The Lonely Polygamist

by Brady Udall

  Every night he would take a long shower, go to church meetings, or play with the kids upstairs, and every night at the chime of the clock he would show up for his ten-thirty appointment with the Barge. For weeks he’d been falling into a desperate, lost sleep, but sometime in late June he began waking in the early hours, stirred by an ache he at first took for sorrow, before realizing what he was feeling was desire. The kind of rich bodily pangs he was sure had abandoned him for good. More than once he awakened to discover Trish standing over him, a pale shadow in a long white T-shirt, a vision created out of the moist vapors of his longing. By the time he could rub the crust from his eyes and rouse himself completely she would be gone.

  Sometimes, unable to get back to sleep, he’d creep down the hall and stand in the doorway of the utility closet, noting how the blue radiance of the water heater’s pilot light played over her sleeping form. He allowed himself to go no further, only to look.

  Trish, feigning sleep, would watch through the blur of her eyelashes, keeping perfectly still. But Golden only stood at the door, a stark black cutout backlit by the dim light of the hall. In the days after Rusty’s funeral, acutely aware of the two weeks since her missed period, the tenderness in her breasts, the growing tightness at her waist, Trish had convinced herself that this new child would be enough, that—especially considering the illicit way in which it had been acquired—she should be grateful for what she had, with the life she had made for herself. But Golden’s dark form in the doorway had imprinted something new and painful on the hard plates of her chest: that old devil, hope. The kind of hope that abandons you in your worst moments and is suddenly there again, weeks later, trailing you like the stubborn, slinking dog who will not take no for an answer. The kind of greedy hope that tricks you into believing that at least some of the things taken from you might be restored, that after everything, you might find your way back to something like happiness.

  So Trish lay in her cot, Cooter’s hot little head wedged into her stomach, hoping, trying not to hope. When Golden appeared in the doorway she would attempt to lure him in like a hunter lures a bear: with a silence and stillness too delicious to resist. She knew how broken with sadness he was, how uncertain around his wives, how unworthy he felt, how nearly impossible he found it to look any one of them in the eye. There was part of her that still wanted to punish and hurt him, to meet his reticence with hers. But since her own betrayal—for which she continued to place, unfairly or not, a large portion of the blame at his feet—she had found herself less and less able to work up anything like anger or jealousy. She wanted only what she had wanted all along: a loving touch once in a while, the companionship of family, to belong.

  One night, a steady procession of thunder skipping through distant canyons, she awoke from a fitful half sleep to find Golden in the doorway and without thinking opened her eyes to look right at him. He disappeared into the hall but, spurred by a sudden, reckless clarity, she followed. He was already sinking back into the Barge, trying to wrestle himself under his Mexican blanket. When she approached he closed his eyes and froze in place like a lizard playing dead. She shook her head and sighed, wondering why they had continued with this silly game for so long.

  She said, “Having trouble sleeping?”

  Blanket clutched under chin, Golden seemed to conduct a quick debate with himself over whether or not to continue the ruse. Without opening his eyes he said, “A little.”

  “Me too,” she said. “A lot.”

  “The thunder,” he said, “it’s kind of loud.”

  “I was thinking maybe it’s this crappy old couch you’re sleeping on. I was also noticing how big it is. How it might be big enough for one more.”

  He looked at her for the first time, and together they confronted two possibilities: he could stay as he was, protecting himself, pretending he hadn’t heard her, and she could go back to her cot in the closet, her independence and pride intact. Or something could be risked, a new reality seeded with the promise of pain and disappointment that attends every act of love. Damp air gusted through the plastic curtains that shielded the gaping breach in the house. In the half-light the whites of her husband’s eyes were luminous, the sides of his mouth pinched, his nostrils flaring with what might have been excitement or fear. He lifted the blanket to let her in.

  This time, she did not rush. She did not smother or clutch at him, as had always been her inclination. She let her body ease into his. This is what she had always loved most about him: his body, his movement and shape, his smell. It was a smell that, when mixed with the rich, percolating odors of the couch, produced in her something like yearning or nostalgia; there were the bodily perfumes of thousands of children in their various ages and incarnations, baby lotion and wet diapers and shampooed hair, the faint metallic tang of old pennies and autumn leaves stuck to the bottoms of shoes, the residue of smoky winter nights and summer dust. For her, it was a smell that meant family and memory and time. It was the smell—and she could find no better word for it—of home.

  Together they listened to a line of heavy rain pass over the house and move on. He put his hand on her hip and from that point of contact radiated a warm, tingling current. Lifting her chin, she searched the shadows of his face, and a question rose in her mind that she was not quick enough to beat back: “All this time, you weren’t really impotent”—she took special care with the word’s pronunciation—“were you?”

  He stiffened, pulled away a little, and just like that the spell was broken. What had gotten into her, to ask this question, at this moment? Slowly it came to her, with some satisfaction, that maybe she did still have her pride, that this was the perfect moment, maybe the only one they would have, to clear the air in a lasting way, to start fresh.

  “Not,” he said, searching for the proper diplomatic construction, “in a manner of speaking.”

