17

1940

“IT SEEMS TO ME,” ANDERS SAID, PULLING HIS topcoat tight against the fog, “that love is in the air.”

“Pardon?”

“And I’m sure he’s a fine young man. Smart, loyal, hardworking. Although he could certainly stand to do something about that hair. Remind me of his name.”

She looked down at her shoes, at their sea-hardened leather. They had just crossed Lighthouse Avenue and were walking alongside the train tracks now, passing over a smelly bit of earth where, on her way to Ricketts’s lab that morning, she had seen the hobo from the party pleasuring himself in the weeds.

“Arthur.”

“That’s right,” her father scoffed. “Well, I caution him to remain gentlemanly, but otherwise, I give him my blessing. He suits you far better than that Agnelli boy. I should have seen that from the outset.”

She scowled and shrank down into her collar. His mood was worse than usual tonight, callous and sarcastic and fierce, and there was a part of her that longed to fire back with a barb of her own. But she remained silent as they moved away from the house and in the direction of the wharf, the night sky reminiscent of an El Greco.

She, too, felt on edge. She had acquired so many of Ricketts’s specimens that she didn’t know what to do with them. Before, when her income had been modest and her orders small, she had had the boxes shipped to a nonexistent address in Chicago. But then, as her portraiture took its darker turn and her profits spiked, she was forced to deal with the shipments at their source. She instructed Tino to bribe one of his mother’s men on the railway, who destroyed the boxes instead of loading them: a solution she knew to be temporary. Any day now, the volume would become too great, the specimens too interesting, the curiosity of their hired conspirator too intense, and she would be required to handle things another way. She began to covet spaces for their existing size and quality. Her father’s cannery, for instance. It was a building so vast, it could have easily concealed every specimen she could ever hope to buy, every specimen Ricketts could ever hope to kill, its functionality as a hiding place so theoretically perfect, it almost hurt her to look at it.

There was also the matter of Arthur, just as her father had implied. Lately, his company had become incessant, his affection full of strident concern. He appeared at the house each morning in order to escort her to the Row; he appeared at the lab each afternoon in order to escort her back home. During the day, whenever she thought she was alone behind Ricketts’s desk, he would materialize at odd and inconvenient times, his smiles too quick, his frowns too broad, the mere fact of his presence annihilating whatever concentration she was able to summon.

Then there was the lab’s other male hanger-on: Steinbeck. Before, the writer’s attentions had been sporadic and mildly resentful, as if Margot were a small pile of dog shit he couldn’t quite keep himself from stepping in. Recently, however, he had become as vicious as on the morning they’d first met. He would groan at the mere sight of her. He would sit in the rocking chair and scrutinize her as she worked, his gaze hateful and unsparing. Arthur would sometimes make excuses for him, but Margot knew the truth. Steinbeck’s anger was real and his envy was justified and she felt sorry for him, but not nearly enough to follow a different course of action.

Ricketts was the real problem, though: the one that made her stomach buckle, her chest hurt. Two days after their trip to the slough, Wormy disappeared from the lab. No excuses were made for this, no explanations offered. She was simply there one day and gone the next, which pleased Margot immensely until she realized the consequences. Wormy’s absence weakened Ricketts like an illness. He began to drink more than usual and wander the coastline in his Buick. Sometimes he invited Margot on his sojourns: poorly planned excursions hunting for specimens they didn’t quite need, carrying picnic lunches that would go uneaten, finding a mostly level, mostly concealed patch of ground on which to up the ante of their pseudoromance. She learned about nuance. She learned that not everything in life could be self-taught. She learned that there was a place several miles down the coast, on the tip of Big Sur’s Hurricane Point, where the southern sea otter, once thought to be hunted to extinction, had made a small yet triumphant comeback.

“I’d like to build something here,” she said, standing alongside him on a ledge above the water. The wind was almost strong enough to rip out the manzanita bushes by their roots. A mother otter and her pup were trussed up in the kelp beneath the cliff, enduring the swells with tucked chins and closed eyes. It smelled like sage and wet stone, and there were cattle in the distance, diligently picking their way down the uneven hillside. Behind them, hidden in the land’s damp folds, were redwood groves, dense and soundproof.

“If I didn’t know better”—he slurred—“I’d say you enjoy being uncomfortable.”

In reply, she pulled him down into the dirt and tasted the alcohol on his tongue.

