The Seal Wife - Kathryn Harrison [32]
And after each show, when the lights come back on, already she has disappeared, like a ghost or a sprite, a creature not quite human. It becomes Bigelow’s mission to see her as she leaves, to learn where she goes, and by what means, but he never witnesses her departure any more than he does her arrival, for both are accomplished in the dark. Even when he hangs about the tent flaps after the show has begun, or slips outside before it has ended, still he never catches her.
At home, his gramophone stands unused in a corner, the sleeves of his records curling in the damp. He tries playing Nellie Melba singing Juliet—too sweet; then Gemma Bellincioni’s Salome—too worldly; Emmy Destinn—absolutely lifeless. Divas, he thinks, bitterly. What did he hear in them before? How did he tolerate such shrilly pompous sounds? He kicks at the clumsy machine, the same that once held such power, the staticky noises broadcast by its black horn enough to stun a group of braves. Of course, it failed him at the Aleut woman’s. It didn’t bewitch her. But what could have?
Walking through the town, up and down its one main street, in and out of every store: he tells himself he isn’t in a hurry, he is enjoying the delicious torment of pursuit, remembering how it felt in the months—they seem a lifetime ago—when he was following the Aleut woman, catching a glimpse of her black braid in the distance.
Stalking his new, invisible quarry, Bigelow realizes that he’s been dead for the past year. Dead ever since the Aleut disappeared; and while the idea frightens him—surely his essence doesn’t reside with a woman, to be borne off at her whim—it’s hard to regret the way he feels now that he has another focus for his longing. It’s only a matter of time before he finds her in the town, during the days that grow ever longer: seventeen, eighteen, soon there will be nineteen hours of light.
But he doesn’t see her, not anywhere. And no one he asks knows anything about her. No one has seen her. Oh, they’ve heard her, they’ve been to the pictures, and they nod when he asks if they remember that a singer provided auditory enhancement. But even the ones who call out song titles while the projectionist fiddles under the bulb wired to the tent pole—even they don’t remember what the voice looks like, let alone where she might live.
EIGHT GEARS of gargantuan proportion. A pulley the size of a locomotive’s wheel. Bundles of rods and shafts, as well as valves, levers, springs. Cocks and caps and cranks. Innumerable bolts and bits.
It’s not the elegant apparatus he imagined, and he blames this on the Aleut woman’s absence. If she were in Anchorage, if he’d been able to come to her in the evenings, talk to her as he used to do, then the reel would be a different thing entirely. Streamlined and efficient.
Inspired. He would have invented it in her house, sat at her table or on her bed, sketched it in his notebook, and it would be—well, it wouldn’t be this.
Hampered by what’s available to him in a frontier town, he’s had to bargain for parts, make do with cast-off, rusted junk. The small parts ought to be larger; the big ones are too big. He’s counting on grease to keep the thing from seizing up, counting on luck, on providence.
And he’s still waiting for piano wire. In the meantime he’ll mount the reel outside the shed.
Bigelow lashes