“Oh, let’s not be too hard on him.” Ricketts laughed. “He never expected this sort of thing, so he was unprepared when it happened. As far as I’m concerned, he can hide out in the lab for as long as he likes. Long enough to mend fences with his wife. Long enough for the world to forget all about Grapes of Wrath.”
A noise from the lab—a loud, delighted shriek—and when he looked up in the noise’s direction, his eyes instantly met hers, his expression so tranquil and steady that it was almost as if he had expected to find her there.
He tossed the chunk of meat into the tank, watched the resulting commotion within the water, took another drink, and then moved in the direction of the balcony.
“Mademoiselle Fiske.”
His face was still impassive, unsurprised, but there was a glint in his eyes that was visible to her even in the darkness. The bald man frowned and nodded. Wormy smiled, her lips a bright and appealing red.
“Fiske?” mused the thin woman. “The family who …”
“That’s right.”
And she wasn’t sure, but he seemed to be winking at her. Not in the louche, crude manner of some of her father’s former colleagues, but in a way that made her feel as if she had just said or done something clever. Wormy took a long drag from the pipe, a heavy certainty clouding her eyes as if she already knew the outcome of the scene under way and was deeply, deeply pleased at the prospect of it repeating itself.
“Perhaps a beer?” Ricketts asked.
“No. Thank you.”
“A puff or two?” He glanced at Wormy’s pipe.
“Edward, she’s a child.”
“Or so they keep telling me.”
Another wink, another shot of warmth running through her. Men and their compulsive need to offer things: Arthur and the cigarette, Steinbeck and the beer, Ricketts and everything else. Tonight, he bore none of the mute, inapproachable, ferocious qualities he had acquired as a result of dreams and distance. He was attentive and witty, and as the foursome resumed their conversation, she could feel her nervousness peel away. It no longer seemed dark. Instead, everything was illuminated as if by a searchlight: their shapes on the concrete tanks, the smoke swirling around the bald man’s ears in direct imitation of a fleeting and translucent head of hair, all of it framed by the black skin of the bay upon which nearly a dozen sardine boats were skating with tectonic slowness. And had anyone else ever felt even half of what she was feeling now? she wondered. The dread and dizziness? The longing that waved from her chest like an extra limb? The desire to sit with someone on top of a desk and stare at him until something explosive was unearthed?
“What’s in the tanks?” she asked.
Their conversation stopped midsentence. The thin woman giggled. The bald man crossed and recrossed his legs.
“Come down and see,” Ricketts said.
She paused and then began to move down the stairs, her descent a marvel of luck and physics. When she reached his side, he smiled and took another swig of beer. Inside the tank, a dorsal fin periodically broke the surface, the shadow of a small, tense body beneath.
“What kind of shark?” she asked.
“Spiny dogfish. Squalus acanthias. Would you like to feed her?”
He offered up the earthenware bowl. She selected the largest morsel it contained and felt her skin flush when his mouth made a click of approval. When she dropped the meat in, she saw a tremor and a curl, muscles seizing up with pleasure, the underwater implications of working jaws and flexing gills.
“Edward,” Wormy noted, “she’s bleeding.”
She looked at her fingers, at the red leavings of the shark’s meal. Then she remembered the penknife. She looked down. As before, she felt no pain, but her right trousers leg was crimson from knee to ankle.
“Indeed she is.” Ricketts turned to his companions. “Will you excuse us, please?”
Inside, the crowd had thinned considerably.
The tourists from L.A. were gone, as were most of the others. Only a dozen or so guests remained, most of them gathered around Steinbeck’s craggy height like a family of squirrels praising a redwood, all of them singing in a language she couldn’t place. The man in the bathrobe was alone, the coatrack abandoned and upended, his affections redirected toward a large glass jar with a brownish liquid inside. The desktop was bare of everything, including papers.
As they entered the bedroom, he removed his coat and tossed it on the floor.
“Take a seat on the bed, please, and roll up your trousers,” he said, disappearing into the bathroom.