And it was on that afternoon that a difficult notion occurred to her. It was entirely possible that, all this time, she had been aiming for the wrong thing. She had assumed that having him was a goal in and of itself, that the fact of the capture would provide her with all the satisfaction she would ever need. But now she was wondering if what really mattered was what occurred after. Their bodies were joined now, several times a week. His mind, however, still resided in a place she would never be able to visit, except as a tourist.

Her only clarity, therefore, was in her work, and in this sense she had never been more successful. With the exception of her and Ricketts’s field trips, her days were split precisely down the middle, anesthetizing and preserving his collections in the morning, drawing them in the afternoon, a schedule as predictable as the tides. In the garage, the air was rough with menthol and brine, her blood warming with each little death; behind the desk, she would perform her artistic resurrections. During these times, she could almost forget how awful it was to be in love. It was only at night on the horsehair sofa that the truth came to her: the day’s disappointments lurking, her adoration of him and her abhorrence of herself so suffocating, so monotonous, that it felt like a measurable physical weight. It made her want to give up entirely, to never go down the hill again, to remain in the house until her father’s work was done and it was time to leave Monterey for good. But then she would remember the mud, the otters, the smells of sage and stone. She would remember how much money could be made and how much power forged in the gratification of primitive desires. She would remember her father’s teachings about persistence and worth, cowardice and heroism, and she would find herself descending the hill yet again, wondering if today was the day when she would kill the animal or draw the corpse that would finally tip the scales, that would bear a fruit that wasn’t so outrageously small and bitter.

Her father’s work had also taken a turn, although in what way she still didn’t know. His vexation was sharper and louder than ever before, and his schedule had become irregular. Instead of departing for the Row in the morning and returning in the evening, he was now coming and going at unpredictable times—the middle of the night, the middle of the day—which made her uneasy because it deepened the mystery of his ambitions. There was a small, unhappy part of her that rejoiced in his aggravation, that extracted a modicum of pleasure from what seemed to be his long-awaited comeuppance, but his despair was much like Wormy’s disappearance: there was something about it that prohibited real schadenfreude. The covert inspection of his papers soon became a habit, no longer in an attempt to undermine, but in an attempt to assist, which was how, on a night he failed to return home, she found something she hadn’t consciously been looking for but that seemed inevitable the moment it caught her eye. Wedged within a roll of blueprints were three of her rawest, most troubling sketches. It gave her plenty to think about, certainly, but among the first considerations was this: that somehow, in the multiple transactions that had allowed them to pass from her hands to his, the message of the drawings had changed entirely. Of course there was disgust and suspicion and fear. But mostly, there was disappointment of a very specific sort: that of the angler hooking a fish long considered too elusive and intelligent to catch.

So when he had invited her to join him on this evening’s visit to the Agnelli warehouse, she had accepted despite deep misgivings. Now, as they proceeded to the wharf, deep into Sicilian territory, she knew her misgivings had been warranted. The boats lurched in their slips. The night crews went about their labors in ghostly silence, condensing and scattering around the perimeter. When they stopped in front of a large, corrugated metal structure marked with the Agnellis’ blunt-lettered logo, she shivered. Her father, too, seemed to feel a chill, rubbing his hands together as he peered through the single salt-pocked window. He began to knock at the door but then thought better of it and entered unannounced.

“My God,” he whispered. “I haven’t seen a place like this since I demolished those olive oil presses in Puglia.”

Inside the warehouse, it was dark, but not too dark to see. A pale light was trickling in from an indeterminate source, painting the walls and floor a sepulchral gray, and it was against this backdrop that she gradually became aware of the room’s contents: hundreds of crates filled to overflowing with oval-shaped sardine tins, and a ten-foot-tall plaster saint standing on an ornately decorated platform, several gardens’ worth of paper flowers wilting at her feet.

Her father rapped on the wall: a cold, tympanic sound.

“Anders Fiske,” he announced. “For Giana Agnelli.”

When there was no reply, her father began eyeing the sardine tins as if counting them. Then there was a noise from the far end of the warehouse—a clearing of the throat, a launching forth of the resulting by-product—which caused Anders to move a step or two closer to the building’s innards. Seconds later, Mrs. Agnelli and Tino appeared from the shadows, both of them attired more expensively than ever.

“There’s a reason they call it an embarrassment of riches,” her father whispered.

If Mrs. Agnelli heard the comment, she gave no sign. She continued to move in their direction, her speed leisurely and unaltered, her head tilted toward the saint as she coughed and spit again. It was only Tino who seemed to acknowledge them, assessing both father and daughter with a gaze that seemed to imply his great regret not only at the fact of their presence here, but in the entirety of the cosmic plan that had given birth to it.

