The 158-Pound Marriage

Utch's tastes were mysterious to me. She claimed she liked most bodies. She said she liked the older part of me, too, but mainly she liked how much I obviously liked women. 'Though I knew it would be troublesome, I never met anyone who was so attentive to women,' Utch told me. She implied that I was a woman's man; in fact, she often used the word 'womanize'. Well, I am more of a womanizer than Severin Winter, but so is the Pope.

'Don't you think I'm nice to women, though?' I asked Utch.

'Oh ja, I guess so. You encourage a woman to indulge herself in being a woman,' she said; then she frowned. 'In being a kind of woman,' she added. Then she said, 'Maybe women are your friends easily because they see that you're not so nice to men. Because they see that you don't have men for friends, perhaps they trust you.'

'And Severin?' I asked her. 'How is he nice to women?' I was just teasing; I didn't feel I had to know.

'Well, he's different,' she would say and look away. She did not like to talk about him.

She would talk about his wrestlers, though. She knew them by their weight classes, by their styles, by everything Winter had told her about them - and he told her everything. Before the home matches, he'd often give her the rundown of the match - picking points, estimating who wa

s going to win or lose. And Utch would sit through the match, taking notes of her impressions for him - how the 142-pound match differed from his prediction, and why. I'd have thought that he would have loved her companionship in this; Edith and I both thought that it would take some of the burden off her. But no, he made us all come to his home matches. Utch would tell us what to watch for in each match. I felt manipulated; it was as if he needed us all there to watch him - and he did seem to like looking up in the stands and seeing all three of us.

Utch's favorite wrestler on the team was a 134-pound black from Lock Haven, Pennsylvania, named Tyrone Williams. He was a languid-looking wrestler, sleepy but explosively quick, and it delighted her that he weighed exactly as much as she did. 'If he needs someone to work out with,' she would kid Severin, 'just send him to me.' In practice, Tyrone Williams was a good mover, always alert, but he tightened up against outside competition. He had stunning speed, and a slow-motion movement between his bursts that often lulled his opponents out of pace. But he seemed to psych himself out of every match. He was given to trances, sudden lapses in everything which made him appear to have heard a secret final-period bell in his head. He seemed to be already dreaming his way to the showers while still moving stiffly on that mat, groping on his back, gazing up at the high ceiling and the glaring lights. Usually he was pinned, and then he seemed to wake up - jumping to his feet, hollering, holding his ringing ears and staring at his opponent as if he'd been beaten by a ghost.

Patiently Severin would show him the match films later. 'Now here it comes, Tyrone. Here's where you go to sleep - you see your head loll back there, your left arm just hanging at your side? Do you see what sort of ... comes over you?'

'Mother,' Tyrone Williams would say reverently. 'Incredible, mothering incredible ...' and he'd go off into a trance right there, in disbelief at his whole performance.

'You see?' Winter would go on. 'You let his ankle go and you hooked over his arm; you wanted to hook under that arm, Tyrone - you know that. Tyrone? Ty-rone!'

Utch loved Tyrone for his lamentable trances. 'It's so human,' she said.

'Utch could break him of that habit,' I said, kidding Severin. 'Why don't you let Utch work on his trances.'

'Tyrone Williams could have a trance right on top of Utch,' Severin Winter said.

I thought this a bit crude, but Utch just laughed. 'There's little evidence of anyone suffering trances on top of me,' she said, arching her back for Severin and me. Edith laughed; she wasn't at all jealous. We all seemed very close and goodhumored in those days.

'Why do you like him?' Edith asked her; she meant Tyrone Williams.

'He's just my size,' said Utch, 'and I think he's a wonderful color. It's like caramels.'

'Yummy,' Edith said, but she didn't mean it. She had no favorites among those wrestlers; to her, they were all perfectly nice and boring boys, and as a result they behaved awkwardly around her. Winter had them all to dinner every month; Edith said that they hulked and bumped through the house, knocking paintings askew on the walls. 'Somehow they break all the ashtrays - and they don't even smoke. It's as if they need the softness of mats and the space of an area in order to be agile.'

At least once a week, one of them would come to their house to be tutored in German. Reading, listening to music or taking a long bath, Edith would hear Severin crooning to 'some bulky boy'.

'Wir mussen nur auf Deutsch sprechen,' he'd say gently.

'Wir mussen nur auf ... auf what?' the wrestler would ask.

'Deutsch.'

'Oh yeah. Oh God, Coach, I feel so stupid.'

'Nein, nein, du bist nicht ...'

Severin liked Williams, but there was a limit to how much he could like a loser, no matter how interestingly they lost. He liked winners better, and the winningest wrestler on his team was a 158-pound stranger from Waterloo, Iowa, named George James Bender. He'd been the state high school champion of Iowa for three consecutive years and had been recruited by the home-state powerhouse, Iowa State. This was before freshmen were eligible for competition, and Bender had spent a year entering only open tournaments. He'd won them all; he'd never lost. As a sophomore, he was expected to go all the way through the nationals, but he tore up his knee in the Big Eight championships. He'd always been a strange, serious student; he'd won some kind of science prize in his junior year in high school. He was a straight-A student at Iowa State; his major was pre-med, but he really wanted to be a geneticist.

On crutches at the national tournament he couldn't wrestle in, Bender introduced himself to Severin. 'Professor Winter?' he said; Severin was a professor, of course, but he wasn't used to being called one. 'I understand you have one of the few undergraduate majors in genetics in the country, and you have the top geneticist in the world in your department.'

'In my department?' Winter said. He was thinking of German or wrestling, I guess. He looked at George James Bender on his crutches and suddenly realized that the boy was talking about transferring and wrestling for him. Winter had heard of Bender, of course; every coach and wrestler in the country had.

But Bender's knee was slow to heal. He couldn't wrestle for the university the first year following his transfer, anyway, and Severin was shaken in the middle of the boy's ineligible year when Bender had to have a second operation on his knee. He'd been working out lightly with the team - whipping them all, though Winter refused to let him play with the heavyweights. Bender could have whipped them too, but anyone can make a mistake, and Severin didn't want 'one of those clumsy football players' to fall on the boy and hurt the precious knee. He didn't re-injure the knee wrestling; he hurt it leg-lifting too much weight on the weight machine.

Winter also wondered if Bender hadn't become too much of 'a goddamn geneticist, of all things', to be a real wrestler anymore. He awaited Bender's senior year with more expectations than he'd ever allowed himself to have for any of his other wrestlers. Bender spent the summer at home in Iowa working out every day with a few of those zealots from his old Iowa State team. But when he came back East in August to work privately with our geneticist, the great Showalter, Winter fretted because there was no one on our summer campus for Bender to wrestle with.

Bender walked around campus in his long white lab coat. He was nearly as pale as the coat - a short-haired reddish blond with a beard that grew six or seven scattered hairs like corn silk on his face; he shaved them once a week and always managed to cut himself while removing one of those six or seven hairs. He had faded blue eyes and wore black heavy-framed glasses with thick lenses. He looked like a powerful farm boy from decades ago, and he may have been a superior genetics student - the great Showalter certainly liked him as a disciple - but he was the dullest young man I've ever met.