The 158-Pound Marriage by John Irving

  Winter tapped his dripping head. 'There's a tunnel,' he said admiringly. 'You know what you have to have on your mind to do that?'

  I watched Bender for a while. He ran cloddishly, but he looked as determined as the tide - like the ancient messenger who would die on arrival, but never before. 'I can't imagine that you could have anything on your mind,' I said.

  'Yes, that's exactly it,' Winter said. 'But try it sometime. Try to have pure nothing on your mind. That's what people don't understand. It takes considerable mental energy not to think about what you're doing.'

  On those hot days in August, I used to go watch Severin get mauled by Bender. Sometimes he'd get so tired that it would be Bender who'd tell him when to stop. 'I'm going to run a few,' he would say, getting up off Winter, who would lie just as Bender had left him, recovering his arms and legs, rediscovering breathing. When he saw me, he'd wave a finger, and in a few minutes, he'd try speech. 'Come to watch me ... get slammed ... around?'

  He grinned. There was a fine froth of blood against his teeth; some hard part of Bender had split his lip. He flopped on his back. Through my socks, the mat felt like a warm, wet sponge. Winter made all visitors leave their shoes at the door.

  'Severin,' I said while he was still too limp to complete a sentence, 'it's a strange way for a thirty-five-year-old man to have fun.'

  'He's going to be a national champion,' Severin managed to say.

  'And you'll be runner-up,' I told him. But though he joked about his runner-up history, he didn't like me to talk about it, so I changed the subject. No, I told him a bad allegory which I thought he'd think funny.

  I told him about the World War I French ace, Jean-Marie Navarre, who swore he hated to kill. Navarre claimed he was an entertainer; when he couldn't locate any German planes, he put on air shows of his acrobatics for the troops in the trenches. He had more than two hundred and fifty dogfights over Verdun, and by May of 1916 he had shot down twelve German planes. But he was wounded shortly after that and spent the rest of the war in and out of hospitals. His temper was bad; his brother died; he took frequent 'convalescent leaves' - a dashing dandy, he wore a lady's silk stocking as a cap. In Paris, he is reported to have chased a gendarme along a sidewalk in his car. Somehow he survived the war, but he was killed in a peacetime stunt, less than a year later, attempting to fly a plane through the Arc de Triomphe.

  When I saw how the story touched him I was embarrassed for Severin. 'I don't think there's anything funny about that story,' he said. Of course he wouldn't; even humor had to be on his terms.

  Like the subject of trances: no one agreed. Utch was fond of speculating on how Tyrone Williams might gain control of his famous lapses, but her suggestions were not really coaching methods which Severin Winter could employ. And Edith liked to tease Severin about George James Bender, to whom she felt he gave too much of his time.

  'George James Bender is in the greatest trance of all,' Edith said. 'I think his mind constantly takes showers.'

  'Don't be a snob,' Severin answered. 'That's a kind of concentration. It's different from the concentration you need to write, but it's similar in the energy it takes.' (You can see how seriously he took wrestling.) 'Sure, Bender is an unsophisticated kid, and very naive. He's shy, and not very attractive - at least, not to women. Of course, he must be a virgin--'

  'A virgin?' Edith said. 'Sevi, I don't believe that boy has ever had a hard-on!'

  But she seemed to regret her joke as soon as she said it, though Severin laughed a little. Severin didn't appear bothered, but Utch and I noticed how anxious Edith was with him the rest of the evening, as if she was making up to him; she touched and rubbed him even more than usual, and she was the one who said she was tired and would really prefer to make it an early evening. Utch and I went home together, and she stayed with Severin. No one felt really disappointed; we got to see a lot of each other, and everyone had to be generous.

  But in the car I said to Utch, 'What do you make of that?' I had the feeling that lately there might have been a lot of talk about hard-ons.

  'Hm,' said Utch, a woman fond of single syllables.

  We went to bed; she, too, said she was tired. I lay awake on my side of our bed, not really wanting to pursue the subject, but when I thought Utch might be asleep I asked, 'Severin doesn't have any trouble, does he? I mean, you know, with you?'

  No answer. I assumed she was asleep.

