My Three Husbands (5 page)

“We can come back another time,” my dad said.

“No.” Whitman straightened his hat. “I refuse to be inconvenienced by ignorance.” He pointed to the parking lot. “We'll begin by taking advantage of that free parking spot for customers only.”

Daddy spun their sleek black Acura into the parking lot. I made an awkward exit. I must have looked like a real slut with my wrinkly ruined dress that I was trying to hold up, and my hair all messed, and mascara and lipstick smeared all over my face.

The dads took care of me. I felt like a five-year-old before a pageant. Daddy One wiped my face with his perfect white hanky as Daddy Two twitched my dress straight. “We have to fix this,” Whitman said. He unpinned a small orchid corsage from his buttonhole and used the pin to repair my torn strap. Then he tucked the orchid in my hair. “There. But where are your shoes?”

I shrugged. I was so embarrassed and ashamed that I couldn't speak. Embarrassed because of the way I looked, and ashamed because I hadn't been able to do one single thing to make their day special.

“You'll have to pretend you're in Hawaii,” Whitman said. “Barefoot among the orchids. Unless you want your dad to pull out his size-ten sneakers from his gym bag in the trunk.”

I shook my head.

“Okay then, but your nylons are ripped to shreds so you better slip out of them.” He and Daddy closed rank like bodyguards. They turned around and made a protective wall so I could slip off my black fishnets. I remembered how the dads used to do this on road trips, so I'd have some privacy when I had to pee beside the road.

“Okay,” Whitman said, “everybody ready? Should we all walk together, side by side?”

“Let me be, like, the flowergirl,” I whispered.

Whitman plucked the orchid from my hair and tucked it in my hand. “Then you should walk a couple of steps in front of us.”

By then everyone was pretty quiet and you could hear Wendell Tuttle's harp. He swooped his fingers back and forth, doing that harp thing, then picked out a melody I didn't recognize. Whitman sucked in his breath.

“I don't want anyone to get sentimental,” he hissed, his voice catching in his throat. “Understand?”

By now we'd progressed from the parking lot to the front sidewalk. I walked a couple of steps ahead, holding Whitman's orchid (I'd
thought
of bringing flowers but was low on cash). The dads walked behind, arm-in-arm. Their friends stopped fighting with the Jesus freaks and lined the sidewalk and lawn, applauding and whistling. The news crews trained their minicams on us. Behind them, the 'phobes regrouped and renewed their attack.

“God hates queers!” they chanted.

I froze. Their hate was like a roadblock, an evil spell. They stood so close to the front door of the registry office that the dads would have to confront them. The faces of those five men and two women were so livid. You just had to wonder where that anger came from.

“Take a deep breath,” I heard Whitman say behind me. “Keep moving forward.”

I nodded. Scanned the crowd but couldn't see Tremaynne anywhere. One of those videocams was right in my face. A woman newscaster stepped around me and held her microphone up to the dads.

“Would you care to explain to our viewers just what it is you're doing today?”

“We came here today because it's our twentieth anniversary and we wanted to sign the domestic partner registry,” my dad said.

“Why?” the newswoman prodded.

She looked slightly taken aback when Whitman said, simply, “Because we love one another.”

“And this is our daughter, Venus,” Daddy said.

The newswoman stepped back and looked me up and down. “Were you an
adopted
child?”

“No, I lived with my mom and my dads.”

“And is your mother here as well?” she asked me.

Before I could answer there were two loud honks from one of those horns that have a big rubber ball on the end. I looked over and felt my knees go weak.

There was my mom.

Dressed in a clown suit.

Her face was made up like a clown's, with those big hideous upturned lips and a round red ball for a nose.

“Heaven strike me dead,” Whitman whispered.

I turned around to see how Daddy was taking it. He looked like a balloon had just been popped in his face.

Carolee, my suddenly
ex
-mother, pushed her way up to us. I wanted the earth to open up and swallow her, or me. My dads and I stood paralyzed as she honked her horn at each of us in turn. When Whitman said, “Hello, Carolee,” and leaned over to airkiss her, she squirted him with water from the fake flower on her lapel. Then, feigning surprise, she disciplined the flower with a tap of her hand, pulled out an enormous checkered cloth, and mopped Whitman's face.

The dads' friends began to whisper amongst themselves.

“And who are you?” asked the newswoman.

Mom honked her horn in my direction. “Her mother.”

“And would you care to tell our viewers why you're here dressed as a clown?”

“Because I just started clown therapy,” my mother the clown said. She peered at the ranting Jesus freaks through her windshield-size glasses. “They don't look very happy, do they?” With that she laboriously made her way toward them, hardly able to walk in her oversized shoes. Her costume, bright and ridiculously exaggerated as anything you'd see at the circus, was topped by a snarled yellow fright wig I recognized from Halloweens past.

