The 158-Pound Marriage

'What? He wasn't twenty-eight? He didn't die?'

'I don't believe Frau Reiner was ever a child model for him. No painting or drawing of her exists among Schiele's workbooks and unfinished canvases, and everything he painted in that last year has been looked over. Unless it was something so bad that he destroyed it, which was not his habit. Frau Reiner has modeled for a lot of people - though not so many as my mother modeled for - but she has always regretted that she could only be a child model when Schiele and Klimt were alive.'

Frau Reiner said something and Severin said, 'She's admitting she never modeled for Klimt.'

Frau Reiner said something else.

'But she claims he spoke to her once,' Severin whispered to Edith. 'This could be true, but she would hardly have been old enough to remember it.'

Edith was struck by how close he moved toward her when he talked. He couldn't talk without touching, squeezing and coming very close, but she felt there was nothing sly or sexual about it. She noticed that he also touched the old Chetniks when he talked to them.

This is true: Severin could never keep his hands off anyone he spoke to. Later it irritated me how he would be all over Utch - I mean in public, at large parties. He would be mauling her in conversation. Of course, Edith and I were more discreet. But I confess Severin mauled me in conversation too. There was always an arm around you, or he would seize your wrist in his hand and squeeze it between sentences. Sometimes he pinched; I even remember that he used to touch my beard. But it was just a way he had, a part of his restless movement. I don't think I agree with Edith that he was unselfconscious - whether he really was, or whether he might have been so selfconscious that you assumed no one could be that selfconscious and decided he was completely natural.

Anyway, he struck Edith as a friendly animal. When he talked he seemed much older, and when he smiled she found herself liking his boyishness.

I think, when we meet people, we can like them right away if we see how much their friends like them. Most of all, Edith said, she was aware of how much Frau Reiner and the two Chetniks adored Severin.

'But I'd have loved him anyway,' Edith told me, 'because he was the first man who treated me lightly. I mean, he was comic. He wasn't the sort of awful comic who tries to make everything funny, either. He was a pure comic. He simply found the comic ingredient in most things - even in me, and I took myself very seriously, of course.'

Well, I won't split hairs. I think that what really got to Edith is what can get to any of us: she discovered jealousy.

They went to a Serbian restaurant where the whole crowd knew that Vaso and Zivan were heroes and clapped their backs and threw celery stalks at them, and where Edith and Severin and Frau Reiner were treated as partial heroes themselves. There was torturous string music and too much spice in everything, and too much of everything, but Edith had a wonderful time.

Severin Winter told her stories about his mother and father (I'm sure the zoo fantasy must have been a part of it); he told her stories of Zivan's and Vaso's escape from Yugoslavia; he told her stories about Frau Reiner when she was the hottest model in the city (Edith was beginning to believe it). 'She learned everything she knew from my mother,' said Severin. And he told her that the 'I' on his jacket was for Iowa, and that the closest he'd ever come to winning a major conference or national championship was when he was runner-up in the Big Ten at 157 pounds.

'What do you weigh now?' Edith asked. He looked so much bigger, though he was lean in those days.

'One fifty-eight,' he said. She wasn't sure if this was a joke. With him you never knew.

Then he leaned across the table and said, 'In the morning, then? We'll see the Belvedere, I'll take you around to a few apartments - old friends of my parents have some of the best ones. I don't believe my father ever sold a damn thing; at least, he didn't make any money. I can't tell you how glad I am that you came here.' Edith looked at his eyes, his hair, that one weird tooth. 'I'm dying to leave Europe,' he told her. 'Everything and everyone is dying here. I want to go back to America very much, but I've got to unload some of these paintings first. This is a break for me, I must tell you.' And it suddenly struck Edith that he was talking about money; he was talking to the representative from the Museum of Modern Art in New York, just flown in from Paris to give old Kurt Winter a second look. She realized she had no idea how much money the Modern would pay, but she didn't think it would be much. God, maybe they would only consider a Kurt Winter as a gift! Wasn't that the way it usually happened? And only one - two at the most - her mother had said.

