On her way down, she had avoided David Avenue, the most direct and well-lit route. Instead, she had kept to the side streets and alleyways, dropping onto the train tracks and lurking behind a steel storage cylinder until she was certain she hadn’t been seen.
Now, at the outer walls of her father’s cannery, she moved to the middle of the street. The air seemed green, vaguely bacterial, the fog wet and heavy and unnaturally close to the ground. She could hear the skittering sounds of pigeons and mice: those smart, dirty creatures that can both confirm debasement and foretell it. Somewhere, a machine was still in nocturnal operation, a boiler epileptic with captive heat, a processor stamping fish meal into oily cakes. The door of the lab was there in plain sight, solid and real. The building behind it, however, seemed as untrustworthy as a mirage.
Inside, she found a similar strangeness. She had been to working-class parties before, she had witnessed their pandemonium. This, however, was a new breed. Men and women assaulting each other before falling into prolonged embraces. Clothes dropping away with neither shame nor exuberance, but with the instinctual, businesslike inevitability of snake-shed skin. There was an old hobo squatting on the beer crate and pretending to read an upside-down volume by Hegel, a woman wearing a sardine net as a dress, sheaves of typewritten pages turning to a beer-soaked pulp beneath dozens of stamping feet. And then there were the people not contributing to the melee but observing it instead. They stood in the corner near the file cabinet; they were urbane, well groomed, remote. One of them in particular—a busty woman with lacquered blond hair—seemed particularly detached, looking down on the scene in sleepy amusement, cooling herself with a fan that had been folded from one of Margot’s best sketches.
Enraged, Margot began to struggle through the crowd until a large form blocked her path.
“Don’t worry. He’s already hidden the good ones away.”
She looked up. Steinbeck was heavy eyed and nearly motionless, the stiffness of his posture that of someone who was either completely sober or just moments from blacking out. The last time she had seen him he had been so vengeful, so irate. Now, under the influence of what was probably a gallon of beer, he seemed to have softened to her, or at least to the idea of her eventual reappearance.
“They’re all good.” She crossed her arms in front of her chest. “And I wasn’t worried.”
“Well, you have that look about you. Like you’re sizing everything up and figuring out how much you can get for it.”
Instead of replying, she indicated the woman, who was now using the sketch to blot her lipstick.
“Tell her to stop that.”
“Oh, she won’t listen. She’s an actress. Here from L.A., on account of that goddamn movie.” He clutched the sides of his waist. “She and her friends told me I’m getting fat, and I’m absolutely terrified they’re right.”
“Is Ricketts here?”
“Girls. Booze. Where else would he be?”
With that, he made his way back into the pit of the mob. She followed. It was crucial, suddenly, to feel that she wasn’t succumbing to the pull of masses but fighting against it instead, and the music seemed to agree. It had been slow and rhythmic upon her entrance, but now it was emitting the high, bright squeals of an experimental style of jazz, the partygoers responding as if controlled by it. For a moment, she was afraid of being dragged underfoot and trampled. But as Steinbeck led her toward the kitchen, she remained completely untouched. Despite the density and animation of the crowd, she was able to move autonomously, securely, as if she were separated from the others by a thick yet invisible pane of something far more durable than glass.
When she and Steinbeck were a yard or two from their destination, a projectile sailed through the kitchen doorway and onto the dance floor.
“Watch out,” Steinbeck groaned, continuing to push forward.
“Was that a steak?”
“There’s no controlling them unless they’re properly fed.”
Another steak flew past her face and into the herd. She pressed herself against the wall.
“And it’s nice of Ed,” he admitted, “if a little lavish. Usually it’s just a few cans of sardines, but I suppose he’s feeling reckless tonight.”
“Reckless?”
Steinbeck couldn’t hear her, though. The crowd’s excitement had grown too fierce, too deafening, so she just stood there and watched as half a dozen more steaks were flung through the doorway. For the next several minutes, there was audible chewing and swallowing, greasy hands wiping themselves on greasy shirts, mouths opening and closing around bottles and jugs, an endless volley of belches harmonizing to the music, which had changed yet again, this time to a wistful, foreign duet of singer and mandolin. A man in a woman’s bathrobe began waltzing with a coatrack. The blond actress continued to look on, smug and immaculate.
“Beer?” Steinbeck asked.
“No.”
“You’ll want to reconsider that at some point.”