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Edith looked at the one she wanted. 'She's on her back, with one leg lying flat and the other bent at the knee. She's touching herself, very lightly, I think, but her face is turned toward us and she's touching the fingertips of her other hand to her lips - as if she's kissing her fingers goodbye to us or maybe just hushing herself so she won't cry out.'
'She's tasting herself,' said Severin. Suddenly Edith saw the painting. 'She's got one orange stocking on?' he asked. 'The stocking's half off her right foot? Her eyes are closed? You mean that one?'
'Yes,' said Edith, almost whispering. 'That's my favorite one.'
'Well, you can't have it,' he told her. 'It's my favorite, too.' He didn't open his eyes to negotiate. Edith was surprised, but she charged ahead as if her feelings were unshaken. I am completely lost, she thought; I don't know myself.
'Second condition,' she said, 'is that you must answer one question, either yes or no. Either one satisfies the condition. You mustn't feel obliged - just be honest: say yes or no.'
'Yes,' Severin said. When she looked at him, his eyes were open. She tried to put her hand over them, but he caught it and held it lightly against his chest. 'Yes,' he said again.
'But I haven't asked the question,' she said, looking away from him. He would not close his eyes or let go of her hand.
'Yes, anyway,' he said. He already knows the question, she thought, and felt humiliated. She pulled her hand away and decided to ask him nothing more. He was cruel; he didn't know when to stop teasing.
But he said, 'Now I have one condition.' She looked at him. 'You have to come to Greece with me.' That had been her question: Did he want her to come with him?
She shrugged. 'Why would I want to do that?' she said. 'I don't have the time, anyway.' She got up from the bed, found her purse and lit a cigarette. 'Is the Gulaschsuppe hot?' she asked.
'If you didn't turn the heat off,' he said, and rolled away and lay on the bed face-down.
Edith went to the kitchen, turned the heat on under the Gulaschsuppe and banged a few pots around, but Severin didn't appear. She looked at a photograph of his mother with Frau Reiner and the two Yugoslav wrestlers. They were clowning for the photographer, who, Edith dimly thought, might have been Severin. The three survivors were all much younger. She could tell that Frau Reiner had at least once had a body, for everyone in the photograph was naked. They stood in front of an elegantly prepared dinner spread out on a table in several courses; they all had knives and forks in their hands. Vaso or Zivan wore a napkin on his head, and between Frau Reiner's ample breasts, a full glass of wine tilted dangerously. Looking older and more dignified than the rest, Severin's mother stood smiling shyly at the camera, her hands folded demurely over her crotch. She was nothing like that Katrina Marek in the bedroom; though naked, she looked fully clothed.
'Did you take this photograph?' Edith called into the bedroom. And he was supposed to say, 'What photograph?' and she would say, 'This one,' and he would have to get up off that dangerous bed and come out. But he didn't answer. 'Soup's hot!' she called. When she heard nothing, she went back; he hadn't moved since she'd left the room.
'You don't have to buy any of the paintings if you don't really want to,' he said, talking into the mattress. 'And if you really want that one' - his hand waved at the wall - 'you can have it.'
'I want to come with you to Greece,' Edith admitted. He still didn't move.
'I want you,' he said. Edith decided, All right, he's said enough. She dropped her skirt at her feet and stepped out of it, then pulled her blouse off over her head so that her hair crackled. She wore a bra in those days, and she unhooked it and looped it over the back of a chair. Then she tossed her panties at Severin, who still lay across the bed like a felled steer. ('The panties fluttered over one of his ears and rested there like a downed parachute,' she wrote in one of her more forced pieces.) She was preparing to look at him directly when he sat up and stared at her; he came up off the bed very suddenly, awkwardly handing the panties back to her and dashing from the room. She thought that her shame would kill her, but he called, 'Jesus Christ, the Gulaschsuppe - don't you smell it?' Boiled over and burnt, she supposed. 'My God, what have I gotten myself into?' she whispered to herself. When she got under the covers, she recognized her perfume - that is, Frau Reiner's perfume - already on his pillows. He didn't even look at me, she thought.
