The 158-Pound Marriage

by John Irving

  'When we finally went downstairs, the children told us the sitter had run home. I think it was Fiordiligi who said, "What a long shower you had!" And Severin said, "Well, your mother and I were very dirty." And we started laughing all over again; even Fiordiligi, who never laughs, started laughing with us, and Dorabella, who laughs at everything. We all laughed until we ached.

  'I remember that next morning I hurt all over, everywhere; I couldn't even move. Severin said, "That's how it feels after a match." I realized that I was about to start laughing again, and that if I did, we would be doing it again. I felt so sore that I tried to hold it back, but Severin saw that, and he got fantastically gentle; he came into me very slowly and we did it again. That was nice, too, but it was completely different.'

  Poor Helmbart, I thought. He never knew what he was up against.

  So Severin was clearly not the usual paranoid about his wife, was he? She gave him no cause to be. She married him and lived with him for eight years without having even a quick lover; she was faithful, and only rare fools like Helmbart couldn't tell this when they met her. But I can appreciate why he tried.

  Severin Winter was too vain to be jealous. He struck me as very much a man's man; aggressive and egocentric, he took you on his terms. But neither Utch nor Edith really agreed with me. Utch claimed he was the only man she'd ever known who actually treated women as if they were equal to men; I agree that he was equally aggressive and egocentric with both sexes. Edith said that Severin's kind of equality could be very insulting to a woman. He seemed to make no distinctions between men and women - treating both with a kind of maleness which made women feel they were just one of the boys. For the sake of equality, few women really care to have men go that far. Even with his physicality - his hands all over you when he talked - women felt relaxed at once by his touch, but also a little put out. There was no mistaking his touch for a cheap feel; his touches had such an absence of sexuality that women felt he didn't notice them as women at all.

  Severin had been married nearly eight years before he'd had time or cause to consider that there might be pleasanter mornings to wake up to, livelier beds to lie in, other lives to lead. The thought upset him. You can see how naive he was. And when he first had the courage to mention his new thinking to his wife, he was all the more upset to hear that his dangerous daydream was already familiar to her.

  'You mean there have been other men?'

  'Oh, no. Not yet.'

  'Not yet? But you mean you've thought about other men?'

  'Well, of course - other situations, yes.'

  'Oh.'

  'I don't mean that I think of it very much, Sevi.'

  'Oh.'

  It was not the first time he found actual equality difficult to bear. He was someone who was always embarrassed to discover his own innocence. I think that a feeling of superiority came naturally to him. With all their chatter about equality, Edith and Utch missed one point about Severin: he thought of himself as protecting Edith from his own complicated feelings. What a shock for him to learn that she was complicated too.

  But if he wasn't essentially a jealous man, he was demanding in other ways. He needed to make himself the source of the important feelings in Edith's life. If he had no need to make her more his than she already demonstrably was, he needed her work to be his too - and I know this troubled her. Though he was fond of saying that it was sex, when things were bad - or when things were good, for that matter - I'm sure that much of his uneasiness about Edith's and my relationship was the intimacy we shared through our writing. He was not a writer, though Edith claimed that he was her best reader. I doubt it; his categories - his notion of weight classes - were irritating. I never knew when it was our sex that was troubling him, or when it was his notion that I had replaced him as a source of Edith's ideas. I always thought it important to know, but I doubt that he usually knew the difference. 'It's the whole thing,' he would say - his heavyweight aesthetics crushing us all.

  'I'll indulge you all the writers, colleagues and mentors that you want,' he told Edith once in a rage, 'but presumably you won't need to sleep with all of them!' Obviously he was obsessed with his bizarre sensitivity to a kind of double infidelity. That Edith and I could talk together was more painful to him than our sleeping together. But what did he expect? Everything can't be equal! Would he have felt better if Utch had been a wrestling coach?

