The Seal Wife - Kathryn Harrison [46]
Because, much as he doesn’t like to admit it, Getz is right— already he resents her pencils and notebooks. Too much of his life is devoted to written exchange, to recording data from instruments, translating it into code, exchanging his reports for more code and transcribing that. Too many attempts each day to quantify experience and fix it between the lines on a page, the outlines of a map. He’s had dreams of his own penis, its shaft marked like the column of a barometer, with a scale of tiny numbers.
The weeks wear on, and as a function of human nature, Getz grows less vigilant. Instead of hovering on the landing, he goes back downstairs; he bends over his account books; he sweeps and mops; he decants molasses from a barrel into jugs; he waits on his customers; while, upstairs, Miriam sidesteps invitations to converse or even to sing and wraps her thin arms around Bigelow, insinuates cold fingers into his pockets and sleeves and even, shockingly, down the front of his trousers. Is this evidence of passion? Shamelessness? A measure of how determined she is to avoid conversation?
Maybe she’s just lonely and bored. Whatever compels her, she vacuums kisses out of his mouth with a spiraling energy, so that Bigelow, his eyes closed, actually thinks of water funneling down a drain, trying to picture what’s happening, the way her lips feel as if they’re munching around and around, clockwise. Once, he strangles on a laugh, imagining the two of them traveling across the equator and into the Southern hemisphere, her mouth reversing its direction. If he can pry their faces apart, all four of their cheeks shine wet with saliva, and in a half second she’s back, sucking diagnostically at the muscled root of his tongue, as if trying to fathom the source of his voice.
It’s astonishing how much of her mouth Miriam manages to thrust inside his, demonstrations (of affection?) so claustrophobic that he begins to pant. He feels as if he’s suffocating, he can’t make himself relax, his mind travels from one anxiety to another. Perhaps it would be different if he kept his eyes open, but he doesn’t like seeing the room in which they sit, the bank calendar on the wall, days X’ed off one by one, the lamp by the piano, the scorched spot on the rug—discouraging, all of it. That awful horsehide sofa, the occasional glimpse of the hairs, or worse, bald spots that tormentingly evoke the animal that used to move beneath the skin. Any attempt to reconcile Miriam’s kisses with the shabby domesticity of their setting is too much for Bigelow. If he leaves his eyes open, he gags on her tongue, he’s distracted by a tickle of saliva on his cheek, stabbed by pins and needles in his buttock. So he closes them, he succumbs to her advances.
After, to clear his head, he walks, preferring the mud or dust of town to the solitude of a prettier destination, the invitation to measure himself against the vastness of the scenery. Across oceans, war is filling landscapes with chaos and blood, broken bodies, rubble. What is it about those X’ed-off days? He hates, hates, them, evoking, as they do, death. Bank calendars with their misered coins of time! The opposite of his books of maps, their lines black and defiant, infinite, marking wind and rain and fluctuations of pressure. Days without end: a book God is writing with Bigelow’s hand.
He looks around himself. All the tents are gone now, and some of the log dwellings have acquired second, clapboard stories, complete with dormers and decorative cornices. A few people have picket fences, but these don’t produce any civilized aspect. They look ridiculous. The town is still so new it seems a conceit, but a growing conceit. The Aleut woman