Divisadero

by Michael Ondaatje

  Her eyes were darting over shoulders. She was sinking. Cooper came forward into the limelight (so this was limelight), and he saw her unsure smile, which seemed to shrug it all off for his sake. They embraced and he felt the sweat on her arms, her wet dress, her wet hair against his cheek.

  The next night he went to a card game, and when he returned was unable to find her. She was not in his room at the Santa Maria Inn, or asleep in the lobby, or in her apartment. It had been cleaned out and paid for. He realized he had no contacts for her, no idea how to reach her. There was only the man from Jocko’s, and he didn’t know his name. In the morning he drove to every hardware store within twenty miles of Santa Maria. He was worried that Bridget was not safe, wherever she was. Even though her rooms had been efficiently emptied.

  He started sitting in coffee shops and bars along the town’s three-mile strip, and walking around Santa Maria, hoping this was a way to find her. He kept up his habit of running in the mornings, but now, more frantic, he flung himself beyond the outskirts. He was conscious, after all these years, of his wakened sexuality. He went into a gym and began sparring, using the regimen of rope and heavy bag. This was harsher, a better escape for his mind than running. He felt strong, but the strength grew, he knew, out of his own powerlessness. When he went back to his hotel one day, he looked at himself in the faint light of the lobby mirror for a clue of some sort. The realization hit him that he had been the one who was addicted.

  The desk clerk said he had mail. It was a postcard from Tahoe with no message or signature, just his name and address in the handwriting he recognized. On the other side was a picture of Harrah’s casino glistening in a dusk light. It was Bridget, telling him where she was.

  Within an hour he was going east, away from the coast, along the same roads he had taken with her on those late nights when they would drive towards Nevada. At the Carrizo Plain Monument he curved north and then travelled up the San Joaquin Valley on Highway 99. Visalia, Fresno, Modesto, and then Sacramento. The sacrament. In Carmichael he ate a meal. By the time it was dark he was climbing into the Sierras. There was rain and a mist, so that towns like Silver Fork and Strawberry, settlements he’d driven through a hundred times in the past, slipped vaguely by. Shortly before Tahoe he checked into a motel, shaved and bathed, using up the thin wafer of soap he’d been given. He put on a clean shirt and a tie. It was about two a.m. when he drove away.

  He descended into Tahoe, into its lights and its subdued universe around the glow of the lake. He got out of the Chrysler to look at the mountains he had come over. He could already sense the change in altitude. He was back in the past, it was a conscious risk, and everything could change. Then he drove the car into the garage at Caesars Palace and walked to Harrah’s—he knew that you never parked where you worked.

  As soon as he entered the Grand Hall, the pumped-in oxygen hit him. He’d driven all afternoon and much of the night, and now the buzz of tiredness in him dissolved. A pompous decor surrounded him. He sat on the twenty-foot-long leather sofa and stretched his legs. When a waiter offered him a drink, Cooper tipped him a ten-dollar bill and asked for a wet espresso. He carried the tall glass towards the tables. So far he’d seen no one he knew, but the Tahoe night was young. Fifteen hours ago he’d been boxing his heart out, sparring at a gym where there was Astroturf for carpeting.

  Cooper knew that if he made himself visible, Bridget would find him, so he moved through the palatial rooms, the waterfall of noise, the haphazard slow motion. Eventually he sat down to play. He lost the first hand intentionally, as he always did. The game was faster than in the south, but these were amateurs around him. It was four a.m. He was still wide awake.

  An hour later, looking up during a deal, he saw her. Something lurched in his body. How long had she been standing there like that, so still, watching him? She was taller than most of the onlookers. He finished the hand and swept up the chips. He’d made enough tonight in any case to rent something good on the south shore, if he or she needed it.

  Cooper.

  She gripped his arm at the cash grill. He put his face against her neck, white, almost gold, the muscle there taut, perhaps the centre of her confidence.

