King of the Worlds

by M. Thomas Gammarino

  “To the contrary, I’m actually sort of happy for you. Even as Wendy was telling me the whole story, I knew I was supposed to feel jealous and all that, but mostly I just felt, I don’t know, impressed I guess, that you managed to bed such a beautiful woman. It’s like you and I have been together so long that your conquest felt like mine too in a way. I felt proud of us for getting to be with her. It’s weird but I think I actually felt more attracted to you than I have in a long time.”

  “You’re serious?”

  “Let’s be honest, baby. Marriage is a pretty claustrophobic affair sometimes.”

  He nodded warily.

  “Well that’s true for us both, so knowing that you’d fucked Wendy and that Wendy was now fucking me felt, I don’t know, enlarging somehow.”

  “I’m sorry, but did you just say—”

  “Oh, did I not mention that after Wendy told me her story, we proceeded to fuck pretty much whenever the kids were asleep

  all weekend?”

  “No. You left that out.”

  “My bad.”

  Wendy winked at him.

  “Now when you say ‘fucked’…?”

  “Did you think fucking required a penis?” Erin said. “I might have thought so too before this weekend, but I’m happy to tell you that women have tongues and hands and feet. And Wendy brought a strap-on penis that’s twice as big as your attached one.”

  “So you’re suddenly a lesbian now, is what you’re saying?” True, there had been that incident in high school when she’d kissed Allison Jenkins for far too long on a dare, but Dylan was nonetheless shocked to learn that she was willing—even happy—to go all the way with another woman.

  “That’s just a word, Dylan. You seem to have forgotten, but I’m still a sexual being. It felt good to be desired by someone again.”

  Funny, but Dylan might have said the exact same thing to her; was there so much parallax between them that she honestly believed he was the one whose affections had cooled in recent years? “Okay, but I still don’t get what she’s doing here in the first place.”

  “I’m right here,” Wendy said. “Why don’t you ask me?”

  “Fine. What were you doing here in the first place? Is this ‘woman scorned’ stuff? Are you trying to ruin my marriage or what?”

  “Not at all. Didn’t you just hear Erin say I brought my strap-on with me? I came here to do exactly what I did. You had nothing to do with it.”

  “But you don’t even know Erin.”

  “To the contrary. Don’t you remember that I spied on you from under your bed one night?”

  “Of course, but that hardly—”

  “Well, as it happens, I stayed there much longer than I had to, despite the risk that Cane might have given me away with a croak at any moment.”

  “Why?”

  “I was pleasuring myself.”

  Christ. What was this woman, a man? Sex was so fucked up. From here on out, he wanted nothing to do with it.

  “At first I was thinking about you, Dylan, but I was as surprised as you’ll be when I tell you I finished by thinking of Erin. She’s my type. I never felt attracted to a woman before, but Erin moves me. The two of you were up there tossing and snoring, and I was right beneath you, quaking and stifling my moans, and all the while I was staring at Erin’s moonlit face in the vanity mirror. Her tawny hair, her ivory skin. After that, I was just using you to get to her.”

  “But that doesn’t make any sense,” Dylan said. “You were begging me to leave her.”

  “Because I wanted her to myself and I could feel what a stalwart wife she was. I was trying to divide and conquer. If you’d left her, I would have left you soon and swooped in on my true love. But then you hung me out to dry, so I had to do it this way and just come clean. I swear I had no idea you were going to be out for the weekend, though. That was just a happy coincidence.”

  “So, what, you just came up here and knocked on the door and told my wife that you were attracted to her?”

  “That about sums it up. And that her husband was cheating on her, of course.”

  “Right, so where exactly does that leave us now?”

  “We’ve been talking about that,” Erin said. “Here’s what we’re thinking. Wendy wants me, I suddenly want you more than I have in forever, and unless we’re mistaken, you want us both to varying degrees. Are we correct so far?”

