Divisadero - Michael Ondaatje [39]
Claire felt that Vea had implanted a cause in her, a guiding principle for what she could do with her life, and so she would do anything for him. He never approached her except as a compatriot, alongside the honour of his work, although god knows what his darknesses and hidden emotions were. Vea’s wife, she knew, could map him intricately. She took Claire to symphony concerts and the ballet, things that Vea could not sit still for. Ballet had not enough words to keep him awake. The closest he got to formal was Thelonious Monk, whose music, in the neglected recordings, were, he said, like imprisoned birdsongs. When Claire went to the Veas’ for dinner, he would be once more rebuilding his homemade sound system, and this always led to a discussion of the most recent eavesdropping equipment on the market. ‘There’s a laser scope,’ he would say, ‘that can measure the vibrations in the glass of a window across the street, and then translate them into sounds. From there it’s one step to hearing the conversation going on in that room. And we’re the ones who lost the war. … ’
Claire woke abruptly. She was in a hotel room in Tahoe. She had driven from San Francisco that afternoon and had needed to sleep for a few hours. Days before, she had been discussing a school board case with Vea, and he told her she would have to go to Tahoe. When she got up and looked out the window onto the town by the lake, she saw the casinos all lit up, beckoning. But when she came downstairs, the bellman suggested that a club called the Stendhal might be more interesting than any entertainment in a card lounge.
At some point during her evening at the Stendhal, someone offered Claire a tablet. ‘What is it?’ she asked the person beside her, and he mouthed something that she could not hear. She broke it in two, then swallowed one of the pieces quickly, deciding on the lesser dose.
The Stendhal was a small city of moods. There were rooms for silence and for loud music, rooms for fruit juice and fresh vegetables, for massage, for films that seemed plant-based or planet-based—like Baraka or Koyaanisqatsi or the one in which a small section of plot from a thriller was replayed in slow motion so that a woman’s arm packing a suitcase became as illuminating as a chrysalis in time-lapse. Claire had fallen under the spell of a brief scene from Psycho that was played slowly, Anthony Perkins walking innocently towards Janet Leigh with a tray of milk and sandwiches. Claire watched it just after taking the tablet, and as a result she was never certain whether the extension of the forty-five-second scene, which played out as a ten-minute sequence, was the talent of the tablet or the artist. In any case, she was now able to read, with a knowledge of what would take place in the future, all those innocent looks that went back and forth. When she turned away from the film she saw strangers moving cautiously around her, and a man who walked painfully slowly towards her with a glass of milk on a tray, so white there must have been a lit bulb within it.
She found the dance hall and remained there for an hour or two. Sometimes she was alone, and sometimes she was jammed up against several bodies moving together like the particles of a wave. She was in Tahoe for something, but she could no longer remember what. There was something she had to do, she just could not distinguish where it was in her memory. She would go into the silent room, behind thick pneumatic doors, and work it out there. The reason for being in Tahoe would then roll in her direction like a marble.
Some hours later she woke, and walked back from the club to her hotel. It was a cloudy morning, and gusts of rain were coming off the lake. The narrow streets sloped down towards the centre of town. She looked back to determine what a certain