The 158-Pound Marriage

'Because it's not truthful,' Utch told him.

Pretty soon Jack started laughing every time his mother did, and Bart, who was used to cartoons, laughed with them. I felt badly, but I laughed more than any of them. We were at odds with the audience; a certain hostility came through to us, particularly during the film's funniest scene. I had to take Bart to the bathroom and so missed some of it but in the part I saw, Robert is about to open a door to an old woodshed. This takes a long time so that the audience can absorb the increasing tension. We know that behind the woodshed door is a crazed mother who's been hiding there for days with her dead children all stashed around her like groceries. There's been an Indian massacre and the mother hides in the woodshed and kills everyone who peeks in the door, then drags the bodies inside with her to wait for more Indians. It's unclear whether she or the Indians have massacred her children. Robert is about to open that terrible door, and we're supposed to hope that by this time he has learned enough from Mother Nature to be smart about it. Of course, it would be smartest not to open the door at all, but it appears he is going to.

Some rows in front of us several young girls in the theater tried to warn Robert. He puts his squirrel-skinned hand on the latch. 'No, no,' the young girls moaned. But from some other part of the house, another voice hollered, 'Go on! Open it, you simple son-of-a-bitch!' Utch and the kids burst out laughing, and so did I, though I recognized that crazy voice. It was Severin Winter, of course.

When the movie was over, I hurried Utch and the kids to the car. It was not that I felt we had to avoid the Winters at that moment; it was just that it was raining. 'Stop pulling me,' Utch said. 'I like the rain.' But we were in our car and driving away when they came out with their children.

'I see Fiordiligi!' Jack said. 'And Dorabella!' Bart shrieked.

'Open it!' Utch shouted, but her laughter chilled me.

When the kids were in bed, Utch said, 'I'm not going to break down.'

'Damn them, anyway,' I said. 'They've always called all the shots.'

'Oh, now it's "them", is it?' Utch asked. Then she took my hand and said, 'No, we'll all still be friends, won't we?'

'After a while,' I said. 'Sure.'

'I know it's going to be bad at first,' she said, 'but it will be comfortable to see each other again without the sex, won't it?'

'I hope so,' I said. 'We can just go back to being friends.'

'You simple son-of-a-bitch,' she said; then she shook her head and cried for a while. I held her. 'We never were friends,' she said. 'We were just lovers, so there's nothing to go back to being.' I thought of shaggy Robert opening doors around the world, tromping around in the bodies of dead creatures, his face gradually simplifying into an expression of stupid endurance. And this pointless, gory journey of always one more unwanted discovery was called survival and thought to be heroic.

'I don't even know if we were lovers,' Utch bawled.

'Of course you were,' I told her.

'I think we were just fuckers!' she cried.

'No, no. Give it time. Time is what matters.'

'You think history actually means something,' Utch said to me bitterly. I wondered who had told her that it didn't. 'Don't touch me,' she said. Then she softened. 'I mean, not for a while.'

I undressed. 'I need some new underwear,' I said, but she was silent. 'Why did you do it?' I asked her gently; I wasn't forcing her.

'How could you have let this happen to me?' Utch said; her face was frightened, hurt, accusing. 'You weren't looking out for me!' she cried. 'You weren't even thinking about me!'

I wondered if Edith and Severin were shouting tonight.

'You're even thinking of her right now,' Utch said. (The poor, dangerous woman in the woodshed with her murdered children strewn around her had grinned at Robert and told him, 'It's a good thing I'm so smart. I knew just where to hide the children so that no one would hurt them.') Utch grinned at me with an unsettling expression and snatched the razored underpants from my hand. 'I did it,' she said, and she put them on her head like a hat.

'I know you did,' I said; I was trying to be comforting, but she kept shaking her head at me as if I didn't understand. Then I understood that she had done that first pair, too - the pair I thought Severin had slashed. She saw the change in my face and nodded vigorously. 'Yes, yes,' she said brightly. 'That's right, it was me!' She seemed delighted by this revelation until she started to cry again. 'I love him,' she sobbed. 'Don't you see what terrible trouble we're in?'

'It'll be all right,' I said. She laughed for a while, then cried herself to sleep.

Then Jack had a nightmare and woke up whimpering. He was remembering a dirty trick from the movie. A lot of tough old savages are reminiscing about the meanest things they've ever seen, and one of them tells the story of how he saw someone's belly slit open just a little bit - enough to pull out a part of the intestines and wave this offal in front of a dog who tried to bolt it down whole, then ran off with it, unraveling the person's insides in a nasty fashion. But I told my delicate boy that the world wasn't like this at all. He wouldn't have that nightmare again, I said. 'It'll be all right,' I said. Ah, the lies we fall asleep to.

Bart slept through Jack's dream like a turtle in its shell. Utch was asleep too. I waited for Jack to go back to sleep; I waited until I knew Severin would be asleep too. I was wide-awake and I was sure that Edith was too. I smoked about my quiet house; I could see Edith smoking from room to room. I had to speak to her, to hear her voice. When I thought I had waited long enough, I tried our signal of letting the phone ring half a tone, then hanging up. I waited. I could see her moving to the phone, lighting a fresh cigarette; she would curl a long strand of hair behind her ear. I could feel the way her hand would lie on the receiver, waiting for my second call. Her wrist was so thin, so angular. I dialed again. As usual, the phone didn't even ring once all the way through before the receiver was snatched up.

'Edith is asleep,' said Severin Winter.

9

The Runner-Up Syndrome

WHEN IT WAS over and before all of it had sunk in, feelings were raw in the supermarket, distant in parking lots, awkward whenever the four of us encountered each other. Because, of course, such meetings were out of context with what we'd once been together. And the children still wanted to play with each other. We could manage as much as a week without encounters; then, when we did meet, the shock of how we'd grown apart made the occasion more unsettling.