The 158-Pound Marriage

by John Irving

  It was an awkward moment, and suddenly Utch had her coat on and was standing between Severin's chair and where I sat on the sofa with Edith. 'Vitch one of you is taking me home?' she asked. 'Who gets me tonight?'

  Well, we all had to laugh. And I stood up, and bowed, and said to Severin, 'Please, the honor is all yours,' and he stood up and bowed and hesitated - and I thought that he might be on the verge of saying, 'Take your goddamn wife home yourself and let me have mine!'

  But with a look to Edith which was mostly in fun, he said, 'Allow me to do you such a favor sometime.' And he picked Utch up in his arms, easily resting her over his shoulder, and left with her worrisome laughter dying away outdoors.

  In the way Edith and I then smiled at each other, I sensed that time was not what Severin Winter needed. I think we felt conscious of him as the driver (any one of us could have asserted ourselves, too, but we didn't seem to have the need for it) - and we knew that he might choose to stop it. (Any one of us could have done that, but we felt that if anyone would stop it, it would be Severin.)

  Usually Edith and I talked a long time after we were alone - about each other and about writing. I would read her some of my new work; occasionally I gave her latest things a good critique. It was often two o'clock in the morning when we'd realize the time and know that Severin would be home in an hour or so, and then we would go upstairs and always be careful not to be still making love when he returned. Usually we were asleep; he'd knock once on the bedroom door to wake us, and I'd get dressed and go home to Utch.

  But that night we went to bed almost as soon as Severin took Utch home. I suppose we may have felt some anxiety that it was going to end. When I told Utch about it, she said, 'Don't try to tell me it's not sex.'

  'Edith and I mean it's not just sex,' I said. 'At least not for us.' But I think that such distinctions - like self-pity and dying for freedom - were dubious to Utch. She had been brought up better than any of us, to know the difference between what you are willing to do for someone else and what you do for yourself.

  4

  Scouting Reports: Severin [158-pound class]

  THE NEW GYM included an indoor hockey rink, three basketball courts, a swimming pool, various exercise rooms, men's and women's locker rooms, and an awful hall displaying trophies and photographs of all the old heroes. From the outside, it had the tomblike appearance characteristic of public skating arenas and modern libraries. There was considerable murmuring among the old guard that the place should have at least been made to resemble the old campus - bricks and ivy - but it was clear that ivy could never be encouraged to cling to all that slick concrete and glass. Severin Winter loved the building.

  What was left of the old gym was a vast underground labyrinth of squash and handball courts, and the old locker rooms, now used by visiting teams - perhaps to depress them. This maze was connected to the new underground of shiny steel lockers and ingenious shower nozzles by a long tunnel to what was called 'the old cage'.

  The cage was an ominous humped dome of brick; it looked like a crematorium for athletes. It was laced with ivy as thick as a girl's wrist; the roof was a beehive of glass, skylight windows so old and dull that they'd lost their glint. A huge circular space with a hard-packed mud and cinder floor, it was used primarily for indoor track and field events; it smelled like a greenhouse, except that plants don't sweat. ('Everything sweats,' said Winter.) To prevent discuses from breaking the skylights during track meets, they'd drop nets all over the inside of the dome, like a see-through shroud. Indoor tennis was played there, too.

  Around the inside rim of the cage was an elevated board track so that runners could operate on two levels; the ones below used spikes in the mud and cinders; on the board track, you ran in rubber soles. The track was banked at the curves; it assumed you ran with some speed; if you were just walking around it, you drifted toward the rail. People claimed that if you ran too many laps on that track, one leg would become longer than the other. ('Not if you occasionally reverse your direction,' said You-know-who.)

  When the cage was busy, it was a noisy place. The track thundered and shook; starting guns sounded for the trackmen on the mud and cinder floor below; the wind and snow made the old skylight windows hum and creak. The only modern addition to the cage was a long rectangular room partitioned off to one side of the board track, up in the rafters under the skylights; it was also glaringly lit with long fluorescent bulbs and had two roaring blow-heaters and its own thermostat. Its walls were padded in crimson matting, and from wall to wall it was carpeted with crimson and white wrestling mats.

