'Oh, no,' I said. 'I don't go that way. That's not my style.'
'Please just try,' Utch said. 'For me.'
I hated Severin Winter for
making my wife pathetic in my eyes. But what could I do? I took her to the gym.
In the darkness the great cage hulked like an abandoned beehive, its dangerous sleepers fled from their cells. In the new gym my shin struck an open locker door, and a tin whang! echoed among the sweat-stiff socks hung up to dry, the hockey sticks leaning in corners, the kneepads and bandages at rest. Utch said, 'Ssshhh! Don't let Harvey hear us.'
'Harvey?' I thought of a watchdog prowling in the dripping showers.
'The watchman.'
'Well, surely he knows you,' I said, colliding with a low bench and greeting the cool cement floor with my cheek. There was a film of powder on the floor, a sort of deodorant designed for whole buildings. 'For Christ's sake, Utch,' I whispered, 'hold my hand!'
She led me to the tunnel. Passing the little cave doors, I thought of the squash courts harboring bats. The air was stale. When we emerged into the moonlit cage, the pigeons stirred. Around the groaning board track, I lurched after Utch. 'I think I lost the keys,' I said.
'I have the keys,' she said.
When she slid open the wrestling-room door the rubbery blast from the heaters hit us. I shut the door and she turned on the lights. I knew that from outside one cell of the beehive was brightly lit, like the eye of a domed prehistoric animal.
'Isn't the moonlight enough to see by?' I asked.
She was undressing. 'It's not the same,' she said. I looked at her strong, round body; she was a ripe, firm woman but she still moved like a young girl. I felt a fresh want for her, like what Severin would have felt if he could only have forgotten himself and let himself go. Maybe he did, I thought. I looked at a stranger watching me undress.
Utch tackled me! By mistake my elbow caught her in the mouth and made her bite her lip; she said, 'Not so rough. Be easy, be smooth.'
Don't coach me, I thought, but I wriggled against her. I touched her; she was already wet, and I knew in that instant that there were men - or ideas of men - who could make her come with no effort at all. She slipped me into herself so quickly that I hadn't yet reacted to the mat; it itched; it smelled like a foreigner's refrigerator. She was sliding us across the white-lined inner circle toward a padded wall, and I steered her back to the center, as so often I'd heard Severin holler to his wrestlers, 'Don't let him get off the mat!'
Utch was beginning to thrash, to actually bridge under me. She was coming - so quickly - and then I was aware of her keening, a high humming like a bee gone berserk in the hive. I thought of the pigeons in panic, and of Harvey, the watchman, crooning quietly in the darkness, masturbating on the soft dirt floor under the wrestling room. My God, I thought, so it was like this for them; Severin Winter knew all this.
We seemed to be jammed into a far corner of the room; we had slid across two mats and were out of bounds, but Utch was still coming. I felt myself grow smaller inside her, and when she was done I had shriveled and completely lost contact.
'I came,' Utch said.
'You certainly did,' I said, but there was no concealing the jealousy in my voice and she knew that I had shrunk from her.
'You can spoil anything you've made up your mind to,' she said. She got up, grabbed a towel from a stack in the corner and covered herself.
'Is it time for a few light calisthenics?' I asked. 'Or should we run a few laps?'
She had swept up her clothes and was moving out the sliding door. 'Turn off the lights when you leave,' she said.
I went after her, around the sloping track. I picked up a splinter in my heel. By the time she reached the tunnel I had caught up; I followed her with my hand on her spine. 'Got a splinter,' I said. 'Damn track.'
She sat in the corner of the sauna away from me, her knees drawn up, her head between them, the towel under her. I said nothing. When she went into the pool, I waited for her in the shallow end but she swam a few solitary laps.
I was following her to the showers when she turned and threw something back into the pool. 'What was that?' I asked.
'The keys,' she said. 'I'm not coming here again.'
In the green underwater light I saw the key ring settle on the bottom of the pool. I didn't want to leave them there. I would rather have had them sent to Severin for Christmas, packed tightly in a tidy box full of turds. I don't know why I wanted them, frankly, but I dove into the pool and brought them up after Utch had gone into the showers.
Which was how I came to have the keys, and they were in my pocket the night I went walking alone and saw Severin's car parked in the shadow of the gym. The light from the wrestling room shone like the pinhole-opening for a telescope in some mysterious observatory.
So he doesn't go there anymore? I thought. And he hadn't come here alone, I was sure. I looked for cast-off, unmatched shoes, but there were no signs. Who was it this time? I wondered. I thought of going to get Edith - to show her how much her vengeance had accomplished. Then I thought of Utch at home, still so convinced of Severin's great suffering. She forgave him, but she had not forgiven Edith or me.
All right, Utch, I thought; I'll show you what sort of suffering Severin's up to. As I ran down the footpath past the library, suddenly it was clear to me: Severin had been seeing Audrey Cannon all the while; he had never stopped seeing her. Did Edith know?