The 158-Pound Marriage

Severin decided he'd have to wrestle with George James Bender himself. He still worked out with his wrestlers, and he'd kept himself in good shape, but he never wrestled a full workout with any of them. Still, he had been good enough so that even now he was in a class slightly above most of them. He'd have had to cut off his head to make weight in his old 158-pound class, but he ran or rode his racing bicycle every day, and he lifted weights. Nevertheless, he was no match for Bender; he knew that he wouldn't ever have been a match for Bender - even as a trim competitor more than ten years ago. But in August no one else was around, and even when his other wrestlers came back to school in September, they wouldn't be up to Bender's conditioning, much less his class.

The only time the wrestling room was tolerable in August was in the early morning before the sun through the skylights had broiled the mats and turned the room into a sauna. But Bender's lab experiments in genetics required his early-morning attention, and he wasn't through with Showalter until almost noon.

Severin Winter was insane. By late morning, the wrestling room was over 100 degrees, even though they left the door open. The mat was hot to the touch. 'But they're liquid,' Winter said. 'A kind of liquid plastic. When it's hot, they're very soft.'

Every day he woul

d meet Bender and try to last long enough to give the boy a workout. When Severin needed to rest, Bender would run laps, furiously fast, on the old board track, while Winter lay on the soft, warm mats, staring at the sun, listening to his own heart pounding in unison with Bender pounding his way around the wood. Then they'd go at it again until Severin had to stop. He'd move out of the cage and sit in the shade, cooling off, while Bender returned to his mad running. The heat blew out of the big open cage doors in those waves like mirror distortions you can see rising off a summer highway. A constant sprinkler system kept the mud and cinder floor from turning to dust.

'In this weather,' I asked Severin, 'why doesn't that fool Bender run outdoors?' It was a shady campus; the footpaths were empty of students; there was always a cool breeze along the river.

'He likes to sweat,' Winter said. 'You'll never understand.'

I'd been walking with my children down to the playing fields beyond the cold cage when I saw Severin sitting outside the cage door, collapsed against a survivor elm. 'Listen to him,' Severin gasped at me; he could hardly talk; his normal breath was still a few minutes away. 'Take a peek.'

I forced myself to step inside that steaming, dank place. The air choked you. A pounding as rhythmic as a machine's crude function was echoing steadily around the track. George James Bender would be visible for a half-moon turn; then he'd disappear over my head. He was wearing a sweatsuit over one of those rubber costumes, elasticized at the neck, ankles and wrists; the sweat had soaked him and made his shoes squeak like a sailor's.

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.'