The Seal Wife by Kathryn Harrison Page A

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