The 158-Pound Marriage Page 10

  Then we felt like a swim and ran, all three, across the lawn, green-black now, and saw the lights on the channel buoys blinking out in the water. And we all three entered the sea and saw that startling figure alone against the lights from the sunroom's open doors. He sprinted down the lawn toward us and cleared the first long dune like a broadjumper. At a glance you would have picked him for a winner in a rare pentathlon - cooking, eating, drinking, wrestling and fucking. 'Here I come, you lovers!' he shouted. A wave rocked us and tilted the horizon, so that Severin momentarily disappeared, and then he burst through it and hugged the three of us; we were chest-deep in the ocean. 'The paella's ready, team,' he said, 'if we can stop screwing long enough to eat it.' A vulgar man.

  But we stopped until after dinner, when I think we'd all had a long enough time to engage in the normal, relatively civilized process of eating, which we'd done together many times before, so that our awareness of how we'd behaved that afternoon had sunk in and left us all happy but shy.

  Severin reviewed his paella, suspected the tenderness of the pork, cast aspersions on the age of the chicken, suggested shortcuts in the making of the Italian sweet sausage, allowed that clams were, usually, clams, that mussels were better than clams anyway, and that the lobster was the undefeated George James Bender of the sea.

  'Don't make me lose my appetite,' Edith said. 'Show some restraint in your images.'

  'This is a vacation from restraint,' Severin said. 'I don't see anyone else showing any restraint.' He flipped a lobster claw in my lap; I flipped it back; he laughed.

  'This is no vacation,' I said. 'This is a beginning.' It was a toast. Edith stood up and drank down her wine the way I was used to seeing Utch drink hers.

  But Severin said, 'No, it's just a holiday. It's like calling time out.'

  Utch wasn't saying anything; I could tell she was a little drunk. Edith announced that she wanted to change her brand of cigarettes. 'I want non-filters,' she said, crumpling a full pack of mine; she'd been out of her own for hours. 'If this is just a time out,' she said, 'I'm going to enjoy myself.'

  Severin said he'd go get her cigarettes. 'What's the worst cigarette? What's the strongest, vilest, most throat-rending, lung-gunking cigarette on sale? Because I'll get you a carton of them,' he told Edith, 'and we'll force-feed them to you all weekend. You can chainsmoke until they're all gone. Maybe that will cure you.'

  'Go with him,' Edith said to me. 'He'll probably buy me a box of cigars.'

  'You shouldn't smoke,' Utch said to Edith. 'You know it upsets him.' She had a fixed smile on her face, and I knew she wouldn't remember anything she said tomorrow. Her left hand lay in the salad as if it were comfortable there. Edith smiled at her and took her hand out of the salad. Utch winked at her and blew her a kiss.

  In the car Severin said, 'Christ, we better hurry back or those women will go to bed without us.'

  'Does it bother you?' I asked. 'It seems natural to me that they should have those feelings for each other. I don't know why, but it doesn't bother me.'

  'I don't know what's natural,' Severin said, 'but, no, it doesn't bother me, either. I just don't want to get back and find us locked out of the bedrooms. I mean, I didn't come all this way to spend a weekend with you.' But he was joking; he wasn't really angry.

  We had an argument about whether to buy Edith Lucky Strikes, Camels or Pall Malls. Severin insisted on the Pall Malls because they were longer and he thought they would burn her throat more. Riding back, I wanted to tell him how good I felt - how I couldn't believe that he'd suddenly relaxed here, and how optimistic I was about all of us. I wanted to say that I thought our future looked fine, but he said suddenly, 'We should be careful no one gets too excited.' It was like his saying that we were all on a holiday, and I didn't know what to make of it. 'Why does Utch drink so much?' he asked me. 'Why do you let her get so plastered?'

  I said, 'You know, one kind of excitement leads to another.'

  '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.'

  I went up to the Great Green Wrenching Orgasm Room, where Edith was sitting up, smoking in bed and fuming about Severin. 'He's not going to spoil this weekend for me,' she said. 'Or for any of us, though he's certainly trying.' I reminded her of what had happened between us all in the afternoon; we had enjoyed ourselves, after all, and it had been surprising. She smiled; I suspected that she sulked with him when he upset her, but she had never done that with me.

