We took the subway to Cambridge. 'It's sort of like an underground Strassenbahn,' I explained, but Utch wasn't interested in the subway. She sat tensely, the wrinkled picture of Mrs Kennedy in her lap. She had thrown away the magazine.
In Harvard Square we walked past a lot of Kennedy mourners. Utch stared at everything but she saw nothing. I talked about my mother and father. If the suitcases hadn't been so heavy, we would have walked the long way home to Brown Street; as it was, we took a cab. I talked on and on, but Utch said, 'You shouldn't make jokes about your mother.'
Mother was at the door, holding the same damn picture of Mrs Kennedy that Utch had. It may have been one of those false sororities of identifying yourself with another person; it works out all right because you never find out that you meant wholly different things by whatever it was that united you.
'Oh, you've really gone and done it!' my mother cried to me and opened her arms to Utch.
Utch ran right to her and cried against her. My mother was surprised; it had been years since anyone had cried all over her like that. 'Go see your father,' Mother told me. Utch's crying appeared inconsolable. 'What's her name?' Mother whispered, rocking Utch in her arms.
'Utchka,' I said.
'Oh, that's a nice name,' Mother crooned, rolling her eyes. 'Utchka?' she said, as if she were humoring a baby. 'Utchka, Utchka.'
I didn't see my wife again for hours; my mother kept her hidden from my father and me. Occasionally she would appear to offer pronouncements, such as, 'When I think of what happened to that poor child's mother ...' or, 'She's a remarkable young woman, and I don't know what you've done to deserve her.'
I sat with my father, who explained to me everything that would happen to the country in the next ten years because of Kennedy's assassination, and everything that was going to happen regardless of the assassination. The distinction confused me.
Utch was restored to me at dinner; whatever had accumulated to unbalance her appeared to be in control. She was relaxed, alluring and mischievous with my father, who said to me, 'I think you got a good one. Jesus, when your mother was running in and out earlier I had the impression that you'd brought home some war waif, some woman of catastrophe.' When the old bore finally stopped muttering the house was asleep.
I looked out on the dark sidewalk. I think I must have been looking for the man with the hole in his cheek, to see if he was checking up on me. But history takes time; my marriage was new, I would not see him for a while.
The next morning my father asked, 'How's that stupid Brueghel book coming?'
'Well, it never got off the ground,' I admitted.
'Good for it,' he said.
'I've been thinking of another one,' I said. 'It's about peasants.' Unknown to us both at the time, this idea would become my third historical novel, my book about Andreas Hofer, the hero of the Tyrol.
'Please don't tell me about it,' my father said. 'I feel like flattering you; your taste in women is admirable. I think it exceeds your literary taste. The Fight Between Carnival and Lent, indeed!' he scoffed. 'Well, it looks like Lent lost. That girl is Carnival through and through! If I ever saw a less Lenten figure, I do not recall it. Bravo, Carnival!' he cheered. The old lecher.
But he was right, Utch was a Carnival character all the way.
For example, how she slept. She did not curl tight and protect herself; she sprawled. If you wanted to cuddle against her, she didn't mind, but she herself was not one to cuddle. Edith slept like a cat - contained, a fortress, snug against you. Utch spread herself out as if she were trying to dry in the sun. When she lay on her back, she didn't seem to notice where the covers were, and she lay on her stomach like a swimmer frozen at the instant of the breaststroke kick. On her side she lay like the profile of a hurdler. In the middle of the night she would often lash an arm out and swat the bedside lamp off the night table or bash the alarm clock across the room.
I attempted to have humorous conversations with Severin about Utch's flamboyant shapes asleep. 'It's obviously a kind of violent reaction,' I surmised, 'no doubt a rejection of being cramped inside the cow.'
'I sleep that way myself,' he said seriously, and that was that.
Edith and I were the snugglers; we tucked ourselves up against each other, neat and small. We often joked about Severin's and Utch's loose sprawls, trying to imagine them fitting on a bed.