I stared at my dads, so embarrassed I wanted to die.
It was all my fault.
Mom was my responsibility. Nobody else wanted her. And now, obviously, she was insane. And there I stood, the nut's daughter, barefoot, dress ruined, more like a ten-year-old tomboy than a mature woman who'd gone through bankruptcy and was about to get married for the third time. It was Mom and me against them—against the dads and all their rich friends. We were the ones who would never fit in, no matter how hard we tried.

I was afraid my dad was going to explode. His face was mottled and his fists clenched tight. He was staring at
me,
his eyes as blue and cold as ice. “Who asked her to come?” he squeezed out.

I shook my head, unable to speak.

“I did,” Whitman said. He patted my dad's shoulder and suddenly left our side.

My dad and I just stood there, like everyone else, watching to see what would happen next. “I'm sorry, Daddy,” I whispered. Daddy put his arm around me.

Whitman made his way up to Carolee. Honking her horn and throwing confetti, she had managed to force the protesters back and away from the office door. They looked more frightened of her than they had earlier during the melee. “Carolee, darling, you're brilliant,” Whitman said. “Thank you so much.”

Mom kept throwing confetti and shooting water from her lapel. “Maybe now's a good time to go in,” she said.

“Adam and Eve,” one of the women protestors squawked, “not Adam and Steve!”

Whitman turned on her. “Thank you, my dear, but I'm gay. I already know
All About Eve
.” He then motioned for us to join him. Daddy took my elbow and we moved down the front sidewalk. Everyone was watching. My body felt really stiff. When we reached Whitman, he smiled and made a mime-like show of dusting us off and straightening our clothes. For a second it was like he and my mom were part of the same act. Then he turned me around, took Daddy's arm, and shouted, “Forward, march!”

And that's how we finally got into the registry office.

Lorenzo Lopez pulled open one door, Fokke the other, and we swept in with about a hundred people, a clown, and a news team trailing behind. Outside, Wendell Tuttle bravely played his harp as the protestors shouted and did their best to spoil the dads' special day.

A
fter the DP signing, the dads invited everyone over to their house. They just happened to have a caterer on hand and enough champagne, coffee, and dessert for a hundred people. Even Mom, wearing her idiotic clown getup, was invited. I heard Whitman breathe a sigh of relief when she said she couldn't make it.

“Well, my dear, we'll meet again
very
soon,” he promised, giving Carolee a hug. “When you're feeling a little less passive-aggressive.”

“You'll be coming to Venus's wedding,” she said. “At my house.”

“Of course.”

Carolee the Clown started to cry in his arms. “Oh Whitman, I want you to know that I'm not angry with you. I want you and John to be happy.”

“We are,” he assured her.

“I know Venus thinks of you as family. And so do I.”

“Come on, Bette Davis.” I dragged her away, like a mom dragging a kid away from a costume party. I put her in her car, slammed the door, and whispered ominously, “I'll deal with you later.”

Tremaynne and I raced home so I could change clothes. I drove so fast that all the warning lights in my junky old Toyota started blinking. “Damn car,” I scolded. “Don't you dare break down on me today.” I could smell burning oil.

“That Acura your dads drive must have cost a shitload,” Tremaynne said.

“The dads always drive beautiful cars.” I kept praying they'd give one of their cast-offs to me.

A party at the dads' is a big deal. And I had nothing cool to wear. I mean nothing. All I could dredge up was an old bustier with a long black skirt and red cowboy boots from my days as an exotic dancer. The bustier showed off the body art on my chest and back, but it was so tight I felt like my head might blow off.

 

 

“It's like a museum,” Tremaynne whispered when I ushered him into the dads' house an hour later. He'd never been there before.

Tremaynne had been living with me for three months, but the dads had only met him twice, once at my apartment and one time at a vegan restaurant Tremaynne had chosen. The restaurant had Formica tables, fluorescent lights, and steamy windows full of spiderplants sending out long tentacles with babies on the ends. Definitely not the sort of place the dads would ever go to on their own. Whitman was amazed that you could get an entire meal for under five dollars. “Don't they have a profit margin?” he asked.

Which made Tremaynne suspicious because he hates capitalism. He hates the whole idea of wealth.

The dads' house is up in the West Hills of Portland, in what Tremaynne calls “Snobtown.” It's this modern thing that Daddy designed, all steel and glass and wood. It's set up high on a hillside with a view toward downtown and Mt. Hood. When you're inside you feel like you're floating, and then outside there are these suspended terraces that hang out over a canyon and give me vertigo.

