The Seal Wife (9 page)

The final note sung, the singer opens her eyes and, perhaps startled by the light and the chaotic, disheveled crowd, closes her mouth and covers it with her hand.

“ ‘Wait Till the Sun Shines, Nellie’!” someone yells.

“ ‘Good-bye, Dolly Gray’!”

“ ‘Pretty Baby’!”

“ ‘Beneath the Moon’!”

“ ‘You Can’t Break a Broken Heart’!”

The English-speaking members of the audience—prospectors and shopkeepers, the barber who subdued the medicine man, as well as the man who lives in the Aleut woman’s house—call out sentimental favorites, and the singer looks from one face to another, smiling behind her left hand, crumpling her music in her right. Her fingers, Bigelow sees, wear no rings.

“Go on, then! What are you waiting for! Christmas?” The projectionist makes a swatting gesture, loops of film spilling over his boots, and the singer bites her lip. Red blotches appear on her white throat. She drops her sheet music and bends to pick it up, swaying slowly to her feet.

Eyes closed, nodding as if to find the tempo, she embarks hesitantly on the “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” chosen perhaps out of a democratic impulse, so as not to have to pick among the requests—either that or for its moral effect, an attempt to tamp down the unruly audience. She compresses her lips, drawing the first syllable out into a long, long, too long
Mmmmmmm;
but by the end of the verse the blood has drained from her neck back into her lungs, and the words swell and carry in a manner that would delight the most exacting revival preacher. The drunk Russians and Eskimos stop brawling to listen, and Bigelow forgets that he doesn’t like hymns, he even forgets that once, during the second verse of this particular hymn, his mother twisted his ear painfully, pinched and held it tight to keep him from fidgeting in church.

By the time the lights are once again extinguished, the last reel jerking over the projector’s sprockets, Bigelow has been shot through by so many piercing
glory
s and
hallelujah
s that he can think of nothing but holding that voice, kissing that voice, pushing his tongue farther and farther until he tastes its source.

BROKE, HE JOINS a crew digging trenches for power lines. Two dollars for a day’s work, and to get there he has to take a ferry. The boat leaves in the dark, he has barely enough time to stop at the telegraph office, and then he is pitching on rough seas for an hour to arrive at a little place called Salmonberry Creek, where they’re building a power station.

The job is to dig twelve feet down through what’s called glacial muck, a heavy blue clay, so heavy it’s like solid lead. He gets a lump of the stuff on the blade of his long-handled shovel, and it takes all his strength to heave it up onto the embankment. When he removes his gloves he finds blisters on his hands the size of dimes. He works shoulder to shoulder with Swede labor, not one of them under six feet tall and two hundred pounds. They drink Donnell’s horse liniment if they can’t get anything better, and the smell of it steams off their sweating backs.

After three days, Bigelow can’t close his bandaged hands around the handle of the shovel, but three days is six dollars, and six dollars buys him what he needs: rice and sugar and coffee and kerosene, and admissions to the tent theater, where he sits picking at the scabs on his palms, shifting from one numb buttock to the other, the only member of the audience who prays for broken reels and jammed projectors, for medicine men and drunken brawls, for any excuse to turn the lights back on. Then he can see the voice that spills from the slight, rapturously swaying silhouette, the voice whose shadow dances on the trembling canvas wall. He watches her flustered hand before her mouth, watches the red blotches on her white neck as they spread each time from a point just above her left collarbone, watches as she drops her music and then stoops down to pick it up. Sometimes when her eyes are open they have the glazed cast of a sleepwalker’s; more often they dart from one to another face. She never accustoms herself to the sight of the audience before her, never looks at any one person long enough to allow even the briefest transaction, never once sings a song anyone calls out to suggest.

And after each show, when the lights come back on, already she has disappeared, like a ghost or a sprite, a creature not quite human. It becomes Bigelow’s mission to see her as she leaves, to learn where she goes, and by what means, but he never witnesses her departure any more than he does her arrival, for both are accomplished in the dark. Even when he hangs about the tent flaps after the show has begun, or slips outside before it has ended, still he never catches her.

