Monterey Bay (17 page)

“He has no degree. Biologists have degrees.”

“He runs a legitimate business.”

“Oh, Anders, that business hasn't been legitimate in years. The only reason it's still afloat is because Steinbeck supplies all the funds that Ricketts and his army of sluts and vagrants sees fit to drink away.”

“He's done the research. He's got the numbers. He knows things are changing and you're a fool if you think you can—”

“A fool?” Mrs. Agnelli shrieked, the last traces of her earlier gentleness falling away.

Then, a commotion from the rear of building, an assembling of bodies. It was not the brothers, Margot realized, who had been hiding in the darkness. It was a squadron of women—many of whose portraits Margot could clearly remember sketching—emerging now from the blockade of crates and cans, arranging themselves in a line behind mother and son. She looked at her father's face, expecting to see the blank, emotionless scrim it usually acquired during moments of challenge or confrontation. Instead, she saw his cheeks turn bright red, his eyes sparking with anger and uncertainty.

“If anyone's a fool,” Mrs. Agnelli continued, “it's you. And your kind.”

“My
kind
?”

“Blustering and preening like you've made the world and
everything in it. Never even the barest understanding that there was something here before your arrival, and that there will be something here long after you depart.”

“Come, Margot. We're done.”

“No, no! She should stay. She should know the truth.” She turned to Margot. “He had been here before, you know, when he was just about your age. Made an absolute mess of himself.”

She couldn't look at her father anymore. All she could do was guess at his response: the color in his face fading away, his eyes going dark.

“And I'll be happy to paint the picture for you, even though that's usually your job.”

“One more word to her, and I'll—”

The women made a collective step forward. Anders fell silent.

“It was squid back then, wasn't it?” Mrs. Agnelli began again. “And it was Chinamen who fished for them. They would usually start up around midnight. A lighted pine-pitch torch on the bow to draw the shoal of spawning squid to the surface, two skiffs following behind the boat, towing the purse seine. The skiffs would circle the shoal and then pull the line to close the purse. Then they would drag the net to the shore by hand, if you can believe it, down there in the water with all those little copulating monsters.”

When Mrs. Agnelli coughed again, Margot could feel the sensation in her own lungs, her own throat.

“And there were women working alongside the men, running
into the water to help the men bring in the net, all of them tanned and half-undressed and bareheaded. If you think it smells bad now, you don't know the half of it. When they would split the squid and dry them on the rocks outside their village, it smelled like the world was coming to an end.”

Mrs. Agnelli paused for a moment and inhaled deeply, as if the smell were still present somewhere, still captured inside the warehouse walls.

“And your father—our dear, young Anders—would sit on China Point and watch them fish. When he wasn't doing that, he would hang around the Hotel Del Monte. He couldn't afford a room there, of course, but he would slip onto the grounds whenever he had a chance, pacing the gardens, pretending he belonged. One night, he even crept into the ballroom. Everyone was so happy and drunk they didn't even notice the poor boy in their midst. He could have done anything he wanted. He could have eaten their food, sipped their wine, but all he wanted to do was confess himself. All he wanted to do was unburden his poor Methodist soul to the Chinese girl who, when she wasn't busy gutting squid, was busy breaking his heart.”

“I was young,” her father insisted. “And very confused.”

“As was I, once upon a time. But now my name is on the biggest boats in the bay. I own a house ten times as large as the one I was raised in. So tell me: what could you possibly know of this place that I do not? What scheme of yours could prove half as successful as what I've already been able to accomplish? What
sort of salvation do you plan to grant those of us who have already been saved?”

“I'm doing something I should have done far sooner.”

“What the hell does that mean?”

Anders removed his eyeglasses. The air inside the warehouse seemed to spasm. The women shifted, the saint stared. Outside, a sea lion began to howl. When he started speaking again, his words were careful and slow and almost modest.

“It means I'm building an aquarium.”

The walk home was quiet and strained.

She stayed a few steps behind, allowing her father to seethe in peace. Every once in a while, a car would rattle past, headlights flickering as the wheels crunched across a patch of gravel. Otherwise, the only sound was of the ocean, the hiss of its tides growing fainter as they climbed, the sky a rolling swath of green and black. At certain points, it felt as though they were being followed, but she couldn't tell for sure.

When they returned to the house, Anders retreated to the kitchen and Margot followed. She watched him from the doorway, hoping the additional confessions would pour forth of their own accord. He was already thumbing through his files, though, already consumed by his work.

“Why are you—”

“Where's my pencil?”

She removed her own pencil from her satchel and handed it to him. He instantly began to scribble something on the nearest sheet of paper, his handwriting illegible.

“I didn't realize—”

“Please, Margot. Not now.”

Heart racing, she went to the cabinet, withdrew a frying pan, and set it on the stove. Then she opened the icebox and desperately scanned it for something to cook, but it was empty.

“Not now!”

She turned to look at him. His eyes were small and red.

“What can I do?” she asked.

