The Seal Wife (18 page)

He rolls out of her way to give her room to get off the bed, to sit in her tub and scrub the smell of him off of her. But she’s not in a hurry. She looks relaxed, even tired. She lies next to him, her arms still in the sleeves of her dress and her shoes still on her feet.

Bigelow looks down at what aren’t the woman’s old winter boots, the ones he knows. Apart from being pulled over her feet and ankles, they’re not even boots. He tugs at the left one and she opens her eyes, she sits up on her elbows. There’s nothing in her expression to forbid it, so he pulls the boot and it comes off in his hand—a seal flipper, unadorned, uncut, unstitched. Unlaced, because what need is there for laces? The animal’s hide has been emptied of its owner, tanned and lined with dry grass, its pointed nails intact, its pearly lustrous fur smooth, the black leather marked with wrinkles too faint to feel. He touches them: soft. As soft as her own skin.

Having taken the left, he has to pull off the other, just to be sure there’s a foot inside, that the pointed nails and the sleek fur aren’t parts of her. But no, the foot slides out, as smooth as its mate, toes rosy and damp from the heat in the boot, a little grass caught between the smallest and its neighbor. He pulls the blade out with his teeth. The smell of them—not the usual cheesy smell of feet, but fishy. Like the sea.

Bigelow puts the boots together at the foot of the bed, side by side, gently. He buttons his shirt and the fly of his trousers, watches as she goes into the other room, pausing by the table, the gifts arranged on the surface. She smells the cocoa, opens the packet of needles, ignores the two spoons. She sets a tubful of snow on the stove.

MAKING HIS WAY HOME, Bigelow feels as if he’s suffered some kind of attack, a delirium.
Perhaps I have,
he thinks, patting himself through his clothes, feeling the body beneath the coat, the muscles of his thighs as they flex to climb the hill.

HE GETS THE CHAIR off a man who’s heading back south. Argues him down from his original price, eight dollars, without remorse. Even if it was his dead wife’s favorite. Bigelow can’t think about other men’s problems.

The headpiece is inlaid, cherry and mahogany and other, lighter woods, oak, pine. Leaves and flowers and stars. Little iridescent circles, nacreous, made of seashells, mother-of-pearl. And tiny chips of some black stone, it must be obsidian. Bigelow runs his fingers over the design. A broad, strong seat, polished by years of use, gleaming. And strong, he tests it and it doesn’t creak. The armrests finish in eloquent scrolls that match those on the crest of the headpiece. One spindle has been mended, but it’s a good job, barely visible.

He points the place out to her anyway. Watches her face, a thoughtful frown. “Here,” he says, pulling her to her feet. “Like this.” And he sits in the chair and tips back, as far as it will go, then lifts his feet so that it rocks forward. “Now you,” he says, and he stands. With his hands on her shoulders, he positions her before the chair, pushing down when she hesitates to sit. He waits for her to rock, but she doesn’t, she just frowns at the chair’s slight movements that echo her own.

“All right,” he says, and he steps down on the front of one rocker, setting the thing in motion, her hands holding the armrests, her feet propped on the front stretcher. She lets the motion slow, then, after a moment, leans forward, pumping her head like a scaup or an eider, one of the smaller ducks, elegant with their black plumage, like the buttons on her dress. There’s something funny in the movement, but he doesn’t smile. He knows she can be touchy about such things.

“Look,” he says. “Use your foot.” He nudges her shoe with his own, but she shakes her head, preferring to keep her feet on the stretcher, as if it were a perch. Her chin goes back and forth with the effort of locomotion. Actually, he thinks, watching her, it isn’t a bird she resembles. Sometimes, walking on the shore, he startles a sleeping seal, and the animal hurries toward the water, throwing her head out before her, her sleek body following. He watches the woman rock. How could he have imagined her as a bird?

A success, he thinks, pleased that he’s come up with something she likes. But when it’s time to go, she gets out of the tub, she follows him naked to the door.

“What?” he asks, and she points at the chair, she makes a whisking gesture with her hand as if to say, “Take it, take it back.”

He shakes his head, and she shakes hers. She leads him back to the chair and picks it up by the arms, thrusts it at him.

