The 158-Pound Marriage

In a brief exchange with Edith - absurdly, we were in line at different tellers' windows - I said, 'Utch and I hope we can see you again soon. I know it's going to be hard at first.'

'Not for me,' she said brightly.

'Oh.'

'Forget it,' said Edith. 'That's what I'm doing.'

But she didn't mean it. She was clearly insulating herself from her real feelings for me; she had to, no doubt, because of Severin's nonstop, needling ways.

Utch's silence bore into me like a wound. She said that when she ran into Severin, he would not look her in the eye. 'I disgust him,' she said and when I tried to hold her, she pulled away.

At first her insomnia only made her go to bed later and later. She slept in her underwear. Then she began getting up in the night to take walks.

'Since when were you ever a walker?' I asked, but she just shrugged; she didn't want to tell me where she went. I knew insomnia had to be handled delicately.

Months earlier we had planned to make the weekend of national wrestling championships a lovers' interlude. Edith and I would stay with all the children while Utch followed George James Bender and Severin to his vicarious victory in Stillwater, Oklahoma. We all agreed that Bender would be so far gone in his tunnel trance that he wouldn't notice the strange but familiar woman who was one door down the motel hall from Severin's room. Edith and I were frequently seen together, but with the children around us all day, we would not be, as Severin continually feared, linked together in an overtly public manner. He had finally agreed: Utch would be his fan while he nursed Bender, match by match, through the nationals, and while Bender slept the dead sleep of gladiators, Severin and Utch could shock the motel's bed-vibrator.

Ah, Stillwater, Oklahoma - a Paris looming in Utch's future. But it never came off.

'It was a Paris in your future too,' Utch said. 'You were looking forward to all that time here with Edith, waking up with her in the morning, sneaking feels all day, resting up for another night. Don't say it was just me who was looking forward to it.'

'Of course not,' I said. 'We were all looking forward to it.'

'He wasn't,' Utch said. 'I think Severin was dreading it.'

I tried to comfort her, but she would just go out walking again. The whole time Severin was with Bender in Stillwater, she walked. And one evening while he was away she walked to the Winters' house to see Edith. I can't imagine why. She found the Winters' house full of the wrestling team and Coke and cheeseburgers and potato chips, Iacovelli and Tyrone Williams and all of Severin's other non-champion wrestlers were babysitting; Edith had gone to Stillwater with Severin and George James Bender.

Edith in Stillwater? A swan in the cornfield!

I have never been in Stillwater, Oklahoma, the home of the Oklahoma State Cowboys, a traditional wrestling power. What could it be like? A flat land, trampled by cattle, cowboys and wrestlers, and seeping oil? Even its name sends a shudder through me: Stillwater. I see an oasis, a swampish lagoon, a string of air-conditioned motels, thirsty wrestlers on horseback malingering around the one saloon. The big drink of the town is Tang. Poor Edith!

'Why did she go, if she didn't want to?' Utch asked.

'Because he didn't dare leave her alone here. He didn't trust her,' I said.

'You don't know that,' Utch said.

'He's never trusted her,' I said. 'Throughout this whole thing.'

We could only follow what was going on in the papers, and wrestling is not popular with The New York Times. On Thursday there was only this:

Iowa State Favored for Team Mat Title

STILLWATER, Okla. (AP) - Host Oklahoma State, third-ranked, hopes to upset defending national champion Iowa State in the national collegiate wrestling tournament beginning here today. Oregon State's second-ranked Beavers and the fourth-ranked University of Oklahoma Sooners are also contenders. Iowa State has three returning individual champions, but one of them - 158-pounder Willard Buzzard (23-0-1) - is not picked to repeat. Though the defending champion, Buzzard is seeded second behind Eastern collegiate champion George James Bender (20-0-0) - the only wrestler east of the Mississippi favored to win a championship title. Bender, voted outstanding wrestler in the Eastern tournament at Annapolis two weeks ago, has pinned eighteen out of his last twenty opponents ...

No information on what brought Edith to Stillwater. No itinerary of her day. Did she attend the Historical Museum of the City of Stillwater? Did she see the prize portrait of the largest Hereford ever slaughtered in Oklahoma?

On Friday The New York Times offered more bare statistics. In the 158-pound class, Willard Buzzard of Iowa State advanced through his preliminary matches with a fall over a Yale boy in 0:55 of the first period and a decision over Colorado State, 15-7. Lehigh's Mike Warnick, runner-up to Bender in the Easterns, advanced by upsetting the Big Ten champion from Minnesota (4-4, 5-4 in overtime) and by pinning the cadet from Army in 1:36 of the second period. Oregon State's Hiroshi Matsumoto flattened Wyoming's Curt Strode in 1:12 of the first and mauled an imported Iranian from UCLA, 11-1. And George James Bender - treading water - advanced with two falls, pinning Portland State's Akira Shinjo in 1:13 of the third, and Les McCurtain, the hope of Oklahoma, in 1:09 of the first. These four also passed untouched through the quarterfinals.

Et cetera. It's a wonder to me that they all weren't bored into a pinning position. I could just see Severin whispering over his fruit cup to Bender - the table strewn with match results, brackets of the possible outcomes, notes about what Matsumoto is looking for when he sets up. And Bender, a mat burn raw on his chin and one eye weeping from a poke by Portland State, would gobble his shrimp cocktail, the tiny fork foreign to his stubby fingers, his knuckles swollen and taped. 'Watch how much of that crap you eat,' Severin would be saying. Between them, Edith would pick at her lobster bisque. 'You should know better than to order lobster in Oklahoma, Edith,' Severin would tell her.

What could be going on? Utch went to see how the wrestlers were doing with the Winters' children. I knew she was hurt that we had not been asked to look after them.

'The children seem happy,' she reported when she returned. 'They're certainly eating a lot of hamburgers.' Probably raw, I thought, but Utch went on. 'The team says that if Bender beats the Japanese in the semis, he'll go all the way. They say he used to beat Buzzard every day in practice back at Iowa State.'

'Do you think I care?' I asked her. She sulked; I knew she was wishing she was there. 'He should have taken you anyway,' I said to her. 'You could have kept to your separate rooms, after all. But he's so paranoid that he can't believe a thing is over even when he's called it off himself. My God, did he think I'd be sneaking down to his house to rape his wife every night he was gone?'

'If I was there,' Utch said, 'I'd sneak into his motel room and rape him.' I was shocked; I couldn't say anything. She took another walk. I pictured Edith out walking in Stillwater - the cowboys drunk, the cattle staring at her, the coyotes ululant.