Divisadero - Michael Ondaatje [43]
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 the 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