The 158-Pound Marriage

  'I see Fiordiligi!' Jack said. 'And Dorabella!' Bart shrieked.

  'Open it!' Utch shouted, but her laughter chilled me.

  When the kids were in bed, Utch said, 'I'm not going to break down.'

  'Damn them, anyway,' I said. 'They've always called all the shots.'

  'Oh, now it's "them", is it?' Utch asked. Then she took my hand and said, 'No, we'll all still be friends, won't we?'

  'After a while,' I said. 'Sure.'

  'I know it's going to be bad at first,' she said, 'but it will be comfortable to see each other again without the sex, won't it?'

  'I hope so,' I said. 'We can just go back to being friends.'

  'You simple son-of-a-bitch,' she said; then she shook her head and cried for a while. I held her. 'We never were friends,' she said. 'We were just lovers, so there's nothing to go back to being.' I thought of shaggy Robert opening doors around the world, tromping around in the bodies of dead creatures, his face gradually simplifying into an expression of stupid endurance. And this pointless, gory journey of always one more unwanted discovery was called survival and thought to be heroic.

  'I don't even know if we were lovers,' Utch bawled.

  'Of course you were,' I told her.

  'I think we were just fuckers!' she cried.

  'No, no. Give it time. Time is what matters.'

  'You think history actually means something,' Utch said to me bitterly. I wondered who had told her that it didn't. 'Don't touch me,' she said. Then she softened. 'I mean, not for a while.'

  I undressed. 'I need some new underwear,' I said, but she was silent. 'Why did you do it?' I asked her gently; I wasn't forcing her.

  'How could you have let this happen to me?' Utch said; her face was frightened, hurt, accusing. 'You weren't looking out for me!' she cried. 'You weren't even thinking about me!'

  I wondered if Edith and Severin were shouting tonight.

  'You're even thinking of her right now,' Utch said. (The poor, dangerous woman in the woodshed with her murdered children strewn around her had grinned at Robert and told him, 'It's a good thing I'm so smart. I knew just where to hide the children so that no one would hurt them.') Utch grinned at me with an unsettling expression and snatched the razored underpants from my hand. 'I did it,' she said, and she put them on her head like a hat.

  'I know you did,' I said; I was trying to be comforting, but she kept shaking her head at me as if I didn't understand. Then I understood that she had done that first pair, too - the pair I thought Severin had slashed. She saw the change in my face and nodded vigorously. 'Yes, yes,' she said brightly. 'That's right, it was me!' She seemed delighted by this revelation until she started to cry again. 'I love him,' she sobbed. 'Don't you see what terrible trouble we're in?'

  'It'll be all right,' I said. She laughed for a while, then cried herself to sleep.

  Then Jack had a nightmare and woke up whimpering. He was remembering a dirty trick from the movie. A lot of tough old savages are reminiscing about the meanest things they've ever seen, and one of them tells the story of how he saw someone's belly slit open just a little bit - enough to pull out a part of the intestines and wave this offal in front of a dog who tried to bolt it down whole, then ran off with it, unraveling the person's insides in a nasty fashion. But I told my delicate boy that the world wasn't like this at all. He wouldn't have that nightmare again, I said. 'It'll be all right,' I said. Ah, the lies we fall asleep to.

  Bart slept through Jack's dream like a turtle in its shell. Utch was asleep too. I waited for Jack to go back to sleep; I waited until I knew Severin would be asleep too. I was wide-awake and I was sure that Edith was too. I smoked about my quiet house; I could see Edith smoking from room to room. I had to speak to her, to hear her voice. When I thought I had waited long enough, I tried our signal of letting the phone ring half a tone, then hanging up. I waited. I could see her moving to the phone, lighting a fresh cigarette; she would curl a long strand of hair behind her ear. I could feel the way her hand would lie on the receiver, waiting for my second call. Her wrist was so thin, so angular. I dialed again. As usual, the phone didn't even ring once all the way through before the receiver was snatched up.

  'Edith is asleep,' said Severin Winter.

  9

  The Runner-Up Syndrome

  WHEN IT WAS over and before all of it had sunk in, feelings were raw in the supermarket, distant in parking lots, awkward whenever the four of us encountered each other. Because, of course, such meetings were out of context with what we'd once been together. And the children still wanted to play with each other. We could manage as much as a week without encounters; then, when we did meet, the shock of how we'd grown apart made the occasion more unsettling.