'That's obviously why they went to the wrestling room,' I said to Edith. 'It's the biggest bed in town.'
Edith sat up suddenly and turned on the light. I blinked. 'What did you say?' she asked. Her voice was oddly dead. I had never seen her face look ugly before; perhaps it was the sudden, harsh light.
'He took her to the wrestling room,' I said. 'Last week, when we thought they were acting so strange? They went to the wrestling room.' Edith shivered and hugged herself; she looked as if she was going to be sick. 'I thought Severin told you everything,' I said. 'What's wrong? Doesn't it suit them? Can't you just see them rolling around on the mats?'
Edith swung her legs off the bed, stood up and lit a cigarette. She clutched her fists against her thighs; I had never noticed how thin she was; the veins at her wrists and on the backs of her hands stood out. 'Edith?' I asked. 'What's wrong with them going to the wrestling room?'
'He knows what's wrong!' she wailed awfully; she seemed so unaware of her own body that I felt ashamed to be looking at her. She paced back and forth beside the bed. 'How could he do that!' she cried. 'He must have known how he'd hurt me.' I didn't understand; I got out of bed and went to her, but she made a startled awkward move back to the bed and drew up the bedcovers to hide herself.
'Go home, please,' she whispered. 'Just go home. I want to be alone.'
'Edith, you have to talk to me,' I said. 'I don't know what's wrong.'
'It's where he used to take Audrey Cannon!' she screamed.
'Who? What?'
'Ask him!' she yelled at me. 'Go on! Please get out, go home. Please!'
I stumbled out in the hall, dressed on the stairs, found my car keys and drove home. I heard her lock the bedroom door behind me. There is nothing so confusing as finding out that you don't know someone you thought you knew.
Severin's car was parked in my driveway. At least they weren't at the wrestling room again. As I crossed the sidewalk, I heard Utch's German song. It was her coming song, but it was going on longer than usual. Through the walls of my house, through the shut windows, I heard my wife coming. What a voyeur's treat our sidewalk was. Something was knocked over, and Severin snorted like a certain hooved species. Utch was a soprano, though I'd never known it; I had not heard her sing quite that way.
I looked down the dark street, imagining the crude conversation I could have with a sudden passer-by. 'Boy, someone's really getting it in there,' he'd say.
'Sure is,' I'd say, and we'd listen.
'Boy! She goes on and on!' he'd say.
'Sure does.'
'Some guy sure has a lively one,' he'd say, the envy showing on his streetlit face. 'That guy must have some wang on him.'
And I'd say, 'Oh that's a lot of bullshit, an old myth. It's got nothing to do with your wang.'
And he'd listen to Utch's highest aria and say, 'Oh yeah? If it's not a wang making that happen, there's somebody who knows something I don't.'
Finally Utch came. I heard her broken voice and saw a faint light flicker in our bedroom. No doubt their breathing had blown the candle out. I thought of the children and how scared they'd be if they ever woke up to that sound. I thought of what a long time it had been since I had thought of the children. And down the dark street I looked for my accuser, the man with the hole in his cheek. 'I am hearing that,' he'd say. How had he put it? I am feeling my pistol cock, I am feeling it in my lungs. It seemed like a good time for him to come save Utch. I would have hung my head if I'd seen him; I felt I had let her get into trouble though I didn't exactly know what kind.
I closed the door of my house loudly, opened the closet and rattled th
e coat hangers, though I had no coat to hang up. Severin surprised me; he sprang into the living room naked, ready to maul the housebreaker. 'It's just me, for Christ's sake,' I said. His wang, I was relieved to see, looked more or less like anyone else's. Utch came up behind him and handed him his pants; she'd already slipped into her robe. I guess they could tell something was wrong by the way I looked.
