“It’s Not About the Sex” My Ass (6 page)

Jeff felt keenly the pressure to marry again. He was the
head apostle, duty-bound not just to keep up but to lead. Some of the men in
the TLC were already up to three wives. Jeff, with only two, had fallen
embarrassingly behind.

It was clear that Ginger, though not a trophy wife by the
usual standard, would not be available for long. If Jeff didn’t act fast, he
would lose her to another.

Ginger thought Jeff was way cute and made no attempt to hide
her attraction to him. Far from feeling threatened, I had compassion for her.
In fact, I liked her—at first. So did Judith. The more Jeff, Judith, and
I discussed inviting Ginger into our family, the more it seemed to us to be the
right thing to do. Jeff made the final decision. “It’s time for me to add to my
kingdom,” he said.

For some reason, it fell to me to propose to Ginger on
behalf of our family. I invited her on a drive and, on the way, proposed. She
accepted. That was it. No coy giggles, no feigned surprise, nothing. It was
perfunctory, almost businesslike.

Jeff married Ginger in 1996. We threw another big wedding.
They honeymooned in British Columbia, but this time around I experienced no
consummation anxiety. Jeff wasn’t attracted to her, and I knew it. Though we
would never have admitted it to ourselves much less to her, at some level he
and I understood that this marriage was about keeping up with the other
polygamists.

We converted the parlor in our home into a bedroom for
Ginger. I spent days repainting the room in her favorite colors. Yet poor
Ginger was unhappy. At night we could hear her alone in the yard, sighing with
discontent.

Nor was she a joy to have around. She snapped at my
children. She loved Judith but didn’t seem to like me. During disagreements, I
knew I could count on Ginger to take Judith’s side. One evening after dinner I
was alone in the kitchen doing dishes while Judith and Ginger relaxed in the
living room. I complained to Jeff, who in turn asked them to give me a hand.
Ginger accused me of being domineering. Judith nodded in vigorous agreement. I
might have laughed had it not hurt. As you may have gathered by now, calling me
domineering was like calling an avocado carnivorous. To this day, my children
call me a lawn chair—because I “fold so easily.”

Soon after the wedding, Ginger took a week-long trip to
visit a relative in the Midwest. Our family cat deemed this the ideal time to
wriggle into Ginger’s room and mark her favorite pillow. If you own cats, I
needn’t tell you that anyone living in the continental United States at the
time probably smelled it. I cleaned the room before Ginger returned, but alas,
the conspicuously missing favorite pillow, which I’d had no choice but to burn,
demanded an explanation. Upon my letting the cat out of the bag, Ginger decided
she needed her own place.

That much wasn’t necessarily a blow. It is not uncommon in
polygamist societies for a man to maintain multiple homes. If you visit Salt
Lake City, you can tour the home Brigham Young built where he lived with his
first few wives, as well as the home he built next door to house additional
ones. Ginger rented a small house. Judith and I helped her move, paint, and fix
up. After that, she continued coming to our house to join us for meals, family
prayer, and family meetings.

Shortly after the move Ginger took sick for a few days.
Judith and I gave her a blessing, something mainstream Mormon women don’t do,
but that early Mormon women did. Of course, Ginger insisted that Judith officiate
in the blessing, and that I assist but keep quiet.

At last with three wives of his own, Jeff began spending two
consecutive nights with each of us in succession. Ginger marked an S on her
calendar for each night they had sex. When she believed she wasn’t getting her
fair share, she complained.

It wasn’t working out for her or us. Jeff discussed the
problem with Harmston. Harmston discussed the problem with God. By way of
answer, God revealed the Doctrine of Rescue. It held that a plural wife who was
unhappy in her marriage could be unattached from one husband and reattached to
another. The only stipulation was that the new husband had to hold the same or
higher priesthood as the about-to-be-dumped husband. Harmston had no interest
in Ginger. He was, however, eagerly eyeing a growing number of other, unhappily
attached plural wives who happened to be young and attractive. Since Harmston
outranked everyone in priesthood, the requirement that they move on to someone
with “the same or higher priesthood” was soon to prove repeatedly convenient
for him.

