“Not bad.”
“I suppose. The only piece I don’t understand is your father. What on earth could be in it for him?”
There was an especially large flower just above Tino’s left ear. She reached up and tore it away, crushing the petals in her fist. Then she lowered herself back onto the ground. Again, Ricketts’s strange words and their sticky echoes. The Methodists, the butterfly trees. Her father as a young man, asleep in a tent.
“I don’t know,” she answered.
Tino cracked his neck once more, the sound like corn popping.
“Well, my advice is to not care too much,” he said. “There was a time when all that mattered to me was what she did and said and where I stood in relation to it. But now I realize it’s a losing game. I’ll succeed only if I escape.”
She wiped her hand on her trousers. “Easier said than done.”
“Is it, though? The way I see it, the only real problem is money. Just because our parents are rich doesn’t mean we are.”
She nodded and looked up. The green leaves looked perfectly black against the white patches of sky; an occasional seagull swooped by to disrupt the pattern. A shrillness from inside the house. Mrs. Agnelli’s laugh.
“That means they’re done.” He jumped from the branch. “Quickly, now.”
They uncaged themselves from the bougainvillea, ran up the front steps, and sat side by side on the porch. Tino’s clothes, she noticed, were still spotless even though hers were peppered with mulch. She tried to brush herself clean but stopped when the door opened behind them. The elders were already halfway through their formal, prim farewells.
“Speaking of money,” Tino whispered, leaning closer. “You could sell those. Right here in town.”
“Sell what?” she whispered in reply.
“Your drawings.”
She retrieved the sketchbook and moved it onto her lap. “I’ve already got a buyer.”
“Who?”
“Ed Ricketts.”
Tino huffed in amusement. “Oh, Ricketts won’t pay you. At least not in cash.”
“Until Sunday,” Anders announced loudly. “I look forward to Mass.”
He guided Mrs. Agnelli past the children, down the steps, and onto the street. Here, there was another round of leave-taking: hands shaken, blessings offered, plans made.
“For your information, I plan on charging him,” she replied, voice still low. “Three dollars apiece.”
“Careful.” Tino stood and rebuttoned his coat. “Don’t price yourself out of the market.”
She looked past their parents and down the hill.
“I’ll price it however I want.”
That night, Anders and Margot had steaks for dinner. Steaks so bad that even Ricketts might have thought twice before touching them.
When they were done eating, they sat on the floor across from each other in front of the sooty stone mantel and played a self-invented, two-man version of belote: an odd, complex French card game her mother was known to have favored. It was the first time since the episode at the lab that they had attempted something this companionable, and they both seemed a bit agitated by it. Anders was taking off his eyeglasses too often and buffing their lenses with too much intensity. Margot was tugging at the waistband of her trousers, as if it had become too tight.
“Now,” her father said after the eighth and final trick. “Where does that leave us?”
He gathered up his cards. Margot hesitated. The game’s scoring process was convoluted and specific, and she wasn’t allowed to do any of the calculations on paper.
“I’m at seventy-three,” she said. “And you’re at eighty.”
“That doesn’t include my carré of tens.”
“No. I suppose it doesn’t.”
“We have a winner, then. Shall we call it a night?”
For a moment, she felt like agreeing. The day had already been long and she was unusually tired. What’s more, she was eager to be alone on the horsehair sofa, where she could shuffle through her thoughts and play them with far greater skill than she had just played her cards.
“One last game,” she said instead.
He glanced at the clock on the mantel, waited out a few loud ticks, and then passed over his cards. She reassembled the deck, cut it, and gave it back to him.
“So,” she said. “The Agnellis.”
The words had come from her sharply and loudly, which she regretted but couldn’t help.
“Yes,” her father replied. His voice was calm and his eyes were fixed on the cards as he dealt them, flipping them onto the floor in near perfect piles, turning the proposed trump faceup. “Quite the situation. I don’t think I’ve ever wasted so much time on snacks and pleasantries, but I suppose that’s the price one pays when things are run by women.”