  They walked up wide carpeted steps. As soon as they escaped the Grand Hall they were free of its noise and a memory came into his mind of himself as a boy canoeing round a bend of San Antonio Creek and losing instantly the roar of a nearby set of rapids. He followed a step or two behind Bridget. She spun around and said, ‘I’ve just been for a swim.’ She was drifting on a light foot. No one else in Harrah’s appeared to have such casual strength. There was an efficiency in her he hadn’t seen before. In the elevator she held off his embrace.

  Wait.

  As if that word explained it all.

  Wait for what?

  We have to talk. Are you checked in here?

  No.

  Because you can’t stay here, in this hotel.

  He said nothing to that, and they rode the rest of the way in silence. His car was at Caesars, he could have stayed here.

  It was now about five-thirty, and the two of them sat down to breakfast. He looked out the windows from the eighteenth floor, and the sky was still a magenta dark above all the lights. Cooper didn’t raise the issue of why he shouldn’t stay here. It felt to him that Bridget was armed in some way, and he needed to circle her carefully. He needed to know what her intention was. Though if she was up to something, it would be wise to keep quiet about it in a building where the eye in the sky could be anywhere. He realized she’d coaxed him into a place where he couldn’t argue and accuse. Instead he brought up her old dinner partner at Jocko’s. ‘That hardware store fellow …’ he asked. She lolled her head side to side as an answer. ‘What’s his name? You never told me. Does he live in Tahoe? Is that why you are here?’ She waved everything away except to admit that the man from Jocko’s was here.

  Underneath Caesars Palace he unlocked the Chrysler, and let her in the passenger side. There was that familiar sense that the air and the uncertain lighting in the underground garage were left over from an earlier decade. He walked slowly around the car and got in beside her.

  I should go back to Santa Maria.

  Huh? Her head jerked towards him.

  Why did you leave? What are you getting me into, Bridget?

  Let’s just drive out of this place.

  No.

  Can we drive—

  I’m not ready for that sun yet.

  Okay. She ran her hand slowly down his arm. Well, you didn’t go to seed.

  Oh, I hit bottom, don’t worry.

  She kissed his right eye, then his forehead, then his mouth. He accepted everything. Her hands on him. They were not kissing now. It was more intimate, their faces staring at each other, almost touching. A breath, no words to accompany this, only watching each other’s naked response. His tired eyes alive upon her.

  On Nevada Inn Road, twenty minutes later. ‘I’m taking you to meet my friend,’ she said. ‘There’s something I want to ask you to do… .’ She began telling him about the hardware store owner on the drive, and how he had recognized Coop that very first night at Jocko’s. His name was Gil. She owed him money, and she worked for him. ‘Is he your lover?’ She’d known him for a long time, she said. He was a card player. There would be his two friends with him, they were all card players. They knew everything about Cooper. They had heard about him before he ever sat down for a meal at Jocko’s. Cooper was silent, whispering to himself, wanting to slam the heel of his hand through the windshield, as if it were her foolishness. She was a part of a setup to bring him to Tahoe.

  They parked, and he walked with her into a short-lease condo. Three men sat in the large, almost unfurnished apartment. She introduced Cooper, and right away the men began speaking of his episode with The Brethren, even about his infamous gesture to the eye in the sky that would find no documentary evidence of his cheating; they were impressed he had been that good. He looked over at Bridget, who was s
taring at her hands, as if she had nothing to do with any of this. Then Gil put forward the plan. It was clever, intricate, and Cooper refused right away. He stood up. There was an exhaustion overtaking him. The men kept giving him more details so that he felt surrounded by talkative demons. He moved away from the light coming through the big windows. Cooper kept replaying the moment in the car when Bridget had admitted her connection with these men so casually. He had no idea who these people were. They were newcomers. They were older than he was, but he had never heard of them. He waved them off when they wouldn’t accept his refusal. He’d made that one mistake in his life; he wouldn’t do it again. He started to walk out of the room. One of the men touched him on the arm, and Cooper wheeled around and almost hit him. They were aware of that. When Cooper got to the door, Bridget came beside him and put her hand on him, exactly where the man had touched him, as if he should understand the difference. He turned and saw the three men, over her shoulder at the far end of the enormous room, watching them.

