Divisadero - Michael Ondaatje [49]
The telephone rang in the chalet, and it was Gil. All communications would come from him. Cooper had one day to decide. The phone went dead. So they knew where he was. They had followed him. Cooper sat down at the Formica table and pushed a kitchen knife back and forth to the edge, as if its weight and balance might contain a crucial clue about how he should respond to all this. Win the right games, lose the right games. People did this every day in their lives, in their careers and friendships and love affairs. It was the moderate virtue of compromise. He stood up, leaving the knife balanced where it was.
Bridget was within that array of lights across the lake. If she had appeared on his porch at that moment and allowed him into her jet-white arms, offering herself like a genuine truth, he knew he would, in spite of this new hate, move towards her, though the odds were blatant and foolish. He could not stand her absence. Her laugh was too far away from him, he was not in a steamed-up bathroom beside her, where she stood drying her hair, twisting the cone of the machine so it blew across her body. He needed the familiarity of her talking in that calm, low, grainy voice, detailing things; he needed the nine or ten glimpses of her in the bevelled mirror of an elevator, and her energy beside him as he drove the coast, her feet jacked up on the dashboard like a twelve-year-old girl’s. He wanted all of that. He would have taken all of that, over the odds.
Then a strange thing happened. He drove into Tahoe the next day to eat a meal. He fantasized he might actually see Bridget somewhere, but instead there was Claire, in a diner. After all these years. Her lean brown shoulders, madrone-coloured, her dark beauty like a brown flower, her inquisitive face, as if she had all at once invented an adult look and manner. She had fallen into his arms, and in that second he recognized the original Claire, right through the years. She made a gesture that was familiar, and he looked around, as if Anna should also be there. But there was no one else. Claire appeared tired, and he accompanied her back to her hotel and said he would contact her later. He returned to the chalet and got into bed, but he couldn’t sleep.
He recalled Claire mostly on horseback. He was used to seeing her in the context of currycombs, a bridle slung over her shoulder, or kneeling in the grass and peering at a ring-necked snake’s thin red collar. She’d been the one to discover him half frozen in the car. He could still hear the voice yelling. But he had been too cold to move. His head had turned slightly and he had glanced at the girl, with one half-open eye, at that figure pulling on the door with all her strength. Then she had disappeared. She had given up. He had been too slow and had not helped in any way. He began falling back into unconsciousness, then woke abruptly as an axe splintered through the passenger-side window and glass leapt into the darkness and into his hair and there was suddenly the noise of wind around him in the car. A hand came in and tugged at the door frame, breaking it free of the casing of ice, and then Claire was in there trying to pull him out through the passenger door. He could not straighten his legs, so she got into the passenger seat, covered in glass, and put her legs over him and kicked the driver’s door open. That was easier. Then she was carrying him out from the driver’s seat and dragging him through the dark yard.
He was being pulled