The Lonely Polygamist

by Brady Udall

  She wanted to say no, it wasn’t like that, that the church here wasn’t like the Short Creek group or the one in Montana, they didn’t just throw their children out. But there was truth in what he said: no matter how you looked at it, there was no place in this kind of life for boys like Rusty, boys who didn’t know how to say and do the right things, boys who could not find their way beyond their boyhood urges and rages, boys who lived too much inside their own heads. This kind of life was for those with the conviction and discipline to obey without question, those who could make themselves believe that their suffering and uncertainty were for a reason yet to be fully revealed. And where, she wondered, did that leave her?

  “Thanks for being nice to him,” she said. “If anybody needs it, he does.”

  “I like him, even though he’s kind of full of it. And besides, he introduced me to you.”

  She felt his weight shift against her, and she wondered if he was going to try to make some kind of move, to kiss her, to touch her, and she acknowledged to herself that she’d come here for that very reason, not only to talk, to be heard, but to be kissed and held by someone who merely had a little time and attention for her, who could find the reserves of will to stay awake in her presence. She turned into him, smelled the damp wool of his coat, the metal tang of his brass buttons, and she felt him stiffen and sit up. She looked up at his face and he was staring past her, into the foggy night. There was a sound, a drone she hadn’t noticed before that suddenly turned into something much more high-pitched, and there was a squeal and a pop and everything went dark.

  “Oh shit,” June said. “The generator.”

  The darkness inside that mass of rock, with no visible light from the world outside, was heavy, primordial; it felt as if she were sinking into a vat of cold tar. Her heart seized and then kicked in hard, and though she instinctively clutched at June, she did not feel the romantic thrill of a movie theater gone dark. What she felt was terror, the sensation of tipping over a precipice, about to fall.

  After a few sharp breaths, she managed to say, “Do you know what time it is?”

  “Must be near midnight. Don’t worry, it’s just the belt, I can get it fixed right up.”

  “I need to go.” She stood up, was overtaken by a swirl of vertigo, sat back down. “I’m worried about Faye. I need to go now.”

  With a calming word here and there, June helped her down the rock-littered slope, and though she could see nothing, not the sky, not a tree, not even the man whose hand she held in a bone-cracking and unladylike grip, he led her unerringly, without so much as a misstep or stubbed toe, to her Rabbit. She had to touch it with both hands, smell it, put her arms around it to make certain that it was, in fact, a car, and that it belonged to her.

  She thanked him, and he told her he was sorry for the inconvenience of the broken generator, and even though her heart was still stuck in her throat and she was still sick with vertigo, she groped in the darkness for June and, with more than a little difficulty, found his mouth with hers. She hadn’t really noticed his mouth before, partially hidden behind his beard as it was, but now she discovered that it was a little lopsided, his lips firm and full, and not at all unpleasant to kiss. There was something both numb and wild in her, and she might have dragged him into his HOME SWEET HOME and forced him to make love to her if they had not stumbled in their awkward embrace, their lips disengaging with a rather loud and unromantic pop. June gasped and Trish cried, “Okay then!” and jumped into her car, her heart a loosening fist, and drove home through the bright corridor of her headlights.

  HER GOLDEN BOY

  When she got home, Golden was sitting at the table, staring into space. He had a glass of water and the note she’d left him on the table in front of him. His hair was mashed against the side of his head and his eyes were so puffy and bloodshot they appeared bruised. He looked, if it was possible, even worse than when he’d shown up a few hours earlier.

  She didn’t speak or acknowledge him in any way. She went to check on Faye and when she came back to the kitchen he was out of his chair and putting on his jacket. He wouldn’t look at her.

  He said, finally, “You have every right to be mad at me.”

  “I was sure you were going to tell me you’re sorry,” she said. “Thanks for sparing me that, at least.”

  “I’m sor—” he began, and shook his head. “I can’t stay, as much as I wish I could.”

