Thy Neighbor's Wife (35 page)

Williamson reached for a set of car keys on the mantel and handed them to Bullaro. The keys belonged to Williamson’s Jaguar convertible. Bullaro took them without comment, wondering if this was Williamson’s way of preventing him from spending the night in his own station wagon rather than sleeping in the desert sand.

After putting on a pair of shorts, a shirt, and hiking boots, Bullaro loaded the sports car with a sleeping bag, cans of food and water, logs, and a large switchblade knife. Judith helped him, while the others stood watching from the porch near the courtyard. Bullaro felt a tingling sense of excitement at being the center of attention, and, for reasons he did not precisely understand, he was looking forward to this trip. In his adolescent fantasies he had often seen himself as an explorer, a quixotic adventurer, but in real life, prior to meeting Williamson, he had been guided by caution and conventionality. After kissing Judith, Bullaro climbed into the car and started the engine. Before pulling away, he turned and waved at the group that surrounded Williamson, and he noticed that Williamson was smiling.

Driving through the valley, Bullaro headed north toward the city of Lancaster, and two hours later he was heading east into the Mojave Desert. It had been a hot night when he had begun, but now the air was cold and he stopped to put up the top. There were no other automobiles on the road, and the arid flatland on either side of him was dark and barren. He drove for another hour, thinking of Judith and the children and the people at Sandstone, and reminding himself, as he rolled through the night, that he was sitting behind the wheel of a moving vehicle with no specific destination in mind; it was an imprecise journey into his own interior.

He continued to drive until he felt himself nodding with fa
tigue; then he slowed down, and, after flicking on the high-beamed lights, he carefully turned off the road and directed the car over the hard sand toward a large clump of desert brush. He decided that this would serve as his shelter against the breeze. Spreading out his sleeping bag, he lay down and fell asleep almost immediately.

At 7
A.M.
he awakened to a glaring sun, and, looking around, he saw nothing but miles of vacant land, scrub, rock, and a pale blue sky. He had never before been so alone, and he was excited by the vast clarity and tranquillity; he felt well rested and relaxed, and looked forward to beginning this day that expected nothing from him, nor he from it.

After drinking from his canteen and opening a can of food, he walked a few hundred yards away from the car, then stopped to dig a hole in which to defecate. Although he was far from the road, and probably many miles from any human contact, he still felt strange about loosening his belt and dropping his shorts in the bright outdoors, and if there were a bush nearby he would have used it for privacy. Nevertheless he squatted over the hole, balancing himself with his arms forward, and he was beginning to feel comfortable in that position when, suddenly, he heard a grinding sound in the distance. Turning, he saw nothing. But the sound persisted, seeming louder and closer; and as Bullaro looked up he saw a small plane descending upon him, piloted no doubt by someone who thought he was lost or in distress. Embarrassed, Bullaro quickly stood and pulled up his shorts. The plane swished over him, then it circled around for a second pass. Bullaro waved at it in a casual manner. Soon, after the plane was gone and silence had been restored, Bullaro dropped his pants and resumed his squatting position.

Later in the morning, back on the main road and driving deeper into the desert, he stopped for gas at a rickety roadside station and then proceeded in the direction of Death Valley. Other vehicles were on the road now, most of them large trucks speeding along the concrete kicking sand up into his windshield. By noon, the temperature had risen to one hundred degrees and
he felt his shirt sticking to his back and his skin itching, and he imagined that he was beginning to smell like the blond hitchhiker he had recently met outside his motel at Malibu. It made him wish for a swim in the Sandstone pool and the sight of the nude bodies of Judith, Oralia, and the others. He thought of returning to Sandstone before nightfall, but decided that he had to spend another evening in the desert, although he was beginning to feel restless. He had responded to Williamson’s challenge, which was why he was now sweltering in this wasteland, a foolish victim once again of his ego, but he sought satisfaction in knowing that he could still accept a dare, was open to new experiences, and was not, like most men his age, resistant to change.

Bullaro reflected on Williamson and the group throughout the afternoon and early evening as he camped on a desolate stretch of land not far from China Lake, along the western edge of Death Valley. It was colder now than it had been on the previous night and, after gathering logs and small dead branches that had been blown by the wind along the sand, he built a fire and then lay in his sleeping bag looking up at the stars. In the distance he heard the howling of coyotes, and the sounds were unsettling. He had read somewhere that coyotes were courageous in packs but cowardly when alone, and he suspected that this was perhaps true of himself. He was an interdependent man, assertive within a crowd but deficient when alone, like a solitary log unable to sustain a fire. He could not sleep that night, and at dawn he packed his things in the trunk of the car and began the long drive back to Sandstone.

