“Normally I use a rock,” he said, still looking at the animal. “Just a quick smack to the head. But I couldn’t find one.”
She retrieved her paddle and the picnic basket. His eyes shot over in her direction.
“What are you doing?” he asked.
“Packing up and going home.”
“No, you’re not.”
He caught her by the wrist, shook the paddle from her grip, and dragged her down.
And this time, it wasn’t slow and it wasn’t careful. Also, there was the mud: a surface far less reliable than his rope mattress and far more eager to involve itself in the intricacies of the movements under way. She could feel it on every inch of her skin, even the parts that were still covered with clothing: how the mud’s temporary wetness both facilitated and impeded the force with which they slammed into each other, and she knew he wasn’t claiming her, not for good. But the land was. For a moment, there was fear and trepidation, but then an opening unlike anything she had ever experienced. He could talk all he wanted about where things lived and why, but the fact of the matter was that wanting something meant nothing unless you actually took it. People, places, things: all of it so fragile, so easy, so obtainable. So infinitely up for grabs.
Later that evening, she took a bath fully clothed.
Her father was a room away, sitting at the kitchen table, as usual. He had seen her come home. He had seen how she was a chalky gray from head to toe, the mud dried into a flaking shroud. He didn’t mention it, though, nor did he disturb her. Hours passed, maybe even days. He remained in his part of the house and she in hers, and by the time she drained the tub, undressed, and toweled off, the kitchen was empty and his bedroom door was closed.
She sat at the kitchen table and pretended it was Ricketts’s desk. On the canoe trip back to the Buick, they had spoken only once.
“Latin name?” she had asked, referring to the dead body at their feet.
“Myliobatis californica. As if it could ever exist anywhere else.”
And how perfect, she realized now, to have two names for the same thing, each of them nonsensical based on your perspective. The streets in Manila had been like this. They had had an official name that appeared on the maps, but also a colloquial name to which the locals obstinately clung. In Monterey it was like this, too: Ocean View Avenue, Cannery Row. And then there was the woman who had wanted a nude portrait of herself, her impulses so desperate and broad, Margot had almost pitied her. Now, as she opened her satchel with loose, prune-y hands, the pity was gone. She sharpened her pencil with the penknife, which was still flecked with dried blood. And the sketches that ensued were things that could have been hung in museums, but never in family homes: exotic, acrobatic pairings that showed not only lust and its aftermath, but also the void in which lust occurred. This time, there were no corners cut, no edges blurred. This was the harsh, contained, ancient survivalism of the tide pools, but magnified into human dimensions, its beauty that of the huge, disembodied tentacle: invisible to everyone except those who felt compelled to seek it.
The following Sunday, four weeks to the day after first acceding to Tino’s offer, she stood with him on the church steps again, just as before.
“You’ll be able to find some buyers for these, I assume.” She handed him her most recent portfolio, her confidence half-feigned. It was ugly and sad, she feared suddenly, to put one’s private thoughts so clearly on display. As he skimmed through the images and recognized their pornographies, however, her uncertainty faded. A redness was rising into his neck and across his face, his expression soft and awed.
“These are all men with women. Can you do men with men? And the other way, too?”
She nodded.
“We’ll sell out within a day,” he replied.
And he was right.
16
1998
IT’S NOT NECESSARY ANYMORE, AND SHE WANTS him to know it.
There was a time when it was fuel. There was a time when she was certain that, in its absence, she might stall out midjourney, just like his old Buick. Now, however, the machine is one that feeds itself, that offers pleasures other than the punitive. If anything, the love she once felt for him is like one of those chronic diseases that starts with the letter L: lupus or Lyme. She can go weeks, months, years, without an outbreak, but then something weakens her defenses—usually a dream—and suddenly he’s with her again, offering old flatteries, opening old wounds.
Which is precisely why she’s come to the cephalopod gallery, the room behind the octopus tank. Darkness and silence. Raised, plastic-grated flooring. A ceiling so low that her head almost touches the water pipes above. If Anders ever taught her anything of value, which she doubts, it’s this: the price of hesitation. So she wastes no time. She submerges herself from fingertip to shoulder. She scratches the fiberglass rockwork that lines the back of the tank. At first, nothing. But then an almost imperceptible shift from somewhere within the rockwork, a series of telltale flashes from the cameras on the other side of the glass. She leans forward as far as she can, her back and hips beginning to protest, her blue aquarium-issue shirt soaked now from neck to navel. When the tentacles appear, it’s with a drama that seems to demand a sound track: the suction cups expanding and contracting with audible pinches and pops, sliding along the window with a sureness no terrestrial appendage could ever possess. When she first came to Monterey, she despised it. She found it cold and sad, especially compared with Southeast Asia. But first impressions are rarely final ones, and now this town is, without rival, the most beautiful place she’s ever seen. And so it is with the octopus. At first, Margot’s existence is repellent, the tips of the octopus’s tentacles curling backward in dismay. But then love strikes like lightning: the octopus rising from the tank using Margot’s body as leverage, its skin blossoming from orange to red, an orange-black quality to the way it inhales and exhales through its flapping siphon. A ballet of braided limbs, swirling together and apart and together again as if choreographed. She begins to laugh—not in the manner of an old woman, but in the manner of a child who has just seen something intended for adults—and by the time it’s all over, she’s happy and sure. Not everything about it was bad, she tells him, despite how badly it ended, and here’s the proof: this map of the octopus’s progress, this Morse code of angered capillaries, these small red kisses on her skin.
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 instea
d 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.
Monterey Bay Page 15