  “Of course not,” she said, with an emptiness in her voice that sounded alien—it was the voice of someone who no longer had the heart to make an effort. “You have so much to do.”

  He picked his way toward the door and opened it. Outside, a solid bank of fog had lifted halfway and stopped, like a faulty curtain in an elementary school play. He looked back at her, and over his shoulder and around his ribs she could see the brightness of stars. He paused there, her man, her Golden Boy, looking so sad and bewildered she could barely restrain herself from going to him.

  “I love you,” he said, and she realized, once he was gone, how much it sounded like a farewell.

  35.

  DOLL HOUSE

  In this house there is a smattering of just about everything: confusion, weariness, panic, exhilaration, doubt, and, of course, plain old gut-curdling fear. This house is, in fact, much too small to contain the Father or his wild, zigzag emotions, which he experiences in relentless succession and then in unprecedented and startling combinations that leave him hunched over and breathing hard, clutching the front of his shirt. For the last few days he has done his fatherly best to be strong, vigilant, and resourceful, to do the right thing by the Other Woman, to visit and comfort Mother #3, to assure Mother #4 he is not avoiding her, to convince wives #1 and #2 that the family will not end up broke because of the mismanagement of his latest project, to somehow assuage the Other Woman’s irate husband, and, more than anything else, to keep his family safe. But it has become too much: the insomnia, the wracking worry, the paranoia that takes him by the throat and squeezes like a cold and steady hand. This unraveling he feels is a distinctly physical sensation, the cords and fibers that hold him together splitting under the pressure, occasionally breaking with a twang like the brittle strings on an old guitar.

  And so he has made his final retreat. Look at him: crouching on a milk crate in this decrepit children’s playhouse, scratching the flea bites in his armpit, and peering balefully out the small octagonal window, a jelly jar of homemade liquor tucked between his feet.

  “Woe is me,” the father says to himself, and for some reason finds this terrifically funny, but has only enough energy to squeeze out a small laugh.

  Of all his houses, this is the Father’s favorite, the only one that can truly be said to belong to him. Much like the children, the houses belong in body and spirit to the wives; the father has no say in how they are managed or appointed, does not have in a single one a bed or a chair or an out-of-the-way corner of his own. He wanders among the houses like a vagrant or a ghost, easily forgotten and leaving no trace, his only companion a threadbare canvas overnight bag full of toiletries and a selection of underwear.

  For so long he has sensed that nothing in his life belongs to him, not even his wives or his children, any of whom can be snatched away in an instant, but this pathetic little shack, unfinished and being further dismantled by weather and pack rats and the vines of morning glory, is his true inheritance, the only place in the world he can rightfully claim as his own.

  Outside, the day is overcast with the remnants of last night’s fog, and the river runs swift and silent, swollen over its banks with mountain snowmelt and distant rains. From here he can see the neighbors’ corrals, the feed bins, the ever-present ostrich. To the north of the corrals, just out of sight, is the neighbors’ house, not three hundred yards from where he sits. Which is not relevant in any way except for the fact that tonight sometime the Other Woman will be delivered to that very house, where she will stay for three days and nights.

  The thought o
f this, and the possibilities it creates in his mind, both terrifying and alluring, make him pick up the jar and take the tiniest sip. And then, why not, one more. He groans, purses his lips, and lets the fumes leak out through his nostrils. It is nine o’clock in the morning. (Not being a drinker—or ever having been around drinkers except for construction workers who tend to drink like fish, but only during their off hours—the Father has no idea drinking so early in the morning is a violation of the codes of respectable behavior. To him, this seems a perfectly good time.)

  At first, the idea of temporarily stashing the Other Woman in the basement of the neighbors’ empty house presented itself as a reasonable solution; the neighbors were in Tucson and would be none the wiser; the Father would not have to risk detection by driving back and forth to check on her. But now the Father is beset with second thoughts; he knows he is playing a dangerous game whose rules are beyond him, that bringing the Other Woman to within shouting distance of his family and Wife #1’s fine-tuned radar is the plainest evidence yet of his willingness to tempt fate, to court oblivion, to pay his debts all at once and in the hardest way possible.

