Claire felt that Vea had
implanted a cause in her, a guiding principle for what she could do with her
life, and so she would do anything for him. He never approached her except as a
compatriot, alongside the honour of his work, although god knows what his
darknesses and hidden emotions were. Vea’s wife, she knew, could map him
intricately. She took Claire to symphony concerts and the ballet, things that
Vea could not sit still for. Ballet had not enough words to keep him awake. The
closest he got to formal was Thelonious Monk, whose music, in the neglected
recordings, were, he said, like imprisoned birdsongs. When Claire went to the
Veas’ for dinner, he would be once more rebuilding his homemade sound system,
and this always led to a discussion of the most recent eavesdropping equipment
on the market. ‘There’s a laser scope,’ he would say, ‘that can measure the
vibrations in the glass of a window across the street, and then translate them
into sounds. From there it’s one step to hearing the conversation going on in
that room. And we’re the ones who lost the war....’
Claire woke abruptly. She
was in a hotel room in Tahoe. She had driven from San Francisco that afternoon
and had needed to sleep for a few hours. Days before, she had been discussing a
school board case with Vea, and he told her she would have to go to Tahoe. When
she got up and looked out the window onto the town by the lake, she saw the
casinos all lit up, beckoning. But when she came downstairs, the bellman
suggested that a club called the Stendhal might be more interesting than any
entertainment in a card lounge.
At some point during her
evening at the Stendhal, someone offered Claire a tablet. ‘What is it?’ she
asked the person beside her, and he mouthed something that she could not hear.
She broke it in two,
then
swallowed one of the pieces
quickly, deciding on the lesser dose.
The Stendhal was a small
city of moods. There were rooms for silence and for loud music, rooms for fruit
juice and fresh vegetables, for massage, for
fi
lms that seemed plant-based or
planet-based
—
like
Baraka
or
Koyaanisqatsi
or
the one in which a small section of plot from a thriller was replayed in slow
motion so that a woman
’
s arm packing a suitcase became
as illuminating as a chrysalis in time-lapse. Claire had fallen under the spell
of a brief scene from
Psycho
that was played slowly, Anthony Perkins
walking innocently towards Janet Leigh with a tray of milk and sandwiches.
Claire watched it just after taking the tablet, and as a result she was never
certain whether the extension of the forty-
fi
ve-second scene, which played out as a
ten-minute sequence, was the talent of the tablet or the artist. In any case,
she was now able to read, with
a knowledge
of what would
take place in the future, all those innocent looks that went back and forth.
When she turned away from the
fi
lm she saw strangers moving cautiously around her, and a man who
walked painfully slowly towards her with a glass of milk on a tray, so white there
must have been a lit bulb within it.
She found the dance hall
and remained there for an hour or two. Sometimes she was alone, and sometimes
she was jammed up against several bodies moving together like the particles of
a wave. She was in Tahoe for something, but she could no longer remember what.
There was something she had to
do,
she just could not
distinguish where it was in her memory. She would go into the silent room,
behind thick pneumatic doors, and work it out there. The reason for being in Tahoe
would then roll in her direction like a marble.
Some hours later she woke,
and walked back from the club to her hotel. It was a cloudy morning, and gusts
of rain were coming off the lake. The narrow streets sloped down towards the
centre of town. She looked back to determine what a certain noise was and saw
it was someone on a skateboard about to pass her. His eyes caught her look, and
he made a quick decision and reached out, lifting her onto the board in front
of him. He barely held her and she was holding nothing, just standing encircled
within his arms, with her eyes wide open. They raced over the clacks of the
sidewalk against the rush of the
rain,
hardly seeing
faces as they slid past, everything was colour and rain. She began to relax,
and at that moment he lifted her and placed her on the pavement, then sped away
ahead of her. Claire turned to see the distance they had come, and stood there
instantly still, immovable in front of the clapboard houses. She needed to
fi
nd her hotel and lie down.
Somewhere during this
somnambulistic walk, she entered a diner and sat down in a booth. She asked for
mineral water, three eggs, sausages, and mushrooms. Did they have green
tomatoes? Yes.
A double order, then.
The waitress
brought her the food and she started eating, picking at it, feeling clumsy,
tired, not controlling her knife and fork. That was when she saw someone who
looked like Coop come into the restaurant.
Coop?
She didn’t say it out loud, not quite sure if she had summoned him from the
darkness. She just stood up in her booth. He looked across the room for a seat,
and he saw her. Then there was an amazed smile. She went up to him and embraced
him. It was him. She wouldn’t let go of him, because she was sobbing. It was
her tiredness, or the vapour trails of that pill. She was not expecting this,
and the emotion of seeing Coop invaded her.
He sat down across from her. Both were silent. He kept looking around. He
turned to look behind him, then back to Claire.
So this is where you live?
No.
In San Francisco.
I don’t live here.
Coop said nothing, just watched her.
I work for a defence lawyer. I do research, investigations. I work for Aldo
Vea. Do you know him?
Does he investigate gambling?
That’s prosecution. I’m defence.
All at once she became conscious of what she was wearing.
I’ve been at a club. Not typical for me. Her eyes
fl
ickered. The excitement and exhaustion
were hitting her simultaneously.
Listen, I want to talk, Coop, hear everything, but I need to...
Let
’
s go, he said. He knew where her hotel was, and
suggested they walk, for the fresh air. Once outside he told her that he made
his living by gambling, and asked her again about the kind of work she did. He
kept walking sideways so he could look at her. Are you investigating something here?
