“Would you like some?” he asked.
“No.”
He tossed the bag over the railing and into a waiting cluster of sea lions, who ripped the bag to shreds and swallowed the candies whole.
She looked at the sky. Somehow, it had become dusk.
“Are you expected at home?”
“No,” she replied.
“Me neither.”
So they continued the pilgrimage together, following the railroad tracks until, at the shared border of Monterey and Pacific Grove, they came to a stop.
“What’s going on here?” she asked.
There were lanterns everywhere: lanterns in every window of every big, cakelike Victorian home, lanterns casting an eerie orange flicker onto the black streets.
“Let’s go,” he pleaded.
“Not yet.”
And when the parade started, she wanted an explanation, but Tino refused, so she asked a fellow onlooker. The celebration, the onlooker said, was a local tradition that had been popular at the turn of the century but that for the past few decades had fallen a bit out of favor. He wasn’t sure of the exact details, but it didn’t really matter because the whole thing had been made up anyway: the story of the ancient Chinese queen who tried to drown herself rather than submit to her father’s desire for a tidy, profitable marriage of convenience. There was a brass band playing what sounded like a funeral dirge. There was a bejeweled bunch of white girls dressed as the queen and her royal court, waving at the crowd from a passing float. As for the actual Chinese, there was no trace of their presence. It was just the lanterns in the windows and the sardine boats in the bay, the land and sea white with fire, the earth’s skin a platinum cloak of heat and error.
“You’re in trouble, aren’t you?” Tino asked when the parade had ended, when most of the lanterns had been snuffed.
“I think so.”
“I’ll talk to my mother. She knows the right people.”
She hesitated and tried to think clearly. But she no longer knew how. She no longer knew the difference between a promise and a coercion.
“Please do.”
“She’ll need payment, though.”
She reached into her satchel and withdrew the canister of film.
“She’ll find this interesting.”
He took the canister and gave it a little shake.
“And for you?” she asked.
“I don’t need anything.”
“I insist.”
He thought for a moment and then glanced in the direction of the hill.
“One last portrait,” he said.
And it was the last one, she told herself as they entered his father’s sickroom, as Tino climbed into bed alongside him. After this, she would never put pencil to paper ever again. She would never create a single thing. Because what was the point? What was the point in the face of such sadness: Tino curled up against the one man who might have shown him a different way to be, his father so drunk on pain and the medication that was supposed to relieve it that, despite the presence of an audience, he was visibly terrified at having been left to die alone.
An hour later, she found herself standing outside the lab.
The door was locked for once, so she let herself in through the bedroom window. Inside, she listened for a while to make sure no one else was there, and then she sat on the bed. Then she wandered into the front room and lowered herself into the chair behind the desk. She pushed her hands against her ears, but the voices were too loud to silence, too big to suppress, so she went back to the bedroom. She lay flat on the bed and watched as night achieved its full expression, as the day’s mute circus packed up and set off for parts darker and unknown. She watched the shadows on the street stamp a changing, conjoined pattern against the green curtains, the shapes heavy and absolute. There was an unfamiliar feeling between her legs that reminded her of the blank, breathtaking millisecond that occurs between pain’s infliction on the body and pain’s registration by the brain, and she tried to rub the feeling away, but to no avail. At dusk, she heard the sound of an automobile engine and went to the window to see if it was the Buick, but it was not. And although the prominent feeling was one of queasiness—that of having accidentally bathed in something other than water—there was also a sense of weird expansiveness. It was almost as if she could see everything from above, the entire town laid bare in all its segments, everyone confined to borders that had more to do with the quality of the light and air than the presence of any real boundaries, everyone holding down their territories as if armies would rise from the water and rob them of everything save the dense comfort of their own kind.
At around midnight, she heard the front door crash open. She set her jaw and didn’t move, even when her father appeared in the bedroom doorway, his suit rumpled, his face bent with rage.
“Get up,” he said.
“No.”
He approached the bed. He grabbed her by the wrist.
“Where did you get those photographs? Why did you give them to her?”