  Winter claimed that the wrestling room was perfectly situated for 'psychological reasons'. Prior to a match, the team would assemble in their little wing off the abandoned cage and watch the gym gang take away the mats. They were carried to one of the dazzling basketball courts in the new gym and properly spread out and taped together. There would be a few mats left in the wrestling room, and the wrestlers would warm up on these.

  When it was time, Severin would lead them out of the wrestling room and around the creaking board track; he would turn lights off as he went, so the great gloomy cage would grow darker as they left it. (Winter scheduled all his home matches at night.) He would take his wrestlers through the long connecting tunnel to the new gym. To each side of the clammy tunnel, bright slots of light winked at the wrestlers from the squash and handball courts, where, like prisoners in strange cells, a few solitary athletes played those lonely games. Everything echoed in the tunnel. Winter would kill the lights as he went. An occasional squash player would holler, 'Hey, what the fuck?' and open his cell. The effect of the wrestlers in single file, solemn in their robes and hoods (Winter's choice), was quieting. Timidly, the squash and handball players often came out of their cells and followed the procession. It was a rite. The wrestlers had the longest, quietest, darkest walk imaginable; they had a weird way of concentrating. When they came to the light at the end of the tunnel, Winter always paused at the door. He looked them all up and down, as if he could see in the darkness. 'Wie gehts?' he'd ask them; in the tunnel, his voice boomed. The squash and handball players hung back in the shadows, not wanting to disturb the ritual. 'Wie gehts?' Severin Winter would holler. They were all his German students, you see.

  And in unison the wrestlers would bellow in that tunnel, 'Gut!'

  Then Winter would fling open the door, and like moles emerging into daylight, his wrestlers would blindly follow him into the new gym and startling light and yelling crowd and out onto that shining crimson and white wrestling mat. To the spectators they always looked as if they had been brainwashed in a dungeon and sent out on some grim task into the real world. They had.

  The Viennese are old hands at psychology. Severin didn't get the best material in the country, and he frankly admitted that he was not the best coach, either. The university wasn't what you'd call a wrestling power, but Winter's teams never lost a match at home. Of course he was clever at scheduling.

  The lure of the university's old Eastern academic prestige was more responsible for bringing Winter the few good wrestlers he had than anything he was able to muster in the way of recruiting. He did his duty and made himself remembered by a few big high school coaches in the serious parts of the real wrestling country, but though he was remembered by a few coaches of his generation as a former contender, he was not known by the younger wrestlers, who remembered only the champions. And though he did get a few good wrestlers, they were drawn to the university because they were flattered as students; if they'd really wanted to wrestle, they wouldn't have come to New England. In short, he got athletes but not fanatics. 'I don't get the ones with the real killer instincts,' Severin complained. 'I get guys who think. If you think, you realize you can lose - and you're right.'

  But I pointed out that the effect he got out of his famous tunnel-walk would probably be lost on wrestlers who didn't think. 'Why do you think I do it?' he asked me. 'All the great wrestlers have tunnels of their own - long, dark, em
pty walks through their long, dark, empty heads. I'm just creating a little illusion for my intellectuals. I'm just playing Plato.'

  He didn't pick an easy schedule; he just fostered his illusions at the home matches. He'd take his team on the road at least twice a season, and they'd wrestle three or four matches with the Big Ten and Big Eight schools. He'd always lose out there, of course, but he'd lose respectably. Usually he'd win one or two weight classes, and not many of his losing wrestlers would get pinned. This class of competition was necessary so that his team could win at home. There wasn't another school in New England that could beat him; he routed the Ivy League, and he'd usually schedule one home match a year with one of the big Eastern powers. He was very clever at anticipating the weakest of those powers in a given year, and he'd stage one great upset for his tunnel-walkers every season. Once it was Army or Navy; once he edged Penn State. He'd always lose to those schools when he took his team on the road, of course, and in the Eastern championships he had to struggle to have place winners in a couple of the weight classes.

  He'd pick out his best wrestler each year and take him on the lonely and humiliating trip to the national tournament. The boy would get knocked off in the early rounds, but Winter never expected better, and he was kind to these boys and never misled them. He took only one wrestler each year - there was always one who qualified - just so he could write off a trip to the nationals as a school expense. 'He has a dark-horse chance,' Winter would tell the Athletic Department. It was an inoffensive lie.

