Monterey Bay(48)

She scowled and shrank down into her collar. His mood was worse than usual tonight, callous and sarcastic and fierce, and there was a part of her that longed to fire back with a barb of her own. But she remained silent as they moved away from the house and in the direction of the wharf, the night sky reminiscent of an El Greco.

She, too, felt on edge. She had acquired so many of Ricketts’s specimens that she didn’t know what to do with them. Before, when her income had been modest and her orders small, she had had the boxes shipped to a nonexistent address in Chicago. But then, as her portraiture took its darker turn and her profits spiked, she was forced to deal with the shipments at their source. She instructed Tino to bribe one of his mother’s men on the railway, who destroyed the boxes instead of loading them: a solution she knew to be temporary. Any day now, the volume would become too great, the specimens too interesting, the curiosity of their hired conspirator too intense, and she would be required to handle things another way. She began to covet spaces for their existing size and quality. Her father’s cannery, for instance. It was a building so vast, it could have easily concealed every specimen she could ever hope to buy, every specimen Ricketts could ever hope to kill, its functionality as a hiding place so theoretically perfect, it almost hurt her to look at it.

There was also the matter of Arthur, just as her father had implied. Lately, his company had become incessant, his affection full of strident concern. He appeared at the house each morning in order to escort her to the Row; he appeared at the lab each afternoon in order to escort her back home. During the day, whenever she thought she was alone behind Ricketts’s desk, he would materialize at odd and inconvenient times, his smiles too quick, his frowns too broad, the mere fact of his presence annihilating whatever concentration she was able to summon.

Then there was the lab’s other male hanger-on: Steinbeck. Before, the writer’s attentions had been sporadic and mildly resentful, as if Margot were a small pile of dog shit he couldn’t quite keep himself from stepping in. Recently, however, he had become as vicious as on the morning they’d first met. He would groan at the mere sight of her. He would sit in the rocking chair and scrutinize her as she worked, his gaze hateful and unsparing. Arthur would sometimes make excuses for him, but Margot knew the truth. Steinbeck’s anger was real and his envy was justified and she felt sorry for him, but not nearly enough to follow a different course of action.

Ricketts was the real problem, though: the one that made her stomach buckle, her chest hurt. Two days after their trip to the slough, Wormy disappeared from the lab. No excuses were made for this, no explanations offered. She was simply there one day and gone the next, which pleased Margot immensely until she realized the consequences. Wormy’s absence weakened Ricketts like an illness. He began to drink more than usual and wander the coastline in his Buick. Sometimes he invited Margot on his sojourns: poorly planned excursions hunting for specimens they didn’t quite need, carrying picnic lunches that would go uneaten, finding a mostly level, mostly concealed patch of ground on which to up the ante of their pseudoromance. She learned about nuance. She learned that not everything in life could be self-taught. She learned that there was a place several miles down the coast, on the tip of Big Sur’s Hurricane Point, where the southern sea otter, once thought to be hunted to extinction, had made a small yet triumphant comeback.

“I’d like to build something here,” she said, standing alongside him on a ledge above the water. The wind was almost strong enough to rip out the manzanita bushes by their roots. A mother otter and her pup were trussed up in the kelp beneath the cliff, enduring the swells with tucked chins and closed eyes. It smelled like sage and wet stone, and there were cattle in the distance, diligently picking their way down the uneven hillside. Behind them, hidden in the land’s damp folds, were redwood groves, dense and soundproof.

“If I didn’t know better”—he slurred—“I’d say you enjoy being uncomfortable.”

In reply, she pulled him down into the dirt and tasted the alcohol on his tongue.

And it was on that afternoon that a difficult notion occurred to her. It was entirely possible that, all this time, she had been aiming for the wrong thing. She had assumed that having him was a goal in and of itself, that the fact of the capture would provide her with all the satisfaction she would ever need. But now she was wondering if what really mattered was what occurred after. Their bodies were joined now, several times a week. His mind, however, still resided in a place she would never be able to visit, except as a tourist.

Her only clarity, therefore, was in her work, and in this sense she had never been more successful. With the exception of her and Ricketts’s field trips, her days were split precisely down the middle, anesthetizing and preserving his collections in the morning, drawing them in the afternoon, a schedule as predictable as the tides. In the garage, the air was rough with menthol and brine, her blood warming with each little death; behind the desk, she would perform her artistic resurrections. During these times, she could almost forget how awful it was to be in love. It was only at night on the horsehair sofa that the truth came to her: the day’s disappointments lurking, her adoration of him and her abhorrence of herself so suffocating, so monotonous, that it felt like a measurable physical weight. It made her want to give up entirely, to never go down the hill again, to remain in the house until her father’s work was done and it was time to leave Monterey for good. But then she would remember the mud, the otters, the smells of sage and stone. She would remember how much money could be made and how much power forged in the gratification of primitive desires. She would remember her father’s teachings about persistence and worth, cowardice and heroism, and she would find herself descending the hill yet again, wondering if today was the day when she would kill the animal or draw the corpse that would finally tip the scales, that would bear a fruit that wasn’t so outrageously small and bitter.