  She almost laughed but sighed instead, with only the barest hint of bitterness. “I should have known, I really should have. You’d think I’d have you figured out by now.”

  “Trish, I’m sor—” and he caught himself. “It’s just, I didn’t know what to do or how to act. I still don’t. I don’t know that I ever will.”

  “You’re getting better,” she said. “This is a start.”

  “I’m trying,” he said. “For you and the others.”

  “And there’s going to be a new one? For sure?” Why not? she thought. Here they were, about to make love for the first time in nearly a year, and who does she invite to the party but the new wife, the one who will one day compete with her for nearly everything that matters, who will just as likely come to view her as an enemy as a friend, who could even turn out to be the raven-haired mistress with the beautiful name who Golden had been courting and cuddling these past several months while she sat at home alone in her sad sweatpants trying not to lose her mind? Why not, really? On this crowded couch, in this crowded house, here it was: the crowded life she had chosen, in all its glory, a life that had to be, by its very definition, divided and shared and shared again.

  “It looks like it, but I don’t want to think about that right now. Do you?”

  “Not really. I guess I kind of like knowing what you’re up to.”

  After this interruption it took them a while to find a way forward. There was a hovering indecisiveness that quickly turned into urgency. Beginning to kiss, they shifted to find a better angle, nearly dumping Trish over the edge of the couch in the process. Golden was quick to throw his arms around her and pull her back, squeezing with such force her breath left her and her joints popped. Trish kissed him hard, grasping his collarbone as if it were the rung of a ladder, and in one motion hoisted herself on top of him. Quickly she shed her own T-shirt and then spent a dozen precious seconds working his over his inconveniently enormous head. Distant lightning ignited the windows twice, three times. He began to strain against her, bearing her up as a wave lifts a boat, a muggy heat rising off him, making her sweat. Centered high on his hipbone, she p
ressed down, searching for leverage, her vision pulsing with the beat of her heart. Thunder sounded against the walls of the house and she heard him saying something, what she thought might be an expression of pleasure, but then he was grabbing her arms and she heard the word, “Wait.”

  “Trish,” he gasped. “Please.”

  “What?” she said, still moving against him. “What is it?”

  “I don’t think—” He began to sit up. “I don’t think I can.”

  Her body weak, shuddering with desire, she could barely keep from shouting. “Don’t start that again, I know you can! We just talked about it!”

  “No,” he pleaded, shaking his head. “It’s not that. Please, I have an idea. Can you give me just a minute? One second?”

  With his free hand he cast around the living room floor for his jeans, from which he extracted his overstuffed leather wallet. He rifled through it contents and removed a square of gold foil with the words A PleasurePlus Prophylactic printed across it in cursive.

  “What is that?” she said, though she knew exactly what it was.

  “It’s—”

  “I know what it is, Golden. Where did you get it?”

  “I’m thinking you probably don’t want to know.”

  “Then why are you showing it to me?”

  He was giving her a strange look, one of equal parts expectation and embarrassment, hoping the square of gold foil might communicate everything that he could not.

  “And what?” she said. “You want us to use that? Now?”

  He nodded, but with such an air of uncertainty he might as well have been shaking his head. He said, “You don’t understand?”

  “What?” she said. “What am I supposed to understand?”

  The words came out with an edge of hostility she hadn’t entirely intended and he looked away, the muscles of his neck clenching in a way that suggested he was trying to hold back tears.

  “Golden, no, don’t do this, not now.” She felt a surge of nausea at the base of her throat and wondered, not for the first time, if there was simply too much that had happened to them—could their relationship be so irretrievably damaged that they could not manage even a simple act of lovemaking? Old folks, invalids, dumb teenagers, complete strangers did it all the time; monkeys, she read somewhere, were known to do it thirty times a day. So what was wrong with her and Golden? The only good answer she could come to was that the chasm that had opened between them over the past year and a half was too wide to breach, and that in deciding to stay, she had made a terrible mistake.

  “See?” he said, turning back to her. His face was soft, his eyes bright but without tears. “It’s just that, right now, I have to take care of the ones I already have.”

  The air seemed to go out of her then, leaving a feeling of empty calm. “I see,” she said. “I do.” Yes, she did. She understood that her greatest wish had turned into his greatest fear, and that if there was going to be a compromise, she, of course, would have to be the one to make it. And yet she’d already taken what she wanted, hadn’t she, stolen it for herself with a boldness that surprised her still? And why not, she wondered, why not allow him to believe, at least for a little while, that he could exercise some power over life and how it was given? He would learn soon enough that when it came to children, there was no way to control how they came and went. They arrived as miracles and were snatched away again without meaning, without the least reason or sense, and she and this sweet, sad man were going to have to help each other accept this as the most fundamental truth of their lives.

  So she set about kissing him again, and as she did she pried open his fist and removed the condom crumpled inside it.

  Coming up for air, he said, “I have to tell you, I don’t have any idea how to use that thing.”

  “Oh,” she said, “don’t worry, hon, I do.”

  In one quick motion she pulled down his sweatpants and underwear, and while she was busy noticing how very unimpotent he was—a rather difficult fact to miss from her vantage point—something else caught her eye. It appeared as if the hair around his genitals had been trimmed back in an almost perfectly round circle, half an inch long or so, like the green on a golf course cut from the surrounding rough.

