The Seal Wife (5 page)

He pulls her up from the bed and walks her through the room. “Warm. Cold. Warm. The earth, it’s a closed system, too. Heat from the equator rises. Cold air from the poles sinks. And it would make huge crosscurrents. Streams that flow across east–west winds.”

The woman stands back, watches Bigelow sweep his arms around. “I bet,” he says, “that the air over Anchorage is warmer than the air over Nairobi. I just have to get the kite high enough.”

The woman looks at him, her eyebrows drawn together. He’s made her forget the raccoon.

“You’ll see,” he says. “You’ll come with me, up the bluff. I have a place picked out. A spot where the wind is always perfect.

“The kite, it’s going to be huge. Enormous. This”—he picks up the rucksack with the fabric inside—“this is just to give you an idea. It isn’t even half of it. A kite big enough to carry all the instruments you could want. Barometer, thermometer, anemometer, hygrometer.” He ticks them off on his fingers. “Dry-cell battery, and rotating barrel for graphing readings simultaneously.”

She sits on her bed, leaning back on her elbows, and he comes to her. He kneels and puts his arms around her waist.

“You’ll come with me, up to the place I’ve found,” he tells her. And he tries, because he can’t not try, to get his tongue between her legs.

HE BRINGS HER a bar of soap. He likes to think of her, sitting in the bath.

There isn’t much of a selection, not in a place like Anchorage, not in April, when the inlet’s ice pack still prohibits shipping, but still, he lingers over the available brands. Canthrox, one bar says—shampoo. He’s never seen her wash or even wet her shining hair. Cuticura, but he doesn’t like its medicinal name or its smell. Naphtha, for laundry only. Most of the soaps have been on the shelf long enough that their wrappers are stained and torn. After all, why buy soap when most people bathe at a bathhouse and bathhouses provide their own?

Bigelow returns to the one bar with a picture on its label: a lady in a tub, her ringed hand resting on its edge, bubbles floating up from the surface of the water. The bathtub is long and has claw feet. It isn’t much like the one the woman uses. And the woman isn’t much like his woman, either. She has a little cap on her head, with curls peeping out from under. LAVANDE. The word is written under the drawing. French. On the other side of the wrapper is the address of the National Toilet Company in Paris, Tennessee.

Still, if she likes the pictures of the corsets, the dimpled faces above the squeezed middles.

Bigelow buys the soap, and after they eat and lie together in the bed, he gives it to her. She’s sitting in the tin tub, smoking, and he slips out from under the skins to fetch the bar from his coat.

“Here,” he says, and she takes it from him. She lays the pipe on the floor beside the tub and, using both hands, turns the gift over and over, smells it, looks once more at the picture, then hands it back.

“No,” he says. “It’s for you. For baths.” He unwraps the soap and gives it to her, and immediately it slips from her wet hand into the water, where she leaves it.

Bigelow hesitates for a moment, then puts his hand in and fishes around for the bar. Past an ankle, under a thigh, the surprise of pubic hair, crisp and springy, even underwater. He hesitates too long in that spot, and she takes his wrist, she pulls his hand from the tub. But he’s seen the soap’s shadow; before she can stop him, he has it and is rubbing the bar up and down her arm to demonstrate how it makes lather, sniffing at it to show her its perfume.

She doesn’t like it. She gets out of the water and empties the tub out the door. Still naked, she fills the kettle with snow and puts it back on the stove, sits in the chair to wait for hot water while Bigelow gathers his clothes and dresses, taking his time because the sight of her perched there, nothing on, is one he enjoys. Too proud to cover herself, she’d rather be cold, the dusky skin of her breasts almost mauve, their nipples drawn up in angry, hard points.

The next time he’s at her place he sees that the soap is gone— she’s thrown it away, no doubt. But she’s kept the wrapper. She’s stuck it to the wall as decoration.

So he’s gotten something right after all.