  Winter knew that he could not bring the old, dark cage and his long tunnel out to Stillwater, Oklahoma, or Ames Iowa. 'Out there,' he said, 'they have their own tunnels.' And he'd tap his shaggy skull. 'Very private tunnels, very tough to crack.'

  I used to wonder about his tunnel - how circuitous was it, and how long?

  But it was Edith who invited us to dinner that first time. Her reasons were straightforward: she wanted to talk to me about writing. At thirty, she had still not engaged the novel, but her stories - mostly of small, closely observed relationships - had been published, most of them in little magazines, but one of them in either Harper's or The Atlantic. She was in the habit of taking a creative writing course every year, though she was not interested in completing a degree, or she would work independently with the university's writer-in-residence. That was not me; I was hired by the History Department, and I told her that I'd never taught a creative writing course and never wanted to. She talked so well about her work, though, that I agreed to look at it. For the last two years, the writer-in-residence had been the famous Helmbart, and Edith confessed that she neither liked his work nor him. I was, I admit, pleased to hear this; Helmbart's sort of haughty kingship over what was called 'the new novel' was nauseating to me. Edith and I agreed that when the subject of fiction became how to write fiction, we lost interest; we were interested in prose, surely, but not when the subject of the prose became prose itself.

  We had a good talk. I was flattered to know that she had read at least one of my books - the third one, about Andreas Hofer. She questioned my insistence on the term 'historical novel', which for her had bad associations. But I insisted on the history, I said, because I felt that novels which did not convey real time conveyed nothing. We kicked that one around; I didn't convince her of anything. Severin, she said, had read all my books. I was surprised. I looked at him, awaiting his comment, but he was speaking German with Utch. 'Of course, Severin reads everything,' Edith said. I didn't know quite how to take that; she could have meant he was not a discriminating reader, a kind of book glutton, or that she admired his reading very much. Edith fixed her eyes on you when she talked to you, and she was animated with her hands - perhaps a habit acquired from Severin.

  Helmbart, she said, had spent his time analyzing her 'hang-ups'; he'd never talk about her writing or characters at all. She said he told her once that she couldn't begin to write until she could 'describe a table and show its soul and its sex'. It's this kind of shit that makes him king of 'the new novel', I guess.

  In discussing my Andreas Hofer book, Edith was wise and, well - kind. I told her that occasionally it angered me that my work was so disregarded. Even the university, when it listed faculty publications, failed to list my books. There would be Helmbart's fiction, and a raft of the usual scholarly articles - a piece, for example, on 'the furniture symbols of Henry James'. I'd always felt that there was a greater similarity between these articles and Helmbart's tiny fictions than the respective authors would admit.

  Edith said she admired the energy of someone like myself - virtually unrecognized, but prolific.

  'Yes,' Severin said suddenly; I hadn't known he was paying attention. 'You really crank them out.' I wondered about that, and he said, 'It's very hard to find your books, you know. They're all out of print.' Sadly, this was true.

  'How did you find them?' I asked him. I had never met anyone other than my mother and my editor who had read all my books. (I suspected Utch of having my father's habit with endings.)

  'The library here buys everything,' Severin said. 'You just have to know how to dig them out.' And suddenly I pictured my books as some archeological discovery. Severin Winter gave me the feeling that he considered the feat of finding them more significant than that of writing them. He didn't say anything further to me about them then, but I learned later that he liked to categorize books by wrestling weight classes. Such as: 'That's a pretty fair 134-pound novel.'

  He came by our house the next day on his bicycle. Utch was out with the children, and though I suspected he might have come to see her, since he found me alone, I thought that he might mention my novels. He didn't. He'd brought me some of Edith's stories. 'She's really very excited to be working with you,' he told me. 'Helmbart didn't work out.'

  'Yes, she told me,' I said. 'I'm really very happy to know another writer here. She'll certainly be a relief from students and colleagues.'

  'She's very serious about her work,' Severin said. 'Helmbart gave her a hard time. He told her he felt he could get closer to what was wrong with her writing if she slept with him.' Edith hadn't told me that. 'I think he thought she was just another faculty wife out to get laid by a new mentor,' Severin said.

