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  In fact, she met Bronson at a 12 Step meeting on Fairfax and Highland—during someone else’s share, he had brazenly reached under the table to hold and still her ever-fidgeting hands. Mary was stunned to find that she did not pull back and slap away this super-forward dude, but rather watched, as if from a sweet remove, her hand stop shaking, calmed in his large, warm palm. She kept it there for the rest of the share. They put a couple rumpled singles in the plate, skipped the after-meeting coffee klatch, and thirteenth-stepped it straight to bed.

  In the first iteration of their relationship, they had bonded over the similarity of their addiction’s origin, to deal with the pain from his stunts and her street-performing, sword-swallowing life. He saw her as a female mirror to himself. Marveling at her flexibility and strength, he taught her the fundamentals—how to shoot, how to ride a motorcycle, how to fall, how to take a hit—and got her into stunt work. She already knew how to fight. She was a natural. Mary loved the thrill of the job, the danger, and the money. And even after they drifted apart, Mary had a legit, taxable career if she wanted it. Bronson always dug her out-of-the-box mentality and kindred, boundaryless spirit, and suspected that their story together was somehow not done.

  More than a decade later, when Bronson was making the move to the desert, he tracked Mary down out of the blue and asked if she’d come homestead with his wife, Jackie, and him and make it a kind of commune/Mormon kibbutz. Mary had become a single mom just months earlier. Her first response to his proposal was to say, “I’m pretty much gay these days.”

  To which he replied, “A sword-swallowing dyke … what a waste.”

  At the time Bronson reconnected with her, she was no longer doing much stunt work because the irregularity of the gigs and long hours were going to prove impossible without a partner or child care. Fed up with busking, bartending, and temp work, a soul-sucking combo that was barely break-even with babysitting, she thought—Why the fuck not? She was Bronson’s second believer.

  “Okay, Bro’,” she’d said, “but before I marry you, I have to meet your wife. She cute? And if I find out you’re going for the Manson family starter kit, I will fuck you up.” She met Jackie and they hit it off surprisingly well. Bronson could see the forms of his new existence taking shape, recombining his past with his present time. As Jackie’s twins, Pearl and Deuce, took turns holding Mary’s infant girl, Beautiful, Mary married Bronson. Both bride and groom wore black tuxedos.

  Raised Catholic in Elizabeth by the Castiligiones, but having rebelled mightily and lived without rules and regimen for her adult life, Mary was relieved by the return to structure and coherence that the familiarity of the Christian/Mormon faith gave her. If Bronson’s entry to salvation was this angry rage for order, Mary warmed to a simpler, less volatile thing, more like a schedule, a to-do list that gave shape to her formless days. If pressed, she probably thought most of the specifics of the origin stories that she had acquainted herself with and the Joseph Smith legend itself were bullshit, but the vector, the aspiration, she felt was true—and the charity, other-centeredness, and responsibility sat well with her. She had only ever lived for herself and the moment, and those were shifting sands. That changed when she became a mother and Bronson came back for her, changed more deeply still within the desert, within the family. Religion and family duty had the same calming effect on her soul, circumscribing its urge to fidget and wander, that Bronson’s hand had upon hers years ago. She still had her moments of untethered panic here and there, but she didn’t miss the boardwalk.

  The third of the sister wives, Yalulah Ballou, was born back east to Yankee money and had gone to ersatz pastoral Putney for high school in Vermont and preppy Bennington for college, where she studied English and was an editor on the Bennington Review. After graduation, she headed west, like Fitzgerald and Faulkner before her, hoping to write for movies or television. She envisioned for herself a wilder, more improvised existence than the blue-blood blueprint her parents had boozily outlined for her. Unable to sell anything quickly, she ended up taking a job as an on-set script supervisor for a television show to learn how the sausage was made and to feel closer to the action than she would sitting in front of a blinking cursor all day, checking and rechecking her paltry word count in the house her parents had bought for her in Los Feliz.

