Monterey Bay(68)

“I kept your original sketches,” he said. “All of them.”

She looked at the window again, at the faces that were still tracking her and Ricketts’s every move despite the fact that they hadn’t done anything worth watching. Not yet.

She gripped the edges of the desk.

“Are you all right?” he asked. “Do you need to lie down?”

“You’re not—”

But then a sound at her back, and as she turned around she knew, somehow, exactly what she would find. A woman in the bedroom doorway, lovely and small, clothed in a child’s white frock.

“Hello,” the woman said.

“Hello,” Margot replied.

There was the scent of perfumed soap as she walked past the desk and toward the phonograph. When the music started, Margot prayed for the fugue: for the baker’s dozen of opening notes, measured and solitary. But it was chords instead, blaring and insistent. The woman fell into Ricketts’s arms. Margot buried her chin and smelled herself. Cigars, menthol, moonshine.

“Hello, Wormy,” he said, kissing the woman on the forehead and then slowly releasing her. “Will you be able to make it on time?”

“Just.”

“Travel safely, then.”

“I will.”

When the woman was gone, Margot tilted back in her chair. Her entire body was brittle, illiquid, a net made of nails and hair and bones. She tried to speak, but her voice had turned to sand.

“That’s Alice,” Ricketts said, his words barely audible beneath the phonograph. “Music student up at Berkeley. We were married in January.”

She looked down at her hands.

“And God, does she love her Mozart. She’s probably transcribed Don Giovanni twenty times by now.”

She squeezed her hands into fists, knowing it was useless to cry, but even more useless not to.

“Oh, Margot,” he said. “I’m so sorry. I always thought you were wonderful.”

She couldn’t hear him, though, and she couldn’t hear the music. All she could hear were the noises at the window. The people there weren’t just watching anymore, she realized. They were tapping. One finger—tap, tap, tap. And then another. And then another, until five fingers became what sounded like five hundred and the sound was indistinguishable from drops of water against glass.

She looked up at him. His smile sprouted and grew.

“Your father once wondered if this town wanted an aquarium,” he said, eyes twinkling. “And I think the answer is finally yes.”

A shot of courage. A sudden change of plan.

“That’s precisely why I’m here,” she said. “To buy back his cannery from the Agnellis. To finish what he started.”

“I’d be happy to assist. If you’ll have me, that is.”

“Looks like we’ll need something else to drink,” she replied, placing the empty jug on the desk.

He stared at her for a long, dangerous moment.

“All right,” he said. “I’ll go downstairs and start the Buick.”





26


    1998




WHEN SHE WAKES, SHE’S BACK ON THE HORSEHAIR SOFA.

She’s fifteen years old again and living in the small white house up the hill from Cannery Row.

Then she’s back in the lab, back in his bed, the nearby canneries causing the walls to bend and shake.

But then she comes to her senses. She’s lived in this house for well over two decades now—this modernist palace on Hurricane Point in Big Sur—and it’s like this most days: the wind strong enough to make a weaker person question things, strong enough to make it sound as if the windows are popping free from their frames. A fish tank on a cliff is what the antidevelopment dopes once called it. But she didn’t let it bother her, not then and not now. There was a similar peevishness directed at the aquarium once. And look how nicely that’s turned out.

As for last night’s bungled dive from the squid boat, she’d rather not consider it. So she pushes her blankets aside, takes care not to wake her boyfriend, and rises from her bed. From the windows in her bedroom she can see Bixby Bridge, its vaulted span the site of countless suicides and luxury car commercials. From the windows in the kitchen, she can see the road leading up to the house: a dynamite-blasted, switchbacked scar on the face of the gray-green hillside. The driveway is a Zen garden of glinting granite pebbles. The fog is thick, but the wind is doing its best to change that. By the time she washes, dresses, and leaves the house, her little territory will likely be bathed in sun, even if the rest of the coastline is still wet and gray.

Most days, she drives too fast. She takes great pleasure in carving the thirty-minute drive down to twenty, twenty-five tops. Today is different. She goes slowly and tries to pay attention. It’s been years since the collapse of the benevolent hippie dictatorship of the yammering mystics at Esalen, but this stretch of Highway 1 continues to retain a modicum of its upscale stoner cachet nonetheless. As she crosses the bridge, she watches in the rearview mirror as a line of identical rental RVs falls into place behind her like the segments of a mechanical worm. At Monastery Beach, a motorcycle speeds past her on the left, the cyclist howling as he extends the middle fingers on both gloved hands.

When she reaches Cannery Row, she pulls the truck into the loading zone adjacent to the Hopkins Marine Station. She thinks of the Chinese fishing village that once stood on this spot, of the fire that consumed it: a fire her father didn’t start. She closes her eyes and tries to see the flames. She tries to see herself reading the daily paper. She tries to see yesterday’s squid beaching, but when she sees nothing, she presses on. Through the automatic gates and into the aquarium’s employee parking lot. Through quarantine and straight to her least favorite exhibit: the one devoted to Ed Ricketts and his lab.