“I’m a good person, Margot. Everyone knows that. And I’ve been watching successful men, men like your father. I’m figuring things out, doing what I can to make life good. I’ll buy a house on the hill, get a better job in the canneries: one that will support a family. Doc says we’re a perfect match, and if you’ll have me . . .”
“I don’t need you.”
At this, he finally looked at her breasts. She looked at them, too. They were swollen, sickeningly opaque, marbled with blue veins. Her stomach protruded.
“You’ll need someone.”
Instead of responding, she stepped out of the dress.
Then she sat on the Buick and slowly spread her legs until the appropriate expression was on his face: gratitude, disbelief, delight. He started to remove his hat, but she shook her head.
“Leave it.”
“All right.”
And she could hear the shark, even though she knew it was dead. She could hear its ghost fins slapping and rubbing, applauding her as she leaned back and let him in.
20
THE NEXT MORNING, THE SMELL FROM THE canneries reached its apex.
Just as Giana Agnelli had predicted, the winter had been one of record-breaking sardine hauls, and now, as spring creaked in, the town found itself awash on a quickly souring tide, the supply vastly outpacing the demand. The municipal authorities, recognizing that a good portion of the populace had already gone half-mad from the stench, dusted off Ordinance 106: a dictate that all canneries and reduction plants install the proper deodorizing equipment, a violation of which was punishable by ninety days in jail. When the threat of the ordinance failed to enact the sort of change the townspeople had been promised, they took matters into their own hands and formed five-man “smelling committees” that roamed the Row at peak canning hours, enforcing a haphazard type of vigilante justice that climaxed in the citizen’s arrest of the seventy-five-year-old superintendent of the Carmel Canning Company.
And as the smell blossomed and bred, compelling everyone in Monterey County to consider the downside of taking from the sea exactly what they thought it had offered, Margot became a corpse. A corpse lying on the horsehair sofa, the hours inching by. Everything was merciless, aggressively lit, and all those details she had taken such great care not to notice—her earlier sickness, her recent fatness, the absence of her monthly bleeding—were insisting upon themselves, repeating themselves in the opposite of prayer.
A resurrection, in other words, didn’t seem likely, but it occurred nonetheless. She wasn’t sure where to go. She no longer had a mutiny in mind or a riddle to solve, so she just proceeded aimlessly, visiting all the places she knew would disturb her with their aftertaste. She returned to the Hotel Del Monte. She sat beneath the sickly palms and watched a skeleton crew of Japanese botanists dance through the pest-eaten topiaries in their small black shoes.
When she had grown tired of the hotel, she climbed the hill to the Presidio, sneaked through the gates, and gazed blankly out at the vista that, more than three centuries earlier, had been claimed under the authority of a careless empire. She loitered around the outskirts of her father’s cannery and listened for the noises she feared. She went to the Agnelli warehouse on the wharf and found Tino standing outside, a bag of saltwater taffy in hand.
“Would you like some?” he asked.
“No.”
He tossed the bag over the railing and into a waiting cluster of sea lions, who ripped the bag to shreds and swallowed the candies whole.
She looked at the sky. Somehow, it had become dusk.
“Are you expected at home?”
“No,” she replied.
“Me neither.”
So they continued the pilgrimage together, following the railroad tracks until, at the shared border of Monterey and Pacific Grove, they came to a stop.
“What’s going on here?” she asked.
There were lanterns everywhere: lanterns in every window of every big, cakelike Victorian home, lanterns casting an eerie orange flicker onto the black streets.
“Let’s go,” he pleaded.
“Not yet.”
And when the parade started, she wanted an explanation, but Tino refused, so she asked a fellow onlooker. The celebration, the onlooker said, was a local tradition that had been popular at the turn of the century but that for the past few decades had fallen a bit out of favor. He wasn’t sure of the exact details, but it didn’t really matter because the whole thing had been made up anyway: the story of the ancient Chinese queen who tried to drown herself rather than submit to her father’s desire for a tidy, profitable marriage of convenience. There was a brass band playing what sounded like a funeral dirge. There was a bejeweled bunch of white girls dressed as the queen and her royal court, waving at the crowd from a passing float. As for the actual Chinese, there was no trace of their presence. It was just the lanterns in the windows and the sardine boats in the bay, the land and sea white with fire, the earth’s skin a platinum cloak of heat and error.
“You’re in trouble, aren’t you?” Tino asked when the parade had ended, when most of the lanterns had been snuffed.
“I think so.”