  In a brief exchange with Edith - absurdly, we were in line at different tellers' windows - I said, 'Utch and I hope we can see you again soon. I know it's going to be hard at first.'

  'Not for me,' she said brightly.

  'Oh.'

  'Forget it,' said Edith. 'That's what I'm doing.'

  But she didn't mean it. She was clearly insulating herself from her real feelings for me; she had to, no doubt, because of Severin's nonstop, needling ways.

  Utch's silence bore into me like a wound. She said that when she ran into Severin, he would not look her in the eye. 'I disgust him,' she said and when I tried to hold her, she pulled away.

  At first her insomnia only made her go to bed later and later. She slept in her underwear. Then she began getting up in the night to take walks.

  'Since when were you ever a walker?' I asked, but she just shrugged; she didn't want to tell me where she went. I knew insomnia had to be handled delicately.

  Months earlier we had planned to make the weekend of national wrestling championships a lovers' interlude. Edith and I would stay with all the children while Utch followed George James Bender and Severin to his vicarious victory in Stillwater, Oklahoma. We all agreed that Bender would be so far gone in his tunnel trance that he wouldn't notice the strange but familiar woman who was one door down the motel hall from Severin's room. Edith and I were frequently seen together, but with the children around us all day, we would not be, as Severin continually feared, linked together in an overtly public manner. He had finally agreed: Utch would be his fan while he nursed Bender, match by match, through the nationals, and while Bender slept the dead sleep of gladiators, Severin and Utch could shock the motel's bed-vibrator.

  Ah, Stillwater, Oklahoma - a Paris looming in Utch's future. But it never came off.

  'It was a Paris in your future too,' Utch said. 'You were looking forward to all that time here with Edith, waking up with her in the morning, sneaking feels all day, resting up for another night. Don't say it was just me who was looking forward to it.'

  'Of course not,' I said. 'We were all looking forward to it.'

  'He wasn't,' Utch said. 'I think Severin was dreading it.'

  I tried to comfort her, but she would just go out walking again. The whole time Severin was with Bender in Stillwater, she walked. And one evening while he was away she walked to the Winters' house to see Edith. I can't imagine why. She found the Winters' house full of the wrestling team and Coke and cheeseburgers and potato chips, Iacovelli and Tyrone Williams and all of Severin's other non-champion wrestlers were babysitting; Edith had gone to Stillwater with Severin and George James Bender.

  Edith in Stillwater? A swan in the cornfield!

  I have never been in Stillwater, Oklahoma, the home of the Oklahoma State Cowboys, a traditional wrestling power. What could it be like? A flat land, trampled by cattle, cowboys and wrestlers, and seeping oil? Even its name sends a shudder through me: Stillwater. I see an oasis, a swampish lagoon, a string of air-conditioned motels, thirsty wrestlers on horseback malingering around the one saloon. The big drink of the town is Tang. Poor Edith!

  'Why did she go, if she didn't want to?' Utch asked.

  'Because he didn't dare leave her alone here. He didn't trust her,' I said.

 
'You don't know that,' Utch said.

  'He's never trusted her,' I said. 'Throughout this whole thing.'

  We could only follow what was going on in the papers, and wrestling is not popular with The New York Times. On Thursday there was only this:

  Iowa State Favored for Team Mat Title

  STILLWATER, Okla. (AP) - Host Oklahoma State, third-ranked, hopes to upset defending national champion Iowa State in the national collegiate wrestling tournament beginning here today. Oregon State's second-ranked Beavers and the fourth-ranked University of Oklahoma Sooners are also contenders. Iowa State has three returning individual champions, but one of them - 158-pounder Willard Buzzard (23-0-1) - is not picked to repeat. Though the defending champion, Buzzard is seeded second behind Eastern collegiate champion George James Bender (20-0-0) - the only wrestler east of the Mississippi favored to win a championship title. Bender, voted outstanding wrestler in the Eastern tournament at Annapolis two weeks ago, has pinned eighteen out of his last twenty opponents ...

  No information on what brought Edith to Stillwater. No itinerary of her day. Did she attend the Historical Museum of the City of Stillwater? Did she see the prize portrait of the largest Hereford ever slaughtered in Oklahoma?