  Wendy leered, in the sexy way. Did he still want her? She was a card-carrying lunatic, but he could not deny it. He nodded his assent.

  “And are we correct that, unconventional though this all may be, there are no very negative feelings in this room right now?”

  Dylan checked each vector of their triangle. “That seems right, as far as I can tell.”

  “Great,” Erin went on. “Then what Wendy proposes, and what I endorse, is that she move in with us. We’ll become a new sort of family unit. We can sleep together in ways that will feel experimental and invigorating. You won’t have to sneak around anymore. And best of all, for me anyway, you should see Wendy with the kids. They love her to pieces.”

  “So you’re talking about polygamy, basically?”

  “Something like that,” Erin said. “Wendy can stay on a tourist visa for three Earth months, but after that, assuming all goes well, she will need some help with her legal status, so we could hire her as an au pair or something, though polygamy is not technically illegal on New Taiwan so…”

  Dylan recalled something from all his reading on Mormonism. “This was your idea, Wendy?”

  “Genius, isn’t it?”

  “Correct me if I’m wrong, but didn’t the Mormon Church outlaw polygamy around the turn of the last century?”

  “That’s true,” Wendy said. “The mainstream church did outlaw it. It’s also true that that’s one of the main reasons my family helped pioneer the Fundamentalist LDS church. I myself was raised by my father, my mother, and her four sister wives.”

  “You never told me that.”

  “You never asked.”

  “But didn’t you tell me your dad taught at Brigham Young?”

  “Still does.”

  “And isn’t BYU about as mainstream as can be?”

  “Exactly. That’s why he’s there. He’s a double agent of sorts.”

  “Like father like daughter?”

  She pondered that for a moment. “I guess, but my dad’s motives are way nobler than mine. He’s basically a double agent for God. He pretends to teach LDS theology, but what he’s actually doing is introducing brainwashed young people to the true history of their faith.

  If you knew anything about that history, you’d know that the doctrine of plural marriage wasn’t meant to be just some temporary exception to monogamy the way the mainstream church now likes to claim. It came by way of a direct revelation from God to Joseph Smith himself, in which Christ declared that plural marriage was to be ‘a new and an everlasting covenant,’ not just some forty-year aberration.”

  “So why’d they outlaw it?”

  “Politics. Later church leaders wanted Utah to be recognized as a state so badly that they sold out their own true prophet to satisfy mainstream American mores. And they’ve been betraying the true faith ever since. Brigham Young himself had fifty-one wives, you know. And Joseph Smith had at least forty.”

  “Another thing,” Dylan said. “And I admit I’m way out of my depths here, but I’d wager that your church is dead set against homosexuality, no?”

  “They’re against QT too, which is why this planet isn’t crawling with missionaries yet, but obviously that didn’t stop me from coming. As I’ve told you before, Dylan, sometimes I’m a Mormon, other times I’m just me. And if love this pure be a sin, call me a sinner.”

  This was easily the most freethinking thing he’d ever heard her say; he felt almost proud of her. “All rig
ht, so if the three of us get sealed or whatever it is, can you promise that you’re not going to try to make converts of us? Because we’re not interested in any of that.”

  “Speak for yourself,” Erin said. “I’m actually quite intrigued.”

  Dylan rolled his eyes. “Erin, are you seriously telling me that you’re going to take it at face value that the freaking Garden of Eden is in Missouri when you won’t even consider that maybe I really have been in the moon despite my having brought you a rock to prove it? That’s just fucked up.”

  “It’s the fastest-growing religion in the Milky Way, Dylan. With mostly holograms for missionaries! That’s got to count for something, no?”

  “No! That’s what we call the ad populum fallacy, Erin. Lots of people used to think that the sun went around the Earth too. That didn’t make it so.”

  “How do you know? Maybe—”

  “Mormonism is Christian fan fiction, Erin. That’s all it is.”

