I’d read, once, that hypnotism only works on the suggestible—those who are willing and ready to suspend disbelief, to focus at length and with wholehearted intensity on an alternate version of reality. Perhaps the men who preyed on these women were like any other criminals—hunters, adept at spotting those with the capacity to believe.
In the course of my double-life research, I came across only one other American woman known to have been secretly married to two men at once, and it had nothing to do with money.
The writer Ana?s Nin was forty-four, married to an investment banker named Hugo, when she met Rupert Pole in 1947. He was twenty-eight and film-star handsome, though his acting fell short of his looks. They met in a Manhattan elevator on their way to the same party, and when he got the impression Nin was divorced, she didn’t correct him.
Eight years after they met, Nin finally agreed to marry Pole. She lived in six-week stretches, swinging from New York to California, where Pole was now a forest ranger. She maintained her double life for the next eleven years, the truth recorded only in her diaries and what she called “the lie box.”
By 1966, Nin was achieving some fame, and both husbands were claiming royalties on their tax returns. Mostly, though, Nin sounded tired of the lies, so she chose to reveal the truth to the man she believed would stay: Pole. And he did. He even agreed to annul their marriage for the sake of her royalties. And years later, when cancer was ravaging Nin’s body, he shuttled her to doctor appointments, administered her injections, and dialed Hugo’s number to help her maintain the ruse of their marriage. When she died, Pole rented a small plane and released her ashes above a small cove near Santa Monica. Her diaries, all thirty-five thousand pages, were left to Pole, and he honored Nin’s wishes by publishing less censored versions of them over the years. When Hugo died, Pole scattered his ashes, too, above the cove. Then Pole returned to the home he’d built for himself and the woman he’d loved, in spite of it all.
Nin was guilty of the same crimes as the men I’d read about—manipulation of trust, exploitation of love, theft of dignity—but told in her own words, her story took on a kind of mythology, even tragedy. Nin herself was like the lie box she kept, the dutiful sole record keeper of what must have been an extraordinarily lonely inner life, pressed like a dried flower between the two she’d lived. Ultimately, Nin had wanted to tell her story, even if it was after her death.
I hoped Dolores Rivera wouldn’t want to wait that long.
Online White Pages spit out nine Dolores Riveras, each with a helpful list of family members. It was easy to find the Dolores related to Gabriel and Mateo Rivera, but I’d need a premium membership to unlock her phone number and address. Instead, I tried a property records search.
One result.
I plugged the address into Google Maps and switched to Street View: the house was one story, clean white brick with a dark shingled roof and extravagant flowering hedges encircling the exterior. A silver Volvo was parked in the semicircular driveway; the license plate was blurred, with no discernible bumper stickers to indicate the driver’s age or interests. Still, unless Dolores rented or owned a house under a different name, it seemed promising. Besides, hadn’t there been some Facebook comment about her “always watering her jungle”? Maybe I was reaching, but those hedges might fit the bill.
I navigated up and down the street, splashed with shadows from mature trees, brick mailboxes, and the occasional garbage can that hadn’t been brought inside yet, or perhaps these were the first to be taken out for the next day’s pickup. I circled the house from all angles. It almost seemed possible to force open the front door with the heat of my gaze, the pressure of my finger.
I felt I was closing in.
It was hard to breathe through the early July humidity as I headed out to the food park. The cleaning crew was back at the cobalt midcentury modern duplex next door, an Airbnb property rented for $150 most nights and $500 during ACL or South By—stupid, unimaginable money. The duplex had gone up quickly last year after the original house, a falling-apart 1950s bungalow like ours, had been razed.
I’d fallen in love with Austin immediately after dragging my two suitcases to my fifth-floor dorm in the Castilian for my freshman year at UT. Through the small windows, the smells of weed and patchouli and Madam Mam’s Thai floated from the Drag below. Austin could almost still be called weird back then. There had been Leslie, riding his bicycle downtown dressed only in a leopard thong and stiletto sandals. Racing turtles at Little Woodrow’s or playing chickenshit bingo at the Little Longhorn Saloon, not because some Austin listicle told you to, but because you’d heard about it from a longtime local, already a dying breed.
The East Side, where Duke and I lived, used to be a mostly Black and Latino neighborhood, with families who’d been here for generations. Even thirteen years ago, though, you could see the cranes. The skeletons of high-rises and hotels, the way modest streets would eventually be thrust into shadow by behemoth mixed-use condo developments. Our neighbors now were architects and coders, bar owners and tech start-up CEOs, transplants from San Francisco, Portland, Seattle, New York. Duke and I were part of the gentrification, I knew—two white thirtysomethings paying ridiculous rent for a house some other white person, far richer than us, had bought from its original residents, likely pushed out by rising property taxes. But we’d been in Austin for nearly half our lives, and I liked to think we were among those clinging to something original, trying to keep it from being destroyed.
At the food park, diners were red-faced and cheerful as they drank Shiners or rosé from plastic cups, hairlines damp despite the whirring efforts of four black fans. There were only three trucks, including Duke’s BBQ, a repurposed Airstream painted with abstract cows and pigs floating in a neon sky. I had sprayed and lacquered the picnic tables candy-apple red, imagining how they’d look in Duke’s Instagram photos. I realized afterward that I’d inadvertently re-created the scene of our first date.
Duke had been in culinary school when a mutual friend had set us up five years ago. He offered to make me dinner at his apartment. Did I have any dietary restrictions? How did I feel about pork belly? But two-thirds of murdered women are killed by men they know—why make it easier? Instead, I suggested the South Austin Trailer Park and Eatery.
Over Torchy’s Tacos at a long red picnic table, Duke told me he wanted to open a restaurant one day. “With a name like Duke, I was destined for barbecue,” he joked. He told me that making brisket was both a science and an art. There was a language to it: the point and the flat, the grade and the wrap. A whole culture around how to trim the meat, whether to wrap it with foil or peach butcher paper, how to manage the stall, what to use as the base wood. “Making brisket is an act of love,” he said. “When it’s good, when it’s real, there’s nothing better.” I couldn’t believe there was a man alive who would say the word love on a first date, even if he was talking about meat.
I had fallen for Duke quickly. Or no—not fallen. Falling sounds too careless and violent, scraped knees and jarred bones. I came to love him quickly. He was easy to love, because he was easy to trust. He answered every question I asked him, from how many women he’d slept with to where he wanted to be in five years. If he liked something, he said it. If he didn’t like something, he said that, too. If he had a secret self hidden within, it was so well concealed that even he didn’t know about it.
I was behind a group of men in line, able to watch Duke for a few moments before he noticed me. He was attentive, with spring-coiled energy and a ready laugh, an ability to forge easy connections with people that I envied but also wasn’t sure I wanted for myself. It was safer to keep a distance.