The 158-Pound Marriage

When Utch woke up, I asked her to move in back with Edith; I wanted to talk with Severin. I sat quietly beside him until I was sure both Edith and Utch were asleep. Every town had a church, every church a lighted steeple. Finally I said, 'I think you're calling all the shots. I think everything's on your terms. But there are four of us.'

'Oh is that you there?' he said. 'I thought Utch's voice had changed.'

Ha-ha. 'We see each other as if we're registered for courses - same time, same place. That's your idea. If that's how you want it, that's fine for you, but a little of it should be on our terms, too, don't you think?'

'I have a recurring dream,' he said. 'You want to hear it?'

Oh, suffering shit, I thought, but I said, 'Sure, Severin go ahead.' I know that in sexual matters it is difficult to say things directly.

'It's about my children,' he said. I had heard him talk about them a hundred times, almost always in wrestling terms; he called them his weakness, his imbalance, his blind side, his loophole, the flaw in his footwork, the mistakes he would always repeat and repeat, his one faulty move. Yet he could not imagine not having children. He said they were his substitute for an adventurous, explorative life. With children his life would always be dangerous; he was grateful for that, the perverse bastard! He said his love for Edith was almost rational (a matter of definition, I suppose), but that there was nothing reasonable about the way he loved his children. He said that people who didn't have children were naive about the control they had over their lives. They

always thought they were in control, or that they could be.

I complained about how much 'control' meant to him; I argued that people without children simply found other things to lose control over. 'In fact,' I said, 'I think human beings find that control is more often a burden than not. If you can give up your control to someone or something, you're better off.'

I have seen how his wrestlers look at their opponents with a cold, analytical scrutiny, a dead eye. Severin Winter gave me such a look. Though he couldn't have been oblivious to the ridiculousness of his controlled behavior, he cherished the idea!

'God save us from idealists, from all true believers,' Edith said once.

God save us from Severin Winter! I thought.

His dream, as he called it, was not entirely fiction. Over and over again, he was stuck behind the watermelon truck, unable to pass, his life controlled and manipulated by the wilful, masturbating Greek on the melon pile - threatening him, forever holding him at bay, squirting his vile seed and more and more of his kind into the air, on his windshield, everywhere - until the mindless depravity of it forced Severin in his dream to pull out to pass. But the watermelons the boy held over the passing car would suddenly become Severin's children, and - too late to meekly fall back in the lane behind the truck - Severin Winter would see his children hurled down on him and splattered against the windshield.

'How's that for a dream?' he asked.

How's that for a loophole? I thought. How's that for a flaw in the footwork? How's that for a faulty move?

'God save us all,' I muttered. He had turned off the dashboard lights again, but I knew he was laughing. What I wanted to say was, Spare me the allegory, just stick to the facts. Who's controlling this? All of us or just you?

The car stopped; we were home.

'I'd give you your choice of whom you'd like to remove from the back seat,' Severin said, 'but there's the awkwardness with the baby-sitter, and I'm anxious to see the children.'

'We've really got to sit down and talk sometime,' I said.

'Sure, anytime,' he told me.

I crawled in back to shake Utch, but she was awake. I saw at once that she'd been awake for all our talk; she looked frightened. I nudged Edith gently as I backed out of the seat and kissed her hair above her ear, but she slept soundly.

When Utch went up to Severin, he shook her hand - his idea of understatement? Utch wanted to be kissed. He said, 'Get a good night's sleep. We can sort out all the stuff later.'

I knew that our belongings intermingling - Edith's clothes in my suitcase, Utch leaving her gloves at their house - really pissed him off. One morning, Edith told me he opened his drawer and pulled out a pair of my underpants. 'These aren't mine,' he said indignantly.

'I just pick up what I find lying around,' Edith said cheerfully.

'They're his!' he roared. 'Can't he keep track of his own fucking underpants? Does he have to leave his goddamn laundry around?'

He stretched my underpants, snapping the waistband out wide enough to contain us both, then wadded them into a ball and kicked them into a corner. 'They like to leave their things behind so that they'll have an excuse to come back. She does it too,' he muttered.

To Edith, he simply wasn't making any sense. She brought back the underpants - to Utch - that morning. She and Utch thought it was very funny.

It wasn't long afterward that I pulled on what must have been the same pair. Something was wrong; the crotch had been slit through with a razor, so that it was like wearing an absurdly short skirt. One was left free to flap, so to speak.

'Utch?' I said. 'What happened to my pants?' She told me that they were the ones Edith had brought back. Later, I asked Edith if she had cut them - perhaps as a joke? But she hadn't of course. It was no joke; it was him. He was not one to be subtle with his symbols.

'Damn him!' I yelled to Utch. 'What's he want? If he wants to stop it, why doesn't he say so? If he's suffering so goddamn much, why does he go on with it? Does he like being a martyr?'

'Please,' Utch said softly. 'If anyone's going to stop it, we know it's going to be him.'