He yanked her to her feet. She fought, gripping the mattress and pulling herself back down.
“I don’t want to hurt you,” he pleaded.
She spit at him. His palm collided with one side of her face and then the other. When her nose began to bleed, he stepped away from the bed, his face frozen in fear and amazement.
“How could you?” he said, quietly this time, almost gently. “You were my life’s work.”
“No, I wasn’t,” she replied. “I was the thing that happened in spite of it.”
21
1998
THE OCTOPUS’S SUCCOR IS FLEETING.
This doesn’t surprise her, though. Relief is not dry land, but a moment on the tide charts, an interlude between drownings. There was a time when she didn’t know how to save herself, didn’t know how to swim back to shore. A long stretch of time—the 1950s through the 1970s—when, in the wake of the inevitable sardine decline, she would pace the remnants of Cannery Row and find herself at fault. Exhibits A through Z: the warehouse fires springing up twice a year as if on schedule, milk-eyed windows, graffiti-veined walls, weeds and pigeons, the abandonment made infinitely more unsettling by the small businesses that attempted to capitalize on the few visitors the Row continued to receive. A History of Monterey wax museum in which the models “breathed” via pneumatic lungs, an antique shop with nearly two hundred doll heads in the window, an art gallery selling coarsely executed oil paintings of naked people riding dolphins, a restaurant that consisted solely of a dented Weber and a trio of lawn chairs.
Worst of all was her father’s old cannery. It had come back into her possession, but she wasn’t sure what to do with it. The time wasn’t right. The world was far too satisfied in its conventionality and then far too satisfied in its iconoclasm, neither of which was ideal for what she had in mind. She found ways to pass the years: a marriage and a divorce, and then another round of both. She invested her father’s fortune and watched the original sum acquire a tail of self-replicating zeroes, the money sprouting like polyps. She made strategic donations to local causes, kissed the occasional rear end. She made the mistake of taking a course in business ethics at the local community college. She was elected and reelected to the city council. She invited Arthur and Tino to her house every so often and pretended to listen to them talk. For a while, she even thought about leaving town again, about finding somewhere entirely new: a language she didn’t know, a quality of light that confused her. But then—it was 1977; she recalls this distinctly because an aquarium called Ocean Park opened that year in Hong Kong—the tides began to change. Monterey began to lose its mind. It didn’t surprise her; she had always suspected that too many years beneath the region’s trademark variant of fog bore the potential not just of physical discomfort but of psychological damage, and now there were stories in the paper along these lines. The death of an otherwise unthreatening preteen, an empty swimming pool and a peaked roof and the great distance between
the two, the body of a young boy found in a house in Carmel Valley high up in the rattlesnake-infested hills, the Pebble Beach woman who, bruised and cut from nightly beatings, shot her husband in the cheek and then turned the gun on herself. Stories of a failed local restaurateur attempting to stave off financial ruin by hiring an Israeli contract killer to murder his wealthy parents in their sleep. Stories of a veterinarian in Seaside slaying two waitresses and having them secretly cremated alongside a Doberman named Fancy.
The entire peninsula, in other words, was breaking apart. And she was just the one to fix it.
So she finally began to set things in motion. Arthur and Tino were on board, as were the scientists at Hopkins, many of whom were persuaded to leave the institute to work alongside her. There was some generalized resistance at first, just as there had been in her father’s day. The fishing fleets feared the fickle interference of tourism; the historical preservationists wanted everything to stay the way they presumed Steinbeck would have wanted it; the residents of Monterey and Pacific Grove moaned about traffic and parking. Permits were another issue. The old cannery from which the aquarium was to be fashioned straddled the border of the two towns in question, which meant that permission had to be granted from each municipality, a bureaucratic quagmire that nearly derailed the project before it even began.
