I went into the bedroom, threw Utch's slip in a corner, lay down naked on the bed and thought of Edith until I came in my hand. It would be the last time, I knew, that I could come with Edith on my mind.
A little later Severin called. I was sure Edith had told him that I was completely crackers and that he ought to check up on me. 'Give us Utch's address,' he said. 'Maybe we can talk to her and tell her you two ought to be together.' I didn't hesitate to give him the wrong address. It was the address of the American Church of Christ, where Utch and I had been married. Later, I thought that the trick I had played on Severin was the kind he would play, and that it would somehow please him.
I wrote Utch that they were coming, and why. 'If you see a couple carrying an ugly painting down the street, arguing about what to do with it, stay out of their way,' I wrote.
Then the dreams started and I couldn't sleep. They were about my children, and Severin Winter would have understood them. There was one in which Jack is riding on the Strassenbahn. He argues with Utch to let him stand on the open platform, and she gives in. The tram comes to a whiplash bend, and when Utch looks back, Jack's gone. Then there's one about Bart, unused to city people. Utch is getting some bread to feed the pigeons in a park, and Bart is standing where he's been told to wait. The car, which looks like an old Mercedes taxi and reeks of diesel fuel, is not a taxi; it pulls to the curb, motor spluttering, and the driver says, 'Little boy?' Because it's a dream the driver speaks English, even in Vienna, and Bart walks over to see what this terrible man wants.
I had to go somewhere; I had to get away. If I was going to Vienna, I needed to borrow a little money from the old source. Oddly, I was even thinking about the Brueghel painting again - about my unidentified character, the lost burgher and that abandoned book. And I owed my parents a repeat of the old ritual. It was better than staying at home.
My mother met me at the Brown Street door. She gushed, 'I never knew so many Cubans went to live in Nicaragua, and I never knew what was so special about Havana cigars before. I'm glad you used the foreign title - how do you say Joya de Nicaragua? - because it seems, well ... different. I'm just not sure it's at all suitable for children, but I suppose publishers know who's reading what these days, don't they? Your father, I think, is still finishing it. He seems to be finding it very funny; at least he laughs a lot when he's reading, and I think that's what he's reading. I didn't find it all that funny myself - in fact, it seemed perhaps your bleakest book - but I'm sure he's found something I missed. Where are Utch and the children?'
'On vacation,' I said. 'Everything's fine.'
'It is not, you look simply awful,' she said and burst into tears. 'Don't try to tell me,' she said as she led me down the hall, crying in front of me. 'Don't talk. Let's see your father. Then we'll talk.'
In the den, the familiar late-afternoon sunlight dappled the open pages spread around my father and in his lap. His head was familiarly bent, his hands typically slack, but when I looked for the glass of Scotch pinched between his knees, I knew immediately. My father's knees were splayed apart and the spilled Scotch puddled the rug at his feet, which were twisted uncomfortably - that is, uncomfortably for anyone who could still feel. My mother was already screaming, and I knew even before I touched his cold cheek that my father had finally finished something, and that once more the particular book responsible for putting him to sleep was not knowable. But it might have been mine.
After the funeral, I was touched that my mother's recovery seemed slowed by her worries about Utch and me. 'The best thing you could do for me right now,' she told me, 'is to get yourself to Vienna immediately and clean up the trouble you're having with Utch.' My mother was always a great one for cleaning up everything, and, after all, it's rare when there's something we can do for ourselves which also pleases someone else.
'Remember the good times, can't you?' my mother said to me. 'I thought you writers were supposed to have such good memories, but I guess you don't write that sort of thing, do you? Anyway, remember the good times; that's what I'm doing. I think you'll find that once you start the process of remembering, you'll just go on and on.'
So. I remember - I will always remember - Severin Winter in his infernal wrestling room on a day we three were supposed to pick him up there. We were all going to the city for an overnight - a movie and a hotel. (Our first hotel and our last.) Severin said he'd wait to shower and change when we reached the hotel.
'God, then he'll sweat all the way in the car,' I complained to Utch.
'It's his car,' she said.