There are no soft, round, or curvy shapes anywhere in the dads' house. Everything has a razor-sharp edge. There's no “fluff and filler” as Whitman contemptuously calls knickknacks, photos, and throw pillows. The furniture is hard so your body doesn't sink into it. You could never lounge around in an old robe with a bowl of Sugar Pops watching Saturday morning cartoons in the dads' house. Anything that's displayed must be of the highest quality and meet the dads' exacting design standards. Nothing is ever out of place. Nothing is ever dusty or dirty. There's never a dirty plate or fast-food carton left out. Mom still hasn't figured out where they hide their TV.

“I wonder how many trees they had to cut down to build this place,” Tremaynne said.

“Don't ask until after we're married, okay?”

“Why?”

“I don't want you to hold it against me.”

“Well, obviously this isn't
your
lifestyle,” Tremaynne said.

“I can't help it if my dads are rich.” In fact, until I met Tremaynne I'd always regarded this as a selling point, believing the dads' wealth made me more desirable to the guys I was dating. “They're nice people, Tremaynne. Not all rich people are assholes.”

“How come they're so rich and you're so poor?” my fiancé bluntly asked.

A question I couldn't answer. Except to say that I was too old to leech off the dads. I did, of course, whenever things got really desperate, but I always promised to pay them back. Pay Daddy back, I should say. I never dared borrow money from Whitman. He's the one with the fortune. I don't know how much he's worth, but I did peek once at a bank statement and saw a balance of $197,843.59. I've never forgotten that figure. That's why it's such a joke when he talks about how “poor” they are. Whitman isn't poor except when he needs to be.

Tremaynne kept close to my side as the guests swirled around us, chattering to me and appraising him. Nobody seemed to recognize him as an alternative media star.

Trying to steer clear of that old society-column bitch Lordie Mallory was impossible. She actually came up to us, her face frozen into a permanent smile from one too many lifts, and said to me in a loud, wine-slurred voice, “Is this the new one, Venus?”

I introduced her to Tremaynne. “Venus is such a popular girl,” she said, extending her gnarled hand to Tremaynne. “Every time I see her, she's with a new man.”

I gave her an inane smile and dragged Tremaynne off for some champagne.

There was a lot of posing as guests with expensive cameras drew people into glamorous, grinning groups and snapped their digital photos.

“Come on, honey, smile,” Whitman urged during one sudden photo op. “Open your mouth and show your pearly whites.”

But I wouldn't. You'll never see a photo of me showing off the bad teeth I inherited from my mom. That's why I quit modeling school: They couldn't get me to open my mouth. When I finally did, they told me I needed ten thousand dollars' worth of orthodontic work.

It was pretty clear that Tremaynne wasn't comfortable with the dads' friends. He has no rich-people skills. But rich people aren't anything special, really. Rich people are just poor people with money. Of course, I knew most of the guests and had my own secret network of friendships and flirtations with them. If I didn't know a person, all I had to say was that I was John and Whitman's daughter. As their kid, I was immediately accepted. But as we walked around, mingling, Tremaynne looked terrified, like a boy who'd been thrown into deep water and couldn't swim. He clung to me like a barnacle, wouldn't let go of my hand.

I tried to imagine Tremaynne moving through a crowd the way my dads did. No way. He's got charisma but, like, no social graces. He's the way I used to be before the dads moved to New York. When I started visiting them in Manhattan, they forced me to meet all their friends and took me around to parties and openings. Every time I'm with a large group of people I can still hear Whitman saying to me, “Work the crowd, honey. There's nothing to be afraid of. Talk to people.
Mingle.”

 

 

The bustier was killing me, but at least no one could mistake my few extra pounds for pregnancy. At one point I left Tremaynne to go to the upstairs bathroom (the giant one in the dads' bedroom) for a breather. I unbuttoned the bustier and let everything hang out. It felt soft, mooshy, wonderful.

I was just coming out of the bathroom when Whitman came into the bedroom. “Oh, there you are,” he said. “I've been looking for you.” He closed the bedroom door and undid his belt.

I wondered what it would be like to be married to him. Daddy never revealed a thing about their sex life, but I know it's intense because I listened in once when they were having phone sex while Dad was visiting me in Portland and Whitman was out in New York.

Dad Two looked so handsome in his tuxedo. His blue eyes sparkled, partly because he was wearing color-enhanced contacts. He smiled, flashing his perfect white teeth, recently bleached and bonded, as he unbuttoned and unzipped his pants.

“Ahhh.” He let out a deep orgasmic breath. “My pants were killing me.” He said he was wearing the same size 32-inch waist trousers he had on when he met my dad twenty years earlier. “I suppose it's like squeezing into an old wedding dress or army uniform.”