When he arrived at the top of the mountain and passed through the stone gates toward the familiar trees that surrounded the main house, he was impressed as never before by the beauty of the place and he rejoiced in being a part of it. Parking the car and beginning to unpack, he saw David Schwind waving at him from a bulldozer on the upper roadway; and, turning, he saw a smiling John Williamson walking down the path to greet him.

Williamson extended both arms and, when Bullaro did likewise, Williamson embraced him in a way that a man would not in
the city below. Then they stood talking for a few moments, and Bullaro described the trip, telling Williamson where he had been, what he had felt, and finally conceded that the time spent in solitude had clarified and reinforced his commitment to Williamson and the establishment of the love commune.

Williamson nodded, saying nothing; but before Williamson had turned away and headed back toward the house, Bullaro noticed with astonishment that there were tears in Williamson’s eyes.

S
ANDSTONE,
and what John Williamson was attempting to create there, was not unlike the idealized community described in
Stranger in a Strange Land
, the science fiction novel by Robert Heinlein in which a group of men and women lived in isolated comfort, swam nude together in a warm pool, made love to one another shamelessly and guiltlessly, and defied the Ninth Commandment because, as the main character in the book explained, “There is no need to covet my wife. Love her! There’s no limit to her love….”

But while Williamson would concede a thematic similarity between the novel and his own ambitions at Sandstone, he dismissed the book as an inspirational source, regarding it mainly as one of many simplistic renderings and evocations of a real and powerful desire that has consumed certain men for centuries: namely, the hope of reviving within Western culture the spirit of festival love and joyful coupling, derived from the pagan fertility rites, that existed among early Christians prior to the darkening influence of the medieval church, with its emphasis on sin and guilt.

A man with whom Williamson
could
identify was the fifteenth-century Dutch painter Hieronymus Bosch, a leader among a group of libertines known as the Brothers and Sisters of the Free Spirit, an erotic sect that considered itself directly descendant
from Adam and Eve; they worshiped in the nude in secret churches they called Paradise, and while they indulged in group sex they regarded it as an experience in shared love rather than an impersonal orgy. Citing the celibacy of priests and nuns as contrary to nature, and disagreeing with the notion that sexual pleasure was a source of original sin, the freedom-seeking Brothers and Sisters, sometimes called Adamites, were eventually destroyed during the Inquisition, although a remembrance of their nude gatherings survives in the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch.

Closer to Williamson in time and place was the nineteenth-century utopia in Oneida, New York, established by a radical theologian who, with his wife, practiced free love with his closest friends and for thirty years pursued a policy of “perpetual courtship” with myriad lovers on a blissful secluded estate that he identified as heaven on earth. In the center of the estate was an impressive mansion that he and his followers had built, large enough for one hundred people; and surrounding it were other buildings that served as dormitories and schools for the Oneida community’s many children, and factories where the community members conducted several prosperous businesses—one of which, the Oneida tin-plated spoon company, begun in the 1870s, would endure and expand into a multimillion-dollar twentieth-century corporation.

The founder of the Oneida settlement, John Humphrey Noyes, was a dignified autocrat with a neatly trimmed red beard who had studied for the ministry at the Andover Theological Seminary and the Yale Divinity School during the 1830s; but his many differences with his ecclesiastical superiors over his interpretation of the Bible precluded his ordination and relegated him to a lifetime as a renegade preacher.

Most upsetting to the church leaders in New England were Noyes’s views on sex and marriage and his assertion that the Bible advocated communal love and physical intercourse be
tween all true believers in God. Instead of monogamous marriage, which Noyes saw as a manifestation of selfishness and possessiveness that minimized one’s capacity to extend love to others, he envisioned “complex marriage,” an arrangement in which harmonious groups of men and women lived and worked together and made love to one another regularly, though never exclusively, and were the collective parents of all children born among them. In an effort to limit the births to a number that the community could financially support, and also in the interest of enhancing women’s enjoyment of sex without fear of unwanted pregnancies or the dangers of childbirth, Noyes exhorted his men to withhold ejaculation during intercourse
except
on those occasions when he had previously approved a couple’s desire for children, or when he himself had selected a willing couple for propagative purposes.

