The 158-Pound Marriage

'That's just a phrase,' he said, laughing. 'It doesn't have anything to do with the word in English.'

'What's it mean?'

'It's just a phrase,' Severin said. 'It means, "It's time to move, time to go," something like that.'

I picked up the slimy cutting board and swung it around as if it were a tennis racquet. 'What exactly is the phrase?' I asked him. 'I want a literal translation.' I couldn't seem to stop trembling.

'"Saddle the chickens,"' he said. '"We're riding out."'

Staring at him, I kept waving the fish-smeared cutting board. '"Saddle the chickens, we're riding out"?'

'An old Viennese joke,' Severin said.

'Some sense of humor you Viennese have,' I said. He held his hand out and I gave him the cutting board.

'If it helps you to know,' he said, 'Utch hates me.'

'Not likely.'

'Look,' he said, 'she just needs to get her pride back. I know, because I have to get my pride back, too. It's really very simple. She knows I didn't really want the whole thing, and she knows you were thinking more about yourself than about her. We were all thinking more about ourselves than about Utch. And you were all thinking more about yourselves than about me. Now you just have to be patient and continue to do as you're doing - only a little less aggressively. Help her to hate me, but do it easy.'

'Help her to hate you?'

'Yes,' he said. 'Edith will hate you too after a while; she'll be sorry about the whole thing. And I'll help her to be sorry. It's already beginning.'

'All this hatred isn't necessary,' I said.

'Don't be stupid,' Severin said. 'You're doing it yourself. You're trying to make Utch hate me, and you'll succeed,' he said cheerfully. 'Just be patient.' Severin Winter was at his most obnoxious when he thought he was doing you a favor.

'Where is Edith?' I asked.

'Writing. I told you,' he said, but he could see I didn't believe him. He shrugged and led me to the foot of the stairs, where he gestured that I remove my shoes. Silently we crept upstairs, through their tousled, strewn bedroom - the melted candle gave me a strong twinge - to the door of Edith's study. Music was playing. She could never have heard our voices down in the kitchen. Severin pointed to the keyhole and I looked in. She was sitting very still at her desk. Suddenly she typed rapidly three or four lines. Then her movement was again arrested and she seemed to hang above the machine with the perfect concentration of a seagull suspended over water - over its food, its whole life source.

Severin motioned me away and we tiptoed back to the kitchen. 'She just sold her novel,' he said. He might as well have slapped me with the cutting board, stunned me like a fish and slit me open.

'Her novel?' I said. 'What novel? I never knew she was working on a novel.'

'She didn't show you everything,' Severin said.

That night I tried to take up sleeping again. I found an old slip of Utch's in the laundry basket and dressed a pillow in it and slept aga

inst it, smelling her smell. But after a few nights it smelled more like me - more like the whole bed and the whole house - and after I washed it, it simply smelled like soap. The slip became stretched and tore a shoulder strap, but I took to wearing it myself in the mornings because it was nearest me when I woke up. I also found Bart's striped T-shirt with a smiling frog face on it and a silver cowboy jacket that Jack had outgrown. In the morning while I ate breakfast I hung Bart's T-shirt over the back of one chair and Jack's cowboy jacket over another, and sat down to eat with them in Utch's old torn slip. I was sitting that way the morning Edith rushed in and told me they were all going to Vienna, and did I have any message for Utch?

Vaso Trivanovich and Zivan Knezevich, those diehard Chetnik Olympians, had died within two days of each other. Frau Reiner had cabled. Severin was the executor of their will, which included more awful paintings by Kurt Winter.

'Isn't it ironic?' Edith asked. 'Schiele's wife died of the Spanish flu in the 1918 epidemic, and Schiele died just two days later. It's just like Vaso and Zivan. And Schiele's wife's name was Edith, too.'

I realized she wasn't making any sense because of me. She was staring at the kitchen chairs dressed like children and at Utch's old slip, and I knew that she was embarrassed and couldn't wait to get away from me; that whatever Severin had failed to convince her of about me I was demonstrating for her now.

'No message,' I said. I had heard twice from Utch; she'd said the children missed me and that she was doing nothing to make me ashamed of her. In her second letter she had sent me back my passport, but with no invitation.

'I decided to go with Severin because it's summer, after all, and the kids have never seen where their father's really from, and it might be fun to go back,' Edith babbled. 'No message?' she asked. 'Really?' She was scatter-brained. I realized that she could see through Utch's slip, so I remained sitting down. I was embarrassed too, and wanted her to leave. I had to keep myself from asking her about her novel; I wanted to know who was publishing it, and when it would be out, but I didn't want her to know that I wanted to know. She hadn't said a word to me about Joya de Nicaragua; I knew she hated it - if she had even read it. She was looking at me as if she thought I was pathetic and there was nothing to say.

'Saddle the chickens,' I said. 'We're riding out.' Which must have convinced her of my lunacy, because she turned and left as quickly as she'd come.

I went into the bedroom, threw Utch's slip in a corner, lay down naked on the bed and thought of Edith until I came in my hand. It would be the last time, I knew, that I could come with Edith on my mind.

A little later Severin called. I was sure Edith had told him that I was completely crackers and that he ought to check up on me. 'Give us Utch's address,' he said. 'Maybe we can talk to her and tell her you two ought to be together.' I didn't hesitate to give him the wrong address. It was the address of the American Church of Christ, where Utch and I had been married. Later, I thought that the trick I had played on Severin was the kind he would play, and that it would somehow please him.