AS IT WOULD MAKE no sense to assemble and disassemble a kite of such complexity and proportion, Bigelow is building a shed for it on the bluff, and, outside the shed, a platform on which to mount a reel. He has lumber left over from the construction of the station house, and he has bought a box of cheap, bent nails from Getz.

On days he does not see the woman, he spends his afternoons on the bluff. He straightens nails with a hammer, striking sparks from the flat rock where he pounds them. He frames the shed and he puts up walls, he pitches the roof steeply to prevent snow from sticking.

Then he carries all the kite’s pieces from the station up to the shed, making two trips with a sledge, first the spars and the wing ribs, and the next day all the rest, muslin and tools and the instruments he wants to send up into the sky.

Inside the new building, protected from the wind, he begins to put the kite together. Crouched under a hurricane lamp tied to a beam, Bigelow is so involved, day after day, with the details of the work at hand—box corners and lock slots, lengths of hemp soaked and tied wet so as not to loosen in flight, spars, three of them, that crack under tension and have to be replaced, a seam so crooked it has to be resewn—that he doesn’t see the whole of what he’s making.

Not until it’s done, ribs tight, stitches knotted. Bigger somehow than he expected. Grander and more beautiful, with a grace that drawings can’t convey.

He walks around and around the kite, squeezing to fit between the taut muslin panels of the cells and the plank sides of the shed, running his fingers over the fabric, touching spars that he sanded, one each night in his station, until they were as smooth as her skin.

He can’t wait to get it outside, into the wind.

ALL WEEK HE HAS no luck with his gun: torrents of rain wash every last bird from the sky, the rabbits are deep in their dens. Soon the mosquitoes will be as fierce as when he arrived. With nothing to offer the woman, and unable to face the idea of a long, wet evening spent alone, Bigelow settles on the idea of some netting for her bed; he walks into town to buy a bolt from Getz’s store.

His purchase held inside his coat to keep it dry, he’s heading east toward her house, when he sees a man crossing Front Street with a mixed brace slung over his shoulder, one scaup and another, bigger bird with a red breast. Bigelow runs through the rain to catch up with him. He wants the prettier one—a merganser, the man says it’s called—but the man won’t sell it for less than a quarter, so Bigelow takes the scaup instead, and then he has two gifts.

He hurries, head down, trying to avoid the deeper puddles, but by the time he arrives he’s soaked through, and she makes him wait by the door, where she sets aside the bolt of netting to strip off his coat and his boots.

“Against the bugs,” he says, pointing at the netting. He pantomimes getting bitten, slaps at his forearm and then scratches the same spot. The woman nods, a brisk gesture, eyebrows raised as if to say she’s not so ignorant—so savage—that she doesn’t recognize mosquito netting.

He stands barefoot on her bed to screw a ring into the ceiling, shows her how to thread the netting through it, how to drape the stuff so the bugs can’t get in. When he mimes using a needle and thread to close the seam at the head of the bed, she nods, again with a kind of put-upon patience.

“Okay,” he says. “Sorry,” he says. Why doesn’t he learn to resist these gestures she finds condescending?

It’s pretty under the net, the way it makes filmy, indistinct shapes of the chair, the doorway, the squat black stove. The fabric draws halos around lamp and window, and he puts his arm around the woman. With his other hand, he tries to direct her face toward his. But she won’t stay there with him. Instead, she slips out of his arms and pulls the net down, she folds it into something resembling the original bolt.

He moves back to the other room, gets the duck and lays it on the table, sits by the stove, feeling suddenly cold and cheap, apologetic on account of its pedestrian black-and-white feathers. But then she never saw the other one, with the tufted green head, the blood-colored breast.

She undresses before the lamp, and her naked shadow falls across the table, spills into his empty lap.

She picks up the bird, examines it minutely, as she does every meal he brings. There’s no reason to assume she can tell he hasn’t bagged the scaup himself, and yet Bigelow feels sure she knows it isn’t his. Except, he tells himself, that it is. He did buy it, after all. He gave the man what he had left in his pocket, one dime and one nickel.

