My Three Husbands

by Swan Adamson

Genres: Women's Fiction

Synopsis

Meet Venus Gilroy: twenty-five, carefree, irresistible, and with a nasty habit of getting hitched to the wrong guy. Husband No 1 would have been a winner, if it hadn't been for the forgery and embezzlement charges. As for husband No 2: well. . .meeting a husband in a strip bar could never end well. But now Venus has met the potential No 3, and he's the real deal. Isn't he? Surely sexy, rugged, principled Tremaynne is finally the right one for Venus? With her crazy family only to keen to weigh in with advice, it's time for Venus to learn for herself -- how you know that Mr Right! won't turn into Mr Wrong

Release date: October 15, 2013

Publisher: Kensington Books

Print pages: 324

Sample

“How about a honeymoon en famille?”

I hate it when Dad Two uses foreign words.

“What does that mean, Whitman?” I asked.

He twirled spaghetti around his fork and smiled. “We’ll go with you.”

“You mean like chaperones?” I let out a choked-sounding laugh and looked over at Dad One, my other dad, my real dad, to see if he was in on the joke.

He wasn’t. The expectant look on John’s face as he gnawed on a piece of crusty Italian bread told me he hoped I’d say yes.

The old worrying fear that I was about to be trapped or tricked by the dads stirred in my gut. It was a side effect from childhood, from a time when I wasn’t old enough to say no and the dads always overwhelmed me.

“Not chaperones,” Whitman said. “More like guides.”

“On my honeymoon.” It sounded weird, even to me. “I don’t think so.” I smiled nervously, looking from one dad to the other. “I don’t think Tremaynne would be comfortable with it.”

“Darling, the man’s been living in a tree for three months.” Uh-oh. Dad Two was starting to get impatient. “I’ll bet he’d jump at the chance for a free vacation in a luxury wilderness resort.”

My ears perked up when I heard the words free and luxury.

“We could go on all sorts of off-road expeditions.” Whitman raised a pee-colored pinot something or other to his lips. “I know, let’s call Tremaynne and ask him right now.”

I grabbed that cute little Finnish phone from his hand. “No!”

“Afraid he’ll say yes?” Whitman held out his hand and twiddled his fingers until I returned the phone.

John the peacekeeper stepped in. “She doesn’t want to, Whit. Let’s just forget it.”

“Why?” Whitman said, clearly befuddled.

“Because it’s just too weird!” I couldn’t think of a word that really expressed it. I tried to keep my voice low and the hot little-girl flush from rising to my cheeks.

Whitman, of course, wouldn’t keep his voice down. He turned up the volume, the better to be heard by everyone around us. “What is so weird about two fathers joining their only daughter and her new husband on their honeymoon?”

The thin, sour, sauerkraut-blonde girl at the next table glanced disdainfully in our direction. She must have heard. Now she knew. I was the daughter of these two men. The bitch, all in Prada, flattened herself to table level and began whispering to her dot-com fiancé—or maybe she was talking to that huge diamond engagement ring he’d given her.

Tremaynne doesn’t believe in rings. Rings, he said, are symbols of capitalism. (Since his bankruptcy, he’s been very down on capitalism.) So instead of that beautiful platinum-and-diamond ring that appears regularly in my dreams, floating just out of reach like a helium balloon, I got one made out of ink, skin, and pain. I paid for the tattoo myself since Tremaynne doesn’t have a paying job. When I showed it to him, he kind of freaked. “You had that done for me?” he said. I think he was scared of the commitment it represented. You can’t take off a tattoo and hurl it in your husband-to-be’s face or drop it accidentally down the toilet or lose it at the beach. It’s there, like, forever.

Whitman pressed on. “If you weren’t so glum and unimaginative about everything, a four-way honeymoon could be fun.”

I rolled my eyes.

“You never think,” he said. “All you do is react. Against anything I say or suggest.”

“Parents. Don’t. Go. On. Honeymoons. With. Their. Kids.” I tore off a hunk of bread and eyed the big sweet slab of butter. My two perfect fathers, ever mindful of their trim waistlines and smooth-flowing arteries, never spread butter on their bread. Whitman always said butter was vulgar unless you were in northern Europe. My mother, on the other hand, always encouraged my slatherings.

