Like You'd Understand, Anyway

She looks at me, waiting. Lately that look has had a quality to it. One time in Ketchikan, one of my pilots and I saw a drunk who'd spilled his Seven and Seven lapping some of it up off the wood of the bar. That look: the look we gave each other.

This is ridiculous. I rub my eyes.

“Is this taxing for you?” she wants to know, and her impatience makes me madder too.

“No, it isn't taxing for me,” I tell her.

She gets up and dumps her dish in the sink and goes down to the cellar. I can hear her rooting around in our big meat freezer for a Popsicle for dessert.

The phone rings and I don't get up. The answering machine takes over, and Dr. Calvin's office leaves a message reminding me about my Friday appointment. The machine switches off. I don't get to it before my wife comes back upstairs.

She unwraps her Popsicle and slides it into her mouth. It's grape.

“You want one?” she asks.

“No,” I tell her. I put my hands on the table and off again. They're not staying still. It's like they're about to go off.

“I should've asked when I was down there,” she tells me.

She slurps on it a little, quietly. I push my plate away.

“You going to the doctor?” she asks.

Outside a big terrier that's new to me is taking a dump near our hibachi. He's moving forward in little steps while he's doing it. “Goddamn,” I say to myself. I sound like someone who's come home from a twelve-hour shift and still has to shovel his driveway.

“What's wrong with Moser?” she wants to know. Moser's our regular doctor.

“That was Moser,” I tell her. “That was his office.”

“It was?” she says.

“Yes it was,” I tell her.

“Put your dish in the sink,” she reminds me.

I put the dish in the sink and head into the living room and drop onto the couch.

“Checkup?” she calls from the kitchen.

“Pilot physical,” I tell her. All she has to do is play the message.

She wanders into the living room without the Popsicle. Her lips are darker from it. She waits a minute near the couch and then sinks down next to me. She leans forward, looking at me. Her lips touch mine, and press, and then lift off and stay so close it's hard to know if they're touching or not. Mine are still moist from hers.

“Come upstairs,” she whispers. “Come upstairs and show me what you're worried about.” She puts three fingers on my erection and rides them along it until she stops on my belly.

“I love you so much,” I tell her. That much is true.

“Come upstairs and show me,” she tells me back.

That night in 1958, undersea communications cables from Anchorage to Seattle went dead. Boats at sea recorded a shocking hammering on their hulls. In Ketchikan and Anchorage people ran into the streets. In Juneau streetlights toppled and breakfronts emptied their contents. The eastern shore of Disenchantment Bay lifted itself forty-two feet out of the sea, the dead barnacles still visible there, impossibly high up on the rock faces. And at Yakutat, a postmaster in a skiff happened to be watching a cannery operator and his wife pick strawberries on a sandy point near a harbor navigation light, when the entire point with the light pitched into the air and then flushed itself as though driven underwater. The postmaster barely stayed in his skiff, and afterward, paddling around the whirlpools and junk waves, he found only the woman's hat.

“You know, I made some sacrifices here,” my wife mentions to me later that same day. We're naked and both on the floor on our backs with our feet still up on the bed. One of hers is twisted in the sheets. The room seems darker and I don't know if that's a change in the weather or if we've just been here forever. One of our kisses was such a submersion that when we finally stopped we needed to lie still for a minute, holding on to each other, to recover.

“You mean as in having married me?” I ask her. Our skin is air-drying but still mostly sticky.

“I mean as in having married you,” she says. Then she pulls her foot free of the sheets and rolls over me.

She told me as she was first easing me down onto the bed that she'd gone off the pill but that it was going to take at least a few weeks before she'd be ready. “So you know why I'm doing this?” she asked. She slid both thighs across me, her mouth at my ear. “I'm doing this because it's amazing.”

We're still sticky and she's looking down into my face with her most serious expression. “I mean, you're a meat cutter,” she says, fitting me inside of her again. The next time we do this I'll have had the operation. And despite everything, it's still the most amazing feeling of closeness.

“Why are you crying?” she whispers. Then she lowers her mouth to mine and goes, “Shhh. Shhh.”