My Three Husbands (12 page)

“Like who?” I asked.

“I don't know. Maybe Jessye Norman or Jane Bugler. Fokke and Marielle are friends with all sorts of opera singers.”

“Opera singers?” I was disappointed. “They aren't celebrities.”

“To those of us interested in art and culture,” Whitman said prissily, “opera singers are celebrities.”

“Jennifer Lopez is a celebrity,” I grumbled. “Brad Pitt.”

“Ralph Nader,” Tremaynne added.

Pine Mountain Lodge was in Idaho somewhere. With his fingertip, Tremaynne traced an endless series of highways and winding roads to a green section on his map. Tree symbols were dotted all over it. He pointed to the words: River of No Return Wilderness Area.

I freaked. I sat up and grabbed Whitman by the shoulder. “You're taking us to someplace called the River of No Fucking Return?”

“It's beautiful,” Whitman said. “Largest wilderness area in the Northwest. Old-growth trees everywhere.”

“Land that's supposed to be protected from development,” Tremaynne said. “Only now the Forest Service has this cozy new arrangement with private developers that no one's supposed to know about.”

“They didn't build
in
the wilderness area,” Whitman informed him. “It's on the outskirts. Venus's father created a place that's completely sensitive to the environment.”

“Sure,” Tremaynne smirked.

I saw the dads exchange a quick glance. Tremaynne was obviously making them uncomfortable.

Watching Tremaynne challenge the dads excited some primitive part of me. He could challenge them in a way that I never could, asserting himself as their equal. My other two husbands had never been able to do that.

Challenge and combat is this guy thing. It's how the alpha male emerges and claims the alpha female. I saw this program once on the Discovery Channel on how it all works.

The Tremaynne in the SUV with the dads was a very different creature from the Tremaynne who'd sat docilely with the dads over dinner in that vegan restaurant. In the car with the dads, he was more like a pit bull.

Something was going on inside me. I felt like I was waking up. My senses were quickening. It was like drinking two double espressos double quick. But below the excitement there was this jangle of panic, as though I'd caught a sudden glimpse of a shadow I didn't want to see. I wasn't sure where the fear was coming from. I felt it the minute I saw those words: River of No Return Wilderness Area.

As a honeymoon destination, the name sucked major league. It couldn't have sounded more doomed unless it was called the You'll Never Get Back Alive Wilderness Area.

Stop worrying,
I told myself.
It can't be that dangerous. You're with three strong men. They'll take care of you. You never have to leave your luxurious honeymoon suite. You can hole up with your handsome new husband and fuck like bunnies for three days straight. With time out for a facial, a hot-mud wrap, and a massage. And it won't cost you a penny.

I drew my legs up, pulled a blanket around my shoulders, and tried to think calming thoughts. How would we make love the first time? A beautiful suite would be so different from my dinky, messy apartment. I pictured us in a huge room with log walls and a stone fireplace. I might even wear the scratchy Patty Cakes shorty negligee that Bruce gave me. I'd been dieting all week, just in case.

A real honeymoon! I tried to imagine how it must have felt for my mom, when Daddy took her off to San Francisco for their honeymoon. It must have been weird. She told me that Daddy couldn't get a hard-on. “So out of guilt,” she said, “he ate me out and I had an orgasm that way.”

 

 

A couple hours later we were, like, totally zonked and totally wired. That buzzy feeling of being exhausted and wide awake at the same time. With nothing to do. I looked up and saw the dads holding hands. They looked so sweet. Whitman's hand rested on Daddy's thigh.

It gave me this crazy idea.

We were covered by a soft Pendleton blanket, so the dads couldn't see what I was up to. I moved my hand down to Tremaynne's thigh. Gave it a slight squeeze.

Tremaynne looked at me through half-closed eyes. I kissed him, darting my tongue into his mouth to turn up the heat a little. Then I began to feel him up. First his thighs, hard as the rocks he loved to climb. Then up, slowly, until I'd cupped his crotch. I felt around until I had his prick between my fingers. He spread his legs and slid his hips forward.