  The bone-dry, clerical nature of the job chafed against Yalulah’s self-conception of herself as an artist. She was miserable all day making sure hungover actors and actresses had regurgitated the exact ifs, ands, or buts of the hungover hack writers. If this was the road not taken, she’d rather not take this road. That’s when she met Bronson, who was working on the Paramount lot at the same time. With her family stretching back to the Mayflower and her identity forged in books and narrative structure, she saw the ever-tan stuntman as a real-life cowboy and rule breaker, a second-act complication, a Springsteen B side incarnate. Neither plain nor pretty, Yalulah Ballou was dubbed “jolie laide” by one of her Francophile aunts, and “as angular and unmarriable as a Picasso” by another. She was quick to flush red in impatience and had a tendency to scare handsome men away with her biting wit, but not Bronson. He cherished that anger, and her sharp tongue, and he found her off-kilter looks exotic amid all the symmetrical, plastic Hollywood beauties. He christened her “Yaya,” after the Stones’ Get Yer Ya-Ya’s Out.

  Yaya and Bronson would meet in the corners of the cavernous soundstages and steal thirty lunchtime minutes making out in the semidarkness, secluded by scrims and green screens as the hammers hammered on nearby sets and the radios of the construction crews both covered and inspired the sounds of their congress. They sought out sets that weren’t being used or were tucked away from the action for the moment, made quick, quiet love in roofless living rooms that had fake sinks with no pipes, and walls that could separate and fly away on thick metal cables—almost playing house where movie stars played house.

  The Scripty and the Stuntman—she began to think it was a good screenplay idea, calling it Stages of Love—how the two humble, below-the-line main characters would appear to make romance around the world and in dozens of exotic homes, hotels, and vistas overlooking (courtesy of giant high-definition backdrop photographs) oceans, mountains, the New York City skyline—without ever leaving the one soundstage off Melrose Avenue—a metaphor of change without change, or the emptiness of wealth, or the thinness of identity, or something or other. And then she realized that she’d never write it and maybe that was for the best, and maybe she was just falling in love.

  But they had no commitment. They weren’t boyfriend and girlfriend. They were just fuck buddies, so Yalulah found herself way sadder than she’d ever expected when Bronson said he was quitting the life and moving to the desert with two other women. Yalulah shocked herself by asking Bronson if she could follow him. He smiled and said, “Yes, if you become my third wife.” Her extended family back east, stretching from Providence to Boston, threw up their Brahmin hands. Her mother’s scarlet heart was broken and her father humiliated. But then again, she came from one of those old, unfathomably wealthy Wasp families with seven kids that seemed almost engineered numerically to withstand and even revel in one or two of their offspring veering colorfully and tragically from the law offices and charity boards onto a wacky, decadent path. Like a Doris Duke or an Edie Sedgwick. Though it may still be whispered about her parents, the Ballous of Providence, salaciously, that they had a “daughter in a Hollywood sex cult, and worse, a Mahhhmin…” Yaya hadn’t heard from them in more than ten years. She drifted in a low-level state of alert that they might try to find her and “deprogram” her.

  But, as the years slid by, that humming dread and paranoia receded to a duller and ever more distant drone. She didn’t miss them. Or LA. Or trying to write. Now, instead of supervising a script for a half-hour sitcom, she had four children of her own with Bronson and six more of an extended family to ride herd on. Regret was a luxury she had no time for, and was not spiraled in her Yankee DNA anyhoo. If she we
re not the writer she thought she would be, she would be a mother to writers, artists, and revolutionaries. Honestly, the hardest thing had been giving up Starbucks.

  As her physical passion with Bronson mellowed over the years and the pregnancies, she had been drawn to Mary, and the two had become lovers. For a heady time, the three of them shared not only a bed, but a vertiginous, triangulated passion. After Jackie’s death, Mary and Bronson even rekindled a physical connection through Yalulah for a while, but soon that, too, receded.

  Yalulah found herself, with Bronson’s sidelong blessing, falling in love with Mary. He had been a jealous man once upon a time, had knocked out the stray eager suitor of former girlfriends when he used to drink, but since he no longer felt incomplete, he no longer felt threatened. This mellowing didn’t happen overnight. When he first realized that Mary and Yalulah had fallen in love separately from him, he spent many a night sulking horizontally between the two women, a mopey, forbidding, cock-blocking presence. Or he might brattily, sighingly make a show of leaving the marriage bed to sleep alone away from them, taking his pillow with him. He thought about forbidding them with scripture. He thought about leaving them or kicking them back out into the world. What did it say about him, as a man, that this type of love would flourish apart from him? He asked himself and his God questions like that over and over, until the answer came back in silence: nothing at all, not a damn thing. It was love, and all love was good.

