Divisadero - Michael Ondaatje [45]
The next time they went, Cooper joined Bridget and her friends. He had called the day before to cancel his presence in a game, and when the musicians showed up, he simply accompanied her downstairs. She kept watching for him to turn back.
Are you coming with us?
I thought I would.
That’s great, Cooper, but take off the tie. Here, give it to me.
The Dauphin had taught him to dress well, and he’d never been able to shake the habit. Something like a tie, or a shirt with French cuffs, gives you an edge, The Dauphin had told him, even on a losing streak.
Bridget sat up front with the driver, while Cooper sat next to a bass guitarist who explained during the drive that he was an editor of a California nature magazine that was owned by a couple of robber barons. ‘Conservatives love California,’ the guitarist said. ‘They’re dying to get their hands on the rest of it.’ Bridget spent the time chatting, barely audible to Cooper. She had told him they all performed in a bar up the coast, and after an hour they arrived at a roadhouse on the edge of the two-lane highway. Bridget got out and brushed down her skirt. That was another thing, it was a skirt he’d never seen her in. The neon above them reddened her face. ‘I’ll leave you here,’ she said. ‘See you later, okay?’ ‘Okay.’ ‘Meet up with me after the show.’ ‘Okay.’ The building looked anonymous, one of those basic rectangular shapes. It could just as easily have been a bordello with wheelchair access. But it was, apparently, a boxing gymnasium and bar. There were already about forty cars, several half-ton trucks, even a honey wagon, parked on the gravel around it.
It was a night when Cooper was in the slipstream of Bridget’s agenda, and was at ease. He walked around the building to kill time. One side of the structure was unlit, and beyond were unseen fields, suggested only when a car turned around in the parking lot. He imagined Bridget in her dressing room, preparing herself, changing her shoes or painting her nails a burnt sienna. He felt avuncular towards her. He really knew nothing about women. A door opened out into the dark, and a slice of light landed on the ground about twenty feet from him. She came out with two men, and they peered into the blackness and then moved closer to one another. She had her hand on one of the men, and there was a tug and she fell against him. She stepped back, and Cooper saw her remove what looked like his blue tie from her bare arm. He’d seen a man collect poison in Taos, forcing the serpent’s jaws open harshly against a beaker and squeezing the venom out of whatever gland held it so that it dripped against the hard plastic, a little click from the tooth of the creature almost inaudible, like a brief protest. Cooper watched Bridget and the two men, not moving from where he was. When they opened the door wider to return into the building, the path of light actually reached him, but they had their backs turned towards him then.
The bar ran down one side of the lounge, and Bridget was on the stage at the far end. She had changed into a cream-coloured dress with a low neck and was wearing his tie loosely around her throat. The Dauphin would not have approved. When she began to sing, what was surprising was not the power of her voice, or its range from rough to tender, but the confidence she had up there, as if a great actress were sculpting the air with her arms while drawling like Chrissie Hynde. It was a persona Cooper had not met in all the time he had spent with Bridget. Her subliminal dancing, her yelling back to the crowd, her translation