  I was almost asleep myself when Utch said, 'No.'

  I thought about it; I was awake again, and I could feel her awake, too. I thought of some things I really didn't want to ask, but it was as if she heard me asking them to myself. 'Of course,' she said, 'it's my impression that Severin always has a hard-on.'

  That broke a slight tension which occupied, like an electrical field, that small area of the bed between us. I laughed. 'Well, I suspect that between times it really does go down, Utch, or get a little soft, and you just haven't noticed.'

  I'd meant to be funny, but she said, 'No.'

  Then I was awake. I said, 'If it never goes down, then he doesn't come, for Christ's sake. Utch? He must not come.'

  'And you say Severin asks too much,' Utch said. 'You say he asks Edith too much.' True, I knew, you shouldn't ask too much.

  But I persisted. 'Utch, does he come?'

  She was quiet a long time. Finally she said, 'Yes.'

  For some reason I had to add, 'With you, anyway.'

  Utch reached over and held me in her hand. In the context of this conversation, I felt embarrassed about not being particularly hard myself at that moment. She held me awhile, then let go; it was the way she said goodnight. And together we achieved that practical silence, a kind of wisdom, which you can learn only after a number of years of a good marriage. We both pretended to be asleep until we were.

  5

  Preliminary Positions

  AT FIRST, THE thought of Severin with Utch was exciting. It rekindled an old lust which had not been entirely absent but which had been perhaps too occasional. Edith said she responded very much the same; that is, the thought of him with Utch re-excited her feelings too. Well, you whet one appetite, you whet them all. Maybe. Utch said she felt that way toward me sometimes; at other times she admitted the effect was not so good. What effect it had on him is typically baffling.

  Severin was too short to make love to Edith standing up. Not that she particularly liked making love standing up, Edith was quick to add, but I confess I took an interest in learning that he had any physical shortcomings. Edith and I liked to make love in the shower standing up; this would be before we went to bed, where we often made love again. It was an innocent enough beginning; the next thing we knew, we had a ritual. ('The first, next and last thing we always know,' said Severin, 'is a ritual.')

  Edith put her arms over my shoulders and let me soap her breasts. She worked up a thick lather on the back of my neck and ran gobs of it down my back, all over my body. I worked up a lather as stiff as egg whites and dabbed her with it. Then we would wet ourselves under the shower and let ourselves foam together; we had the ideal height-proportions for it (Severin, I suppose, just couldn't reach). She slipped under my arms and hugged herself tight to my chest, and I pushed her against the cool, wet tiles until I could feel her reaching behind me for the towel rod, which was something hard for her to hold on to and yank herself against me.

  We went to bed clean and soap-smelling and whispering, touching and looking at each other in the candlelight, smoking cigarettes, sipping a little chilled white wine until we felt like it again. But I never quite felt the same about it in bed with her. She'd told me that, 'prone', Severin was just the right size for her ('top or bottom or side by side'). In the shower, I knew I was nice and new.

  I never heard him knock; it was always Edith who woke me. He would give one sharp rap, and Edith would say, 'Just a minute, love,' and wake me up. I loved that sleepy, slept-in smell - as if sex were cellular and our aroma of spice and fermentation was the old sloughed-off cells. Someti
mes I wanted to make love to her quickly then, before I dressed and left, but she never let me. She said Severin didn't like waiting for me to leave; it was a hard time for him, apparently. I often offered to be the one to leave first. I told him I wouldn't mind waking up him and Utch; I said I wouldn't mind waiting. But he had to be the one. Only once, when he agreed to let me come to them, did he and Utch stay together until I arrived home. And then I was late - as if it mattered! I'd said three or four o'clock, but Edith and I had overslept; I came home closer to five and found him pacing the sidewalk in front of our house, not even staying with Utch, fuming and shivering in the cold. He got into his car and drove home before I had a chance to speak with him.

  When you get out of bed at three or four in the morning, it's always cold. I stumbled downstairs after kissing Edith goodbye - her breath a little sour from the cigarettes and wine and sleep, but it had a ripe smell, like the bed, and it always aroused me. Downstairs, Severin emptied ashtrays, rinsed glasses and loaded the dishwasher. He never wanted to talk; he'd nod goodnight. Once, when I could tell by his restless bustle around the dishwasher that I'd taken too long getting dressed, he offered me a cold can of beer to drive home with. 'It helps to cut the phlegm,' he said.

