The Seal Wife - Kathryn Harrison [58]
Watching her through the binoculars, he has the impression that the particular errand is of less importance than the outing itself. That she must leave and come back as a kind of ritual. For what could she need every day from town? Nothing except a glimpse of the main street, a chance to walk among the people for a moment. He remembers clearly, so clearly the first time, the finger ascending. Tea, tobacco, toffee, paregoric.
Of course, it’s hard to determine much of anything from his vantage. He only knows it’s the right woman because he knows the block, the house. She herself—even as revealed by a power of eighty—she is no more than a moving dot, her head indistinguishable from her torso, itself blending into her legs. Except that he can see her as if she were standing in his room before him. The three lines on her chin, the eyelashes without a curl, straight as straight. He makes her naked—and why not? She is his, this vision—the spiral navel, the hair in the fold under her arm, the breasts, smallish and pointed, the bowed legs and smooth skin. But these are for him and no one else. Back on the street, the tiny enigmatic figure travels toward Front Street, bundled beyond recognition, cloaked to all eyes but his own.
AS SOON AS HE’S SURE, as soon as he’s watched every day for a week (assuming on those two days that he can’t see through his binoculars, days of fog thick enough to obliterate the town, the houses, that she conforms to her pattern, she goes out before noon and stays out for at least an hour), he visits her house. Twelve noon exactly, and he’ll stay only five minutes; he promises himself that he won’t linger.
Impossible to sneak up on the place now that it’s no longer on the outskirts—where is fog when he needs it? and yet it makes him nervous, the indeterminate halo it casts around the sun; he sacrifices speed for nonchalance, trying to appear as if meandering down side streets while examining an old cable receipt in his hands. But there’s no one around. He darts up to the door unnecessarily fast; the hinge gives way so easily that he stumbles, he falls to his knees inside.
It will have changed, he told himself as he walked. Or the eyes that see it, they’ll have changed. Someone else has lived in the house—the trackwalker—cooked in it, smoked in it, slept in it. Put his boots on the window’s sill.
Bigelow has braced himself, but the room is as it was when he first walked in, when he followed her home from Getz’s store. He walks around the stove, placed where it always was, the table with its two chairs. He runs his hands over the rungs of the chair on the left, his, and the other one, hers. Touches the surface of the table, that place where he was once in the habit of rubbing his thumb, a groove made by a knife or an accident of milling, a spot where the saw blade faltered. The other room, too, is as it always was, the loose cap on the bedpost that used to rattle as they moved.
All these heavy things, stove and bed and table and chairs— how has she done it? Who has helped her to transport them? Had he had his wits about him, there are many questions Bigelow might have asked the man.
He walks all around the two rooms, running his hand along the walls. It’s tight; she’s rechinked it so that it couldn’t be tighter. And replaced the corset ad with something equally mysterious, an illustration of a clothes wringer, a smiling woman feeding a cloth into one end of the mangle.
Five minutes: they are up very quickly. He allows himself the trespass of pressing his face into her pillow, smelling it, then he goes.
HE VISITS THE HOUSE AGAIN, creeps along the road, then darts in the door, panting as he looks around the one room and then the other. Peering under a pot lid and tasting what’s left in a cup. Sitting in a chair. Sitting at the table in his chair, a fork in one hand, a knife in the other. He knows where to find them, in the box on the shelf. Making sure, after he stands, that he has not left any trace of himself. Wiping