Monterey Bay(29)

Inside, she found a similar strangeness. She had been to working-class parties before, she had witnessed their pandemonium. This, however, was a new breed. Men and women assaulting each other before falling into prolonged embraces. Clothes dropping away with neither shame nor exuberance, but with the instinctual, businesslike inevitability of snake-shed skin. There was an old hobo squatting on the beer crate and pretending to read an upside-down volume by Hegel, a woman wearing a sardine net as a dress, sheaves of typewritten pages turning to a beer-soaked pulp beneath dozens of stamping feet. And then there were the people not contributing to the melee but observing it instead. They stood in the corner near the file cabinet; they were urbane, well groomed, remote. One of them in particular—a busty woman with lacquered blond hair—seemed particularly detached, looking down on the scene in sleepy amusement, cooling herself with a fan that had been folded from one of Margot’s best sketches.

Enraged, Margot began to struggle through the crowd until a large form blocked her path.

“Don’t worry. He’s already hidden the good ones away.”

She looked up. Steinbeck was heavy eyed and nearly motionless, the stiffness of his posture that of someone who was either completely sober or just moments from blacking out. The last time she had seen him he had been so vengeful, so irate. Now, under the influence of what was probably a gallon of beer, he seemed to have softened to her, or at least to the idea of her eventual reappearance.

“They’re all good.” She crossed her arms in front of her chest. “And I wasn’t worried.”

“Well, you have that look about you. Like you’re sizing everything up and figuring out how much you can get for it.”

Instead of replying, she indicated the woman, who was now using the sketch to blot her lipstick.

“Tell her to stop that.”

“Oh, she won’t listen. She’s an actress. Here from L.A., on account of that goddamn movie.” He clutched the sides of his waist. “She and her friends told me I’m getting fat, and I’m absolutely terrified they’re right.”

“Is Ricketts here?”

“Girls. Booze. Where else would he be?”

With that, he made his way back into the pit of the mob. She followed. It was crucial, suddenly, to feel that she wasn’t succumbing to the pull of masses but fighting against it instead, and the music seemed to agree. It had been slow and rhythmic upon her entrance, but now it was emitting the high, bright squeals of an experimental style of jazz, the partygoers responding as if controlled by it. For a moment, she was afraid of being dragged underfoot and trampled. But as Steinbeck led her toward the kitchen, she remained completely untouched. Despite the density and animation of the crowd, she was able to move autonomously, securely, as if she were separated from the others by a thick yet invisible pane of something far more durable than glass.

When she and Steinbeck were a yard or two from their destination, a projectile sailed through the kitchen doorway and onto the dance floor.

“Watch out,” Steinbeck groaned, continuing to push forward.

“Was that a steak?”

“There’s no controlling them unless they’re properly fed.”

Another steak flew past her face and into the herd. She pressed herself against the wall.

“And it’s nice of Ed,” he admitted, “if a little lavish. Usually it’s just a few cans of sardines, but I suppose he’s feeling reckless tonight.”

“Reckless?”

Steinbeck couldn’t hear her, though. The crowd’s excitement had grown too fierce, too deafening, so she just stood there and watched as half a dozen more steaks were flung through the doorway. For the next several minutes, there was audible chewing and swallowing, greasy hands wiping themselves on greasy shirts, mouths opening and closing around bottles and jugs, an endless volley of belches harmonizing to the music, which had changed yet again, this time to a wistful, foreign duet of singer and mandolin. A man in a woman’s bathrobe began waltzing with a coatrack. The blond actress continued to look on, smug and immaculate.

“Beer?” Steinbeck asked.

“No.”

“You’ll want to reconsider that at some point.”

And then he turned away, stomping heavily toward his rocking chair, the crowd trying and failing to eliminate his looming shape from view.

She looked in the direction of the kitchen. She sucked in her stomach and started walking. He would be inside, she told herself, standing in front of a fry pan, cloaked in fat and steam. But the kitchen was empty, so she spun around and scanned the front room, and that’s when she saw him. He was moving quickly, past the desk and the file cabinet, past the fern in the Coast Guard buoy. She shouted his name, but he didn’t seem to notice. Instead, he kept his head down, his expression both cheerful and pensive as he hurried out the rear door, an earthenware bowl in hand.

She followed, fighting what she knew was an idiot’s smile. Outside, the night blinded her. On her journey down the hill, the streetlights had glowed yellow, obscuring the absence of the moon. Now the darkness seemed saturated, absolute, the densest fog she had ever seen settled over the land and water, the moisture in the air so thick she could feel it beading on her arms like sweat, clinging to the hairs and making her shine like something that had just recently been plucked from the sea. She was standing on a narrow balcony. Beneath her was a strange hybrid of a space: a back lot that merged seamlessly with the ocean and that was framed on two sides by the towering walls of adjacent canneries. The area closest to the lab was marked with a grid of concrete tanks, some of which had wooden lids, some of which did not. On top of one of the lidded tanks sat a bald man and his gaunt, homely female companion, their heads surrounded by a cloud of fragrant smoke. Wormy, the woman who had been there on Margot’s first two visits to the lab, stood beside them. And Ricketts was leaning on the next tank over, the earthenware bowl perched on the tank’s uncovered rim, a beer in one hand and a chunk of raw meat in the other.