“Is there a rule?” Whitman asked, raising his eyebrows and watching as I slid my knife into the butter. “Is there a law inscribed somewhere on the Holy Tablets of the Boring Middle Class that says, Thou shalt not accompany thy daughter on her honeymoon?”

“Whitman, drop it,” said Dad One. I could tell he was nervous because he was compulsively realigning the silverware, dishes, and glasses, calibrating everything on the table to some orderly pattern in his head. Daddy’s an architect.

“Yeah, drop it,” I chimed in.

“Drop it? What am I, a dog?” Dad Two turned slowly from Dad One back to me. He spoke as though I were retarded. “Look, honey, I know it’s difficult for you, but let’s be practical here. You don’t have a penny to your name. Am I correct?”

I sat tight-lipped, wishing with all my might that you could still smoke in restaurants.

“You’ve just declared bankruptcy. At age twenty-five. Am I correct?”

I refused to answer.

“You’ve been married twice—even though I happen to know you were happier as a lesbian—”

“Ha-ha.”

“—and you’ve never been on a honeymoon.” His voice softened. “That’s something every girl should have at least once in her life. Even if she’s not married. So this time around we’re offering it to you.”

“But it’s not a honeymoon if you two come along!”

“There’s no honeymoon, period, if we don’t.” Whitman let out a sigh. “Look, honey, we’d love to send you off on a romantic trip to a luxury resort where you get fabulous spa treatments and pampered like royalty. But the truth is, I lost my shirt in the dot-com crash. We just can’t afford it.”

“Then how come you can go?” I asked.

“Because your dad is the architect and they’ve invited him out for the gala opening. And I snagged a juicy little assignment to write the place up for Travel magazine.”

“So where do me and Tramaynne fit in?” I asked.

“Tremaynne and I,” Whitman corrected. “Well, I knew this place would do anything to get in Travel magazine. So I pulled a prima donna.”

“A what?”

“I said I needed to bring along my assistants, to help with the story.”

“You demanded,” Daddy said.

“I demanded,” Whitman said, “and they agreed. So now you and Hubby Three can come along with us. I even got you your own suite.” He let out a sudden snort of laughter. “You didn’t think we’d all be staying in one room, did you?”

Oh, I loved that word—suite. “I don’t know what I thought. This is the first I’ve heard about any of it.”

“A free honeymoon,” Whitman whispered emphatically. “Think of it. Free. All you have to do is pretend you’re my assistants. Does that really sound so awful?”

“You mean we have to, like, carry your luggage?”

“No, you don’t have to, like, do anything. Except pretend you’re taking notes.”

“It’s a scam, in other words.”

My comment took him aback. “It’s a present,” he said with wounded dignity. “For you.”

“And there’s the other part, too,” Daddy reminded him.

“Yes, but I wouldn’t dream of asking your darling ungrateful self-centered daughter to celebrate something with us. God forbid.” He rose abruptly and strode off to the men’s room, leaving us in the dust of his melodrama.

“Celebrate what?” I asked my dad guiltily.

Daddy took my hand and stroked it. “We’re getting married, too.”

“What?” Tears popped into my eyes. “Daddy!” It took me a minute to recover from my sentimentality and think clearly. “But how?”

“Well, it’s not the same as being married married, but it’s all we’re allowed.”

“That registry thing?”

He nodded. “It has no legal bearing on anything. But we thought it would be a nice idea to celebrate our twentieth anniversary by getting Dped.”

“Dped?”

“Domestic partnershipped.”

“I want to be there. When are you doing it?”

“The first day it’s possible. July first.”

“Oh.” The timing made me suspicious. I wondered if Whitman had chosen that date in order to overshadow my ceremony on the Fourth of July. The dads were being remarkably cool about my upcoming wedding. They didn’t talk about it and hadn’t offered to help with the preparations.

“That date’s all right, isn’t it?” Daddy’s always extra solicitous when Whitman isn’t around.

“Sure. Why not?”

“Back-to-back ceremonies,” he said. “Honeymoons together. Kind of fun.”

I let him pull me close and kiss me on the cheek. I wanted to lie back right there in the restaurant in front of everyone and be cuddled in his arms. But I was as rigid as my old skateboard. The sauerkraut blonde couldn’t keep her eyes away. She was confused. I can always tell when they’re confused. She couldn’t place me, peg me, pigeonhole me. Maybe Ms. Prada thought now that I was Daddy’s girlfriend or his wife. I closed my eyes and let him cuddle me.