  At least she was a fan. It grieved Winter that Edith wasn't. He'd beg her to come to the matches, he'd bore her with stories of his boys until finally she'd have to tell him that she just didn't care for it. She could see why he liked it, and that was fine, but it had nothing to do with her. 'Everything that has to do with you has to do with me,' he told her. She didn't think it ought to be that way. 'I read everything you write, I read lots of stuff you don't write - and lots of stuff you don't read. We always talk about it!' he'd say.

  'But you like to read,' Edith pointed out.

  'So much of that has to do with you,' he told her. 'What makes you think that I like it so much?'

  I understood perfectly what Edith didn't like about the wrestling. She was attracted by an aspect of Severin that could also weary her; she liked his cocky sureness, his explosiveness; she wasn't that way, but she liked it in him, except when it seemed too strong, threatening to suck her up in it. And that aspect was strongest when he was involved with his wrestlers. How crazily committed all Severin's wrestlers looked to her! They seemed hypnotized by themselves, drugged in ego, which unleashed the moment their physical frenzy was peaking. It was too loud, too serious, too intense. It was also more struggle than grace; though Severin insisted it was more like a dance than a fight, to her it was a fight. To me, too. Also, more to the point, it was boring. So few of the matches were really close; often you just watched someone maul someone else - the only issue in doubt being whether or not the obvious winner would finally pin his victim or have to be content with just rubbing him all over the mat. Of course, I was never an athlete; I don't care for sports. I don't mind a walk now and then, but I do it to help me think. Edith was no jock either. She liked wrestlers' bodies, she said, 'from the lightweights through the middleweights', but big men were repulsive to her. Though she was tall, she liked Severin's shortness. She liked wrestlers' thickness, the queer proportions of their weight that was mostly in their upper bodies. She liked men 'with no asses, with small legs'. Severin was like that.

  'Why do you like me?' I asked her once. I am tall and thin; even my beard is narrow.

  'Well, you're such a change,' she said. 'You're so different that it's nice. Maybe it's your beard; you have an older look that I like.'

  'Well, I am older,' I told her. Four years older than Utch and Severin; eight years older than Edith.

  Utch's tastes were mysterious to me. She claimed she liked most bodies. She said she liked the older part of me, too, but mainly she liked how much I obviously liked women. 'Though I knew it would be troublesome, I never met anyone who was so attentive to women,' Utch told me. She implied that I was a woman's man; in fact, she often used the word 'womanize'. Well, I am more of a womanizer than Severin Winter, but so is the Pope.

  'Don't you think I'm nice to women, though?' I asked Utch.

  'Oh ja, I guess so. You encourage a woman to indulge herself in being a woman,' she said; then she frowned. 'In being a kind of woman,' she added. Then she said, 'Maybe women are your friends easily because they see that you're not so nice to men. Because they see that you don't have men for friends, perhaps they trust you.'

  'And Severin?' I asked her. 'How is he nice to women?' I was just teasing; I didn't feel I had to know.

  'Well, he's different,' she would say and look away. She did not like to talk about him.

  She would talk about his wrestlers, though. She knew them by their weight classes, by their styles, by everything Winter had told her about them - and he told her everything. Before the home matches, he'd often give her the rundown of the match - picking points, estimating who wa
s going to win or lose. And Utch would sit through the match, taking notes of her impressions for him - how the 142-pound match differed from his prediction, and why. I'd have thought that he would have loved her companionship in this; Edith and I both thought that it would take some of the burden off her. But no, he made us all come to his home matches. Utch would tell us what to watch for in each match. I felt manipulated; it was as if he needed us all there to watch him - and he did seem to like looking up in the stands and seeing all three of us.

