Divisadero - Michael Ondaatje [44]
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