She sat and tried to steady herself. Her sketch of the young mother was still on his wall, its presence thrilling, auspicious. When he reappeared and sat next to her on the bed, there was the urge to push him down and stake her claim, but she clenched her fists until it subsided. From beyond the door, she could hear the final notes of Steinbeck’s chorus, the melody drifting off into hums and moans.
“How did this happen? It’s deep.”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know?”
He smiled, shook his head, and wiped a pair of nail scissors on his shirtsleeve.
“I can give you some ethanol if you’d like.”
“No. I don’t need it.”
“Well, in that case, try to do better than I did at sitting still.”
She nodded. As the needle entered and reentered her skin, she tried to pretend it hurt, but it still didn’t, even when he tugged the sutures into a knot and pressed a strip of gauze firmly against her leg.
“You probably should have taken that ethanol. You look a little green.”
“I’m fine.”
“Glad to hear it. Let’s hope I didn’t botch this one quite as badly as the first.”
She leaned toward him.
“I thought I told you to sit still,” he warned.
But when she touched the back of his neck, he didn’t move away. He just laughed quietly, as if remembering a particularly filthy joke, and she could feel the vibration of it as she put her mouth against his. When they moved apart, he wasn’t smiling anymore.
“Fifteen,” he said, shaking his head. “Fifteen years old. Am I imagining things, or aren’t they making girls like they used to?”
“My mother was married at seventeen.” Her fingers were still on his neck, pressing into the notch at the base of his skull, tracing the line of demarcation between his skin and hair. “I was born a year later.”
“And look what happened to her.”
She removed her hand.
“I’m sorry. All I’m trying to say is that these are different times,” he said. “Far different. A young woman of your caliber should have more useful things on her mind.”
“You sound like my father.”
“Your father’s right.”
“Then let me work here. With you. Inside the lab.”
He laughed again, but still no smile. “I trust you’ll understand why that’s completely out of the question.”
“I won’t be a bother.”
“I don’t believe that for a second.”
They exchanged a long stare, and then she backed away just enough for him to see her fully. She had never attempted this sort of thing before—this arch and this tilt, this throwing back of the shoulders, this parting of the lips—but she knew she had done it right when his eyes briefly wandered down to her waist and then back up to her face, his breath coming through his mouth instead of his nose.
“Tomorrow morning,” she said.
He squinted at her and tried to stifle something: a giggle or a whistle, or possibly a groan.
“I won’t get arrested?”
“I’m sure of it.”
“Fine,” he said, making for the door and allowing himself one half of a grin. “Mind your manners, though. I’m not the sort of man who stands for being harassed.”
11
1998
HIS THIRD MESSAGE ARRIVES AT A BAD TIME.
Everyone is here, every last aquari
st, in a conference room that is slightly nicer than a nonprofit should allow. She sits at the head of the table. The aquarists sit along the sides in a hierarchical phalanx determined mostly by tenure and a bit by skill. They are all dressed exactly like her, all of them in uniform, their blue shirts extending out to a vanishing point of which de Chirico would have been proud. She’s assembled them well over the years; she’s kept them to a certain type. Mostly men. Odd but not ashamed, or even particularly aware, of their oddness. Unkempt, ruddy, resilient, amenable to camping, bathing in rivers, repeated exposure to ticks, ingestion of iodine-treated pond water. Dressed as if for action: bleach-stained jeans tucked into black rubber boots that stomp across the wet floors with a specific sort of casual, unwarranted bravery. Most of all, though, there’s the fact of their relationship to their work. To a less enlightened soul, it could seem like drudgery: those endless loops of routine maintenance, knuckles permanently abraded by fiberglass and salt. They, however, treat it with a palpable sense of purpose, their aims so noble that they give her faith by proxy. Whenever she can, she invites herself along on their collecting trips. She’s afraid of seeming useless, so mostly she just watches them in admiration disguised, for the sake of her reputation, as evaluation. She watches them blast tube anemones from their sandy burrows with a gasoline-powered pump and a hundred feet of garden hose. She watches them catch half-moons with pieces of candy-colored yarn on barbless hooks. She watches them lure garibaldis and señoritas into their nets with the luxuriant stink of fresh sea urchin roe, and by the time they return to the aquarium with their prizes in tow, she is drunk with secondhand excitement.
