The Seal Wife - Kathryn Harrison [48]
Anticipated as a reward, each Thursday afternoon feels more like a punishment, a defeat. After an hour has passed, or two, or ten—he cannot tell the time, cannot ever contrive to get his watch before his eyes—Bigelow disentangles himself from Miriam; he smoothes her hair and her bodice, reties the undone bows and uses his handkerchief to blot her flushed and wanton face. It’s alarming, the damp way she lies there on the horsehide sofa, her limbs as pliant as a hypnotist’s victim. “Good-bye,” he says, “I’ll see you next week,” provoking an intoxicated, trembling nod.
Approaching the stairs, he, too, feels shaken and confused. Sometimes his knees seem not so much to flex as to buckle when he descends. A politeness for Getz, then he reels out the door and through the streets, hurrying to the prostitute, Violet, where he has either to pay an extra dollar or listen to her blather until he jumps on her, his hand over her mouth, and rides her flesh, coming so fast it’s not worth the money.
If he’s to spend money on sex, it should last a few minutes, he thinks, and as an economy he’s tried masturbating en route. He’s stopped in the woods, crouched and furtive, adolescent, but it doesn’t work. By the time he follows Violet upstairs he’s hard again, and even for the second time in under an hour, it’s over before it begins. What’s more, no matter who he holds, in his arms or in his thoughts, by the time he comes, that woman has transformed herself. She’s changed into the Aleut. Cool, detached, silent, smiling her closed-lipped smile.
UP ON THE BLUFF, Bigelow never sees the crowds he draws in town, people standing on corners, the barber with his scissors hanging from his hand, the bibbed man with his hair half cut, the waitress holding a pot of coffee, the Indians who work at the sawmill, all of them, necks cricked, watching his kite rise through the air, high above the streets and houses.
Violet and Bunch Grass and Nellie the Pig—all the girls on the Line—lean out of their windows. They run outside with hairbrushes or playing cards still in their hands, wearing nothing but camisoles and garter belts, mud squeezing up between their toes, faces lifted to the sky.
And railroad workers, too, at the end of the track, however far they’ve gotten that day, they stop hammering and lie on the ground, heads resting on ties. They look up to see how the silver wire catches the rays of the sun.
Now, when Bigelow walks along Front Street, people wave, they point and stare. “Today?” they ask. “Are you going to fly it today?”
The town’s undertakers shake his hand, all three of them in their black suits, plump and clean and prosperous. There’s good business in high latitudes; a man in the funeral trade doesn’t have to wait long for the inevitable. Something about the slant of the sun’s rays, or their absence. The sheen on the rails, the relentless scream of the mill’s round blade. People see gold where gold never was. They snowshoe off cliffs or into rivers. They misjudge a bear or forget to feed their dogs.
“Better than whiskey,” one of the undertakers tells Bigelow, referring to the kite’s white flight, an antidote to the persistently surprising weight of a filled casket.
“Thank you.” Bigelow squeezes the hand too hard, unprepared for sudden popularity. “Thank you. Thank you very much.”
The Chinese attendant at the bathhouse bows when he comes in.
The barber cuts his hair for free.
A boy of about eleven, pale hair and pale, serious eyes— Bigelow thinks of himself, the spring his father died—follows him from the wireless office to the dry-goods store.
“Hello,” Bigelow says, but the boy doesn’t answer, he runs away at the word.
Standing at the cobbler’s bench, waiting in his socks while his one pair of boots are resoled, Bigelow sees a woman with a long black braid, sees her from the corner of his eye. There she is, just coming