Noyes’s venturing into eugenics, and his persuasive power over the sexual acts of other people, was possible only because his followers accepted him as an inspired medium of God’s will—he was their messiah, a majestically aloof and erudite man who promised them salvation from sin as well as continued prosperity, salubrity, and sexual joy with several partners. Life was supposed to be happy, he reassured his cohorts—“the happiest man is the best man, and does the most good.” Referring to the prudery that prevailed in the outside world, he declared: “To be ashamed of the sex organs is to be ashamed of God’s workmanship,” and he added: “The moral reform that arises from the sentiment of shame attempts a hopeless war with nature.”

But John Humphrey Noyes’s approval of pleasure did not mean that he tolerated unstructured hedonism or laziness. All his men and women were expected to work six days a week on the community farm, or in the mansion, or in the school, or in one of Oneida’s many business enterprises; and all the money earned through the manufacture and sale of community-made products—in 1866 Oneida’s animal-trap factory alone earned $88,000—went directly into the common treasury that supported Oneida’s high standard of living.

Free medical and dental care was provided by Oneida’s resident doctors; all clothing was made and repaired by the community’s tailors and dressmakers, milliners and cobblers; two and sometimes three meals a day were served in the mansion’s huge dining hall. In the basement of the mansion there was a Turkish bath, and on the spacious lawns of the 275-acre estate there were croquet courts and baseball diamonds. There was sailing and boat fishing on Oneida Lake, swimming in the pond, and musical and stage entertainment offered by Oneida’s twenty-two-piece orchestra and its drama company, and on weekends communal dances were held in the mansion’s ballroom.

Each child was required to attend the community school until the age of sixteen, and some of the more ambitious students were sent on to Yale and Columbia, where they were trained as physicians, lawyers, and engineers, and after graduation some of them returned to live and work within the expanding community. When Noyes believed that certain of Oneida’s young people were mature enough for their first sexual experience, community women volunteered to share their beds with teenaged boys, while Noyes or other older men of his choosing would indoctrinate the female virgins. In addition to pleasing the older people, Noyes believed that this system offered the young the benefit of more experienced lovers—and, since the older males had already proven themselves faithful to Noyes’s policy of “male continence,” there was little chance of unwanted pregnancies. Although the younger members would also be permitted to enjoy sex within their age group, there was constant community pressure against any sign of “exclusive” love. Like everything else in the community, one’s body was to be shared; possessiveness of any kind was considered contrary to the community spirit and the will of God.

In the nurseries and playrooms, young children learned early that they had no proprietary claim to any specific toy; all the toys were to be shared, and after it was noticed by the supervisors that several little girls were becoming attached to certain dolls, preening them, talking to them, and taking them to bed at night, efforts were made to repress the infant mimicking of the tradi
tional role of motherhood. The girls were reminded that dolls were false fabrications of life, and that such preoccupations did not honor the ideals of Oneida womanhood.

The leading women of Oneida did not regard a female’s primary purpose in life to be childbirth and domesticity; agreeing with Noyes that married women in the outside world too often became “propagative drudges,” the Oneida women saw their goals as spiritual growth, personal emancipation, and intellectual improvement. They were encouraged by Noyes to attend the adult education classes conducted nightly at the mansion, and to make use of the community’s 4,000-volume library. They wore short skirts and pantalets, bobbed their hair, and assumed a coequal status with the male members concerning community roles and duties. They took turns in factories, as did the men in the kitchen, and while they shared equally in the attention and affection shown to all the children of Oneida, they believed that the little girls’ predilection for dolls, those frilly wax figurines with painted faces whose costumes reflected the style of the outside world, advanced an undesirable spirit that should somehow be exorcised.

One woman, a teacher, recommended as a solution that all the dolls be gathered in a pile, stripped of their clothes, and laid on the fiery coals to be “burned up with a merry blaze.” After this suggestion was considered by the committee in charge of the children’s nursery and school, the children themselves were assembled to respond to the problem—and, with some encouragement from their elders, the little boys unanimously voted to burn the dolls, while the girls, though reluctant, finally concurred. One of the girls who surrendered her doll would recall in a memoir written many years later the scene of that dreadful day in 1851: “At the hour appointed, we all formed a circle round the stove, each girl carrying on her arm her long-cherished favorite, and marching in time to a song. As we came opposite the stove-door, we threw our dolls into the angry-looking flames, and saw them perish before our eyes.”

