Bridget sat up front with
the driver, while Cooper sat next to a bass guitarist who explained during the
drive that he was an editor of a California nature magazine that was owned by a
couple of robber barons. ‘Conservatives love California,’ the guitarist said.
‘They’re dying to get their hands on the rest of it.’ Bridget spent the time
chatting, barely audible to Cooper. She had told him they all performed in a
bar up the coast, and after an hour they arrived at a roadhouse on the edge of
the two-lane highway. Bridget got out and brushed down her skirt. That was
another
thing,
it was a skirt he’d never seen her in.
The neon above them reddened her face. ‘I’ll leave you here,’ she said. ‘See
you later, okay?’ ‘Okay.’ ‘Meet up with me after the show.’ ‘Okay.’ The
building looked anonymous, one of those basic rectangular shapes. It could just
as easily have been a bordello with wheelchair access. But it was, apparently,
a boxing gymnasium and bar. There were already about forty cars, several
half-ton trucks, even a honey wagon, parked on the gravel around it.
It was a night when Cooper
was in the slipstream of Bridget’s agenda, and was at ease. He walked around
the building to kill time. One side of the structure was unlit, and beyond were
unseen
fi
elds,
suggested only when a car turned around in the parking lot. He imagined Bridget
in her dressing room, preparing herself, changing her shoes or painting her
nails a burnt sienna. He felt avuncular towards her. He really knew nothing
about women. A door opened out into the dark, and a slice of light landed on
the ground about twenty feet from him. She came out with two men, and they
peered into the blackness and then moved closer to one another. She had her
hand on one of the men, and there was a tug and she fell against him. She
stepped back, and Cooper saw her remove what looked like his blue tie from her
bare arm. He’d seen a man collect poison in Taos, forcing the serpent’s jaws
open harshly against a beaker and squeezing the venom out of whatever gland
held it so that it dripped against the hard plastic, a little click from the
tooth of the creature almost inaudible, like a brief protest. Cooper watched
Bridget and the two men, not moving from where he was. When they opened the
door wider to return into the building, the path of light actually reached him,
but they had their backs turned towards him then.
The bar ran down one side
of the lounge, and Bridget was on the stage at the far end. She had changed
into a cream-coloured dress with a low neck and was wearing his tie loosely
around her throat. The Dauphin would not have approved. When she began to sing,
what was surprising was not the power of her voice, or its range from rough to
tender, but the con
fi
dence she had up there, as if a great actress were sculpting the air
with her arms while drawling like Chrissie Hynde. It was a persona Cooper had
not met in all the time he had spent with Bridget. Her subliminal dancing, her
yelling back to the crowd, her translation of ‘Season of the Witch’ into a
rough, dangerous blues, left him unmoored from everything he knew about her.
He’d never met this woman before. All he recognized was his tie, loose around
her neck. She was the only thing he watched. That evening, every approach to a
song was a new side of her nature. Even when he saw that she was growing tired,
she had a focus and a presence. She moved back and forth among the other band
members, banging into the contained light, breaking across the structures of
songs, her white arms catching the sparkle off a globe, her hip fucking the
audience. There was nothing too prepared or controlled about the performance.
She was enlarged.
When it was over, he watched
as she came down from the stage with the band. She was handed, and swallowed it
seemed in one slide, a tall glass of beer. The determination in the songs was
now replaced by a childish happiness at the
fl
attery and hugs from acquaintances. Now
and then she looked out beyond them to see if he was there, but she could not
see him. He remained further back, watching her out of the darkness. He was
curious about every detail of this moment, when she was still partially caught
up in what she had been onstage; he didn’t want that person to dissolve into
the air with his appearance.
Her eyes were darting over
shoulders. She was sinking. Cooper came forward into the limelight (so this was
limelight), and he saw her unsure smile, which seemed to shrug it all off for
his sake. They embraced and he felt the sweat on her arms, her wet dress,
her
wet hair against his cheek.
