Monterey Bay(43)

“You’re sure about the knife?” he asked, noting the inscription.

“Yes. I’m sure.”

The next Sunday was the same: up and down the hilltop streets, in and out of small, dark, overdecorated parlors, curtains drawn to conceal the net-tanning cauldrons out back, garages open to reveal the chrome-limned shadows of new cars. One of her clients—all of whom were women, most of whom bore a passing resemblance to Mrs. Agnelli—offered her a sip of anise liqueur, which she smelled but didn’t drink. Another client was so satisfied with Margot’s rendering of the suggestive look on her face that she took off her blouse and asked Margot to continue farther south, to which Margot agreed until she reached the breast region and found her pencil frozen in unexpected horror. On the third Sunday, when she ran out of good paper and her last pencil had worn itself to a nub, Tino was dispatched to the store on Alvarado for supplies, and so it went until the sky dimmed and the families gathered for dinner. Alone on the street now, the two of them returned to the steps of the church and stood there for a moment in silence. It was the time of day Margot had always liked least: dusk, everything too sharp, everything too orange, the day’s accomplishments, no matter how grand, withering under the aspersions cast by the sun’s dying light. Nevertheless, the sense of achievement was electric. All these homes. Not only had she been inside them, she had left something of herself within. She had shaped these dwellings in a way that was more than just transactional, in a way that was apparent only to her. Power and possibility and beauty, and this time it wouldn’t be taken from her.

“Can you get the penknife back?” she asked Tino as the sun set into the bay, its vermilion snuffed like a candle.

“Consider it done.”

Now, as the Buick began to sputter, she traced the outline of the penknife through the leather of the satchel and watched Ricketts guide the car onto the road’s dusty shoulder.

“Goddamn it.” He gave the dashboard a little slap. “Arthur told me it was fixed.”

He leapt from the car and peered under the hood. From the other side of the windshield, she couldn’t see the whole of him, just a collection of representative parts: his shoulders in his cotton shirt, the back of his sunburned neck. The bay wasn’t visible from this stretch of highway. Rather, it was artichoke and lettuce fields as far as the eye could see: hypnotic, gray-green striations of them. The sky seemed to be fighting for its blueness, the sun for its warmth. She crossed her ankles and buttoned up her vest, watching the two flaps meet and merge with a mental click. If there was any downside to the past several days of near-constant sketching, it was this: the clicks, the machine-symphony of verification when two shapes joined correctly. Usually, it was something she could turn on and off at will, but it no longer seemed voluntary. The shape-clicks now sounded whether she summoned them or not. Even worse, the colors were mixing themselves without her instruction or permission: a phenomenon that seemed to intensify in Ricketts’s presence. The car was repaired now and they were back on the road, but it didn’t feel like they were moving. Rather, it felt like the world beyond the windshield was outlining itself, smudging itself, and filling itself in with browns and greens and blues while she remained perfectly separate from the process, perfectly still.

When the scenery finally became inert, she looked over at Ricketts. He had brought the Buick to another stop: intentional this time.

“Where are we?” she asked

“Elkhorn Slough. About twenty miles up the coast.” He exited the car and she followed. “There are some canneries over there on the island, just like on the Row. And rumor has it they’re going to build an honest-to-goodness harbor here. A wharf even bigger than the one in Monterey.”

As he opened the trunk and began to unload it, she tried and failed to appraise the property without imagining how she’d draw it. A pocket of brackish marshland, an estuary snaking through the low, dry hills before slipping into the mouth of an industrial marina. A series of conjoined mud flats, clusters of yelping gulls, a dense patch of pickleweed separating the land from the water.

Then she considered Ricketts’s face. He was still happy, but not as happy as he had been inside the lab.

“If the harbor was a good idea,” she said, “it would have happened already.”

“Excellent point.” He gave her a bucket of bait. “The same can probably be said for their plans for a power plant and a yacht club.”

“Maybe the power plant. But not the yacht club.”

“I’m glad you think so, because I don’t have a yacht. Just a canoe.”

“You don’t even have that.”

“Guess again.”

He pointed to the pickleweed, in which she now perceived the shadow of an elongated wooden watercraft.

“Technically, you’re right. It’s not mine.” He went over to the vessel and began extracting it from its hiding place. “But Manuel’s more than happy to let me borrow it, provided we bring him back a bat ray.”

“He’s a collector, too?”

“No. He uses a cookie cutter to punch little circles from their wings. Then he fries them up and sells them to tourists who think they’re eating scallops.”

She wasn’t sure if she was supposed to laugh, so she didn’t.

“Bow or stern?” he asked, when the canoe had been packed with gear and carried to the waterline.