There was also the matter of Arthur, just as her father had implied. Lately, his company had become incessant, his affection full of strident concern. He appeared at the house each morning in order to escort her to the Row; he appeared at the lab each afternoon in order to escort her back home. During the day, whenever she thought she was alone behind Ricketts’s desk, he would materialize at odd and inconvenient times, his smiles too quick, his frowns too broad, the mere fact of his presence annihilating whatever concentration she was able to summon.
Then there was the lab’s other male hanger-on: Steinbeck. Before, the writer’s attentions had been sporadic and mildly resentful, as if Margot were a small pile of dog shit he couldn’t quite keep himself from stepping in. Recently, however, he had become as vicious as on the morning they’d first met. He would groan at the mere sight of her. He would sit in the rocking chair and scrutinize her as she worked, his gaze hateful and unsparing. Arthur would sometimes make excuses for him, but Margot knew the truth. Steinbeck’s anger was real and his envy was justified and she felt sorry for him, but not nearly enough to follow a different course of action.
Ricketts was the real problem, though: the one that made her stomach buckle, her chest hurt. Two days after their trip to the slough, Wormy disappeared from the lab. No excuses were made for this, no explanations offered. She was simply there one day and gone the next, which pleased Margot immensely until she realized the consequences. Wormy’s absence weakened Ricketts like an illness. He began to drink more than usual and wander the coastline in his Buick. Sometimes he invited Margot on his sojourns: poorly planned excursions hunting for specimens they didn’t quite need, carrying picnic lunches that would go uneaten, finding a mostly level, mostly concealed patch of ground on which to up the ante of their pseudoromance. She learned about nuance. She learned that not everything in life could be self-taught. She learned that there was a place several miles down the coast, on the tip of Big Sur’s Hurricane Point, where the southern sea otter, once thought to be hunted to extinction, had made a small yet triumphant comeback.
“I’d like to build something here,” she said, standing alongside him on a ledge above the water. The wind was almost strong enough to rip out the manzanita bushes by their roots. A mother otter and her pup were trussed up in the kelp beneath the cliff, enduring the swells with tucked chins and closed eyes. It smelled like sage and wet stone, and there were cattle in the distance, diligently picking their way down the uneven hillside. Behind them, hidden in the land’s damp folds, were redwood groves, dense and soundproof.
“If I didn’t know better”—he slurred—“I’d say you enjoy being uncomfortable.”
In reply, she pulled him down into the dirt and tasted the alcohol on his tongue.
And it was on that afternoon that a difficult notion occurred to her. It was entirely possible that, all this time, she had been aiming for the wrong thing. She had assumed that having him was a goal in and of itself, that the fact of the capture would provide her with all the satisfaction she would ever need. But now she was wondering if what really mattered was what occurred after. Their bodies were joined now, several times a week. His mind, however, still resided in a place she would never be able to visit, except as a tourist.