  “Look,” Wendy interrupted. “I’m not here to sow discord. My religion is a fundamental part of who I am, so I can’t promise I’ll keep quiet about it, and I do intend to start wearing my temple undergarments again, but I can promise that I won’t force my faith on you. I believe in my heart that you will each find God in your own time, and then and only then can we be properly sealed in the new and everlasting covenant. For now, let’s just focus on this love we feel for one another. We are so blessed. And if you find that my presence has a negative effect on your relationship, then all you have to do is say the word and I will pack my bags. Though I’m quite confident that day will not come.”

  “What about the children?” Dylan asked. “You don’t think this will have a negative effect on them?”

  “How could love ever have a negative effect? I’ll basically be like a live-in nanny. I will look after them as if they were my own. I already do.”

  Erin nodded. “I might even be able to go back to work part-time. I’d really love to do that.”

  Four human female eyes and two male amphibian ones looked up at him imploringly. This was not a situation he could ever have anticipated, and his only guide was his feelings, which were still dominated by something like relief that, though he’d been caught with his pants down, his wife was not furious at him. “I won’t pretend I’m not nervous about all this,” he said, “but I guess I’m willing to try anything.”

  “Sweet,” Wendy said. “Now what do you say we go celebrate in the bedroom?”

  Erin smiled kittenishly, first at Wendy and then at him. He hadn’t seen that look in a long time.

  So much for his wanting nothing to do with sex. They began with a kind of mouth-to-genital daisy chain in their California King—Wendy to Erin, Erin to Dylan, Dylan to Wendy—and though they were three in number and not four, Dylan couldn’t help but think of Josh Song’s comment a while back about A Midsummer Night’s Dream: “So like what if instead of having love as this petty little directional force between them, they could place it right at the center and let it radiate out in all directions like the sun?”

  • • •

  Dylan woke up enmeshed in the limbs of his complementary loves: Erin, the queen bee, the locus of familiarity, history, and stability; and Wendy, the novum, the blast of fresh air, the loose screw. They weren’t quite the Madonna and the whore, but close, and while this might have made him an asshole if he had sought out the arrangement himself, he had no major qualms about enjoying what had simply fallen into his lap.

  At the breakfast table, while Erin fried up some pteraduck eggs and Wendy changed the batteries in Junior’s diaper, Dylan announced to Arthur and Tavi that Auntie Wendy and her toad were going to be moving in. He expected them to ask why, as they did so many times a day, and he was prepared to explain that Auntie Wendy was a good friend who wanted to help Mommy out with the housework, which was more or less true. But on hearing the news, all they did was to clap their hands together and exclaim “Yay!” Apparently Erin had been telling the truth: they really did like Wendy. Maybe because she was in so many ways like a kid herself.

  During his lunch break, Dylan read up a bit on polygamy via omni since the territory was so uncharted to him. He learned, unsurprisingly, that polygyny, i.e., group marriage involving one husband with multiple wives, was historically associated with all manner of problems in human societies. On the domestic front—leaving aside the host of larger social ills associated with exacerbated gender and power inequities—there tended to be considerable disharmony between wives, each of whom was acutely aware of her place in the marital pecking order and was therefore beset with varying degrees of jealousy and low self-esteem. Children likewise tended to suffer from neglect as the patriarch spread himself thin and invested his energies less in the family than in acquiring newer and younger—often much younger—brides.

  And so, hovering home that afternoon, Dylan was plagued by worries that he’d made a colossal mistake in agreeing to this domestic arrangement. But when he pulled into the driveway and found Erin and Wendy gabbing and sipping iced poxna on lawn chairs while the kids ran and slid across the Slip ‘N Slide—which he’d bought for them months ago at the Earth Store and hadn’t once brought out yet—he vowed that he would never again bother to read about the potential downsides of plural marriage, which were all so academic as compared to this actual blooming life of his.

  And thus did a new age dawn in the Green household. Dylan began going to work with verve and an enlarged sense of purpose while Erin and Wendy split the domestic chores right down the middle. To all appearances there wasn’t a note of disharmony between them.

