Monterey Bay(47)
And how perfect, she realized now, to have two names for the same thing, each of them nonsensical based on your perspective. The streets in Manila had been like this. They had had an official name that appeared on the maps, but also a colloquial name to which the locals obstinately clung. In Monterey it was like this, too: Ocean View Avenue, Cannery Row. And then there was the woman who had wanted a nude portrait of herself, her impulses so desperate and broad, Margot had almost pitied her. Now, as she opened her satchel with loose, prune-y hands, the pity was gone. She sharpened her pencil with the penknife, which was still flecked with dried blood. And the sketches that ensued were things that could have been hung in museums, but never in family homes: exotic, acrobatic pairings that showed not only lust and its aftermath, but also the void in which lust occurred. This time, there were no corners cut, no edges blurred. This was the harsh, contained, ancient survivalism of the tide pools, but magnified into human dimensions, its beauty that of the huge, disembodied tentacle: invisible to everyone except those who felt compelled to seek it.
The following Sunday, four weeks to the day after first acceding to Tino’s offer, she stood with him on the church steps again, just as before.
“You’ll be able to find some buyers for these, I assume.” She handed him her most recent portfolio, her confidence half-feigned. It was ugly and sad, she feared suddenly, to put one’s private thoughts so clearly on display. As he skimmed through the images and recognized their pornographies, however, her uncertainty faded. A redness was rising into his neck and across his face, his expression soft and awed.
“These are all men with women. Can you do men with men? And the other way, too?”
She nodded.
“We’ll sell out within a day,” he replied.
And he was right.
16
1998
IT’S NOT NECESSARY ANYMORE, AND SHE WANTS him to know it.
There was a time when it was fuel. There was a time when she was certain that, in its absence, she might stall out midjourney, just like his old Buick. Now, however, the machine is one that feeds itself, that offers pleasures other than the punitive. If anything, the love she once felt for him is like one of those chronic diseases that starts with the letter L: lupus or Lyme. She can go weeks, months, years, without an outbreak, but then something weakens her defenses—usually a dream—and suddenly he’s with her again, offering old flatteries, opening old wounds.
Which is precisely why she’s come to the cephalopod gallery, the room behind the octopus tank. Darkness and silence. Raised, plastic-grated flooring. A ceiling so low that her head almost touches the water pipes above. If Anders ever taught her anything of value, which she doubts, it’s this: the price of hesitation. So she wastes no time. She submerges herself from fingertip to shoulder. She scratches the fiberglass rockwork that lines the back of the tank. At first, nothing. But then an almost imperceptible shift from somewhere within the rockwork, a series of telltale flashes from the cameras on the other side of the glass. She leans forward as far as she can, her back and hips beginning to protest, her blue aquarium-issue shirt soaked now from neck to navel. When the tentacles appear, it’s with a drama that seems to demand a sound track: the suction cups expanding and contracting with audible pinches and pops, sliding along the window with a sureness no terrestrial appendage could ever possess. When she first came to Monterey, she despised it. She found it cold and sad, especially compared with Southeast Asia. But first impressions are rarely final ones, and now this town is, without rival, the most beautiful place she’s ever seen. And so it is with the octopus. At first, Margot’s existence is repellent, the tips of the octopus’s tentacles curling backward in dismay. But then love strikes like lightning: the octopus rising from the tank using Margot’s body as leverage, its skin blossoming from orange to red, an orange-black quality to the way it inhales and exhales through its flapping siphon. A ballet of braided limbs, swirling together and apart and together again as if choreographed. She begins to laugh—not in the manner of an old woman, but in the manner of a child who has just seen something intended for adults—and by the time it’s all over, she’s happy and sure. Not everything about it was bad, she tells him, despite how badly it ended, and here’s the proof: this map of the octopus’s progress, this Morse code of angered capillaries, these small red kisses on her skin.
17
1940
“IT SEEMS TO ME,” ANDERS SAID, PULLING HIS topcoat tight against the fog, “that love is in the air.”
“Pardon?”
“And I’m sure he’s a fine young man. Smart, loyal, hardworking. Although he could certainly stand to do something about that hair. Remind me of his name.”
She looked down at her shoes, at their sea-hardened leather. They had just crossed Lighthouse Avenue and were walking alongside the train tracks now, passing over a smelly bit of earth where, on her way to Ricketts’s lab that morning, she had seen the hobo from the party pleasuring himself in the weeds.
“Arthur.”
“That’s right,” her father scoffed. “Well, I caution him to remain gentlemanly, but otherwise, I give him my blessing. He suits you far better than that Agnelli boy. I should have seen that from the outset.”