  'Go on,' she said tiredly. 'Just talk to me.' But then she wanted to tiptoe down the hall and say goodnight to Severin. I didn't know what her motive was, but I let her go. I surveyed the green walls, the green drapes, the notorious brass bed, the wrench dangling from the foot-rail. I listened to Edith in the hall as she knocked on the door of the Come If You Can Room. 'Sleep tight!' she cried out to Severin brightly. 'Come if you can!'

  When she came back, I got angry with her; I told her that the quickest way to end our relationship was to use our being together as a kind of provocation of Severin. Then she sulked with me. I very much wanted to make love to Edith at that moment because I knew that Utch and Severin couldn't, but I saw that her anger with him had made her angry with everything, and that making love to her was unlikely.

  When I thought she was asleep, she whispered, 'It's got nothing to do with you sometimes. It's just between us. Don't worry. You see, he doesn't know what he wants; it's himself he's upset with most of the time.' A few minutes later she mumbled, 'He only thinks of himself.'

  We were both asleep when Severin woke us with his knocking on the door. 'Goodnight!' he called. 'Be careful what you use that wrench for! It's only meant to fix the bed! Goodnight, goodnight ...'

  But Edith started to huff and moan and pant and thrash around, gripping the head-rails of the old brass bed and thumping up and down - sounding like she never sounded when she was actually doing what she pretended to be doing now for his benefit. 'Ooooh!' she cried out; the bed heaved. 'Uuuuh!' she grunted, and the casters moved us across the green room like some boat on choppy water. 'God!' she cried out, her long thin arms as rigid as those brass rails. When the bed collapsed under us, Severin was probably on his way back to Utch, but he heard it. Edith sat laughing on the floor; at least I think she was laughing - it was strange laughter. The bed, detached entirely from the head-rail and clinging still to the right foot-post, had pitched the mattress and us across the scatter rug and sent the night table spinning into the chaise longue.

  'Are you all right?' Severin asked at the door. Edith laughed.

  'Yes, thank you,' I said. Then I wondered how to fix it. I had no idea what one was supposed to do with the damn wrench.

  Edith curled up on the chaise with a wild look at me and said. 'If you can fix it, I really will fuck you.' I'd never heard her talk so crudely. But the bed was hopeless; mechanically, I have never known what goes where. I was going to suggest that we move to another room when we heard Utch being sick down the hall.

  'It's OK,' Severin was saying soothingly. 'Let it all come and you'll feel better.' We listened to Utch's terrible retching. I had to go to her, of course; Edith kissed me hurriedly and I went down the hall.

  Severin was holding her head over the toilet in the bathroom adjacent to the Come If You Can Room. 'I'm sorry,' Utch said weakly to him, then threw up again.

  'I'm here, Utch,' I said.

  'I don't care,' she said. She heaved some more, and then Severin left us alone together. We inherited the Come If You Can Room and I heard him move with Edith into the Hot & Cold Flashes Room. Evidently Severin didn't feel like fixing the brass bed at such a late hour, though he had fixed it many times before, I knew.

  Utch and I hugged each other in the Come If You Can Room while Severin and Edith had no apparent difficulty coming next door. Hot & Cold Flashes, indeed. I listened to Edith sound the way I knew she really sounded. Utch's strong hand bore down on the base of my spine. We each knew what the other was thinking: we'd all spoken of this weekend as being an opportunity to break the 3 a.m. arrival-and-departure schedule. We'd thought it would be nice to be real lovers, who occasionally got to wake up in the morning together.

  But I woke up with Utch, her breath echoing vomit. Edith made jokes about it at breakfast, but Severin said, 'Oh, I don't know, it was still a novelty for us, Edith. I've always wanted to nail you in your mother's room.'

  'Poor Mommy,' Edith said.