  Bronson’s natural and potent, sexually fueled anger lived on, but was better suited to other midlife combatants, like his mano a mano with God. And Bronson was no fool. He knew Mary’s transgressive, sensual power and her playful shine. He loved both Mary and Yaya, and loved that they loved each other. They were bodies and souls. They would have their ebbs and flows. They would have their seasons. They would wax and wane all three together, naturally, in elliptical orbits, an eternal, inviolate marriage of true minds. They had met through him; they had found their love for each other through loving him. Through Mary to Jesus, as the cult of the Virgin goes, and through Bronson to Mary and Yaya in Agadda da Vida. He was an invisible presence in their love. It was a human trinity as mystical, disparate, and intertwined as the Holy Trinity.

  Yaya taught all her children to read by the age of three. She shared the literature and history duties of the school with Bronson, in addition to yoga and meditation. Today, Yalulah was teaching the younger kids My Father’s Dragon by Ruth Gannett, and Randall Jarrell’s The Bat-Poet—with possible excursions into Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans, Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, and Allen Ginsberg’s Howl. The history lesson supervised by Bronson in an hour or so would be a hagiography of Eugene V. Debs. Philosophy today would be Lao-Tze, René Girard, and Nietzsche. The school day always culminated in a reading from the Pearl of Great Price (Smith, Abraham, and Moses) or the Old Testament.

  Yalulah moved to teaching the teenagers from William Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, a late eighteenth-century revolutionary text she had turned Bronson on to when they first got together, when she was still entertaining Pygmalion/Sam Shepard fantasies of educating her as yet unlettered cowboy—another screenplay scenario that had never been, and, God willing, never would be written. Blake, an uncanny genius, both simple and mysterious, worked equally as well for older and younger kids.

  She asked Deuce, Jackie’s boy, to read aloud the more than two-hundred-year-old words. The young man, tall and handsome though still lanky and gangly as a daddy longlegs, read: “Man has no Body distinct from his Soul; for that call’d Body is a portion of Soul; discern’d by the five Senses, the chief inlets of Soul in this age. Energy is the only life, and is from the Body; and Reason is the bound or outward circumference of Energy. Energy is Eternal Delight…”

  “Amen,” called out Bronson. Addressing the younger kids clustered around a finger-painting area, “‘Energy is eternal delight,’ says the bard. What are the five senses?”

  The children stirred happily and looked up at the ceiling, thinking. Little Big Al said, “Sight, smell, taste, touch, sound…”

  “Well done.”

  “And farts,” giggled Joseph, the five-year-old boy.

  “Farts isn’t a sense,” said Lovina Love, the six-year-old girl.

  “Farts aren’t a sense. That would come under the rubric of smell and sound,” Beautiful offered helpfully.

  “And taste! Sometimes!” Little Joe challenged.

  “Ooof, he’s got a point, Beautiful. The boy’s poots transcend even Blake’s genius to classify.” Bronson laughed. “That’s six, the sixth sense has been discovered by Little Joe Powers.”

  “What does Blake mean?” Yalulah asked, steering them back to the text.

  “He means that God is energy,” Deuce answered. “And the Soul of man is like a little piece of God cut off from God and surrounded by a wall called Reason.”

  “So how, then, if we are cut off by our reasoning minds, to come to know God?” asked Bronson.

  “Through Faith,” Deuce replied.

  “Like Joseph Smith said,” Beautiful spoke from memory, “‘There is no such thing as immaterial matter. All spirit is matter, but it is more fine or pure, and can only be discerned by purer eyes. We cannot see it, but when our bodies are purified, we shall see that it is all matter.’”

  “Yes,” affirmed Bronson. “All spirit is matter. Well done, Beaut’.”

  “Maybe,” said Yalulah.