“She looks fatter,” Mrs. Agnelli said. This was not her cajoling, reverent, hilltop voice. This was a voice from somewhere far beneath. A voice that matched the laugh. “Which begs the question of what, exactly, you’ve been stuffing into her.”

A gossipy murmur from the bowels of the building. Margot moved closer to her father. On account of the echoes, it was difficult to estimate the size of the audience, but she could imagine the brothers lurking nearby, fully concealed from view behind the towers of crates. She glanced fearfully at Tino. Tino blinked and crossed his arms around his waist.

“My daughter’s dietary habits,” Anders replied, “are her business entirely.”

“I was just trying to lighten the mood. But I forgot that your people aren’t known for their sense of humor.”

“And your people aren’t known for their ethics. So many lies, so many distractions. Wouldn’t it be easier to just rob your countrymen in the night?”

A new tightness passed across Mrs. Agnelli’s face, an expression that made Margot certain someone or something was within seconds of being hit; but then the tightness collapsed into a frown, and for the first time, Margot could see the resemblance to the son, who was now standing behind his mother and slightly to one side.

“So you’re done being polite,” Mrs. Agnelli said. “What a shame.”

“The permits. Where are they?”

Her frown deepened. “What makes you think I know? I’m a fisherman. Not a bureaucrat.”

Anders lifted his chin and clasped his hands in front of him. “The workers, then. Why haven’t they shown up? Have they been threatened?”

The sorrow on Mrs. Agnelli’s face looked irreproachable. “My influence reaches only half as far as most people think. There’s no mafia here. Unless you count the Chinese.”

Margot took a deep breath and then released it without a sound. She looked over at the saint. Her arms were outstretched in a gesture of simultaneous menace and supplication, a glint in her glass eyes that Margot recognized. The workmanship here was crude but passionate, and there was something about it that reminded her of taxidermy. But she didn’t want to think about that right now.

“You know her, my dear?” Mrs. Agnelli was using the other voice now, the sweet one. Margot remembered the hug, then shook her head to clear the memory.

“Santa Rosalia,” Mrs. Agnelli continued. “The patron saint of the sardine fleets. Last year her blessings were unprecedented. And this year is certain to bring more of the same.”

“Not according to Ricketts’s estimates,” her father interjected. “Which I’m assuming you haven’t read.”

The name made Margot twitch.

“Oh, I read them,” Mrs. Agnelli replied, the sweetness gone. “But I found them less than sane.”

“His methods are unorthodox, yes. But I’m certain he’s right.”

“And I’m certain he’s out of his mind. Him and his writer friend, that bloated communist. Stomping around in those tide pools, slobbering over each other and bickering like a married couple. Your daughter knows what I mean.”

Her father looked at her. Her heart almost stopped.

“He’s the only good biologist in town,” Anders replied. “Miles ahead of everyone at Hopkins.”

“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.”

She watched the beer bottle come back in on a wave and rebound hollowly against a rock.

“Do you know where I can find a camera?” she asked.

“There’s one in the garage. Right next to all those goddamn vials of shark liver oil.”

And then she started laughing. She knew it was a bad sound—unnatural and spooky, just like Mrs. Agnelli’s—but she couldn’t stop, even when Steinbeck recoiled in confusion. She couldn’t stop when he left her alone at the water’s edge, or when she slunk into the garage like a chastened animal and found it there, just as he had promised: a Kodak 35 Rangefinder, still in its box, a canister of film accompanying it. Laughing, she loaded the film. Laughing, she left the lab and sprinted in the direction of downtown.

She fell silent, however, when she stepped onto Alvarado Street. She remembered it from her earlier explorations: how the streetlights dropped off into an incense-tinged darkness once a certain corner was turned. At the intersection of Tyler and East Franklin, she slowed down. Then, as she proceeded onto Washington Street, it revealed itself: a purple-curtained, two-story building with an anachronistic gas lamp out front. There was a window in the alleyway that would have been inaccessible to most voyeurs but that, on account of her height, gave her a direct view of the brothel’s most well-trafficked chamber. And although she had to endure the proclivities of seven other clients before finding the client she sought, she didn’t lose courage or stamina, she didn’t start to laugh again. Instead, she worked with the calmness of a professional, making sure her father’s face was in the frame whenever possible, the woman beneath him little more than a compositional afterthought: beautiful and foreign, thin with work and want.