The Seal Wife (8 page)

Somehow the Aleut woman has deprived him of his body as well as her own, leaving him numb to his own touch. He runs his hands over his chest and doesn’t feel them, jerks his flesh until it produces orgasms as sudden, wet, and unmemorable as sneezes.

Perspiring under layers of wool and skins, Bigelow can’t guess if the clock on the table reads nine at night or nine in the morning. Whereas masturbating used to be, like shaving or breakfast, a ritual performed once each day, providing him another means of distinguishing one dark hour from another, now it has become the opposite, a way of losing himself in time. Between orgasms he sleeps and has dreams of unrelieved tedium, plotless dreams of counting nails, winding thread on spools, chewing tasteless mouthfuls of gruel.

When the heavy sun appears, rolling sullenly along the horizon, it reveals landscapes of unutterable splendor, ice glazing every twig, turning gravel to diamonds, garbage to ransoms. On the walk down to the inlet, Bigelow holds his arm before his eyes, dazzled behind his snow glasses, treading carefully on the polished path. But what he described as grandeur in last year’s letters to his mother and sister now strikes him as threatening, the inlet’s water black and violent, heaving under a mantle of splintered ice.

Even if he felt like making the effort, there’s nothing in walking distance that might pass for a Christmas tree. In the past year, Anchorage has consumed all the forest around itself, milled or hammered or incinerated every usable branch within miles, leaving stumps, like fields of gravestones, in the weird blue twilight of noon.

And it isn’t just in winter that the light is wrong. No matter the season, the Alaskan sun is never overhead. A different incarnation entirely from the frank and workaday midwestern sun of Bigelow’s childhood: Calvinist, forthright, up in the morning to show him his chores, down at night to send him to bed. A different sun from any Bigelow has known—not the inquisitive Chicago sun, beaming bright bars through the tracks of the elevated train, probing gray corners, squinting through aisles of buildings, brash, baptismal. And not the week-at-the-shore sun, heavy on the eyelids, hazy and spangled and soporific. And certainly not the cloaked, cagey sun of Seattle, never fixable in any exact spot, just a whiter patch of gray, ambient, aloof.

The Alaskan sun remains unknowable, every day a new prank, pulling along its bows and parhelia and other odd, errant optical paraphernalia, too lazy and distracted to achieve altitude, rolling along the tops of the mountains, infusing the icy fog with a strange and sullen greeny gold. Halos and sun dogs, auroral curtains of purple and pink, livid green coronas trailing ribbons of white, airborne ice devils that whirl from red to blue, secondary and even tertiary rainbows, prismatic explosions and ricocheting arcs of light, the basin of the inlet on fire, the sky dark, twinkling. From his station windows Bigelow has seen all manner of phenomena he would never before have called
weather.

Because light bends toward the cold—toward cold’s denser air—falling temperatures summon vistas that remain invisible during warmer months. Every day at noon, Mount McKinley marches south, flanked by lesser, pinker peaks, whole landscapes yanked back up over the horizon. Like sliding off the edge of the world into sleep, Bigelow thinks, only to be jerked back to the glare of consciousness.

Bigelow’s breath clouds before his face, hanging still in the windless winter air. He tries to picture himself in the landscape before him. He turns, making a full circle, trying to impose an image of himself on what he sees, but he can’t. The scale is wrong, or the sky, the way it presses down on the land, and its emptiness, birds as evident in their absence as when they crowded out the sun. Can a man exist here? Can Bigelow?

He hasn’t mastered the required optimism. Everywhere else he’s lived, he’s taken his presence for granted. Here, in the north, alone now, he finds himself not quite credible.

HOW CAN IT BE he has no friends in Anchorage? He’s not, after all, an ungenial person. He had friends in Chicago, in Seattle. University friends. Bureau friends. But, having come north alone, he finds that here he works without company, eats alone, has no money to spend in those places where men gather to talk: taverns, pool halls.