  The day cheered up; Utch took off her jersey at noon. Severin, making sandwiches, put a dab of his homemade mayonnaise on one of her available nipples, but no one offered to lick it off and Utch had to use a napkin. Edith kept her blouse on. Severin announced he was taking a swim, and Utch went with him. Edith and I talked about Djuna Barnes. We agreed there was a kind of bloodless immorality to Nightwood; it was art, but wasn't it clinical? Edith said suddenly, 'I suppose they're doing it down on the beach. I wonder if they ever talk about anything.'

  'Why do you mind if they're doing it?' I asked.

  'I don't, really,' she said. 'It's just that it's Severin's idea that we all keep the times even, or something, and the thought's contaminating. And he knows that you and I didn't, last night.'

  'I think Utch thinks we did,' I said. 'I think she feels she missed out.'

  'You didn't tell her what happened?'

  'No,' I said. She thought it over, then shrugged.

  When they came back, Edith asked lightly, 'Well, what have you two been doing?' She thrust her hand down Severin's bathing suit and squeezed. Utch had put her jersey back on.

  Severin winced; his eyes watered; Edith let him go. 'Well,' he said, 'we've been enjoying our holiday.' That word again!

  'What's it a holiday from?' Edith asked.

  'Children and reality,' he said. 'But mostly children.' At that time I didn't know how much he implied by 'children'. Over his head, above the knife rack, was a wretched painting of decapitated fish with scales resembling Gustav Klimt's little squares of color-forms. It was an original Kurt Winter, of course; the Museum of Modern Art hadn't wanted it. Edith's mother had been stuck with a lot of minor paintings over the years. She felt no sense of responsibility for the estate of Van Gogh, but when they rejected a Haringa, a Bodler or a Kurt Winter, then she was touched. She ended up buying a lot of paintings the Modern turned down.

  'She's such a sweet person,' Edith said. 'She's especially moved by bad paintings because she feels such embarrassment for the painter, even if he's dead.' It's true. There wasn't a decent painting in the bunch of Kurt Winters; she had bought his very worst.

  Edith hardly did better. In Vienna, she had met Severin on the t
wentieth-century floor of the Belvedere, as planned. Though he wore his letter-jacket, confirming her worst fears, they still made a kind of art history together. Pausing by the great square canvas by Gustav Klimt - 'Avenue Leading Up to Castle Kammer on the Attersee,' c. 1912 - Severin said, 'See that green? My father just didn't have it. With my father, trees were trees and green was green.'

  'I want you to know that I'm not officially employed--' Edith started to say.

  'This is Klimt's "Judith with the Head of Holofernes", 1901,' Severin said. 'His brother, Georg, made the frame with the inscription.'

  'The Museum of Modern Art has not committed itself to a price,' Edith went on doggedly. 'In fact, they might only want one painting. But how much money do you need? Will you go straight to America? Would you consider traveling about first?'

  'Schiele's "Sunflowers", 1911,' Severin said. 'Not what you'd expect of Schiele.'

  'My mother and I might be able to buy one or two paintings ourselves, but what will you do with the money, exactly? I mean, will you work at some job? You're getting a doctorate? In what?'

  'Do you like "The Kiss"?' Severin asked.

  'What?'

  '"The Kiss", 1908. It's one of my favorite Klimts.'

  'Oh, mine too,' Edith said. They looked at it for a while but it was 'Judith with the Head of Holofernes' which prompted Edith to ask, 'Do you think Klimt liked women?'

  'No,' said Severin. 'But I think he desired women, was tantalized by them, intrigued by them, attracted to them.' They regarded Judith's strong jaw, her open mouth, her wet teeth, her startling dark hair. Her flesh was gauzy, perhaps in decay, and her long fingers were in Holofernes' hair; she held his severed head matter-of-factly against her stomach, her shadowy navel almost in line with his shut eye. Her breasts were high, upstanding, girlish but soft. One was naked, the other covered by a filmy blouse; the gold gilt was carefully placed so as not to obscure the nipple. Fruits, vegetation, a possible forest and garden, grew over Judith's shoulder and framed her cold, elegant face. But the dead head of Holofernes was casually cropped out of the painting; his one shut eye and part of a cheek was all of him that was in the picture.