A month from today, on August 17, 2023, Julie and I will have been married 27 years. It’s been a good 27 years, full of laughter and love and, not least, dumb luck. We now and then say that we’ve been in a threesome with Mr. Dumb Luck since we met, which doesn’t always go over well with the people we tell it to, some of whom find joking about the sacred boundaries of marriage uncomfortable if not in bad taste.
But psychologists who write about deep relationships postulate that two people create a third body between them, a person just as real as they are, one with a separate personality, separate needs, separate ambitions, and a separate sense of humor. Sometimes that humor is in worse taste than anything Julie or I can come up with.
Mr. Dumb Luck is trans and polyamorist. Sometimes she’s Ms. Dumb Luck. Sometimes Dumb Luck insists on they as a pronoun, and I object that I didn’t go to all the trouble to learn English grammar and teach it for thirty years to see it subverted to sexual politics.
They ask me if I think there is no such thing as sexual politics. I say of course there’s such a thing as sexual politics, and they—by this time Julie has taken Mr. Dumb Luck’s side and I’m feeling ganged up on by an appropriately grammatical pronoun—seem to think this settles the matter.
I acquiesce, as I always do when the vote goes against me in the democracy of our marriage.
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I don’t take luck for granted. It’s gotten me where I am today, which is to say, in reasonably good health for a septuagenarian, with enough money to live well but not too well, with my wits still about me, and retaining the ability to maintain good cheer in the face of bad climate and political news.
I know that on a global scale, luck is a zero-sum game, and my good luck comes at high cost for less lucky people, some of them child slaves mining coltan in the Congo, or Ukrainian pensioners whose homes were destroyed by Russian artillery, or people melting down bales of plastic in Indian nurdle factories. The world economic system is a wealth-redistribution machine, one which often enough takes from the poor and gives to the rich.
Also less lucky: Victims of poor health care. Victims of bigotry. Victims of environmental pollution. Victims of bad educations. Victims of corrupt politicians. I’m not any of those, and I’m pretty sure it’s all Mr. Dumb Luck’s fault.
One thing I do know is that it’s not my fault. It isn’t my talent, skill, or hard work that has gotten me to where I am today. Julie’s talent, skill, and hard work have been factors, though. But from where I sit, it’s hard not to see those as luck, too.
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I’m on apocryphal ground here, but some years ago there was a disastrous Brahmin wedding in Mumbai, where a number of wedding guests, and the bride and groom, were electrocuted due to a wiring mistake. Celebration turned to tragedy, and a bunch of ragged onlookers, members of Mumbai’s Untouchables, started laughing at the wedding party, calling what had happened divine justice. The surviving members of the wedding party murdered the Untouchables, restoring the gods to their usual politics and the murdered to their rightful position in the universe.
You can get killed if the wrong people have bad luck. Laughing at them doesn’t help, but just witnessing their misfortune can get you in bad trouble.
The reason that Donald Trump has brought this country to the brink of civil war is because half the population sees his eventual downfall as the inevitable end to a life filled with—let me count to seven—Pride, Greed, Wrath, Envy, Lust, Gluttony, and Sloth.
The other half of the country believes in Luck to an extreme: you can commit all the Deadly Sins and still get reelected President. Their faith in Luck is stronger than faith in the Rule of Law, a Just God, Hard Work, Honest Sweat, Election Integrity, and Saving Your Money and Investing it Wisely. When you lose faith in all those things—and a lot of people have—Luck is what glitters in The Ashes of Hope.
Sorry about all the capital letters, but when we do have a civil war in this country, it will be religious in nature. At stake is the Order of the Cosmos: who sits at the right hand of God, who’s the equivalent of the Elohim and Seraphim and the other seven orders of Angels, who gets a harp and who sings hosannahs, and who has sinned and in which circle of Hell they get to spend Eternity.
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The Ancient Greeks spent a lot of time and effort detailing what happens to people who anger the gods. The worst thing you could do was to act like you were in control of your own fate. If you went to an oracle and were told what was going to happen, you didn’t dare try to change anything.
In the most famous example of calling divine excrement down on one’s own head, King Oedipus of Thebes was told by an oracle he would kill his father and marry his mother—and it wasn’t even prophecy because it had already happened. But Oedipus didn’t know that, and his efforts to avoid incest made an already bad family situation worse. A bunch of innocent people in Thebes died of the plague, Oedipus blinded himself, and his mother hung herself.
None of this would have happened if these people had had free will.
