The Gum Thief - Douglas Coupland [19]
And all of those dead people in your life. I dream about Brendan every so often, but when he was alive, I never dreamed about him. Ever. How sick. When he was a toddler, I remember worrying about the fact that I never dreamed about him. If someone’s big in your life, you dream about them. Is their absence from your dreams disloyal? Is it cheating? I dream about my old high school locker twice a week. I dream about our old next-door neighbour’s poodle—dead twenty years now—twice a month, and I’m sure if I stared at snails, they’d become a nightly feature with me.
The thing about dreaming about dead people is that you don’t know they’re dead—your brain makes you forget that one key fact. And then you wake up and remember they’re dead, and you feel the loss all over again, every single time. You feel scooped out and hollow. I do. It’s been three years now. Hit by a car while he was riding his bike. It was instant. Joan couldn’t handle her Brendan dreams. Unlike me, she’d been dreaming about him since the moment she knew she was pregnant. Her counsellor kept trying to tell Joan that she should look at Brendan’s dream visits as something wonderful, treasures to remember him by. That’s when Joan stopped going to see the counsellor and went on autopilot taking care of Zoe. And then she was diagnosed with spleen cancer and she never really changed gears along the way, and the two years wore us ragged and we never recovered. Or, rather, I didn’t—I think Joan did. Who knows? I don’t think anyone ever gets over anything in life. They merely get used to it.
Glove Pond
“You answer the door.”
“No, you answer the door.”
As their guests waited on the other side, no doubt bored as well as chilled by gusts of arctic air whooshing in to refrigerate the fall evening, Steve and Gloria bickered.
“Why should I?” Gloria was indignant. “You heard the doorbell first.”
“We both heard it at the same time.”
“That’s not true. I was upstairs, so technically you heard it first.”
“No, I didn’t,” Steve said. “The doorbell’s ring mechanism is directly beneath your makeup collection, and as sound travels more quickly through solids, chances are that you heard the doorbell ring first. And tell me, your Grace, why won’t you answer the door?”
“Because it’s my role to be walking down the stairs in a gracious manner while you answer the door. That way, I can work on my character of Lady Windermere too. My devotion, my dear, is to my craft. And, tit-for- tat, why won’t you open the door?”
Steve was matter of fact: “I think it befits the director of a highly prestigious English faculty to be seated near the fireplace when his guests arrive, perhaps holding a snifter of highly exclusive brandy.”
“Let me get this straight,” said Gloria. “You’d put your petty vanity ahead of my need to be an artist?”
“Tell me, Gloria, does Lady Windermere actually descend a staircase in the play?”
Checkmate. “No.”
Steve felt he could already taste Gloria’s opening of the door. Then a voice inside his head said, Wait—can one actually taste the opening of a door?
Gloria, however, surprised him. “Steve—if I agree to discuss your five novels with you, would you consent to opening the door?”
It had been years since they had discussed his five critically acclaimed yet poorly selling novels. “Maybe.” He was wary.
“Is that a yes?”
He chewed the lower knuckle of his right index finger. “Yes.”
Gloria climbed the stairs to position herself.
“Not so quickly, Meryl Streep. You agreed to discuss my five novels.”
Gloria shrugged. “Very well, then. Shall we go in chronological order?”
“Please.”
“Okay, novel number one, Infinity’s Passion.”
Steve’s face bore the expression of a kindergartner just moments before the commencement of an Easter egg hunt. “Yes?”
“Potent but impotent. A cuckold’s vagina.”
Steve protested, “What the hell does that mean? Infinity’s Passion established my career. Without Infinity’s Passion, how