Work, then. Work unlike any that had come before, that made her apprenticeships to Anders and Ricketts seem frivolous in comparison. Dark mornings, sweaty afternoons, weepy nights. A cast of humans to manage, but also a cast of fish and plants, none of them quite as amenable as one would like. Lingcods devouring the black-eyed gobies, sea otters using any object within reach to make deep, irreparable gouges in the three-story acrylic windows, seven gill sharks bashing their snouts against the tank walls and refusing to eat unless a sushi-grade salmon steak was clipped to a pole, dangled directly beneath their mouths, and made to thrash around in imitation of a live fish. A sea turtle was acquired from an aquarium in Japan, its suspiciously low price explained when, after its painstaking installation into a million-gallon exhibit, it attempted to mate with one of the volunteer divers. And the turtle wasn’t the only one. The aquarists, too, couldn’t keep their hands off each other. Almost every time she went into the service corridors behind the tanks, she would find a new couple going at it in the darkness: up against the filters and fiberglass, shirts off, pants down, the fish bearing witness.
“It’s not an amusement park,” she told the offending aquarists as they stood before her, their hair mussed and their eyes lowered. “And I’m not amused.”
When it came to matters of aesthetics, however, no one needed much convincing. The architects understood perfectly, as did the exhibit designers. The old did not bow to the new, nor did the beautiful cave to the efficient, nor did money prove an object. The original system of overhead piping was preserved despite outrageous inconvenience and expense, as was the gigantic boiler, which was made an exhibit in its own right. When it was discovered that the whistle towers—the ones that had once summoned the cannery workers to the lines—would not survive the rigors of large-scale renovation, the originals were quietly demolished and precise fiberglass replicas were assembled and installed over the course of a single weekend. Floor tiles of sparkling gray quartzite were specially ordered from Mozambique. The font on the informational placards was designed on commission and then trademarked. Indulgences, she sometimes answered whenever the Herald came asking. Secretly, though, she knew it was something else entirely. A vision both enamored of and at odds with itself, a private need made public, a dream that had both everything and nothing to do with the waking life that had inspired it.
And then there was the matter of the ocean itself. It wouldn’t look good, she knew, for an immaculate aquarium to preside over the shores of a spoiled bay. So she began the long-overdue task of repairing the damage the canneries had once wrought. Anders’s schooling was key. Know a politician’s needs, he had advised her, and you’ll be more powerful than the politician. So she pulled her strings and called in her favors and it wasn’t long before environmental safeguards were recommended, legislation was written, and a sanctuary was established, the fishermen’s livelihoods now secondary—and rightfully so—to those of the fish.
Then, without warning, it was almost time. They were in the final phase of construction now, the crews laying the foundation for the sprawling outdoor deck and amphitheater. Because of the tides, this work couldn’t be done during the day, so she hired night laborers at an expense that seemed to necessitate supervision. Hidden in the darkness, she would stand there on concrete that was still semi-wet underfoot, her body held precariously aloft on ad hoc plywood “snowshoes,” and she would imagine the bay’s prehistory. She would watch the blowtorches spray and hiss, she would hear the pneumatic fire of the nail guns, and she would summon the gods, Greek in girth and temperament. How to make that first, submarine slice? A trident dragging across the earth’s skin and splitting it open. Out of wounds, something must flow or else it’s not really a wound. So, sulfur: sulfur spewing from huge, hollow columns, sulfur on which blind things began to feed. A richness to these depths, pea-soupy and sinister. A shift in temperature, a lightning strike of radical warmth, the gods of earth and sky finally taking an interest. The land carving Santa Cruz to the north, Pacific Grove to the south. The first inhalation of fog, the rich deepness rising. And then the feast. The filter feeders siphoned in whatever they could from their anchorages on the rocks. Fish, big and small, gorged themselves silly. Whales, too, blues and grays and humpbacks, suckling calves in tow. The blood shadows of sharks and sea lions, teeth snapping at the periphery. Then, the people. Only a few of them at first: a calm, resourceful tribe who ate the sea urchins straight from the tide pools and used their spiny tests as currency. Then, visitors from elsewhere, harbingers of thievery and sickness and faith. Gold, otters, squid, sardines, oil: bait for a new worship. And standing there on the deck, on the black edge of her own creation, she knew. She knew she was not one of the people summoned by the gods. She was a god herself. Angry, jealous, impulsive, cruel, but also possessed of more than a little magic, more than a little immortality. If she waved a hand across the water, actual waves would rise up in response. If she bled into the bay, it would start to boil. If she gave enough of herself, this town would love her even more than it loved its own children.