As for Arthur and Tino, they sit to her immediate right and left. Unmatched bookends, exceptions working overtime to prove the rule. Sometimes she wonders what her father would have done, but there’s no way of telling. He could have gone either way, embracing them as comrades or vanquishing them as rivals. As it stands, she’s pleased with her choice. They’ve each served their purpose nicely: Tino, in his long-ago willingness to turn over a crucial piece of property, to defuse the tension among the fishing contingent; Arthur in his jack-of-all-trades gregariousness, which in his old age has blossomed into something downright beatific. It seemed only fair to take them in, to give them titles, to pay them for a loyalty she appreciates but can’t explain.
Which is why she bites her tongue when the two of them begin talking. As boys, they were never friends. Their personalities were too different, their communities too segregated. In their old age, though, they’ve grown close. They come alive in each other’s company, they relish the tag-team retelling of old stories, which is what they’re doing right now: relating how in August 1984, two months prior to opening day, a complication arose.
“The wharf pilings exhibit was missing its … ,” Arthur begins, eyes big and vaudevillian.
“Wharf pilings,” Tino concludes, deadpan.
But not for a lack of planning. Almost two years earlier, Arthur and Tino continue, they had begun to prepare. They had commissioned the fabrication of fake vinyl-polyester-fiberglass pilings, instructed a dive team to submerge them in the bay and secure them to actual pilings in the hope that the fakes would acquire a similar decorative cloak of invertebrate life. It was only much later, with the aquarium at the cusp of completion, that they realized their mistake. The desired populations—colonies of mussels and barnacles and anemones—had become so well established that it was impossible for even the most observant, capable aquarists to physically separate the fake pilings from the real ones, much less tell them apart.
And this is where she stops listening, because when they tell the next bit, she knows they will tell it wrong. They won’t talk about how, when they broke the news to her, she didn’t speak and she didn’t sigh. Instead, she removed the penknife from her pocket, placed it on the blank, spotless expanse of her desktop, and spun it on its narrow end like a top, Tino and Arthur watching in horror as the knife took a handful of tight revolutions before falling with a clank.
“What should we do?” Arthur asked.
“We’ll move forward precisely as intended. We’ll remove the pilings and put them in the tank.”
“But the whole wharf could collapse if we take the wrong ones,” Tino protested.
“This entire town could collapse,” she replied, aware of the ensuing hyperbole but doing nothing to stop it, “and I wouldn’t care. As long as my aquarium remains standing.”
At midnight, then, the team reassembled, ready to do as instructed. The divers descended and made their best guesses, their cleanest cuts. The aquarists attached floats to the severed pilings and towed each of them over to the launch ramp. Tino and Arthur backed the boat trailer into the water and helped maneuver the pilings on board. The collectors covered the pilings with seawater-damp burlap sacks. When everything was loaded, they all waited for a moment, wincing. They expected to hear the creaks and snaps of breaking wood, the jarring, sonic-boom splashes of big things falling into an even bigger body of water. But they heard nothing, so they began the slow, careful journey back to Cannery Row, Tino and Arthur in the tow truck, the others in a motley fleet of vehicles following close behind, Margot sitting protectively astride one of the shrouded pilings on the trailer, her jeans cold and wet, the night wind weaving through her hair as she guided the secret, merciless parade away from the shore and into town.
The conference room is silent now. They are all looking at her: Arthur and Tino and the aquarists, looking at her and grinning in a way that reminds her of Ricketts. And she wants to say something that will express her gratitude, maybe even her love, but the moment has already passed. The meeting is under way again, the staff’s attention precisely where it should be: on more urgent, more Mola-related matters.
