Monterey Bay(70)
From the wharf, she climbs the hill. She sold the small white house shortly after deciding to stay in Monterey for the duration. She has, however, continued to keep tabs, spying on its residents through the window near the bougainvillea. For a while, aquarists lived here: aquarists who descended the hill much like the cannery workers before them. These days, however, it’s a vacation rental property. Seashells and wicker, everything upholstered in sturdy, beachy pastels. On the walls, there are whitewashed pieces of driftwood painted with chatty, unambiguous demands: LIVE, LAUGH, LOVE.
Then, finally, she returns to the bike trail and visits the site of Ricketts’s demise. Other than the aquarium, this is the only place in town that truly matters to her, so she lobbied hard to ensure a certain look. The railroad crossing sign still stands, even though the railroad itself is long gone. There is a commemorative bust of Ricketts himself, sculpted by a local artist of known mediocrity. The bust looks nothing like him, and she feels absolutely nothing when she looks at it. The same is true of the lab. Since Ricketts’s passing, it has been meticulously preserved despite a number of functional incarnations. First, it was a boarded-up monument to Steinbeck’s loss. Then it was a men’s literary club founded on the principle that great poetry can be written and read only in the absence of wives. These days, it’s owned by the city and is open to visitors only twice a year. She’s never made the mistake of joining the tour groups and going inside. She’s happy just to watch them as they enter and exit: young people with a penchant for polar fleece who have discovered his works and have become fanatic as a result, their faces alight with the eternal blood sport of disappointment versus rapture.
Back at the aquarium, there is still another hour to kill. So she reads a little Steinbeck. She has all of his books, except Cannery Row, hidden in the same desk drawer as the liquor bottle. She starts with her favorite: The Grapes of Wrath. A few pages here and there, just enough to get a taste of its angry beauty. Then she moves on to the ones she hates: Of Mice and Men, Tortilla Flat, Travels with Charley. East of Eden, she’s not surprised to discover, still offends and flatters her in a personal way: the succubus with the head wound, the photographs of the brothel, the corruption of the virtuous man. Finally, she peruses the book she’s never known how to categorize: a retelling of the Arthurian legends, published eight years posthumously. It’s a weird, childish, late-in-the-game offering, the players whittled-down archetypes who, despite their weaponry and armor and blustery shows of monarchical fealty, have no choice but to abandon themselves to love’s predictable pitfalls. It’s also, in her opinion, Steinbeck’s most autobiographical work. There is no reason why this should be the case. The characters are not of his own invention, nor are the stories, but there it is regardless: a man writing about himself with the deluded, self-destructive certainty of an oil baron who’s convinced the biggest payload is in his own backyard.
Then again, maybe it was. All these lofty motivations, but it’s usually so much simpler than the creator will ever admit. Her father and the Chinese girl. Herself and Ricketts. Jean-Paul Sartre, she learned recently, became a philosopher for the sole purpose of seducing women.
“You know, I’ve never read any of that stuff. Not a single page.”
Arthur, his hair a coppery white nest, is standing in the doorway and bouncing on his toes like a boy.
“Why not?” She closes the book and puts it away.
“I didn’t like how he acted when Doc died. Breaking into the lab and burning everything controversial. It wasn’t right.”
She thinks of her old sketchbooks, the ones permanently lost to fire. Not right, but not wrong. The same could be said for Steinbeck’s plans to improve Cannery Row after the canneries shut down. Scatter it with fake sardine heads, he had quipped. Bring in some actresses to play hookers, pump in the smells of fish meal and sewage. None of this happened, of course. Something hopeful and monumental and sincere happened instead. And this, finally, is how she knows she’s won, because what is an aquarium except a gigantic heart? Fluid coming in and fluid going out, fluid passing through multiple chambers and then returning to the larger body with new offerings in tow?
“Is it time?” she asks.
“Sure is.”
By the time they get to the top of the tank, the other aquarists have already arrived.
The volume of water is outrageous, the drones of the chilling and heating units unearthly. There are glaring halogen lights overhead, just like the ones the squid boats use to draw their catch to the surface. It’s endless and shimmering and spooky, and she’s hit with the urge to jump: an urge so strong, she has to remind herself she’s too old to indulge in something so lamely symbolic. So she leans back from the railing. She cannot see what this water contains, and for a moment, there’s a terrible suspicion. Empty, she tells herself, scanning the depths. Completely empty. But then she sees the familiar shape: a fish that doesn’t resemble a fish so much as it does a massive severed head.
“I’m the Mola. M-o-l-a, Mola,” Arthur sings happily. “You know. Like the banjo player’s song.”
She smiles at him and so do the other aquarists, who for the next minute or two do absolutely nothing. They just watch the fish’s blunt circumnavigation, its rectangular dorsal and pelvic fins windshield-wiping through the water in awkward inverse. It moves behind the horizontal curtain of the water’s surface very slowly, very carefully, an almost prehistoric stupidity in its eyes, an unshakable ignorance of its own place in the world and how that has or hasn’t changed as a result of its captivity.