'Edith's upset,' I said. 'It's probably my fault. I told her that you two had gone to the wrestling room.' Severin shut his eyes; Utch touched his shoulder. 'Well, no one told me not to tell her,' I said. They just stood there, Severin with his eyes shut and Utch looking at him. It was clear that they both knew what Edith was upset about. I was angry that I was the only one in the dark. 'Who's Audrey Cannon?' I asked angrily. Utch took her hand from Severin's shoulder and sat down on the couch. 'Come on, Severin,' I said. 'You used to take her to the wrestling room, too.' I may have sounded bold but when I looked at Utch, I got scared. She was looking at me with the kind of pity which could only be knowledge. She was telling me that I didn't really want to know, but I asked anyway: 'Who is Audrey Cannon?'
8
The Wrestling-Room Lover
IN SEPTEMBER THE wrestlers who didn't play football or soccer ran laps at the stadium track or plodded through the leaves on the cross-country course. Later they would have plenty of laps to run on the board track in the old cage; as long as the weather stayed warm, they ran outdoors. They were not all cut in the curious mold of George James Bender.
They played basketball together - funny, stumpy-looking figures bungling the ball, missing the basket cleanly, jarring the backboard. Two of them took up handball until one of them ran into the wall. Other sports appeared to frustrate and bore them, but by October they took on many restless sports, built their wind and lost some weight - and when they'd finished exercising they'd make for the wrestling room, turn up the thermostat and 'roll around'.
Unless they'd been wrestling through the summer months - and only the Benders of the world did so - Severin did not allow them to actually wrestle. It was too early, he said; they weren't in shape. They cooperated, putting each other through moves and holds at half-speed. Occasionally they got playful and brief flurries of real combat would erupt, but for the most part, they just drilled. They also sat on the soft mats, with their backs against the padded walls, letting the temperature rise to eighty-five, ninety, ninety-five, moving around just enough to keep loose.
Anyone seeing them in the wrestling room would have thought they were a parody team miming wrestlers, moving with an exaggerated gentleness antithetical to their purpose. They lumbered and rolled and carried each other around in an almost elderly fashion. Some of them, tired from running in the woods or straining against the weight-lifting contraptions, actually slept. They came to this hothouse wearing double layers of sweatsuits with towels around their heads, and even as they slept they kept a sweat running. Tight against the wall and in the corners of the room where they would not accidentally be rolled on, they lay in mounds like bears.
Severin Winter, their coach and German professor, came by the wrestling room just to look in on them - like a father observing his children in some incubator phase. He did not really believe that these hibernating metabolisms represented life as he knew it; not yet. He appeared almost embarrassed for his wrestlers, as if, in the shape they were in, there was nothing he could offer them but hope and a few words to enhance their German vocabularies. (At this time of year, he did hold occasional German classes in the wrestling room.)
But in the pre-season before Bender was on his team - the same pre-season before he and Edith knew us - Severin was low on hope. 'I knew he was low on hope,' Edith told me, 'because he talked a lot about going back to live in Vienna. That's a low-on-hope sign with him.'
'No, no,' Severin disagreed. 'First it was the insomnia. It all started with the insomnia.'
I could have told him that insomnia after eight years of marriage is very little trouble. If I'd known him then, I could have recommended some remedies less drastic than the one he chose. (When my typist, the History Department's secretary, was typing the manuscript of my third historical novel, I couldn't sleep and knew I wouldn't until it was done. I found that the only place I could sleep was in her tiny apartment while listening to her typing new pages. Her name was Miss Ronquist. I told Utch I was using the department's big office typewriter to type the manuscript myself, and that the only time I could use the typewriter was at night, when the office was closed. It was impossible to reach me by phone because the university switchboard shut off all calls after midnight. It took a long time to type that manuscript. Miss Ronquist was tired all the time and could manage only about five pages a night. Slow for a typist, but she found other ways to help me sleep. And when the book was finished, I went home and slept very well with Utch. Nothing was amiss; no one was upset.)
But Severin was inexperienced with insomnia, and his reaction was typically unreasonable. You can tell a lot about someone by how he deals with insomnia. My reaction - to insomnia and to life in general - is to give in. My best-trained senses are passive; my favorite word is yield. But Severin Winter would not yield to anything, and when he had insomnia, he fought it.
