The Seal Wife - Kathryn Harrison [30]
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