The Seal Wife - Kathryn Harrison [67]
A success, he thinks, pleased that he’s come up with something she likes. But when it’s time to go, she gets out of the tub, she follows him naked to the door.
“What?” he asks, and she points at the chair, she makes a whisking gesture with her hand as if to say, “Take it, take it back.”
He shakes his head, and she shakes hers. She leads him back to the chair and picks it up by the arms, thrusts it at him.
It’s the same with all the gifts: the tablecloth, the umbrella, the box of dominoes, the nutcracker. He spends his money as if he had plenty to spare. She condescends to examine what he gives her, but before they move from table to bed she replaces whatever it is in his rucksack by the door, and he ends up bringing it home to the station, the downstairs room a gallery of his failures.
Except for the box of magazines, so many months out of date that he gets them for half the cover price. A dollar for the lot of them, plus twenty cents for a box of tacks, and another dollar for a pair of lady’s scissors shaped like a crane, the pointed blades coming together to make a long beak.
The woman takes them from his hand, slips her fingers through the holes. She sits on her bed as if he’s not there, pages through slowly, stopping to consider each illustration. At this rate it will take her a year to get through them. And when he interrupts, when he sits beside her and points at one or another picture, she pushes his hand away, she turns aside so as to better ignore him.
“I gave you one,” he says, reaching around her to lay his finger on a drawing of an umbrella. “You didn’t want it.” She looks at him as he puts his hand on his chest for emphasis.
“You didn’t want it,” he says again, but he finds he can’t return her look. He can’t empty his eyes of accusation, and hers— as usual they betray nothing.
He watches as she decorates the wall facing the bed: a girl with a hoop standing on a giant box of Jell-O dessert powder; an automatic Venus adjustable dress form; a woman’s head emerging from a bottle of Ingram’s Milkweed Cream. Once, she makes a little noise—of what? satisfaction?—as she presses the tack into the wood; then she stands back to consider her work, her face expressionless. After a minute, she takes down the dress form, replaces it with a photograph of a man and woman picnicking beside an automobile parked under a tree, but then she tears this down as well. Is there anything to be understood from the pictures she selects? The harder he thinks, the less he knows. Bigelow throws himself back on the bed, sighing loudly.
They sit across from each other, drinking tea and eating bread she has fried, slabs topped with bone butter, a substitute for the real thing made by boiling sections of antler and rendering their marrow. White and mild, it tastes good, like dairy fat. The woman finishes hers; she licks the tips of her index and middle fingers.
The table between them, the silence between them, the sheen of grease on her lips. The pucker of fabric between her third and fourth buttons. “I want . . .” Bigelow says.
She looks at him, and he stops speaking. He places his hands on the table, palms upturned.
So there’s another private pleasure I’ve afforded her, Bigelow thinks as he walks home, grumpy, feeling his unrelieved erection, the ache in his balls, as he helplessly compares the success of the gift to her sexual excitement, orgasms to which he has trouble not attaching the word coincidental. The thought isn’t a bitter one, not exactly. Who would she be, if she were available to him? If he could successfully insinuate himself between her gaze and its object?
IT TAKES HIM BY SURPRISE, as it did on the day he smashed his barometer. He’s sitting at the table, watching as she skins a woodchuck, the animal he shot, thinking, from a distance, that it was a rabbit with its ears down. Who knows how it will taste? It’s young, anyway. Its face has the blunt look of immaturity—a kind of sweet and dopey quality, it made him angry as soon as he saw it, when he stooped down, turned it over. Grass was in its mouth, and its eyes