The Seal Wife by Kathryn Harrison Page A

missionary’s wife—his second, as one has already fled south from the rigors of high latitude. The rest are waitresses or prostitutes or natives or, frequently, a combination thereof.
    To address the problem of desire, to mark the end of a day, to fall asleep, Bigelow does as he used to do—he masturbates—but having grown dependent on the woman’s company, physical release now comes at psychic cost: the act only makes his loneliness more acute. It makes him feel pathetic, as it didn’t used to do. He’s resisted spending his limited money on prostitutes, put off by the peculiar names of the women in the parlor of the whorehouses he tries not to visit: Moosehide Annie, Bunch Grass, Nellie the Pig. He doesn’t like the forthright negotiation that precedes the encounter. This is hypocritical, perhaps; he tells himself that in one sense the Aleut woman traded her favors for the meat he brought, and what is the difference between that and money? Didn’t he impose himself on her just as surely as he will impose himself on Violet, the girl he chooses not for her face or figure but for her name—the only one he can say out loud without embarrassment.
    He follows her up the stairs and sits on her bed, feeling oddly listless as she makes a performance of removing her blouse and stockings.
    “Do you like them on or off?” she says, gesturing at her garters, and he shrugs, struck silent in the face of her loquacity, as if it is he now who must be mute. But Violet goes on, she talks about the telephone exchange the town is planning, about her sister in Vancouver who works a switchboard, about her other sister who is blind in one eye. What does he think will happen to the new sewers when it freezes, she wants to know, and isn’t it a shame that the crop that does so well here is cabbage? What’s the use of a cabbage that weighs seventy pounds? Does he like coleslaw?
    All the while she talks she is slipping her hand between the buttons of his shirt and caressing the back of his neck. Is this what it was like for the Aleut woman as he went on and on about water tables and rain gauges and broken anemometers? At least, he thinks, she didn’t understand him.
    The girl’s words pelt Bigelow like a fine hail of irritations, and he considers asking her to stop talking, but seeing the anxiety his silence inspires and how earnest she looks in her attempts to seduce him, he says nothing and instead closes his eyes. He’s young enough that arousal doesn’t require expertise, and it’s over well within the half hour allotted. He sits up to watch her gather her clothes and dress. Between stockings, she opens her mouth but, perhaps finally oppressed by his refusal to converse, closes it without saying anything. If he had money to spare he would tip her extravagantly enough that she couldn’t interpret his silence as disappointment, but as it is he just leaves, his hand still in his pocket, folding and unfolding the bills that remain.
    Back at the station, he records the pressure, which has fallen a tenth of an inch, from 29.90 to 29.80, and the temperatures, earth 59, air 53. He looks up from the louvered shed and sees a man standing on the lip of the creek, appearing, in the distance, as tiny as a comma on a page. So small that Bigelow is struck, suddenly, by the enormous distances he has traveled. How far he is from mother and sister in St. Louis. From Chicago. Seattle. How is it that he’s never considered this before?
    By the time he closes his log and returns it to its shelf, night is pressing on the windows. When he lights a lamp, the panes show him his solitary reflection as it moves from stove to table and back to stove. He has no appetite, and no energy, either, so he adds four teaspoons of sugar to a tin mug of tea before sitting to work at his drafting table. He begins drawing but is distracted by a sensation—not pain exactly—at the tip of his penis, and the accompanying notion that, despite having stopped at a