And besides not being much of a drinker or a fisher or a trapper, he’s not a gambler, either, not really. The only bet he’s ever made was the one on the schoolteacher, an ill-considered flirtation, and one that failed. In a town where gambling would guarantee companionship, Bigelow cannot make himself understand a bet as anything other than the invitation to throw away the few dollars he has. He believes he’s not lucky; he’s sure he wouldn’t win.

He walks along Front Street, looking at clumps of men on corners and in doorways; they trade news about the war in Europe, usually, the loss of Russian labor, the inevitability of U.S. involvement. Sometimes he pauses in their midst; but feeling that he stops conversation, he tries to appear as casual in departure as he did in arrival.

What is it that he wants? Human contact, a person to talk to. But about what? Certainly not the weather, or his work. His work arouses suspicion in people, as if he were really only fooling the government into supporting some private crackpot pursuit. In winter, the punishments of climate seem to be of his devising. Even when his storm warnings are accurate, they seem to inspire more blame than gratitude. And on those days when his forecasts are wrong, he’s the target of jokes, enough that he takes the longer, less populous route to the cable office.

HE’S NOT SURE how it begins, can’t remember if something sets him off, or if, as it will seem to him afterward, rage arrives like a tornado or a blizzard, a storm whose antecedents might have been plotted, had he only known what phenomena to observe. All Bigelow knows is that one moment he is standing outside the louvered shed, notebook in one hand, pen in the other, trying to turn to the current page; but there is something—a bit of food?—and the leaves of the book stick together. It’s a small thing, an irritant to a person particular in record keeping, but no more than that, the kind of minuscule impediment that would ordinarily provoke a sigh, a frown. But on this day, Bigelow stamps his feet and curses, he hurls the notebook and pen at the shed, then launches himself after them. In a wild and kicking frenzy, he beats his fists and feet against the slats, splintering two, knocking others out of their frame, driving slivers into the heels of his hands, where they burn and ignite more rage. He pulls one panel off the shed, then turns on the equipment inside, shoves the thermometers over and the hygrometer, too, whacks it with his forearm and watches it fly. He tears the barometer from its stand—the instrument that only a day before he had tested with a plumb line to be sure it was standing absolutely vertical—and hurls it to the ground, watching as its tube shatters, spraying needles of glass onto the frozen mud.

The frenzy is short-lived, a minute or two, and that’s it. Bigelow kneels beside the mess. The barometer, a gift from his mother and sister when he completed his training at Fort Myer, lies like something unearthed from a tomb, evidence of an earlier age of wealth and surprising refinement. He sees that even in pieces it is elegant.

He picks up the polished brass collar, uses it to push the beads of mercury together into a slippery blob. With his pen he tries to pick debris from its surface. For most Alaskans a dish of mercury suffices as a forecasting tool: when it freezes solid, stay indoors.

Improbably, all three thermometers are intact; the hygrometer, dented, will function after some tinkering. And Bigelow has another barometer, one issued by the bureau, a utilitarian instrument, its scale drawn with a mingy officiousness.

What has possessed him to destroy this thing he loves, the one object he has that partakes—partook—of other places, civilized places? Made in France, the brass collar is stamped with an address: 12, AVENUE DU CIEL, CHERBOURG.
Number 12, Avenue
of the Sky.
How likely was that? Perhaps more whimsical invention than truth, and the French words inscribed on its case in fanciful, curlicued script—
Tempête, Variable, Beau, Vent, Pluie
— did make the piece more suited to a drawing room full of ladies deciding the outcome of a picnic than to a person of serious meteorological intent. Yet it was an exact instrument, and one of great charm. Each time he moved, from Fort Myer to Seattle, from Seattle to Anchorage, Bigelow packed it with care, swaddling it in layers of clothes and blankets.

At least there was no one to see his tantrum. Although, Bigelow thinks as he picks up the broken slats, if he did not feel so alone, perhaps he would never have fallen prey to his temper.

