Monterey Bay Read Online Free PDF Page B

narrow waist, a substantial topknot of hair, a caustic temper. A hasty courtship, an even hastier marriage, and then a departure for Bolivia, where Anders purchased a coffee plant in the hope of switching it over to chocolate production. Work was not halted when the floods started or when Marcelle began to vomit all morning and sleep all afternoon. And so it was that Margot was born at 11:59 P . M . on February 13, the rain drumming away at the hut of the village midwife, Anders shivering beneath a leafy overhang outside, thrilling to the shrieks of his first and only child as she emerged into a wet and borderless world.
    Here, she paused, waiting for the charm of her birth story to sink in. But instead of looking awed, the biologist looked impatient.
    â€œWhat’s your point?” he said.
    The point, she replied, was that Marcelle would never actually meet her daughter. By the time Margot emerged, her mother was already dead, a victim of hemorrhaging and fever. Per local custom, the midwife let the body stay in the hut long enough for the baby to take a few fortifying suckles at the breast, long enough for Anders to kiss both mother and child on their sweaty brows, and then Marcelle was carried to the outskirts of the village and burned in a fire that, because of the rain, took nearly two days to adequately dispose of the corpse.
    She stopped talking. The biologist was staring at her, unsmiling.
    â€œA straight line, then,” he said finally, taking the jug from her and drinking what seemed to her like slightly more than his share. “Between two fixed points.”
    â€œWhat do you mean?”
    He waved at her drawing, at the babies and the breasts.
    â€œA coincidence,” she replied.
    â€œAnd what about the fires? And what about the collections and the copies? All of them just as good as the real thing but also incalculably worse?”
    â€œMore coincidences.”
    â€œNo! The fakes in the root cellar, the fakes on my walls. Circles are circles, Margot Fiske. That’s why everything always comes back around.”
    â€œCircles? I thought you said it was a straight line.”
    â€œAll right.” He took a deep breath and retrenched, and she was surprised at how much it thrilled her. The man in the tide pools—the dull, pointless obstacle—was gone entirely, replaced by a bizarre yet compelling intellect, one that seemed to both reek and glow. “A personal example, then. When I was a boy, my uncle gave me a field catalog, a drawer full of dusty old animal corpses, and the very same magnifying glass I still keep chained to my belt loop. And now, here we are. As if not a moment has passed, much less thirty-odd years.”
    She had had beer and wine before, but never anything muchstronger. It was as if she could actually see and smell the corpses: their papery skin, their powdery hides.
    â€œThat’s precisely what I don’t understand, though,” she protested. “How can anything in that essay be related to anything in the tide pools? How can any of it be connected, except by someone who’s trying to make excuses for himself?”
    He took the jug from her and put it on the windowsill. Then he hopped up from the bed, left the room, and returned after what seemed like only a few seconds.
    â€œHere,” he said when he was sitting beside her again. “I got you a live one.”
    He placed something yellow and cylindrical into her hand. There was the urge to flinch, to toss it across the room in disgust, but she kept her hand steady. She let it roll against her palm, light and wet, its ridges like worn-down tire treads. Then she picked it up by the small stem at its base and held it above her, as if peering into the speckled center of a foxglove.
    â€œWhat are you doing?” he asked.
    â€œLooking.”
    â€œWould you like to know what you’re looking at?”
    â€œIf I must.”
    â€œIt’s a
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