The Seal Wife - Kathryn Harrison [28]
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