Monterey Bay(25)

And the fog. The fog. Always the fog. It was the most persistent phenomenon, meteorologic or otherwise, she had ever seen. Each morning as she stepped out onto the porch, there it was. Occasionally, it burned off in the afternoons to reveal a porcelain-like blue, but most of the time it stayed put, causing each passing hour, each passing day, to appear identical to the one before it. In any other instance, it would have been intolerable. Here, however, it meant something. It was a blank canvas on which she could envision a huge and glorious design, an abstract blueprint of her future inside the lab. With each new creature she was asked to draw, she could feel her desire taking shape again, her earlier doubts fading into something as useless and desiccated as the squid tentacle, which, after she had finished drawing it, had been kicked off the porch and into the dirt beneath the bougainvillea. And it was only a matter of time, she reassured herself whenever it caught her eye. Only a matter of time until she was once again in the center of things, until the right opportunity presented itself, until she could reclaim what had been promised her and unpack it with gratitude and greed.

“Once you hit bottom, you have to start running along the ocean floor. You have to run or else they’ll have time to hide in the rocks. And then there are the sea otters, which are another problem entirely.”

She lifted her pencil and made a critique. Yes, success was imminent, but it wouldn’t be easy, especially with work this deceptively simple. Seeing an object, isolated and context free, and then drawing it: a path that looked flat and straight on the map but that, once traveled, proved itself aggressively otherwise. The abalone, for instance. Its shell was correct—big, rough, oblong—but its foot was not, so she turned to a fresh page and began again.

“And that’s why you should never trust Chileans. Because what they call an abalone is actually a rock snail, even though—”

Arthur fell abruptly silent. She continued drawing.

“Look,” he resumed. “Down the hill.”

Reluctantly, she lifted her eyes from the paper. Her father was making the climb to the house, which wouldn’t have been remarkable except for two things. First, he was returning midday instead of in the evening: a dramatic disruption to his usual routine. Second, he was not alone. He was flanked by a woman and a boy, the sight of whom caused Arthur to fidget with nervousness. They didn’t move like rich people, she noticed as the visitors continued to ascend, but they took great pains to dress like it: in clothing as well made as it was ill suited to even the mildest exertion. The woman, especially, seemed atrociously uncomfortable in her high-necked linen dress, the crisp fabric wilted with perspiration and clinging to her round limbs like butcher paper. She clutched a delicate straw boater in one substantial fist. The other fist dabbed at her forehead with a pink silk handkerchief, using the sort of care normally lavished on an open sore. She was panting from the effort of the climb but laughing, too, which produced something akin to the noise of the cannery whistles.

The boy, however, didn’t make a sound. Like the woman, he was dressed in a way that indicated a specific type of masochism, but he didn’t seem nearly as amused by it. His shoulders were hunched, his hands were clenched, and on his pale, sunken, strangely pious face was the pained expression of a convalescent forced from his sickbed instead of being allowed to die in peace.

“Oh no,” Arthur said.

“Who are they?”

The trio came to a stop at the foot of the porch. She closed the sketchbook and wedged the pencil between its pages. Her father gave Arthur an obscure half smile and then turned to Margot.

“Allow me to introduce Mrs. Agnelli, my new business partner.” He was speaking slowly and deliberately, giving his subtext ample time to sink in. “While we’re inside, I trust you’ll entertain her son, Tino.”

Tino gave what Egon Schiele might have deemed a smile.

“I’ll do my best,” Margot said.

Anders escorted the woman up the porch steps and into the house. Arthur exhaled loudly. Tino remained standing in the street, his gaze aimed sullenly at the treetops. Margot opened her sketchbook and began working again. The interruption was inconsequential, she told herself; she would return to her sketches undeterred. But the sudden urge to do something decisive and physical was too strong, so she drew back her hand and lined it up with the bucket. A slapping contest, as Ricketts would have said, that would send the abalone down into the dirt alongside the tentacle. Before she could make contact, however, a cannery whistle was sounding and Arthur was jumping to his feet.

“I’ll be back,” he said.

“No hurry.”

“Tomorrow?”

“If we must.”

He gave a manic smile and what almost looked like a curtsy, then sprinted down the hill twice as fast as the neighboring workers. When he had disappeared from view, Tino cracked his neck and unbuttoned his topcoat with a flicker of his thin-fingered hand. One eye seemed to be studying her sketchbook while the other eye scanned the perimeter of the house.

“My mother’s people should stop torturing him.” He sighed. “He’ll end up just like my father.”

She remembered the Sicilian women with their cigarettes: a school of sharks toying with their next meal.

“Your mother owns the Del Mar cannery,” she guessed.

“Indeed.”

“Is my father buying that one, too?”