“Are they dead?” she asked.
“No.”
He uncapped another bottle and poured its contents into the bin.
“Now they are.”
They both coughed, the smell in the garage unthinkably foul. Eyes watering, she searched his face, but he just smiled with the same vacant brightness as before and turned toward the icebox.
“And now we’ll just give them another minute.” The ease in his voice was an insult now. When he opened the icebox door, she could see a stack of dead cats, a tapestry of bared teeth and stiff tails. “And then we’ll rinse them down and get them into the formalin: a five percent mixture, just to be safe. As for the rest of our little friends, I suspect we’ll use some Bouin’s fixative on the mollusks, or maybe some Zenker’s. And the brittle stars should be easy enough. Seventy percent alcohol and just a splash of glycerin. It’s important to remember the glycerin. Keeps the articular membranes nice and flexible so there’s no risk of—”
She backed away from the sink and reclaimed her seat on the car.
“You disagree?” he asked, shutting the icebox. “About the glycerin?”
“No.”
“Then what’s wrong?”
She looked at the hutch again. She wasn’t sure if it was the euphoria of working alongside him or the lingering effect of the menthol. Either way, the sea creatures in their jars seemed to be moving slightly. She blurred her eyes, hoping to erase what she was seeing, but they came even more alive as a result. And she wanted to say something about it, but how to phrase it? How to put it in a way he couldn’t possibly discard or misinterpret?
“I’ve been having dreams,” she said.
At that, his face finally darkened. He wiped his hands again, removed his apron, and joined her on the Buick’s hood. Their legs were almost touching, both of their feet propped up on the front fender, and it reminded her of sitting on the bed with him, both of them admiring her sketch, both of them fully aware of what would happen next.
“‘The dream is the aquarium of the night,’” he said.
“From the new draft of your essay?”
“No. From Victor Hugo.”
“I don’t like it when people quote things. It’s better when they just say it for themselves.”
“I disagree. I feel like I always sound better when I sound like Jung.”
“Jung is even worse than Hugo.”
“Have you read either of them? No lying this time.”
“I haven’t. And I don’t intend to.”
“Really? I think you’d benefit highly from a little dip into the collective unconscious.”
She put a hand on his knee. He gently removed it.
“Margot Fiske,” he said. “You promised.”
There was a fast, sharp pain in her lungs, her eyes once again glued to the specimens in the hutch. They weren’t moving anymore. In fact, it was as if they had never been alive at all.
“It never should have happened,” he said softly. “I’ll never forgive myself.”
“Forgive yourself for what?”
“For disrespecting … for dishonoring …”
“You don’t actually believe that, do you?”
“I don’t know. I might.”
“You weren’t my first,” she lied.
“I wasn’t?”
“In Manila, I drank a flask of lambanog one night and ended up passing out in the pickers’ shed. With one of the pickers.”
He looked at her closely but not admiringly.
“Not that it’s any of my business,” he said. “But there are some women you can talk to, aren’t there? Friends? Neighbors?”
She shook her head.
He nodded. “As long as we’re in the process of confiding, I must admit that I still don’t know what to do with you. You seem to enjoy drawing these creatures, but you don’t seem especially fond of the creatures themselves.”
“I do,” she replied. “And I’m not.”
She looked down at her balled-up fingers. To have once touched him, she realized, felt strangely like handling the microscope slide, and now she was sorry she had followed his guidance so carefully, that she hadn’t just slid the worm directly off the rock and onto her palm.
“I want to be the one who kills them,” she said at last. “I’ll still draw them. But I want the other part, too.”
He swallowed loudly.
“Is that wrong?” she asked. “Does it make me bad?”
“I hope not. Because it would make me bad, too.”
And when the noises started from upstairs, she thought it was her father again, here to drag her out of the lab and back up the hill. But then she heard Steinbeck’s voice echoing down the stairwell.
“Oh no.” Ricketts jumped off the hood of the car and rolled down his sleeves. “I thought he was still up in Los Gatos.”
“Ed!” came the voice from above. “Ed!”
“Down here, John.”
Seconds later, Steinbeck burst through the doorway, a pink invoice clutched in his hand. Ricketts fiddled with his cuffs and studied the ground as Steinbeck approached.
“I should have known as much. First chance he gets, he’s bending you over the front of his Buick.”
“John!” Ricketts sputtered. “Enough.”
“Oh, I’ll tell you what’s enough.” Steinbeck waved the invoice above his head. “Fifty dollars! On syringes! How much, exactly, do you think I’m worth?”
“The book did so well. And now there’s the movie …”
“That’s not the point!”
“I’m good for it. You know that, John.”
“You haven’t had an order in months!”
“We needed them, John.”
“Fifty dollars!”
“We needed them for the octopuses. Immersion won’t work on cephalopods. We have to inject. You know that.”
Steinbeck lowered his hands to his sides, let out a moaning exhale, and then squinted at Ricketts. Margot watched them both very closely. She had never witnessed the full arc of a domestic dispute before—from the initial explosion to the eventual rapprochement—but this was precisely how she imagined one taking shape.