  Utch's favorite wrestler on the team was a 134-pound black from Lock Haven, Pennsylvania, named Tyrone Williams. He was a languid-looking wrestler, sleepy but explosively quick, and it delighted her that he weighed exactly as much as she did. 'If he needs someone to work out with,' she would kid Severin, 'just send him to me.' In practice, Tyrone Williams was a good mover, always alert, but he tightened up against outside competition. He had stunning speed, and a slow-motion movement between his bursts that often lulled his opponents out of pace. But he seemed to psych himself out of every match. He was given to trances, sudden lapses in everything which made him appear to have heard a secret final-period bell in his head. He seemed to be already dreaming his way to the showers while still moving stiffly on that mat, groping on his back, gazing up at the high ceiling and the glaring lights. Usually he was pinned, and then he seemed to wake up - jumping to his feet, hollering, holding his ringing ears and staring at his opponent as if he'd been beaten by a ghost.

  Patiently Severin would show him the match films later. 'Now here it comes, Tyrone. Here's where you go to sleep - you see your head loll back there, your left arm just hanging at your side? Do you see what sort of ... comes over you?'

  'Mother,' Tyrone Williams would say reverently. 'Incredible, mothering incredible ...' and he'd go off into a trance right there, in disbelief at his whole performance.

  'You see?' Winter would go on. 'You let his ankle go and you hooked over his arm; you wanted to hook under that arm, Tyrone - you know that. Tyrone? Ty-rone!'

  Utch loved Tyrone for his lamentable trances. 'It's so human,' she said.

  'Utch could break him of that habit,' I said, kidding Severin. 'Why don't you let Utch work on his trances.'

  'Tyrone Williams could have a trance right on top of Utch,' Severin Winter said.

  I thought this a bit crude, but Utch just laughed. 'There's little evidence of anyone suffering trances on top of me,' she said, arching her back for Severin and me. Edith laughed; she wasn't at all jealous. We all seemed very close and goodhumored in those days.

  'Why do you like him?' Edith asked her; she meant Tyrone Williams.

  'He's just my size,' said Utch, 'and I think he's a wonderful color. It's like caramels.'

  'Yummy,' Edith said, but she didn't mean it. She had no favorites among those wrestlers; to her, they were all perfectly nice and boring boys, and as a result they behaved awkwardly around her. Winter had them all to dinner every month; Edith said that they hulked and bumped through the house, knocking paintings askew on the walls. 'Somehow they break all the ashtrays - and they don't even smoke. It's as if they need the softness of mats and the space of an area in order to be agile.'

  At least once a week, one of them would come to their house to be tutored in German. Reading, listening to music or taking a long bath, Edith would hear Severin crooning to 'some bulky boy'.

  'Wir mussen nur auf Deutsch sprechen,' he'd say gently.

  'Wir mussen nur auf ... auf what?' the wrestler would ask.

  'Deutsch.'

  'Oh yeah. Oh God, Coach, I feel so stupid.'

  'Nein, nein, du bist nicht ...'

  Severin liked Williams, but there was a limit to how much he could like a loser, no matter how interestingly they lost. He liked winners better, and the winningest wrestler on his team was a 158-pound stranger from Waterloo, Iowa, named George James Bender. He'd been the state high school champion of Iowa for three consecutive years and had been recruited by the home-state powerhouse, Iowa State. This was before freshmen were eligible for competition, and Bender had spent a year entering only open tournaments. He'd won them all; he'd never lost. As a sophomore, he was expected to go all the way through the nationals, but he tore up his knee in the Big Eight championships. He'd always been a strange, serious student; he'd won some kind of science prize in his junior year in high school. He was a straight-A student at Iowa State; his major was pre-med, but he really wanted to be a geneticist.

  On crutches at the national tournament he couldn't wrestle in, Bender introduced himself to Severin. 'Professor Winter?' he said; Severin was a professor, of course, but he wasn't used to being called one. 'I understand you have one of the few undergraduate majors in genetics in the country, and you have the top geneticist in the world in your department.'

  'In my department?' Winter said. He was thinking of German or wrestling, I guess. He looked at George James Bender on his crutches and suddenly realized that the boy was talking about transferring and wrestling for him. Winter had heard of Bender, of course; every coach and wrestler in the country had.