It began one night when he was lying awake beside Edith after they'd made love. She was drowsy, but he lay there like an overcharging battery. 'I have nothing to do,' he announced and got out of bed.
'Where are you going?' Edith asked.
'I can't sleep.'
'Well, read something,' Edith said. 'The light doesn't bother me.'
'There's nothing I want to read right now.'
'Well, write something and then read that.'
'You're the writer,' he said. 'One's enough.'
'Why don't you wait until I fall asleep,' Edith said, 'and then very gently see if you can make love to me again without waking me up.'
'I tried that last night.'
'You did?' said Edith. 'What happened?'
'You didn't wake up,' he said. He put on his running shorts and track shoes, then stood there as if he didn't know what to do next. 'I'm going to ride the bicycle around,' he decided. 'That will make me tired.'
'It's after midnight,' said Edith, 'and you don't have a light on the bike.'
'I can see the cars coming. Or I can hear them if they're sneaking around with their lights off.'
'Why would they be doing that?' Edith asked.
'I don't know!' he shouted. 'Why am I doing this?'
'I don't know!' Edith confessed. I'm the writer, she thought. I should have his energy, I should be as crazy.
But I don't think either of them really understood it. When I told Severin that I sympathized with his insomnia, he told me that I understood nothing. 'I'm not like you,' he said. 'I was simply unable to sleep. I went out to ride my bike. That's how it started.'
It was a warm early fall night. He rode through the sleeping suburbs, his racing bicycle going tzik-tzik past all the people safely in bed. He passed only a few lighted windows and these he pedaled by slowly, but he was rarely able to see anything. He was glad he didn't have a light; it made his journey more secretive. In town he held to the sidewalks; in the country, he could hear and see the occasional cars coming and simply get off the road. That first night he rode for miles - all around the campus, out of town and back in. It was almost dawn when he unlocked the gym and carried his bike into the locker room. He slipped into a wrestling robe, went up to the wrestling room, lay down on the great warm mat and slept until the sun through the skylight woke him. He took a sauna, swam and rode home in time to bring Edith her breakfast in bed.
'It was marvelous!' he told her. 'Just what I needed.'
But that didn't take care of it. A few nights later he was up pacing the house again. Outside, lurking near the garden shed, his white racing bicycle glowed in the moonlight like a ghostly thin dog. 'It's waiting for me,' he told Edith. Soon he was out riding three or four nights a week. At first, like a lot of things with Sev
erin, he turned his habit into an endurance feat. He tested himself for distance, striking out for the farthest towns and making it back before first light. Then he timed himself for forty-mile jaunts. But always, before dawn, he would catch an hour's deep sleep in the wrestling room.
Edith didn't object. He made love to her before setting out and was back in the house before she was awake; fresh from a sauna and a swim, he'd often wake her nicely by making love to her again. One night a week his loss of sleep would crash down on him and he'd fall into a stupor after supper and drowse about the house until the middle of the next day. But that was merely his body knowing what it needed.
To hear him tell it, nothing was wrong until the first night he rode past the old cage, after midnight, and saw the light on in the wrestling room. At first he thought it was the watchman's error, even though he saw an unfamiliar car. Severin Winter was on his way to another county and thought he'd see about the light when he visited the wrestling room later for his dawn nap. But he hadn't ridden much further when the light began to bother him and he turned back. Whoever was in the wrestling room after midnight would certainly be up to something nonathletic. He imagined the fun of catching a judo couple copulating on the mat, their stupid pajamalike costumes wildly abandoned.
He was going to go straight to the room, but then he thought he might have more authority if he dressed for the part he was about to play, so he suited up in full wrestling gear. As he made his stealthy way to the tunnel, he reminded himself to give the watchman a piece of his mind. Not even faculty had permission to be in the gym after 10 p.m., and since Severin was the only person in the Athletic Department who ever used the facilities at such odd hours, he probably felt his monopoly was threatened.