Just brie
fl
y. I
’
m looking in on a case for my boss.... You
move like a gangster, Coop.
I
’
m a card player.
I see.
I live a few hours north of L.A. A small town called Santa Maria. I
’
ve been there some years now. I
’
m in Tahoe looking for someone.
Do you have a house? In Santa Maria, I mean.
I live in a hotel.
Jesus.
He waved down a cab.
What are you doing?
You’re tired. I don’t think you will make it to the Fuller.
He stood
in the doorway after she entered her hotel room and asked when she was leaving
Tahoe.
Sit. Have a drink,
Coop
. I can stay long enough to see you again, if you have
the time. She fell back onto the sofa and toed her shoes off, watching him.
Coop walked over to the
window that showed the stillpulsing lights of Tahoe.
There’s a big card game down there, in the next few days. Somehow I need to get
out of it. I need to get some help, from an old friend. Coop turned and saw
that Claire had slipped sideways on the sofa and was asleep. He went over and
stood looking at her.
He pulled her up so that she was against him, her face at his neck. He could
smell a remnant of perfume. He had never thought of Claire as someone with
perfume. She was a girl he had taught to
fi
sh, ride a horse, drive a car. Up close he could see the same warmth
in her face, and he found himself smiling at her. It was years since he had
last seen her. ‘C’mon, you need a bed.’ She half woke and her hands pushed him
away. ‘It’s okay, it’s me, Coop. I’m just helping you.’
During the next two days,
Claire worked on the school board case, and waited for Coop to call. She tried
the number he had left for her, but there was never an answer. Perhaps he had
left town, after all. She went into a few card lounges, but when she asked
players about Coop, they turned away or ignored her. Anonymity seemed a
courtesy in this world. She might be the wife of an errant gambler. She had
nothing, no address for him, only his scrawled phone number. After all these
years she had managed to lose him again.
She called Vea and said
she was staying on for a while, and asked if he would track an address from a
phone number for her. Someone she knew well, a sort of relative. She’d begun to
feel something was wrong. That is, if he had existed in the
fi
rst place. Perhaps the half of the pill she
had swallowed had invented him, a little gift to end the very long night.
Angeles, during the years he had been there, Cooper would gamble long into the
night, returning to his room at the hotel at three or four in the morning.
He lived alone, mostly anonymous within the community of the town.
A generation back, Santa Barbara County was populated mostly by migrant
labourers, Mexican, Colombian, Vietnamese, Italian-American, who worked on the
ranches and vegetable farms that spread over the landscape beyond the highway.
The rich lived in the hills, and it was there one found the errant sons who
loved to gamble. This was how democracy got a toe-hold in the valleys.
Sometimes Cooper drove south and risked playing in bigger amateur games along
the coast, but mainly he was at ease in this small highway town. Since the
episode in Vegas, where he had cheated The Brethren, he was better off hidden.
He went to movies in the afternoon, read legal thrillers, bought hookers when
he needed them, and sat down at card tables at night. He would wake late in the
day,
then
go running to burn off the staleness of the
previous night. There was a balance to this spare life, and that was the trick.
He didn’t go to Vegas or Tahoe anymore. He was unknown to the strangers he
played cards with. There was no desire in him to step back into his past.
In the early evening
Cooper would drive to a steak house on the Taft road and stand at the bar and
drink a bad margarita, then sit down at a table by himself. He was usually out
of Jocko’s before the main dinner crowd came. He preferred eating alone. Later,
during the night, he would be surrounded by gregarious company at the card
tables, but here he silently watched the few other diners and
the tells
between couples. He had become preoccupied with a
woman who came in every Monday and Friday with a bearded man. Jocko’s wasn’t
known for its fast service, and while Cooper waited he tried to imagine the
man’s profession.
A surveyor?
Or one of those men who
drove insectlike trucks up to planes at airports? The woman, in her
black-and-white-checked woollen skirt, and with legs that barely seemed to
fi
t under the table, was almost six feet,
tall as Cooper anyway, and she was a ripple of energy. She’d leap up and talk
to the staff, or check a name or a date on one of the posters tacked to the
wall and come back with information for her partner.
She often had books on the
table beside her.
Chemistry,
he thought he saw in a title once. She was
in her early or middle thirties. She always seemed to be there at the same hour
with the man.
Her professor, perhaps.
Or brother.
They never touched each other, although they
talked constantly while they ate. Like Cooper, they always sat at the same table.
Sometimes he got there
fi
rst, sometimes they did. Occasionally the woman looked over at him
and acknowledged his presence
—
once charmingly in the
middle of her laughter about something, and he had smiled back. So there was
this small moment between them that he folded carefully away. Then sometime in
the middle of a meal she would stretch her legs out. She did not
fi
t or belong inside this wooden-walled
diner, where the lighting clari
fi
ed mostly the wrinkled necks of old gamblers and their season-long
partners. Whatever the lighting was at Jocko’s, it should have been bottled, he
thought, and gone on tour with her, its sole purpose to follow this woman for
the rest of her life, parting from her only after the funeral rites.
What he wanted was to
simply look at that face that he couldn’t read at all. That face, the blond
hair. It wasn’t the beauty, it was the variousness. Maybe in Vienna the woman
might go unnoticed, but in Santa Maria she was this panther who came in and
fi
t herself somehow between that chair and
table near him every Monday and Friday, opposite a man who perhaps was an
amateur magician in this semi-suburban California town—who sawed her in half in
some unhealthy bar down the road. She leaned forward to whisper to the friend,
or whatever he was.