The Lonely Polygamist (15 page)

“I don’t like lying to my girls,” Golden said.

“It’s a miserable thing.”

“I’m thinking I should quit the project. I know several people who’d be willing to take over…”

“Let’s don’t go that far.”

“I’m all twisted up with it. I don’t know what to do anymore.”

“You’ll finish that job,” the old man said, something new and hard entering his voice, “and you won’t complain about it or speak of it again. There’s hard things we have to do in this life. We bite our lip and do ’em. And we pray to God to help us along the way.”

Golden slowed the pickup down along the shoulder, gravel pinging on the oil pan, and swung it back around toward town. “You don’t think I should go ahead and tell Beverly about the whole deal, just get it over with?”

“Don’t be a dummy,” Uncle Chick said. “You do that, and you’ll deserve everything you get. We don’t need to say another word about it, except this: be careful. You know what I’m talking about. Get away from your family too long, the church, you forget who you are, what’s important.”

“I’ll be careful,” Golden said. “I always am.”

ON SALT POND

Despite his best intentions to commit himself to God and family, to get through this construction project without conceding another thought to Weela and her fascinating calves, the following Tuesday there he was at Salt Pond after work, innocent as a child, throwing a ball around with his dog.

He’d brought Cooter along even though recent experience had proven it to be a bad idea. Cooter didn’t like being cooped up in the trailer or in the cab of the pickup (left outside he would quickly become lunch for an enterprising coyote), he was terrified of the loud machinery, and fast became lonely for the dozens of children who, at any one moment out of the day, vied for his attention. Bored and homesick, he would sulk for the remainder of the work week like a teenager on a family trip to the Smithsonian.

But Golden decided Cooter was exactly what he needed: a distraction, a chaperon, a sidekick, a reminder of who he was and what his commitments were. When Weela didn’t show up that evening he went home feeling just a little virtuous, as if he’d passed some sort of test, as if he’d been saved from temptation by virtue of his good intentions alone. But the next day, he sat on his favorite boulder, sulking. The sun was going down, and the shadows of the peaks moved incrementally up the rocky slopes, filling the wide basin like water in a bathtub. A fever of disappointment had come over him; he’d been waiting an hour and a half and there’d been no sign of her.

If only he could figure out his attraction to this woman, he decided, maybe he could liberate himself from it. But the more he thought about it, the more convinced he became that freedom itself was to blame; for the first time in his life he had been left to his own devices, free from the restrictions of church and family, free to do and think and choose as he saw fit. Ever since he was a boy all his choices had been made for him, and now that they had been given a little latitude, where had his questionable instincts led him? To a dark-skinned prostitute with a strange name who liked to wash her clothes in a pond.

To clear his head he picked up a chunk of rhyolite, hucked it over the pond. It would be dark soon. She had not missed him in his absence, who was he kidding, she had no interest in him at all, she was just being polite to the big goofy guy who’d horned in on her private oasis in the desert. He ought to go home, he decided. He ought to go home and never come back.

That’s when he saw the top of her head moving over the sagebrush. She wore a red handkerchief that in the last angle of light glowed like a hot coal. He waved his arms. Much too loudly he cried, “Weeeela!” and ducked his head, wincing; he sounded like a kid on a Tilt-A-Wirl.

He clambered down and waited for her, trying not to look pleased. As usual, she did not look directly at him, but stood a few feet away—out of wariness or simple propriety, he couldn’t tell—looking out into the distances, occasionally sending a glance his way. Cooter, who had been making his rounds, peeing on as many bushes as possible, trotted up with his ball.

“This is my dog,” Golden said. “Cooter.”

She squatted and received Cooter with one hand under his chin and the other stroking his side. Immediately he twisted onto his back and offered his belly for rubbing, a lascivious look on his face, his eyes bulging, his tongue hanging out, his hind legs spread wide. Golden was hoping maybe Cooter would draw some words out of her, but she only murmured low nonsense noises and gave Cooter such a thorough rubbing that one of his legs pumped like a piston as he groaned in ecstasy.