  I suspected his reasons for telling me this, but I laughed, 'I thought, right away,' I said, 'that she was interested in writing.' He laughed too.

  He rode that ten-speed bicycle every day in good weather, pumping up and down for miles in a tank-top style of wrestling uniform - what they call a singlet. He was sweating; he was tanned. 'When Helmbart got to the point when he couldn't see Edith without pinching her, she gave it up,' he said. We laughed again.

  'That was a fine evening we had with you,' I told him. 'You're an excellent cook.'

  'Well, I love to eat,' he said. 'And I enjoyed talking with your wife.'

  'You have a lot in common,' I told him, but he looked puzzled.

  'No, not much,' he said seriously, but then he laughed again - nervously, I thought - and back-pedaled his bicycle, jamming something in his complicated gears, so that he had to get off to tinker with it. We both agreed to see each other again soon.

  It was later that I learned the rest of the story about Helmbart's pinching. From the start, Edith had told Severin about the man's advances. 'Next time knee him in the balls,' Severin had told her. But that was hardly Edith's style. She kept thinking she must be able to get something valuable from Helmbart. She asked Severin if he would speak to Helmbart for her, but he told her that this would make the fool so self-conscious that everything he'd say to her would be a lie. I think this was wise. So Edith went on trying, fending off the pinches and squeezes.

  Then there was a large party, mainly of English and Art Department people. Because of her writing, Edith was usually invited to such things, and Severin always went along; he enjoyed teasing those people. At this party Helmbart again pinched Edith. She gave him a look, she told me, which was 'truly annoyed', then went over and told Severin that she was really
fed up. 'It's the only time I've really wanted Severin to do anything physically to anyone for me,' she said. 'I was ashamed at how angry I was, because Severin is rarely that way with people. I don't remember what I told him, but I wanted him to make an ass out of Helmbart. I suppose I expected him to wrestle the bastard. It was very unfair of me. Severin had always given me a great deal of confidence in myself by letting me know that he believed I could take care of myself - and here I wasn't able to.'

  Severin patted her hand and went bobbing off into the party crowd looking for Helmbart. Edith followed him, fascinated. Severin moved up behind Helmbart, who was telling a story to four or five other people. He is a tall man; Severin comes up to about his shoulder. Standing behind him on tiptoe, Severin must have looked like a dangerous elf. He quickly pinched Helmbart hard on the ass and kissed him loudly and wetly on the ear. Helmbart dropped an hors d'oeuvre in his drink, gave a little leap, blushed rosy. When he saw it was Severin, he handed the drink to the man standing next to him; the drink got dropped. Helmbart got pale; he thought he was in a fight with the wrestling coach.

  And Severin, winking lewdly, said, 'How's the writing coming, Helmbart?' Edith was there, hanging on Severin's arm, trying to restrain her laughter. But when he saw the man's face, Severin burst out laughing himself, and Edith let herself go before they were out the door together - laughing, actually baying like hounds. 'It gave me such enormous confidence,' Edith told me, 'that I tossed my head back and took one last look at poor horny Helmbart. He wasn't laughing; he looked absolutely gelded! Severin and I kept laughing. It was late afternoon; the children were home with a baby-sitter, getting ready for supper. We drove around. I put my head in Severin's lap; I unzipped him and took him in my mouth. He talked nonstop, driving very fast, all the way home. I don't know what he said, but it was hilarious; even with him in my mouth, I couldn't stop laughing. We ran in the back door, through the kitchen where the children and the sitter were, upstairs and into the bedroom. I locked the door; he turned on the shower in the bathroom, so that the sound would drown out our sound - also, I guess, so that the children would think we had rushed home to wash. We knew we wouldn't fool the baby-sitter. My God, we went at each other like leopards. I remember lying on the bed, after God knows how many times I'd come, and I saw the steam from the shower rolling out the bathroom door. We took a shower together and soaped each other until we were slick, and then Severin pulled the bathmat into the shower and laid it down on the floor of the tub, and we had it all over again with the soap in a great lather and the water beating down like a storm and the soggy bathmat soaking up all of it and sucking underneath me like a giant sponge.