This time, the party in Ricketts’s lab could be heard from halfway down the hill.
As before, she stopped in the middle of the Row before entering. The curtains were fully parted in every room except the bedroom, so she could see what was happening inside, all of it misty with booze and lamplight. Once again, it was a segregated mix: the locals carrying on with an almost pitiful lack of self-awareness, the tourists behaving with the expectation of being recognized and celebrated from the shadows. Steinbeck was happy for once, radiantly so, his arm around the same blond actress who had once used Margot’s sketch as a fan. Arthur was sitting in Steinbeck’s chair, staring at the empty space behind the desk, the drink in his hand making him look just a tragedy or two shy of a grown man. Ricketts, yet again, was nowhere to be seen.
She went around the building and into the back lot, but he wasn’t there either. So she picked her way down to the waterline and found a rock that was mostly dry and adequately flat. Someone would come to her. She knew it. Ever since her arrival here, it had been like this: someone on the hill, someone on the porch, someone in the garage, someone behind the wheel of the Buick. At times, it felt like she barely needed to move. It felt like, if she waited long enough, the tides would bring everything she wanted and everything she didn’t, and the world would wait patiently for her to figure out the difference.
A minute later, Steinbeck appeared. He was holding two beer bottles, one of which he extended in her direction.
“Please don’t say no this time. It’ll make me feel bad about myself.”
She held up a hand and let him deposit a bottle into it. When she drank, the taste was bitter and weak, almost like nothing.
“We don’t do our best collecting out here, to tell you the truth,” he continued. “He prefers a spot in Pacific Grove, technically beyond the boundary of Monterey Bay. I’m sure he’s shown you by now.”
“No. He hasn’t.”
He nodded, as if noting something and filing it away for future use.
“Why are you being nice to me?” she asked.
“Wormy’s back. I thought you should know. She’s in the bedroom.”
“With Ricketts.”
“That’s right.”
She took another sip. It still tasted bitter, but this time in a way that seemed to suggest something. “She knows what she’s doing.”
“She sure does,” he replied.
“You sound angry.”
“No, I don’t,” he grumbled. “I’m in favor of sex. I like it. It’s just that I expected a bit more from Ed. I thought he was too smart for small distractions. I thought he enjoyed our little conspiracy against Venus. But I suppose the good days never last, which is precisely why they’re good.”
And where, exactly, did these strange urges come from? she wondered. Why did she want to run into the lab, not in search of Ricketts this time, but in search of Arthur and his stricken reliability? Such an unfair, unwanted ache, as if her body were now host to needs and unions she had never considered before, that had always been rejected purely on account of their unfamiliar color and volume. Steinbeck, she knew, felt it, too, but in a different way. There was the young woman inside with her big, stupid smile, but there was also Ricketts, the potential of love incompatible with love’s actual existence.
“You’ll write about him?” she asked.
He looked at her with heavy eyes. “How can I not?”
“Are those essays any good?”
“Yes. But they’ll never get published.”
“Have you told him that?”
“No. It would crush him.”
“He seems pretty resilient to me.”
“Well, then you don’t know him at all. I shouldn’t be telling you this, especially since I’ve been against your little dalliance from the beginning. But for a while there, when Wormy was missing, he wanted another loan from me. He said that for a few extra thousand, in addition to all the money he’s been making on your mysterious dogfish orders, he could purchase a little parcel of land in Big Sur. A place right off of Hurricane Point. He said he could imagine building a house there. And living in it with you.”
He gave a long, baritone sigh and then chucked his beer bottle into the sea.
“What do I do now?” she asked, brain on fire.
“Well, I don’t tend to give advice, especially to people I don’t particularly like, but try not to take it too hard. You’re different and maybe even a little bit evil, and talent like yours is a lonely, sickening thing. Someday, though, you’ll find your own spot, a place where you can burrow in with a handful of souls who don’t make you feel like the world’s ending. And suddenly there you’ll be. Home.”
She watched the beer bottle come back in on a wave and rebound hollowly against a rock.
“Do you know where I can find a camera?” she asked.