To put an end to this embarrassing display, Golden took the ball—a gray mass of wet dirt and hair that at one time may have been used for a game of tennis—from Cooter’s mouth and tossed it high in the air. The ball bounced twice before caroming off a rock into the pond. Cooter, who an hour ago had given up a game of fetch after two or three throws because he’d decided there were better things to do, now raced to retrieve the ball, kicking up dust as he went. To Golden’s surprise he leapt into the water, stretching for air like a Labrador. Cooter hated water, cried pitifully through his weekly baths, but the show-off in him had taken over; he paddled out toward the ball, woofing and kicking like he knew exactly what he was doing.

He made it to the ball without difficulty, but could not seem to get his mouth around it. He pushed it forward with his nose, snapped at it, kicked harder, eyes bulging with effort. Weela and Golden laughed together—he knew it had been a good idea to bring Cooter along! But then the dog began to tire. He had lost interest in the ball and now seemed to be paddling in place, the tip of his tail sinking out of sight until there was nothing but eyes and a snout.

Golden ran to the water’s edge, made a frantic attempt to pull off one of his boots, failed, and splashed out into the shallows. With a reluctant groan he launched his long body out into the water. At first he slid forward almost gracefully, like a great fish returned to its element, but then his momentum stalled, his boots filled with water, and he began to sink. He did not know how to swim, made evident by the way he slappped at the pond’s surface with his palms and choked on the water that flowed easily into his open mouth as if it were a bathtub drain. He did his best to churn his legs, all the while casting his arms about in the hopes of locating Cooter, or anything else to hold on to, but there was only water and more water, bubbling up everywhere, pushing its way up his nose and down his throat. He felt something on top of him, a tug at his collar, and instinctively twisted his body and grabbed handfuls of cloth and hair. As he did so his boots touched the bottom of the pond and he pushed up with all he had. He broke the surface almost immediately and, after coughing out a mouthful of dank pond water, was amazed to find himself standing in the soft muck of the pond’s bottom, the water just covering his shoulders, and Weela clinging to his back, one hand with a firm grip on his collar. She had tried to save him and if the pond had been deeper than five and a half feet he would have certainly dragged her down with him.

He pulled her around to his front and they held on to each other, coughing and gasping. He wasn’t sure if he was a coward or a hero. She grasped him tightly around the neck with both arms as if to hold him up, to make sure he didn’t try to dive back in.

“Thank you!” he shouted, his ears plugged with water. “I’m sorry! I don’t think I know how to swim!” And coughed some more.

Cooter, who had somehow made it to the other side, pulled himself onto the gravelly shore and with a thin wheeze flopped on his side. Golden hardly noticed. He asked Weela if she was okay and she made a noise—he wasn’t sure if it was a laugh or a sob—and pressed her cheek against his. Even in the cold water, he could feel the heat of her, could feel every part of her body that touched his: her thigh clamped with a rigid strength around the top of his hips, her breasts against his chest, her cheek against his, her breath hot on his ear.

Golden started forward, tried to walk them out of the pond, but found that his feet were firmly planted in the clayey silt, which was just as well. He was happy to stay right here, wet and cold in the insistent embrace of this strange woman. He asked her again if she was all right; he wanted a response from her, he didn’t care if it was in English or Italian or Martian, he wanted to hear words, warm and moist, come out of the lips grazing his ear.

Cooter wheezed out a bark and they both turned to look. He was on his feet now, dripping and quivering, half covered in mud, his bloodshot eyes blinking furiously, his fur slicked down over his bony frame, whining at the ball still bobbing just out of reach.

Weela put her face back against his, her mouth next to his ear. This small gesture of intimacy flooded him with a tingling warmth, a sense of events trembling in the balance. He could feel her lips as she opened her mouth to speak.

She said, “That is a very ugly dog.”

