There was a time when it was fuel. There was a time when she was certain that, in its absence, she might stall out midjourney, just like his old Buick. Now, however, the machine is one that feeds itself, that offers pleasures other than the punitive. If anything, the love she once felt for him is like one of those chronic diseases that starts with the letter L: lupus or Lyme. She can go weeks, months, years, without an outbreak, but then something weakens her defenses—usually a dream—and suddenly he’s with her again, offering old flatteries, opening old wounds.
Which is precisely why she’s come to the cephalopod gallery, the room behind the octopus tank. Darkness and silence. Raised, plastic-grated flooring. A ceiling so low that her head almost touches the water pipes above. If Anders ever taught her anything of value, which she doubts, it’s this: the price of hesitation. So she wastes no time. She submerges herself from fingertip to shoulder. She scratches the fiberglass rockwork that lines the back of the tank. At first, nothing. But then an almost imperceptible shift from somewhere within the rockwork, a series of telltale flashes from the cameras on the other side of the glass. She leans forward as far as she can, her back and hips beginning to protest, her blue aquarium-issue shirt soaked now from neck to navel. When the tentacles appear, it’s with a drama that seems to demand a sound track: the suction cups expanding and contracting with audible pinches and pops, sliding along the window with a sureness no terrestrial appendage could ever possess. When she first came to Monterey, she despised it. She found it cold and sad, especially compared with Southeast Asia. But first impressions are rarely final ones, and now this town is, without rival, the most beautiful place she’s ever seen. And so it is with the octopus. At first, Margot’s existence is repellent, the tips of the octopus’s tentacles curling backward in dismay. But then love strikes like lightning: the octopus rising from the tank using Margot’s body as leverage, its skin blossoming from orange to red, an orange-black quality to the way it inhales and exhales through its flapping siphon. A ballet of braided limbs, swirling together and apart and together again as if choreographed. She begins to laugh—not in the manner of an old woman, but in the manner of a child who has just seen something intended for adults—and by the time it’s all over, she’s happy and sure. Not everything about it was bad, she tells him, despite how badly it ended, and here’s the proof: this map of the octopus’s progress, this Morse code of angered capillaries, these small red kisses on her skin.
17
1940
“IT SEEMS TO ME,” ANDERS SAID, PULLING HIS topcoat tight against the fog, “that love is in the air.”
“Pardon?”
“And I’m sure he’s a fine young man. Smart, loyal, hardworking. Although he could certainly stand to do something about that hair. Remind me of his name.”
She looked down at her shoes, at their sea-hardened leather. They had just crossed Lighthouse Avenue and were walking alongside the train tracks now, passing over a smelly bit of earth where, on her way to Ricketts’s lab that morning, she had seen the hobo from the party pleasuring himself in the weeds.
“Arthur.”
“That’s right,” her father scoffed. “Well, I caution him to remain gentlemanly, but otherwise, I give him my blessing. He suits you far better than that Agnelli boy. I should have seen that from the outset.”
She scowled and shrank down into her collar. His mood was worse than usual tonight, callous and sarcastic and fierce, and there was a part of her that longed to fire back with a barb of her own. But she remained silent as they moved away from the house and in the direction of the wharf, the night sky reminiscent of an El Greco.
She, too, felt on edge. She had acquired so many of Ricketts’s specimens that she didn’t know what to do with them. Before, when her income had been modest and her orders small, she had had the boxes shipped to a nonexistent address in Chicago. But then, as her portraiture took its darker turn and her profits spiked, she was forced to deal with the shipments at their source. She instructed Tino to bribe one of his mother’s men on the railway, who destroyed the boxes instead of loading them: a solution she knew to be temporary. Any day now, the volume would become too great, the specimens too interesting, the curiosity of their hired conspirator too intense, and she would be required to handle things another way. She began to covet spaces for their existing size and quality. Her father’s cannery, for instance. It was a building so vast, it could have easily concealed every specimen she could ever hope to buy, every specimen Ricketts could ever hope to kill, its functionality as a hiding place so theoretically perfect, it almost hurt her to look at it.