“Leave. And don't come back until I'm asleep.”

Outside, Tino was sitting on the porch, chin cupped in his hands.

“Were you following us?” she asked.

“An aquarium,” he mused. “That's wonderful.”

And how could she possibly respond without sounding foolish? How could she possibly tell him there was a part of her that had known it since the beginning? Not the conscious, striving part, but the part that refused to be taught. The part of her that, upon entering Ricketts's lab for the very first time, honestly believed it had already occurred and that she had been taken captive alongside the fish.

“The new drawings,” she replied instead. “The dirty ones. Who bought them?”

“The brothel.”

“The one on the Row?”

“No. The one on Washington Street.”

“In Chinatown?”

“That's right. They give them to the customers on their way out. Like souvenirs.”

“I can't work with you anymore.”

When he winced and rubbed his neck, she was glad of it. Someone else was in pain now, not just her.

“But it's so much money.”

“I can't.”

“You'll proceed on your own, then?”

“I don't know.”

“Can I make a suggestion?”

She shrugged.

“Get a camera,” he said. “Sell the real thing.”

This time, the party in Ricketts's lab could be heard from halfway down the hill.

As before, she stopped in the middle of the Row before entering. The curtains were fully parted in every room except the bedroom, so she could see what was happening inside, all of it misty with booze and lamplight. Once again, it was a segregated mix: the locals carrying on with an almost pitiful lack of
self-awareness, the tourists behaving with the expectation of being recognized and celebrated from the shadows. Steinbeck was happy for once, radiantly so, his arm around the same blond actress who had once used Margot's sketch as a fan. Arthur was sitting in Steinbeck's chair, staring at the empty space behind the desk, the drink in his hand making him look just a tragedy or two shy of a grown man. Ricketts, yet again, was nowhere to be seen.

She went around the building and into the back lot, but he wasn't there either. So she picked her way down to the waterline and found a rock that was mostly dry and adequately flat. Someone would come to her. She knew it. Ever since her arrival here, it had been like this: someone on the hill, someone on the porch, someone in the garage, someone behind the wheel of the Buick. At times, it felt like she barely needed to move. It felt like, if she waited long enough, the tides would bring everything she wanted and everything she didn't, and the world would wait patiently for her to figure out the difference.

A minute later, Steinbeck appeared. He was holding two beer bottles, one of which he extended in her direction.

“Please don't say no this time. It'll make me feel bad about myself.”

She held up a hand and let him deposit a bottle into it. When she drank, the taste was bitter and weak, almost like nothing.

“We don't do our best collecting out here, to tell you the truth,” he continued. “He prefers a spot in Pacific Grove,
technically beyond the boundary of Monterey Bay. I'm sure he's shown you by now.”

“No. He hasn't.”

He nodded, as if noting something and filing it away for future use.

“Why are you being nice to me?” she asked.

“Wormy's back. I thought you should know. She's in the bedroom.”

“With Ricketts.”

“That's right.”

She took another sip. It still tasted bitter, but this time in a way that seemed to suggest something. “She knows what she's doing.”

“She sure does,” he replied.

“You sound angry.”

“No, I don't,” he grumbled. “I'm in favor of sex. I like it. It's just that I expected a bit more from Ed. I thought he was too smart for small distractions. I thought he enjoyed our little conspiracy against Venus. But I suppose the good days never last, which is precisely why they're good.”

And where, exactly, did these strange urges come from? she wondered. Why did she want to run into the lab, not in search of Ricketts this time, but in search of Arthur and his stricken reliability? Such an unfair, unwanted ache, as if her body were now host to needs and unions she had never considered before, that had always been rejected purely on account of their
unfamiliar color and volume. Steinbeck, she knew, felt it, too, but in a different way. There was the young woman inside with her big, stupid smile, but there was also Ricketts, the potential of love incompatible with love's actual existence.

“You'll write about him?” she asked.

He looked at her with heavy eyes. “How can I not?”

“Are those essays any good?”

“Yes. But they'll never get published.”

“Have you told him that?”

“No. It would crush him.”

“He seems pretty resilient to me.”

“Well, then you don't know him at all. I shouldn't be telling you this, especially since I've been against your little dalliance from the beginning. But for a while there, when Wormy was missing, he wanted another loan from me. He said that for a few extra thousand, in addition to all the money he's been making on your mysterious dogfish orders, he could purchase a little parcel of land in Big Sur. A place right off of Hurricane Point. He said he could imagine building a house there. And living in it with you.”

He gave a long, baritone sigh and then chucked his beer bottle into the sea.

“What do I do now?” she asked, brain on fire.

“Well, I don't tend to give advice, especially to people I don't particularly like, but try not to take it too hard. You're different and maybe even a little bit evil, and talent like yours is a lonely,
sickening thing. Someday, though, you'll find your own spot, a place where you can burrow in with a handful of souls who don't make you feel like the world's ending. And suddenly there you'll be. Home.”