  Cooper, can you help me? This has to work. I need my life back.

  This life?

  I need money to pay him back… . It’s a lot of money. It’s just a card game.

  He laughed at her.

  Can you do this? She reached out and he stepped back, would not be touched. He remembered how comfortable she and her friend had been at Jocko’s. Always talking, always interested in each other.

  You can step away from here, he said.

  You don’t understand, Cooper. You have to help me through this.

  Tell me.

  There’s this dream. I don’t know. It’s a long-standing dream. You walk into a room and the white lines are laid out, or the crystals are forming, and you think, Just walk out, don’t take a hit, you’re going to feel bad if you take a hit. But an addict never just walks out. You always take the hit. You get the high, even in your dream, and you know at the same time it’s going to hurt. If only you had just walked out.

  Why are you whispering?

  Why do you think? It’s the truth about me.

  I see. He looked back towards the men.

  I’ve known him so long. But I’m unsafe now. You have to help me. Do you need more time? He and his friends … they could give you another day to decide. I’m sure. Think about it. Don’t decide against it now.

  He drove along the south shore of the lake and found a chalet to rent. Neither anger nor exhaustion had kept him away from Bridget when he arrived in Tahoe. But even in his passion for her, Cooper had refused Gil’s proposal. He could have done everything the three men wanted him to do, but then he would be imprisoned in their world forever. He knew when he’d stacked the deck against Autry and The Brethren that they were familiar with larceny. These men were about to hit an innocent. And they already had too much knowledge of him. They’d selected him before he knew of their existence—long before his first sighting of Bridget at Jocko’s. He had never been invisible. And Bridget was there only to bring him to Tahoe, with the crook of her finger, with a swirl from her sea-green skirt. He saw another version of their romance, where the only thing being gratified and comforted was him, not her. He saw himself in the frame, surrounded by the con.

  The telephone rang in the chalet, and it was Gil. All communications would come from him. Cooper had one day to decide. The phone went dead. So they knew where he was. They had followed him. Cooper sat down at the Formica table and pushed a kitchen knife back and forth to the edge, as if its weight and balance might contain a crucial clue about how he should respond to all this. Win the right games, lose the right games. People did this every day in their lives, in their careers and friendships and love affairs. It was the moderate virtue of compromise. He stood up, leaving the knife balanced where it was.

  Bridget was within that array of lights across the lake. If she had appeared on his porch at that moment and allowed him into her jet-white arms, offering herself like a genuine truth, he knew he would, in spite of this new hate, move towards her, though the odds were blatant and foolish. He could not stand her absence. Her laugh was too far away from him, he was not in a steamed-up bathroom beside her, where she stood drying her hair, twisting the cone of the machine so it blew across her body. He needed the familiarity of her talking in that calm, low, grainy voice, detailing things; he needed the nine or ten glimpses of her in the bevelled mirror of an elevator, and her energy beside him as he drove the coast, her feet jacked up on the dashboard like a twelve-year-old girl’s. He wanted all of that. He would have taken all of that, over the odds.

  Then a strange thing happened. He drove into Tahoe the next day to eat a meal. He fantasized he might actually see Bridget somewhere, but instead there was Claire, in a diner. After all these years. Her lean brown shoulders, madrone-coloured, her dark beauty like a brown flower, her inquisitive face, as if she had all at once invented an adult look and manner. She had fallen into his arms, and in that second he recognized the original Claire, right through the years. She made a gesture that was familiar, and he looked around, as if Anna should also be there. But there was no one else. Claire appeared tired, and he accompanied her back to her hotel and said he would contact her later. He returned to the chalet and got into bed, but he couldn’t sleep.

