Shipping News, The - E. Annie Proulx [6]
He got in the habit of walking around the trailer and asking aloud, “Who knows?” He said, “Who knows?” For no one knew. He meant, anything could happen.
A spinning coin, still balanced on its rim, may fall in either direction.
2
Love Knot
In the old days a love-sick sailor might send the object of his
affections a length of fishline loosely tied in a true-lover’s knot.
If the knot was sent back as it came the relationship was
static. If the knot returned home snugly drawn up the passion
was reciprocated. But if the knot was capsized—tacit advice
to ship out.
THEN, at a meeting, Petal Bear. Thin, moist, hot. Winked at him. Quoyle had the big man’s yearning for small women. He stood next to her at the refreshment table. Grey eyes close together, curly hair the color of oak. The fluorescent light made her as pale as candle wax. Her eyelids gleamed with some dusky unguent. A metallic thread in her rose sweater. These faint sparks cast a shimmer on her like a spill of light. She smiled, the pearl-tinted lips wet with cider. His hand shot up to his chin. She chose a cookie with frosting eyes and an almond for a mouth. Eyed him as her teeth snapped out a new moon. An invisible hand threw loops and crossings in Quoyle’s intestines. Growls from his shirt.
[13] “What do you think,” she said. Her voice was rapid. She said what she always said. “You want to marry me, don’t you? Don’t you think you want to marry me?” Waited for the wise crack. As she spoke she changed in some provocative way, seemed suddenly drenched in eroticism as a diver rising out of a pool gleams like chrome with a sheet of unbroken water for a fractional moment.
“Yes,” he said, meaning it. She thought it was wit. She laughed, curled her sharp-nailed fingers into his. Stared intently into his eyes like an optometrist seeking a flaw. A woman grimaced at them.
“Get out of this place,” she whispered, “go get a drink. It’s seven twenty-five. I think I’m going to fuck you by ten, what do you think of that?”
Later she said, “My God, that’s the biggest one yet.”
As a hot mouth warms a cold spoon, Petal warmed Quoyle. He stumbled away from his rented trailer, his mess of dirty laundry and empty ravioli cans, to painful love, his heart scarred forever by tattoo needles pricking the name of Petal Bear.
There was a month of fiery happiness. Then six kinked years of suffering.
¯
Petal Bear was crosshatched with longings, but not, after they were married, for Quoyle. Desire reversed to detestation like a rubber glove turned inside out. In another time, another sex, she would have been a Genghis Khan. When she needed burning cities, the stumbling babble of captives, horses exhausted from tracing the reeling borders of her territories, she had only petty triumphs of sexual encounter. Way it goes, she said to herself. In your face, she said.
By day she sold burglar alarms at Northern Security, at night, became a woman who could not be held back from strangers’ rooms, who would have sexual conjunction whether in stinking rest rooms or mop cupboards. She went anywhere with unknown men. Flew to nightclubs in distant cities. Made a pornographic video while [14] wearing a mask cut from a potato chip bag. Sharpened her eyeliner pencil with the paring knife, let Quoyle wonder why his sandwich cheese was streaked with green.
It was not Quoyle’s chin she hated, but his cringing hesitancy, as though he waited for her anger, expected her to make him suffer. She could not bear his hot back, the bulk of him in the bed. The part of Quoyle that was wonderful was, unfortunately, attached to the rest of him. A walrus panting on the near pillow. While she