Howard Walpole was different. The three days with him were part of the compact, the program she'd set herself, and though she knew Sess was the one, knew it even before she climbed into the canoe with him and felt his weight there behind her like the perfect counterpoise to her own, she had to go through with it, because that was the kind of woman she was. You make a promise, you keep it. That was how she felt. That was who she was. But Howard-Howard was stiff as a board. He shook her hand when she got in the boat, as if they were signatories to a solemn truce between two warring factions, and he never thought of brushing his cheek to hers or clasping her shoulders in a welcoming hug. He just gave her his hand, took a minute to taunt Sess and then cranked the throttle on his twin outboard engines.
The day was biting and sharp, flecks of foam riding the wavelets, a spatter of windblown rain in her face. She was up front and Howard Walpole was in back. The fiberglass hull slapped at the water, over and over again, slap, slap, slap, and the noise of the engines made conversation a chore. She held on, thinking how much nicer the canoe had been, the pace of it, the silent liquid progress that was no intrusion on the day, the river, the hovering birds and furtive mammals. “Nice boat!” she shouted back over her shoulder, just to be polite, just to say something, and Howard, a plug of tobacco distending one cheek and his smudged cap pulled down tight against the wind so that his head looked as if it had been preshrunk to fit it, just nodded. The trip took an hour. She didn't say another word the whole way and neither did he.
When they got there, though, when the bow of the boat slid up the bank beneath his house and the dogs stammered out their elaborate greeting, Howard had a whole speech prepared. It was equal parts disclosure, pep talk and closer's spiel, and he never looked her in the face the whole time he was delivering it, and he went on delivering it for the better part of the three days and two nights she was to spend in his company. He told her about his boat and his airplane and his house, about his gold claims and how he'd lay a moosehide in the sluice box so the hairs could pick up the finest particles, showed her a mayonnaise jar with thirty-two thousand dollars' worth of gold flecks in it and asked her to lift it from the table and laughed to see her strain to do it. He talked through the dinner of black bear stewed in a mash of dried apples and prunes with a side dish of kippered salmon and pan-fried potatoes, talked till she yawned on the couch and kept talking as he laid a blanket over her and her eyes fell closed.
In the morning he woke her with talking, talk about his ailments-he'd broken his leg in three places just two years back, did she know that? — and talk about his dogs, the individual quirks and dietary predilections of each one, though he didn't really mush dogs anymore like Sess Harder and some of the other throwbacks because the snow machine was a real hoot, didn't she think so? Over breakfast it was his mother in Minneapolis; automobiles he'd owned; the evil, meretricious ways of his ex-wife, Irene; the insurance business-two years of his life down the drain with that laughable fraud of a con man's scheme, and could she ever see anybody taking out term life and betting against their own death? — and an hour-long tirade against the United States government and the land grab they were about to perpetrate on all Alaskans in the name of the black gold at Prudhoe Bay.
He was a bore. A windy, ignorant, opinionated, half-cracked bore with real staying power and the lungs of a packhorse. And he was unattractive too, now that she got a good long look at him, with his dodging red-flecked eyes, the wispy hair poking out from beneath the cap and his hands laid out on the table like slabs of boiled meat. All right, she was resigned to it, resigned to three days and two nights of boredom, and by the second hour of the first day she'd begun to see it as a kind of purifying ritual, a mortification of the flesh and the spirit to make herself worthy of Sess Harder, who was before her now like a shining promise. She ate the food Howard Walpole gave her. She looked at his dogs, his snow machines, his floatplane, his boat, his cache, his smokehouse. She answered when he paused at the end of a paragraph to put a rhetorical question to her and she fought off his advances. “Sex,” he said to her after dinner on the first night, and to the best of her recollection they'd been talking about two-stroke engines to this point, “you like sex? Because I do. And that's the thing I miss out here most of all-just that, sex.” He paused a moment, his eyes charging round the room like scattershot. “And I'm very sex-u-al, if you know what I mean.”
On the last day, no more than an hour before they were scheduled to plow back up the river so she could get on with the rest of her life, he appeared in the doorway of the main room where she was sunk into the easy chair reading a back issue of _Argosy__ for the second time in as many days and enjoying the briefest respite from the sound of his voice. “Pamela,” he said in a low glottal wheeze, “Pamela, look at me.” She glanced up, and she saw that he was naked but for his socks and the greasy cap, naked and erect and pulling at himself like a dairy farmer working at the long maculated teat of a cow. It took her a minute, the shock of it settling into her legs like a burden of the blood, and then she was up out of the chair and reaching for the fire poker. All she said was, “Put that thing away,” and in the next instant Howard was ducking out of sight, the bulb of his hand blooming with the waxy sheen of the stuff he'd dredged up out of himself as if it were gold dredged from the tailings of an abandoned claim.
And why was she thinking about that now? Because now it was appropriate, now was the time. She was a married woman and that man with the rigid back and the neck like a fireplug fooling with something in the other room was her husband and she could indulge her wildest fantasies, do anything she wanted-stroke him, suck him-and not feel dirty. This was her wedding night. This was the consummation of all those groping, panting hours and the rigor of self-control that was fiercer than any desire. “Sess,” she said, and she unfastened the brassiere and dropped it to the floor too, “Sess, look at me.”
He turned round then, her husband, and in his hand the thing he was fumbling with, shiny foil, the skin-like droop of plastic. “I was just-” he said, and she watched his face, watched his eyes, as he warmed to this new vision of her standing there in nothing but the thinnest pearly evanescent flap of Oswalt's silk. “I couldn't-I mean, I tore the thing getting it out of the package…”
She wanted to laugh. “You don't need that thing,” she said, spreading her arms wide, “you'll never need it, ever again. Don't you realize? I'm your wife.”
They were up early, both of them, bags packed, the canoe loaded to the gunwales with wedding gifts, and they breakfasted on whatever came to hand (Sess had a ham, Swiss and caribou-tongue sandwich on half a loaf of the French bread her sister had brought with her from Anchorage; she had a plate of leftover three-bean salad, marinated artichoke hearts, a wedge of iceberg lettuce and a scoop of potato salad to round it off). She hadn't slept-or she had, off and on, but in a way that was more like a waking dream than any sleep she'd ever experienced, and she couldn't stop reaching out for him, running a hand down the slope of his arm or over the mysterious topography of the shoulder that lay pressed to hers. She was an explorer, that was what she was, learning the lay of the land, creating it anew all over again, and then again.