  He recalled Claire mostly on horseback. He was used to seeing her in the context of currycombs, a bridle slung over her shoulder, or kneeling in the grass and peering at a ring-necked snake’s thin red collar. She’d been the one to discover him half frozen in the car. He could still hear the voice yelling. But he had been too cold to move. His head had turned slightly and he had glanced at the girl, with one half-open eye, at that figure pulling on the door with all her strength. Then she had disappeared. She had given up. He had been too slow and had not helped in any way. He began falling back into unconsciousness, then woke abruptly as an axe splintered through the passenger-side window and glass leapt into the darkness and into his hair and there was suddenly the noise of wind around him in the car. A hand came in and tugged at the door frame, breaking it free of the casing of ice, and then Claire was in there trying to pull him out through the passenger door. He could not straighten his legs, so she got into the passenger seat, covered in glass, and put her legs over him and kicked the driver’s door open. That was easier. Then she was carrying him out from the driver’s seat and dragging him through the dark yard.

  He was being pulled out of his bed, half asleep. The men hoisted him and took him into the living room of the chalet and made him sit in a cane chair, then duct-taped his hands to it loosely. For a while there was a silence as they stood around him. He felt he was still within his dream. Then Bridget came in. A skirt, her grey sweater, for the cold Tahoe evening. She came and sat on a low stool near him and leaned forward. Moved her face closer. He could feel the breath from her mouth. One of the men behind her said, ‘The deal, Cooper, the choice—say you will work with us, or we’ll beat the hell out of you.’ ‘I’ve been there,’ Cooper said quietly.

  Gil came forward and put his hand on Bridget’s shoulder as if it were something he owned. ‘It’s just this—you can’t fuck her for a couple of months and then not work for us, because you’re “principled.” You’re a mechanic, Cooper. You need to pay your way. We’re going to beat that principle out of you.’ He gripped Bridget’s yellow hair for a moment and then moved back, leaving the two of them alone.

  ‘Look down,’ she said. A whisper. ‘I can give you this, so you will barely feel what they do to you.’ A syringe lay in the palm of her hand. She tilted it and the fluid swayed back and forth; it was like a floater pen in which a woman’s black dress would slip off, or a train would vanish into a tunnel. She was screwing the needle onto the syringe as she looked at him. ‘It’s a favour. … Or you can say you will work with them.’ She hesitated, then the words stopped. He was conscious that everyone was watching him. He said, ‘Do you only fuck him when you’re stoned?’ Someone struck him in the face so hard he fell backwards with the chair, his head hitting the fl
oor.

  They pulled the chair with him back onto its four legs. Gil was now sitting on the stool Bridget had used, as close to Cooper as she had been. He swung his elbow hard against Cooper’s mouth. ‘You can’t walk away, not now. Let’s admit we’re all whores.’ He took a deep breath—Cooper sensed a movement but dared not look away from the man’s lips—and then Bridget crashed into Cooper, and under the shield of her body stabbed his neck with the syringe, compressing it fully, and dropped it. The three men were all struggling to pull her off him. Cooper lay on his side by the fireplace, his head capsized with the rush of the drug. She was in Santa Maria, saying, ‘This is for you. There are five flags. The yellow one is earth, the green one is water, the red is fire—the one we must escape.’

  He remembered nothing after that.

  The Person Formerly Known as Anna

  I came to France, in the thirty-fourth year of my life, to research the life and the work of Lucien Segura. I had flown into Orly, my friend Branka had met my plane, and we drove through the darkening outskirts, passing the smaller peripheral towns that were like blinks of light as we travelled south. We had not seen each other in over a year, and now we were catching up, talking all the way. Branka had packed a hamper of fruit, bread, and cheese, and we ate most of it, and drank from a constantly refilled glass of red wine that we shared.

  We reached Toulouse around midnight. Nothing was open, and we still had another hour to go before we got to Dému. Branka proposed a diversion to the village of Barran, where her architectural firm was involved in the restoration of an old church belfry, and forty minutes later we navigated the car through the narrow streets of that town. We parked beside the graveyard.