Monterey Bay(34)

“But a crab looks nothing like a fish,” she muttered. “And a fish looks nothing like a snail. Or haven’t you noticed?”

“You sound like the boys over at Hopkins.”

“You mean the real scientists? The ones who know what they’re doing?”

“For your information,” Ricketts replied, his tone still alarmingly good-natured, “they keep my specimen catalogs on their shelves. They use them for their graduate course work.”

He blinked and grinned. She didn’t desire her father’s intrusion, not in the least. She did, however, desire his clarity, his confidence, his brutal adherence to a system that had long since been praised and proven.

“I’m going back inside,” she said.

“Absolutely not. You’ll do it right today. Even if it kills me.”

She set her jaw and met his gaze, trying to hold it for several seconds longer than usual, to finally extract something from it. He was already on the move, though, approaching the shark tanks and beginning to inspect each one in turn, seemingly oblivious to her company. For the next few minutes, she just stood there, watching. Once or twice, she tried to stop herself. She tried to do something that would convey the presence of her free will and the absence of an infatuation so deep, it had begun to border on servitude. But it was hopeless. All she could do was marvel at him: the air gathering around him as he studied his captives, the world shimmering beneath his single-mindedness, eliminating everything in its periphery.

The saddest part was that on the first morning of her apprenticeship here, she had assumed it would be easy. Bolstered by her triumph on the night of the party, she had entered the lab without knocking, eager to see the look of surprise on his face, the surprise morphing into delight. Instead, she was met with an empty room, the whole place completely abandoned save for a selection of preserved tide pool creatures already lined up on the desk, inert and perfect in their jars of yellow fluid. On the seat of the desk chair was a note written in a somewhat feminine hand, detailing both the manner in which the specimens should be portrayed and the full contents of the kitchen in case she got hungry. She sat down and tried to work but found herself unable. Her eyes wandered away from her papers at every opportunity, divining the clues that, if assembled in the right order, would help to shrink the distance between her body and his. She wanted to stand up, jump around, knock things from the shelves. She had, however, made herself certain promises: detachment, maturity, indifference, restraint. So she forced herself to remain behind the desk, her only concession to her weaker impulses the occasional visit to his bathroom, where she would stare at herself in the mirror and perform the sorts of actions that, until now, she had always considered wasteful and sad: the fluffing of hair, the pinching of cheeks, the releasing of the top two buttons of her shirt, anything to ensure her attractiveness when he eventually found her sitting there with his jars, one living body among the dead.

The morning came and went and still he failed to appear. At around noon, she put her sketches into an immaculate pile and rose from the desk. She went into the kitchen and cut a chunk of salami from the links that hung above the stove top like stalactites. She opened a can of the same sort of sardines her father either was or was not in the process of canning. She washed one of the dirty glasses in the sink and filled it from a pitcher of milk in the icebox. Then she took her meal out to the balcony that overlooked the shark tanks and the shoreline, and that’s when she finally saw them: Steinbeck and Ricketts and Wormy, all of them out as far as the tide allowed, all of them bent over the same patch of water as if whatever was inside of it required three grown humans to successfully subdue.

Her lunch forgotten, she descended the stairs to the back lot and positioned herself in the most obvious spot: sitting on one of the lidded concrete tanks, faced in their direction. She could hear Ricketts guiding the others as they rummaged through the water and filled their buckets. Occasionally, there was a small spark of excitement or humor: a rogue wave dousing them with spray, a slapstick stumble on the rocks, a sea cucumber eviscerating itself onto Wormy’s hands, Steinbeck insisting he had been bitten by a periwinkle until Ricketts reminded him that on a purely technical level, periwinkles didn’t have teeth but, rather, a rasplike tongue called a radula that was used to scrape algae from the rocks. Otherwise, it was meditative in the extreme, the spell unbroken until, about an hour into Margot’s observations, Wormy suddenly looked up from the water and into her eyes. It wasn’t a long glance and it wasn’t a combative one. But it was enough to make her retrieve her lunch and return to the lab, mortified.

“Don’t mind me.”

Arthur was rocking in Steinbeck’s chair, one of Ricketts’s essays sitting on his lap.

“I won’t,” she replied.

She put her dishes in the kitchen sink and reclaimed her place behind the desk. Before stopping for lunch, she had been sketching a clownish, misshapen little gastropod called a sea hare, and now, as she resumed the task, she could feel the cold, unwelcome spark of Arthur’s surveillance.

“They mate in orgies, if you can believe it. Hundreds of them sometimes. Right there on the seafloor. They’re hermaphrodites, so it doesn’t really matter if—”

She looked at him sternly. When he scratched his scalp, she could hear sand falling from his hair and onto the manuscript.

“Have you read that before?”