The Seal Wife - Kathryn Harrison [47]
He snared two fox pups and ruined their skins, wasted the meat. How easy it looked in the woman’s hands. He cannot understand his clumsiness. The fur seemed glued to the flesh beneath, and the newly whetted knife tore this way and that, slipping out of his grasp, biting at the muscle, the hide, the surface of the table. When he was done, the coppery fur was shot through with holes, bloodied. He dropped the first carcass and its shroud of skin in a hole, buried it, then did the same thing with the second. Except then he buried his knife next to the mutilated animal.
Did he feel it when he was with the Aleut? Did he recognize happiness in the moment? The perfect emptiness of those evenings—each hour hanging like a pelt from her hands, each a flawless vessel—nights when he was satisfied with nothingness, a silent meal and wordless sex.
A lie. There were worries, aggravations. There must have been. But what were they? He cannot remember. All he knows is that she left him. That for weeks he came to sit on the floor of her house and stare at its emptiness.
In bed, alone, the weight of black night pressing on his eyes, Bigelow tries to redirect his lust from the Aleut woman, her chin and her armpits, her hairless smooth legs, onto Miriam. He pictures Miriam’s stomach—it would be long and sinuous like her neck—and the crests of her hip bones, how they would protrude were she to lie on her back. The depth of the dip of flesh between her hips, it would be just about the thickness of his hand, were he to put it there. Never having seen Miriam without clothes, still he can imagine the whiteness of her hidden skin, its warmth, and how the fat must slip over the muscle of her stomach. Under his palm it would move just so far in one direction and so far in the other. No matter how slight the woman, always those little cushions, his favorite the plump little mound over her sex, its unruly hair and how it yields to the pressure of fingers, the halt of bone below. With Violet, he once let his teeth sink into that softness, not drawing blood, of course; she squealed, but she hadn’t been hurt.
Miriam’s wanton kisses suggest to Bigelow that she might let him put his mouth there, and his eye as well. In his head he can see it all and even set it to music, to verses sung by the girl herself—your shoes ain’t buttoned, gal, don’t fit you right—but his lust is not so easily reoriented. Directly, it returns to the Aleut woman, refusing to be tricked onto any other, lesser path, underscoring his enslavement to a person who has gone, left, disappeared.
Married. Married more than once. Twice?
Virginity does not have the power to enthrall Bigelow, but the vision of Getz’s tongue wagging at him, the malicious, taunting pink tip of it—how could he, how dare he, in a conversation about his own daughter, make such a gesture?
A hundred times Bigelow has returned to the scene, attempting, if only in his mind, to respond to Getz’s tongue. But it’s not the kind of insult he can assuage with a remedial cleverness. By himself, during endlessly long and pacing evenings, he hasn’t been able to think of anything he might have said or done to combat such, such what? Aggression? No, something worse, something more insidious. Hostility fades, but this, it’s a kind of dare, a mocking, contemptuous sort of a slap whose sting increases with the passage of time.
In fact, it’s Bigelow’s impression that the tongue is getting bigger, even somehow longer. He goes about his chores, pursued by the tongue, never before but behind him, at about the level of his shoulder blades. Between them and out of reach, like a terrible itch, tormenting, undismissable, it chases him along the slippery mud ruts, it pokes around corners and sneaks up on him when he’s working. There are only so many lines he can trace on a map before it intrudes, pink, wet, twitching.
And whenever he thinks of skipping a visit to the little room