Divisadero - Michael Ondaatje [46]
When it was over, he watched as she came down from the stage with the band. She was handed, and swallowed it seemed in one slide, a tall glass of beer. The determination in the songs was now replaced by a childish happiness at the flattery and hugs from acquaintances. Now and then she looked out beyond them to see if he was there, but she could not see him. He remained further back, watching her out of the darkness. He was curious about every detail of this moment, when she was still partially caught up in what she had been onstage; he didn’t want that person to dissolve into the air with his appearance.
Her eyes were darting over shoulders. She was sinking. Cooper came forward into the limelight (so this was limelight), and he saw her unsure smile, which seemed to shrug it all off for his sake. They embraced and he felt the sweat on her arms, her wet dress, her wet hair against his cheek.
The next night he went to a card game, and when he returned was unable to find her. She was not in his room at the Santa Maria Inn, or asleep in the lobby, or in her apartment. It had been cleaned out and paid for. He realized he had no contacts for her, no idea how to reach her. There was only the man from Jocko’s, and he didn’t know his name. In the morning he drove to every hardware store within twenty miles of Santa Maria. He was worried that Bridget was not safe, wherever she was. Even though her rooms had been efficiently emptied.
He started sitting in coffee shops and bars along the town’s three-mile strip, and walking around Santa Maria, hoping this was a way to find her. He kept up his habit of running in the mornings, but now, more frantic, he flung himself beyond the outskirts. He was conscious, after all these years, of his wakened sexuality. He went into a gym and began sparring, using the regimen of rope and heavy bag. This was harsher, a better escape for his mind than running. He felt strong, but the strength grew, he knew, out of his own powerlessness. When he went back to his hotel one day, he looked at himself in the faint light of the lobby mirror for a clue of some sort. The realization hit him that he had been the one who was addicted.
The desk clerk said he had mail. It was a postcard from Tahoe with no message or signature, just his name and address in the handwriting he recognized. On the other side was a picture of Harrah’s casino glistening in a dusk light. It was Bridget, telling him where she was.
Within an hour he was going east, away from the coast, along the same roads he had taken with her on those late nights when they would drive towards Nevada. At the Carrizo Plain Monument he curved north and then travelled up the San Joaquin Valley on Highway 99. Visalia, Fresno, Modesto, and then Sacramento. The sacrament. In Carmichael he ate a meal. By the time it was dark he was climbing into the Sierras. There was rain and a mist, so that towns like Silver Fork and Strawberry, settlements he’d driven through a hundred times in the past, slipped vaguely by. Shortly before Tahoe he checked into a motel, shaved and bathed, using up the thin wafer of soap he’d been given. He put on a clean shirt and a tie. It was about two a.m. when he drove away.
He descended into Tahoe, into its lights and its subdued universe around the glow of the lake. He got out of the Chrysler to look at the mountains he had come over. He could already sense the change in