Divisadero - Michael Ondaatje [61]
Coop began walking towards them, his brain struggling to hold on to something. He heard Ruth say, as he approached, ‘Look at your friend, even he’s not innocent. No one here is. Not me. Not you. Not even you. We’re the barbarians too. We keep letting this happen.’ Dorn was not responding, until her hand ripped at his neck and a hundred small shells paused on his chest for a second, then clattered to the floor. Children began scrambling for them. Coop in his silence had something by the tail, and he couldn’t name it. He stood in front of them and didn’t know what to say. He could see tears on Ruth’s face. The music got louder, suddenly.
What had he been about to say to them? Something about her? Something he’d seen? She went up to him, weeping, and put her arms around him. ‘Dance with me, Coop. Will you?’ He put his arms up and she moved gently in against him, remembering the bruises. They aligned themselves to the dance. More and more children came onto the floor, then adults, as if coupled in another time, at an outbreak in the Hundred Years’ War. Much later, Dorn, very drunk, grabbed the mandolin from a six-foot-tall teenager and joined the band, insisting on the endless version of ‘Fire on the Mountain.’
The next morning nobody woke early, except for Coop, who sat alone at the kitchen table.
Was this his life before this life? What he was looking at felt familiar only because he had been here in this very same place the day before. There was nothing older than a few days in what he remembered. And what he held now, like a smooth doorless object in his mind, was his dance with the woman named Ruth. He had been able to tell right away that if he had danced in his earlier life he could not have been good. He had thought about this for a moment and then said it out loud to her. And she had said, ‘That’s right.’ ‘Begin the Beguine,’ he said. And she had not responded.
He pondered now her manner, the way she had said, ‘That’s right.’ As in, ‘It was certainly a well-known fact among us.’ What was she to him? A friend? Nothing? Was she speaking only of the present when she said, ‘That’s right’? But that was not the way the remark had been said to him. Who was Ruth? She had a name as small as a keyhole. She had danced with him. She’d wept in his arms.
Coop’s mind held only a few distant things. A Polaroid of him by the highway, an owl on the road, a woman bent over a blue flame, a dance to the sound of flags. Otherwise his mind was this scrubbed table that could barely remember holding cups, or plates, or slices of bread, or a girl’s tired head.
Driving to San Francisco, Claire reaches for Coop’s hand.
I need you to meet my father.
Your father … Why?
He brought you up, Coop. And he’s old now. So old. After you went away, and after my sister went away, he barely talked. Not even to me. He made himself alone. I want you to see him.
I don’t know him.
He will want to meet you, Coop. And you need to say your good-byes. Perhaps this is important for you.
She did not want to explain any more to him, knowing this act could be terrible, even brutal. Or it would be generous. Or break her father’s heart again. All of these things were possible. But so much had been wasted. She had only a distant father, and now Coop, like this, a boy remembering nothing. She wanted to fold the two halves of her life together like a map. She imagined her father, standing now on the edge of the cornfield, his white beard speckled by the shadows of the long green leaves, an awkward, solitary