  But Bender's knee was slow to heal. He couldn't wrestle for the university the first year following his transfer, anyway, and Severin was shaken in the middle of the boy's ineligible year when Bender had to have a second operation on his knee. He'd been working out lightly with the team - whipping them all, though Winter refused to let him play with the heavyweights. Bender could have whipped them too, but anyone can make a mistake, and Severin didn't want 'one of those clumsy football players' to fall on the boy and hurt the precious knee. He didn't re-injure the knee wrestling; he hurt it leg-lifting too much weight on the weight machine.

  Winter also wondered if Bender hadn't become too much of 'a goddamn geneticist, of all things', to be a real wrestler anymore. He awaited Bender's senior year with more expectations than he'd ever allowed himself to have for any of his other wrestlers. Bender spent the summer at home in Iowa working out every day with a few of those zealots from his old Iowa State team. But when he came back East in August to work privately with our geneticist, the great Showalter, Winter fretted because there was no one on our summer campus for Bender to wrestle with.

  Bender walked around campus in his long white lab coat. He was nearly as pale as the coat - a short-haired reddish blond with a beard that grew six or seven scattered hairs like corn silk on his face; he shaved them once a week and always managed to cut himself while removing one of those six or seven hairs. He had faded blue eyes and wore black heavy-framed glasses with thick lenses. He looked like a powerful farm boy from decades ago, and he may have been a superior genetics student - the great Showalter certainly liked him as a disciple - but he was the dullest young man I've ever met.

  Severin decided he'd have to wrestle with George James Bender himself. He still worked out with his wrestlers, and he'd kept himself in good shape, but he never wrestled a full workout with any of them. Still, he had been good enough so that even now he was in a class slightly above most of them. He'd have had to cut off his head to make weight in his old 158-pound class, but he ran or rode his racing bicycle every day, and he lifted weights. Nevertheless, he was no match for Bender; he knew that he wouldn't ever have been a match for Bender - even as a trim competitor more than ten years ago. But in August no one else was around, and even when his other wrestlers came back to school in September, they wouldn't be up to Bender's conditioning, much less his class.

  The only time the wrestling room was tolerable in August was in the early morning before the sun through the skylights had broiled the mats and turned the room into a sauna. But Bender's lab experiments in genetics required his early-morning attention, and he wasn't through with Showalter until almost noon.

  Severin Winter was insane. By late morning, the wrestling room was over 100 degrees, even though they left the door open. The mat was hot to the touch. 'But they're liquid,' Winter said. 'A kind of liquid plastic. When it's hot, they're very soft.'

  Every day he woul
d meet Bender and try to last long enough to give the boy a workout. When Severin needed to rest, Bender would run laps, furiously fast, on the old board track, while Winter lay on the soft, warm mats, staring at the sun, listening to his own heart pounding in unison with Bender pounding his way around the wood. Then they'd go at it again until Severin had to stop. He'd move out of the cage and sit in the shade, cooling off, while Bender returned to his mad running. The heat blew out of the big open cage doors in those waves like mirror distortions you can see rising off a summer highway. A constant sprinkler system kept the mud and cinder floor from turning to dust.

  'In this weather,' I asked Severin, 'why doesn't that fool Bender run outdoors?' It was a shady campus; the footpaths were empty of students; there was always a cool breeze along the river.

  'He likes to sweat,' Winter said. 'You'll never understand.'

  I'd been walking with my children down to the playing fields beyond the cold cage when I saw Severin sitting outside the cage door, collapsed against a survivor elm. 'Listen to him,' Severin gasped at me; he could hardly talk; his normal breath was still a few minutes away. 'Take a peek.'

  I forced myself to step inside that steaming, dank place. The air choked you. A pounding as rhythmic as a machine's crude function was echoing steadily around the track. George James Bender would be visible for a half-moon turn; then he'd disappear over my head. He was wearing a sweatsuit over one of those rubber costumes, elasticized at the neck, ankles and wrists; the sweat had soaked him and made his shoes squeak like a sailor's.