It’s the same with all the gifts: the tablecloth, the umbrella, the box of dominoes, the nutcracker. He spends his money as if he had plenty to spare. She condescends to examine what he gives her, but before they move from table to bed she replaces whatever it is in his rucksack by the door, and he ends up bringing it home to the station, the downstairs room a gallery of his failures.

Except for the box of magazines, so many months out of date that he gets them for half the cover price. A dollar for the lot of them, plus twenty cents for a box of tacks, and another dollar for a pair of lady’s scissors shaped like a crane, the pointed blades coming together to make a long beak.

The woman takes them from his hand, slips her fingers through the holes. She sits on her bed as if he’s not there, pages through slowly, stopping to consider each illustration. At this rate it will take her a year to get through them. And when he interrupts, when he sits beside her and points at one or another picture, she pushes his hand away, she turns aside so as to better ignore him.

“I gave you one,” he says, reaching around her to lay his finger on a drawing of an umbrella. “You didn’t want it.” She looks at him as he puts his hand on his chest for emphasis.

“You didn’t want it,” he says again, but he finds he can’t return her look. He can’t empty his eyes of accusation, and hers— as usual they betray nothing.

He watches as she decorates the wall facing the bed: a girl with a hoop standing on a giant box of Jell-O dessert powder; an automatic Venus adjustable dress form; a woman’s head emerging from a bottle of Ingram’s Milkweed Cream. Once, she makes a little noise—of what? satisfaction?—as she presses the tack into the wood; then she stands back to consider her work, her face expressionless. After a minute, she takes down the dress form, replaces it with a photograph of a man and woman picnicking beside an automobile parked under a tree, but then she tears this down as well. Is there anything to be understood from the pictures she selects? The harder he thinks, the less he knows. Bigelow throws himself back on the bed, sighing loudly.

They sit across from each other, drinking tea and eating bread she has fried, slabs topped with bone butter, a substitute for the real thing made by boiling sections of antler and rendering their marrow. White and mild, it tastes good, like dairy fat. The woman finishes hers; she licks the tips of her index and middle fingers.

The table between them, the silence between them, the sheen of grease on her lips. The pucker of fabric between her third and fourth buttons. “I want . . .” Bigelow says.

She looks at him, and he stops speaking. He places his hands on the table, palms upturned.

So there’s another private pleasure I’ve afforded her,
Bigelow thinks as he walks home, grumpy, feeling his unrelieved erection, the ache in his balls, as he helplessly compares the success of the gift to her sexual excitement, orgasms to which he has trouble not attaching the word
coincidental.
The thought isn’t a bitter one, not exactly. Who would she be, if she were available to him? If he could successfully insinuate himself between her gaze and its object?

IT TAKES HIM BY SURPRISE, as it did on the day he smashed his barometer. He’s sitting at the table, watching as she skins a woodchuck, the animal he shot, thinking, from a distance, that it was a rabbit with its ears down. Who knows how it will taste? It’s young, anyway. Its face has the blunt look of immaturity—a kind of sweet and dopey quality, it made him angry as soon as he saw it, when he stooped down, turned it over. Grass was in its mouth, and its eyes were still moist. But the sweet look and the stupidity of the creature, those remained and made him hate it. Standing over the little corpse, he considered leaving it there. But he couldn’t excuse the waste.

In the chair across from his, the woman steps on its front paws to hold them firmly, while, back legs in her left hand, she uses the right to strip the hide down. Bigelow watches as the pelt turns inside out. He was hungry when he arrived, but something about the creature’s feet, its long tarsals with their gummy-looking pads and dirty nails, like those of a grotesquely large squirrel, nauseates him.

The hide, when she gets it free, swings neatly from her fist, and she lays the carcass on the table to turn the skin right-side out and examine it, the density of the mud-colored fur, the surprising length of the white guard hairs. She looks thoroughly absorbed, perhaps deciding to what use she might put it; either that or its value on Front Street. How many toffees it might command.

