The Gum Thief - Douglas Coupland [16]
“I’m ordering another drink.”
DeeDee changed the topic and told me that her condominium’s co-op board was on her case for keeping a cat. I said I didn’t see why cats were such a big deal, but she told me it wasn’t the actual cat that was the problem; it was the $600 plumbing bill to snake out the clots of kitty litter choked inside the bathroom pipes. She confessed that this had happened not once, but twice.
You have to remember that two years ago my freefall had just begun. I’m used to it now, but it was all very fresh then. A chronology of my life would read:
Thorpe, Roger
• Wife’s cancer diagnosis: 2003
• Totally cancer’ed out: 2004
• Seeks diversion as stagehand in local theatre production of Neil Simon’s Same Time Next Year: 2004
• Canned from desk job at insurance firm: 2004
• Makes one stupid mistake he pays for the rest of his life: 2004
• Dumped by embittered wife: 2004
• Learns the disturbing financial cost of anything legal: 2004
• Old friends pretend not to notice him in a checkout line: 2004
• Rents basement suite from condescending yuppies: 2004
• Seborrhea inside hairline: 2004
• Begins work at Staples: 2005
• Ugly phone calls with Joan: 2004, 2005, 2006
• Unable to afford Halloween candy, so he sits in basement apartment with all the lights off: 2004, 2005, 2006
• Weekend highlight: learning how to use a photocopier’s collating function: 2005
I was hypnotized by the speed of my life’s implosion, but DeeDee was having no truck with my self-pity. She said, “Guys forget that women have to make their peace with their half-assed lives too, and earlier than men. Women get more realistic far faster than men do, so don’t expect tears in your beer from me, Roger. To me, you’re a rookie at this failing life shit.”
I reached over to touch her hand, and she yanked it back.
“I want to go home.” “But . . .”
“Roger, I feel so . . . old.”
“Tonight was supposed to be about making you feel young again.”
She slid a twenty under her water glass. “Nothing about the past ever makes me feel young.”
I watched through the window as she got into her car and drove away. I got sloshed.
Glove Pond
Gloria was in her boudoir—a delirious vision of a 1930s Hollywood set director, pushed to the farthest, pinkest extreme. Not a hard surface existed anywhere in the room. What was not carpeted was covered in velour or velvet or starbursts of ostrich and marabou feathers. The room smelled of violets and tuberoses, breezeless and claustrophobic, as though heaps of rotting blossoms were concealed behind drapes and beneath the divan.
Gloria was trying to decide which colour she would try on her lips, but the sound of the doorbell not ringing was driving her crazy.
She reached down to touch her spleen, which was puffy and irritable. Fortunately, she’d paid attention during her Vassar biology lessons and knew that a spleen is a ductless gland not strictly necessary for life, and which is closely associated with the circulatory system, where it functions in the destruction of old red blood cells and the removal of other debris from the bloodstream.
A puffy spleen—what could that mean?
She looked at her artillery of lipsticks. She remembered how her mother always used to throw out all her old makeup and how it drove Gloria crazy. As an adult, she overcompensated by never throwing out anything. Steve once told her that her makeup table resembled the road tour makeup kit for the entire cast of Cats. To punish him, Gloria withheld sex for several months.
Falling Blossom Pink. Perfect.
She looked for some Kleenex to blot the previous colour from her lips, but realized she had run out. All that remained were some used sheets hastily stuffed into her dresser drawer the previous spring—long enough ago that any microbes they once harboured would have disintegrated, thus making them reasonably safe to use again. So she blotted her lips, sipped a gin and tonic, and wondered about the evening’s guests—an academic and his wife. This young chap had recently published a novel that was