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'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.
'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.