John Humphrey Noyes had personally consented to the burn
ing—“the doll-spirit,” he asserted, “is a species of idolatry, and should be classed with the worship of graven images” and Noyes would have as easily banished from the community any human being who persisted in demonstrating acts of “exclusive” love, be it a mother toward her child or a romantic couple toward one another. “The new commandment,” Noyes wrote, “is that we love one another…not by pairs, as in the world, but
en masse
.” An obedient, God-fearing member of Oneida should not be deprived of love and attention because of the selfish bonding of blood relatives or the possessive passions of a particular couple; Noyes insisted: “Hearts must be free to love all of the true and worthy.” After a man had confessed to Noyes that he was hopelessly in love with one woman, Noyes impatiently commented: “You do not love her, you love happiness.”

John Humphrey Noyes’s unorthodox views on love and marriage were not the result of an unconventional boyhood, for the prominent and prosperous Vermont family into which he was born in 1811 in Brattleboro was in no manner eccentric. Noyes’s mother, Polly Hayes, was a gently reared intelligent woman who descended from the New England family that would produce the nineteenth President of the United States, Rutherford B. Hayes; and his father, John Noyes, Sr., who had successively been a teacher (he had tutored Daniel Webster), a minister, and a successful businessman, was elected to Congress by the voters of southern Vermont when John Humphrey Noyes was four years old.

As a boy Noyes was popular with his peers, was vigorously drawn to outdoor living and sports, and was also a diligent student who, like his father, graduated with honors from Dartmouth College. Leaving the campus in 1830 intending to study law, Noyes became attracted instead to the dramatic flair and conviction of certain revivalist ministers who, near his home and throughout New England, in the name of God, were challenging the traditional interpretation of the Bible and were confronting
in particular the Calvinistic doctrine on human unworthiness and the prevalence of sin and predestination. Some new ministers went so far as to suggest that people could, after a true conversion, rise above sin and achieve perfection on earth, a condition that not only appealed to vast audiences but also seemed feasible in this post-Revolutionary War period when all things seemed possible. It was a time of great enthusiasm and optimism in America; the young nation, having severed its official ties to the mother country, was now free to expand and explore deeper into its own wilderness and consciousness, reappraising its Puritan past and seeking control of its own destiny.

A man named Joseph Smith, the son of a poor New England farmer, had in 1827 claimed to have communicated with the angel Moroni, and as a result of this and other revelations Smith founded Mormonism and espoused polygamy—until in 1844 an angry mob broke into the Illinois jail where he was being detained, and killed him. Smith was succeeded as the prophet by a onetime house painter and glazier named Brigham Young, who moved the Mormons westward into Utah, where the religion flourished and allowed Young to support twenty-seven wives.

A Lutheran minister, George Rapp, had years before in Pennsylvania revealed a visit from the angel Gabriel, and he was thus inspired to gather around him more than eight hundred followers who lived and worked unselfishly and contentedly, while practicing celibacy, within an agricultural haven called Harmony.

A female communitarian and abolitionist of prosperous Scottish parentage named Frances Wright founded in 1826 near Memphis a community called Nashoba, a 2,000-acre farm on which blacks and whites worked together and were allowed to sleep together—and many did until word of their sexual mingling spread through the countryside and provoked controversies that, together with the continued unprofitability of the farm itself, induced the group to disband in 1830. In addition to her opposition to slavery, Frances Wright was also known for her lectures and writings critical of organized religion and the institution of marriage. “In wedded life,” she declared, “the woman sacrifices her
independence and becomes part of the property of her husband.”

Similar views on marriage were often expressed during the mid-1800s by other female activists as well as by ordinary women who dwelled in small free-love communes that existed in New York State and New England, and in such towns as Berlin Heights, Ohio. Freedom between the sexes was sometimes also encouraged within the “Fourieristic” settlements, which were gatherings of people who sought Utopia not through communism, but through capitalism, being inspired by the writings of a whimsically idealistic but almost impecunious French aristocrat named Charles Fourier.