The 158-Pound Marriage

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.'