Divisadero Read Online Free PDF Page A

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 fl ags 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 be wind-blessed!’ He could feel her
wetness at the back of his neck, as she reached up and attached one end of the
strip of fl ags so
the snake of it fl uttered loose, free of the earth.
    There are fi ve fl ags, she explained. The yellow one is earth, the green is water, the
red is fi re — the one we must escape — and white is cloud,
and blue is sky, limitless space or mind. Coop, I don ’ t know what to do. She was on his shoulders, in mid-air, looking
into space.
    Do you
think Claire knows?
    Claire talks to me every
night, and I don’t say a word about you, and she must wonder why I don’t say a
word about you.
Then Claire knows.
Some afternoons she spoke to him in an earnest schoolgirl French—as though she
were not someone who had grown up alongside him, almost a sibling. Or she’d
move away from his desire and read him a description of a city. Sometimes she
snuggled against his brown shoulders and after making love burst into tears.
There were times she needed this boy or man, whatever he was, to cry as well,
to show he understood the extremity of what was happening between them. When he
was in her, about to come, looking down on her, his passive face looked torn
open, but still he was wordless. It was easier for him. He did not accompany
her down to the farmhouse each evening and eat a meal with her father and
sister, and play a game of whist during which she’d look up suddenly to see
Claire staring at her, attempting to break into her privacy. They were long,
maddening, sterile games of chance and counting and collecting pairs or runs,
with her father keeping score obsessively. (Besides, Coop was the only one
among them good at cards. There were games in the past, Anna remembered, when
he would sit laughing at their incompetence.) Worst of all, she had to sleep in
the bed next to Claire in mutual silence.
Then Claire knows.
Had Coop loved anyone else? Did you love anyone else? she asked. He was shy at fi rst. Then he said, ‘A woman in Tulare.’ Tell me about her.