Divisadero (16 page)

Cooper, can you help me?
This has to work. I need my life back.
This
life?
I need money to pay him back.... It’s a lot of money. It’s just a card game.
He laughed at her.
Can you do this? She reached out and he stepped back, would not be touched. He
remembered how comfortable she and her friend had been at Jocko’s. Always
talking,
always interested in each other.
You can step away from here, he said.
You don’t understand, Cooper. You have to help me through this.
Tell me.
There’s this dream. I don’t know. It’s a long-standing dream. You walk into a
room and the white lines are laid out, or the crystals are forming, and you
think, Just walk out, don’t take a hit, you’re going to feel bad if you take a
hit. But an addict never just walks out. You always take the hit. You get the
high, even in your dream, and you know at the same time it’s going to hurt. If
only you had just walked out.
Why are you whispering?
Why do you
think
? It’s the truth about me.
I see. He looked back towards the men.
I’ve known him so long. But I’m unsafe now. You have to help me. Do you need
more time? He and his friends... they could give you another day to decide. I’m
sure. Think about it. Don’t decide against it now.

He drove along the south
shore of the lake and found a chalet to rent. Neither anger nor exhaustion had
kept him away from Bridget when he arrived in Tahoe. But even in his passion
for her, Cooper had refused Gil’s proposal. He could have done everything the
three men wanted him to do, but then he would be imprisoned in their world
forever. He knew when he’d stacked the deck against Autry and The Brethren that
they were familiar with larceny. These men were about to hit an innocent. And
they already had too much knowledge of him. They
’
d
selected him before he knew of their existence—long before his
fi
rst sighting of Bridget at Jocko
’
s. He had
never
been invisible. And
Bridget was there only to bring him to Tahoe, with the crook of her
fi
nger, with a swirl from her sea-green
skirt. He saw another version of their romance, where the only thing being
grati
fi
ed and
comforted was him, not her. He saw himself in the frame, surrounded by the con.

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
fi
gure 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 out of
his bed, half asleep. The men hoisted him and took him into the living room of
the chalet and made him sit in a cane chair, then duct-taped his hands to it
loosely. For a while there was a silence as they stood around him. He felt he
was still within his dream. Then Bridget came in.
A skirt,
her grey sweater, for the cold Tahoe evening.
She came and sat on a low
stool near him and leaned forward.
Moved her face closer.
He could feel the breath from her mouth. One of the men behind her said, ‘The
deal, Cooper, the choice—say you will work with us, or we’ll beat the hell out
of you.’ ‘I’ve been there,’ Cooper said quietly.

Gil came forward and put
his hand on Bridget’s shoulder as if it were something he owned. ‘It’s just
this—you can’t fuck her for a couple of months and then not work for us,
because you’re “principled.” You’re a mechanic, Cooper. You need to pay your
way. We’re going to beat that principle out of you.’ He gripped Bridget’s
yellow hair for a moment and then moved back, leaving the two of them alone.

‘Look down,’ she said.
A whisper.
‘I can give you this, so you will barely feel
what they do to you.’ A syringe lay in the palm of her hand. She tilted it and
the
fl
uid
swayed back and forth; it was like a
fl
oater pen in which a woman
’
s black dress would slip off, or a train would vanish into a tunnel.
She was screwing the needle onto the syringe as she looked at him.
‘
It
’
s a favour.... Or you can say you will
work with them.’ She hesitated,
then
the words
stopped. He was conscious that everyone was watching him. He said, ‘Do you only
fuck him when you’re stoned?’ Someone struck him in the face so hard he fell
backwards with the chair, his head hitting the
fl
oor.

They pulled the chair with
him back onto its four legs. Gil was now sitting on the stool Bridget had used,
as close to Cooper as she had been. He swung his elbow hard against Cooper’s
mouth. ‘You can’t walk away, not now. Let’s admit we’re all whores.’ He took a
deep breath—Cooper sensed a movement but dared not look away from the man’s
lips—and then Bridget crashed into Cooper, and under the shield of her body
stabbed his neck with the syringe, compressing it fully, and dropped it. The
three men were all struggling to pull her off him. Cooper lay on his side by
the
fi
replace,
his head capsized with the rush of the drug. She was in Santa Maria, saying,
‘
This is for you. There are five
fl
ags. The yellow one is earth, the green
one is water, the red is
fi
re
—
the one we must escape.
’

He
remembered nothing after that.

