Monterey Bay (14 page)

“YOUR FATHER HAS STRANGE FRIENDS.”

She decapitated Arthur with her eyes and then turned her attention to the real work in progress.
Styela
: their bodies like little lumps of alien excrement. Since her first encounter with them, they had grown no more appealing to her aesthetically. In a practical sense, however, they had become indispensable. At first, she had considered other, more expensive species: the dogfish, or the red octopus, or Ricketts's beloved flatworms. But all these creatures had seemed too rare in a relative sense, too labor- and time-intensive, too vulnerable to unwanted scrutiny. The
Styela
, by contrast, were plentiful and unremarkable and something the lab was extremely eager to divest: so much so that it was only now, as the tenth order had been placed, that someone was thinking to question it. And that someone was Arthur.

“Not his
friends
,” she snapped. “His associates.”

“Either way, I don't understand why they need so many of these things.”

“No one expects you to understand anything.”

“Settle down, children,” Steinbeck drawled in a broad Great Plains accent. “Else you'll get the whip.”

Ricketts laughed and then leaned close to her.

“It's wonderful, you know,” he confided. “I never could have flushed out so many buyers on my own.”

She fought back a smile and grabbed a bottle of fixative from the shelf above the sinks. Ever since the orders had started rolling in—orders she had placed in another name using the proceeds from her portraiture—it had been like this: his affection more brilliant than usual and aimed more often than not in her direction. Today it was especially obvious. In a subversion of the lab's usual hierarchy, she—not Steinbeck—had been chosen to stand next to him at the countertop while Steinbeck and Wormy packed and labeled the boxes that Arthur lugged broodingly from the garage to the curb. The message, therefore, was clear. Money wasn't everything, but it was something. And now, just as Steinbeck had predicted, allegiances were shifting on account of it.

So there was satisfaction: a surplus of it that rivaled the
Styela
themselves. But there was another feeling, too—a less jubilant one—that resided several layers lower. As she measured out the chemicals and slew each little tunicate in turn, she probed this
feeling and stirred it up a bit so that its contents could swirl and separate and make themselves known. She had struggled and she had prevailed. She had proceeded exactly as Anders would have. Why, then, did it feel less than perfectly earned? Why did she suspect there was a better and more admirable way: one that her intellect was too dull or her character too weak to fully discern?

“Well,” Ricketts announced, “that appears to be the last of them. Arthur, you wait for the shippers. Wormy, you update the accounts. John, you tidy up.”

Steinbeck huffed through his nose and slapped a paste-damp shipping label onto a box. At some point, they would figure out the truth. They would realize that her father's
Styela
-hungry colleagues were nonexistent and that the money was actually hers. By that point, however, it would all be settled, she reassured herself as she buried the bad feelings even deeper. She would be a fixture inside the lab. She would be essential to Ricketts's ambitions, a prize within his heart, and the elaborateness of her ruse would be fodder for the best sorts of stories, the best sorts of songs.

“And Margot. Please come with me.”

In the passenger seat of the Buick, she continued to congratulate herself.

From the very first portrait, she knew Tino had been right. There was a gold mine here, and she was just the one to mine it, which is not to say she had proceeded without caution or forethought. Her drawings, in their unaltered state, would not have appealed; they were too ragged, too raw. So she had blurred the rough edges on purpose, she had improved on nature's design instead of representing it faithfully: a compromise she expected to sicken her. But it didn't. It was an opportunity, she reasoned, not a surrender. She was giving something to the masses, and they were giving it back. Her inaugural client, for instance—a new mother with a baby less than two weeks old—was so overcome by the exceptional portrait of her subexceptional child that she wept with pleasure and offered Margot three times the agreed-upon fee. An old, mute crone, thrilled with a depiction of her face that made her appear several decades younger, gave Margot a gilt pocket watch that, according to a flurry of unofficial sign language, had been in her family for over a century. Margot thanked her in a Sicilian subdialect, just as Tino had taught her, and then placed the watch into her satchel alongside the penknife. Later that afternoon, she had Tino take both items to the pawnshop on Munras.

“You're sure about the knife?” he asked, noting the inscription.

“Yes. I'm sure.”

The next Sunday was the same: up and down the hilltop streets, in and out of small, dark, overdecorated parlors,
curtains drawn to conceal the net-tanning cauldrons out back, garages open to reveal the chrome-limned shadows of new cars. One of her clients—all of whom were women, most of whom bore a passing resemblance to Mrs. Agnelli—offered her a sip of anise liqueur, which she smelled but didn't drink. Another client was so satisfied with Margot's rendering of the suggestive look on her face that she took off her blouse and asked Margot to continue farther south, to which Margot agreed until she reached the breast region and found her pencil frozen in unexpected horror. On the third Sunday, when she ran out of good paper and her last pencil had worn itself to a nub, Tino was dispatched to the store on Alvarado for supplies, and so it went until the sky dimmed and the families gathered for dinner. Alone on the street now, the two of them returned to the steps of the church and stood there for a moment in silence. It was the time of day Margot had always liked least: dusk, everything too sharp, everything too orange, the day's accomplishments, no matter how grand, withering under the aspersions cast by the sun's dying light. Nevertheless, the sense of achievement was electric. All these homes. Not only had she been inside them, she had left something of herself within. She had shaped these dwellings in a way that was more than just transactional, in a way that was apparent only to her. Power and possibility and beauty, and this time it wouldn't be taken from her.