The only sound was the tires humming on the asphalt.

I rubbed and squeezed and felt his cock blossom and grow hard. I stroked and teased it. It was like playing with the stubby barrel of a revolver. Then I left it, swollen against the buttons of his jeans, and traveled higher, to his chest. I inched a finger into his soft flannel shirt until I reached a nipple. His were almost as sensitive as mine.

My accomplice shot me a secretive glance, then turned to look out the window as I started a light, circular movement with the tip of my finger. The nipple stood up at attention. Tremaynne closed his eyes and lolled his head back as I worked my magic.

“You're certainly quiet back there.” Whitman turned around. I snapped my eyes shut. “Oh. They're sleeping,” he whispered to Daddy.

I opened my eyes again. I could see Whitman's hand moving higher up Daddy's leg. Daddy gave him a quick, bemused glance and glanced into the rearview mirror. I closed my eyes just in time.

When I opened them again, I could see what Whitman was doing.

The dads were totally unaware that I was spying on them as I jerked off my husband in the backseat.

 

 

The landscape changed. It wasn't wet, like on the west side of the mountains. It was dry. High desert, Whitman called it. “Part of the Great Basin,” he said.

Whatever that was. In my mind's eye I saw a huge sink.

Tremaynne was totally engrossed in a set of maps he'd pulled out of his backpack. The maps were covered with intricate dots and squiggles and symbols marked in different colored inks. I didn't realize until then just how interested he was in where we were going.

My handsome new husband wasn't being very communicative, so I tuned into the Dads Channel in the front seat. Whitman and Daddy seemed to be having a good time. They ignored us completely. They gossiped about friends, talked about their work, discussed financial issues, wondered when the economy would get back on track, made fun of politicians, laughed and carried on like newlyweds.

Whitman told Daddy there was a secret hot springs somewhere in the vicinity of Pine Mountain Lodge. One of his “sources” had told him about the springs but begged him not to reveal their whereabouts in his travel story. Whitman was determined to find them. “These springs were sacred to the Indians, evidently,” he said. “The Indians called them
si'pi.”

“What does that mean?” Daddy asked.

“Big Fart. Big Stink. Something like that. Sulphur, I guess.”

I surreptitiously studied my new husband as he studied his maps. Would we ever have the kind of relationship the dads had? Driving someplace fun with twenty years of shared experiences behind us? Getting excited about a secret hot springs?

My thoughts drifted back to my familiar world. Phantastic Phantasy, where I'd be if I wasn't on my honeymoon. In the bright desert light, with not a building in sight, that furtive half-lit world of shooting sperm and pineapple-vomit-smelling disinfectant seemed a million miles away.

I couldn't stay in the adult entertainment industry forever. I had to for a while, because I lived from paycheck to paycheck. But maybe, eventually, now that I was remarried and my bankruptcy was behind me, I could think about doing something more challenging. I could go back to school. Get a degree in something.

I didn't know what Tremaynne would contribute to our new life together. We'd never talked about finances. His bankruptcy made him very cynical about banks, corporations, and credit-card companies. He had a whole theory about it. “They set up a trap and push you into it,” he maintained.

He'd started charging when he was going to school in Berkeley. Now he was totally poor. And though I sometimes wondered why he didn't go out to get a job, like everyone else in the world had to do, I also admired him for doing the kind of environmental work that didn't earn him a dime.

“Some jobs you can't do for money,” he insisted. “You have to do them because if you don't, everything on Earth will be destroyed.”

I didn't feel that same kind of urgency myself. But I was glad someone else did.

 

 

Whitman was the navigator. He directed Daddy to turn right and left. We began to climb higher, through a dense pine forest.

“Ponderosas,” Whitman said. “Wow! Look at that view!”

I looked. Tremaynne looked up from his maps. All I saw was, like, nothing. No houses. Just a hundred or maybe a thousand miles of hills and pine trees with snowcapped mountains way in the distance. I'd never seen anything like it.