  On Friday The New York Times offered more bare statistics. In the 158-pound class, Willard Buzzard of Iowa State advanced through his preliminary matches with a fall over a Yale boy in 0:55 of the first period and a decision over Colorado State, 15-7. Lehigh's Mike Warnick, runner-up to Bender in the Easterns, advanced by upsetting the Big Ten champion from Minnesota (4-4, 5-4 in overtime) and by pinning the cadet from Army in 1:36 of the second period. Oregon State's Hiroshi Matsumoto flattened Wyoming's Curt Strode in 1:12 of the first and mauled an imported Iranian from UCLA, 11-1. And George James Bender - treading water - advanced with two falls, pinning Portland State's Akira Shinjo in 1:13 of the third, and Les McCurtain, the hope of Oklahoma, in 1:09 of the first. These four also passed untouched through the quarterfinals.

  Et cetera. It's a wonder to me that they all weren't bored into a pinning position. I could just see Severin whispering over his fruit cup to Bender - the table strewn with match results, brackets of the possible outcomes, notes about what Matsumoto is looking for when he sets up. And Bender, a mat burn raw on his chin and one eye weeping from a poke by Portland State, would gobble his shrimp cocktail, the tiny fork foreign to his stubby fingers, his knuckles swollen and taped. 'Watch how much of that crap you eat,' Severin would be saying. Between them, Edith would pick at her lobster bisque. 'You should know better than to order lobster in Oklahoma, Edith,' Severin would tell her.

  What could be going on? Utch went to see how the wrestlers were doing with the Winters' children. I knew she was hurt that we had not been asked to look after them.

  'The children seem happy,' she reported when she returned. 'They're certainly eating a lot of hamburgers.' Probably raw, I thought, but Utch went on. 'The team says that if Bender beats the Japanese in the semis, he'll go all the way. They say he used to beat Buzzard every day in practice back at Iowa State.'

  'Do you think I care?' I asked her. She sulked; I knew she was wishing she was there. 'He should have taken you anyway,' I said to her. 'You could have kept to your separate rooms, after all. But he's so paranoid that he can't believe a thing is over even when he's called it off himself. My God, did he think I'd be sneaking down to his house to rape his wife every night he was gone?'

  'If I was there,' Utch said, 'I'd sneak into his motel room and rape him.' I was shocked; I couldn't say anything. She took another walk. I pictured Edith out walking in Stillwater - the cowboys drunk, the cattle staring at her, the coyotes ululant.

  In Saturday's New York Times the 158-pound class had narrowed down predictably. Iowa State's Willard Buzzard had a hard time with Lehigh's Mike Warnick, but survived the semifinal round to beat Warnick by two points, 12-10. (Bender had pinned Warnick in their Eastern final match; by comparative scores, Buzzard appeared to be in trouble.) Bender, coasting 9-0 in the third period of his semifinal with Oregon State's Hiroshi Matsumoto, separated Matsumoto's shoulder and advanced to the finals by forfeit - as good as a fall. 'Well, that's that,' Utch said. 'The Jap was supposed to be the only one who could give him any trouble. He's got it wrapped up.'

  '"Wrapped up!"' I said. I hated that goddamn language. 'I hope he gets stuck in an elevator and misses the match. I hope he eats a diseased steer and throws the whole thing. I hope he's seduced by a cowgirl and wilts under pressure. I'm going to set up a shrine to Willard Buzzard and pray to it all night. I hope Bender loses himself in a genetics problem - preferably his own. I hope Severin is so humiliated that he never dares to coach anyone again!'

  'Stop it,' Utch said. 'Please stop it. Do we have to hate them now? Do we?'

  On Sunday The New York Times said nothing. The finals took place after 8 p.m., Oklahoma time, and the results would be in Monday's paper.

  'I could call the boys over at the Winters',' Utch said. 'I'm sure they'd know.'

  'Jesus, "the boys",' I said. 'Go ahead, if you must.'

  'Well, I can wait, of course,' Utch said, and she did.

  I ran out of cigarettes a little after midnight and had to go to Mama Paduzzi's Pizza Parlour. It was the only place in town open after midnight and was always full of students, or worse. I met Edith at the cigarette machine. Severin hated smoking so violently that he now refused to buy them for her if she ran out. Edith disliked the pizza place so much that she actually looked pleased to see me. Two seedy youths were hanging around the machine, eyeing her.