She cuts the neck to let it bleed; then, without plucking any feathers, she skins it. Does she find the plumage pretty enough to preserve intact? She opens the stomach to find what’s there: the orangy flesh of a bivalve and two small crabs, whole, their legs folded tight. Bigelow finds the sight of them sad somehow, as if rather than having been eaten, they’d been put carefully away, saved for some purpose.

He will think of the crabs later. He’ll try to see them as they were, the pair of them, legs pulled into their sides. He’ll close his eyes to better remember each detail of this evening—the halos drawn by the netting, the smear of blood on the table, the coat of feathers drying on a nail. He’ll wish he’d paid closer attention, as he surely would have had he known to look for auguries. Had he known she would leave him.

As it is, he just sits, shivering by the stove. The scaup has a fishy taste, but he eats it, he holds out his plate for more, the only way he knows to compliment her.

THE DISAPPEARANCE of the Aleut woman grieves him as nothing ever has. “I’m dying,” he tells the face in his shaving mirror. He expects the words to embarrass him, to rouse him from self-pity, but they feel true.

He reminds himself that he has lists of what he’s learned to do without: butter, milk, peach cobbler. Newspapers, paving stones. A decent library, and a place to buy new recordings for his gramophone. A hot bath in his own home instead of a thread-bare gray towel and ten shavings of soap for a penny at one of the bathhouses.

And he has always been restrained in the expression of emotion. He didn’t cry when his father died, not even when the undertaker and his boy carried the corpse feetfirst from the bedroom, down the stairs, and into the road. After the funeral, Bigelow’s mother gave him a box of his father’s effects. That was the word she used,
effects,
and he remembers repeating the two syllables silently to himself, over and over,
e-ffects, e-ffects,
a compulsive mental throat clearing, but one that produced no result, for he never opened the box. He noted its size, and imagined what a container of its dimensions might hold—eyeglasses, cuff links, the sign, B. GREENE, ATTORNEY AT LAW, that had hung under the bell—but he didn’t open it.

So why, then, does he return to the woman’s abandoned house almost daily, driven to reconsider the two vacant rooms, the window’s empty pane of light as it moves across the floor and onto the opposite wall?

Sunday morning hours that he once squandered in church, crammed into a pew between mother and sister, grudgingly dropping nickels into the collection plate, he spends in rooms she has consecrated, a word that surprises him when it comes into his head.
Consecrated.
After all, he hasn’t been to a Sunday service in ten years. But how else to describe what he feels as he walks through her house, around and around, reeling with loneliness?

She chinked between the shrinking, warped boards of the house with scraps of leather, moss, paper—whatever came to hand—and in her absence these have fallen out and cracks have appeared, admitting air, light. He tries to restuff them, but the dried moss crumbles at his touch, the bits of leather and paper slip straight through and outside, then blow away. He presses his eye to the crack, watching the wind tease them over the packed dirt.

JULY 4, the town explodes, bunting and baseball and smuggled bottles of beer. Despite the fact that the Engineering Commission has designated the town as dry—there are no legal intoxicants in Anchorage, and anyone caught selling contraband beer or whiskey within the town site will forfeit his or her claim to a plot of land—alcohol flows through its streets from the Line, as the straggling track of whorehouses southeast of the site is called. The madams use their connections to buy beer by the crate straight off the dock, packed in boxes labeled BEANS or MOLASSES or LAUNDRY SOAP; and stills abound in the uncut woods. Women who sell their favors sell bootleg, too, either as an aphrodisiac to be consumed on the premises, or as a nightcap, to carry home in a hair-oil bottle.

Thieving and brawling among the workers hold the attention of a police force of two, without either officer troubling himself to cross Ninth Street to begin arresting prostitutes; and anyway, where would he put them? There’s no jail, just a dugout under the cabin that serves as a police station. How would it look if a pair of bachelor officers were to cram a dozen or more fancy ladies into that muddy hole? So whoever wants to drink, drinks openly, especially on a summer holiday.