But he didn't leave her alone long; he returned shedding clothes. She had not known enough men to know that athletes, like women, are used to changing clothes and therefore are smooth and careless undressers. He stood naked beside the bed and let her look at him; she had thought that only women did that, and she pulled back the covers for him so that he would look at her. He looked her over a little too quickly for her feelings, but he touched her just perfectly and was under the covers with her very gracefully. Well, she thought, nakedness is almost a family tradition with him; maybe he will look longer later. Before he kissed her and didn't stop, she barely had time to say, 'I think I'm going to like you.' She was right, of course.
They left for Greece five days later; they'd have gone earlier, but it took that long for Edith to make and send slides of Kurt Winter's best work to her mother. 'Mother,' she wrote, 'I hope the Modern will buy one or two of these. You and I have already bought numbers one through four, and a fifth not enclosed. I am going to Greece; I must get back to my writing.'
The morning they were to leave, Frau Reiner and the Yugoslav wrestlers gave them a ritual goodbye. Edith and Severin were in bed, which was where they could have been found regularly in those five days, when Edith heard Frau Reiner and the Chetniks whispering and tromping about in the living room just as she and Severin were waking up. 'Frau Reiner still has an apartment key,' Severin told Edith, who scowled. 'Mother gave it to her,' Severin whispered. 'And anyway, over the years Vaso and Zivan probably have collected about four keys apiece.' What were they up to out there, Edith asked. Severin listened. The sounds they were making were apparently familiar t
o him; he rolled his eyes. 'It's a kind of family joke,' he told her.
'What is?' she whispered.
'You'll see,' he said; he looked worried. 'It's really almost a tradition. You must take it as a sign of great respect.' Outside the bedroom door she heard thumping and giggles. 'It goes way back,' he said nervously; he put his arm around her and smiled toward the bedroom door. It opened, and into the room blew Frau Reiner, as flushed and beefy and naked as a Rubens. Vaso and Zivan were carrying her, with some difficulty, and they were naked, too. At the foot of the bed they quickly assembled in a group pose which Edith recognized as the one from the old photograph. Only Severin's mother was missing; a space for her separated Vaso from Zivan. They all held knives and forks in their hands, and Vaso or Zivan had a napkin on his head. But Frau Reiner was missing the wine glass; her breasts could no longer have clamped it tight in her cleavage. It must have been sad for Severin to see so much sagging flesh. 'Gute Reise!' Frau Reiner croaked, and the old wrestlers burst into tears.
'They wish us a good trip,' Severin told Edith. Later she learned that the photograph had also been taken at a goodbye party for Severin, when he was leaving for Iowa and a future perhaps bright in wrestling.
Then they were all standing around the bed, weeping and patting and kissing everyone. Edith realized that the covers were peeled back and that she was as naked as they. The old wrestlers seemed hardly to notice her - a professional numbness, perhaps - but she saw that Frau Reiner's close survey of her young body reflected both the sincerity of her affection and the agony of her envy. Suddenly Frau Reiner hugged her with a frightening passion; for a grip on her real life, Edith held on to Severin's thigh while he was being buffeted and cuffed by the bawling old Olympians.
Crushed against Frau Reiner's bosom, a playground of history, Edith remembered her mother's letter, which said, 'He has no surviving family.' Frau Reiner pinned her to the bed; her tears - her sweat? - wet Edith's face; she was at least two weight classes superior to Severin. Edith tightened her grip on Severin's thigh, which, for all the confusion around the bed, might have been Vaso's or Zivan's, and hoped Frau Reiner would not suffocate her. He has no family? Her mother was quite wrong. Edith knew that Severin Winter's sense of family was more ferocious than most. We should all have been warned.
I admit that my own sense of family suffered from our foursome. I remember the children least of all, and this bothers me. Of course, we all had other friends, too, and our own lives with our children. But I forget where the children were. Once when I was with Edith, Dorabella knocked weakly on the bedroom door. I flinched; I thought it was Severin coming home early, though I couldn't imagine him knocking so softly. There was a hasty confusion of knees and other limbs, and I know Edith was worrying that Severin had heard her.
'Mommy?' Dorabella said. I got down under the covers and Edith let her into the room.
There had been a dream; the child described it in flat, unbroken tones, her hand nervously plucking and patting the lump beside her mother which was me. 'Ssshhh,' said Edith gently, 'don't wake up Daddy.'
The child poked me. 'Why is Daddy sleeping like that?' She started to lift the covers but Edith stopped her.
'Because he's cold,' Edith said.