I came to
France, in the thirty-fourth year of my life, to research

the
life and the work of Lucien Segura. I had
fl
own into Orly, my friend Branka had met
my plane, and we drove through the darkening outskirts, passing the smaller
peripheral towns that were like blinks of light as we travelled south. We had
not seen each other in over a year, and now we were catching up, talking all
the way. Branka had packed a hamper of fruit, bread, and cheese, and we ate
most of it, and drank from a constantly re
fi
lled glass of red wine that we shared.

We reached Toulouse around
midnight. Nothing was open, and we still had another hour to go before we got
to Dému. Branka proposed a diversion to the village of Barran, where her
architectural
fi
rm was involved in the restoration of an old church belfry, and
forty minutes later we navigated the car through the narrow streets of that
town. We parked beside the graveyard.

Of course she had an arc
light in the trunk of her car, and she lifted it out and beamed it towards the
strange steeple that rose high into the darkness like a spear, or a giant
beanstalk, though what it reminded me of mostly was the shambling water tower
that we used to climb as children. But this was stranger. Built in the
thirteenth century, the belfry had been constructed like a coil or a screw. It
had one of those unexpected, helicoidal shapes— the surface like a helix—so
that as it curved up it re
fl
ected every compass point of the landscape. We circled the church in
the dark. Who had conceived and constructed this? Branka said that early
historians claimed its builders were inspired by the form of a snail shell.
Other explanations were that carpenters had used wood that was too fresh, so it
ultimately warped, or that a very strong wind had created the torsion. My
friend disregarded these theories of fresh wood or strong winds. The belfry was
for her an example of visionary craftsmanship, its
fi
fty-metre elevation
‘
like a
fi
re in the sky.
’
She added there had been a
fi
ght during the recent restoration, in
which a man had almost been killed.

We returned to the car and
drove towards Dému. All my life I have loved travelling at night, with a
companion, each of us discussing and sharing the known and familiar behaviour
of the other. It’s like a villanelle, this inclination of going back to events
in our past, the way the villanelle’s form refuses to move forward in linear
development, circling instead at those familiar moments of emotion. Only the
rereading counts, Nabokov said. So the strange form of that belfry, turning
onto
itself
again and again, felt familiar to me. For
we live with those retrievals from childhood that coalesce and echo throughout
our lives, the way shattered pieces of glass in a kaleidoscope reappear in new
forms and are songlike in their refrains and rhymes, making up a single
monologue. We live permanently in the recurrence of our own stories, whatever
story we tell.
There was now not a single lit streetlamp in the villages we passed, just our
headlights veering and sweeping along the twolane roads. We were alone in the
world, in nameless and unseen country. I love such journeying at night. You
have most of your life strapped to your back. Music on the radio comes faint
and intermittent. You are wordless at last. Your friend’s hand on your knee to
make sure you are not drifting away. The black hedges coax you on.

Whenever there is thunder
I think of Claire. I imagine her, content by herself, though as far as I know
she could be comfortably married. There is a poem of Henry Vaughan’s that
describes the way ‘care moves in disguise.’ I don’t know if this is what I am
doing, from this distance, imagining the life of my sister, and imagining the
future of Coop. I am a person who discovers archival subtexts in history and
art, where the spiralling among a handful of strangers tangles into a story. In
my story the person I always begin with is Claire.

Claire’s limp made her appear
serious to those who did not know her well. It was the result of her having had
polio as a child, and I remember our father during that period carrying her
constantly from room to room. The limp always led to ardent gestures of
courtesy towards her. Men on a trolley car or the Larkspur Ferry would rise and
give her their seats. But Claire never felt this seriousness in herself. It is
in fact I, Anna, who should be identi
fi
ed as the serious sister, who always insisted on some determined
path to be taken. Claire was in many ways the adventurous one, with
a wildness
in her. Her journals about her travels—on
horseback, of course—contained a range of friends unknown to the rest of us....