But then it was opening day and she wasn’t a god anymore. She wasn’t untouchable or vengeful or brave. In fact, she could barely approach the aquarium without panicking, much less go inside of it. So for the first few weeks, she did everything remotely. She attended meetings by phone. She wore out her fax machine. She had someone bring her the daily security tapes so she could watch them at home. She watched the fish and waited for them to give her courage. But, in the end, it was the people who convinced her. The looks on their faces. The fire in their eyes. They all understood exactly what she meant. They had all broken through.
So now what more is there to do? In the years since his death, she hasn’t been shattered, she hasn’t been chaste. He always hated old women, their bad smells and their thin lips, and she does, too. Tonight, however, she will share a bed with someone far better looking than she, far younger, and it’s not on account of her beauty, which existed for only five months: from November 1939 through March 1940. What matters are her accomplishments and the strength of character that enabled them, although sometimes she wonders. She wonders about the women, both old and young. She wonders what her mother would have said. She wonders about Wormy. She imagines the face of her father’s first love. She considers the acts of Giana Agnelli and aches with understanding. She never wanted to join their ranks and still doesn’t. But that doesn’t mean she would object to them joining hers. Follow me down the stairs, she would say. Watch your step. And then they would work side by side to empty the china hutch, place the jars on the garage’s dirt floor, and arrange the specimens however they damn well pleased.
22<
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1948
A LEAP YEAR THAT SEEMED, FOR ONCE, TO DESERVE the extra day. An entire nation gripped by a sizzling postwar enthusiasm, endless cocktails and endless car rides, huge vehicles grinding through countrysides that were just now being chopped up into the staging grounds of modern suburbia.
The death of Anders Fiske, therefore, felt poorly timed on many levels. He would have been able, Margot reasoned, to harness this new dynamism in surprising and productive and potentially revolutionary ways. But his life was cut short in Colorado Springs when he choked to death on a bison steak that had been raised on a plot of grassland he had purchased in prescient anticipation of both a booming alternative-meat market and his impending retirement in the mountains; and this was how she found herself at his grave site with only his recently hired secretary for company, the Rockies looming at their backs like guests that had been invited to the funeral but hadn’t particularly wanted to come.
Later that night, the secretary joined her in the mountain cabin in which her father had met his end.
“You’re the boss now,” he said. “If you want to be.”
“I don’t,” she replied.
“So we’ll sell it off?”
“Yes, I think that’s best.”
She let the secretary finish his brandy, then showed him out. She watched the road until he disappeared from it, the door open to the darkness and cold, the landscape’s jagged miraculousness even more jagged and even more miraculous on account of the Milky Way’s prophetic presence overhead. She shivered. For a moment, she wished for her old clothes: the ones she had worn as a child, the sturdy trousers and stiff collars and woolen sweaters that had done such an exemplary job keeping out the elements, or at least camouflaging her physical response to them. But she hadn’t had the luxury of such things for quite some time. As counterintuitive as it seemed, living apart from her father’s supervision had required her to become more fragile—more feminine—not less, as if calling attention to her weaknesses made them harder for strangers to exploit. There was also the fact, jarringly realized, that the imitation of power is not the same as its acquisition. So it had been skirts and blouses for nearly eight years now, even the occasional dress. Clumsily, at first—sleeves too short, waistlines too loose, proportions all askew—but then her freshman-year roommate at Wellesley had doled out a morsel of sartorial charity, and soon she was passing for normal and then some. The way she looked was not only important; it was malleable. It could be as carefully planned and executed as the pictures she had once drawn, and she began to see herself in precisely this context: as a project not unlike the ones her father pursued.
Monterey Bay Page 18
