NO MATTER WHERE SHE GOES, THOUGH—NO MATTER which part of the aquarium’s public spaces occur to her as a refuge—there’s music. Music designed at her own behest. Music meant, if she’s honest with herself, to replicate and revise how it once felt to be inside his lab.
She remembers sitting down with the composer, showing him the blueprints, describing the main exhibits, playing him a few examples of what she had in mind. Bach, of course. A well-known kirtan: “Hay Hari Sundara,” the 1926 Carnegie Hall version. Some Debussy, embarrassingly enough. That part in “Take It on the Run” where the guitar does a high altitude burn. To all of these, he nodded in time to the beat, scribbled down notes. When she reached the last song, however, he stopped writing. It was “Get Ready,” perhaps the Temptations’ strangest offering. To be fair, she knew it was weird. For one thing, it was about a stalker. For another, it didn’t start out like all the other Motown relics, with a jolting, percussive call to arms. Instead, it began with a dirge of horns, persistent and menacing, followed by some violins gasping for breath. Then there was the part with the saxophone, notes stabbing the air in what should have been a solo but instead seemed like the disembowelment of one. On top of it all, the singer: a voice that sounded neither male nor female, neither completely sane nor completely unhinged, neither dangerous nor safe. I don’t want this kind of trouble, the composer’s face seemed to say. Who would? She, however, was sitting there with her eyes half-closed, certain that, had he lived long enough, this song would have either pleased Ricketts greatly or upset him to near madness.
So in addition to her infantile excitement about his messages, there’s also a reaction far worse: the need to prove she’s received them. In a sense, this was why the aquarium was created in the first place, to make his most famous, most accessible theory flesh. Instead of arranging things the traditional way—by species or taxonomic relativity—she’s arranged things by habitat, by place of residence. Things that live together should go together, he once said. And things that live elsewhere should go elsewhere. She’s even taken it one step further. She’s demanded that, with the exception of special temporary exhibits—the one about the Amazon basin, for instance—everything in the aquarium must be indigenous to Monterey Bay. Every animal, every plant, every alga, every fungus. No cheating, except when she permits it.
And it’s not something she will ever question. It’s not a position from which she will ever back down. The problem, however, is that the bay is getting warmer and the skies are getting bluer, and not in a cyclical, El Ni?o–type way. No, this is something permanent, which means that species from the south—species that would have previously found Monterey unlivably cold—are moving in. The Humboldt squid and the Mola mola: two animals that were once seasonal visitors but now take up year-round aquatic real estate. Accept it, she tells herself. Accept it and move on. But her artist’s eye won’t quite allow it. If everything is embraced, nothing is said. A crowded canvas is proof of an empty mind. There’s a moment at which even the most purehearted tribute becomes an ode not to the person being honored, but to the person doing the honoring. And I’d be honored in return, she tells him, the aquarium’s ambient sound track egging her on, if you’d quote me on that.
14
1940
“AN ANGEL. SHE LOOKS LIKE AN ANGEL IN THAT dress.”
Mrs. Agnelli’s voice was gentle, off-puttingly so. The laugh, however—the one Margot had heard that day at the house—seemed ready to surface at any moment and break the veneer of her goodwill, like the air-raid sirens that had punctuated their last days in Manila.
“Thank you,” Margot muttered. “It’s new.”
She yanked at the skirt. Yesterday afternoon, in anticipation of churchgoing company, her father had taken her to Holman’s, the local department store. She had expected to be able to find something sturdy and anonymous and reasonable, like what the First Lady wore when she was photographed making speeches or visiting disaster sites. The store, however, offered women’s apparel of only one style: lightweight, lace-trimmed frocks so spectacularly ill suited to both Margot’s tastes and the local climate that even Anders had been amused on account of it.
“Now I know why you always wear that sport coat,” he had said, chuckling.
Margot, however, hadn’t laughed. She had suspected it would happen in time—her chest and hips and stomach resigning themselves to a puffier inevitability—but she hadn’t expected it to happen so fast, and now, looking at Mrs. Agnelli, she could imagine the horrors with which it all might progress.
“Speaking of angelic,” her father redirected, “the Mass was sublime. So many kind tributes to your husband.”