The Lonely Polygamist

by Brady Udall

  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:

  Many women are understandably apprehensive about striking out on their first oral adventure. Some are worried about the taste or smell, others are nervous about doing it “the right way.” So for all you nervous nellies and old pros alike, here’s a tip: keep it minty fresh! Before your lovemaking session, just pop in a cough drop, some Tic Tacs, or your favorite brand of mint gum, and you’ll give your man a cool, tingling sensation that will leave him begging for more. You’ll not only have fresh, minty breath, but a grateful partner forever in your debt!

  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.

  She waited in the dark bathroom, her mind blank, until there was no more sound, not even of the bed complaining under Golden’s nearly three hundred pounds. She opened the door and walked through her compact house, her eyes wide, as if new rooms might miraculously present themselves. When finally she slid into bed next to her husband—asleep, of course, sputtering, whistling through his nose—he stirred, rolled over, and rested his hand on her hip.

  She waited, poised for a change in his breathing, for him to move closer, to press his body against hers, but his breathing slowed and he began to snore. His hand was warm and heavy, and though it wasn’t much, she knew she was going to have to learn to accept what she was given, no matter how small.

  12.

  DRIVING LESSONS

  WHEN GOLDEN RICHARDS WAS NINETEEN AND BY EVERY MEASURE STILL a boy—one who built model battleships and took a glass of warm milk every night before bed—he made the first real decision of his life: he abandoned his mother. That was how he would always think of it: a betrayal, a defection, an escape. One May morning he woke up before dawn and snuck away, limping across the town square in the muggy dark, with nothing but a knapsack of clean underwear and a plane ticket to Las Vegas.

  Upon his arrival, he did not receive the hero’s welcome he had expected. A small, dour Mexican man met him at the airport with a cardboard sign that read ROYAL SON and drove him, without a word, to the house in Utah, where he waited two days for his father to return from a business trip. The Mexican man’s wife, a cheerfully fat woman named Tita, fixed his meals and cleaned up after him, and he did little but sleep and wake occasionally to stumble around the house and its grounds, his eyes raw and full of grit, trying to acclimate himself to the dry air, the alien landscape, the constant blast of light.

  The house was like nothing Golden had ever seen: a red-brick Victorian with steep gables, mullioned windows, blond limestone detailing and a three-story turret that looked like it had been transplanted from the castle of an Austrian duke. The house was more museum than domicile, filled with booty from Royal’s desert expeditions: giant glittering geodes, moqui marbles, amethyst cathedrals and back-lit fluorescent minerals lined up along oak shelves. Earlyman spearheads and Fremont rawhide shields, meteorites and Anasazi baskets filled with beads. A beaver skull half encrusted with rose quartz. The jawbone of a megalodon. And the pièce de résistance: the calcified femur of a Tyrannosaurus rex weighing half a ton and displayed on a giant table carved from yellow sandstone embossed with fossils of whiskered prehistoric fish.

  If the interior of the house confused him, he could make even less sense of what lay outside: a huge, blank sky hovering over a landscape of wild chockablock colors: flat-topped mesas of black basalt, the white, crosshatched elephant hide of Navajo sandstone, ocher cliffs streaked with desert varnish, distant trembling blue mountains covered with pygmy forests of piñon and juniper, the gypsum-rich hills, candy-striped red and yellow and orange.

  After a few expeditions into the backyard and over to the river, which at this time of year was a silver ribbon cutting a channel through a bed of crimson sand, he admitted to himself that this place scared him. He preferred to stay inside and, when he wasn’t asleep, positioned at the window way up in the tower where he could see everything, watching and waiting—this feeling of clenched expectation so familiar he almost welcomed it—for his father to come home.

  When Royal arrived, he did so piloting a shiny new car. It was the morning of Golden’s third day out West, the sun edging over the eastern cliffs, drawing long shadows that moved like living things across the knurled landscape. From his window, Royal watched his father get out of the car and stand next to the lilac hedge that flanked the gravel driveway.

  “Where is he?” Royal shouted at the house. “Where’s my Goldy?”

  Golden didn’t move. He was almost nauseous with the confusion and uncertainty of what he had done, of this sudden turn his life had made.

  Besides the gray cowboy hat tipped back on his head, his father looked, from this distance, like the person who had left him ten years before: a short man who made himself large with a sharp, flashin
g smile, every word accompanied by dramatic gestures of arms, hips and head.

  “Hey!” he cried, moving toward the house. “Wake up! Goldy! Look what I brung!”

  When they met on the front porch his father took a step back and laughed. “Whoa, hold on now, lookit here. Make way for the Jolly Green Giant.”

  It was the kind of thing one of the bullies at school might have said.

  “Come on,” Royal said, his arms held wide. “Come on now, right here.”

  Golden went to his father, bent down to embrace him. He smelled his cologne—something sharp and musky—could feel the pleasant rasp of his whiskers against his own soft cheek, and decided that even though it wasn’t the reunion he’d planned or hoped for, it was good enough.

  This sudden wash of satisfaction caused him to squeeze too hard and he felt the air go out of his father with a wheeze, and then came a faint popping sound. His father fell away from him, clutching his side. Doubled over, he coughed and raised his head, wincing. “Hoooh,” he said, blowing out his cheeks. “Hah. Guess you could say I deserved that.”

  From his shirt pocket he took a ring with a key on it and tossed it into Golden’s chest. “See that car? It’s yours. Just drove it in from St. George. Let’s go see what she can do.”

  It was a beautiful thing, a black 1956 Ford Thunderbird with portholes in its white detachable hardtop. Golden slid in behind the wheel and held the key up to his face as if the tiny letters engraved on it might offer some instruction. He turned to his father in the passenger seat, who was still gently palpating his ribs. He said, “I don’t know how to drive.”