“Pass,” she said, leaving the trump untouched.
“Me too.” He collected the cards and redealt them. “But I must say we were both amused when her son’s face appeared in the window. It was like watching a Buster Keaton film.”
She gritted her teeth. “Accept.”
“Coinchée, then.”
“And I, in turn, was amused to learn you signed a contract that, on the face of it, offers you no upside at all.”
He looked up from his cards. She held her breath. His back was very straight now, the chipped, glass-shaded lamps etching black amber half circles beneath his eyes, and for some reason, she was thinking of her mother. It wasn’t a thought that came to her often, that of the woman who had barely survived long enough to warrant a parental designation. Mourning, in particular—the process of purposefully summoning a memory in order to subsequently demolish it—had always struck her as far too much of a winnerless game. Tonight, though, it was as if she could finally see her mother’s features clearly enough to miss them: a huge, white, disembodied head floating up to the ceiling, looking down on her with pity and affection, waiting for the signal to swell and explode and release fifteen years’ worth of accumulated pressure.
“I was right the first time.” He retrieved the card tin from the side table. “We’re done playing.”
She caught her lips between her teeth. She was ready. She was ready to know exactly what was at stake. She was ready to force the issue, to harpoon it and drag it from him, alive and growling.
“You’ve put me in exile,” she snapped. “And the entire town knows it.”
“You’re out on that porch all day by your own stubborn choice.”
“You told me not to go back there.”
“Because you’re better than that.”
“I’ll always have a scar.” She gouged at the wound as if carving it anew. “I’ll always look like this.”
“You’re right.”
She threw down her cards and instantly regretted it. It was the most anemic-possible tantrum: eight small rectangles of paper, splayed in impotent disorder. Anders, however, seemed moved by the gesture. He scooted an inch closer to her and picked up her mess. Then he returned all the cards to their tin and tapped it with his forefinger.
“There’s a reason I haven’t told you yet,” he said. “And it’s not what you think.”
“Does Mrs. Agnelli know?”
“No. I haven’t told her, either. At least not the truth.”
“Why not?”
He looked at the low, stained ceiling and then at his stocking feet.
“Because while I’m not planning on violating the letter of our contract, I’m certainly planning on violating its spirit.” Here, a jittery pause. “And there’s also some superstition involved, I’m sorry to say. I can’t quite shake the feeling that, by speaking frankly about my hopes, I’m inviting the universe to ruin them.”
She was gaping at him now, but couldn’t help it. She had never heard him speak like this. She didn’t even think he was capable of such a thing—addressing the mystical, much less using it as an excuse—and the resulting bafflement was so great that when he reached into his vest pocket, she was
certain, somehow, that he would withdraw a weapon. And she was half-right. She had seen the switchbladed penknife hundreds of times before, usually when he was slashing open an envelope or severing the head from a cigar, but it had never looked as lovely or as old as it did this evening: glowing like a burnished nugget of bronze, the family name—the original, multisyllabic one—engraved on it in swirling, oversize script.
“You know what this is?” He placed it on the floor between them.
She nodded, her rage dissipating.
“It’s the only gift I’ve ever given myself.” He picked it up again and extended it in her direction. “And tonight, I’m giving it to you.”
She hesitated. The reversal in his mood had been sharp and swift, which made his affection seem more perilous than his displeasure.
“You are? Why?”
In response, he took her hand, opened her palm, and placed the knife into it. It felt infinitely heavy against her skin, infinitely useful. She reached for her satchel and tucked the knife inside, right next to the sketchbook. He sighed but didn’t smile.
“You want to return to his lab?”
She nodded.
“Then you should be properly armed.”
“That’s not—”
“It’s late,” he said briskly, standing. “You’ll have to excuse me.”
And then he was gone, the bedroom door closing noiselessly behind him.
For the next hour, she sat there, alone.