“Can’t argue with science, I suppose,” Steinbeck said at length.
“No.” Ricketts smiled persuasively. “You cannot.”
“Christ, my head aches. I think I’m coming down with the flu.”
“You always think that.”
“Doesn’t mean I’m wrong.”
“Well, in that case, I know just the cure!”
Ricketts reached for a crate labeled SHARK LIVER OIL.
Steinbeck took a large step backward. “Unless that’s where you’ve started to hide the tequila, I want no part of it.”
Laughing, Ricketts turned away from the crate and grabbed the bin that contained the worms. He held them out for Steinbeck’s inspection.
“Look! Aren’t they delicious? Margot found them. Turns out she has something of a knack.”
“Of course she does.”
A noise escaped from her: something that sounded like a giggle but wasn’t.
“Ed, please tell her I’m in no mood for levity. Or an audience.”
She looked at Ricketts. He jerked his head firmly in the direction of the stairway, and she didn’t protest. She did, however, envision something seditious as she began to climb: that she was bottled up alongside the largest and rarest of his specimens. That she was still in the garage, watching and hearing their private conversation from the strange comfort of the china hutch.
Upstairs, she could, in fact, still hear their voices: loud yet entirely indecipherable, like a radio tuned just a few notches in the wrong direction. Arthur wasn’t there, and she was unspeakably thankful for it. The canneries next door were an earthquake that never stopped. From the bedroom behind her, there was the sound of typing. On the desk, an unfamiliar tube of lipstick was serving as a paperweight, its cap missing and the red paste inside crushed down to a sore-looking nub. She could
feel the wounds on both her forehead and shin as intensely as if they had somehow been reopened.
She sat down, moved the lipstick to where she couldn’t see it, turned to a clean sheet of paper, and began to sketch. And just as she had expected, the worms appeared there with twice the accuracy and intention of anything she had ever drawn. When a wide-angled shadow fell across the floor, she was certain Ricketts was in the doorway, ready to claim her. But Steinbeck was there instead.
She leapt from her chair and stood beside it.
“I’m not that monstrous, am I?” he asked, shaking his head. “Sit down. Just sit down.”
Watching him carefully, she reclaimed her seat. His face was red and shiny, a veil of moisture across his mustache.
“It’s hot down there,” he moaned. “Why are we out of beer?”
“I don’t know.”
“Run and get some, will you?”
She shook her head. He frowned at her and then looked blankly around the room as if trying to remember where he was. Then he walked over to the desk and began to study her sketch of the worm. He stood there for several seconds in silence, his face and neck gradually regaining their normal hue, leaving only his large, jutting ears a vengeful shade of red.
“He told me to tell you to go home.”
She nodded in understanding but didn’t move.
“You’re working for him now?” he asked. “In the tide pools?”
“No. I’m doing the sketches. And the embalming.”
“But you’re hoping for something more, is that it?”
She held his gaze for a second. When she was afraid her face had turned the same color as his ears, she returned her attention to the sketch and made a few swipes of her pencil, unsure as to whether she was making things better or worse.
“Well, keep at it.” Steinbeck sighed. “From what I can tell, you’ve already done an admirable job, and not just with the drawings. He likes to make things complicated, to put up a little fight, but at the end of the day, it’s always the same. Like a goddamn goldfish, round and round the bowl, thinking he’s found the ocean when he’s really just mucking around in the same old puddle as always. And the worst part is that I believe him. I believe him every damn time. I believe him because I’ve never met anyone as smart or as good as him, and besides, I’m far too busy to be doubting things all the time. Do you have any idea how terrible it is? To have created something people care about? To get rich on account of it? We used to make fun of people like me but, my God, how times have changed. These days, I’m little more than a bank account. Without my money, I’d be even less useful to him than Arthur.”
He fell into another extended bout of silence. She stopped drawing and, in lieu of considering his words, reappraised her sketch, hoping for the same feelings of pride. Something about it had changed, though. Something had been vanquished as a result of Steinbeck’s grim company.
“And I tell him,” he resumed suddenly, the sharpness of his voice making her jump. “When you’ve collected every little creature from the Sea of Cortez to Alaska, when you’ve fucked everything in lipstick and a Catholic school uniform, when all your jars are finally categorized and cross-referenced and organized to some lunatic’s version of order, when that damn essay has been revised and rewritten for the one-millionth time, do you honestly think you’ll be any better off? Any wiser? Sure, you’ll know the ocean inside and out, but people will still be a mystery, and there’s nothing in this world more tragic than that.”
That night, she didn’t return home right away.
Instead, she went to the place where Arthur had once given her the sketchbook and the bucket: the small promontory just south of her father’s cannery, just east of the train tracks, the spot from which she could see not only the terminus of the Row, but the marine station on its outskirts. There were no scientists on the beach this evening, but there were lights on in the stattion building, and the lights were something she envied.
