The 158-Pound Marriage

Clearly, there were positions in which her lost toes were no loss.

So much for bicycling; so much for Severin's fabled endurance. When he came home to Edith now, he wasn't up to making love to her. He had pedaled to too-faraway towns, established new time records. When he came home now, he slept until noon. How long did he think Edith would put up with it?

I don't think he saw anything clearly. Outside the wrestling room, out in the real world, he had no vision. He saw and thought and acted clearly under the moonlit dome, within the clear circles inscribed on the wrestling mats, but he left his mind behind whenever he hung up his clothes in his locker.

Severin's feelings and worries were always as obvious as boils; he could conceal nothing. ('I'm not good at lying, if that's what you mean,' he told me. 'I don't have your gift.') He must have known that Edith would find out. How long did he think she'd believe that he was bicycling all night in the rain? And after Thanksgiving, it snowed. For a while she thought Severin was just indulging his masochism - the last struggles of an over-the-hill wrestler, one more feat of foolish stamina.

What else could she have wondered when he bought the Air Force survival suit, the bright orange one-piece zippered sack designed to float in the ocean or withstand sub-zero weather? The pretty white bike came back bent, rusted, its vital parts scraping. Daytimes, Severin would repair and oil it. He put up a map in the kitchen - supposedly of all the roads he'd traveled. That he was too tired to make love when he returned was understandable; that he was often too excited to make love before he left was slightly harder for Edith to bear. And what was that music he whistled around the house?

Though all his wrestlers were supposed to keep their nails cut, some of them were sloppy, so Edith was used to an occasional scratch on his back or shoulders. But not on his ass; those were her scratches or they were nobody's. And gradually she was sure that they weren't hers.

Twice she actually said to him tentatively, jokingly, in real but concealed fear: 'Sometimes it's as if you have a lover.'

I don't know what his reply was, but I can't imagine him responding naturally.

What finally convinced her was the way he was with the children. He took too long putting them to bed, told them extra stories, and often she found him standing in their room after they'd fallen asleep, just staring at them. Once he was crying. 'Aren't they beautiful?' he said. She recognized the look in his eyes: he was saying goodbye to them, but at the same time he couldn't.

The night of the great December buzzard, Edith woke up with the shutters flapping, the storm door slamming, the wind howling under the eaves like mating cats. The trees appeared to be bent double. She doubted that a bicycle could even be held upright in such weather. It was 3 a.m. when she managed to get the car unstuck in the driveway and slithered her way down the snowy streets. She had always believed the part about the wrestling room and gym and sauna and swimming; she could smell the chlorine in his hair while she was sniffing him for other odors. She saw the light on in the wrestling room. She also recognized the parked car; on the dashboard was a pair of ballet slippers. The slippers weren't the same size as each other, but neither were Audrey Cannon's feet.

Edith sat in her car with the windshield icing over and the dark hulk of the new gym squatting over her. Ironically, she thought of how angry Severin would be with her for leaving the children alone at this hour on a night like this. She drove home. She smoked in the living room and played a record; she smoked in the bedroom where she found Severin's ring of extra keys. There was the extra car key, the extra house key, the extra gym key, the extra wrestling room key ...

She did not want to go there. At the same time, she imagined confronting them. She did not want to slide open the door to the wrestling room and catch them at it; on the other hand, she imagined various shocks she might give them. They would be walking around the old board track - did she always limp? Would they be wearing anything? - and Edith would start toward them around the track, headed for a confrontation.

No. She lit another cigarette.

She imagined catching them in the tunnel. Surely he would lead his maimed dancer through the tunnel; he was always showing off. At mid-tunnel, by the light switch to one of the squash courts, Edith would brace herself and wait for him to walk into her. His startled hands would grope and find her face; she was sure he would recognize her bones. He might scream; then Audrey Cannon would scream, and Edith would scream too. All three of them yelling in that echoing tunnel! Then Edith would flick on the squash court light and show herself to them - blind them with herself.

Somehow her distress had woken Fiordiligi. 'Where are you going?' the child asked; Edith had not realized that she looked as if she was going anywhere, but her coat was still on, and when her daughter asked, she realized she was going. She told Fiordiligi that she'd be back before breakfast.

All the slithery way back to the gym, Edith thought of the smell of chlorine in Severin's hair. When she saw that the light was still on in the wrestling room, she let herself into the gym and groped her way through it with her cigarette lighter. Once her lighter went out and couldn't be relit and she cried for a few, controlled minutes in what turned out to be the men's showers; they opened into the swimming pool. She found the underwater lights, flicked them on and then off again, climbed the stairs and sat in a corner of the first row of the balcony. She wondered if they swam in the dark or turned on the underwater lights.

