The Seal Wife (13 page)

She points at the word
can’t.

“You sing but you can’t talk?”

“She stammers,” Getz says, and Bigelow looks up. The shopkeeper is standing at the top of the stairs, his hands in his pockets. His squint, his posture, the shine on his shoes, all convey not satisfaction, exactly. Vindication.

“She—” Bigelow begins.

“Stammers.”

Bigelow doesn’t speak but looks from one face to the other. Miriam smiles self-consciously; she tilts her head to one side and raises that shoulder: an apology. It’s already occurred to Bigelow that she is unusually adept at using gesture to convey meaning; now he sees that, of necessity, she has developed a talent for it. She’s wearing a white blouse with a black bow tied at the collar, the tops of its sleeves so voluminous they look empty.
Leg-o’mutton,
Bigelow remembers such sleeves are called. “So?” he finally says.

“No,” Getz says. “No. Not
so.
She stammers bad enough she can’t talk.”

“But I’ve heard—”

“You’ve heard her sing.” Getz looks at his daughter, who sits, hands clasped between her knees, in the middle of the slippery sofa. “Show him,” he says to her. “Let’s get it over and done with.”

Miriam shakes her head.

“Go on. Do what I say.”

But she doesn’t open her mouth. Her father steps into the small room, the parlor that is too small for even three people. “Say ‘Hello.’ Say ‘How d’you do?’ Say ‘My name’s Miriam.’ Or ‘Mimi,’ say ‘Mimi.’ ”

She shakes her head.

“Say, ‘My name’s Mimi Getz.’ ”

Bigelow stands between them, transfixed. The girl opens her mouth, then shuts it. She stands from the sofa and steps back, but Getz moves quickly toward her. He seizes the top of her arm, and the big sleeve collapses under his fingers so that it looks as if he’s caught nothing more than a handful of fabric. “Say ‘My name’s—’ ”

“No!” Bigelow says. “Leave her. What does it matter?”

“What does it matter? Well.” Getz’s face is hard and assessing, the way it looks when he stands behind his counter, considering something offered in trade, a pelt or an egg. A snuffbox holding a few flakes of gold. “I’m not sure. But you’ll see that it does. Matter.” He shakes his daughter’s arm. “Don’t it, Mimi?”

The girl pulls away. She raises her chin so that the cords stand out in her white neck. Then the red blotches appear, her lips compress into a line.

“That’s it,” her father says, “Mmmmmm. Mmmmmy name . . .”

Bigelow watches the sinuous white neck, the jaw thrust toward the ceiling, as fine-boned as a cat’s. Getz gives the arm another jerk and frees a sound, a broken
m- m- m-,
nothing more, her head tossing with the effort.

“Stop it!” Bigelow says, and Getz turns on him.

“Who are you? Who are you to tell me what to do! Is this
my
daughter? Yes! Is this
my
home? It is!” He drops the crumpled sleeve and Miriam falls back onto the couch. Like a child, she covers her face with her hands.

“Fifteen years of elocution lessons. Eight years of vocal training. Dance and rhythm and—and . . .” Getz’s face is red; he swings his arms and minces his legs in parodic choreography. “Moved up here on advice of a doctor. Change of scene.”

Bigelow turns away from Getz, away from his performance. “How is it you can sing?” he asks, looking at Miriam.

“You tell me!” Getz’s arms go up over his head.

“What I mean is, why can’t . . .?” Bigelow looks back at Getz. “She could sing what she wants to say,” he says.

“You think you’re the first genius to come up with that! She can sing lyrics. She can sing nonsense. She can sing polly wolly doodle, but she can’t sing a thing but what somebody else made up.”

Getz drops his flailing arms and stands, staring at the girl, her face as white as his is red.

“So now you can get out. You’ve seen what you wanted, what you waited for. Get out and stop toying with her. She’s had enough.”

“But—” Bigelow says.

“But what?”

“It . . . it doesn’t bother me.”

“Not yet it don’t.” Getz looks at his daughter, who drops her eyes, then back at Bigelow. “But it will,” he says. “It will.”

He takes Bigelow’s elbow, escorts him down the stairs and to the front door, where he pauses, his hand on the knob. “She’s been married, you know. More than once.” He smiles, and Bigelow sees the pleasure in this revelation.

“Not consummated the first time,” Getz continues. “But the second . . . Well, that would be for you and her to”—he pauses—“talk out,” he says, enjoying the irony.

Bigelow’s mouth is open. Getz looks satisfied.