“Can you get the penknife back?” she asked Tino as the sun set into the bay, its vermilion snuffed like a candle.

“Consider it done.”

Now, as the Buick began to sputter, she traced the outline of the penknife through the leather of the satchel and watched Ricketts guide the car onto the road's dusty shoulder.

“Goddamn it.” He gave the dashboard a little slap. “Arthur told me it was fixed.”

He leapt from the car and peered under the hood. From the other side of the windshield, she couldn't see the whole of him, just a collection of representative parts: his shoulders in his cotton shirt, the back of his sunburned neck. The bay wasn't visible from this stretch of highway. Rather, it was artichoke and lettuce fields as far as the eye could see: hypnotic, gray-green striations of them. The sky seemed to be fighting for its blueness, the sun for its warmth. She crossed her ankles and buttoned up her vest, watching the two flaps meet and merge with a mental click. If there was any downside to the past several days of near-constant sketching, it was this: the clicks, the machine-symphony of verification when two shapes joined correctly. Usually, it was something she could turn on and off at will, but it no longer seemed voluntary. The shape-clicks now sounded whether she summoned them or not. Even worse, the colors were mixing themselves without her instruction or permission: a phenomenon that seemed to intensify in Ricketts's presence. The car was repaired now and they were back on the road, but it didn't feel like they were moving. Rather, it felt like the world beyond the windshield was outlining itself, smudging itself, and filling itself in
with browns and greens and blues while she remained perfectly separate from the process, perfectly still.

When the scenery finally became inert, she looked over at Ricketts. He had brought the Buick to another stop: intentional this time.

“Where are we?” she asked

“Elkhorn Slough. About twenty miles up the coast.” He exited the car and she followed. “There are some canneries over there on the island, just like on the Row. And rumor has it they're going to build an honest-to-goodness harbor here. A wharf even bigger than the one in Monterey.”

As he opened the trunk and began to unload it, she tried and failed to appraise the property without imagining how she'd draw it. A pocket of brackish marshland, an estuary snaking through the low, dry hills before slipping into the mouth of an industrial marina. A series of conjoined mud flats, clusters of yelping gulls, a dense patch of pickleweed separating the land from the water.

Then she considered Ricketts's face. He was still happy, but not as happy as he had been inside the lab.

“If the harbor was a good idea,” she said, “it would have happened already.”

“Excellent point.” He gave her a bucket of bait. “The same can probably be said for their plans for a power plant and a yacht club.”

“Maybe the power plant. But not the yacht club.”

“I'm glad you think so, because I don't have a yacht. Just a canoe.”

“You don't even have that.”

“Guess again.”

He pointed to the pickleweed, in which she now perceived the shadow of an elongated wooden watercraft.

“Technically, you're right. It's not mine.” He went over to the vessel and began extracting it from its hiding place. “But Manuel's more than happy to let me borrow it, provided we bring him back a bat ray.”

“He's a collector, too?”

“No. He uses a cookie cutter to punch little circles from their wings. Then he fries them up and sells them to tourists who think they're eating scallops.”

She wasn't sure if she was supposed to laugh, so she didn't.

“Bow or stern?” he asked, when the canoe had been packed with gear and carried to the waterline.

“Bow.”

“Naturally.”

She boarded. He handed her a paddle and hopped in behind her. When they pushed off and began drifting through the marina, it was with the practiced ease of people who had known each other for years. The clicks in her head were silent now and the colors were respecting their own boundaries, and it felt like a reprieve. But it also felt like an emptiness that needed filling.

“What's the marina called?” she asked.

“Moss Landing. Which I'm sure you'll find hopelessly obvious.”

Instead of replying, she dipped her paddle and watched it work. For a while, the water justified its name: soft, green, inert. Then, as he steered them away from the marina and into a channel, everything changed. A fast, clear current was pushing against them now, the canoe slipping into reverse, the landscape wheeling by in the wrong direction. She began to paddle faster, spurred on by the sound of him doing the same. Soon, she could feel blisters stinging on her palms like cigarette burns, her arms threatening to give out, until, all at once, the current vanished as quickly as it had appeared. The canoe moved effortlessly into the gray brown funnel of the slough's midsection, into the black green of the eelgrass that reached out from the banks like fingers. She lifted her paddle as the canoe slid ashore. The water here was still and murky again, the dunes wet and fat. The shore curved around them in a lazy crescent, the half-submerged remains of an oyster farm dangling from its southern tip.

As they disembarked and unloaded the gear, she tried to keep her arms from shaking.

“Didn't think we'd make it, did you?” he asked.

“Seems like a great deal of trouble for a handful of worms.” Her voice was overloud, but she couldn't help it. She was far more fatigued than she should have been, and there were two strange, symmetrical pains throbbing between her hips.

“Oh, we're not looking for worms today.” He unrolled a gill
net and began to bait it with squid. He, too, seemed spent, but not physically. His earlier brightness was now almost totally extinguished, an odd flatness moving in to take its place. “In fact, I'm not sure what we're looking for. I just needed to escape for a bit, I suppose.”

“From what?”

“From the lab.”

He handed her one end of the net, which she held in place as he got back into the canoe and rowed across the cove. He jumped out, secured his end to a section of the old oyster farm, and then returned to where she was standing. He tied her end to the beached canoe and then sat down on the slough's wet banks, the mud receiving him with an audible squish. She raised an eyebrow.

“Ah, yes. I'm in the presence of a lady. I keep forgetting.”