“Who all’s going to be at your DP ceremony?” I asked.

“Just a few close friends.”

“Are you going to invite Mom?”

He tensed. “I’ll think about it.”

A tall, handsome man with thick sandy-brown hair, sharp blue eyes, and a long, straight nose appeared at the far end of the dining room. Whitman. Daddy’s lover and my faux pa. He smiled at us over the heads of the diners. It was only a naughty-little-girl fantasy, but I imagined him seething with jealousy. Wanting me for himself.

In actual fact, the one who was seething with jealousy was Ms. Prada at the next table. Don’t ask me why. I didn’t do anything to make her fiancé stare at me like that.

After my fancy-ass dinner with the dads, I drove my dying Toyota back over to the east side where my mom lives. I wanted to be with her, but I didn’t know why.

It had something to do with the dads getting married. I felt kind of anxiously protective, as if I were the mom and Mom were the little girl, and I had to break some potentially traumatic news to her. If the dads didn’t invite her to their DP ceremony, she’d find out about it and be devastated because she was left out. But if they did invite her, she would make up some excuse not to go because she’d feel humiliated in front of all their friends.

Twenty years the dads had been together. Which meant it had been twenty years since Dad left Mom. Which meant it had been twenty years since my own life had taken that fateful turn. A jumble of memories suddenly swelled up in front of me, like those wafer-thin sponges that expand in water. Whitman used to buy me one at Zabar’s every time I visited them in New York.

Christmas and my birthday, those were always the big events. One of my earliest memories is being with Mom and Dad on Christmas morning in the big Victorian house with a fire roaring in the fireplace and what looked like hundreds of presents under the tree. It was the first time I understood the meaning of Christmas (toys, all for me) and the pretty stuff that went with it: the giant tree hung with glass balls and strung with white lights, vases of fresh-cut holly, cards, cookies, ribbon, the special incense that my mom would burn. Carolee just loved to decorate for Christmas. I was wild with excitement as Mom presented me with box after wrapped box, laughing as I tore off the paper and hauled out dolls, stuffed animals, games, clothes, candy, and books. At some point in my rampage I was so idiotically, incandescently happy that I ran over and jumped into Daddy’s arms. He held me the way I liked to be held, suffocatingly close, squeezed tight as a swaddled papoose. My mom stopped laughing and said tenderly, “Oh, look at all that lovin’. Can’t I have just a little?” And I said, quite deliberately, as Daddy rocked me in his arms, “No. I hate you.”

My first Christmas alone with Carolee was an unwanted memory, but I found myself reliving it as I drove east toward her house. It was during the Big Change, after Daddy moved out of the big beautiful Victorian house. For months nothing had been clear to me. Daddy still lived in Portland but was talking about moving to New York. Fear gnawed at me day and night. I couldn’t figure out why he’d left us and I was terrified that he would move away forever. Mom went from being happy to being a sobbing wreck. Without Daddy the house felt disjointed, scary, empty. That Christmas, as I came down the wide oak stairs wearing my Big Bird slippers and Wonder Woman cape over flannel pajamas, it was not Daddy I saw but Mom’s support group. I stopped dead in my tracks. The smell of coffee and pot wafted up to my nose. “Merry Christmas, sweetheart,” Mom called out as I stood there staring down at them. “Santa’s left lots of presents for you.”

I could see the presents, but I knew she was lying about Santa. “Is Daddy here?”

One of her friends muttered, “No, your asshole daddy is not here.”

“He’s not an asshole,” I shot back, hotly defensive, “you are.”

They coaxed me downstairs with the lure of sweets and joys beyond measure. Only I felt dry and empty, like someone had pulled the plug and my bubble bath of happiness had drained away.

That Christmas, the first one without Daddy in the house, Mom’s support group worked valiantly to cheer us up. They clapped and oohed and aahed as I opened my presents. Then they inducted me into a daddyless world of all women. One of them gave me a perm. One of them painted my toenails gold and my fingernails green with red stripes. I got to put on foundation, powder, lipstick and mascara. All day long they sucked on cigarettes and joints and sipped coffee and drank eggnog and munched cookies and took turns holding Mom, who spent most of the day sobbing on the sofa.