I half-expected to hear the theme music from
Bonanza
and see the three Cartwright boys gallop past with their dad.

This forest was different from the lush wet forests west of the Cascades. Or so Whitman said. He and Dad were talking geology, history, the evolution of plant species.

“These ponderosas are amazing,” Whitman said. “They've learned how to benefit from disaster.”

I asked how. Whitman explained that we were in a very high and dry area that got hit by lightning a lot. The ponderosas shed their needles, so lightning fires periodically swept through the dry forest floor, burning everything to a crisp. The trees, he said, had figured out an ingenious method of survival. “They use the fire. The fire is necessary to eject the seeds from their pine cones.”

“Adaptive evolution,” Tremaynne said.

Whitman turned around in surprise. “That's right. Adapt yourself to your environment.”

“Adaptive survival,” Tremaynne said. “If fire or something is your enemy, put the enemy to work for you.”

“Are you saying that the trees can, like, actually think?” I asked.

“They can think, communicate, and remember,” Tremaynne said, turning back to his maps as if I'd offended him. “They eat, shit, breathe, and grow, just like us.”

We left the main road and drove across a flat arid plain. Then suddenly Daddy made a sharp turn and we began to switchback down the side of a steep bare canyon.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” Whitman said in his tourist-guide voice, “welcome to Hell's Canyon, the deepest gorge in North America. The cliffs of this precipitous canyon drop one mile to the Snake River below.”

Once I saw what was happening, where we were going, I couldn't breathe right. The road was gravel. Narrow. There weren't any side railings. A mile below us a river sparkled like a silver thread in the sunlight.

The grade was so steep that the car began to skid and slide when Daddy put on the brakes.

“Stop!” Whitman cried. “John, stop for Christ's sake!”

“I'm trying to,” Daddy said, tapping the brakes as we skidded faster and faster. “It's the gravel.”

I was scared shitless. I needed something to grip. I lurched over to grab hold of my husband. His mouth was open.

“If we go over the side,” Whitman shouted, “everybody jump out!”

“We're not going over the side,” Daddy said. He brought the SUV to a stop about two inches from a precipice, at the outside edge of a hairpin curve.

We all sat there, real quiet. Daddy was clenching the steering wheel so hard his knuckles were white.

“You need to put it into four-wheel drive,” Whitman said.

“I can't, until we get around this curve,” Daddy said. “It needs to go forward about a yard before it engages.” His voice was measured. He licked his lips and stared into the distance.

“Why don't you two get out of the car,” Whitman said to Tremaynne and me. “Just in case.”

“In case of what?” Daddy said through clenched teeth.

“There's no reason for us all to die,” Whitman said. “If you go over the edge, I want to go with you. But they don't have to.”

Daddy, clutching the steering wheel, looked stiffly in his direction. “It's not that bad, Whit. I can back up from here and make the turn.”

“You might slide on the gravel,” Whitman said. “Those treads are shot. It's my fault. I should have put on new tires.”

“Whit, I can do it,” Daddy insisted.

“Get out of the car,” Whitman said to Tremaynne and me.

“Should we, Daddy?”

Whitman snapped, “I am your daddy in this case. Get out!”

Dad One caught my eye in the rearview and gave a tense nod.

“Here's my cell phone in case anything happens,” Whitman said. “All the important phone numbers are programmed in. Call everyone and tell them I was happy right up to the last moment.”

“Whitman, for Christ's sake!” Daddy barked. The veins were standing out in his neck.

“You inherit the house,” Whitman said to me. “The lawyer's name is Jack Sullivan. Sullivan, Delaney, and Yost. Now go.”

I felt like we had to move slowly, carefully, or something would be thrown off balance and the car would tip over the edge. I carefully cracked open the door. The second I did, a hot, violent gust of wind blew in and the door flew open. Tremaynne and I slid out. Stood on solid ground. Beneath the loose gravel, the packed-dirt surface of the road was slippery as a greased waterslide.

Whitman called out, “Take the picnic basket just in case. There's foie gras and gherkins—”