A Bigamist's Daughter (18 page)

Not unlike Bill’s name, invoked each time, as if he were a grace once earned. A plenary indulgence.

Tupper Daniels walks naked from her bathroom to her kitchen, his shoulders slightly slouched, his face a little dumb, like a man alone. He comes out of the kitchen with two bottles of beer.

She wonders if she even remembers what a plenary indulgence is.

“Think about bigamy,” Tupper says, handing her a cold green bottle and climbing back into the bed. “Polygamy. The concept.”

“All right.” She wonders if she hadn’t, in a way, been thinking about it already.

“Think about what it implies: not a man who has affairs, who sleeps with his secretary or a mistress or some woman he met on the street or in a bar, but a man who loves and marries, loves and marries. A man who is, ironically, incapable of having an affair. A man who must always, always sanctify his love with marriage, who must establish a home for himself and any woman he loves and then must return to that home whenever he can. A man of great nobility, I think. A truly romantic, heroic character.”

He turns to adjust the pillows behind him, and then crosses his legs again, cupping his hand over his penis and moving it gently, the way an adolescent girl might absent-mindedly arrange her hair on her shoulders, nearly draping it. He rests the bottle on his thigh.

“Compared to him,” he goes on, “the monogamist is a bore. Without imagination or energy or passion. A coward whose loyalty is merely an excuse. He’s one of those men who considers sex a function and marriage a duty. Who wears a ball and chain or a noose around his neck to his own bachelor party, and believes in everything it symbolizes.”

He raises the bottle, drinks slowly. She wonders if he is speaking extemporaneously or again reciting from his book; if she should reply or merely cite the page number. She wonders if he’s testing her.

She lowers her eyes, as she might have to avoid being called on in school, and drinks too.

On her stereo, a woman is singing, “I-Want-Your-Love,” over and over, letting the emphasis fall on a different word each time, as if she can’t get it right. Her voice is whiny and passionless, full of a dull kind of longing.

“Did it surprise you?” he asks, “When you read the book and discovered that Beale, the bigamist, was actually portrayed as a good man, a hero? Did you feel some of your own values were being turned upside down?”

She pulls the bottle from her lips, swallows. “A little,” she says.

He nods, pleased. “Most people do. Bigamy equals villainy for most people, like the townspeople in the book. But you have to know how to look at it.” He presses his lips together. “When Bailey was found to be a bigamist, in Gallatin, everyone acted like he was the devil himself. But I said, ‘Hold on, he’s no villain, think about it.’ ” He pauses, thinking. “Of course, no one did. But
I
did.” He drops his voice and raises his colorless eyebrows. “I discovered,” he says, “that Bailey was the stuff of great literature.”

She smiles. They have been sitting side by side, leaning against the back of her couch, but now she moves away from
him, to the center of the bed, and pulls her legs up in front of her, crossing her ankles, pressing her thighs to her breasts. He watches her movements carefully and then smiles too, as if he has read some meaning into them; a meaning he knows she is unaware of and so refuses to share.

She rests her chin on her raised knee and says, “Go on,” to make it clear she will not ask why he’s smiling. The lamp beside him makes his hair seem white, his face powdery.

He leans his head back against the couch, looks up at the prints hanging just above him, as if he were trying to read what was written behind them. The light falls over his taut throat. “A man who loves and marries,” he says to the ceiling. “Loves and marries.” Without moving his head, he looks down at her, making his eyes seem shifty. “But why? Why does he marry when he could just have affairs? When extramarital sex—as we’ve just proven—is as good, if not better, than marital, and certainly, even forty years ago, nearly as available.” He looks up again. “Why indeed?”

She waits, wondering if he expects her to answer, wishing she hadn’t been so willing to think about bigamy. “Why?” she asks softly.

He lets out a long sigh: Is it disappointment?

“In a way,” he says, “it’s for the ceremony. The way it can bind the woman to him, not through the vows, really, but through the religious, mystical, almost dreamlike aura of it. The sense of fate, of fulfillment of prophecy, that it must give a woman.” He lifts his head. The light falls on his face again. “Remember Joy? The fat wife? The one the townspeople call Joy in sorrow?” He says
sorra.
“Joy in longing?”

“Yes,” she says.

