Monterey Bay(52)

“We don’t do our best collecting out here, to tell you the truth,” he continued. “He prefers a spot in Pacific Grove, technically beyond the boundary of Monterey Bay. I’m sure he’s shown you by now.”

“No. He hasn’t.”

He nodded, as if noting something and filing it away for future use.

“Why are you being nice to me?” she asked.

“Wormy’s back. I thought you should know. She’s in the bedroom.”

“With Ricketts.”

“That’s right.”

She took another sip. It still tasted bitter, but this time in a way that seemed to suggest something. “She knows what she’s doing.”

“She sure does,” he replied.

“You sound angry.”

“No, I don’t,” he grumbled. “I’m in favor of sex. I like it. It’s just that I expected a bit more from Ed. I thought he was too smart for small distractions. I thought he enjoyed our little conspiracy against Venus. But I suppose the good days never last, which is precisely why they’re good.”

And where, exactly, did these strange urges come from? she wondered. Why did she want to run into the lab, not in search of Ricketts this time, but in search of Arthur and his stricken reliability? Such an unfair, unwanted ache, as if her body were now host to needs and unions she had never considered before, that had always been rejected purely on account of their unfamiliar color and volume. Steinbeck, she knew, felt it, too, but in a different way. There was the young woman inside with her big, stupid smile, but there was also Ricketts, the potential of love incompatible with love’s actual existence.

“You’ll write about him?” she asked.

He looked at her with heavy eyes. “How can I not?”

“Are those essays any good?”

“Yes. But they’ll never get published.”

“Have you told him that?”

“No. It would crush him.”

“He seems pretty resilient to me.”

“Well, then you don’t know him at all. I shouldn’t be telling you this, especially since I’ve been against your little dalliance from the beginning. But for a while there, when Wormy was missing, he wanted another loan from me. He said that for a few extra thousand, in addition to all the money he’s been making on your mysterious dogfish orders, he could purchase a little parcel of land in Big Sur. A place right off of Hurricane Point. He said he could imagine building a house there. And living in it with you.”

He gave a long, baritone sigh and then chucked his beer bottle into the sea.

“What do I do now?” she asked, brain on fire.

“Well, I don’t tend to give advice, especially to people I don’t particularly like, but try not to take it too hard. You’re different and maybe even a little bit evil, and talent like yours is a lonely, sickening thing. Someday, though, you’ll find your own spot, a place where you can burrow in with a handful of souls who don’t make you feel like the world’s ending. And suddenly there you’ll be. Home.”

She watched the beer bottle come back in on a wave and rebound hollowly against a rock.

“Do you know where I can find a camera?” she asked.

“There’s one in the garage. Right next to all those goddamn vials of shark liver oil.”

And then she started laughing. She knew it was a bad sound—unnatural and spooky, just like Mrs. Agnelli’s—but she couldn’t stop, even when Steinbeck recoiled in confusion. She couldn’t stop when he left her alone at the water’s edge, or when she slunk into the garage like a chastened animal and found it there, just as he had promised: a Kodak 35 Rangefinder, still in its box, a canister of film accompanying it. Laughing, she loaded the film. Laughing, she left the lab and sprinted in the direction of downtown.

She fell silent, however, when she stepped onto Alvarado Street. She remembered it from her earlier explorations: how the streetlights dropped off into an incense-tinged darkness once a certain corner was turned. At the intersection of Tyler and East Franklin, she slowed down. Then, as she proceeded onto Washington Street, it revealed itself: a purple-curtained, two-story building with an anachronistic gas lamp out front. There was a window in the alleyway that would have been inaccessible to most voyeurs but that, on account of her height, gave her a direct view of the brothel’s most well-trafficked chamber. And although she had to endure the proclivities of seven other clients before finding the client she sought, she didn’t lose courage or stamina, she didn’t start to laugh again. Instead, she worked with the calmness of a professional, making sure her father’s face was in the frame whenever possible, the woman beneath him little more than a compositional afterthought: beautiful and foreign, thin with work and want.





18


    1998




THROW THE FISH, THROW ’EM GOOD. FISH FOR THE fish. Eat or be eaten. Sardines in the bay? Not anymore, but they’re sure as hell inside the aquarium. She stands above their tank on a catwalk. She throws them their food the way Ricketts used to throw his steaks. “Broadcast feeding,” one of the aquarists named it, as if there’s a message being transmitted and received, and she can’t see the delight of the crowd on the other side of the glass, but she can feel it. She can feel the vacuum of drawn breaths as the sardines tighten their school, as they begin to move as a single undulating tongue, curling around the meal and flashing with satisfaction, a mass of pure instinct shattered and rejoined. The urge to start yelling is nearly uncontrollable. Of course she once saw the horses fight! she wants to yell at him. Of course she did! A clearing in the orchard, a makeshift fence, the snap of torchlight, the waxy leaves of the mango trees catching the breeze like tiny, black sails. A bad, sweet smell in the air, like a pie being baked from rotten fruit. A crowd of men, her father’s long, pale form a crude oddity among the darker, smaller ones. Then the horses, three of them. One: a skinny, nervous mare tied to a stake in the middle of the clearing. Two and three: a pair of stallions, circling the ring, sizing each other up. An involuntary flick of the mare’s tail. A hoof to the chest, a gargle of anguish. Teeth sinking into a throat and pulling away a sheet of bloodied hide. The loser falling to his knees, the winner limping forward to claim his trapped prize. After that, she couldn’t watch anymore, but she could listen and she could smell. And that, of course, was more than enough.