Divisadero

  She often had books on the table beside her. Chemistry, he thought he saw in a title once. She was in her early or middle thirties. She always seemed to be there at the same hour with the man. Her professor, perhaps. Or brother. They never touched each other, although they talked constantly while they ate. Like Cooper, they always sat at the same table. Sometimes he got there first, sometimes they did. Occasionally the woman looked over at him and acknowledged his presence—once charmingly in the middle of her laughter about something, and he had smiled back. So there was this small moment between them that he folded carefully away. Then sometime in the middle of a meal she would stretch her legs out. She did not fit or belong inside this wooden-walled diner, where the lighting clarified mostly the wrinkled necks of old gamblers and their season-long partners. Whatever the lighting was at Jocko’s, it should have been bottled, he thought, and gone on tour with her, its sole purpose to follow this woman for the rest of her life, parting from her only after the funeral rites.

  What he wanted was to simply look at that face that he couldn’t read at all. That face, the blond hair. It wasn’t the beauty, it was the variousness. Maybe in Vienna the woman might go unnoticed, but in Santa Maria she was this panther who came in and fit herself somehow between that chair and table near him every Monday and Friday, opposite a man who perhaps was an amateur magician in this semi-suburban California town—who sawed her in half in some unhealthy bar down the road. She leaned forward to whisper to the friend, or whatever he was.

  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 place-mat, 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 first 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 first 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 identified 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 find a subject that allowed a wide field 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 first 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 milky-white 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 fireplace. 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 finally 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 th
e morning he’d find 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 filled 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 flashed-by month. ‘Her hair was so yellow, the wine was so red …’ At first 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 floods 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 flame. 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 traffic of small things around her. Here was where importance existed, within this small firmament 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 not-quite 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 traffic 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.

  Bridget sat up front with the driver, while Cooper sat next to a bass guitarist who explained during the drive that he was an editor of a California nature magazine that was owned by a couple of robber barons. ‘Conservatives love California,’ the guitarist said. ‘They’re dying to get their hands on the rest of it.’ Bridget spent the time chatting, barely audible to Cooper. She had told him they all performed in a bar up the coast, and after an hour they arrived at a roadhouse on the edge of the two-lane highway. Bridget got out and brushed down her skirt. That was another thing, it was a skirt he’d never seen her in. The neon above them reddened her face. ‘I’ll leave you here,’ she said. ‘See you later, okay?’ ‘Okay.’ ‘Meet up with me after the show.’ ‘Okay.’ The building looked anonymous, one of those basic rectangular shapes. It could just as easily have been a bordello with wheelchair access. But it was, apparently, a boxing gymnasium and bar. There were already about forty cars, several half-ton trucks, even a honey wagon, parked on the gravel around it.

  It was a night when Cooper was in the slipstream of Bridget’s agenda, and was at ease. He walked around the building to kill time. One side of the structure was unlit, and beyond were unseen fields, suggested only when a car turned around in the parking lot. He imagined Bridget in her dressing room, preparing herself, changing her shoes or painting her nails a burnt sienna. He felt avuncular towards her. He really knew nothing about women. A door opened out into the dark, and a slice of light landed on the ground about twenty feet from him. She came out with two men, and they peered into the blackness and then moved closer to one another. She had her hand on one of the men, and there was a tug and she fell against him. She stepped back, and Cooper saw her remove what looked like his blue tie from her bare arm. He’d seen a man collect poison in Taos, forcing the serpent’s jaws open harshly against a beaker and squeezing the venom out of whatever gland held it so that it dripped against the hard plastic, a little click from the tooth of the creature almost inaudible, like a brief protest. Cooper watched Bridget and the two men, not moving from where he was. When they opened the door wider to return into the building, the path of light actually reached him, but they had their backs turned towards him then.

  The bar ran down one side of the lounge, and Bridget was on the stage at the far end. She had changed into a cream-coloured dress with a low neck and was wearing his tie loosely around her throat. The Dauphin would not have approved. When she began to sing, what was surprising was not the power of her voice, or its range from rough to tende
r, but the confidence she had up there, as if a great actress were sculpting the air with her arms while drawling like Chrissie Hynde. It was a persona Cooper had not met in all the time he had spent with Bridget. Her subliminal dancing, her yelling back to the crowd, her translation of ‘Season of the Witch’ into a rough, dangerous blues, left him unmoored from everything he knew about her. He’d never met this woman before. All he recognized was his tie, loose around her neck. She was the only thing he watched. That evening, every approach to a song was a new side of her nature. Even when he saw that she was growing tired, she had a focus and a presence. She moved back and forth among the other band members, banging into the contained light, breaking across the structures of songs, her white arms catching the sparkle off a globe, her hip fucking the audience. There was nothing too prepared or controlled about the performance. She was enlarged.

  When it was over, he watched as she came down from the stage with the band. She was handed, and swallowed it seemed in one slide, a tall glass of beer. The determination in the songs was now replaced by a childish happiness at the flattery and hugs from acquaintances. Now and then she looked out beyond them to see if he was there, but she could not see him. He remained further back, watching her out of the darkness. He was curious about every detail of this moment, when she was still partially caught up in what she had been onstage; he didn’t want that person to dissolve into the air with his appearance.