T
ONIGHT TRISH PACED AT THE FRONT WINDOW IN NOTHING BUT A
towel, her razor-nicked ankles smarting with every step. Even though she’d showered twice, scrubbed and soaped herself silly both times, the lingering odor of Night Passion perfume trailed her around the room. It was now nine—two hours after Golden had promised he’d be home—and the darkness outside had consumed everything but the lit windows of the houses across the street. Inside, her elaborate dinner of jerked pork and sweet potatoes sat hardening on the kitchen table. Faye had fallen asleep in the back room and the house was so quiet it hummed.

Early this morning she had been awakened by the familiar pain deep within her abdomen that told her she was ovulating—a series of hard cramps followed by a sensation like a token dropping into a slot. As a teenager she’d gone to her mother, who not only told her what it was, but gave it a name:
Mittelschmerz
, a German word meaning “middle pain.” It was such a ridiculous-sounding word, Trish used to say it over and over again in the midst of her cramps—
Mittelschmerz! Mittelschmerz! Mittelschmerz!
(using an exaggerated German accent, of course)—as a way to distract herself from the pain.

But there was nothing to distract her from the situation she found herself in now: showered, lotioned, and perfumed to within an inch of her life, the owner of a body as ready and willing as it would ever be—and no man in sight. She kept telling herself that she was being absurd, that she should get herself dressed, that waiting around wantonly in an undersized towel was an obvious and tired tactic if there ever was one. But she couldn’t deny the truth: she was out of fresh ideas, out of patience, nearly out of hope. She and Golden had made love only twice since Jack died, and she was beginning to believe that if it didn’t happen tonight they might never make anything together again.

Two weeks ago, after the dust-up over Beverly’s old couch, Golden had come home as happy and loose as she’d seen him in months, and she was sure it would be their night. Wearing a dress she’d cut and sewn herself and the slippery lip gloss of a teenager, she massaged his shoulders while he ate a few leftovers from the fridge. They chatted for a while, he made polite inquiries about Faye and her schoolwork, she stroked his neck and ears suggestively a few times, and after he put away three bowls of ice cream he went out to his pickup to get his overnight bag. When he didn’t come back after five minutes she went out to find the driver’s door open and Golden slumped facedown on the vinyl bench seat, which he apparently found quite comfortable. In the yellow glow of the cab light, his fingers wrapped around the handle of his bag, he slept, innocent as a babe. She came this close to taking the bag from his hand and clouting him over the back of the head with it. She woke him and, staggering under his weight, guided him inside the house to the bathroom, where she helped him brush his teeth, scrubbing his big chompers with an angry sawing motion until he begged for mercy through a mouthful of foam. She dragged him to the bed, yanked off his boots, peeled his clothes from his body as if in preparation for emergency surgery…but by then he was gone, a huge loaf of dead weight sinking into the mattress, smacking his lips and snoring even before she could get to his socks. She dumped a comforter over his head and went out onto the porch to cry.

Tonight she would show him no such mercy. Already she had spent two hours tucked into what amounted to a hand towel, occasionally wetting her hair so it would look like she had emerged steaming fresh from the shower. She had shaved her legs and, because she was five years out of practice, had lost a few bits of ankle flesh in the process. But it didn’t matter. Her calves were smooth and buttery, her hair damp and fragrant, and if all else failed, she had her backup: waiting innocently in the bed table drawer, a twenty-pack of Wrigley’s Spearmint gum.

After coming home from the hair academy, she had read her pilfered
Cosmopolitan
cover to cover between peeling potatoes and revacuuming the rugs. It was the hyper-peppy article called “Advanced Lovemaking Techniques for the Rest of Us” that received more of her attention than any other. Under the subheading “Oral Fixations” it read:

Despite her extended detour on the worldly byways of Reno, Trish had very little experience with Advanced Lovemaking Techniques; Billy had always been the traditional, three-frantic-minutes-in-the-pitch-dark sort of man, and Golden, sweet Golden—she’d made love with Golden only enough to know that he was entirely too gentle (worried that he was going to smother or otherwise damage her with his unmanageable bulk) and liked to be kept up to speed on her comfort and pleasure (“Okay? Ah? Right? There?”). Sex was one thing she and the other wives never spoke of, and though she knew there was very little in the way of advanced lovemaking going on with them or with other members of the church (the unspoken law was that sex was meant for procreation and nothing but), she couldn’t help but wonder.