Bits of glass and mercury gleam underfoot; too small to pick up, they elude fingers and broom straws. When he stands he’s surprised by what he’s seen a hundred times before: how quickly a sky can darken, on the water a few glints of silver even smaller than those underfoot.

HE TAKES READINGS from his mended instruments, he enters data in his logs. He walks to and from the inlet, the creek, the telegraph office. When storms threaten, he warns the Alaska Engineering Commission, but to no purpose. Work on the railroad has ceased during these darkest, coldest days.

December. January. February. He sits at his table and chews the pads of his fingers, and the man reflected in the window’s pane chews his fingers, too. The light that enters his room, that falls on his table and maps, is blue and cold. Heavy, like slabs of ice.

He tries to imagine what might have summoned her from her home. Illness? A death in her family, or a birth? Only the most dire explanations make sense to him—passages in and out of this life.

But maybe she was just tired of Anchorage, of its mud, its blocks of ugly houses, the clatter of hammers hitting ties, the seemingly inexhaustible, even rising, tide of railroad workers and prospectors, men who watched as she walked down the street. Men who, deprived of women, reverted to animals, hands down their trouser fronts, eyes narrow, appraising. He saw what they did as she walked past; he watched, once even using his binoculars, training them on her back. She never cast her eyes down, never acknowledged the catcalls and whistles.

He lay in wait at the corner of Front and Ninth to walk with her, tried to protect her, but she wasn’t having any of it. She crossed the street to avoid his company, did everything but push him away, and that, he suspects, because she wouldn’t touch him in public. Instead, she returned to her house. She could wait for whatever it was she wanted.

Was that what drove her away? Not the one incident, but the assumption behind it, that she was his?

Could she have left to escape him, his relentless visits to her door, her table, her body? The thought is so painful that he closes his eyes, he shakes his head as if to refuse it.

Bigelow tries to picture the woman in places other than those few in which he’s seen her—Getz’s store, her chair by the stove, the bed she shared with him, the tin tub—but he can’t.

Except on those nights when he wakes and sees her in his room, standing at the foot of his bed, gazing not at but through him. She looks as she did the last day he saw her, her long braid pulled over one shoulder. He knows it can’t be true, her presence—in the morning, when he lights his lamp, she is gone—and yet it feels true. It feels truer than the table, the water for his coffee, the match between his cold fingers.

He scrimps on food in order to drag home another case of kerosene, pulling his sled carefully over the frozen ground. Still, the runners find a slick patch, or they catch on a stone, the sled tips, the box skids. One bottle shatters noiselessly and its golden contents leak away, leaving an iridescent trail in his wake, a prismatic oily sheen on the snow’s blank face.

And when he crawls under the blankets on his bed, his dreams find another plotless monotony: he holds out his hands to catch a spilling flow, but it leaks through his fingers and is lost.

PART TWO

ACROSS THE WATER, Knik refuses to die. There’s the Alaska Commercial Company trading post, a couple of roadhouses and a miners’ outfitters, the Pioneer Hotel, Jenkins’s Transfer and Tarpaulins, a barbershop, a saloon, and a fistful of cabins, the winter population holding at eighty-seven. When surveyors for the railroad bypassed Knik, even the postmaster quit and boarded up his office, those planks now gone, torn off by squatters. But Indians keep the town going, Indians and gold-panners and the Friday-to-Saturday dances.

May through September, a motor launch leaves Anchorage on the high tide and heads fifteen miles up the inlet’s north arm, the city band on board, tuning instruments, taking requests en route.
You are my honey honey suckle, I am your bee. I’d like to sip
the nectar sweet from those red lips I see.
They set up at Open Hall, just off the Pioneer’s potato field: a plank floor with gaps wide enough to catch the ladies’ heels as they dance, a concession offering deep-fried doughnuts, bottles of root beer, a scoop of chicken salad on a hard roll for fifteen cents.