  And I went home to Utch, whose breath was fruity and sweetly sickish; our bed lay strewn with her clothing, the mattress half sliding to the floor. And then I would trot about the house - not emptying ashtrays but disposing of the apple cores and spines of pears, cheese rinds, salami skins, grape stems and empty beer bottles. He knew how food in the bedroom revolted me! 'And you know how he hates Edith's smoking,' Utch said. 'He says you leave ashtrays smoldering like fireplaces all over the house.' A slight exaggeration. He was a maniac for the care of his phonograph records, too, and apparently raved at how I treated them. He would always use those inner envelopes; he turned them sideways so that you had to take a record out and put it back twice. 'He thinks you abuse his record collection intentionally,' Utch said.

  'It's like the damn ice trays,' I told her. 'He bawls out Edith for not refilling the ice trays, for Christ's sake. We're filling a bucket to chill the wine, and he wants all the ice trays refilled the second they're empty.'

  'And you're in too much of a hurry?' Utch asked.

  'Jesus!' I cried.

  When I saw Utch in those pre-dawn hours, sprawled out, randy and ravished, I was attracted to her and to the passion I imagined he had evoked in her. I always went to her, amazed that my desire was up again for the third or fourth time that evening. And sometimes she'd respond, as if her appetite were endless too - as if Edith's smell on me drew her out again and made the foreignness of our familiar bodies especially alluring. But often Utch groaned and said, 'Oh, God, I couldn't, please, I can't do it again. Would you get me a glass of water?' And she'd lie still, as if wounded internally and fearful of silent hemorrhage, and sometimes her eyes were frightened and she squeezed my hand against her breast until she fell asleep.

  Edith said that, like me, she felt the same aroused responsiveness when Severin would finally come to bed; she'd keep warm the spot I'd left in their bed for him, and her imagination of him with Utch excited her and kept her awake - though he often fussed and puttered around the downstairs of the house for a long time after I'd gone. When he came to bed, she'd hum and whisper at him; she liked to smell him. We were all in that rich phase where sweet scents turn to decay. 'Sex sniffers', Severin called us once.

  But Severin Winter would climb into bed like a soldier seeking comfort in a wet foxhole; it was necessary for him to first rid the room of wine glasses, ice bucket, another ashtray, the burnt candle - all of which, Edith said, he touched as if they were tainted. Then he would lie chastely on his far edge of the bed; when she touched him, he seemed to cringe. She'd rub against him, but it was as if he were choking down a gag at her smell. Self-conscious, hurt, she'd roll away from him and ask, 'Did you have a bad evening?'

  'Did you have a good one?'

  'I want to know how it was for you.'

  'No you don't. That doesn't matter to you.'

  Whew. Of course, he wasn't always so obviously dark, but he could pervert the most frankly innocent, erotic things. ('You smell rich,' Edith told him once, nibbling his ear. 'You reek,' he said to her.)

  I know there must have been times for him when the pure sensuousness of our belonging to each other must have excited him and stopped his adolescent brooding, but these times were so rare that I remember them most vividly. For example, once we spent a weekend on the Cape at Edith's mother's place. There were just the four of us - no children; we'd successfully farmed them out. It was late September, and the great Cape house was sunny and cool. Like Edith's mother, most of the summer people had already migrated back to Boston and New York.

  We started out in Severin's car so early that we were there before lunch. Edith and Severin were familiar with the place, of course, but it was Utch who first acknowledged our isolation and privacy; she was the first to undress down on the blowy and abandoned beach. I noticed how Edith looked at her. Back in the house, both women looked at each other naked, while Severin prepared an enormous paella and I opened raw oysters for a first course. There was a lot of liberal touching, and everyone was very loud. Severin went for Utch's ass with a lobster claw. In his white cook's apron, with nothing on underneath or behind, he stood with one hand on Edith's long thigh and the other on Utch's round one. As his hands moved up he said to me, 'The New York loin is a cleaner cut than the Central European variety, but a good cook can bring out the flavor of both.'

