She removed her hand.
“I’m sorry. All I’m trying to say is that these are different times,” he said. “Far different. A young woman of your caliber should have more useful things on her mind.”
“You sound like my father.”
“Your father’s right.”
“Then let me work here. With you. Inside the lab.”
He laughed again, but still no smile. “I trust you’ll understand why that’s completely out of the question.”
“I won’t be a bother.”
“I don’t believe that for a second.”
They exchanged a long stare, and then she backed away just enough for him to see her fully. She had never attempted this sort of thing before—this arch and this tilt, this throwing back of the shoulders, this parting of the lips—but she knew she had done it right when his eyes briefly wandered down to her waist and then back up to her face, his breath coming through his mouth instead of his nose.
“Tomorrow morning,” she said.
He squinted at her and tried to stifle something: a giggle or a whistle, or possibly a groan.
“I won’t get arrested?”
“I’m sure of it.”
“Fine,” he said, making for the door and allowing himself one half of a grin. “Mind your manners, though. I’m not the sort of man who stands for being harassed.”
11
1998
HIS THIRD MESSAGE ARRIVES AT A BAD TIME.
Everyone is here, every last aquarist, in a conference room that is slightly nicer than a nonprofit should allow. She sits at the head of the table. The aquarists sit along the sides in a hierarchical phalanx determined mostly by tenure and a bit by skill. They are all dressed exactly like her, all of them in uniform, their blue shirts extending out to a vanishing point of which de Chirico would have been proud. She’s assembled them well over the years; she’s kept them to a certain type. Mostly men. Odd but not ashamed, or even particularly aware, of their oddness. Unkempt, ruddy, resilient, amenable to camping, bathing in rivers, repeated exposure to ticks, ingestion of iodine-treated pond water. Dressed as if for action: bleach-stained jeans tucked into black rubber boots that stomp across the wet floors with a specific sort of casual, unwarranted bravery. Most of all, though, there’s the fact of their relationship to their work. To a less enlightened soul, it could seem like drudgery: those endless loops of routine maintenance, knuckles permanently abraded by fiberglass and salt. They, however, treat it with a palpable sense of purpose, their aims so noble that they give her faith by proxy. Whenever she can, she invites herself along on their collecting trips. She’s afraid of seeming useless, so mostly she just watches them in admiration disguised, for the sake of her reputation, as evaluation. She watches them blast tube anemones from their sandy burrows with a gasoline-powered pump and a hundred feet of garden hose. She watches them catch half-moons with pieces of candy-colored yarn on barbless hooks. She watches them lure garibaldis and se?oritas into their nets with the luxuriant stink of fresh sea urchin roe, and by the time they return to the aquarium with their prizes in tow, she is drunk with secondhand excitement.
As for Arthur and Tino, they sit to her immediate right and left. Unmatched bookends, exceptions working overtime to prove the rule. Sometimes she wonders what her father would have done, but there’s no way of telling. He could have gone either way, embracing them as comrades or vanquishing them as rivals. As it stands, she’s pleased with her choice. They’ve each served their purpose nicely: Tino, in his long-ago willingness to turn over a crucial piece of property, to defuse the tension among the fishing contingent; Arthur in his jack-of-all-trades gregariousness, which in his old age has blossomed into something downright beatific. It seemed only fair to take them in, to give them titles, to pay them for a loyalty she appreciates but can’t explain.
Which is why she bites her tongue when the two of them begin talking. As boys, they were never friends. Their personalities were too different, their communities too segregated. In their old age, though, they’ve grown close. They come alive in each other’s company, they relish the tag-team retelling of old stories, which is what they’re doing right now: relating how in August 1984, two months prior to opening day, a complication arose.
“The wharf pilings exhibit was missing its . . . ,” Arthur begins, eyes big and vaudevillian.