Edith picked us up. 'I'm late,' she said. 'Severin hates me to be late.'
Near the gym I saw Anthony Iacovelli trudging through the snow. He recognized Severin's car and waved.
'An ape loose in a winter resort,' said Edith.
We waited, but Severin did not appear. 'Thank God, he's probably taking a shower,' I said.
Then Tyrone Williams came out of the gym, his black face like a coal moon floating above the snow; he came over and told us that Severin was still up there, wrestling with Bender.
'God, we'll have to carry him to the car,' I muttered.
'Let's go up and get him,' Edith said. I knew she was thinking that he wouldn't be so angry if we all appeared.
Down on the dark mud floor of the cage a lone shot-putter was heaving his ball. It whapped the mud like a body dropped unseen from the board track. An irregular thudding came from the wrestling room. Edith pulled on the door, then pushed it.
'It slides,' said Utch, opening it. Inside, the incredible damp heat blew against us. Several wrestlers sagged against the walls, sodden with sweat, watching Severin and George James Bender. Earlier, it might have been a match, but Severin was tired now. He grunted on his elbows and thighs, straining to lift his stomach off the mat; whenever he'd struggle to his hands and knees, Bender would run him forward like a wheelbarrow until Severin's arms buckled and he pitched down on his chest. When Edith said, 'Sorry we're late, love,' Severin looked too tired to get up again. He raised his head off the mat and looked at us, but Bender pushed it back down; Bender hadn't heard anybody - I doubt if he ever did. Severin fought up to his hands and knees again and Bender drove him forward. Then Severin began to move. He sat sharply under Bender and pivoted so fast that Bender had to scramble to keep behind him. Then he shrugged Bender's weight off his back long enough to stand and grabbed a fistful of the boy's fingers around his waist, peeling them apart and suddenly sprinting across the mat like a halfback breaking a tackle. Bender dove for his ankles but Severin kicked free; his breathing was fierce, great, sucking breaths drawn from some old reservoir of energy, and he crouched, bent double, hands on knees.
Then Bender saw us, and he and the other wrestlers filed from the room as serious as Druids. Edith touched Severin's heaving back, but quickly wiped his sweat off her hand on her coat. Utch gave Severin's drenched chest a hearty smack.
Later I said to Utch that I thought Bender had let him go, but she said I didn't know anything about it. Severin had broken free, she could tell. Whatever, his extra burst had been a special performance for us, so I said, 'I didn't know you had it in you, old boy.'
He could barely talk; his throat seemed pinched, and the sweat ran in an unbroken rivulet off his bent nose, but he winked at me and gasped, loud enough for the women to hear, 'Second wind of the cuckold.'
Our first and last night in a hotel, Severin Winter, as always, provided us with a topic for conversation. His vulgar one-liner kept Edith and me up all night.
'And what did you talk about?' I asked Utch in the morning.
'We didn't talk,' she said.
Early one morning I took a goodbye walk. I was on hand to see the maintenance men unlock the new gym, unbolt the old cage and air out all the ghosts and germs in there. Behind the tennis courts a young girl was hitting a ball against the backboard; her soft blows made the only sound I could hear. No one was running on the board track. I stood on the dusty floor of the cage, which was beginni
ng its slow summer bake, and in the loose system of nets that keep the baseballs from breaking the skylights. I sensed someone standing, as still as I was standing, at the door of the wrestling room. There was a shadow near his cheek - or was it a hole? I suppose I gasped, because of course I was sure it was Utch's old bodyguard come to America to perform a promised slaying: mine. Then the figure seemed discomforted by my stare and moved out from behind the concealing nets. He was too young; there was no hole in his cheek, I realized, merely a black eye.
It was George James Bender; he recognized me and waved. He hadn't been exercising; he was dressed in ordinary clothes. He'd only been standing in the old cage, remembering, like me. I hadn't seen him since his upsetting loss, and suddenly I wanted to ask him if it was true, if he'd slept with Edith, if any of that impossible tale was true.
'Good morning, Professor,' he said. 'What are you doing here?'
