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I was chilled in the car. I had a momentary vision, terrible and clear, of coming home and finding Utch murdered in our bed, her limbs twisted and tied into some elaborate wrestler's knot; the rest of the house would be 'neat as a pin'.
I shouldered open the door and found her sitting at the kitchen table, fully dressed, drinking tea and picking at the remains of an impressive-looking breakfast. It was almost dawn. She smiled when I came in; she looked sleepy but happy. 'What's the matter?' she asked.
'I thought something might be the matter with you.'
She laughed. They certainly had a bounty of giggles and chuckles tonight, I thought.
'What have you been doing?' I asked, surprised to see her dressed. When I opened the bedroom door, the bed was cleanly made, as tucked-in as at noontime, the pillows undented.
'We went to the wrestling room,' Utch said. She burst out laughing and blushed. Then she told me.
Severin had parked the car at the rear of the new gym and blinked the headlights on and off, on and off. When a watchman came out of the maintenance entrance, Severin called out, 'It's me, Harvey. I'm going up to the room tonight.'
'OK, Coach,' the watchman said. Utch realized that this was not the first time he'd done this.
It was midnight when he led her through the dark corridors; he knew every turn. They undressed in the locker room. Only Utch shivered. They dressed in clean wrestling robes, the crimson and white ones with the ominous hood. Like monks engaged in some midnight rite, they walked through the fabulous tunnel; he kissed her; he felt her under her robe.
In the blackness of the tunnel, Severin never even brushed a wall. Utch felt his arm reach out for the door just as they reached it. Moonlight glazed the mud and cinder floor of the old cage and the skylight dome was etched with dark vines of ivy. The old board track shrieked when they walked around it. The pigeons under the eaves were disturbed and fretted like grandmothers. Somewhere a high-jump bar clanged; she froze, but he kept walking smoothly, in rhythm. Severin Winter was familiar with that place at night.
Inside the wrestling room, the moonlight made the mats ripple like a blood-colored pond. Utch said she was excited, but a little frightened. He took off her robe; the mats were a perfect body temperature against her skin. They 'rolled around', she said; they 'loosened up'. She tried some yoga positions; he showed her some stretching exercises. The thermostat kept the room warm constantly, and soon they were both sweating. Utch said she never felt so limber. Then Severin moved to the ghostly white rim of the starting circle on the center mat, his bare toes lined up behind the line. He waited for her; he was not smiling. Utch said she felt uncertain, but she trusted him. She stood across the circle from him and breathed deeply; she let her head loll, stretching her neck. His hands were restless against his moonlit thighs. She shimmied her fingers the way Tyrone Williams did before the whistle.
'Wie gehts?' asked Severin in his tunnel voice.
'Gut,' Utch said - huskily but loudly.
Now Severin heard some whistle in his head, and he started across the circle toward her - not rushing, not coming at her directly. Again she felt a little fear, but when his hand shot out and cupped the back of her neck, she came alive; she dove in under his chest and hit him at the knees, driving hard. He glided away, then floated toward her again; she swiped at his head - a mistake, she knew - and he had her. He dropped in so deeply under her that she was surprised; he hit her hard but cleanly; nothing hurt. He had her so snugly that nothing moved. The round weight of his shoulder was in her crotch, his arm snaked through her legs, the palm of his hand lay flat against her spine. She reached back to break her fall and discovered she was already down on the mat; she squirmed off her back (he let her) and bucked back into him, got up to her knees and tried to stand. He rode her closer than a coat. He was the opposite of rough; he made her feel that she had two bodies which moved in time with each other. There was no strain, but his weight wore her down. Her arms grew heavy lifting his arms; her back dipped under the weight of his chest. She let her head droop and felt his mouth on her neck. She sank back onto the mat. Their bodies glistened - even seemed phosphorescent - in the moonlight. The mat gave off heat. Their bodies slid. Bending was never easier. Slickness was everywhere, but her heels found a way to grip the mat. Over his snug shoulder she saw the moon sailing through a maze of vines. Either the pigeons were talking excitedly or she was failing to recognize her own voice; she swore she felt their wingbeat lifting her lightly off the mat. She was coming, she came, she was waiting for him; when he came, she expected the hand of an invisible referee to smack the mat hard and flat, indicating a fall. Instead there was a crushing weight, a foreign silence; the great fans for the blow-heaters whirred on, a sound too constant to be called a noise. They rolled apart, but their fingers touched. She doesn't remember who started laughing first when he got a towel and wiped up what they'd spilled on the mat. He flipped the towel back into the corner, where Utch said she imagined it reproducing towels all night. The next day, a great stack of towels would be towering there to greet the shocked wrestlers.
