Divisadero (14 page)

Cooper went back to his
room at the Santa Maria Inn, curious about her interests. He had to admit to
himself that he knew nothing about her. He had not even caught the timbre in
her voice. He simply arrived for dinner faithfully at eight o’clock before driving
to his card games. And he ate those Spenser steaks cooked on the
swimming-pool-sized outdoor grill at the back of Jocko’s—a medieval scene—the
t-shirted staff guiding the meat with giant tongs. Then he played cards until
three in the morning, as the twelve-ounce steak digested slowly within him.

One night he looked up and
she was there, sitting alone. As his head rose, she turned towards him, and
without thinking he gestured a greeting with his hand. She acknowledged it and
he sat there not knowing what to do. Normally he would glance at the couple,
who were so engrossed in conversation they were never aware of him. She moved
her fork around, on and off the placemat, which gave diners a history of the
restaurant. Cooper’s eyes skimmed his own placemat. The saga had begun in 1886,
when Emery Knotts opened a saloon. One of his eight sons was ‘Jocko’ Knotts,
whose wife was the region
’
s
fi
rst telephone operator. They had children
called Pookie, Jissy, Noonie, and
Beagle,
they had
white lightning during Prohibition, slot machines throughout the forties, and a
card room for poker. ‘It was not unheard of for people to travel hundreds of
miles to get to Jocko’s,’ the placemat read. ‘For years there was a monkey in
the bar....’

So—may I join you? She
stood and brushed her skirt. He said nothing while she sat down opposite him.
Where’s your friend?
he
asked.
Oh, who
knows.
He probably won’t be here. She was
still settling in. Her clear voice was inches away from him. There was an
absence of perfume on her. A strange
fi
rst reaction, but in most card lounges women were encased in it and
men had their talcums and sprays.
She was mouthing something to herself, a little prayer or a chant perhaps. He
would discover this was a habit. But now, this first time, he sat forward,
quizzical, as if missing something she was trying to impart. ‘
As I was
motivatin’ over the hill ...I saw Maybelline in a Coupe de Ville.’
I’m sorry?
Chuck Berry...
I played cards with him once, Cooper told her, when she’d identi
fi
ed the source of her lyrics.
Did he beat you?
No. He paused, to break it gently. No, I skunked him. He was not too bright
about the game.
Who else?
Who else famous?
She nodded.
Oh, I don’t know.
No one else.
He had come across no
one else as important as the singer and writer of ‘Maybelline’ in the card
halls. As far as he knew, he had not dealt a pair of aces to Alfred Brendel.
They spoke haltingly, unable to
fi
nd a subject that allowed a wide
fi
eld of conversation. She said nothing
about the relationship with her usual dinner partner, though she mentioned that
he owned a hardware store. She was reading books on science, but no longer had
a university connection. She travelled a lot. Her dad had been in the army, but
she didn’t see him anymore. ‘I’ll have a Spenser,’ she told the waitress.
And a glass of wine?
She shook her head, she didn’t drink.
Cooper had already noticed that. They threw little clues back and forth across
the table until about nine-thirty, when he announced he had to go.
Oh.
Card game at the Guadalupe Dunes, west of here, with some
archaeologists.
Oh.
He had been able to witness her more clearly when she sat at the other table,
at an angle from him. This close he had to keep up his end of the talk and also
think before offering his answers. This close too many other things existed
between them.
Will I see you again?
Mondays and Fridays, he said. He got up to pay the bill, and she remained
sitting.
Bridget, she slipped him her name as he left.
He nodded. Hello, Bridget.

If Bridget had not been an
addict or a dealer, if she had not been one whose life seemed engaged with many
others, if these qualities had been absent among the clues Cooper had intuited
in their
fi
rst
meeting, he probably would have avoided her, would not have had another meal
with her at Jocko
’
s the following Friday, or taken
that walk to her apartment.
Just as, in an earlier century,
he would not have picked up the carefully dropped glove and returned it to the
strolling woman.
The knowledge of all he assumed made him feel safe. If
Bridget sucked a milkywhite smoke up through a water pipe or put a needle into
her veins, if she found more pleasure in that than in romance, it meant he
would not be important to her. He would remain at most a fragment in her week.
She might, he thought, not even recall him a few months from now. As a
competent gambler, his instinct told him she would not be a danger to him.

They walked to her
apartment. He followed her into the large kitchen—its dimensions surprised
him—and watched her cook up heroin. Then she was sitting on the carpet, the
checkered skirt had ridden up her thighs. And all he kept thinking was that she
looked healthy. As if it was impossible for health to be a segment of this
life. He shook his head when she offered him some, although it was only a quick
courtesy on her part—you offered salt before you used it yourself; a girl
brought up by army rules—she was already hungry, and he had in essence
disappeared. And then she moved back, away from him, and her gaze froze,
balanced on a far tree, no longer in this world. He thought this surfeit of
pleasure in her was like some unreachable beauty he would never know, beyond
any won purse he might scoop from a card table into his arms. Her shoulders and
head were resting against the
fi
replace. And her look returned to the room. ‘Come and hold my hand,’
she said quietly. She didn’t use his name.

She lay on her back, her
knees up, and guided his head across her white shirt, down to her stomach, her
skirt. Her arm started pushing him away and then pulling him towards her, as if
he were a log, or something she was trying to get loose and then into her
possession. He wasn’t expecting such strength or energy. He had imagined a
languid seduction. She climbed over him, saying,
Cooper,
as if she had
fi
nally found his name and were now holding
it up like a sword pulled out of a lake, as if it were
he,
jaded, on his
back, who had to be revived with her surrounding force, white-shirted and
gold-legged above him.