Bigelow can’t dance; he has no date. He stands in line for chicken salad and, when it’s finally his turn, surprises himself by shaking his head at the aproned girl with the big spoon. He walks off, into a clot of Indians spending their money on hooch. Bigelow puts a dime on the makeshift counter, and the transaction is accomplished without talking: a couple of ounces poured from a beaked can into a communal cup. It’s clear when he holds it to the light, clear enough so dirt shows on the glass, and it has no smell. The only thing that distinguishes it from water is the way it sits in the glass, heavy with possibilities. He dips his tongue in, feels the burn. Better to get it over with—the Indians are staring—so he swallows it fast, almost fast enough to avoid coughing.

The first thing it does is dispense with shyness. Back on the dance floor, Bigelow sees a girl who might work out—why, he can’t say, just a hunch based on nothing, the bracelet worn above the elbow—she won’t mind, maybe, when he missteps. He cuts in, and her partner shrugs, walks off toward the outhouses. She’s half and half, that much he can tell, black hair with the wrong-color eyes.

“Mika kumtux Boston wawa?”
He’s drunk enough to try a line in Chinook—there’s something he hasn’t done in a long while— asking if she understands any English. But she doesn’t answer, not exactly. Something about the question, about him, is funny to her. She opens her mouth to laugh, and he sees she’s missing two teeth on top, right in the front, and just like that he’s hard, hard enough to want to press his groin into her hip, her side, whatever he can get away with. Strange what does it to him, nothing he could predict, and he’s dancing very well, thank you. Without missing a step, he pokes his tongue into the gap, tasting the slick little absence, the incredible sweetness of her gums. He pushes until she allows her teeth to part, and they dance like that, faces pressed together, groins teasingly close, to a rollicky fast “I Didn’t Raise My Boy to Be a Soldier.”
No sir,
thinks Bigelow, exempt from conscription (perhaps the only perquisite of the Weather Bureau), his mother raised him to look up at the sky, to chase clouds, count raindrops, fly kites, and jam his tongue into girls’ mouths. Dancing, he discovers, is a way to get his cock harder, if that were possible.

Bootleg makes it softer, a manageable lust. Thirty cents gone, three glasses down, he’s pacing himself, and he owes a word of thanks to the temperance ladies for inspiring the manufacture of illegal beverages. The night, lit by a string of bulbs, is a long one. The United States has been at war with Germany for a month, and Alaska’s newly enlisted men are determined not to waste any hours on sleep before they depart for training camp. After a hundred or so turns on the floor—several times he’s on hands and knees to free the girl’s scuffed shoe from a crack—Bigelow gets three fingers past the girl’s waistband, but after her missing teeth the pinch of flesh is a disappointment, and he goes back to kissing as he boxsteps, taking her lead. No trick to this; how is it he’s never gone dancing before?

The fifth glass—he doesn’t want to swallow it. Well, he does, some of him does. His brain says swallow; his throat says no. Still, who’s in charge? And he’s not sorry after he gets it down because this is a drunkenness that allows sublime substitutions. Bigelow finds himself dancing on the inlet, on the surface of an endless ice pan, black and almost imperceivably pitching, a degree or two with the action of the tide beneath, just enough seesaw to explain the dizzy shivers he feels as he hugs the girl in his arms, herself a sleepy, silken warm sack of compliance, sweet— she even smells syrupy, like something poured over a cake or a pudding. She tips her head to just the right angle, and, eyes closed, Bigelow follows his tongue through the gap in her smile, he slithers into the airless dark inside her, all of him: breathing, not breathing, dancing, not dancing. He won’t open his eyes, he doesn’t want to destroy this perfect, dangerous equilibrium; very important to keep them shut, because he’s swimming inside her now, inside where it’s red and claustrophobic.

