The Seal Wife (12 page)

Bigelow waits four hours, during which every muscle stiffens, for the wind to change, lift the kite. He watches it rise overhead, then gets to his feet to reposition the plank. But as he tests the line he feels it slacken. First it isn’t as taut, and then it isn’t taut at all.

The kite plummets, losing altitude and looping wire all over the tree, the ground, and Bigelow, who grabs at the falling line, trying to pull fast enough to reestablish tension. But it’s no good—impossible—the kite is dropping down an invisible canyon, its boxlike form warped and contorted into an aerodynamic monster, a great-beaked bird of prey bent on destroying itself.

Bigelow runs to thrust himself between the kite and what it’s headed for, an outcropping of rock mottled with lichen and dusted with a few scraps of vegetation, not a shred of anything that might soften its impact. He has a moment to position himself, to squat like a wrestler, his arms out to catch or guide an edge, redirect its landing toward the slippery dry grass, then another to question his allegiance to what can’t be worth more than his life: spars and fabric, instruments. And the time invested in making it, of course, the hours he spent, hundreds of them, at his drafting table. All those hours now rushing back at him.

The kite dives; Bigelow scrambles off the rocks. The kite shimmies; Bigelow squints at it from under his hands. The kite hits a low current and scoots sideways; Bigelow watches what must be an effect of wind moving over the inlet and onto land, air snaking up over the cliff, invisible and unforeseen.

Then he runs, and for a few seconds the kite and Bigelow are moving at the same speed, both of them heading back down toward the shed, Bigelow chasing, but not so fast he can’t keep pace; he has that in him, anyway, a loping kind of run were he not so banged up, but, as it is, a limping run favoring his left leg, when suddenly he starts gaining on the kite. By the time he catches up to it, all he has to do is reach out, the line is there for him to take.

He has bruises all over, scrapes on his arms and on his forehead, a pulled muscle in his groin, a gash elongating one eyebrow. As for the kite—the kite remains perfect, each face white, taut, and smooth, almost smugly unblemished. Walking it back to the shed, holding its harness and yet not feeling its weight as it glides, enchanted, along puffs and whiffs of breezes, Bigelow has the sense, completely fanciful, of the kite’s vanity, its amused tolerance of himself, hapless acolyte. It’s been places he will never see.

IN THE END, after failing to devise a more sophisticated plan, Bigelow comes with his recordings to the store, where he sits on a barrel and waits. He sits on a barrel, he sits on a box, he returns to the barrel. What he wants is to sit in the sun on the front step, but he is afraid this might be interpreted as a retreat, a waning of his resolve, so he remains in the shadowy store, and Getz walks around him as if he isn’t there, stepping around Bigelow’s feet, standing, arms crossed, conveying his usual impatience, while Bigelow removes himself from the barrel lid when a customer requests some of whatever is swimming in the brine beneath.

Observing the storekeeper, Bigelow is impressed by the grace of Getz’s performance, if performance is what it is, for the man seems not so much blind as indifferent to his presence, regarding Bigelow in much the same way as did the Aleut woman when he first followed her home, when he sat at her table and watched her chew a piece of toffee. It’s only at the end of a day, when Getz closes his store, that he acknowledges Bigelow’s existence, holding the door until Bigelow steps outside, then locking it behind him.

With his recordings under his arm, Bigelow walks home in the summer light. He changes the flags on his new tree pole. He inscribes readings from his instruments into his log. He sits at his table and decodes information from the day’s wireless message. He stands at his window to take advantage of the late-setting sun, tracing lines onto transparencies, and then, during the brief darkness, he lies on his bed and sleeps a seamless black and dreamless sleep.

The next day, he stops at the telegraph office en route to his vigil, stands on the sidewalk until Getz unlocks his store, then steps back inside and sits on the barrel, opera recordings stacked neatly in his lap.

For two days no customer comments on Bigelow’s presence; but on the third, as if having reached an unspoken, perhaps even an unconscious, consensus, there is not one who does not.

“Who’s this? Your new partner?”

“Looks like Getz has finally got himself a cat.”

“Nice pickle lid.”

One even sings: “When froggy came a courtin’, he did ride. Uh-huh. With a somethin’ somethin’ and a pistol by his side. Uh-huh.”

“Watch out,” another warns, cryptically. “Last of her suitors didn’t make out so good.”

Convulsed with laughter, they fall onto the counter and Getz makes change over their heads; he smiles sourly, he ties twine around tins, he answers questions pertaining to business—no, still no mousetraps, yes, camphor on the back wall and yes, yes, a shipment of nails coming on the next boat; he retrieves items from the high shelves and spreads sawdust over spills. But he won’t acknowledge that a young man sits with a lapful of music, waiting for permission to see his daughter, an invisible daughter whose name he won’t reveal.

During the long days, Bigelow does not think about the singer. His mind, drugged by hours of unremitting light, skips and flits, occasionally replaying a note, or revisiting a slash of white throat, two missing teeth, three lines on an outthrust chin. A coat of feathers hanging on a nail. But without commenting on these it hurries on to other impressions, to the violet shadows that fill the ruts in the street, the flashing legs of people walking past, the pressure of his unrelieved bladder.