The life of a plural wife, she’d found, was a life lived under constant comparison, a life spent wondering. Sitting across from her sister-wives at Sunday dinner, the platters and serving dishes floating past like hovercraft, the questions were almost inescapable: Who of us is the most happy? Which of us is his one true love? Who does he desire most? Who does he open himself up to in the middle of the night? And the one that, lately, crossed her mind most often: Am I the only one he won’t have sex with?

To her sister-wives, she knew, she was the new one, the young one, the pretty one (if only they’d seen her in her makeup days!), the free-and-easy one. But beneath the jokes about her movie-starlet bone structure and carefree days ran a cross-current of deep pity. That
look
in their eyes sometimes, they might as well have said it out loud:
Poor Trish, cursed and lonely Trish, banished to her sad little duplex on the other side of the valley. Trish the afterthought. Trish the fifth wheel.

She was sick of their pity, sick of waiting, sick of sorrow, sick of standing here half nude at the window, vulnerable with wanting. Her hand had cramped from holding the corners of the towel tight against her chest, and it felt good to let go, to stand naked before the entire darkened world. The cold coming off the glass of the window hardened her nipples and made the skin on her arms and shoulders prickle with goose pimples.
I don’t give a damn if anybody sees me
, she thought, and not two seconds later a pair of headlights swung around the corner, coming directly at her. She yelped, dropped to the carpet and crawled across the hallway to the safety of the bathroom.

She heard the sound of tires on gravel, the creak of the pickup’s door. Frantic, she stuck her head under the shower, gave it a blast of freezing water, and dug around under the sink for the only other available towel, a beach towel that bore a colorful life-sized likeness of Bozo the Clown.

She came dripping and shivering out into the hall and found Golden at the front door with his overnight bag, holding the screen door open, hesitant, as if reluctant to tread on the carpeting. He looked like he might have spent the last few weeks as the subject of a sleep-deprivation experiment: hair tangled and mashed to one side, face pallid and drawn, eyeballs so swollen and bloodshot they looked on the verge of bursting.

The sight of him made her temporarily lose her resolve. “Oh honey, are you tired?”

“Me?” he said. “Oh no, no.” He seemed to concentrate intently for a moment, shaking his head as if to ward it off, but it came anyway: a great, cracking yawn that temporarily rearranged his face. Finally, he stepped inside and pressed his cheek against hers, delivering the smallest of electric shocks, and kissed her clumsily on the ear. She felt the crackling rasp of his whiskers, his large hands on her back, and she held him against her in a clutch that lasted several beats too long.

“You’re wet,” he said, standing back, a damp spot on the front of his shirt.

“Just got out of the shower,” she explained. “I wanted to be…clean.”

He looked from her face down to her body, and she was sure he was taking note of her barely covered breasts, the statements being made by her naked shoulders and smooth thighs.

“Hey, all right!” He nodded, grinning tiredly. “Bozo the Clown!”

She bit her lip, resisted the urge to make some childish remark along the lines of,
Takes one to know one
. She led him through the kitchen, and once she’d ascertained that he needed no dinner, conversation, or shower of his own, she pulled him toward the bedroom. He went happily, eagerly, and with a sigh toppled stiffly and slowly onto the bed like the oldest tree in the forest.

Quickly, she turned off the lamp; the thing she was about to attempt, she was sure, should happen only in the dark.

