“Ed, please tell her I’m in no mood for levity. Or an audience.”
She looked at Ricketts. He jerked his head firmly in the direction of the stairway, and she didn’t protest. She did, however, envision something seditious as she began to climb: that she was bottled up alongside the largest and rarest of his specimens. That she was still in the garage, watching and hearing their private conversation from the strange comfort of the china hutch.
Upstairs, she could, in fact, still hear their voices: loud yet entirely indecipherable, like a radio tuned just a few notches in the wrong direction. Arthur wasn’t there, and she was unspeakably thankful for it. The canneries next door were an earthquake that never stopped. From the bedroom behind her, there was the sound of typing. On the desk, an unfamiliar tube of lipstick was serving as a paperweight, its cap missing and the red paste inside crushed down to a sore-looking nub. She could feel the wounds on both her forehead and shin as intensely as if they had somehow been reopened.
She sat down, moved the lipstick to where she couldn’t see it, turned to a clean sheet of paper, and began to sketch. And just as she had expected, the worms appeared there with twice the accuracy and intention of anything she had ever drawn. When a wide-angled shadow fell across the floor, she was certain Ricketts was in the doorway, ready to claim her. But Steinbeck was there instead.
She leapt from her chair and stood beside it.
“I’m not that monstrous, am I?” he asked, shaking his head. “Sit down. Just sit down.”
Watching him carefully, she reclaimed her seat. His face was red and shiny, a veil of moisture across his mustache.
“It’s hot down there,” he moaned. “Why are we out of beer?”
“I don’t know.”
“Run and get some, will you?”
She shook her head. He frowned at her and then looked blankly around the room as if trying to remember where he was. Then he walked over to the desk and began to study her sketch of the worm. He stood there for several seconds in silence, his face and neck gradually regaining their normal hue, leaving only his large, jutting ears a vengeful shade of red.
“He told me to tell you to go home.”
She nodded in understanding but didn’t move.
“You’re working for him now?” he asked. “In the tide pools?”
“No. I’m doing the sketches. And the embalming.”
“But you’re hoping for something more, is that it?”
She held his gaze for a second. When she was afraid her face had turned the same color as his ears, she returned her attention to the sketch and made a few swipes of her pencil, unsure as to whether she was making things better or worse.
“Well, keep at it.” Steinbeck sighed. “From what I can tell, you’ve already done an admirable job, and not just with the drawings. He likes to make things complicated, to put up a little fight, but at the end of the day, it’s always the same. Like a goddamn goldfish, round and round the bowl, thinking he’s found the ocean when he’s really just mucking around in the same old puddle as always. And the worst part is that I believe him. I believe him every damn time. I believe him because I’ve never met anyone as smart or as good as him, and besides, I’m far too busy to be doubting things all the time. Do you have any idea how terrible it is? To have created something people care about? To get rich on account of it? We used to make fun of people like me but, my God, how times have changed. These days, I’m little more than a bank account. Without my money, I’d be even less useful to him than Arthur.”
He fell into another extended bout of silence. She stopped drawing and, in lieu of considering his words, reappraised her sketch, hoping for the same feelings of pride. Something about it had changed, though. Something had been vanquished as a result of Steinbeck’s grim company.
“And I tell him,” he resumed suddenly, the sharpness of his voice making her jump. “When you’ve collected every little creature from the Sea of Cortez to Alaska, when you’ve fucked everything in lipstick and a Catholic school uniform, when all your jars are finally categorized and cross-referenced and organized to some lunatic’s version of order, when that damn essay has been revised and rewritten for the one-millionth time, do you honestly think you’ll be any better off? Any wiser? Sure, you’ll know the ocean inside and out, but people will still be a mystery, and there’s nothing in this world more tragic than that.”
That night, she didn’t return home right away.