'Did you just think of this?' he asked.
'No,' she said. 'I was waiting for you to really want me again. I was waiting to see if you'd ever enjoy making love to me again.'
'Of course I do.'
'Yes, I could tell,' she said. 'But now I've got this leverage on you. I can feel it, and you can too. And I don't like having it any better than you do, so I'm going to use it and then it will be gone and I won't have it anymore.'
'Everything isn't equal,' Severin said.
'Listen to who's talking,' she answered. Later in the night she woke up; the bed was empty. Severin Winter was crying in the kitchen. 'No, I won't ever do that,' she told him gently. 'Come back to bed. It's all over.' She hugged him. 'Don't worry, I love you,' she said. But later she whispered, 'But I should do that. But I won't.' Later still she said, 'Maybe I won't. You always say you like to know what I'm thinking.'
She felt they both wore fresh scar tissue which each could see on the other. 'It made us self-conscious with each other,' Edith told me.
And Severin told me, 'So, you see, you and Utch were inevitable. We'd talked about foursomes before, and I think we were each interested in the idea, but we each had our doubts. I think we both thought it was better than the clandestine affair, but that it could be terrible if you didn't find the right people. Well, I never felt that you and Utch were the right people for us - not for me, at least. But since there were other motives for Edith ... do you see?'
'What are you trying to say?' I asked. Utch had gone to bed. He couldn't have said all this to her, I thought. 'If you're trying to tell me that Edith is having this relationship just to pay you back, I don't believe it.'
He shrugged. 'Well, it's not just to pay me back. There are always other reasons ... for everything.'
'Edith and I are genuinely attracted to each other,' I said.
'You and Edith wouldn't ever have gotten together at all,' he said evenly, 'if there hadn't been this other thing. I just didn't quite have the right to ask her not to.'
'And what about Utch?' I asked.
'I'm fond of Utch,' Severin said, 'and I would never hurt her.' Fond of her! That ass! Such fondness I have rarely seen.
'Do you mean that you don't have any reasons of your own to keep our relationship going?' I asked. 'Do you expect me to believe that you're just doing Edith a favor?'
'I don't care what you believe,' he said, 'I'm simply telling you why the whole thing began. Things were not equal between Edith and me, do you see?'
'I see that you're jealous,' I said. 'Never mind how anything began. I see how you are now.' But Severin just shook his head and said goodnight. I wondered if Edith would let him in.
He persisted in this line about equality with Edith too. He made us feel as if we had nothing to do with it! He reduced us; he implied that the responsibility was all his.
'It wasn't all your decision!' Edith screamed at him.
'It was all my indecision,' he said. 'And I'm never going to be less than equal to you again. It's all right now,' he told us all lightly. 'I feel I'm back to being even now.'
'You do,' Edith said scornfully. 'It's always you. And I suppose you'll never sleep with someone else again?'
'No, never,' he said. He was enough of a fanatic so that you could believe him - or at least believe that he believed himself.
'I don't want to talk to you about this anymore,' Edith said coolly. 'I refuse to listen to you.'
'Don't treat him like a child,' Utch said to her.
'He is a child,' Edith said.
'Look,' I said. 'There are four of us, and there are four versions of all of us, and there probably always will be. It's silly for us to try to make each other agree. All of us can't be expected to see what's happened in the same way.'
There are probably five or six versions,' said Edith, 'or eight or nine.' But Severin could not keep quiet.
'No,' he said. 'I see it better than any of you because I've never really been involved in it.' I could have killed him for saying that with Utch right there. He was a child. 'If I'm a child,' he said, 'that's OK with me.'
'With you, yes!' said Edith harshly. 'It's always what's OK with you - you, you, you!'
But this was later. That night she did let him in. They came by our house the next morning, after all the kids were in school. Edith would not look at me; she held Utch's hand and smiled at her. When I saw that Edith had a bruise on her face, I grabbed Severin's wrist and said, 'If you were pissed off last night, you could have hit me before you left. I'm not any match for you either, but I could have offered more resistance than Edith.' He looked at me as if he doubted this. A mark the color of a plum stretched Edith's skin tight over one cheek and tugged one eye half-closed; her bruise was the size of a good novel.