The Gum Thief - Douglas Coupland [50]
“Let’s just hurry, then.”
The couple walked down the rear alley, peeking into successive yards in pursuit of something decidedly specific.
“There?” asked Gloria, pointing to a white plastic pony with a pink fringe and a purple tail.
“Gloria, Kendall was a boy.”
“I’m not stupid, Steve. I just thought it looked . . . cheerful.”
“Don’t think about it too much, Gloria. You know it’ll only make you hurt.”
“Steve, I keep waiting for that to change. But it never does.”
“It doesn’t. It won’t.”
“How can you be sure?”
“Because I’ve read everything I can about it. The important books, the unimportant books. Even an article in The New Yorker. The most you can ever expect is that you’ll simply get used to it.” Steve stopped looking into other yards and looked only at his toes.
Gloria stopped and said, “But it’s been so long now, and I’m not used to it. How could a person possibly become used to it?”
“Don’t ask me, Gloria. I’m not there yet, and let’s change the subject. It never goes anywhere but down.”
Gloria nodded towards a yard. “I see some toys over there.”
“Jesus, those people must have triplets. Look at all that plastic.”
“Let’s just do this quickly, Steve.”
“Right.”
Glove Pond: Kyle
While everyone was gone, Kyle had used the opportunity to investigate the secret life of Steve.
That turkey-cocking fraud must have an office here somewhere.
He found the guest bathroom with its white sink coated in dust. In the soap dish were some cracked and splintering hotel soaps from the distant past. Beside the toilet was the first chapter of Love in the Age of Office Superstores. Kyle was astounded: First he steals my manuscript, and then he leaves it beside the toilet?
Outside on the hallway’s flocked walls hung framed yellowed fox hunting prints above a demi-lune side table on which rested far more objects than it was ever meant to hold: a dusty wicker basket full of dusty keys, the locks they opened long since forgotten; five unmated men’s gloves; middens of neglected bank statements and bills; piles of half-sucked white Scotch mints; a heap of injured reading glasses and sunglasses; a dozen or so cosmetic products that had evidently fallen into Gloria’s disfavour; plus various hardware-like objects whose function was unclear to Kyle.
At the hallway’s end were two doors. One led into a parlour area, where, in a corner, sat a small black-and- white Philco TV, sans cable hookup, its antenna snapped in two. The room beside this was, bingo, Steve’s office. It reminded Kyle of New Yorker cartoons of offices in which flapper-era plutocrats chased their melon- breasted secretaries in circles around a large, document- cluttered desk lit by a brass banker’s light with a green glass shade. Closer inspection revealed a carpeting wear pattern from door to desk. A leather sofa groaned beneath its predictable load of yellowed newspapers and magazines. Kyle picked up a paper dated from a previous era (“President Touts ‘Information Superhighway’; Naysayers See Only Speed Bumps”), and the paper crumbled in his hands. He rubbed a finger along the sofa’s back and found that the dust in this particular room had fused with decades’ worth of pipe tobacco smoke to form a greasy, borderline explosive substance not unlike the Alberta tar sands. He tried rubbing the molasses-y substance off on the ledge of a bookshelf beside the door, only to accrue more noxious goo. He scraped his finger off on the bottom of his shoe.
Say what you will about the old monster, he did manage to complete five novels, Kyle thought as he moved closer to Steve’s desk, looking for evidence of the sixth, the one that allegedly took place in an office superstore.
Kyle sat down in Steve’s baronial leather desk chair. He expected a bit of bounce, but instead his coccyx slammed neatly into the chair’s solid base, its interior foam latex stuffing having long ago encrusted into brittle yellow sand that dribbled out from frayed cushion corners.
Kyle looked at the desk before him. Where to start? He searched for anything that resembled a manuscript,but saw only