The next night he went to
a card game, and when he returned was unable to
fi
nd her. She was not in his room at the
Santa Maria Inn, or asleep in the lobby, or in her apartment. It had been
cleaned out and paid for. He realized he had no contacts for her, no idea how
to reach her. There was only the man from Jocko’s, and he didn’t know his name.
In the morning he drove to every hardware store within twenty miles of Santa
Maria. He was worried that Bridget was not safe, wherever she was. Even though
her rooms had been ef
fi
ciently emptied.
He started sitting in
coffee shops and bars along the town
’
s three-mile
strip, and walking around Santa Maria, hoping this was a way to
fi
nd her. He kept up his habit of running
in the mornings, but now, more frantic, he
fl
ung himself beyond the outskirts. He was
conscious, after all these years, of his wakened sexuality. He went into a gym
and began sparring, using the regimen of rope and heavy bag. This was harsher,
a better escape for his mind than running. He felt strong, but the strength
grew, he knew, out of his own powerlessness. When he went back to his hotel one
day, he looked at himself in the faint light of the lobby mirror for a clue of
some sort. The realization hit him that he had been the one who was addicted.
The desk clerk said he had
mail. It was a postcard from Tahoe with no message or signature, just his name
and address in the handwriting he recognized. On the other side was a picture
of Harrah’s casino glistening in
a dusk
light. It was
Bridget, telling him where she was.
Within an hour he was
going east, away from the coast, along the same roads he had taken with her on
those late nights when they would drive towards Nevada. At the Carrizo Plain
Monument he curved north and then travelled up the San Joaquin Valley on
Highway 99.
Visalia, Fresno, Modesto, and then Sacramento.
The sacrament.
In Carmichael he ate a meal. By the
time it was dark he was climbing into the Sierras. There was rain and a mist,
so that towns like Silver Fork and Strawberry, settlements he’d driven through
a hundred times in the past, slipped vaguely by. Shortly before Tahoe he
checked into a motel, shaved and bathed, using up the thin wafer of soap he’d
been given. He put on a clean shirt and a tie. It was about two a.m. when he
drove away.
He descended into Tahoe,
into its lights and its subdued universe around the glow of the lake. He got
out of the Chrysler to look at the mountains he had come over. He could already
sense the change in altitude. He was back in the past, it was a conscious risk,
and everything could change. Then he drove the car into the garage at Caesars
Palace and walked to Harrah’s—he knew that you never parked where you worked.
As soon as he entered the
Grand Hall, the pumped-in oxygen hit him. He’d driven all afternoon and much of
the night, and now the buzz of tiredness in him dissolved. A pompous decor
surrounded him. He sat on the twenty-foot-long leather sofa and stretched his
legs. When a waiter offered him a drink, Cooper tipped him a ten-dollar bill
and asked for a wet espresso. He carried the tall glass towards the tables. So
far he’d seen no one he knew, but the Tahoe night was young. Fifteen hours ago
he’d been boxing his heart out, sparring at a gym where there was Astroturf for
carpeting.
Cooper knew that if he
made himself visible, Bridget would find him, so he moved through the palatial
rooms, the waterfall of noise,
the
haphazard slow motion.
Eventually he sat down to play. He lost the
fi
rst hand intentionally, as he always did.
The game was faster than in the south, but these were amateurs around him. It
was four a.m. He was still wide awake.
An hour later, looking up
during a deal,
he
saw her. Something lurched in his
body. How long had she been standing there like that, so still, watching him?
She was taller than most of the onlookers. He
fi
nished the hand and swept up the chips.
He
’
d made enough tonight in
any case to rent something good on the south shore, if he or she needed it.
Cooper.
She gripped his arm at the cash grill. He put his face against her neck, white,
almost gold, the muscle there taut, perhaps the centre of her con
fi
dence.
They walked up wide carpeted steps. As soon as they escaped the Grand Hall they
were free of its noise and a memory came into his mind of himself as a boy
canoeing round a bend of San Antonio Creek and losing instantly the roar of a
nearby set of rapids. He followed a step or two behind Bridget. She spun around
and said, ‘I’ve just been for a swim.’ She was drifting on a light foot. No one
else in Harrah’s appeared to have such casual strength. There was an ef
fi
ciency in her he hadn
’
t seen before. In the elevator she held
off his embrace.
