“Or so they keep telling me.”
Another wink, another shot of warmth running through her. Men and their compulsive need to offer things: Arthur and the cigarette, Steinbeck and the beer, Ricketts and everything else. Tonight, he bore none of the mute, inapproachable, ferocious qualities he had acquired as a result of dreams and distance. He was attentive and witty, and as the foursome resumed their conversation, she could feel her nervousness peel away. It no longer seemed dark. Instead, everything was illuminated as if by a searchlight: their shapes on the concrete tanks, the smoke swirling around the bald man’s ears in direct imitation of a fleeting and translucent head of hair, all of it framed by the black skin of the bay upon which nearly a dozen sardine boats were skating with tectonic slowness. And had anyone else ever felt even half of what she was feeling now? she wondered. The dread and dizziness? The longing that waved from her chest like an extra limb? The desire to sit with someone on top of a desk and stare at him until something explosive was unearthed?
“What’s in the tanks?” she asked.
Their conversation stopped midsentence. The thin woman giggled. The bald man crossed and recrossed his legs.
“Come down and see,” Ricketts said.
She paused and then began to move down the stairs, her descent a marvel of luck and physics. When she reached his side, he smiled and took another swig of beer. Inside the tank, a dorsal fin periodically broke the surface, the shadow of a small, tense body beneath.
“What kind of shark?” she asked.
“Spiny dogfish. Squalus acanthias. Would you like to feed her?”
He offered up the earthenware bowl. She selected the largest morsel it contained and felt her skin flush when his mouth made a click of approval. When she dropped the meat in, she saw a tremor and a curl, muscles seizing up with pleasure, the underwater implications of working jaws and flexing gills.
“Edward,” Wormy noted, “she’s bleeding.”
She looked at her fingers, at the red leavings of the shark’s meal. Then she remembered the penknife. She looked down. As before, she felt no pain, but her right trousers leg was crimson from knee to ankle.
“Indeed she is.” Ricketts turned to his companions. “Will you excuse us, please?”
Inside, the crowd had thinned considerably.
The tourists from L.A. were gone, as were most of the others. Only a dozen or so guests remained, most of them gathered around Steinbeck’s craggy height like a family of squirrels praising a redwood, all of them singing in a language she couldn’t place. The man in the bathrobe was alone, the coatrack abandoned and upended, his affections redirected toward a large glass jar with a brownish liquid inside. The desktop was bare of everything, including papers.
As they entered the bedroom, he removed his coat and tossed it on the floor.
“Take a seat on the bed, please, and roll up your trousers,” he said, disappearing into the bathroom.
She sat and tried to steady herself. Her sketch of the young mother was still on his wall, its presence thrilling, auspicious. When he reappeared and sat next to her on the bed, there was the urge to push him down and stake her claim, but she clenched her fists until it subsided. From beyond the door, she could hear the final notes of Steinbeck’s chorus, the melody drifting off into hums and moans.
“How did this happen? It’s deep.”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know?”
He smiled, shook his head, and wiped a pair of nail scissors on his shirtsleeve.
“I can give you some ethanol if you’d like.”
“No. I don’t need it.”
“Well, in that case, try to do better than I did at sitting still.”
She nodded. As the needle entered and reentered her skin, she tried to pretend it hurt, but it still didn’t, even when he tugged the sutures into a knot and pressed a strip of gauze firmly against her leg.
“You probably should have taken that ethanol. You look a little green.”
“I’m fine.”
“Glad to hear it. Let’s hope I didn’t botch this one quite as badly as the first.”
She leaned toward him.
“I thought I told you to sit still,” he warned.
But when she touched the back of his neck, he didn’t move away. He just laughed quietly, as if remembering a particularly filthy joke, and she could feel the vibration of it as she put her mouth against his. When they moved apart, he wasn’t smiling anymore.
“Fifteen,” he said, shaking his head. “Fifteen years old. Am I imagining things, or aren’t they making girls like they used to?”
“My mother was married at seventeen.” Her fingers were still on his neck, pressing into the notch at the base of his skull, tracing the line of demarcation between his skin and hair. “I was born a year later.”
“And look what happened to her.”