Thus authorized by God, Ginger commenced flirting with a TLC
man whose wife professed belief in polygamy but had, to that point, refused to
let him take any plural wives whatsoever. Now, all of a sudden, she experienced
a change of heart. If her husband wanted for his second wife an unattractive,
older woman with physical challenges who would add to instead of take from the
family budget, well, OK, anything for the Lord.

That marriage didn’t endure either. Ginger packed up and
left Manti. But not for good. She reappeared a few years later with an attorney
and sued the TLC for $300,000—allegedly the sum she had contributed to it
while living in Manti, plus extra for her trouble.

The suit was the closest thing to a genuine news story to
have popped up in sleepy Manti in years, so the local radio station gave it
extensive coverage. I was embarrassed when the news announcer read off the
names of all the defendants, since Jeff was one of them.

As you might imagine, finding a fair venue for lawsuits
involving polygamists presented difficulties in Utah. Most judges in the area
were mainstream Mormons. They had no fondness for polygamists flouting the law
and embarrassing their beloved church. Yet this case was no simple matter of
socking it to the polygamist weirdos. Ordering a religion, even an obscure one,
to refund contributions could set a dangerous precedent. Socking it to the TLC
could lead to socking it to the mainstream Mormon Church and beyond. Not that
the local Mormon judges cared much about the beyond part.

Which made it surprising that a lower court awarded Ginger
the money. She never collected. A few years later, a higher court overturned
the decision. No one heard from Ginger again. No one tried terribly hard.

Especially Jeff. He had better things to pursue. Such as
almost marrying Catherine.

Now there you have a sample of man’s “reasoning powers,”
as he calls them. He observes certain facts. For instance, that in all his life
he never sees the day that he can satisfy one woman; also, that no woman ever
sees the day that she can’t overwork, and defeat, and put out of commission any
ten masculine plants that can be put to bed to her. He puts those strikingly
suggestive and luminous facts together, and from them draws this astonishing
conclusion: The Creator intended the woman to be restricted to one man … Now if
you or any other really intelligent person were arranging the fairnesses and
justices between man and woman, you would give the man a one-fiftieth interest
in one woman, and the woman a harem.

—Mark Twain, Letters from the Earth

Some polygamist cults practice their religion in obscurity,
but we took seriously our mission to testify to the world. Reporters seeking
salacious polygamy stories found a willing source in the TLC.

It helped that we weren’t the garden-variety,
backward-looking polygamists you can easily pick out at the nearby Walmart,
whose men wear only coveralls and whose woman don’t cut their hair, wear only
long dresses with long sleeves, and aren’t allowed to wear makeup. We were
neo-yuppie polygamists. Most of us were educated, had careers, and, despite a
few notable exceptions, took pride in looking sharp. The
this-isn’t-the-polygamy-you-expect angle played well in the media. Or, at
least, so we fantasized.

Jeff was adept at his calling as the apostle in charge of
generating press. We entertained newspaper, radio, and television reporters
from New York, San Francisco, Brazil, and Sweden. John Stossel showed up and
interviewed us for a segment of
20/20
.
But it was the United Kingdom that seemed to have the most insatiable appetite
for us. One British reporter followed another to Manti. So what if a London
television station hurriedly put together a documentary on us before rushing
off to the state of Washington to do a feature on a Sasquatch sighting? It was
publicity. They were helping us spread the word.

As a result, The True and Living Church of Jesus Christ of
Saints of the Last Days, with Jeff as spokesman, garnered awareness in the UK.
Which is what led Catherine, in 1996, to send Jeff an email.

The TLC had struck a chord for Catherine, a New Age devotee.
She wanted to know more. If Jeff and a few other priesthood bearers would be
willing to travel to England, she wrote, she would arrange meetings where they
could preach. Jeff was all for it. Harmston approved the mission.

Catherine sent her photo. She had a statuesque, intimidating
beauty about her. Then she sent a cassette tape. She spoke with a charming
accent and sang with a seductively beautiful voice.

