Monterey Bay (23 page)

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.”

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.

Or perhaps “exhibit” is putting it a bit too strongly. It's more like a display, small and unpopular, an enclosure barely four feet high and six feet wide, a preserved fetal dogfish or two arranged in their jars as if on a liquor store shelf, the only known snapshot of Ricketts and Steinbeck in a thick black frame. A wooden beer crate. A disembodied drawer from one of his file cabinets. Approximately twenty sheets of sketchbook paper on which one can see the shadows of someone else's doodles. The lighting here is strange—half-natural, half-incandescent—which makes everything look like an object in a bad still life, especially the Humboldt squid in the big glass cylinder. It's the one they anesthetized and preserved on their final night together, its body grown flaky and stiff from a half century of formaldehyde immersion, its actual length and girth so much more modest than memory always seems to insist.

Then the part that should trouble her the most but doesn't. No explanation of a life is complete without an explanation of the life's end, and in this regard, everyone did their level best. A
carefully worded informational placard in the trademarked font, a photo of the immediate aftermath. The image is out of focus, the action framed at a slippery diagonal, a huge train engine looming in the background. There's the wreckage of an old black Buick, emergency personnel and onlookers, a body laid out on a stretcher. She remembers how slyly she stole one of the tourists' cameras, how expertly she lined it all up, how decisively she pressed the button even though her hands were shaking. It was not her fault, she recalls repeating to herself. It was not murder. She simply sent him out for more booze and he never came back. She had nothing to do with how the Buick stalled on the tracks. She had nothing to do with the train conductor: a weepy, tongue-tied fool who, having seen the obstruction, had neither the time nor the inclination to stop.

“So. You made it back alive.”

Does Arthur understand? He must. He once suggested that, when Ricketts's body flew through the windshield, it probably looked like a fish-meal sack full of cats.

“Word traveled, then?” she asks.

He nods.

She cringes and closes her eyes. The crew of the squid boat will likely tell this story for years to come: how they noticed her buoyancy was incorrect the second she hit the water, how one of them was able to dive down and retrieve her before she got too deep. Usually, she doesn't feel like she's seventy-three years old;
not even close. But as they hoisted her back onto the deck of the boat, her body limp and brittle in their arms, her weight belt jammed with too many weights, her BCD underinflated, she felt like the smallest, most decrepit soul in existence. She was too embarrassed to let them take her to the hospital. Instead, she made them drive her home, and now, if she's thinking of her long-ago accident in the tide pools and the brief convalescence that followed, it's not in the spirit of forcing parallels. Not in the least.

“You know it's the same one, right? The train engine at the playground?”

She nods. Of course she knows. They've joked about it—darkly, nervously—for years. What he doesn't know is that she's never found it funny. She used to go there, not all that long ago, and watch the action in secret. She would watch the kids climb to the top of the same
Del Monte Express
engine that killed Ricketts. She would watch them laugh and fall and howl, and she knew that if she had ever had her own daughter, she wouldn't have been craven and she wouldn't have been foolish. She would have let her daughter climb all the way to the top and hit the big bell with the edge of a quarter. And when her daughter fell from the engine's tallest point, which she doubtlessly would have—because there is, after all, a symmetry to these things that makes them worth pondering in the first place—there would have been nothing in the way of hindsight or regret. They would
have simply held each other and cried, shocked by their sudden reacquaintance with the type of thing that, as the old saying goes, should have only made them stronger.

“There are those who still think it was planned. That he did it on purpose.”

“That's insane,” she snaps. “He wasn't that kind of man.”

“And you aren't that kind of woman.”

“You're right. I'm even worse.”

“Oh, Margot.”

“I'm going home.”

“You can't.”

“Why not?”

“Because we've arranged a little something. In your honor.”

“Right now?”

“No. Tonight. Just after closing.”

“What is it?”

“The
Mola
release.”

She stares at him. He shrugs and smiles.

“You told us to surprise you.”

To pass the time until closing, she indulges in an old habit. She explores the town on foot.

First, she drives her truck to the head of the bike trail, to a little parking lot within spitting distance of the Naval
Postgraduate School, the former site of the Hotel Del Monte. She gets out of the truck and inhales. There are eucalyptus trees here—planted long ago by a foreign-born boatbuilder who mistook them for teak—and it smells just like the menthol in Ricketts's lab.

Then she begins to walk down the bike trail in the direction of the Row, in the direction of the aquarium. Back in the late 1980s, when the aquarium was still brand-new, the bike trail was laid directly over the old railroad tracks, and she can almost feel the steel ribs beneath her feet. She walks past the dunes and the beach, joggers and in-line skaters swerving around her without pause or complaint. When she reaches the adobe plaza above the wharf, she makes a point of visiting the bocce courts. The elder Agnellis, who still control this part of town, play here every day, rain or shine, and they bid her a polite “Good morning” as she passes.

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?