  The Father is thinking about the Other Woman because thinking about her, despite everything that has happened, is the only thing—besides, maybe, this horrible Mexican liquor—keeping him from cracking at the seams. He went to visit her last night clinging to the idea that with some rigorous thinking and a well-defined plan (neither of which the Father has any real experience with) they could rescue themselves from this situation without anyone getting hurt. But when he saw her sitting at that old formica kitchen table, her hair tied up and her face glowing softly with fever, he forgot all about plans and the rational thinking. He wanted nothing but to go to her, to take refuge in the warmth of the simple affection she offered. And when she stood, smiling, apparently glad to see him, that’s exactly what he did.

  They talked about her health—she was fine, nothing more than a mild fever—and about her efforts to bring her son up from Guatemala, which made her eyes grow soft, her voice hushed. She asked if he had heard anything more from her husband, and he shook his head, though in these past two days he has seen much to indicate her husband has not forgotten about either of them. Twice more the Father has come across the sleazeball who trespassed on his property and plied his daughter with a lollipop: once at the IGA in town, buying beer and Swisher Sweets and Vienna sausages as if stocking up for a bachelors-only camping trip, and once more the following afternoon in the wide turnout just south of Big House, sitting in a white Buick Electra, looking up and waving happily at the Father as he drove by. The Father hopes it is nothing more than unchecked paranoia, but he has begun to notice all sorts of peculiar phenomena: cars he’d never seen before driving past his houses, suspicious tire tracks in the gravel driveway of Big House, a strange man in a fringed suede jacket watching him from across the street while he took care of business at the bank. On his way to visit the Other Woman that very night he had been overcome with an icy certainty: someone was following him. The same pair of headlights had trailed him from the railroad crossing all the way onto the freeway, where he sped up—pushing the old engine on his GMC as far as it would go—and with a particularly graceless manipulation of the steering wheel nearly killed himself as he swerved off onto an exit ramp and down a dirt access road, where he stopped and turned off his lights, panting and light-headed with fright.

  Telling her any of this, he realized, would do her no good. It would probably do her no good at all to know that he went out to his truck that very morning and found on the driver’s-side seat a battered old Gideon’s Bible left open to Psalms, with a single passage carefully underlined in blue ink: Happy shall he be that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stones.

  He inquired off-handedly if she wouldn’t be more comfortable staying in a motel for the next few days instead of in the basement of an empty house and she said she wanted to be able to see him, that she didn’t want to be alone, and that was the end of it, because no matter how foolhardy a plan it may have been, there was this: he wanted to see her, to be near her, too. It was this feeling of swaddling contentment in her presence, and the prospect of living inside it forever, that had gotten him to seriously consider running away with her, disappearing into the misty and indistinct possibilities of a new existence. Of course, he had been entertaining fantasies of escape for a long time now, but they had always been just that: entertainments (simply thinking about escape had always been escape enough for him). But now that his world has been turned on its head he has begun, in his desperation, to force his imagination into unfamiliar territory: what would happen to his family if one day he disappeared, never to return? Most importantly, they would be protected, both from the Other Woman’s husband and from their own bumbling father and husband who, despite his sporadically honorable intentions, did not seem to know how to keep them safe.

  Each time he turns it over in his mind he finds his way to the conclusion—with considerably less resistance and more self-pity than he might like—that they would be better off without him.

  Last night, in the overwarm kitchen that smelled of fried onions and marijuana smoke, he was entertaining out loud the notion of running away with the Other Woman—she was the one who had brought it up first, after all—when she asked him the question he’d been dreading. Was it true what she’d been told? Was he really married to more than one wife?