  “What,” she said, “is this?”

  He looked down at himself. “Yeah,” he said, “this. I don’t know. A while back I got some gum caught there somehow. I guess I got carried away cutting it out.”

  In a few moments Trish and her husband would make love for the first time in nearly a year, with such vigor and abandon that they would have to bite their lips and hold their hands over each other’s mouths to keep from waking the house. But right now, slipping the condom from its little golden pouch, she laughed longer and louder than she had in a very long time.

  44.

  A WEDDING

  A SATURDAY AFTERNOON IN LATE SEPTEMBER, THE SKY A CHECKERBOARD of clouds, the air soft with the coming fall. The Big House renovation is winding down, and none too soon; the work, as always, has been plagued by mishaps and delays, broken sewer pipes and code violations, bureaucratic snafus at the county office, nasty weather of all kinds. The crew, offered a handsome bonus to finish the job by the end of the month, lay shingles and set windows and paint trim with uncommon industry, the entire rear of the house so jumbled with ladders and scaffolding and scrambling men that the whole enterprise brings to mind the Tower of Babel.

  Occasionally, the roofers pause in their hammerivng to watch the spectacle below. On the broad, weedy lawn a couple hundred people have gathered for a wedding: rows of folding chairs, banquet tables spread with desserts and finger food, and up front, at the outer edge of the milling crowd, the happy couple, the handsome groom and lovely bride.

  The ceremony doesn’t take long. A thin silver cloud passes in front of the sun, casting everything a deeper shade of itself, and as if this is his cue Uncle Chick asks the crowd to be seated. There is a brief bout of musical chairs that leaves at least thirty disappointed stragglers searching for a place to stand. Mostly, this is a typical fundamentalist crowd, comprised of the usual mob of children, the men in polyester suits and bolo ties, the women with their long hair brushed and shimmering in the glassy light. But there are a few who obviously don’t belong (invited here by Golden unbeknownst to Uncle Chick or anyone else): Nelson Norman, settled in next to the banquet tables, having already sampled three kinds of cake and two flavors of punch; Leonard Odlum, looking sorely out of place in a rented maroon tuxedo and trying in vain to make meaningful eye contact with some of the young ladies in the audience; and near the back, Nestor, flanked on one side by a few of his hungover bandmates, and on the other by Huila, her son Fredy, and her silver-haired uncle Esteban, who accompanied the boy on the journey from Guatemala.

  Clearing his throat, Uncle Chick takes his place before the groom (who sweats despite the cool air, as if at the tail end of a forced march) and the beaming bride in the pale chiffon dress she wore for her first wedding nearly seventeen years ago, altered to show a hint of cleavage. She lifts a hand to keep her complicated and newly dyed hairdo in proper alignment, and the sudden movement causes the dress, already showing signs of considerable strain, to make a sharp tearing noise at one of its seams.

  An hour or so ago, to prepare himself for this moment, Golden snuck out to his work truck while the older boys were busy setting up chairs and fished out his jelly jar from under the bench seat. Though tempted on more occasions than he could count, he had not partaken of it since Rusty’s accident. He held it up to the light: less than an inch of amber liquid at its bottom. One sip for comfort, two for courage, he thought, and took one exceptionally long and very deep sip until the jar was emptied. He shuddered, gave himself an exhortatory slap on the face, and tossed the jar into his neighbor’s trash heap on the other side of the fence.

  Now, while Uncle Chick cracks his oversized Bible-and-Book-of-Mormon combination to a random page and without looking at it begins to recite a series of wedding-r
elated scriptures, Golden concentrates, making sure not to teeter or sway. Speaking at a good clip, as if he’s trying to get this over with as soon as possible, Uncle Chick explains to the couple that they will be required, from this day hence, to love and support each other, that it is the sacred duty of the wife to submit herself to her husband in all things and in return he must protect and provide for her, to cleave unto her as if she were his own body, that they must share all things in love and righteousness and always keep their marriage bed pure—here he pauses to give Golden a less-than-enigmatic look through the smoked lenses of his glasses—and if they will heed this counsel and keep God’s commandments they shall forever be as one mind, one flesh.

  The sun slides free of the silver clouds and Golden is dazzled for a moment, he has to close his eyes and turn his head, and when he opens them again he is looking at his four wives, seated side by side in the front row just to his right, wearing identical cream-colored dresses. They are holding hands and in each of their eyes, even Beverly’s, is the evidence of tears.

  For a moment he experiences that familiar, almost thrilling sense of dislocation—How did I get here? How did this happen?—and then the web of phosphenes and colored dots clears from his vision and he is struck by the beauty of these women, their generous mouths and graceful arms, their backs held straight as if in defiance or pride. His own body, compressed for so long under the weight of sadness and doubt, creaks at this sudden and irregular expansion of feeling, with the swelling of belief that he can do this, that he has the capacity to love and care for these women—his wives!—that his heart is spacious enough to accommodate them all, even this strange woman at his side who nudges him a little to direct his attention back to the matter at hand, her hair crackling in his ear.