Wait.
As if that word explained it all.
Wait for what?
We have to talk. Are you checked in here?
No.
Because you can’t stay here, in this hotel.
He said nothing to that, and they rode the rest of the way in silence. His car
was at Caesars, he could have stayed here.
It was now about
fi
ve-thirty, and the two of them sat down to breakfast. He looked out
the windows from the eighteenth
fl
oor, and the sky was still a magenta dark above all the lights.
Cooper didn
’
t raise the issue
of why he shouldn
’
t stay here.
It felt to him that Bridget was armed in some way, and he needed to circle her
carefully. He needed to know what her intention was.
Though
if she was up to something, it would be wise to keep quiet about it in a
building where the eye in the sky could be anywhere.
He realized she’d
coaxed him into a place where he couldn’t argue and accuse. Instead he brought
up her old dinner partner at Jocko’s. ‘That hardware store fellow . . .’ he
asked. She lolled her head side to side as an answer. ‘What’s his name? You
never told me. Does he live in Tahoe? Is that why you are here?’ She waved
everything away except to admit that the man from Jocko’s was here.
Underneath Caesars Palace
he unlocked the Chrysler, and let her in the passenger side. There was that
familiar sense that the air and the uncertain lighting in the underground
garage were left over from an earlier decade. He walked slowly around the car
and got in beside her.
I should go back to Santa
Maria.
Huh? Her head jerked towards him.
Why did you leave? What are you getting me into, Bridget? Let’s just drive out
of this place.
No.
Can we drive—
I’m not ready for that sun yet.
Okay. She ran her hand slowly down his arm. Well, you
didn’t
go to seed.
Oh, I hit bottom, don’t worry.
She kissed his right eye, then his forehead, then his mouth. He accepted
everything.
Her hands on him.
They were not kissing
now. It was more intimate, their faces staring at each other, almost touching.
A breath, no words to accompany this, only watching each other’s
naked response.
His tired eyes alive upon her.
On Nevada Inn Road, twenty
minutes later. ‘I’m taking you to meet my friend,’ she said. ‘There’s something
I want to ask you to do. . . .’ She began telling him about the hardware store
owner on the drive, and how he had recognized Coop that very first night at
Jocko’s. His name was Gil. She owed him money, and she worked for him. ‘Is he
your lover?’ She’d known him for a long time, she said. He was a card player.
There would be his two friends with him, they were all card players. They knew
everything about Cooper. They had heard about him before he ever sat down for a
meal at Jocko’s. Cooper was silent, whispering to himself, wanting to slam the
heel of his hand through the windshield, as if it were her foolishness. She was
a part of a setup to bring him to Tahoe.
They parked, and he walked
with her into a short-lease condo. Three men sat in the large, almost
unfurnished apartment. She introduced Cooper, and right away the men began
speaking of his episode with The Brethren, even about his infamous gesture to
the eye in the sky that would
fi
nd no documentary evidence of his cheating;
they
were impressed he had been that good. He looked over at Bridget, who was
staring at her hands, as if she had nothing to do with any of this. Then Gil
put forward the plan. It was clever, intricate, and Cooper refused right away.
He stood up. There was an exhaustion overtaking him. The men kept giving him
more details so that he felt surrounded by talkative demons. He moved away from
the light coming through the big windows. Cooper kept replaying the moment in
the car when Bridget had admitted her connection with these men so casually. He
had no idea who these people were. They were newcomers. They were older than he
was, but he had never heard of them. He waved them off when they wouldn’t
accept his refusal. He’d made that one mistake in his life; he wouldn’t do it
again. He started to walk out of the room. One of the men touched him on the
arm, and Cooper wheeled around and almost hit him. They were aware of that.
When Cooper got to the door, Bridget came beside him and put her hand on him,
exactly where the man had touched him, as if he should understand the
difference. He turned and saw the three men, over her shoulder at the far end
of the enormous room, watching them.