Then she returned to the horsehair sofa and unrolled herself as long as possible across it, propping up her ankles on one of the arms. Time seemed to be moving very fast now, the clock on the mantel ticking louder than ever, the seconds falling away. She imagined the world continuing to go on without her, the lights coming on inside Ricketts’s lab, Ricketts behind his desk, her sketches spread out before him. She considered her desire for him and the manner in which it seemed to be growing with almost nothing in the way of fuel: just the buckets coming up the hill, the drawings going down. She thought of every decision her father had ever made, especially the ones she didn’t understand. She thought of her mother’s legacy, disfigured by the white-hot disturbances of death and birth; and when the last noises from the bedroom had subsided, she retrieved the satchel and withdrew the knife. She opened the knife to reveal the blade. She yanked up the cuff of her trousers and drew a line of blood across the side of her calf: the fleshy part where, no matter how deep she went, she was unlikely to hit bone. Then she wiped the blade clean and put the knife in her pocket.
And when she rose to her feet, opened the door, and began to run, there was no pain or fear. There was just excitement. The excitement of a world captured and contained and under her exclusive control, the taste and texture of it filling her mouth like food.
10
CANNERY ROW AT MIDNIGHT.
On her way down, she had avoided David Avenue, the most direct and well-lit route. Instead, she had kept to the side streets and alleyways, dropping onto the train tracks and lurking behind a steel storage cylinder until she was certain she hadn’t been seen.
Now, at the outer walls of her father’s cannery, she moved to the middle of the street. The air seemed green, vaguely bacterial, the fog wet and heavy and unnaturally close to the ground. She could hear the skittering sounds of pigeons and mice: those smart, dirty creatures that can both confirm debasement and foretell it. Somewhere, a machine was still in nocturnal operation, a boiler epileptic with captive heat, a processor stamping fish meal into oily cakes. The door of the lab was there in plain sight, solid and real. The building behind it, however, seemed as untrustworthy as a mirage.
Inside, she found a similar strangeness. She had been to working-class parties before, she had witnessed their pandemonium. This, however, was a new breed. Men and women assaulting each other before falling into prolonged embraces. Clothes dropping away with neither shame nor exuberance, but with the instinctual, businesslike inevitability of snake-shed skin. There was an old hobo squatting on the beer crate and pretending to read an upside-down volume by Hegel, a woman wearing a sardine net as a dress, sheaves of typewritten pages turning to a beer-soaked pulp beneath dozens of stamping feet. And then there were the people not contributing to the melee but observing it instead. They stood in the corner near the file cabinet; they were urbane, well groomed, remote. One of them in particular—a busty woman with lacquered blond hair—seemed particularly detached, looking down on the scene in sleepy amusement, cooling herself with a fan that had been folded from one of Margot’s best sketches.
Enraged, Margot began to struggle through the crowd until a large form blocked her path.
“Don’t worry. He’s already hidden the good ones away.”
She looked up. Steinbeck was heavy eyed and nearly motionless, the stiffness of his posture that of someone who was either completely sober or just moments from blacking out. The last time she had seen him he had been so vengeful, so irate. Now, under the influence of what was probably a gallon of beer, he seemed to have softened to her, or at least to the idea of her eventual reappearance.
“They’re all good.” She crossed her arms in front of her chest. “And I wasn’t worried.”
“Well, you have that look about you. Like you’re sizing everything up and figuring out how much you can get for it.”
Instead of replying, she indicated the woman, who was now using the sketch to blot her lipstick.
“Tell her to stop that.”
“Oh, she won’t listen. She’s an actress. Here from L.A., on account of that goddamn movie.” He clutched the sides of his waist. “She and her friends told me I’m getting fat, and I’m absolutely terrified they’re right.”
“Is Ricketts here?”
“Girls. Booze. Where else would he be?”
