“They still need someone to help out with the online accounts,” she says. She has an expression like every single thing today has gone wrong.
“Do you want to go back to work?” I ask her. “Do you miss it?”
“I don't know if I miss it,” she says. She adds something in a lower voice that I can't hear because of the crunch of the grit. She seems bothered that I don't respond.
“I think it's more, you know, if we're not going to do the other thing,” she says. “Have the baby.” She keeps herself from looking away, as if she wants to make clear that I'm not the only one humiliated by talks like this.
I push some spinach around and she pushes some spinach around. “I feel like first we need to talk about us,” I finally tell her. I put my fork down and she puts her fork down.
“All right,” she says. She turns both her palms up and raises her eyebrows like, Here I am.
One time she came and found me in one of the hangars at two o'clock in the afternoon and turned me around by the shoulders and pinned me to one of the workstations with her kiss. A plane two hangars down warmed up, taxied over, and took off while we kissed. She kissed me the way lost people must act when they find water in the desert.
“Do you think about me the way you used to think about me?” I ask her.
She gives me a look. “How did I used to think about you?”
There aren't any particular ways of describing it that occur to me. I imagine myself saying with a pitiful voice, “Remember that time in the hangar?”
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.”
Howard Ulrich and his little boy Sonny entered Lituya Bay at eight the night of the wave, and anchored on the south shore near the entrance. He wrote about it afterward. Their fishing boat had a high bow, a single mast, and a pilothouse the size of a Portosan. Before they turned in, two other boats had followed them in and anchored even nearer the entrance. It was totally quiet. The water was a pane of glass from shore to shore. Small icebergs seemed to just sit in place. The gulls and terns that they usually saw circling Cenotaph Island in the middle of the bay were hunkered down on the shore. Sonny said it looked like they were waiting for something. His dad tucked him in bed at about ten, around sunset. He'd just climbed in himself when the boat started pitching and jerking against its anchor chain. When he ran up on deck in his underwear, he saw the mountains heaving themselves around and avalanching. Clouds of snow and rocks shot up high into the air. It looked like they were being shelled. Sonny came up on deck in his pj's, which had alternating wagon wheels and square-knotted ropes. He rubbed his eyes. Ninety million tons of rock dropped into Gilbert Inlet as a unit. The sonic concussion of the rock hitting the water knocked them both onto their backs on the deck.
It took the wave about two and a half minutes to cover the seven miles to their boat. In that time Sonny's dad tried to weigh anchor and discovered that he couldn't, the anchor stuck fast, so he let out the chain as far as he could, got a life preserver onto Sonny, and managed to turn his bow into the wave. As it passed Cenotaph Island it was still over a hundred feet high, extending from shore to shore, a wave front two miles wide.