And this was the real crux of the matter. Envy. Earlier that afternoon, when Steinbeck had finally left her alone, she had succumbed to it. She had shuffled through Ricketts’s desk drawers, looking for a draft of something she hadn’t read yet, something Wormy had typed. Another essay or perhaps a poem: anything strange and dense enough to bang her head against. But the only thing she found was the carbon copy of a letter that had been penned years before her arrival and that seemed like a remnant from a different lifetime. All quiet, he had written, until the glass case gets broken either from the outside or inside. And then maybe it’s sleeping or comatose instead of just an exhibit. I mean the dream.
And, God, how she hated her tallness. Sometimes, it was a longing even more painful than her longing for Ricketts: the wish for a complete bodily distillation, a retraction into a more adorably compact form. Her father had always told her to take pride in her vertical inheritance. He had taught her to let it speak for her, to give her authority by proxy. But lately she had become convinced of a more evolved way of being. She imagined Ricketts and Wormy in bed together, their small bodies a perfect match, their union muscular and efficient and happily confined to a cell of its own devising, a cell in which she couldn’t possibly fit. If anything, she was more like Steinbeck than Wormy. She was big and sour and needy, and what if Steinbeck’s fears were true? If he were no longer the lab’s sole patron, would he be cast aside and forgotten? Would someone else come in to take his place? Could that someone else be her? And that’s when the realization dawned: an answer that caused her to turn away from the ocean and sprint up the hill.
Back at the house, she paused briefly in the sitting room. With the exception of the sofa and the good china and their personal belongings, most of which were still in trunks, there was nothing material that spoke to their presence here, nothing that could have told a curious observer who they were or what they prized. Similarly, there could have been nothing extrapolated by examining their neighbors, all of whom differed from Anders and Margot in every possible way. And perhaps this was why she had been so resistant thus far to Ricketts’s categorization of the world. She didn’t glorify the distinction between those who lived here and those who lived elsewhere—the distinction between the locals and the tourists, the distinction between those who watched the party and those who joined it—because to do so would be tantamount to denying the boundaries of her own existence.
“Margot?”
When she entered the kitchen, she was alarmed at how bright it was.
“Did you get a new lamp?” she asked.
“No. I brought in the one from the bedroom.”
The can of grease was still on the windowsill, as it had been for more than a month now. Normally, she wouldn’t have even noticed it. Tonight, however, it had company: first, a vial of shark liver oil similar to those Ricketts was always trying to convince people to drink; second, a Chinese joss stick jammed into the flesh of an unripe peach, the burned end releasing an irregular curl of musky smoke, its presence somehow both placating and aggressive, like the warning shot that comes before deadly fire, like the line in the proverbial sand.
“I heard you lurking,” he resumed. “I don’t like it when people lurk. It means they want something but are too cowardly to ask for it.”
Heroes advance when it makes sense to retreat, she quoted to herself. And cowards retreat regardless of what makes sense.
“I’d like to ask your permission to visit the Agnellis.”
He put down his pencil and arranged his documents into a pile, the resulting déjà vu making her head swim. A newspaper sat on the far edge of the table. A headline read, FISKE CANNERY TO CEASE OPERATIONS: UNIONS TO SUPPORT.
“You didn’t seem particularly fond the other day,” he replied. “I’m surprised you’re so keen to socialize.”
“Oh, my interests aren’t social.”
“You’ve a new plan in place. Good girl.”
She adjusted the strap of the satchel.
“Would you care to discuss it?” he a
sked.
“No. I think I’ve become a little superstitious, too.”
He smiled, but not gladly.
“I’m joining them for Mass again on Sunday,” he said. “You can accompany me.”
She nodded at the newspaper. “Soon we’ll both have reason to celebrate.”
“Yes.” He leaned back in his chair. “I think you’re right.”
13
1998
NO MATTER WHERE SHE GOES, THOUGH—NO MATTER which part of the aquarium’s public spaces occur to her as a refuge—there’s music. Music designed at her own behest. Music meant, if she’s honest with herself, to replicate and revise how it once felt to be inside his lab.
She remembers sitting down with the composer, showing him the blueprints, describing the main exhibits, playing him a few examples of what she had in mind. Bach, of course. A well-known kirtan: “Hay Hari Sundara,” the 1926 Carnegie Hall version. Some Debussy, embarrassingly enough. That part in “Take It on the Run” where the guitar does a high altitude burn. To all of these, he nodded in time to the beat, scribbled down notes. When she reached the last song, however, he stopped writing. It was “Get Ready,” perhaps the Temptations’ strangest offering. To be fair, she knew it was weird. For one thing, it was about a stalker. For another, it didn’t start out like all the other Motown relics, with a jolting, percussive call to arms. Instead, it began with a dirge of horns, persistent and menacing, followed by some violins gasping for breath. Then there was the part with the saxophone, notes stabbing the air in what should have been a solo but instead seemed like the disembowelment of one. On top of it all, the singer: a voice that sounded neither male nor female, neither completely sane nor completely unhinged, neither dangerous nor safe. I don’t want this kind of trouble, the composer’s face seemed to say. Who would? She, however, was sitting there with her eyes half-closed, certain that, had he lived long enough, this song would have either pleased Ricketts greatly or upset him to near madness.
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