The 158-Pound Marriage

'Severin,' I said. 'Suppose what's wrong between you and Edith doesn't stop; suppose it's not us who are making things bad, but just you - or something else. Then what?'

'Nothing's wrong between Edith and me,' he said walking away; he was leaving the car for Edith.

'I can't stay here,' I said. 'They want to be alone. I'll come with you.'

'Suit yourself.'

For a short-legged, stumplike man, he walked fast. I was winded halfway to the gym; I thought of his lungs sucking up more than his share of air - air that other people could use.

'What did you hit her with?' I asked. The mauve mark on Edith's face was almost a rectangle, too big to be covered by a fist. I didn't think that Severin Winter would slap anyone with his open hand.

'It was just something lying around the bedroom,' he said.

'What?'

'A book,' he said. Of course; leave it to him to hit a writer with what hurts.

'What book?' I asked.

'Any old book,' he said. 'I just used it. I didn't stop to read it.'

We were near the gym; I had no intention of actually going in there. Coming toward us were two of Severin's wrestlers. I recognized their hipless, assless, bowlegged walk, and their shoulders crouched awkwardly alongside their ears like yokes on oxen.

'Did the Ullmans come before or after Audrey Cannon?' I asked.

'You have no right to anything that's not freely offered,' he said to me.

'For God's sake, Severin. This is going to upset Edith and Utch terribly!'

'If we keep on with it, it could upset them more,' he said.

The wrestlers merged with us. One of them - that dolt Bender - gave Severin Winter an apish blow on the back, a clout with his cat-quick paw. The grinning one with the baboon arms was Iacovelli. He was in my Introduction to European History course, and I'd once had to tell him that the Dordogne was a river in France; Iacovelli had thought it was the name of a king. Dordogne the First, I suppose.

'Hi, Coach,' Iacovelli said. 'Hello, Doctor.' He was one of those who thought a PhD was rarer than admiralty, but it's odd that he didn't seem to know that Severin Winter had one too.

'I'll call you,' I told Severin.

'Ja,' he said. Watching him heading for the gym, flanked by his wrestlers, I couldn't resist yelling, 'I know whose book it was. It was mine!' I had just given Edith a copy of my first historical novel, the one about the French village being wiped out by plague; it was long out of print and the only one of mine that Edith hadn't read. We'd spoken of our early styles, and I'd wanted her to see my first effort. What a book to hit someone with! Over four hundred pages, a heavy weapon. (Later he would say to Edith, 'The presumptuousness of that bastard to think that it was his book. As if a 118-pound novel could leave any marks on a person at all, not to mention a bruise.' But it was my book; it must have been! No doubt they had been arguing about me when it happened, and what better symbol could he have found for his frustration?)

But Severin ignored me. He never turned or broke his bearish gait. Only Bender looked back at me, as if he thought I might have been calling on him. His machine-steady gaze was as lifeless as the building he was entering: gray, concrete, steel and glass - its insides of chlorinated water, disinfected mats, ice frozen by cooling pipes, ointments and powders which dealt harshly with fungi of the feet and crotch, and countless bouncing balls pumped full of air. That was Severin Winter's world, and I knew I did not belong in it.

So then it was over. Severin retreated to his wrestling room. I went to the library and waited until I thought Edith and Utch had talked all they needed to. But it was hard to imagine them talking at all.

When I went home, the kids were playing in the kitchen and Utch was cooking. She was making a complicated meal, though I doubted she felt like celebrating.

'Get out of here and find something to do,' I told the kids. 'Don't get in your mother's way.' But Utch said she wanted them around; she liked the feeling that she was in a busy place. I sliced radishes, and Jack read to us from an old edition of Europe on Five Dollars a Day. He read all the parts about what to do with children in various cities, then told us which city he wanted to visit. Bart ate radishes as fast as I could cut them up; occasionally, he spat one at Jack.

All through dinner Utch chattered with Jack, and Bart pushed his uneaten food in my direction. I remembered that it had been a long time since we'd eaten with the children. After dinner, while Jack was promising to fix Bart a bath without pushing his head under, Utch said, 'When the children go to bed, I think I'm going to die. We've got to keep them with us. Can't we all go to a movie?'

I took a bath with Bart and Jack; their small bodies were as sleek as wet puppies. Afterward the first pair of underpants I tried to put on was the pair Severin had redesigned with a razor. As I threw them away I wondered why Utch had kept them. Now she was splashing in the tub with Bart and Jack; it seemed she would never stop talking to them. The second pair of underpants I tried on also had the crotch slit through, and so did the third and the fourth. All my underpants were uncrotched with a single slash.

I slipped on my old corduroys without underwear and we went to the movies. It was one of those films without sex and full of simple violence, and therefore all right to take your children to. Someone named Robert is a kind of rookie in the wilderness; he meets various savages, white, Indian and animal, all of whom teach him how to survive. The film is about survival, I guess. Robert learns how to make mittens out of skinned squirrels; he wears rabbits on his feet; he keeps his head warm with an Indian's head of hair. He meets lots of weaker people who are crazy or cowardly or about to become one or the other; they haven't learned all of Mother Nature's harsh little tricks as well as he has. Robert enters the wilderness blond, clean-shaven, boyish and wearing clothes that fit him. He emerges bearded, wrinkled and bundled in animal hides, looking like the animal which grew the hides and somehow shrank insi

de its own skin. He learns not to be afraid and not to feel anything. Apparently a part of survival is getting over things. By the end of the movie, Robert has adapted to the wilderness and is very good at getting over, for example, the rape, mutilation and murder of his wife and children.

The film was absolutely humorless about this crap, which the audience took very seriously - all except Utch. She knew a little bit about survival, and she started laughing at the very first scene of meaningful slaughter.

Jack whispered, 'Why is that funny?'