Their laughter caromed around the old board track; it echoed in the caverns under the swimming pool. They swam; they took a sauna; they swam again. I imagine them conquering new territory, leaving prints and spores behind like dogs.
'Christ, did you talk?' I asked. Utch smiled. I couldn't imagine how many eggs they'd eaten; the sink seemed full of shells.
'Ja, we talked a little.'
'What about?'
'He kept asking me how I was: "Wie gehts? Wie gehts?" And I kept telling him: "Gut! Gut!"'
How good? I wanted to ask, as sarcastic as a stone, but Utch's placidity among the toast crusts and yolk stains made me mute.
Over our kitchen table is a print of Pieter Brueghel's The Fight Between Carnival and Lent; I lost myself in an image from years before. I imposed myself on Brueghel's painting. I walked into his cosmos; I shrank, put on wooden clogs, browsed through the old Netherlandish town.
'Are you all right?' Utch asked, but it was 1559; I smelled the waffles baking (it was almost Ash Wednesday; Shrovetide customs were everywhere). I wriggled in my leggings. My codpiece itched.
In the great painting, I nudged against droves of the subservient masses, dark and cloaked. They are milling about the church, but their devotion is dull. Women are selling fish. Lent and her followers prepare for a joust - a gaunt woman drawn into battle by a nun and a monk. Astraddle a barrel, probably sour from ale, a fat representative of Carnival thrusts forward a suckling pig on a skewer; his masked revelers surround him, comic and lewd with their instruments. Everywhere, children tease or ignore them; everywhere, cripples are ignored. The inn is busier than the church. I watch a performance of the comedy 'The Dirty Bride'. I imagine I am touched - tweaked under my breechclout - but nearly every woman's smile is randy. I push on, I am beseeched, I have difficulty not stepping on the maimed and deformed - the beggars, the blind, the dwarfed, humped, bent and bizarre. Bodies take up every available space. A woman with a pilgrim's emblem on her hat pleads to me: 'Kind sir, regard this legless, stump-armed thing before me.' Its upturned mouth is a hole.
From the twentieth century, Utch calls to me: 'Are you coming to bed?'
How should I know? I'm just playing my life by ear. But in the painting fantasy I always recognize myself: I am the well-dressed one. A well-to-do burgher? Possibly a patricia
n? I have never identified my station exactly. I am in a black tunic, fur-lined, expensive; my hair is cut like a scholar's; a rich purse hangs at my chest, a richly bound prayer book protrudes from my pocket; my cap is soft leather. I pass a blind man, but he is more than blind; appallingly, he is without eyes! His face is unfinished - the cruel intention of the painter: where the sockets should be, pale, translucent scar tissue stretches over slight indentations. Without looking at him, I give him a coin. A numbing smile, by nuns in unison, follows me. Am I a big tipper? Do they desire something from me? I am pursued, or perhaps simply followed, by a boy or a dwarf carrying what appears to be either an easel or a piano stool. For me? Am I a painter? Will I sit down somewhere to play? Actually, I'm the only one in the painting who clearly isn't a peasant, the only one who has a servant. The item my servant carries looks like one of those golf seats, but it is probably my church stool. Others - peasants lugging crude country furniture - are also bringing their own seats to church; only I have a servant to carry mine. I think I must be a lawyer, or maybe the mayor.
I have never bothered to find out. I am more pleased guessing at my identity and purpose. I am moving from the church toward the inn; this seems wise. Once I made up a story of my day in the old Netherlandish square. It was to be my second historical novel, but I never followed through. I went little further than to approach my father for a loan. That was in 1963. I had finished with my higher education and was a young, available PhD who did not want to be available just yet. I wanted to go to Vienna, see the original Brueghel, discover my main character's role and choose my supporting cast from among the Shrovetide crowd. The book, based on Brueghel's painting, would have been called Carnival's Quarrel with Lent. At one point in the novel, my characters would all come together and be doing just what they're doing in the painting. I had already selected the well-to-do man with the prayer book in his pocket to be me, to be the narrator of the book.
'I don't know how you come up with such academic and pretentious ideas,' my father said.
'I'll look for a teaching job next year,' I said. 'I'd just like this year off, to get a good start on the book.'
'Why don't you forget the book? Wasn't the first one enough?' he asked. 'I'd rather finance a vacation - something good for you.' I maintained silence; I knew what he thought of historical novels. 'Why don't you find out everything about the painting before you go all the way to Vienna to see it?' he asked. 'You might find out that your leading character is the town tax collector or a Flemish fop! There's available iconography of every painting Pieter Brueghel ever made. Why don't you be professional, for Christ's sake, and find out what you're doing before you start doing it?'