Jeff was smitten.

So far I had managed not to feel threatened—for the
most part, anyway—by either of my sister-wives. But Catherine was hot
enough to make even the likes of Anita Bryant, Ann Coulter, or Boy George
reconsider their sexual orientation. And Jeff just wouldn’t shut up about her.

Jeff chose three fellow apostles to accompany him to
England. They lodged in Catherine’s home. As promised, Catherine organized
meetings where they preached. They stirred no interest and gained no converts.

Catherine turned out to be more striking in person than her
photo and tape conveyed. One of the apostles who accompanied Jeff promptly and
conveniently received a revelation from God that he was to marry her. There was
one problem with that, and there should have been another. The one was that
Catherine didn’t have the hots for him but for Jeff. What should have been
another, but wasn’t, was her short, pudgy husband Ezekiel. Husband, as in
someone to whom Catherine was already quite married.

Yet Ezekiel graciously received the apostles, happily
entertaining the possibility that Catherine might become a plural wife to one
of them. Indeed, soon after Catherine and Ezekiel waded into a lovely, English
country stream to be baptized as members of the TLC, it was settled. Catherine
would divorce Ezekiel, move to Manti, and marry Jeff.

Why on earth was Ezekiel OK with that?

Well, why on earth was I?

Oh wait. I wasn’t. Not with a sister-wife who looked, spoke,
and sang like Catherine. So much for my zeal to find Jeff a hot wife after all.

The other men returned home while Jeff remained behind to
court Catherine. Together they took a week-long sightseeing trip. They visited
fabulous cathedrals, Castle Combe in Wiltshire where
Dr. Doolittle
was filmed, and Glastonbury, the land in which legend
holds Jesus traveled, married, and had children as a young man before returning
to Jerusalem. The legend would later delight enthusiasts of
The Da Vinci Code.
They capped off the
trip with a visit to Stonehenge. The more Jeff checked in with me, the more
insecure I became.

I felt no more secure upon Jeff’s return to Manti. As we
awaited Catherine’s arrival, he could talk only about her. I had seen him
flirt, but I had never seen him infatuated. One night, rolling off of me and
still panting, he opened his mouth and rhapsodized about Catherine. Call me
petty, but I wouldn’t describe that moment as the coziest post-coital
experience we ever shared. Though I had experienced moments of anxiety since
accepting polygamy, this was the first time I felt truly threatened long term.

Enough was enough. I wasn’t going to take this sitting down.
I decided to do something about it.

I started sewing clothes for her.

And I prepared to move into my daughters’ room so Catherine
could have mine.

And, so that her son could have a room, I told my own son
that he would have to move out of his room and onto a couch in the living room.

Take
that,
Catherine.

Judith, of course, would remain in her own room. No sense in
going overboard.

Weeks later, Catherine and Ezekiel arrived in Manti. We took
them into our home. We fed them. We threw parties for them. We took them
sightseeing. She sang for us. It was like heaven in our little home. That is,
it would have been if she hadn’t turned out to be a bossy, controlling, bitchy
pain in the ass.

Judith, the kids, and I all breathed a sigh of relief when
Catherine and Ezekiel took off for sightseeing on their own. We were also a
little relieved though surprised when word came back through a fellow TLC
member that Catherine wouldn’t be going through with marrying Jeff. “We’re
afraid of you people,” the message said, “and we’re not coming back.”

Afraid? Come on. We weren’t dangerous or cruel. Just whacked
out.

We thought we had heard the last of them until a woman from
a rival cult stopped by to collect a coat Catherine had left at our house.
Catherine and Ezekiel were looking at joining the rival cult. Or, rather, they
were enjoying letting the rival cult lavish attention on them in hopes of
converting them. They visited one polygamist cult after another, each time
accepting hospitality, gifts, and favors. Only when no cult remained untapped
did they return to England.

Remember the apostle who received the revelation to marry
her? “Yeah,” he now smugly said, “I knew it all along. The Spirit told me they
were fake.”

I marvel at God’s ability to reveal the truth after it has
become evident.