For some reason, she touched his hand; his damn physical habits were catching. But before she could say anything, Frau Reiner leaned against Severin; she bit his ear, took his chin in her hand, turned his head toward her and kissed him lushly on the mouth. Edith could see where Frau Reiner's tongue went. Severin didn't seem surprised, only interrupted, but Frau Reiner gave Edith a very clear look which Edith wilted under. She felt like a very young girl. His mother's friend, indeed. So she blurted, 'I've been looking at your dress all night and I still can't figure out how it works.' Frau Reiner was surprised that Edith spoke to her; she couldn't understand, of course. But Edith was saying all this for Severin. 'I wonder if Gustav Klimt designed that dress for you,' she said; Frau Reiner stiffened at the word 'Klimt' while Edith went on, 'I mean, it looks like a Klimt: the shiny gold gilt, the little squares, the Egyptian eye forms. But the way you've got it wrapped around you, it doesn't seem to show itself quite right.' She stopped, embarrassed; she couldn't remember ever showing off before.

And Severin replied in his boy's face but with the same irritating fatherliness she was used to from other men. 'I don't think you want me to translate for you,' he said. But he was smiling; he showed her his teasing tooth. 'I will translate, though, if you wish.'

'Please don't,' she said. And in a burst of candor, 'I think she's too old for you.' That got to him; he looked selfconscious for the first time. But she felt uneasy that she had said it; Why do I care? she almost said aloud.

They all rode home in the same cab. Frau Reiner sat on Severin's lap; twice, she licked his ear. Edith was crammed between them and either Zivan or Vaso - she still couldn't tell them apart - the other one rode up front.

They dropped Edith off at her Schwarzenberg Platz hotel, 'Ah, Geld,' said Frau Reiner, regarding the hotel. Edith knew enough German to know that meant money.

'Well, you know the Museum of Modern Art,' Severin said in English. It was to Edith - not to Frau Reiner - that he spoke, and Edith knew that he knew she had a lot of money. Possibly the Museum of Modern Art was just another thing he found funny.

She felt terrible. But as she was slipping out of the cab - one old Chetnik wrestler holding the door for her, like a bodyguard - Severin picked Frau Reiner up off his lap, put her down in the back seat, came around the cab and said to Edith, 'I agree with you. And I'll meet you at the Belvedere at ten.' He shook her hand so quickly that she did not have time to firm her grasp before he bounced back into the cab. The old wrestlers shouted something to her in a chorus, and she was inside the hotel lobby, seeing herself in twenty gold-edged mirrors, before she realized that she wasn't sure what Severin Winter agreed with her about. Frau Reiner's Gustav Klimt dress? Or that Frau Reiner was too old for him?

Edith went to her room and took another bath. She was angry at herself. She decided that she had felt so much out of her element that she had performed. She decided they were all very odd people, dwellers in a city, as her mother had written, that 'never took the twentieth century seriously'. The remark is quite true. Once I asked Severin if he regarded the new so-called Sexual Freedom as a fad. 'I regard the twentieth century as a fad,' he said. But there was his tooth winking at you. He never told the truth!

Before Edith went to bed she went t

hrough all her clothes trying to decide what to wear to the Belvedere. Then she got angry at herself about that too; she had never been selfconscious about what she wore. In bed she watched the city lights struggle through the high windows and the rich cream-colored drapes. Why do I wear black so much? she brooded. Before she fell asleep, she wished that Severin Winter would not wear that awful letter-jacket to the Belvedere.

I saw that letter-jacket only once. By the time Utch and I met him, he had outgrown it - physically, I mean. I assumed that it was thrown out or packed away. Then one day Utch and I were sitting on the steps of our house when Edith came along the sidewalk alone and sat down between us. Severin was upset about 'the whole thing', she told us. Utch and I had just been talking about that. This was at a time when Edith had already expressed her fears to me that she doubted whether 'the whole thing' could work. We all knew Severin was unhappy, but our relationship was very new and Severin had never made it clear what he was unhappy about. 'I thought we all ought to talk,' Edith told us. 'I mean, all four of us - together.' We sat on the steps waiting for Severin. He was driving his daughters to some friend's house to play. Our children were out. It was early spring, and in the sun's warm hours, it was barely possible to sit on the steps.

'Does Severin want to talk?' Utch asked Edith. 'I mean, all together.'

'Well, I thought we should,' Edith said. We sat there.

Severin parked his car in front of us, then sat in the car after he shut the motor off and looked at the three of us together on the steps. He was grinning. I realized I was holding Utch's and Edith's hands. He sat in his car like a smiling camera, and when he got out and started toward us, I felt Edith's grip spasm in my hand. Then I saw that he was wearing that goddamn letter-jacket. The sleeves stopped halfway down his forearms and the jacket's waist barely reached below his chest. The T-shirt and jeans and sneakers were familiar, almost a uniform, but though I'd never seen it, I knew about that jacket. Even the fucking weather that day must have been like it had been in Vienna!