutionalized, Americanized Mormonism. They pushed into the fringes of the scriptures, egging each other on in a type of Mormon folie à deux.
Bronson found himself falling for Jackie’s mind, the intensity of her faith, but he was also overwhelmingly attracted to her. And she to him. And even though she was a divorcee, she would not make love to Bronson out of the seal of marriage. They made out for hours and hours, though. Like they were in high school. Bronson was giddy with the flush of true romance and the idea of a new life. When Bronson told her the story of his family and Delilah’s inheritance, it was Jackie’s idea to get married and have a family out in the desert. It was also her idea that Bronson should take more than one wife, that polygamy was a natural state and a restoration of the biblical way—and, quoting the prophet, “with more worthy women than men, some women would not be exalted without plural marriage.” When she said slyly that she might like a few husbands as well, Bronson immediately asked her to marry him, saying, “I’d like to be first in line.”
They were wed in the Los Angeles Temple, officially sealed by the Mormon Church, a celestial eternal bond. For their vows, they chose 1 Corinthians 13:1–2. Jackie chanted, “If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or clanging cymbal.”
Bronson continued the verse from there, “And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing.”
After the ceremony, Jackie toasted Bronson with a glass of sparkling apple juice, using the words of the prophet Joseph Smith himself as a benediction and hope for a perfectable future: “‘As man now is, God once was. As God now is, man may be.’”
She was the love of his life, and the first sister-wife, and subsequently, Bronson had brought Mary and then Yalulah to her for approval. After a decade in the desert, when Jackie died of cancer, refusing Bronson’s entreaties to let him take her to a hospital, he had fallen into a deep, bottomless funk. He sleepwalked through a year, maybe more. He absented himself from the kids, from Mary and Yaya, from everything except the hard work Agadda da Vida demanded. It was during that time when Bronson was “away” that Yaya and Mary had fallen truly, deeply in love as a couple. When Bronson awoke again from his grieving slumber, he was the odd man out. He’d felt more or less alone since then. Until Pearl.
Pearl reminded him eerily of Jackie. Mother and daughter had had an inexplicable bond, inside jokes, even a little made-up language that only they understood. They were like witches in a coven of two. One night near the end, as Jackie lay in her sickbed and Bronson sat beside her, stroking her hand, she asked, “You won’t forget me, will you, Bronson Powers?”
Bronson did not even need to answer, but nonetheless, he said, “Never.”
She goaded him sweetly, “Man is resilient. Time passes, memory fades.”
“Stop it, love,” he said gently. Her hand in his looked unrecognizable, like a Halloween gag, a dinosaur claw, it was so large and red and swollen, larger now than his, even. She held his eyes, and motioned for him to lean in like she would tell him a secret.
She smiled, and when her lips parted he could smell rank death on her weak breath. “Look for me in Pearl when I’m gone. She’s my secret sharer. Look for me in Pearl’s eyes.” It was the last thing she said to him. She closed her green eyes, slipped into sleep, and died a few days later.
Pearl had taken Jackie’s dying the hardest. She had refused to go in and say goodbye to her in the final days, and did not watch as she was buried. Bronson was the only one from whom Pearl would accept even the smallest solace, and indeed, she was the only one that he would accept consolation from as well. They grew very close, and as she grew up, Bronson, as Jackie had instructed, secretly looked for Jackie in the child, and he had found her. It was unmistakable, uncanny. It seemed almost a performance of his dead love, a haunting, a channeling, a cohabitation. He was both horrified and delighted. He was mystified and terrified of Pearl. For her part, Pearl doted on him as only a young girl can dote on a father.
And still he had kept a certain distance from her. Even as she grew into a woman, he remained aloof enough. When she hit puberty, he unconsciously distanced himself further and further. He saw how hurt she was that her remaining confidant and best friend had taken himself away for no reason she could fathom, but he could do nothing about that pain, could say nothing to assuage it, as he was the cause and the cure.
He had stopped himself even as she made herself so clear to him, dared him, teased him, exercising in the loneliness and safety of their desert bubble her nascent sexual power, staring at him constantly with a mixture of possessiveness and delight. Yes, he had stopped himself. He had ignored her. She would not be ignored. She was vain and proud. He didn’t blame her. He knew this was natural. She was as perfect as the God that made her. He knew he was the only thing standing between them. The pressure was enormous, the thoughts constant.
He slept sandwiched safely between Mary and Yalulah,
even though they didn’t seem to want him there. He felt hunted. And yet in the daylight hours, he couldn’t stop himself from being near Pearl. Patting her on the head, looking at her. When she would dismiss his company or ignore him, he sulked, moody and moony as a teenager. But he had weathered the initial storm of those years. He had guided her through with paternal love and restraint. Thoughts were just thoughts. He had done the right thing.
Fifteen and sixteen passed for Pearl, and Bronson felt they had made it past their own Scylla and Charybdis. But when she turned seventeen, Pearl seemed to get hostile and antsy all over again, and with greater intensity and ingenuity. She started flirting with Bronson overtly. It pissed him off. It pissed Mary and Yalulah off. Still, Bronson knew it was natural for her. It was her life force. It was nature and God expressing Himself through this body. And as Pearl matured, she became ever more and more like her mother, Jackie. So much so that sometimes it hurt Bronson to look at Pearl and remember his dead love.
He locked the door of his room when he left Mary and Yalulah to their own devices and he slept alone. Night after night, he could hear a tentative hand try the door handle and then walk away. He knew it wasn’t Mary or Yaya. He could’ve locked the door forever. How hard would that have been? But he didn’t. He didn’t. One night, he had left his bedroom door unlocked and Pearl had slipped into his bed. And then he hadn’t stopped himself. He did not send her away. He did not. He welcomed her into his bed and heart. He felt love again, a kind of love for Pearl, simple and deep, complicated by circumstance.
Mary seemed to hate him for it now, sure, probably Yaya, too, but Mary had love with Yaya and Yaya with Mary. Where was Bronson’s? For without love, as his wedding vows had proclaimed, a man had nothing. The psychology of it all was messy and confusing, and he ran from it. He did not believe in psychology. They were mere animals, hairless apes, after all, without faith. Baboons. Without faith, we are all beasts engaged in endless violence and domination in different dress over the epochs. Same-o same-o. He did not believe in the march of progress. He did not believe in cultural relativism. He was no modern man. He believed in the restoration of the ancient scripture, as commanded in Acts 3:21, a “restitution of all things.” Restoration and restitution was his calling. He remembered Holden Caulfield catching those kids in the rye. That was him, too. A catcher and a savior, a restorer of things and souls. He had restored the word of God in the desert. He was a king in the desert. A desert king like David.
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