She helped him off with his shirt and lay beside him, her face close to his, until he kissed her: a chaste kiss, a closemouthed kiss, but a half-naked bedroom kiss nonetheless. She let her mouth linger on his, and he gave in, moving his lips and tilting his head for a better angle. Emboldened, she kissed his neck and chest, making her way down across the smooth plain of his belly, abandoning her towel as she went. The length and breadth of him seemed edgeless. The room was as dark as a cavern and she could hear his every breath, every rustle of fabric, every watery thump her heart made against the bones of her chest. She felt desirable, capable of anything.

She unbuckled his belt, fumbled for a moment with button and zipper, positioned her hands, and then, with the sudden, sure motion of a magician yanking a tablecloth out from under an elaborate dinner setting, pulled down his underwear and pants, all the way to the ankles, shackling him. He made a small surprised noise in the back of his throat and was quiet again.

In the pitch-black she groped for the bedside table, but it was out of reach. She stretched across the bed, opened the drawer and fished around blindly until she came up with the packet of gum. With her other hand, she found Golden’s thigh, rubbed it so lightly and sensuously that she touched hair but no skin. She kept this up, one leg and then the other, though the package of gum was giving her trouble. She tried to open it one-handed, went at it with her teeth, gnawing at the smooth, hopelessly impenetrable paper, all the while trying to keep Golden reassured with her stroking fingers, and it became like a juggling act she couldn’t quite manage. She gasped in frustration, strangled the packet of gum with one hand and clawed at it with the other, puncturing the paper with her nails, ripping and biting, until she fumbled two pieces out of their foil wrappers and into her mouth. To her ears it sounded as if she had just torn open a giant Christmas present in the dark.

“Trish?” Golden inquired. “You okay?”

“Um, yesh,” she said, her mouth packed with gum now, and groped to locate him on the bed once again. Gnashing fiercely, trying to break the wad of gum down to a manageable size, she bought time by slow-massaging his chest and arms with the heels of her hands. She discovered that simultaneously chewing gum and giving a sensual massage in the dark required a form of advanced muscle coordination she had apparently been born without; she ended up kneading the skin of his chest and ribs with the same quick rhythm of her gumchewing so that he began to gasp like he was being held down and tickled.

“Hey—” he said, and tried to roll over, but she was on top of him, pinning him in place, trying to find a way to position her mouth near his crotch, chewing, chewing, chewing that damn gum, desperately trying to move her hands against him with some sort of erotic intent, kissing his breastbone and belly, moving down down down, raising her head for an instant to gather herself and then plunging back in, skimming her face along the smooth skin of his lower abdomen until her lips found and touched him
there
, and he jerked sideways in surprise, his hipbone butting her jaw and knocking the gum out of her mouth.

“Oh!” he cried. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean…”

“No,” she said, “it’s okay, shush, lie back down.”

“Okay,” he said. “Yes. I will.”

Letting out a small wail of distress, she cast around on the bedspread for the lost wad of gum, and when she couldn’t come up with it, set herself again to her task. But as she touched his body again, found it tense and rigid, heard the hard pulse of his breathing, she knew she couldn’t go on. As much as she wanted him, as much as she loved him, as much as she wanted to have another child with him, a child that would forever connect her to him and to his, she would not lower herself to this. She would not terrorize him any more.

She got up, stumbled down the hall, and locked herself in the bathroom. She heard the coils of the mattress creak as he stood up and the reverberating
whump
of his large body hitting the floor, tripped up by the pants around his ankles. He recovered quickly, groaning and leaning for balance against the walls.

The bathroom doorknob rattled. “Trish?” he said.

She told him she wasn’t feeling well, to go back to bed.

“Is there something wrong? Let me in and we’ll talk.”

“Just a little stomach thing, I’ll be fine. Please leave me alone now.”

He waited at the door for ten minutes, occasionally calling her name. She wanted to open the door to him, to fall into his arms and be carried back to the bedroom, where they would make slow, tender love, but some bit of pride, left over from who knows where, prevented her. She ignored him until finally he went plodding back to the bedroom, the carpeted floor squeaking under each step.