Then there was that birthday with Daddy. That’s what he and Mom both told me it was going to be. But it wasn’t just with Daddy. As Daddy pulled up to the big house, I saw Whitman in the front seat of the BMW. That had to mean something important, but I didn’t want to know what it was. I was sick with tight-lipped apprehension as Daddy took my hand and led me down to the car. Whitman smiled out the open window. “You remember Whitman?” Daddy said, opening the back door of the BMW.

I shook my head. Whitman laughed. I felt panicky.

“Whitman’s coming with us today. For your birthday.”

“I don’t want him,” I whispered.

“Well, honey, he’s going to be with us today,” Daddy said in a low firm voice.

I started to squirm as Daddy buckled me into a seatbelt. In the backseat. I always rode in front, next to him. “No!”

“Venus—” That tone. I hated that “you have no choice” tone.

I looked anxiously back toward the big house, but it seemed to mock me, mock my fear. I saw Mom standing upstairs, in the front turret, her arms crossed. Then she disappeared.

Whitman turned around and smiled at me. “Happy birthday, Venus. I brought you a present.”

I calmed myself sufficiently to snatch the beautifully wrapped package he held out.

“What do you say, honey?” Daddy prompted.

I thought for a moment before answering. “Fuck you,” I said.

I didn’t know what the words meant, but I’d heard Mom’s support group using them. And they seemed to have some magic effect because Whitman’s eyes opened so wide I could see his contact lenses. He stared at me for a moment, then said, “You’re welcome,” and turned back around.

Birthdays in Portland were for little girls who lived at home with their overloving lesbian moms. Birthdays in New York were for “The Fabulous Miss Venus Gilroy” (as Whitman called me) who flew off all by herself four times a year to spend a week with her handsome dad and his handsome lover in their cramped Manhattan apartment. When I was in New York, I rarely let on that I was having a good time, but fun did seep into those always-too-short visitations. One birthday they took me to the Rainbow Room, where I drank Shirley Temples and danced with Daddy on the revolving dance floor and Whitman never once butted in. Another time they took me to lunch at Windows on the World and we all had foie gras on toast. I could always count on a Broadway show, usually a musical with some big star. It never ceased to amaze me that people I’d seen on television or in movies with my mom were there, alive, on a stage. New York birthdays were one big, new, scary, shivery delight after another: an opera, a concert at Lincoln Center, a show at Radio City Music Hall. A new dress from Bloomingdale’s, shoes from Bergdorf, a winter coat from Saks. And when I’d get back to Portland with all my shopping bags and looked at the stuff my mom had given me for the same event, I could barely suppress my disdain. Sometimes it actually seemed like the dads knew me better than my mom did.

I pulled up in front of my mom’s dinky little house (“Early Crackerbox,” I once heard Whitman describe it) and sat there, smoking and listening to my old Black Garters tape. Black Garters was this awesome all-girl garage band that lasted about a year. JD, lead singer and lead guitar, gave me the band’s one and only demo tape when we were lovers. Her singing voice was a hoarse, croaky rasp of anger.

I just sat there in my incredibly messy car (Whitman had once likened it to a hamster’s nest) thinking about my mom, my dads, and me. If you eventually turn into your parents, no matter how hard you try not to, which one of the three was I doomed to become?

Long ago, back in the mists of the ’80s, even before my dad left us, I realized that I could twist Carolee, my mom, around my little finger. I could get her to do anything I wanted.

It’s kind of horrifying, in a way, to realize how much power you can have over another person. What intrigues me about Whitman, for instance, is that I have zero power over him. Back when I was five, and Dad was just starting to date him, Whitman and I would get into stupid fights over things like who got to sit next to Daddy in the front seat of the BMW. I always won. But it was because Whitman let me. He could afford to because he had the real power, and we both knew it. He had Daddy.

And Carolee didn’t. Not anymore.

When Dad left, all Carolee had was her “support group”—this huge congregation of women bitching and bawling their way through the pain, pain, pain of wrecked dreams and fractured lives. My mom was the focal point, the earth mother, the good witch doomed to stir the cauldron of unconditional love until she keeled over from the fumes.

She was a size eight back then. She was my size, and my age, which is too freaky to think about.