  'Different flavors, surely,' I said.

  'Long live the difference!' said Edith, who reached under Severin's apron for something and touched hands with Utch there.

  I fed Edith an oyster; I fed Utch an oyster. I was wearing my shorts and Edith unzipped them; Utch pulled them down and said to her, 'Why are these men hiding themselves?'

  'I'm the cook,' Severin said. 'Don't want to burn anything.'

  'I'm opening oysters,' I said. 'One slip of the hand ...'

  Edith hugged Utch, suddenly around her hips. 'You're so solid, Utch, I can't get over it!' she cried, and Utch hugged her back. 'It must seem like quite a handful after me,' Edith said to Severin.

  He spattered and hissed at the stove; he flipped up his apron and fanned himself. Utch ran her square, broad hand down Edith's sloped stomach. 'You're so long,' she said admiringly; Edith laughed and drew Utch to her; the top of her head fitted against Edith's throat. Utch picked Edith up quickly, with astonishing strength. 'And you don't weigh anything at all!' she cried.

  'Utch can pick me up, too,' I said. Edith looked suddenly alarmed as Utch picked me up with a low grunt.

  'Heavens, Utch,' Edith said. Severin had taken off his apron and had wrapped himself in sausage links. He pressed himself against Edith, who squealed and jumped away from him, feeling the cool, slick sausage against her. 'My God, Severin--'

  'Got a whole string of pricks for you, my dear,' he said as his paella fumed and conspired behind him.

  When Severin and Utch went for another swim, Edith and I made love on the long corduroy L-shaped couch in the living room. We were lying there drowsily, after the act, when Severin and Utch came back cold-skinned and salt-tasting from the ocean; they were shivering. They made me feel like swimming too, but Edith wasn't interested. I leaped up from the couch and ran naked across the pale green lawn just as it was getting dark and on to the sand which was still warm from the sun. The water stung; I hollered as loud as I could, but there were only gulls and sandpipers to hear me. I sprinted back to the house where so much flesh awaited me.

  When I came in through the French doors to the sunroom, I could hear that no one had actually missed me while I was gone. I could not see them in the living room, and I discreetly went into the kitchen and warmed myself over Severin's steaming paella until the three of them were finished. The three of them! Utch told me later that she and Severin, chilly and shaking, had curled up with Edith on the couch
because she had opened her arms to their shivering, or they were attracted to how warm and sticky she was. She covered Utch and kissed her, and Severin touched and rubbed them both, and suddenly Utch was pinned under them, with Severin kissing her mouth and Edith kissing her deeply, until Utch felt herself coming and wanted Severin inside her. Edith didn't mind and Severin came into her; Edith held Utch's head against Severin's shoulder; she was mouth-to-mouth with Edith, their tongues exchanging recipes, when Severin made her come. Utch said that Edith almost came then too. Then it was Edith's turn, because Severin had been holding out, and she held Edith's head while Severin came inside her; he came quickly and rolled away. But Edith had still not come, Utch knew, so Utch helped her. Edith was so light that Utch could easily manipulate her; she picked up Edith at the hips and drove her shoulders against Edith's slim buttocks and very lightly touched her tongue to Edith where she was wetter and saltier than the sea. When Edith screamed, Severin covered her mouth with his own. I heard just a short cry before the orchestra of the paella captured my attention again.

  Then Severin was beside me in the kitchen smelling more distinctly than shellfish. He shoved me in the direction of the living room. 'Go on,' he said, 'you don't know anything about paella. Let me. Go keep the ladies ... happy,' he said, and gave me a bewildered roll of his eyes (the most honest, worried and intimate confession I believe he ever made to me). 'Go on, man,' he said, shoving me again. He dug a wooden spoon deep into the paella, brought up that unlikely and delicious mixture - chicken, pork, sausage, lobster, mussels and clams - and slid the steaming spoon into his mouth. A bright red tongue of pimento hung down his chin, and I found my way to the couch where Utch and Edith were drawn tight together, curled against each other; they were touching each other's breasts and hair, but when I came up they parted and let me fit snugly between them. I did not object to how they used me.