The Lonely Polygamist (49 page)

S
HE WOULD WRITE HIM A LETTER. NOT A
HI, HOW ARE YOU
?
LETTER
full of banal inquiries, but a letter of complaint, a cease-and-desist order, an argument, a shout, a baring of the soul in words, the kind of letter you could nail to a church door. Trish had returned from Nevada feeling strangely liberated, as if her talk with Golden had resolved something, as if she had asserted herself and was therefore in control of her own destiny and happiness, but that feeling hadn’t lasted much longer than the drive home. Now the trip came to her as a distant and bitter memory, even though it had happened just a few days ago. And here she was again, alone, sitting at her kitchen table in her quiet little house feeling quietly desperate, as if she’d never taken a chance, as if she’d been here all her life.

This desperation, she was sure, had to do with the sudden spike of activity in the Richards family: Golden losing his job, the Barge appearing mysteriously on Big House’s lawn, reportedly placed there by minions of his angry ex-boss for mysterious reasons, to make no mention of fleas and barn fires and birthday parties gone awry. There was something in the air, a sense of flux, or imminence, which left her feeling as she always felt at such times: that she was out of the mix, being left behind.

So: she was going to do something about it by…writing a letter. It was ridiculous, she knew. (
It can never hurt,
Uncle Chick always said,
to acknowledge your own foolishness
—which was one of the reasons she liked Uncle Chick so much.) What self-deluded saps letter-writers were, believing that by putting words on paper and sending them to the powers that be—the newspaper, the utility company, the local congressman—they were having an effect, making a difference. These kind of people, they were no different than she: helpless, irrelevant, and striving to feel less so.

Writing a letter, then, might or might not be better than sitting here in her profoundly sad nylon sweatpants and old cardigan, waiting while the world moved on without her, but it would give her something to do. She had gotten the idea this morning while visiting Rose at the hospital. She had come to enjoy those visits, not only because they filled a few hours, but because she had become fond of dumpy old Forest Glen; she was beginning to understand why Rose was in no hurry to leave the place. Sure, it smelled funny and was teeming with the deranged and suicidal, but its charms were undeniable: the I’ve-seen-it-all nurses in powder blue who approached cautiously and touched you with extreme care, the crisp white sheets on the beds, the murmuring televisions watching benevolently over every room, the tiny white paper cups full of pills floating by on trays, the staff asking each person they passed, residents and visitors alike, “How
are
you?” as if your feelings at that very moment were all that mattered in the universe.

She and Rose were sitting together in one of the visiting rooms watching
$10,000 Pyramid
with the sound off, clutching one another’s hands for comfort like an elderly couple in a chaotic bus station, when some kind of therapy session started up in the room across the hall. A woman with a booming, mannish voice began talking to a group of patients about the transformative power of the written word. “The spoken word,” she said, “is unreliable, let’s face it, people! When you speak, you are speaking in the moment and prone to mistakes, and once the words come out of your mouth they are gone forever, or lodged in the memory of others, where they can be twisted or misconstrued. But the written word, it can be carefully fashioned, see, you can take your time with it, it
lasts
! Nobody is putting you on the spot. You write something down, there is power in it exactly because you have taken the time and the effort to put it down.”

With the easy solicitude of a first-grade teacher she asked the group what form of the written word they preferred. There was some mumbling Trish couldn’t make out. Newspapers, somebody volunteered. Comic books. Suddenly there was shouting. Magazines! Novels! Crossword puzzles! Someone who may have been a joker hollered, “Movies with subtitles!”

“The question is,” the woman said, “what are
you
going to write? You could write stories, you could write a poem, but honestly, who wants to read a poem?”

Everyone seemed to agree that nobody wanted to read a poem.

“That’s what I thought,” the woman said. “You could write in your diary, which is a perfectly good thing to do, but what about a letter?
More than kisses, letters mingle souls.
You know who said that? John Donne. You guessed it, a poet. Those kind of letters, the kind that mingle souls, those aren’t the ones we’re talking about today. We’re talking about a less poetic kind of letter in which you clear the air or stake your claim or tell somebody off. So. Anybody here feel misunderstood or unappreciated or angry?”

I do
, Trish thought, raising her hand just a little.
Me.

“Maybe you need to clarify your life? Maybe you need to gain control over your emotions instead of giving them free rein in your mind and heart? Maybe you’ve got a bone to pick?”

Yes, yes and yes.

“Why not a letter, then. I bet there’s somebody out there who needs to hear from you. Maybe it’s somebody in your life right now, maybe it’s a person you’ll never see again. Who knows, it could be your old self, the self that got you in the mess you’re in now. Maybe you need to write a letter to that whiskey bottle that’s been on your mind all day. Maybe you need write a letter to your mean old father. I’m thinking maybe we all need to write a letter to our mean old fathers.”

Trish, for the first time in a long time, thought of her mean old father. Who had not been mean at all, but patient and serene, almost saintly with his white beard and quivering hands. He was sixty-six years old when she was born, seventy-eight when he died, and in the time between he might have held her in his arms a few times or spoken to her in passing, but she had no recollection of any such thing.

What kind of letter would she write to him? It would probably be very short, something like:

A SIGN OF LIFE

So she got out her legal pad, her good pen and started writing.

She slapped the pen onto the table and sighed. This was absolutely, without a doubt, the most idiotic idea she’d ever had. She tried another sentence, gave up immediately and tossed her pen across the room, hitting the ceramic cactus on the windowsill and knocking it onto the counter, where it broke into three pieces.

“Great,” she said to herself, the broken cactus, the quiet house. “Look at us now.”