But then he takes a breath, and it isn’t so dire. It isn’t even cramped, no, as it turns out, there’s a cathedral of space inside a woman, and Bigelow, he is double-jointed, he is made for genuflection. On his knees, he hears couples glide past, the hush and scrape of shoes. How mysterious women are, like Chinese boxes, Russian dolls, except that they get bigger as you go; the one in the center is the biggest of all, her head scrapes heaven’s vault. And Bigelow is holding tight to the hem of her dress, to threads unraveling: don’t let go because it’s one of those bottomless plummets, the kind into which he falls some nights, legs jerking convulsively as he wakes in his bed, saving himself, saving himself from falling through himself, through her. Because that’s what’s happening now, he’s falling through a woman’s vastness: storms and oceans, a desert, a mountain, a field in bloom, the wind moving in loops and arcs and great gusting sighs, the breath of God, in out in out, God exhaling clouds of geese, and Bigelow in his tower, watching. On the bluff, over the creek, on Cook Inlet, in the territory of Alaska, vast and austere, possessing a beauty that cares nothing for the attentions of men, who crawl like ants on her face, at her feet; Bigelow watches himself drawing a map, tracing lines that only he can see, lines that give him the power to predict.

But how amazing to have found a way inside a girl that has nothing to do with fucking. Five glasses of something that looks like water, that closes the cracks in the dance floor, ices them over and lets him slide.

The launch stays the night, waiting out the ebb tide, so Bigelow comes home at sunrise, sore-footed, mosquito-bitten, puking bootleg, and considering the torment worthwhile. Here’s another thing he’s never done before—danced all night with a gap-toothed girl. Still young enough to keep a mental notch of experience, stuff he’s collecting.

A gap-toothed, pickpocketing girl, he’s forced to conclude when he doesn’t have the fare back home, but still, no regrets. The captain laughs as if Bigelow’s hardly the first to be fleeced in this manner. In lieu of a ticket, he accepts the promise of one dollar within an hour of disembarking.

It’s not a pleasant walk to the station and back—Bigelow has to go much more briskly than he’d choose in his eviscerated condition—but Anchorage isn’t big enough to allow for anonymous deceit. He returns to the muddy dock with the dollar, and then, cursing himself—how can he have been so stupid as to neglect to read his instruments?—he has to go back to the station before he can cable the bureau.

Home again, and the effort of another mile walked in the sudden heat, of straining to interpret cruelly tiny lines through a buzz of insects, brings on dry heaves and cold sweats, but still, he’s not sorry. There must be a price, after all, for revelation.

For slipping inside a woman and seeing what’s there.

IT COMES TO HIM SUDDENLY, like a message traveling down the taut line of the kite, making it tremble with the knowledge. The Aleut left because she was pregnant.

He’s sure, he
knows,
that she went off to have a child, his child. The two of them alone, away from him. But
his,
they are his.

And how far from him can they be? Not so far that their very breath doesn’t, by the action of the wind, blow past, touching him.

Standing on the bluff, wind whipping tears from his eyes, he sees her navel unwind with the swelling of the flesh around it.

Then again, he thinks, back in the station house, eating undercooked beans and washing each mouthful down with a swig of boiled creek water, this is just the kind of fantasy to which loneliness makes a person prey.

All those hot baths afterward, her legs crossed, open, his seed leaking out.

HEARTS IN EXILE, and he’s seen it twice before, he can’t afford to part with another nickel; and yet there he is, one buttock tingling, the other already asleep. Ten to a bench, lice strolling from one host to the next, Bigelow leans forward, resting his elbows on his knees, hoping to keep his head out of the path of infestation. The film is projected onto an old sheet and he wonders, as he did during the previous week’s showing, from whose bed the screen has been taken, from whose body flowed the now dry and ghostly stains. Not sweat, and not blood, and not urine either. Seven overlapping outlines in the center of the screen, each about the circumference of a saucer. Bigelow waits for outdoor scenes, for patches of pale sky, blank fields of snow, and, memorably, the sequence in Moscow’s slum in which the heroine’s white apron is sullied by the seven evocative rings: a scribbled bull’s-eye hovering over her private parts.

