Divisadero - Michael Ondaatje [41]
She called Vea and said she was staying on for a while, and asked if he would track an address from a phone number for her. Someone she knew well, a sort of relative. She’d begun to feel something was wrong. That is, if he had existed in the first place. Perhaps the half of the pill she had swallowed had invented him, a little gift to end the very long night.
In Santa Maria, in the hills a few hours northwest of Los Angeles, during the years he had been there, Cooper would gamble long into the night, returning to his room at the hotel at three or four in the morning. He lived alone, mostly anonymous within the community of the town. A generation back, Santa Barbara County was populated mostly by migrant labourers, Mexican, Colombian, Vietnamese, Italian-American, who worked on the ranches and vegetable farms that spread over the landscape beyond the highway. The rich lived in the hills, and it was there one found the errant sons who loved to gamble. This was how democracy got a toe-hold in the valleys. Sometimes Cooper drove south and risked playing in bigger amateur games along the coast, but mainly he was at ease in this small highway town. Since the episode in Vegas, where he had cheated The Brethren, he was better off hidden. He went to movies in the afternoon, read legal thrillers, bought hookers when he needed them, and sat down at card tables at night. He would wake late in the day, then go running to burn off the staleness of the previous night. There was a balance to this spare life, and that was the trick. He didn’t go to Vegas or Tahoe anymore. He was unknown to the strangers he played cards with. There was no desire in him to step back into his past.
In the early evening Cooper would drive to a steak house on the Taft road and stand at the bar and drink a bad margarita, then sit down at a table by himself. He was usually out of Jocko’s before the main dinner crowd came. He preferred eating alone. Later, during the night, he would be surrounded by gregarious company at the card tables, but here he silently watched the few other diners and the tells between couples. He had become preoccupied with a woman who came in every Monday and Friday with a bearded man. Jocko’s wasn’t known for its fast service, and while Cooper waited he tried to imagine the man’s profession. A surveyor? Or one of those men who drove insectlike trucks up to planes at airports? The woman, in her black-and-white-checked woollen skirt, and with legs that barely seemed to fit under the table, was almost six feet, tall as Cooper anyway, and she was a ripple of energy. She’d leap up and talk to the staff, or check a name or a date on one of the posters tacked to the wall and come back with information for her partner.
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