At home, his gramophone stands unused in a corner, the sleeves of his records curling in the damp. He tries playing Nellie Melba singing Juliet—too sweet; then Gemma Bellincioni’s Salome—too worldly; Emmy Destinn—absolutely lifeless.
Divas,
he thinks, bitterly. What did he hear in them before? How did he tolerate such shrilly pompous sounds? He kicks at the clumsy machine, the same that once held such power, the staticky noises broadcast by its black horn enough to stun a group of braves. Of course, it failed him at the Aleut woman’s. It didn’t bewitch her. But what could have?

Walking through the town, up and down its one main street, in and out of every store: he tells himself he isn’t in a hurry, he is enjoying the delicious torment of pursuit, remembering how it felt in the months—they seem a lifetime ago—when he was following the Aleut woman, catching a glimpse of her black braid in the distance.

Stalking his new, invisible quarry, Bigelow realizes that he’s been dead for the past year. Dead ever since the Aleut disappeared; and while the idea frightens him—surely his essence doesn’t reside with a woman, to be borne off at her whim—it’s hard to regret the way he feels now that he has another focus for his longing. It’s only a matter of time before he finds her in the town, during the days that grow ever longer: seventeen, eighteen, soon there will be nineteen hours of light.

But he doesn’t see her, not anywhere. And no one he asks knows anything about her. No one has seen her. Oh, they’ve heard her, they’ve been to the pictures, and they nod when he asks if they remember that a singer provided auditory enhancement. But even the ones who call out song titles while the projectionist fiddles under the bulb wired to the tent pole—even they don’t remember what the voice looks like, let alone where she might live.

EIGHT GEARS of gargantuan proportion. A pulley the size of a locomotive’s wheel. Bundles of rods and shafts, as well as valves, levers, springs. Cocks and caps and cranks. Innumerable bolts and bits.

It’s not the elegant apparatus he imagined, and he blames this on the Aleut woman’s absence. If she were in Anchorage, if he’d been able to come to her in the evenings, talk to her as he used to do, then the reel would be a different thing entirely. Streamlined and efficient.

Inspired. He would have invented it in her house, sat at her table or on her bed, sketched it in his notebook, and it would be—well, it wouldn’t be this.

Hampered by what’s available to him in a frontier town, he’s had to bargain for parts, make do with cast-off, rusted junk. The small parts ought to be larger; the big ones are too big. He’s counting on grease to keep the thing from seizing up, counting on luck, on providence.

And he’s still waiting for piano wire. In the meantime he’ll mount the reel outside the shed.

Bigelow lashes the apparatus onto a sledge and, on top, the gramophone, a few recordings, Caruso singing Don Giovanni, Otello. He thinks of the tenor, the one time he saw him onstage, fat and handsome, his inky, luxuriant mustache twisted up into points, the plume of his hat vibrating with what seemed like satisfaction.

Bigelow wades through dry grass on the hillside, trampling it down with his boots, pulling the sledge behind him. The runners make a hissing noise.

After playing it for her once, he’d left his gramophone at the Aleut woman’s house, and it sat in a corner, unused, until she left and he reclaimed it. He is sure that even in his absence, even in privacy, she didn’t listen to the recordings he brought.

Of course, his motives had not been honorable. As he walked to her house with the machine he told himself he was bringing a gift, but really he’d hoped the thing might unnerve her as it had the work crew. He saw himself comforting her, assuaging her fear with kisses. When he reached her door, he pushed it with his shoulder and it swung open; she put her arms out to take his burden from him. Her head was tilted to one side, as if in question. What strange animal did he have? Bigelow set the device on the table, unwrapped it carefully, folding the oilcloth and winding the length of twine around his hand as she sat by her stove, arms crossed.

Caruso held a note for longer than anyone might reasonably expect, and she pursed her lips in what could have been interpreted as grudging admiration, either that or boredom. With one hand on the table’s edge to keep her balance, she tipped backward in her chair, and, when he came to her, she looked up. She lifted an eyebrow as if to ask whether he didn’t have company enough with all those voices he’d brought with him, their keening and clamor.

Bigelow studied her face, looking for condescension, found it in her imperturbable eyes. Was she as she seemed, serenely selfsufficient, like a stone or a star, a single skin boat hurrying through the waves? He ground his face into her silence until their teeth clacked together.