'It's a good place to think,' I said.
'Yes, it is,' said Bender.
'I was thinking about Severin Winter,' I said. 'And Edith. I miss them.' I watched him closely, but there were no revelations in his dead-gray eyes.
'Where are they?' he asked; he didn't seem interested.
'Vienna.'
'It must be very nice there,' he said.
'Just between you and me,' I said, 'I'll bet Edith Winter is the best-looking piece of ass in all of Vienna.'
His reptile calm was untouched; his face showed only the faintest trace of life as we know it. He looked at me as if he were seriously considering my opinion. Finally he said, 'She's kind of skinny, isn't she?' I realized, with revulsion, that George James Bender was actually smiling, but there was nothing about his smile that was anymore accessible than his blank eyes. I knew once again that I knew nothing.
So I am going to Vienna, and I'm going to try the Brueghel book again. But of course there are other contributing factors. ('There are always contributing factors,' Severin used to say.) It's a way to be near the children, and I admit that I want to assure Utch of my availability. We historical novelists know things take a little time. And Vienna has a fabulous history of treaties; the truces made there over the years run long and deep.
And I'd like to run into Edith and Severin sometime. I'd like to see them in a restaurant, perhaps dining out with another couple. I would know everything about that other couple at a glance. Utch and I would be alone, and I would ask the waiter to send a note from us to that couple. 'Watch out,' it would say. And the husband would show the note to his wife, and then to Edith and Severin, who would suddenly scan the restaurant and see us. Utch and I would nod, and by then I hope I would be able to smile.
Some other time, there's a question I would like to ask Severin Winter. When it rains or snows, when the heat is unrelenting or the cold profound - whenever the weather strikes him as an adversary - does he think of Audrey Cannon? I'll bet he does.
Yesterday Utch wrote that she saw Edith sitting in Demel's eating a pastry. I hope she gets fat.
So. Today I bought a plane ticket. My mother gave me the money. If cuckolds catch a second wind, I am eagerly waiting for mine.
READ ON FOR AN EXTRACT OF
IN ONE PERSON
THE BREATHTAKING NEW NOVEL FROM BESTSELLING AUTHOR JOHN IRVING
A compelling novel of desire, secrecy, and sexual identity, In One Person is a story of unfulfilled love - tormented, funny, and affecting - and an impassioned embrace of our sexual differences.
Chapter 1
AN UNSUCCESSFUL CASTING CALL
I'm going to begin by telling you about Miss Frost. While I say to everyone that I became a writer because I read a certain novel by Charles Dickens at the formative age of fifteen, the truth is I was younger than that when I first met Miss Frost and imagined having sex with her, and this moment of my sexual awakening also marked the fitful birth of my imagination. We are formed by what we desire. In less than a minute of excited, secretive longing, I desired to become a writer and to have sex with Miss Frost--not necessarily in that order.
I met Miss Frost in a library. I like libraries, though I have difficulty pronouncing the word--both the plural and the singular. It seems there are certain words I have considerable trouble pronouncing: nouns, for the most part--people, places, and things that have caused me preternatural excitement, irresolvable conflict, or utter panic. Well, that is the opinion of various voice teachers and speech therapists and psychiatrists who've treated me--alas, without success. In elementary school, I was held back a grade due to "severe speech impairments"--an overstatement. I'm now in my late sixties, almost seventy; I've ceased to be interested in the cause of my mispronunciations. (Not to put too fine a point on it, but fuck the etiology.)
I don't even try to say the etiology word, but I can manage to struggle through a comprehensible mispronunciation of library or libraries--the botched word emerging as an unknown fruit. ("Liberry," or "liberries," I say--the way children do.)
It's all the more ironic that my first library was undistinguished. This was the public library in the small town of First Sister, Vermont--a compact red-brick building on the same street where my grandparents lived. I lived in their house on River Street--until I was fifteen, when my mom remarried. My mother met my stepfather in a play.