The tent canvas flaps, the sheet wobbles, the first reel breaks twice, and the second jerks enough to make his head ache. As always, the audience is intoxicated and stands up to fight with images on the screen. Russians, Swedes, Laplanders—few read enough English to follow the title cards, but who needs plot when illusion dances so close to life? As he does once or twice a month, the Tlingit medicine man crawls in after the show has begun and goes crazy, more or less, shaking rattles and setting a handful of dried plants on fire. Threatened with a haircut once before, he is apparently going to get one this time; the cashier cuffs him to a tent pole and sends his usher to collect the barber.

But the film goes on; another reel remains; the hidden accompanist rattles her sheet music. Smoke swirls through the projector’s beam, and the acrid rebuke of exorcism mingles with the moist, ripe smell of spring. Under the low canvas ceiling the air carries a complex bouquet of sweat and decay, of alcohol and unwashed hair, of swill discarded when temperatures were below zero. Whatever froze underfoot has thawed, and Bigelow gives up breathing through his mouth to avoid it, tantalized by the proximity of natives in their fish-smelling parkas. Restricted to the last three rows, they stay put, but their scent wafts forward, imparting a coy, teasingly genital savor to the dark.

Bigelow hasn’t thought about it before, but when he went to a show in Seattle the music seemed to have been provided or at least suggested by whoever made the picture. The nickelodeon on King Street had an orchestra pit, and he remembers percussive battle scenes, shrill staccato chases, enchantments enhanced by harp strings. But the music in the tent theater, its human source invisible, takes little inspiration from Anna Ivanovna’s odyssey through czarist Russia; instead, perhaps devised by the same tormenting intelligence that has conjured emanations of undergarments, it provides a mocking score to unsatisfied lust.

One night he saw dancing a maid so entrancing his heart caught
on fire inside. . . .

No piano, no violin, and the man whose accordion wheezed through the previous week’s showing isn’t on hand either. There is only one voice—high and clear, innocent but not, it seems to Bigelow, untrained, a soprano without the tremulous affect to which opera recordings have accustomed him. He turns his head to favor his ear’s rather than his eye’s reception. Used as Bigelow is to arias sung in languages he doesn’t understand, meaning incidental to expression, he dismisses the ballad’s lyrics as vulgar and tries to refocus his attention on the wobbling sheet, the heroine weeping on her knees.

“I beg you!” the title card reads, and the voice squanders another octave on nonsense.

Yip I addy I ay I ay, yip I addy I ay, I don’t care what becomes of
me, when you play me that sweet melody—

Just then, the film breaks again, the light goes on, Bigelow sees the singer and realizes he’s seen her before. But where? She sings with her eyes closed and her face tipped up, music in her hands, but she isn’t following it—she doesn’t even know, perhaps, that the film has been interrupted.
Song of joy song of bliss,
home was never like this. . . .

Bigelow leans a little farther forward, his tailbone lifting off the bench. To get a better look at the girl, he asks the man in front of him if he wouldn’t mind removing his hat, a Stetson whose brim hasn’t bothered Bigelow during the show, and he doesn’t notice that under it is the new occupant of the Aleut woman’s house, the same man from whom he hid his face all winter, ducking under his parka hood on the few days warm enough to tempt everyone outside into the air.

Is she beautiful, the singer? With her eyes closed, her face betrays an abandon, even an ecstasy, that belies her smoothly buttoned bodice, the modest proportions hidden beneath its dark fabric—no operatically heaving bosom for this singer. And her skin is as luminous as if she holds all the long winter’s light inside her. Her neck is long and graceful; she wears a locket on a short chain and it gleams at the base of her pale throat, resting just between the two protuberant knobs of her clavicles. She takes a breath, and as she does she inclines her head so Bigelow can see how sharp is her chin, how straight the white part in her hair, and how her dark eyebrows nearly meet over her nose.

Has he seen her before, or has she—as is his sudden impression—existed in his mind all along? The way a longing, never articulated, might find expression in a poem or a painting. An unexpectedly high, clear note.