The Seal Wife by Kathryn Harrison

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