“But then you’re a man. You’ve had your affairs.” Getz doesn’t mention the Aleut woman, but he lets go of the doorknob, he leans against the jamb and looks Bigelow up and down. With his thumbnail, he traces three lines on his chin, watching Bigelow’s face to measure the effect of his gesture. “You like ’em quiet, I guess. Women that don’t talk back.” He studies Bigelow. “Can’t say as I blame you.”

When Bigelow doesn’t answer, Getz sticks his tongue out, a long, narrow, nimble tongue, whose pointed end he wags in what Bigelow struggles to interpret as anything else than the universal sign for cunnilingus.

“I—” Bigelow says. “I—she—she never . . .” He stops himself before saying the words
let me.

AS IT’ S TURNED OUT, Thursday is the day he calls on Miriam. Not that it’s a formal arrangement, or even that he says to himself on a Wednesday evening that he’ll see her the next day. But on Thursday, after tacking his forecast map to the wall of the post office, Bigelow stops at a bathhouse, scrubs his neck and fingernails, combs his hair with attention, and uses pomade to subdue the one persistent cowlick. On Thursday he changes his linen, he scrapes the mud from his boots, he walks to her father’s store wondering how to get her to talk.

Because, much as he doesn’t like to admit it, Getz is right— already he resents her pencils and notebooks. Too much of his life is devoted to written exchange, to recording data from instruments, translating it into code, exchanging his reports for more code and transcribing that. Too many attempts each day to quantify experience and fix it between the lines on a page, the outlines of a map. He’s had dreams of his own penis, its shaft marked like the column of a barometer, with a scale of tiny numbers.

The weeks wear on, and as a function of human nature, Getz grows less vigilant. Instead of hovering on the landing, he goes back downstairs; he bends over his account books; he sweeps and mops; he decants molasses from a barrel into jugs; he waits on his customers; while, upstairs, Miriam sidesteps invitations to converse or even to sing and wraps her thin arms around Bigelow, insinuates cold fingers into his pockets and sleeves and even, shockingly, down the front of his trousers. Is this evidence of passion? Shamelessness? A measure of how determined she is to avoid conversation?

Maybe she’s just lonely and bored. Whatever compels her, she vacuums kisses out of his mouth with a spiraling energy, so that Bigelow, his eyes closed, actually thinks of water funneling down a drain, trying to picture what’s happening, the way her lips feel as if they’re munching around and around, clockwise. Once, he strangles on a laugh, imagining the two of them traveling across the equator and into the Southern hemisphere, her mouth reversing its direction. If he can pry their faces apart, all four of their cheeks shine wet with saliva, and in a half second she’s back, sucking diagnostically at the muscled root of his tongue, as if trying to fathom the source of his voice.

It’s astonishing how much of her mouth Miriam manages to thrust inside his, demonstrations (of affection?) so claustrophobic that he begins to pant. He feels as if he’s suffocating, he can’t make himself relax, his mind travels from one anxiety to another. Perhaps it would be different if he kept his eyes open, but he doesn’t like seeing the room in which they sit, the bank calendar on the wall, days X’ed off one by one, the lamp by the piano, the scorched spot on the rug—discouraging, all of it. That awful horsehide sofa, the occasional glimpse of the hairs, or worse, bald spots that tormentingly evoke the animal that used to move beneath the skin. Any attempt to reconcile Miriam’s kisses with the shabby domesticity of their setting is too much for Bigelow. If he leaves his eyes open, he gags on her tongue, he’s distracted by a tickle of saliva on his cheek, stabbed by pins and needles in his buttock. So he closes them, he succumbs to her advances.

After, to clear his head, he walks, preferring the mud or dust of town to the solitude of a prettier destination, the invitation to measure himself against the vastness of the scenery. Across oceans, war is filling landscapes with chaos and blood, broken bodies, rubble. What is it about those X’ed-off days? He hates,
hates,
them, evoking, as they do, death. Bank calendars with their misered coins of time! The opposite of his books of maps, their lines black and defiant, infinite, marking wind and rain and fluctuations of pressure. Days without end: a book God is writing with Bigelow’s hand.

He looks around himself. All the tents are gone now, and some of the log dwellings have acquired second, clapboard stories, complete with dormers and decorative cornices. A few people have picket fences, but these don’t produce any civilized aspect. They look ridiculous. The town is still so new it seems a conceit, but a growing conceit. The Aleut woman’s house is no longer on the outskirts; the spread of Anchorage has engulfed it. Bigelow hesitates at its bare front yard, its window like a blank, blind eye.

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 over the store, it hunts him down, it chases him up the stairs. Because, the tongue makes clear, if he lets it control his movements, if he stays away because of the tongue, then, obviously, the tongue has won.

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.