It seemed to her that she'd been there for a long time before she heard their voices; they were coming through the showers from the sauna. She saw their silhouettes - a short, thick one and one which limped. They dove separately into the pool; there were moans from each when they surfaced, and they met near the middle of the pool. Edith was surprised that they had turned on the lights; she'd expected that Severin would prefer the dark, but she didn't know this Severin. They were as graceful and playful as seals. She thought with particular pain that Severin must love Audrey Cannon's smallness; how strong he must feel with her; he was a strong man anyway, but with her he was also big. For a moment she wished she could hide in the balcony; she felt so ashamed that she wanted to disappear.

Then Audrey Cannon saw her sitting in the first row of the lower balcony, and her voice pierced them all; in the sound-bouncing swimming pool it came at them in stereo. She said, 'It's Edith, it must be Edith.' Edith was surprised to find that she was already on her feet and coming down the stairs toward them; in a moment she was standing at the side of the pool. Lit up, bobbing in the aqua-green glowing pool, Audrey Cannon and Severin were suddenly as vulnerable as creatures in an aquarium. Edith said that she wished she had secretly assembled an audience - that she had filled the entire balcony, perhaps with the wrestling team, certainly the German Department, and of course his children. 'Later I wished I'd had the courage to be waiting there for them with just Fiordiligi and Dorabella,' she said. 'Just the three of us, perhaps with all of us in our pajamas.'

'He really was thinking of you,' Audrey Cannon told her, but Edith roamed the rim of the pool as if she were looking for hands to stamp on, as if she were a cat intent on eating every fish in the bowl. When Severin tried to get out, she shoved him back in. She was crying and shouting at him, though she doesn't remember what she said. He said nothing; he treaded water. While he held Edith's attention, Audrey Cannon slipped out of the far side of the pool and limped toward the showers. It was the last Edith ever saw of her; her narrow, bony back, her lean sprinter's legs, her sma

ll pointy breasts, her hair as dark and rich as wet chocolate. Her painful, grotesque limp jarred her sharp hips but failed to even jiggle her high, hard ass, as small as a twelve-year-old boy's.

'I could catch you, you cripple!' Edith screamed after her. 'I could run you down and snap your fucking bones!' But Severin hauled himself out of the pool and offered her a larger, unmoving target. She began to beat him with her fists, kick him, scratch him; she bit his shoulder and would have sunk her teeth into his throat had he not pried open her mouth with his strong fingers and held her at arm's length. She bit deeply into his thumbs; he used his thighs to shield himself from her knees, but she remembers the spurts of blood. She was wearing the Tyrolean boots he had given her, and she mashed his toes with them. She kicked and bit and hit as hard as she could until she was too tired to swing her arms anymore. She tasted the blood from his thumbs in her mouth. She looked at the tears streaming down his face - or was it simply water from the pool? She realized that she was doing what he probably most wanted from her, and that if she shoved him back in the pool, he would probably gratefully drown. She could not bear what he had done to her, but his obvious guilt sickened her even more.

On their silent way home, she told him that she would never let him see the children again, that he would have to beg her to even see a photograph of them. He sobbed. She realized how helpless he was, and the terrible power she had over him made her feel ugly; it made her be cruel, but it also made her feel that she needed to love him. 'You've confused me terribly,' she told him.

'I've confused myself terribly,' he said, which enraged her. She scratched him slowly and deeply down one cheek; she drew blood; he never moved his face. She was horrified that she could do this, and even more horrified that he would let her. 'The whole thing gave me an awful responsibility,' she told me.

For weeks she thought of leaving him, reconsidered, tried to hurt him, tried to forgive him - and he took it all. 'He was un-Severined,' she said. He was completely at her mercy except when she wanted to strike back at Audrey Cannon. Then he said dumbly, 'I loved her. I loved you at the same time.'

What melodrama.

One night Edith said she was going to call Audrey Cannon. When she picked up the phone, Severin pushed the buttons down; Edith whacked him on the fingers with the receiver over and over, bloodied his nose and wrapped the phone cord around his neck. But you couldn't strangle Severin Winter, not that thick neck. He made no move to protect himself but he wouldn't let her make the call.

'What were you going to do?' I asked him. 'If Edith hadn't caught you, where would it have ended?' Edith had saved him and he knew it. He must have wanted her to catch him all along. How strange it must have felt to him to be in a situation where he was completely passive.

Audrey Cannon moved to the city and commuted to school for her classes; she announced that she would keep her position at the university only as long as it took her to find something else. Though I'm told she occasionally appears in town, no one has ever pointed her out to me. Both Edith and Severin say they have never seen her.

A long time after Audrey Cannon last swam naked in the university pool and a short time before they met us, Edith and Severin made love together again. She beat him all over his back and pulled his hair and drummed him with her hard heels, but she loved him again. Afterward she lay crying and told him that she could never forgive him for all the time alone, lying awake, she had suffered, imagining the strength of the passion for this crippled dancer that had driven an honest man to lie.

It was after they made love again that Edith told him she was going to pay him back. 'I'm going to get a lover,' she said, 'and I'm going to let you know about it. I want you to be embarrassed when you make love to me - wondering if I'm bored, if he does it better. I want you to imagine what I say that I can't say to you, and what he has to say that you don't know.'