  'You're back,' I said.

  'It's not that far.'

  'I thought it was another country,' I said.

  'Oh, it is.' We laughed, and then she seemed to remember when we had last laughed together and looked away. 'I left my headlights on,' she said. Outside, she got into the car, turned the lights out and sat staring at the wheel. 'I can't see you at all, under any circumstances,' she said. 'It just doesn't work out very well.'

  'If Severin would just talk to Utch sometime,' I said. 'She's pretty bad, she is really, well ... taken with him, you know.'

  'I know that,' she said, exasperated. 'Didn't you know that? Severin can't talk to her. I don't think he can stand her. He doesn't want to hurt her any more than he already has.'

  'He doesn't have any right to hate us,' I said.

  'It's me he hates,' she said. I touched her arm, but she pulled away. 'Go look after Utch,' she said. 'I'm all right, I'm not suffering. I'm not in love with you.'

  'You didn't have to say that,' I said.

  She started the car; I saw that she was crying. But for whom?

  When I got home, Utch had left a note; she had gone to see Edith. But I knew she hadn't found Edith at home. At 4 a.m. I went to the Winters' house to get her. She was curled up on their living room couch and wouldn't come home with me. Severin had gone to bed.

  'He went to bed hours ago,' Edith told me, 'and I'm about to go to bed myself.' She said Utch could stay on the couch if she wanted to, and she did. I left her after about an hour; it was clear she wasn't going to talk to me.

  It was the university paper that I saw on Monday; I never did see how The New York Times wrote it up. But the school paper had more local information.

  Bender Upset in Finals; Winter to Resign

  An interesting headline, I thought, and it wouldn't have made The New York Times. I couldn't believe it. I doubted that Iowa State's Willard Buzzard could either. Bender was quoted as saying, 'I just didn't get up for it.' Willard Buzzard - a former teammate of Bender's at Iowa State - said he sensed that Bender wasn't ready for him from the very first takedown; Bender looked listless. Remembering their old practices together, Buzzard said, 'George used to push me around pretty good, and I never forgot it. I owed him this one.' Buzzard wrestled a very physical, aggressive match. 'I just never rose to the occasion,' said George James Bender. Coach Severin Winter agreed. 'George wasn't himself. I think he shot his wad the night
before.' Winter was referring to Bender's semifinal victory over Oregon State's Hiroshi Matsumoto. Coach Winter announced to the reporters in Stillwater his plans to retire. Back on campus, he denied that Bender's loss in the finals had any influence on his decision. 'I've been thinking about stepping down for some time. I'd like to spend more time with my wife and children, and continue my studies for the German Department.' Asked if he would stay with the team until a new coach could be found, Winter said he would. 'I hope to still get up to the wrestling room from time to time,' Winter said, 'just to roll around.' Bender had nothing but praise for Severin Winter's coaching. 'He was instrumental in getting me to the finals,' Bender said. 'He got me there, and it was up to me to take it from there. I'm sorry I let him down.' Coach Winter shook his head and smiled when asked if he thought Bender had let him down. 'We only let ourselves down,' Winter said. 'We should try to minimize all this responsibility we feel we owe other people.'

  A curious remark to find in a sports column.

  'Incredible!' I said to Utch. 'What was the score? The stupid paper doesn't even give the score.'

  'Buzzard was leading twelve to five in the last period when he pinned Bender.'

  'A slaughter,' I said. 'I don't believe it. Bender must have been sick.'

  I could see the look of bored superiority that Utch suddenly showed before she turned her face away. She was afraid I had seen it, and I had. 'What is it?' I asked her.

  'What happened out there?'

  'Bender didn't get up for it,' Utch said, her back still turned to me. 'Just what the paper says - he shot his wad the night before.'

  '"Shot his wad!"' That disgusting sports talk!

  '"I just never rose to the occasion,"' Utch said, quoting Bender, but suddenly she burst out laughing. I did not like the tone of her laughter; harsh and derisive, it was not her tone.

  'You talked with Edith,' I said. 'What happened?'

  'You'd have liked to talk with her, wouldn't you?' Utch said.

  'Never mind,' I said. 'What did she say?'

  There's nothing vengeful in Utch, and I was surprised to see her face so suddenly determined to pay me back. For what? 'Edith was angry that Severin made her come along,' she said.