“Remember her wedding scene?” He raises his free hand, two curved fingers, as if he were about to make a shadow-bunny, and scratches two marks in the air.
“Joy looked at him
through her tulle veil,”
he recites, his voice suddenly low, formal, as if he were on the telephone,
“the bride-veil that even now was being flecked with black from the inside, from her heavily mascared lashes.
” He moves his raised hand gently, humming the words, wafting a tune toward her.
“She smelled the warm, turbid odor of orchids, a smell close and hot like that of an animal, trapped, panting, and knew this was not merely a dream, this body perspiring in its bride-white dress not merely the trick of some heavy guilt or a supper eaten too quickly, too soon before bedtime, this man before her saying yes and making it both an affirmation and her name, the word itself her name, not merely the ascension of her waking hopes into somna-bulant dream, but knew instead that this was the beginning of her life; the secret life that had, since her birth, been spinning itself at her core.”

He closes his eyes, smiles softly. Another woman is now singing that if you’re a girl from New York City, you know love is like a Broadway show. Opens them again. “Remember?”

It occurs to her that he could be leading her into a trap, getting her to say, yes, yes, I remember and then crying, Aha! I never wrote such a thing!

“Yes,” she says.

“The ceremony itself is important to Beale,” he goes on, “because of the way it binds the woman to him. But the repetition of the ceremony, the ceremony taking place again and again is important to him too—although one is never any more important than the other.”

He scratches the air again.
“First second third would mean nothing to a man whose life was without progression, was only a series of rhythmical stops and starts, each as impossible and as fruitless to rank or distinguish as the rhythmical stops and starts of a heartbeat.”
He brings down the hand. “Did that stand out for you, the image of each wife as one of many heartbeats?”

I never wrote such a thing, he could cry, which proves you never read my book. You’re no real editor!

“Yes,” she says.

He leans forward, holds up one finger. “Well, that’s another reason why he marries. The women sustain him, just as the townspeople do when they talk about him, meet on porches,
in the thick, turbid odor of wisteria and breathe into his ubiquitous ghost those stories and speculations that would sustain him all the time he was away.
He is a man whose life is without progression, who loves and marries, loves and marries. Beginning after beginning, but”—he waves his hand like a magician—“no end.”

She nods. “I see.”

“Which may be why I’m having such trouble with the ending,” he says.
“Any
kind of ending undermines one of my basic themes—Beale’s immortality.”

Elizabeth agrees. A man’s voice on the other side of the wall yells, “Carol,” as if it were a warning. Or maybe, Elizabeth thinks, it was “careful.” More appropriate.

“But the most important reason why he marries,” Tupper says, “is because he loves. Because, despite appearances, he is a good man, incapable of having affairs. A man of great integrity. Infinitely moral.” He points at her, seems to suppress a smile. “Quickly,” he says, “what comes to mind when you think of a bigamist?”

She frowns, slowly, resisting the game. Or the trap. “I don’t know,” she says: A man with a raised collar and a lowered hat brim, a guilty walk? Edmond O’Brien portraying a bigamist in a cheap, black-and-white movie, shown very late on TV, the dialogue trailing the film by only a few seconds so the words seemed dubbed? A joke about two women wanting to screw the same man? Woman crying? Ward’s voice?

“Your book,” she says finally. But he only rolls his eyes.

“Before that.”

She shrugs. What comes to mind is that her mother alone was not quite sufficient for him, that the one quick ceremony was not quite enough. They were married right after the war, her mother always said, as if her father had arrived at the ceremony in stained khaki, covered with dust, a green helmet under his arm. They were married in a rectory in Brooklyn. Her mother wore a suit but no corsage.

“Don’t you think of a villain?” Tupper asks, impatiently. “A cruel, selfish man? Or else a stupid one, forced to the altar against his own will? A man who has let his love life get ridiculously out of hand?”

She smiles, searching for her editor’s voice. “I suppose so.” They lived alone together for nine, nearly ten years before she was born. Their time without her, they called it. “B.E.”

“Would you have ever—before you read my book—ever have thought of a bigamist as a moral man? A man of integrity?”

“No,” she says. And now she is living her time without them.