With that, he made his way back into the pit of the mob. She followed. It was crucial, suddenly, to feel that she wasn’t succumbing to the pull of masses but fighting against it instead, and the music seemed to agree. It had been slow and rhythmic upon her entrance, but now it was emitting the high, bright squeals of an experimental style of jazz, the partygoers responding as if controlled by it. For a moment, she was afraid of being dragged underfoot and trampled. But as Steinbeck led her toward the kitchen, she remained completely untouched. Despite the density and animation of the crowd, she was able to move autonomously, securely, as if she were separated from the others by a thick yet invisible pane of something far more durable than glass.
When she and Steinbeck were a yard or two from their destination, a projectile sailed through the kitchen doorway and onto the dance floor.
“Watch out,” Steinbeck groaned, continuing to push forward.
“Was that a steak?”
“There’s no controlling them unless they’re properly fed.”
Another steak flew past her face and into the herd. She pressed herself against the wall.
“And it’s nice of Ed,” he admitted, “if a little lavish. Usually it’s just a few cans of sardines, but I suppose he’s feeling reckless tonight.”
“Reckless?”
Steinbeck couldn’t hear her, though. The crowd’s excitement had grown too fierce, too deafening, so she just stood there and watched as half a dozen more steaks were flung through the doorway. For the next several minutes, there was audible chewing and swallowing, greasy hands wiping themselves on greasy shirts, mouths opening and closing around bottles and jugs, an endless volley of belches harmonizing to the music, which had changed yet again, this time to a wistful, foreign duet of singer and mandolin. A man in a woman’s bathrobe began waltzing with a coatrack. The blond actress continued to look on, smug and immaculate.
“Beer?” Steinbeck asked.
“No.”
“You’ll want to reconsider that at some point.”
And then he turned away, stomping heavily toward his rocking chair, the crowd trying and failing to eliminate his looming shape from view.
She looked in the direction of the k
itchen. She sucked in her stomach and started walking. He would be inside, she told herself, standing in front of a fry pan, cloaked in fat and steam. But the kitchen was empty, so she spun around and scanned the front room, and that’s when she saw him. He was moving quickly, past the desk and the file cabinet, past the fern in the Coast Guard buoy. She shouted his name, but he didn’t seem to notice. Instead, he kept his head down, his expression both cheerful and pensive as he hurried out the rear door, an earthenware bowl in hand.
She followed, fighting what she knew was an idiot’s smile. Outside, the night blinded her. On her journey down the hill, the streetlights had glowed yellow, obscuring the absence of the moon. Now the darkness seemed saturated, absolute, the densest fog she had ever seen settled over the land and water, the moisture in the air so thick she could feel it beading on her arms like sweat, clinging to the hairs and making her shine like something that had just recently been plucked from the sea. She was standing on a narrow balcony. Beneath her was a strange hybrid of a space: a back lot that merged seamlessly with the ocean and that was framed on two sides by the towering walls of adjacent canneries. The area closest to the lab was marked with a grid of concrete tanks, some of which had wooden lids, some of which did not. On top of one of the lidded tanks sat a bald man and his gaunt, homely female companion, their heads surrounded by a cloud of fragrant smoke. Wormy, the woman who had been there on Margot’s first two visits to the lab, stood beside them. And Ricketts was leaning on the next tank over, the earthenware bowl perched on the tank’s uncovered rim, a beer in one hand and a chunk of raw meat in the other.
Margot froze. The bald man held a pipe to his lips, inhaled deeply, and then passed it to the thin woman. Wormy coughed delicately and brushed something from the front of her dress. A spot of blood fell from the meat and onto Ricketts’s boots.
“And to make matters worse,” Ricketts said after pausing to take a sip of beer, “Zanuck gave him a private screening. Can you imagine it? Our John sitting there trying to be polite?”
“I’ve heard it’s quite good, actually.” The bald man shrugged. “And John gets along just fine with the L.A. types. Have you seen it in there tonight? It’s like he’s auditioning twenty-two-year-old blondes for the role of ‘Most Likely to Make Carol Kill Him in His Sleep.’”
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