The Seal Wife. Kathryn Harrison

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       Chapter 5

      WHEN HE TEARS the side of his parka, it is the woman who repairs it, unfastening the coat and taking it from his shoulders as she did on the day he followed her home, then stepping outside her door to shake the dry snow from the fur.

      As he watches, she unwinds a length of heavy black thread from a spool and cuts it with her teeth before drawing it back and forth over a bar of yellow wax. Then she coaxes its end through the eye of a long needle and begins, using the heel of her hand protected by a disc of bone to push the needle through the skin. While she works, he holds the wax, rubbing his thumb over its scored surface. His eyes follow her industrious fingers. There is an impersonal quality to her labor; it seems not so much a gift to him as it does a habit of northern housewifery. Furs must be kept in repair. A torn parka, otherwise valuable, is next to useless.

      Her stitches are small. The needle makes slow progress. Oddly, when its bright point emerges and then disappears back into the dark fur, he feels a tightening in his chest, and he gets up from where he is sitting silently next to her on the bed and paces, yawning and sighing, until she has finished.

      Contrary to what prejudice has taught him to expect, she is not uninhibited. He’s heard how native girls mature earlier than whites, how mothers and fathers send their daughters off to be initiated by uncles or friends. But she does not betray the evidence of such an education. There is a whole list of affectionate gestures she will not tolerate.

      While she keeps still for a closed-mouth peck, if he attempts a more penetrating kiss she quickly turns her head, leaving him licking her cheek. She moves his hands away from her neck, her feet, her hair, and her genitals. But, once he’s inside her, she lies under him with a rapt smile, eyes closed and fingers busily agitating her own flesh without regard for the rhythm he’s established. When she comes, her arousal is keen—she arches her back, she cries out—but private. He cannot induce her to sit astride him or to allow him to enter her in any manner except what is understood as missionary. And perhaps this is the explanation, as the Aleutian Islands have long been colonized by Russian Orthodox.

      She skins a rabbit with a grace and attention she doesn’t seem to waste on him. Why doesn’t he resent this? Instead he watches, intent, as she bends its ears and opens the cleft in its lip to see how young it is, how fresh. Then she girdles the skin around its hind legs and, holding its back feet in her left hand, strips the hide down over the body with her right, so that it comes off inside out, as quickly as if she were removing a glove. The parting of silver-gray fur from tender new muscle reveals an elastic integument of faintly iridescent blue, like the raiment of a ghost, and once, when he reaches out to touch it, she pulls the animal quickly from under his hands. She takes off the head and saves it with the skin, saves the entrails as well, washes and butchers the carcass. As she works, the muscles play under the smooth skin of her forearms, and otherwise invisible sinews stand out on the backs of her small hands.

      Every meeting is the same, as ritual as his walks to and from the telegraph office, his entering observations into a log. He watches as she prepares the food he has brought; he eats with her in silence; they lie together on her bed, a fur blanket beneath them; he waits until she cries out and arches her back, then allows himself release.

      When he lets her go, she sits up. She leaves the bed to retrieve a tin tub from behind the stove and she fills it with water left hot in her two big kettles. Then she opens her tin of tobacco, readies her pipe, and sits cross-legged, smoking in the tub while he talks to her, propped on one elbow, wondering at his gabble and yet helpless to stop it.

      Later, walking home to the station or lifting his head from the work on his table, he asks himself if it is some failure on his part: the lack of spontaneity. It isn’t he who imposes the order, but perhaps in some way he doesn’t understand he is its catalyst.

      He devises little tricks—puerile, at once irresistible and shaming. He stands on his hands and knocks at her door with his heel, he opens his mouth to reveal a button on his tongue. But this doesn’t provoke her, she doesn’t even blink. Instead, she removes his coat to look for the spot on his shirt from which he’s torn it, she takes the button from his mouth and stitches it back, tight, where it belongs. It’s as if she anticipates his nonsense and hardens herself against it.

      She opens for him, yes, but only her legs, and all the rest that she does—preparing food, mending furs, even waxing his boots—strikes him as an elaborate decoy, a way of distracting him from her deeper self, her deepest self, all that he wants most to penetrate.

      She.

      Inside her is a name, a word he wants to know. To possess.