He slaps his palm on the mattress. “And that’s my point,” he says. “That’s one of the things that’s so unique about this book. Bailey was no villain, nor is Beale. Despite our standard ideas of bigamy as villainy, selfishness or stupidity, they’re heroes, they’re good men.” He quickly gulps some beer, like a marathon runner slowing only to grab a cup of water and spill it over his mouth, never losing his pace. “I want this book to show that values are meaningless in themselves,” he goes on, “fragile as glass and useless as dust. I want it to show that value depends only on how you look at things, there are no absolutes. One man’s meat, the eye of the beholder.” He drinks again. “Morality is point of view.”

She rests her head on her knee, letting him run on. She thinks vaguely of the
Reflections of My Mind
book jacket and how much depends on how you look at it. She wishes she
could tell him about it, make him laugh, change the subject. Also of a poem Ann showed her once, called “Prayer to Orion.” Ann had written it, she said, after a ski weekend in Vermont when Brian had announced that he wanted to marry one of his company’s vice presidents. “She’s her own woman,” was the way he’d described the attraction. She was also three months pregnant.

In the poem, Ann described how she’d gone out that night, alone, limping (she was not used to skiing) and crying a little, catching cold, had looked up to see the constellation. It told of how she began to imagine the male body (“blue black winter night skin/Cold”) around and between the stars that formed his girdle and shoulders and sword; how she began to imagine the details of his face and arms and waist. How, standing there in the cold, looking up, a salty phlegm running down her throat, she began to feel strangely aroused, and reassured. How she knew somehow that she would love again; that she would some day again be satisfied by a man.

The professor she was then studying poetry with at The New School had given her an A on the poem and had written on the side, “Cosmic Fellatio!!” Pointing this out, Ann told Elizabeth that he had missed her point. “But,” she said, laughing, “maybe he’s right. Maybe all I really wanted to do was to suck off the Milky Way. I suppose it all depends on how you read it.”

Was her mother alone not sufficient for him? Or was her father merely spreading the wealth?

“Let me put it another way,” Tupper Daniels is saying, drawing up his knees. “A man falls in love, gets married, falls out of love, divorces, falls in love again and remarries—we say, fine, happens all the time, right? The man’s done nothing wrong.”

She nods.

“But another man falls in love, marries, stays in love, but then
falls in love—equally in love—with someone else and so he marries her too. And then we cry bigamy! Villainy! But, really, who’s the better man, the more loyal, more loving, more true-to-his-word?” His little round eyes are stretched open.

She tries to laugh. “There’s got to be something wrong with your logic.” Spreading the wealth? Blessing other women with his sudden homecomings?

He throws up his hand. “What’s wrong, except the way we’re used to looking at love and marriage, and divorce? Except our obsolete sense of values.”

She looks at her beer, picks at the gold foil around its neck. And if her father had called them that morning, said he was in Wisconsin with his other wife, would they have said, How lovely, how loyal? “But he lies,” she says slowly. “He doesn’t tell one wife about the other.” She realizes she’s talking about his book and quickly adds, “Does he?”

Tupper leans back, like a man sitting exhausted under a tree. “No,” he says, “that’s true. But I think, somehow, they know. He doesn’t need to tell them. I think they’re all in a kind of conspiracy of silence.”

She continues to play with the label, scraping gold flecks onto her sheets. Her mother had theories.

“They say nothing—and, you probably noticed, asked him few questions—because they understood, somehow, the delicate balance he has established between them. And because they know the other wives don’t imply he loves them less. In fact, each time he returns to one of them, it’s a confirmation of his love. That’s why I named one of the wives, the blonde with the painted toes, Penelope—
‘Penelope, after Ulysses’ wife, who waited those many years, who was beset by suitors yet ever-assured, ever-faithful.’”
He nods a little, as if to say, You know the rest.

She nods back: Yes, I do.

“Ulysses, after all, had Circe while away, and still he returned to Penelope. And I don’t think there can be any doubt of his love for her.” His hand is splayed over his stomach. He strokes himself gently. “This is what I mean in the book when I call him the Magician and talk about the spell he casts over the women when he marries them. It’s a spell that keeps them from questioning him, but also keeps them assured that he’ll always return.” He smiles at her. “So he doesn’t lie to them, he merely accepts their silence.”