  Bronson furrowed his brow and looked at her quizzically. Because Bronson’s grasp of the greats was akin to that of a precocious high schooler or a college freshman, he would more often than not defer to Yaya in literary matters. Autodidact that he was, he had come to the great books of the world so late that he was nearly blinded by his own youthful enthusiasm and struggled not to swallow them whole and be swallowed by them. Even though he himself was middle-aged, his academic mind was still, and perhaps forever would be, in the honeymoon phase of his relationship with books. Yaya, on the other hand, had grown up a reader, attended the finest schools, was to the manor born. Her enthusiasm was still alive, for sure, and she let it come through for the kids, but it was tempered by years of mental sedimentation and familiarity.

  Pearl, Deuce’s twin sister, who was supervising a music session with Mother Mary for the younger ones, interrupted the “Hey Jude” sing-along to call out from across the classroom.

  “The body,” she said. Without missing a beat, she jumped seamlessly back into the Na Na Na Na’s of the “Jude” chorus. Pearl, along with Deuce, the only child here who remembered the outside world, had taken piano lessons when very young. Bronson’s worldview that America had gone hopelessly wrong after the ’60s was mirrored in his musical and history curriculum. So, like Plato, who insisted poets be banned from his perfect Republic, Bronson, the architect of a perfected Mormon society and under the sway of his first wife, Jackie, who was naturally a hard-liner, had wanted to ban all music from his Republic of Agadda da Vida. “The Amish have no music,” he said, “and they’re fine.”

  Once Bronson had overheard Yalulah singing “Wild Horses” as a bedtime lullaby to one of the kids, and later that evening, in the marriage bed, had admonished her. He liked the song too, it wasn’t that, it’s the principle, he argued, a song could be a Trojan horse of mental infection, and the Rolling Stones did not exist. “I am the immune system,” he said. Yalulah was unconvinced of Jagger’s danger, but felt that maybe this was not the battlefield to die on. She did not persist.

  But Mother Mary, a music lover, had patiently negotiated with him. And it was clear to her from an early age that Jackie’s Pearl had a gift. She would often hear the young girl humming beautiful melodies of her own making. Bronson called them “wordless hymns.” After Jackie’s death, Mary got Bronson to allow Mozart, Brahms, and Bach into Agadda da Vida. And after months of running arguments and Yalulah’s backing, the Fab Four were admitted to the kingdom. Bronson even got with the program and returned from one trip to civilization with a
n old mono phonograph from the prop room of some period film. Bronson also managed to lift an old upright piano from a Fox prop warehouse, found a few pawnshop guitars, some yellowing Mel Bay guitar books, and drumsticks for plastic buckets. The kids taught themselves how to play and then taught one another. One morning, Mary walked into the living room to hear Pearl playing the guitar line to “Blackbird” perfectly. Making music became their entertainment. They weren’t the Jacksons, they wouldn’t scare the Osmonds, or the Partridge Family; hell, they weren’t even the Cowsills, but they had fun.

  “The body,” Pearl repeated, a little louder. Bronson turned in Pearl’s direction like he’d been startled by a loud noise, but then covered that start with a slightly embarrassed smile. “The body, huh?” he mused.

  Mary watched their eyes meet, could see the connection between them, tense like the ropes that join climbers to one another on a steep mountain. “What do you mean by ‘the body’?” Mary’s tweenage daughter, Beautiful, asked.

  Beautiful’s father had been a male model that Mary had impressed with her muscular stuntwoman legs and sword-swallowing skills on the Venice Boardwalk one afternoon so many moons ago. “Mr. Beautiful,” as Mary dubbed him, had hung around her like a stray puppy on the boardwalk for a couple days conspicuously dropping twenty-dollar bills in her sword case as she juggled live chain saws. Then he continued to linger for a couple months doing print work, repainting Mary’s run-down surf-ghetto beach pad, and making love to her before moving to Vancouver, B.C., to pursue acting.

  He was long gone before Mary began to show and swell. Mary had once known Mr. Beautiful’s real name, but had long forgotten it. He might’ve made it big in the movies, he was charismatic and ambitious, she wouldn’t know. Mr. Beautiful knew nothing of his kid’s existence, and the child knew nothing of his save the name Mary had bestowed upon her. For all practical purposes, the young girl was a miracle born of a Venice Virgin Mary, and as far as Mary was concerned, that’s exactly what Beautiful was.