The 158-Pound Marriage

'I've noticed that in four-year-olds,' he said.

'Come on,' I said. 'I mean, it really excites me when I know Utch has been with you. And being with Edith - well, that also makes Utch very arousing to me.'

'Polymorphous perverse,' said Severin. 'Something like that. It's normally a phase of childhood sexuality.'

'Come on,' I said. 'Doesn't it excite you? Don't you find that generally you're more sexually aroused?'

'There have always been certain moments in the day when I think I could fuck a she-goat,' Severin said.

I was angry at him. 'I hope you don't mean Utch.'

'I hope I didn't mean Edith,' he said.

'You know, Severin, I'm just trying to get to know you.'

'That's a little difficult,' he said. 'It's a little late. I mean, it's not as if we were friends first, and things just naturally led to this. Things began with this, and now you're Edith's friend, first and last.'

'I've never had too many men friends, anyway,' I told him. 'I know you have. We're just different.'

'I have a few old friends,' he said, 'but no one around me now. I don't really have any more friends than you. I just used to have them.'

'And women friends?' I asked. 'I mean, since Edith and before Utch?'

'Not as many as you,' he said. But he was assuming; he didn't know anything.

'How many is "not so many"?'

'Counting she-goats?' he asked, but there was that slashed tooth, that mischief-making tooth, that storytelling tooth. 'If you want to know, ask Edith,' he said.

'You mean she knows?' I asked.

'Everything. We don't have any secrets.'

'Some people would rather not know everything,' I said. 'Utch and I agree - not that we're that frequently unfaithful, or whatever you want to call it - that if one of us has someone, some light occasion only, we don't want to know. Just so it doesn't show, just so it doesn't affect us together. And if it's a little nothing, why should we know? We might get upset when there's no reason to.'

'I couldn't have "a little nothing",' Severin said. 'What's the point of having nothing? If I were having a relationship with someone and it didn't show - and Edith couldn't see it and feel it - then I couldn't be having much of a relationship. I mean, if you have one good relationship, why would you be interested in having a little nothing of a relationship? If you have a good relationship, that's all the more reason to want to have another good one. Which is what the trouble is,' he added.

I asked Edith once, 'Do you tell him everything about us?'

'If he asks,' she said. 'That's how he wants it.' Then she smiled. 'Almost everything,' she said. 'But if he always knew what to ask, I'd always tell.'

In the car, I asked him, 'Don't you think that's an invasion of privacy? Don't you think it violates someone else's independence?'

'What independence?' he asked me. 'I honestly admit the degree of independence that I don't have if I live with someone,' he said, 'and I expect whoever's living with me to do the same.' (Later I remember him yelling: 'There's a precious amount of having-one's-cake-and-eating-it-too shit going on around here!')

The Cape house was darker than we'd left it. 'I'll bet they're in there lapping each other right up, so to speak,' Severin said. But I knew how drunk Utch had been when we left, and I wasn't surprised to see her flopped on the couch - passed out from the wine, I was sure, not love-drugged by a bout with Edith. Edith sat braiding Utch's hair while she snored. Braids were not flattering to Utch.

'Brunhilde's been felled by the mead, or the lords of the hall, or both,' said Edith. She'd washed her hair; it was done up in a big mint-green towel that came from the bathroom adjoining the Green Room. Like some grand English country home, the house had named bedrooms: the Green Room, the Cove Room, the Master Red, the Lady Yellow. I had never met Edith's mother, but Severin mimicked her perfectly, Edith said, and he had renamed all the rooms for us when he'd shown us the house on arrival. There was the Wet Dream Room - it had a single bed - and the Hot & Cold Flashes Room (Edith's mother's room; she complai

ned of such symptoms) and the Come If You Can Room, so named for being next to Edith's mother's room (and a trial in the early days of their marriage, Severin claimed; Edith laughed), and the Great Green Wrenching Orgasm Room - the most private of the upstairs rooms, most separate from the others and, when the house was full, most coveted. 'It has the best orgasm record,' Severin claimed. 'Daughters have trouble having orgasms in their mothers' houses.' It had a brass bed which was notorious for falling apart. From the gleaming foot-rail, tied on a satin cord, hung a wrench for emergency repairs.

By her choice of the mint-green towel, Edith had indicated that the Great Green Wrenching Orgasm Room was to be ours. 'Love?' she said, touching Severin nicely, 'you take Come If You Can, OK? I mean, when Mother's not here, the room doesn't deserve its name, does it?'

But Edith told me later that when I went off to pee, Severin said to her, with a nasty jerk of his head toward the snoring Utch, 'You mean Come if She Can, don't you? What's the going price for baby-sitting? Why should he get it free?'

I could tell there was something between them when I came back, so I offered to put Utch to bed; Severin waved me off. 'She usually just sleeps it off,' I told him.

'Any special instructions?' he asked. I thought he was kidding; I saw his tooth. But Edith left us and went to bed. Whose bed, I wondered? 'She's in the Green Room,' Severin told me. 'I'll look after Utch; don't worry about a thing.'