  The children exulted in their new family member, who encouraged them to build forts of their beds and to finger-paint on the walls, even if she strictly forbade them from touching her toad.

  Indeed, the entire household appeared to be flourishing of late, and nowhere was this better symbolized than in the new garden. Dylan and Erin had never had any patience for New Taiwanese soil, which contained an excess of mica—it was like sticking your hand in a pile of broken glass—but Wendy just bought the appropriate gloves and dug right in. She planted basil, mint, kale, collard greens, and zucchini—all exorbitantly priced since the teleported-crop ban—as well as the native skarnpok, bun’jala,42 and galric. She planned to harvest all of them for the green smoothies by which she had long made her living and which she now made at least once a day for her new family members between Erin’s slow-cooked meals. She insisted that the concoctions would do wonders for their longevity. “At last,” she pronounced, “the Greenyears shall have their green years!”

  42_____________

  Spinach and Swiss chard, more or less.

  • • •

  Daniel Young, meanwhile, must have been flourishing in his own right, because that Friday he showed up to class a few minutes early to declare that he was ready to deliver his monologue. Already he was exhibiting a kind of nervous energy Dylan hadn’t seen in him before. He spoke louder, clearer, and with greater confidence, and there was a spark of something new in his eyes, love maybe, unless—and what a marvelous possibility—Dylan was just projecting it there.

  As soon as the rest of the class had taken their seats, Dylan explained that they were going to begin by hearing Daniel’s monologue. “Why don’t you set us up a little, Daniel? Which monologue did you choose?”

  “So I read through that whole book you gave me,” Daniel began, “and I really liked the speeches from Romeo and Juliet, and I thought I was going to do one of those, like maybe the ‘Wherefore art thou Romeo’ one, because it’s all about being in love with someone from a different clan, and as I’ve already told Mr. Green”—and here he didn’t even flinch—“I myself am in love with someone from a different clan.”

  The class’s attention palpably swelled. For a moment, what was going on in this room trumped anything that might be happening via omni.

  �
�But then when I started practicing it,” Daniel went on, “it just didn’t feel right because those aren’t words I would ever actually use. But the story reminded me of one of my favorite movies. I don’t know if any of you have seen it, but in a way it’s a similar kind of story, about two people from different clans who fall in love on a star-crossed boat. It’s called Titanic. It came out in 1997. It’s American.”

  The forces that would have made Dylan’s head explode exactly counterbalanced the ones that would have made it implode, so it just stayed there, dumb, atop his neck.

  “So, Mr. Green, I decided to do a monologue from toward the end of that movie if that’s okay. It’s really short and it’s not Shakespeare, so I know I might fail, but that’s fine with me. I just felt like this was something I needed to do.”

  Whereas Dylan might have expected to feel sick to his stomach in such a moment, he in fact felt somewhat amused, tickled even. One didn’t need to believe in God to ascribe a sense of humor to the universe; chance was clever enough.

  “That’s fine, Daniel. Let’s hear it.”

  And so the actor went to the corner and furtively, but not that furtively, applied some lipstick. Then, pocketing his lipstick and compact mirror, he turned to the class with ruby-red lips and closed his eyes for a moment—a few students chuckled, but most knew better—and when he opened them again and cast them on the North Atlantic, it was clear that Dylan had not been projecting before; there really was something new indwelling there, a sort of tender power. No doubt he was thinking of Kwizok.

  Fifteen hundred people went into the sea, when Titanic sank from under us. There were twenty boats floating nearby…and only one came back. One. Six were saved from the water, myself included. Six…out of fifteen hundred. Afterward, the seven hundred people in the boats had nothing to do but wait…wait to die…wait to live…wait for an absolution…that would never come.… And I’ve never spoken of him until now.… Not to anyone.… Not even your grandfather.… A woman’s heart is a deep ocean of secrets. But now you know there was a man named Jack Dawson and that he saved me…in every way that a person can be saved.