The complete calm with which she accomplishes a task seems to mock his turbulence, his nights of agitation, of wondering how possibly to guard himself against what seems like her capriciousness, another unexplained disappearance.
She will leave. She
will leave. She will leave.
He’s made the three words into a refrain, sung them over and over as a kind of defensive training. But how laughable. How pathetic and useless an exercise.

Abruptly, Bigelow is jolted into a wild temper. He jumps up from his chair so suddenly that she looks from him to the stove, as if assuming he’s been burned, a cinder must have flown out of the open door.

In a minute he’s on her, he’s pulled the oily-feeling pelt from her hands and thrown it across the room, picked up the naked animal and dashed it on the table so that its head makes a dull thud.

“I hate you!” he says, yelling the words. “Stupid! You’re no better than a dog the way you sit there!” He flails at her, without actually making contact, and she steps out of reach.

“Come back at me!” he cries. “Why don’t you!” He lunges forward, grabs her shoulders to shake them, and she eludes him with a neat swift twist, so that he’s left with empty hands; and she, standing some distance away, regards him impassively, as if she’s seen things he can’t imagine. What could he do that might surprise her?

Nothing, judging from her calm regard, and yet this doesn’t stop him from wrecking the house as she watches. He turns over the table and chairs, stomps on one so that he breaks its back leg, splinters a stretcher. At this she looks pained, but it’s a kind of look reserved for spills, for wear and tear—she’s not threatened. Not by that or by his hurling everything he can get hands on, parkas and boots and cups, ladles, broom and dustpan, box of toffees, canister of tea. Tobacco and pipe and tub and towel. The kettle and the frying pan.

Throughout, the woman stands to the side, avoiding his touch. It’s as if he’s nothing, nothing personal. Like wind or water, like the weather itself, soon he’ll be spent, he’ll have worn himself out and she’ll right the furniture, she’ll go on with her chores. A man, that’s all he is, the outline of his psyche like that of his cock, one minute all puffed up hard, bellicose, the next spent and shriveled.

Bigelow falls facedown into the furs that he’s pulled off the bed and, inside himself, keeps falling. Down and down, into wracking seizures of sobs. The more it seems that words are useless, the more of them he uses, while she sits silent on the stripped bed.

“What do you think! That you can just leave, just like that! No warning! No explanation! I came here. You were gone. I came back. Every day. I was here every day! I waited. I waited because I didn’t believe that you would just go. Disappear without telling me somehow.”

He has to force himself to lift his face out of the fur, to look at her sitting on the stripped bed, bits of straw poking through the mattress ticking. He wants to put his head in her lap, but there’s nothing in her posture, her crossed arms and set lips, to indicate she’d allow any such gesture, so he stands. He begins to clean up.

By chance, there’s a piece of kindling that’s straight and the same length as the splintered stretcher. All he has to do is peel off the bark and whittle the ends so that it fits. She sits on the bed, arms still crossed, watching as he works. Under her gaze, he picks up the mended chair and sits carefully, testing it. He puts the furniture back where it belongs, table before the stove, and he replaces objects on the shelf.

All right,
he thinks as he works.
All right.

And, like someone reciting a prayer, he goes over the remainder of the afternoon.
She will cook and we will eat. We’ll sit across
from each other without saying a thing, and when we’re finished,
we’ll get into the bed. And she’ll touch herself. She’ll reach down
when I’m inside her and make herself cry out—the first little noise
from her after all that I’ve made. I’ll come, and then maybe she’ll let
me hold her, but probably not. She’ll take a bath, and I’ll sleep. I’ll
sleep a little before going back to the station. And tomorrow, tomorrowI’ll wake up in my bed. For a minute I’ll lie there, and then I’ll
go outside to the instruments and write the numbers in the log and
transcribe them into code and carry the page to the cable office. And
come home. I’ll come home every day to draw my maps, the maps for
me, for the book of storm tracks, and the forecast maps for the post
office. There will be time left over, some afternoons, to build a new
kite. Muslin is cheap, and wood for the spars. I know the dimensions.No instruments, but still, the kite will allow me to observe the
wind, the wind above the water.

It will be as it was. For as long as she allows it, I will come to this
house. I will come, and I will bring a gift and she will cook and we
will lie together in her bed and she will bathe and smoke and I will
watch and then I’ll go home.