If he could, I could, so I undid the lower buttons of my bustier. “Ahhh,” I sighed.

We laughed.

“All right,” he said, “I know I'm just your old faux pa so I can't object to anything you do. But I want you to tell me what it is you see in Tremaynne.”

I was used to Whitman's sudden interrogations. He keeps his questions to a minimum when he's with Daddy and then pounces whenever he catches me alone. “Tremaynne's committed to something,” I said. “He's smart.”

“But sweetheart, he has no money. You met him in a bankruptcy court, for God's sake! Don't take umbrage—”

“What does that mean?”

“It's a literary way of saying don't be pissed off. Just talk to me about it. Allay my fears.”

“Well, I can't, because he doesn't have any money. The work he does is always for free. For a bigger cause.”

Whitman sighed. “Yes, I'm sure he's very noble. As long as someone else is paying the bills. Are you going to support him?”

My voice rose defensively. “For now.”

“On what you make at that video store?”

He meant Phantastic Phantasy, where I work. “I pay my rent. It doesn't cost that much more for two to eat.”

“Yes, but—” He turned away, agitated, rubbing his long hands together. “What about the bigger picture?”

“What bigger picture?”

“Going back to school. Doing something with your life. Sweetheart, you're a smart person but you don't act like one. Don't you want something more?”

“Like what?”

“I don't know. When I was your age I wanted so much.”

“And you got it.”

“I
worked
for it,” he said sharply. “Damned hard, too, because my family cut me off without a dime. And even so, even working as hard as I did, I only got some of what I wanted.”

“Only some?” I chided him. “You got my dad, didn't you?”

“I was lucky to meet your father,” he admitted. “He wanted many of the same things I did. That's how true partnerships work.”

“Are you saying I'm incapable of forming a true partnership?”

His voice turned steely. “Don't get angry with me just because I'm being frank with you. Your biological parents accept everything you do. I don't, but I always feel like I have to keep my mouth shut.”

“You generally get your point across,” I said.

“Okay, the point is this: You've made two mistakes already. You've chosen major losers. In both cases, you said that you loved them.”

“I did love them. They just turned out not to be right for me.”

“And then, bang, you're divorced as fast as you were married. Why can't you just live with Tremaynne for a while? Why do you have to marry him?”

“Because that's what we want to do.”

“Why?” he asked sharply. “It can't be for the tax benefit.”

“Because we want to be together. We love one another.”

“You can be together without marriage. You can love each other without marriage. That's what your father and I have done for twenty years.”

“Only because you couldn't get married.”

“Try it out for a year or two,” Whitman suggested. “Maybe it's nothing more than sex.”

“It's more than sex,” I said.

“He doesn't look like he's any good at it anyway,” Whitman said.

I let out a squawk of boy-are-you-wrong laughter. “If you don't like him,” I said, “why are you so gung-ho for us to go on our honeymoon with you and Daddy?”

“I didn't say I didn't like him. I know nothing about him. Except that he seems extremely ill at ease in my presence.”

“You intimidate him.”

“I've never intimidated anyone in my life,” Whitman scoffed. “I'm one of the nicest people I've ever met.”

“I know that,” I said, “but Tremaynne doesn't. His dad used to beat him. So he's, like, wary of authority figures.”

“Sweetheart, don't, like, hold this against me. I'm just asking, okay? But what income level does Tremaynne come from? Is he from the lower-middle-class like your other husbands?”

“I don't know. I don't judge people that way.”

“I'm not judging him. I know nothing about him. I'm trying to place him in some kind of socioeconomic milieu that might help me to understand him better.”

“You'll just have to get to know him. You're a lot alike. You both have strong opinions about things.”

Whitman opened my purse and extracted my cigarettes. He shook one out for himself and then one for me. He hadn't smoked in five years, so it had the feeling of a special ceremony. Like a drug ritual. Holding his pants up, he went into the bathroom and came back with a glass of water. Opened the sliding glass doors to the balcony. Threw back one corner of the slippery yellow silk duvet and motioned for me to sit down beside him on the enormous bed he shared with my dad.

Whitman looked at me before putting the cigarette between his lips. “Promise you won't tell your father?”

“Promise.” I gave the oath, then lit our cigarettes. Whitman closed his eyes and inhaled, coughing softly.

“Venus,” he said, “your dad and I have lived together for twenty years. We can't get married. We're not considered morally or psychologically fit to control our own destinies.” Another inhale. “Now I want you to think for a moment about what it's like to be in our position and to see you, our daughter, going through marriage after marriage.”