The Greeks didn’t believe in free will. They didn’t believe in luck. Theirs was a simpler world, run by entities who might not have been paragons of virtue, but who generally could be trusted not to make your life any worse than it already would be if you tithed the minimum at their temples.
Our world is more complicated. We believe in free will, at least to the extent that we can choose to resist or accept the good advice of Yahweh, Mohammed, Jesus, the Buddha. When things turn out well or badly, we can choose to take responsibility or assign it to somebody else. We also believe in luck, which means that we acknowledge that the universe occasionally hands you a winning lottery ticket. As psychic existences go, ours is messy and inconsistent and unpredictable.
Not many people worship the Greek gods anymore, but it doesn’t hurt to acknowledge they exist. Carl Jung said that in the absence of faith, the gods have become our diseases, which is a way of saying that you might not believe in Athena or Artemis or Hermes, but you’re damned well going to believe in luck whether you want to or not.
As for free will, there does seem to be room in our world to learn from experience and not make the same mistake twice.
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Mr. Dumb Luck is not my first third body. There were others, before I met Julie, when I was in other relationships. The third bodies thus created were not always as nice as the people they owed their existence to.
Some of them didn’t want to be there and announced it, loudly. Some of them were plain old bad luck. Some of them had resting unhappy face. Some of them were subtly self-destructive and over time clearly didn’t want the best for at least two of us. Some of them brought friends along. Threesomes became foursomes, fivesomes, and so on. It was hard to keep track of everyone, easy to mistake the person you were talking to for someone else, easy to mistake bad luck for good.
I’m grateful that I never had trouble seeing and talking to these third bodies. They were good conversationalists.
But you’re reading it here first. In a culture where you’re supposed to give up imaginary playmates by the time you’re five, you don’t want to advertise that you’re talking to people other people might not be able to see.
I did talk to them, and I did listen, for the most part. When I didn’t listen, things didn’t go well. There have been nice, intelligent, beautiful people in my life, but if the third bodies we created together said it wasn’t going to work out, that was enough to put the relationship into a downward spiral.
It wasn’t like being a slave to some demonic entity, or even being forced into a predetermined fate. It was closer to having a partner who is essential to an entire endeavor, who should be paid attention to. If they said something wasn’t going to work, it wasn’t going to work. If they were unhappy, the relationship was unhappy.
There had also been third bodies who resembled Mr. Dumb Luck but were flashier, dressed in loud plaid suits with blinking LED bow ties and diamond pinky rings. When intoxicated, they had promised fame and fortune, but hungover, they told me that fame and fortune weren’t a good fit for me.
“Fame and fortune? More like being enslaved to demonic entities,” they said, holding their aching heads. Because those third bodies had a whiff of the demonic themselves, I figured they knew what they were talking about.
Anyway, these folks, by intimating that what I planned to do with my life was not only wrong but disastrous, allowed me to finally find Julie in my 40s, and to finally meet the real Mr. Dumb Luck, and to find previously unknown varieties of happiness, at least one of which bore a startling resemblance to Julie.
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Julie is coming home today after picking apricots at her parents’ place. She’s been there for three days, and she’s coming back with fresh apricots for our neighbors and vacuum-sealed bags of apricot pie filling for us. The neighbors and I are trusting Mr. Dumb Luck to get her and the apricots home safely.
Yesterday and the day before, Mr. Dumb Luck and I went morel hunting. It’s the end of the season—the forest is drying out and its black mud has become black dust—but here and there, you can find big morels, gray-black and heavy, and over two days I managed to pick twenty pounds. Two lucky days in a row, and when I see Julie this evening, her presence—and a steak smothered in a green-peppercorn morel cream sauce—will make it a third.
But we’ll try not to push things. I’m exhausted from two long days wandering in a blackened and rocky landscape, and Julie’s tired from two days of standing on a ladder, picking fruit. If we request yet another lucky day, it will feature quiet contentment rather than a full bingo card. We’ll take Juno out to the Redfish Dog Beach, and if we throw a stick in the lake for her, she’ll refuse to retrieve it, because she went morel hunting with me and is exhausted too. We’ll sit in our beach chairs. We’ll share a picnic. Juno will lie beside us in the shade and will take dog treats from our hands as long as she doesn’t have to get up.
We’ll wonder if our relationship with Juno has created a third body that is a dog. Because there will be so many dogs around, we’ll decide that sort of thing happens a lot. We’ll wonder if third-body dogs are any better than Juno at fetching sticks.
All will be right with the world, as long as we can keep the world the size of Sawtooth Valley, and not too overrun with dogs and people.