The Lonely Polygamist (63 page)

After getting Ferris back in his pants and calling the boys away from the machinery, Trish stopped near Jack’s headstone. She was here, of course, to mourn Rusty, to support and comfort Rose, but could not help pausing for a moment, standing a little off to the side as if she were doing nothing more than scanning the cemetery for additional troublemakers. She resisted the urge to reach out and touch the small marker, to pull the weeds growing at its base, to swab with the hem of her dress the dust that had gathered in the carved letters of her son’s name.

Out of the corner of her eye she saw Golden look back at her and then he and Rose were stepping forward to gather several bouquets off the casket. With Golden beside her, Beverly laid a mixed wreath at Glory’s grave, and eventually Golden stepped away to rest a bouquet of carnations against his father’s stone. Trish did not know how long they maintained those positions, mourning alone in their separate corners, only Rose comforted by the soft weight of her sister’s arm. Freed of any pretense, Trish bent on one knee to wrestle a few clutches of chickweed from the ground, and when she rose Golden was next to her, holding a bouquet of chrysanthemums. He arranged it carefully on the small grave, and when he stepped back he was so close the buttons of his jacket cuff grazed her arm. He wiped his mouth and whispered, so low she almost couldn’t hear, “He was a beautiful boy.” His hand drifted sideways and, just for a moment, touched hers.

For some time they stood that way, without moving or speaking, the sun so high they stood perfectly inside their own shadows. Mr. Baugh checked his watch and the younger kids chased each other through the stones, their shouts carrying on the warm air, and Tellis Blackmore sat in his preferred spot under the shade of a gnarled juniper, finishing up his lunch and waiting patiently to lower one more child of God into the earth.

T
HE MONSOONS CAME EARLY THAT YEAR. EVERY AFTERNOON THE
clouds would build to the south, darkening the far horizon and throwing down the occasional thunderbolt. The dry grass along the ditches would stir, the cottonwood leaves clatter like loose coins, the clouds swell and fold and spread, blocking the sun and pushing great walls of water-cooled air in front of them, bending trees and making laundry jump on the line, the temperature dropping fifteen degrees in twenty minutes. During the average monsoon season it didn’t rain every afternoon, but this year it seemed to, storms lining up like causeway traffic, pushing up from Mexico by way of Arizona one after the other, sometimes well into the night.

Though almost everyone was grateful for the moisture, the relief from the heat, the beauty and distraction of such big weather, for Golden, trying to complete the Big House renovation as quickly as possible, it was a nightmare. Luckily he’d dug out and poured the new walls of the expanded basement before the rains came, but the entire south side of the house had been torn away to accept the new addition, and though the opening was draped with twenty-foot lengths of clear plastic, the rain gusted in, soaking into the subfloors and drywall. Part of every day was lost to channel-making and dam construction to keep the water from flowing into the kitchen and the basement, and everywhere you walked it was mud and slop and branching tributaries of brown water spanned by bridges of plywood scrap or warped two-by-sixes. Even worse, his crews balked at working in the rain, even the Mexican framers and roofers who wouldn’t have thought twice about hammering right through a dust storm or logging a twelve-hour day in one-hundred-degree heat. Some were terrified by lightning and others seemed to believe that a rainstorm was nothing less than a memo from God reminding them to take the day off or risk the consequences.

Golden worked every day except Sunday, with or without his crew. On a given afternoon you might have found him trying to put up plywood sheeting alone or straddling a high truss in the middle of a squall, pounding away with his oversized framing hammer, soaked through, buck teeth exposed and hair plastered to his head in a way that brought to mind an irritable muskrat. He got so used to slipping in the thick clay gumbo that he would go down on his back or side, smeared all the way to the shoulders, and be right up and moving on to the next thing as if nothing had happened. Some evenings he’d come in for dinner nearly encased in dried mud, his eyes and teeth flashing white like some Aborigine on a vision quest.

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 pressed 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.