Monterey Bay(57)
An hour later, she found herself standing outside the lab.
The door was locked for once, so she let herself in through the bedroom window. Inside, she listened for a while to make sure no one else was there, and then she sat on the bed. Then she wandered into the front room and lowered herself into the chair behind the desk. She pushed her hands against her ears, but the voices were too loud to silence, too big to suppress, so she went back to the bedroom. She lay flat on the bed and watched as night achieved its full expression, as the day’s mute circus packed up and set off for parts darker and unknown. She watched the shadows on the street stamp a changing, conjoined pattern against the green curtains, the shapes heavy and absolute. There was an unfamiliar feeling between her legs that reminded her of the blank, breathtaking millisecond that occurs between pain’s infliction on the body and pain’s registration by the brain, and she tried to rub the feeling away, but to no avail. At dusk, she heard the sound of an automobile engine and went to the window to see if it was the Buick, but it was not. And although the prominent feeling was one of queasiness—that of having accidentally bathed in something other than water—there was also a sense of weird expansiveness. It was almost as if she could see everything from above, the entire town laid bare in all its segments, everyone confined to borders that had more to do with the quality of the light and air than the presence of any real boundaries, everyone holding down their territories as if armies would rise from the water and rob them of everything save the dense comfort of their own kind.
At around midnight, she heard the front door crash open. She set her jaw and didn’t move, even when her father appeared in the bedroom doorway, his suit rumpled, his face bent with rage.
“Get up,” he said.
“No.”
He approached the bed. He grabbed her by the wrist.
“Where did you get those photographs? Why did you give them to her?”
He yanked her to her feet. She fought, gripping the mattress and pulling herself back down.
“I don’t want to hurt you,” he pleaded.
She spit at him. His palm collided with one side of her face and then the other. When her nose began to bleed, he stepped away from the bed, his face frozen in fear and amazement.
“How could you?” he said, quietly this time, almost gently. “You were my life’s work.”
“No, I wasn’t,” she replied. “I was the thing that happened in spite of it.”
21
1998
THE OCTOPUS’S SUCCOR IS FLEETING.
This doesn’t surprise her, though. Relief is not dry land, but a moment on the tide charts, an interlude between drownings. There was a time when she didn’t know how to save herself, didn’t know how to swim back to shore. A long stretch of time—the 1950s through the 1970s—when, in the wake of the inevitable sardine decline, she would pace the remnants of Cannery Row and find herself at fault. Exhibits A through Z: the warehouse fires springing up twice a year as if on schedule, milk-eyed windows, graffiti-veined walls, weeds and pigeons, the abandonment made infinitely more unsettling by the small businesses that attempted to capitalize on the few visitors the Row continued to receive. A History of Monterey wax museum in which the models “breathed” via pneumatic lungs, an antique shop with nearly two hundred doll heads in the window, an art gallery selling coarsely executed oil paintings of naked people riding dolphins, a restaurant that consisted solely of a dented Weber and a trio of lawn chairs.
Worst of all was her father’s old cannery. It had come back into her possession, but she wasn’t sure what to do with it. The time wasn’t right. The world was far too satisfied in its conventionality and then far too satisfied in its iconoclasm, neither of which was ideal for what she had in mind. She found ways to pass the years: a marriage and a divorce, and then another round of both. She invested her father’s fortune and watched the original sum acquire a tail of self-replicating zeroes, the money sprouting like polyps. She made strategic donations to local causes, kissed the occasional rear end. She made the mistake of taking a course in business ethics at the local community college. She was elected and reelected to the city council. She invited Arthur and Tino to her house every so often and pretended to listen to them talk. For a while, she even thought about leaving town again, about finding somewhere entirely new: a language she didn’t know, a quality of light that confused her. But then—it was 1977; she recalls this distinctly because an aquarium called Ocean Park opened that year in Hong Kong—the tides began to change. Monterey began to lose its mind. It didn’t surprise her; she had always suspected that too many years beneath the region’s trademark variant of fog bore the potential not just of physical discomfort but of psychological damage, and now there were stories in the paper along these lines. The death of an otherwise unthreatening preteen, an empty swimming pool and a peaked roof and the great distance between the two, the body of a young boy found in a house in Carmel Valley high up in the rattlesnake-infested hills, the Pebble Beach woman who, bruised and cut from nightly beatings, shot her husband in the cheek and then turned the gun on herself. Stories of a failed local restaurateur attempting to stave off financial ruin by hiring an Israeli contract killer to murder his wealthy parents in their sleep. Stories of a veterinarian in Seaside slaying two waitresses and having them secretly cremated alongside a Doberman named Fancy.