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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.
