Divisadero - Michael Ondaatje [9]
Build a fire, will you, Coop!
It’s a warm rain, he said quietly to himself, and then louder, It’s a warm rain.
But build a fire for me. My clothes. They’re wet.
Here. I’ll do this.
The cotton shirt like seaweed as he peeled it off, and he startled to see it come away in one piece. She looked down, her face burning, at her whiteness, in the grey light. The freckles of rain on her small frame. My turn, she said.
There was silence, only water climbing down a chain from the spout. Everything else was still. Clouds, unseen tentative hills. She saw herself and Coop in this pause of weather, the sun coming out. A fox’s wedding, her father called it.
In her memory later, in her unforgetfulness of that day, she sensed she had been present everywhere. With Claire by the stove in the farmhouse, saying, ‘Oh, I got caught in the rain.’ And Claire coming forward to help her, to (again!) undress. ‘No, it’s all right, I’ll do it myself.’ Or she was sheltered under the green curling trees across the gully, watching their two fragile, unprotected bodies on the deck. Anna and Coop, with the sun coming out from under the brief rainstorm so that there were actual shadows on her when his fingers moved back and forth on her stomach as if he were thoughtlessly or thoughtfully trailing them in a river. She watched his dark arm, his wild hair in this light, turned her head away and saw the damp hand-rolled cigarette he had placed on the lip of the deck, still burning.
He was, it felt to her, no longer Coop beside her, on top of her, his hands pinning her shoulders too hard into the wood so she was trying to shrug him off. Anna, he said, finally, as if that word was naked in his throat, so much an admission. Then his palms releasing the grip that held her against the deck, so that his chest now was on her and she could no longer see him, only his hair against her eyes and face, in this changing light.
They were on their sides facing each other. ‘A fox’s wedding,’ he said, sharing the familiar phrase he had heard in their household; but it embarrassed her now, she wanted no evidence of a familial link, wanted wordlessness. As if … as if … if they did not say anything, all this physicality wouldn’t exist, could not be tangible evidence anywhere.
Some days she would come up to the cabin and just watch him work. She would offer to hammer planks alongside him, but he did not want that. Sometimes she brought a library book and sat reading in the shadow of the corrugated roof’s overhang until the sound of his sawing and hammering disappeared and she was in another country, in Italy with The Leopard, or in France with a musketeer. There were days they barely touched, when they would try to talk themselves out of this desire, and there were days when she would bring her book and there was no reading, no talking, in this sparse cabin that was colourless. One afternoon she brought an old gramophone that she had found in the farmhouse, along with some 78s. They wound it up like a Model T and danced to ‘Begin the Beguine,’ wound it up and danced to it again. The music made them belong to another time, no longer a part of this family or place.
Anna was sitting on the deck, hugging his black t-shirt to her stomach, watching him. She leaned over and opened her little satchel and unstrung the set of Buddhist flags she had bought through a mail-order catalogue. She put on his t-shirt and looked at the struts that bolstered the overhang by the door. ‘Can you help me, Coop? I need to get up there. We can tack this to the rain lip over the door.’ She already had his hammer in her hand, and a nail. He crouched so she could sit on his shoulders. ‘Time for the heart and the mind,’ she sang. ‘You need to