And it’s a shame, because the story of the wharf pilings has been left unfinished. Not in a strictly narrative sense—beginning, middle, end—but in terms of its lesson. For a while there, in the years immediately following the incident, she could barely contain herself. She was so pleased by the grand gesture, so proud of it. She honestly believed the retrieval of the pilings was the sort of anecdotal monument outlandish enough to send a ripple through space and time, theatrical enough to change things, powerful enough to reach him in that place beyond life. In the years since, however, she’s recognized an upsetting pattern, a certain scorched-earth mentality. The self-inflicted leg wound comes to mind, as does the time she traveled to Key West to hunt down and seduce the reclusive designer of a revolutionary new jellyfish tank. There was also the time she insisted on using her own two hands, instead of a trained professional’s, to weld the surge machine for the kelp forest exhibit. So loud, these actions. So dramatic and unsubtle. And she regrets them not because she’s embarrassed, but because Ricketts’s latest message is now so clearly in opposition, so clearly laid out on the surface of this big, expensive table.
“You’ll have to excuse me,” she says, standing.
“But we were just about to—”
“Not now.”
“But we need you to decide about the—”
“It doesn’t matter. Surprise me.”
And within the aquarium proper, within the spaces meant for tourists—tourists who observe and mock and praise and sometimes imitate, tourists who think it’s all for them, all for show—she feels, for the first time in years, like a failure. The darkness she sensed on the rooftop, the darkness at the perimeter of the otter rehab tank, is now falling in earnest. She’s seeing shapes in the periphery, the shadows of doomed company, eerie black profiles against the vivid, backlit blue, the ghosts of people who once felt this same thing and couldn’t crawl out from under it. Outside, the banjo player offers up an acoustic homage to Duran Duran entitled “Hungry Like the Wolf Eel.” Inside, the white sturgeons trawl the tank bottom with their Confucian whiskers, giant sea bass loom midwater like obese, blue black sentries, white-plumed anemones sprout in furry, albino gardens. She doesn’t hate it. Of course she doesn’t. But sh
e can imagine being someone who does. Not just the fish and the anemones and the repurposed pop songs, but the aquarium itself. She can imagine hating how its perfection and cleanliness approach the realm of parody. She can imagine hating how whenever the fish speak their own dual names—Mola mola, ocean sunfish—she’s never quite sure which one is the alibi: the one used by the scientist or the one used by the layman.
“Oh, just put it out of its misery,” she said upon first learning that the Mola had outgrown its tank.
“You’d honestly rather murder it than just let it go?” Arthur gasped.
“I don’t see the difference.”
“You’re kidding, right?”
And she’s frantic now and sweating, the aquarium’s crowds suddenly indistinguishable from the ones that used to attend Ricketts’s parties. Why, she asks herself, do both courtrooms and aquariums have the same word for the thing that contains the evidence: exhibit? Why do the visitors always—always—tap on the exhibit windows, even though they are expressly requested to refrain from doing so? Is it because they want the fish to acknowledge them in the same way they are acknowledging the fish? And why do they take so many photographs? Hundreds and hundreds of snapshots without a single human face in them: a thought that freezes her in place right beneath the gray whale skeleton suspended from the ceiling of the atrium, her sweat starting to cool, her muscles beginning to shake. A family photo album, she imagines, horrified, in which both people and fish are given equal precedence. Fish pouting and mugging alongside the newly born and newly betrothed. Fish exhausted by their singular, immersive knowledge, suspending mankind’s breakable prism in a way that both devours light and excretes it.
12
1940
“YOU’RE DOING IT WRONG.”
She lifted her pencil to shoulder height and let it fall onto the desk.
“Come,” Ricketts said. “I’ll show you. Again.”
She gave him a narrow look. Then she rose to her feet and followed him through the lab, down the rear stairs, and into the back lot. Outside, she squinted into the fog as he retrieved a bucket from beneath the balcony’s overhang. It was the most unsubtle hour of the morning, sharp and white with noise and light, the canneries running at full throttle. The sharks were restless in their tanks today, their bodies stirring the water into a chop. Her father’s place of business was not far from here, the possibility of his appearance both immediate and real, but she didn’t care. All that seemed to matter was the fact that for the past two weeks of coming to the lab, the only thing she had succeeded at was failing. Failing to maintain even the faintest shred of aloofness and disinterest, her excitement at his closeness still obvious and hateful. Failing to entice him in any manner, his treatment of her still formal and unwilling.
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