The year he arrived, he was insulated by the Aleut woman’s flesh, for which exaggerated rhythms were natural. No matter how long or short the days, her body presented constancy— unlike Bigelow’s, whose heart seems to slow during the dark months, and, when it is relentlessly bright, beats too fast. Like one of the rabbits, he thinks: at the mercy of high latitude, traveling in waves across the land, strange helpless tides of animals breaking over hills and across roads. To eat, you don’t have to shoot one, just step on its neck as it washes past your boot.

He is hungry; he is thirsty, too. A June rabbit with its neck under Getz’s heel, his thoughts trembling in anticipation of release.

One afternoon, captive to a manic fugue, Bigelow conceives a brilliant scheme for numerical weather prediction, a series of thermodynamical equations to be performed simultaneously around the world—computations made at 3,200 kite stations connected by telegraph and tabulated together in a kind of central ganglia, a forecast factory whose brain is set up like an orchestra pit, with a conductor waving a slide rule and members clacking abacuses. But he has no paper and pencil, and the equations flare and then die, like sparks coming off a fire: Δp
_G
= sin λ cos φ (sin φ)
²
× 10
⁵
dynes cm
^-2
for initial pressure distribution, and + div (
wv
) for the increase of water per volume and per time due to convection and precipitation, δ
ME /
δ
t
= - H’(δp
_G
/δe) + 2ω sin φ . M
_N
to summarize vertical velocity on a rotating globe, and for the moment neglecting quadratic terms for reasons of simplification.

Bigelow feels that the top of his head is coming off, and that he is flying through it, right out of his own brain. He is a thought, a thought of himself, combustible, an equation traveling on an updraft, glowing brightly, about to be extinguished. His arms are numb, tingling; the records slide from his lap. One, Rossini’s
Otello,
shatters, and he falls off the barrel onto his knees, hearing the thunder of applause at the first kite symposium, Caruso in his plumed hat, bowing deeply at Bigelow.

“For fuck’s sake, let him see the girl,” someone says. The store is filled with voices.

“Let her down the stairs. You can’t lock her up.”

“How old is she? Thirty?”

“Who else is going to have her, I’d like to know?”

Bigelow lies on the floor, and somebody offers him a swig from a flask and, when he doesn’t drink it fast enough, pinches his nose shut and tips the bottle so that its contents pour into him in a choking, smoky rush, drowning the last of his incandescent thoughts, washing away the article featuring his equations, already, in his mind, typeset in the font used by the
Monthly Weather Review.
Around Bigelow’s head, legs ascend like columns into the towering, celestial realm of condensed milk and stacked tins of Postum, boxes of cornstarch, bottles of Lysol, Sapolio, cakes of P&G Naphtha, Ivory and Canthrox, Nadinola, and Snider Process pork and beans.

“Damn, but you’re a mean bastard.”

“I’m taking my business across to Charlie.”

“Yeah, I’ll spend the extra dime.”

Legs shift and boots scuff, a clumsy choreography, hands reaching down trouser fronts to scratch and adjust pairs of testicles.

“Uhhhh,” Getz says, a noise Bigelow has heard from livestock, the kind of huff a horse makes when someone knees its belly to tighten up the girth, and Bigelow sits up on his elbows to watch as the shopkeeper pulls his own hair.

“Miriam!” he yells. “Mirr iii aammm.”

SHE LIVES WITH HER FATHER, above the store. When Bigelow pays a call on her, he has to pass Getz standing behind the counter, walk through an aisle of boxes and up eleven creaking stairs, at the top of which is a cramped windowless parlor furnished with a horsehide sofa and one ladder-back chair, a beveled mirror and a bank calendar, an upright piano with magazines and a metronome on its lid, a red wool carpet with a scorch mark on the edge near the wood stove. It’s a room that requires no chaperone, as Getz can see into it from the foot of the stairs, can hear whatever conversation might occur. Behind the sofa is a door, always closed, that presumably leads to other rooms, rooms where a person might relax.

On his third visit, following one afternoon spent listening and nodding to opera, another spent looking and nodding at photographs, Bigelow brings paper and a pen.

Why won’t you speak?
he writes, hoping that if he, too, abandons his voice she might consent to a written exchange. But she reads the question, lifts her shoulders in an embarrassed hunch, and hands the paper back to him.

I enjoyed your singing at the shows. The pictures weren’t the same
without you. I stopped going.
Bigelow writes what he’s told her before, and she responds as she does to spoken compliments: she nods and she ducks her head, she dips her knees and plucks at the side of her skirt, all the movements together making an idiosyncratic little curtsy.

I know you can talk,
he writes.

And the girl’s lips twitch, she winces, she shrugs, she puts her hands to her temples and then together before her chest, and then, after this series of seemingly petitionary gestures, she shakes her head.

Confused, Bigelow smiles.
Would you rather I didn’t visit you?
he asks, and she shakes her head. She takes the pen from his hand.

No,
she writes,
I like your company.
Ink flows from the nib like her singing voice, a soprano kind of penmanship, Bigelow thinks, precise and pleasing, filled with points, loops, and dots.

But you won’t talk to me,
he writes.

She holds the pen in her hand for a long while before answering.
Not won’t,
she writes, and she remains bent over the paper in her lap as if considering adding more, hunches over it for so long that he begins to worry that she is ill. But then she sits up, she hands him the page with just the two words.

“Yes,
won’t,
” Bigelow says out loud. And he says it again. “Won’t. You won’t talk.”

Miriam takes the paper and pen.
I can’t,
she writes.

“But I’ve—I’ve heard you.”

She nods.
Sing,
she writes on the paper.

“You sing but you don’t talk?”