On the bed, he studied her, tracing his thumb over the lines on her chin. He put a finger near one of her eyes and she blinked, but without looking at him, and when he lay above her, both of them still dressed, she struggled only if he let his weight rest too heavily on her ribs, only when he pressed the breath from her lungs.

Feeling her move under the layers of fabric that separated them, the collar of his shirt pulling uncomfortably against his neck, Bigelow was suddenly aroused. He fumbled with his own buttons, then turned his attention to hers, eager to get to her body: to armpits with their sparse straight black hairs, lines that strangely echoed those on her chin, to the shriveling dark aureoles of her nipples, the humped back of her littlest toe.

If she would punish him with her vacancy, if she would leave him alone with her body, he would trespass over all those parts she usually kept from him. He rolled her over and played with her braid. He bit at the tendons lying tight behind her knees. Slid his hand like a knife between her buttocks.

The phonograph wound down, and he left her side to crank the arm and replace the needle. Carrying the lamp back to the bed, he spread her legs to look at the dark place from which she always removed his exploring hand, the place where for months he drove himself into her. A drop of oil fell onto her smooth leg, but she didn’t protest. Her face, as expressionless as her knee, betrayed nothing.

Bigelow set the lamp on the floor by the bed, and the woman’s body disappeared into a well of shadow. The phonograph wound down again, but he didn’t get up to crank it. Instead he remained where he was, listening to the sudden sound of rain.

After a while, the woman sat up. She swung her legs over the side of the bed and stood, walked naked to her stove. Bigelow disassembled the phonograph, removed the trumpet and latched the tone arm so it wouldn’t swing, took the recording from the turntable and slipped it back into its envelope. He was hungry, so hungry that his head ached, but she wasn’t cooking, she was heating water for a bath.

The two of them stepped around each other, as if each were alone in her house.

THE USUAL DISRUPTIONS get him nowhere; he has to wait for
Hell’s Hinges,
the scene in which the church is burned, the drunken minister killed. Then a real riot delivers Bigelow into touching distance of the singer. It’s high summer, days long enough that eight o’clock shows end like matinees, audiences dismissed into the light, blinking and disoriented. And the town is full of alcohol, railroad workers with overtime wages to spend in brothels open twenty hours a day.

Temperance and arson and firearms, Clara Williams as the minister’s sister, Louise Glaum as the whore—to bleary, libidinous, overstimulated and undersatisfied eyes, a prostitute projected onto a grimy bedsheet is more than enough incentive for bench-mates to shove and curse; and on the one night that the projector doesn’t catch the film on fire, a pipe-smoking prospector in the front row leans forward and does the job instead. Human conflagration follows that of celluloid. One minute Bigelow is embellishing a lurid scene with details inspired by his own romantic career; the next his nose has been bloodied by a passing elbow; and when he scrambles forward out of the way, jumping over one bench and then another and quickly ducking and turning his head to avoid further blows, a spot of his blood lands on the voice’s pale blue shirtwaist, just below the swelling of her right breast.

“I’m sorry,” he says.

To see where he is pointing, she puts her hand to her breast, lifts and flattens it, a gesture so pretty and awkward, so artless, that he almost falls down with desire.

“Here,” he offers, and when she doesn’t lift her head he says it again: “Here.” He holds out his handkerchief—clean, folded, never used but carried for just such an occasion, the kind he’s replayed a thousand times in his fantasies, but better, for who could conjure an explosive nosebleed?

But she doesn’t take it, she pushes it away without raising her eyes.

“Go on,” he says. “It’s clean.”

She glances at him, then looks down again; she puts her hand under his and raises the handkerchief to his bloodied face.

He is rehearsing an introduction—
I’m sorry for . . . I’m sorry
to have . . .
what?
unwittingly besmirched?
No.

Perhaps he should offer to have her blouse laundered. Or is that too forward, implying as it does, taking it off? Why does she persist in staring at her feet? Shyness? Fear of blood? Should he offer to escort her outside? The projectionist steps between them, his equipment hurriedly strapped into its wheelbarrow.

“Let’s go!” he says. “What’re you waiting for—” But before he can add “Christmas,” Bigelow takes the bloody handkerchief from his face.