She would let him fuck her
only when she was stoned, after she peaked and came back from the twilight of
it. Two or three afternoons of the week, it was almost always afternoons,
within the sunlight and motes of her apartment. Sometimes she asked him to hold
her—she was cold—while she vomited into a sink. Sometimes when he returned from
work at three or four in the morning he
’
d
fi
nd her in the lobby of the Santa Maria
Inn, asleep in a leather armchair. She would have left a message for him at the
desk, as it was a confusing, rambling lobby with several alcoves—one for games
and crosswords, one with a piano, one with historical photographs—and it was
easy to miss someone waiting for you. He’d pull her to her feet. He would be
tired and she would offer him pills, but he never took any from her.

On those nights when
Cooper still felt wide awake, they would get into his car, fill up at a Texaco,
and drive almost into Nevada, the windows down and music by The Clash pouring
like tacks onto the highway behind them. Bridget snapped on the interior light
and they were a lit bubble gliding through scrubland. She unwrapped an oblong
white package of cocaine, and shook up the cocaine with sodium hydroxide till
it was milky white,
then
added the ether. She siphoned
the ether into a dish, then turned off the car light and continued in darkness
with just the knowledge of her hands. He could see her faintly within the light
of the dash, picking the crystals off the plate and dropping them into the
pipe, could hear the pipe hissing with the burning of the crystals, then her
breathing in the smoke, until she sat with the sledgehammer of euphoria against
the open window.

The darkness of the car
held them together. He felt it was Bridget’s body, with whatever drug sparkled
and pumped away
inside, that
steered them easily
through the towns of Duncan and Erica. She placed her bare feet against the
dashboard and guided the car, her head against the frame of the open window,
the thump of the bass coming off the door panel against her neck. They stopped,
left the car door open so music
fi
lled yards of the desert night, and she bent over the hood of the
Chrysler, the heat from its engine against her t-shirt. He could hardly grip
her because of the sweat on her shoulders, and he knew even in careless moments
like these never to touch the bruises on her arms.

She had been the woman who
brought a chemistry book with her into a restaurant, whose seeming mystery and
boundlessness he had been drawn to before this
fl
ashed-by month.
‘
Her hair was so yellow, the wine was so red . . .
’ At
fi
rst he believed he would remember her that way, as someone in a
song. She slept against him with her young secrets and her senses doubled by
substances that constantly waved their arms, so he could not look at what was
behind them. Her world existed only here, only now. There wasn’t a single tale
he knew from the past or from another place that he could ask her to retell or
enlarge on. When she mused—in those
fl
oods and rivers when she was high
—
it was
about what drugs were capable of, what desire was capable of, so uncontrolled
it was illegible. Sometimes he woke just before dawn and saw her hunched on the
carpet over an inconstant blue
fl
ame. Once he opened his eyes to see her a few inches away, watching
him, and he feared suddenly that she looked like Anna. He did not know whether
she was a lens to focus the past or a fog to obliterate it.

‘I love singing. My dad
used to sing while he drove, when I was a kid.’ Bridget was looking over
Cooper’s shoulder. It seemed to him as if a catch had been released on a small
door. She was handing him something. Even without her direct gaze it felt
intimate.
A father’s tune that drifted into the backseat of a
car where she sat alone as a child.
Cooper did not take his eyes off her
remembering face. The way her blond hair fell across her cheek, the shadow of
light under her shirt. He swallowed these moments and textures, as if preparing
for an eventual drought. Her becalmed voice interpreted the traf
fi
c of small things around her. Here was
where importance existed, within this small
fi
rmament she turned over and over in her
hands, alongside the quick code-talk of border drugs
—‘
the
parakeet,
’ ‘
the rooster,
’ ‘
the
goat
’—
in that sweet and, yes, becalmed voice.

Sometimes a car with
musicians came by and picked Bridget up. She would be away all evening,
returning in the early morning, about the time Cooper got back from his card
games. ‘Why don’t you come with me,’ she asked him. ‘Singing is my pleasure.’

He was hesitant,
accustomed to her only in close quarters. To witness the way she behaved with
others would release him from what he knew and wanted. She was his willing and
diligent lover, even as she shot up and loosened the sallow tube from her arm.
She was already various to him, even in her habits. Some days she would go
running with him, equal in stamina, then come home and unpack her paraphernalia
of eyedroppers and sodium hydroxide and contact-lens-shaped discs, waiting
patiently for the crystals to appear. Or she would read restlessly into the
night. So when Bridget asked him to accompany her, along with the musicians, he
swivelled his hand, meaning ‘Not a good idea,’ assuming wordlessness was more
polite. Her mouth made a notquite grimace, more pensive than annoyed. The
exchange was thus a gesture of his hand, a tightening of her expression. She
left the room, and when he followed her into the bedroom later she was looking
out of the window at the slow traf
fi
c along the collector lanes of Santa Maria Boulevard. Thirty minutes
later her friends picked her up. She was always good-humoured on returning.

The next time they went,
Cooper joined Bridget and her friends. He had called the day before to cancel
his presence in a game, and when the musicians showed up, he simply accompanied
her downstairs. She kept watching for him to turn back.

Are you coming with us?
I thought I would.
That’s great, Cooper, but take off the tie. Here, give it to me. The Dauphin
had taught him to dress well, and he’d never

been
able to shake the habit. Something like a tie, or a shirt with
French cuffs, gives you an edge, The Dauphin had told him, even on a losing
streak.