Drop City

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.