They came, all those women, because Carolee had the biggest heart and the nicest house and the largest alimony check. Back then we lived in a huge old Victorian that Daddy had turned into a showplace. Some of Mom’s endless women friends hung out there so much they had their own rooms. “You could almost call ’em boarders,” my grandma sourly observed, “if they ever paid any rent.”

During the year they were separated, Daddy continued to pay the mortgage and all the bills. And after the divorce, Mom had alimony for three years and child support until I was eighteen. So she didn’t have to work back then, except to take care of every freeloading sob sister who showed up at our door.

I took advantage of her like everyone else. I got everything I wanted because my own mother was afraid of me. If I didn’t get my way I turned into Linda Blair in The Exorcist. It worked every time.

Until one day I made the mistake of calling my mom a “fucking bitch” in front of my grandma. Mom let out a weird noise and started to cry. But Grandma’s hand shot out and slapped me so hard I went blank with terror. And in that moment of shocked blankness, Grandma, furious in a way I’d never seen before, leaned down and said through her new dentures, “Don’t you ever call your mother that again, young lady. Do you understand?”

I nodded dumbly. It was the first time in my life that I’d been disciplined, and it was overwhelming.

“When you say that, it means you have no respect,” Grandma hissed. “You should always respect your mother because she does her best for you.”

Mom, of course, got furious with her mom for slapping me because I’d never been spanked or physically mistreated in my life. I played it up for all it was worth, loving the way Carolee’s dark eyes glowed with fiery maternal indignation and concern. It meant I’d be getting more presents than usual.

But I have to say: Grandma’s smack and admonition did work. I heard what she said. I remembered. Her slap sent me flying into a new phase of understanding, or trying to, anyway.

Respect. Like that old Aretha Franklin song. Mom with her big hair deserved R-E-S-P-E-C-T.

But then the dynamic changed and Mom began sucking me into her confidence. Every night she drank a bottle of red wine, drew me close, and told me all the scary non-fairy tales that turn bratty little girls into fucked-up women. What she didn’t know was that her life was territory I didn’t want to explore. It was dark and scary and lonely in that forest. There were horrible monsters hiding behind every tree.

Daddy had been her one fairy tale come true. A young hot-shit architect, he plucked her from the receptionist’s desk, married her, and introduced her to a world of high-flying affluence that just about wrecked them both. Mom had just divorced her first husband, a Sixties radical who got busted for selling LSD at UCLA. Dad had just been divorced by a mysterious Italian woman who ran off after she became an American citizen.

John gave Carolee this short, fabulous life. Then he took it away. She wasn’t Cinderella after all. The glass slippers shattered into slivers that pierced her feet and made them bleed. That wasn’t a diamond tiara perched high atop her big red hair; it was a dunce cap.

Mom never blames anyone for anything. She’s chronically unable to express hatred and anger. She tried to understand where her husband was coming from. She even tried to support his decision to leave her for a man. But other betrayed women in her support group kept telling her how awful Daddy was, how selfish. I heard what they said. Daddy was just another incomplete, incompetent, insensitive man, and she was a wimp if she didn’t take him for all he was worth. Under their influence, Mom began ragging Daddy constantly. Never to his face, because she was afraid of him. She did it in private, to me.

I began to see Daddy in a very different light, one that made me resent him for what he was doing to us. His side of the story didn’t matter because he was the one who fractured our fairy tale.

Then Carolee got into this weird competition thing. If Daddy was gay, and dating a person of the same sex, then she would, too. God knows there were enough lesbians in the nonstop cotillion passing through our beautiful old house.

Only Mom didn’t get a Whitman. She didn’t get a rich handsome younger man who spoke foreign languages and wrote travel books.

She got Jerri. A possessive, alcoholic dyke who spent her life spinning the same ugly brown clay mug over and over on her potter’s wheel. I never could see what the attraction was. Mom was so pretty. Jerri was thirty years older, with short-cropped gray hair and false teeth that looked too big for her mouth. They met at one of the endless garage sales Mom and her friends were always throwing.

Their affair lasted about two years. Jerri was subtly abusive when sober, insanely jealous and violent when drunk. One night she hauled off and belted my mom across the face. It was true-blue black-and-blue physical abuse. One woman smacking another. I saw it with my own tw. . .