She considered calling her mother, but she knew exactly what her mother would say.
Honey, I don’t want to say I told you so, but damn it if I didn’t. Do yourself a favor and get out while you still can.

She thought she heard the faint, gravel-popping sound of a car pulling up out front. It was late and the house was so quiet she could hear the flipping numbers of the clock radio in the other room.

She went to the family room, stole a peek out the window. It was Golden in his pickup, parked on the other side of the road, for some reason. He didn’t get out, just sat there with the engine running and headlights off. She picked her way across the road in her bare feet, opened the passenger-side door, and got in.

“Hey there,” he said, “I—”

“What are
you
doing
here
?” she said with piercing, antagonistic cheer. In the few days since he’d been back from Nevada—for good, apparently—there hadn’t been time for the wives to get together to decide on Golden’s new rotation schedule, so he was left to come and go at his leisure. Which bothered Trish only because his leisure did not seem to include her. Which, come to think of it, was one of the primary reasons she felt so compelled to write him the letter.

“Just checking up on things,” he said. “Making sure everybody’s safe.”

“You look worried,” she said, which was putting it mildly. He looked
distraught
, his features bunched in the middle of his face, his eyes tense with something very close to fright. He hadn’t shaved in a few days and his silver whiskers glinted among the blond and red like flecks of mica in a bed of sand.

“Little bit,” he said distractedly, staring out the window into the foggy dark. “Little bit…worried.”

“You want to talk about it?”

He shrugged and shook his head; he
never
wanted to talk about it. And then he did something unexpected: he scooted toward her across the seat and with a meek sigh let his big head fall heavily into her lap. “I don’t know,” he mumbled into the fabric of her sweatpants. “I don’t know what to do.”

“Join the club, big guy.”

“You know that hospital where Rose is? I think I need to check myself into that place.”

“I’m already on the waiting list.”

He released a deep, shuddering sigh and she could feel the heat of his breath on her legs.

She had already begun to stroke his hair and tell him everything would be all right when she remembered she was supposed to be so irate with him, so deeply and irretrievably vexed that she had resolved to take the drastic step of writing him a letter. She wanted to kick herself; she was so
easy
!
But what else is there to do
, she asked herself,
when your husband puts his head in your lap like a frightened child, except to stroke his hair and tell him everything will be all right?

She might have carried on this argument with herself for quite some time if Golden had not begun to act even more strangely: he started to nuzzle her. While she’d been arguing with herself, her fingers had strayed from his hair down the collar of his shirt to the warm, fuzzy skin of his back, and in response he began to press his face into her inner thigh, then into her belly, and the next thing she knew that big head was slowly and erratically making its way up her torso, like a loosed balloon rising fitfully through the branches of a tree, grazing at her neck and chin as it went, and then, with a suddenness that made her mind go blank, he was kissing her on the mouth.

It had been so long since she’d been kissed, truly kissed, like she was being kissed now. She gave in to it, pressed herself against him, but something stopped her: there was a strange taste to his mouth, sweet and sharp, something she remembered from her high school days wrestling with boys in the cabs of pickups much like this one. She pulled away.

“Wait, wait,” she said. “Have you been
drinking
?”

“What?” he said. “Drinking? Drinking what?”

“Alcohol,” she said. “Booze. You taste like it. You smell like it.”

He stared at her for a moment, his eyes wide and bloodshot. “I don’t know. Maybe it’s the mouthwash I’ve been using. Sorry if my mouth tastes bad.”

He began to turn away but she wouldn’t let him; she didn’t care. She didn’t care if he’d been drinking. She didn’t care if he’d been shooting heroin. No, she didn’t even care if he was distant and unavailable and possibly impotent. She cared only that he was with her, doing this, right now. She
was
easy, she realized. She required so very little, and when something good came her way, how glad she was! She grabbed him by the neck and pulled him toward her. Little by little she slid her body underneath his, grabbing the stick shift for leverage, and once she had one of her legs pressed between his she thought she felt something down
there
, a stirring, a sign of life and hope, and though it might only have been her imagination it gave her such a thrill she kissed him with a fierce, wet heat, squeezed him until he gasped, believing that it would be all right, all right for both of them, if she could just take him in the house with her and make love to him until he couldn’t stand it anymore.

“The bedroom,” she gasped. “No room in here. The bedroom will be better.”

She led him stumbling into the house and deposited him on the bed. In a giddy panic she rushed into the hall to close Faye’s bedroom door, made a detour into the bathroom for some deodorant—she hadn’t showered in two days—and when she got back to the bedroom, panting and wild and nearly psychotic with hope, there was Golden, curled up in the middle of the bed, asleep. Though she’d left him alone for no more than thirty seconds he looked as if he’d been sleeping for hours: his mouth gone slack and his chest heaving with deep, even breaths.

“No!” she shouted, and clapped hard twice right over him as if he were a puppy about to soil a rug. “No, no!”

With a groan he fought to lift his head, eyes rolling and lips smacking, then relaxed, falling back into sleep with swift and enviable ease. She clapped her hands again, hard, just to feel the sting. For a moment she wished fervently that she owned a gun.

She went into the kitchen and retrieved the pen she had thrown earlier. She added a few sentences to the letter she had already started, slashing each word into the paper. Before she left, she propped the note between the sugar bowl and saltshaker so it could not be missed.

PLYG KID

The directions, of course, were perfect. Even in the dark, in the fog, she had made her way to June’s place without a wrong turn or missed landmark, as if he were sitting right next to her, pointing the way. She had been expecting a small bachelor’s house, maybe a single-wide trailer, but not this: two Quonset huts, both lit from within, sitting in the middle of a wonderland of sandstone buttes and pinnacles and hoodoos turned eerie and animate in the slow churn of fog.