  She wore an oddly noncommittal look, a look that said she was preparing herself to be amused or angry by his answer, she hadn’t yet decided. He told her it was true, and that he was sorry for lying to her—he only did it because he was afraid of what she might think of him—and that yes, he had more than one wife. Four, in fact. Four wives who would be very angry if they knew where he was right now.

  She did not laugh or hold up her hand to her mouth in abject horror, which he took as an encouraging sign. She simply continued staring at him expectantly, her face betraying nothing more than curiosity, and asked him if it was true that this was a normal thing for this part of the world, that the more wives a man had the more rich and important he was.

  The Father blushed, said that it was normal for some, but not for others. Was he rich and important? Not, he said, in the way she might think.

  When she asked how many children he had, and he answered her in a small, half-swallowed voice, the gasp she made in the back of her throat told him all he needed to know. He was simply confirming for her what she had already begun to suspect: that the bucktoothed lout sitting across from her was not anything close to the ordinary man of conventional tastes she thought she had taken up with, but a stranger of such odd and possibly dishonorable circumstances he had been lying to her about them all along.

  Now, stuffed into the ground floor of this miniature house, sweating through his clothes at the armpits and with so little head room his neck is beginning to cramp, the Father tips his nose into the jelly jar and concedes that he has allowed himself, somewhere along the way, to be taken in by his own lies; playing the role of an average American breadwinner with the standard number of spouses and offspring has not only been strangely thrilling, but has made it easier, somehow, to betray his real family, to willfully discard their trust and faith in him. But of course he is not average in any way, he is the Father, everything in his life is magnified tenfold, including his sins, the worst of which just might be his willingness to give a moment’s thought to the abandonment of his wives and children.

  As long as he is being honest with himself, he might as well admit that hiding here is simply another form of desertion, one he has been practicing for a good long time.

  From his pocket he extracts two pink antacid tablets, fumbles them into his mouth, and gnashes them into a gritty paste, which he washes down with a sip from his jar. He doesn’t know whether it’s the incessant worry or this battery acid he’s been drinking, but for the past three days the flame in his stomach has only grown hotter. (Paranoia, the Father heard once
, is having all the facts. He is sure he is in possession of only a very limited number of the facts, and can only guess at the gastrointestinal distress he will be experiencing once he has them all.)

  The Father takes another greedy little sip—why not?—and slumps against the splintery plywood wall, sighing: he surrenders, he gives up completely and absolutely. God only knows what perils his family may be exposed to while he sits here, tucked out of sight. Though it’s the last thing he wants to do, he begins to picture the possibilities, sees visions of bad men creeping in the bushes, peering into windows, testing the hone on their knives. His imagination gets away from him, as it so often does when he’s alone like this, and eventually he is watching in the dark movie theater of his mind a detailed and brightly colored panorama of domestic destruction: houses set on fire and family pets hung from mailboxes with piano wire and wives assaulted and children stolen and stuffed into the trunks of cars.

  Though it’s absolutely the last thing he wants to do, he can’t help it, he looks out the window, beyond the clumps of tamarisk and willow, and sees an empty wheelchair at the river’s edge, the deep water moving swiftly past.

  He puts his face into his hands and distracts himself with the filaments of pulsing red electricity behind his eyelids. After a while he hears a car coming at an even pace over the hill and then the whine of brakes, the rasp of tires turning off the hardtop, and it is as if all his immediate fears have brought themselves to bear in this single unassuming sound, the pop-and-crackle of a vehicle coming slowly up the gravel drive. The Father, who has spent many an hour in this spot with one ear to the wall, alert to the approach of those who would interrupt his seclusion, is versed in the distinctive rattles and creaks of his wives’ cars, the well-oiled throb of farm trucks and old-fashioned sedans driven by neighbors and fellow church members. This vehicle, he is certain, belongs to nobody he knows. It emits a coughing, watery gurgle as it drags its broken tailpipe over the polished river rock with the faintest, almost imagined screech of fingernails on a blackboard.