The Seal Wife - Kathryn Harrison [54]
Too tired to take the long way home, the route that avoids Front Street, he’s waylaid by Miriam, who comes running out of the store as he passes, carrying basket and notebook. What happened?she writes, her words hurried, less neat than usual. We heard there was an accident down at the dock.
In reply, Bigelow holds up his bandaged hand.
But what? she presses. What?
“Nothing,” he says, continuing slowly up the block, Miriam following. “Hurt myself, that’s all.”
She pauses to write, then runs to catch up, pushes the notebook into his good hand. I have some things for you—food. And I can help around the house. I’ll come home with you and do what you say.
“There’s nothing,” he says, “I don’t want anything,” aware that he’s being ungracious, surly, and assuming she’ll excuse his bad temper, blame it on what’s under the bandage. Although, like an invalid or a prisoner, a creature whose temperament has been formed by dependence, Miriam possesses an uncanny ability to divine moods.
He shrugs her hand off his sleeve, and she drops back a few paces, walking behind instead of beside him. All the way to the station house, he can hear her steps, the basket brushing against her skirt as she walks.
She follows him through his door and sets the basket on his drafting table, heedless of the maps, the pens. He moves it to the floor and glowers at her, but she pays no attention, walking around, looking at the unwashed pans on the stove, the dirty plate on the table. She walks up the stairs to the room above, comes down so quickly that she can’t have bothered to look out the windows.
What do you do here all day? she writes.
Bigelow sits, slumped and sighing, hand held above his head to alleviate the throb. “I’m on the bluff a lot,” he answers, finally. “With the kite.”
Curtains will make it much cozier, she writes in reply. What a difference you’ll see when I move in!
She leaves him looking at the words and unpacks her basket, setting out crackers and sardines, cherries in their can.
“I’m not hungry,” he says before she can reprise their terrible dinner, and she nods. She leaves the food where she set it and puts her hands together, fingers and palms aligned, a gesture of patient supplication that makes him feel both guilty and angry.
“You tricked me,” he says, shoving the notebook back at her. “I want you to admit that you tricked me.”
She bends over a page. I’ll change the dressing on your hand, she writes.
“No,” he says, “I’m—I want you to go home. I’m tired.” He goes upstairs to avoid her face, her notebook, her welling eyes and praying hands, upstairs where he can make sure from his windows that she walks back to town. It isn’t fair, he tells himself, watching as she stops and turns to look back at his station. He has no tangible reason to assume a conspiracy between Miriam and her father. Bigelow tries to see the small figure on the road as deserving of sympathy, if not love. She’s passionate, anyway. If he married her he’d have sex every night, maybe sometimes in the morning. If he married her he could have sex when—well, whenever.
He takes a drink before removing the splint to change the dressing, braces himself for what’s under the bandage—purple and blue and green and even black, the stitched-up bite a mere dimple in the oozing mess. The wound is infected and the hand is so fat that the sutures look like the thread restraining a mattress button. His fingers are useless, swollen shiny and stiff.
It hurts, even with bootleg it hurts, but not more than the rest of him. Oddly, he aches all over, and he keeps touching himself to check this, his arms, his thighs and shoulders and neck. Everything except his cock. He must be sick, he thinks, because he can’t imagine masturbating. Instead he sits, slumped before his big windows, staring at the town, the creek bed.
Almost glimpsing a map of his own life. Invisible, or nearly so. Like wind. Like weather that he must capture and record. But how? It’s so fleeting, the picture, so vast and impossible to grasp, to fix in place. Like waking from a dream: for a moment it lies before