The town's amateur theatrical society was called the First Sister Players; for as far back as I can remember, I saw all the plays in our town's little theater. My mom was the prompter--if you forgot your lines, she told you what to say. (It being an amateur theater, there were a lot of forgotten lines.) For years, I thought the prompter was one of the actors--someone mysteriously offstage, and not in costume, but a necessary contributor to the dialogue.
My stepfather was a new actor in the First Sister Players when my mother met him. He had come to town to teach at Favorite River Academy--the almost-prestigious private school, which was then all boys. For much of my young life (most certainly, by the time I was ten or eleven), I must have known that eventually, when I was "old enough," I would go to the academy. There was a more modern and better-lit library at the prep school, but the public library in the town of First Sister was my first library, and the librarian there was my first librarian. (Incidentally, I've never had any trouble saying the librarian word.)
Needless to say, Miss Frost was a more memorable experience than the library. Inexcusably, it was long after meeting her that I learned her first name. Everyone called her Miss Frost, and she seemed to me to be my mom's age--or a little younger--when I belatedly got my first library card and met her. My aunt, a most imperious person, had told me that Miss Frost "used to be very good-looking," but it was impossible for me to imagine that Miss Frost could ever have been better-looking than she was when I met her--notwithstanding that, even as a kid, all I did was imagine things. My aunt claimed that the available men in the town used to fall all over themselves when they met Miss Frost. When one of them got up the nerve to introduce himself--to actually tell Miss Frost his name--the then-beautiful librarian would look at him coldly and icily say, "My name is Miss Frost. Never been married, never want to be."
With that attitude, Miss Frost was still unmarried when I met her; inconceivably, to me, the available men in the town of First Sister had long stopped introducing themselves to her.
*
THE CRUCIAL DICKENS NOVEL--THE one that made me want to be a writer, or so I'm always saying--was Great Expectations. I'm sure I was fifteen, both when I first read it and when I first reread it. I know this was before I began to attend the academy, because I got the book from the First Sister town library--twice. I won't forget the day I showed up at the library to take that book out a second time; I'd never wanted to reread an entire novel before.
Miss Frost gave me a penetrating look. At the time, I doubt I was as tall as her shoulders. "Miss Frost was once what they call 'statuesque,'" my aunt had told me, as if even Miss Frost's height and shape existed only in the past. (She was forever statuesque to me.)
Miss Frost was a wom
an with an erect posture and broad shoulders, though it was chiefly her small but pretty breasts that got my attention. In seeming contrast to her mannish size and obvious physical strength, Miss Frost's breasts had a newly developed appearance--the improbable but budding look of a young girl's. I couldn't understand how it was possible for an older woman to have achieved this look, but surely her breasts had seized the imagination of every teenage boy who'd encountered her, or so I believed when I met her--when was it?--in 1955. Furthermore, you must understand that Miss Frost never dressed suggestively, at least not in the imposed silence of the forlorn First Sister Public Library; day or night, no matter the hour, there was scarcely anyone there.
I had overheard my imperious aunt say (to my mother): "Miss Frost is past an age where training bras suffice." At thirteen, I'd taken this to mean that--in my judgmental aunt's opinion--Miss Frost's bras were all wrong for her breasts, or vice versa. I thought not! And the entire time I was internally agonizing over my and my aunt's different fixations with Miss Frost's breasts, the daunting librarian went on giving me the aforementioned penetrating look.
I'd met her at thirteen; at this intimidating moment, I was fifteen, but given the invasiveness of Miss Frost's long, lingering stare, it felt like a two-year penetrating look to me. Finally she said, in regard to my wanting to read Great Expectations again, "You've already read this one, William."
"Yes, I loved it," I told her--this in lieu of blurting out, as I almost did, that I loved her. She was austerely formal--the first person to unfailingly address me as William. I was always called Bill, or Billy, by my family and friends.
I wanted to see Miss Frost wearing only her bra, which (in my interfering aunt's view) offered insufficient restraint. Yet, in lieu of blurting out such an indiscretion as that, I said: "I want to reread Great Expectations." (Not a word about my premonition that Miss Frost had made an impression on me that would be no less devastating than the one that Estella makes on poor Pip.)