The Gum Thief - Douglas Coupland [69]
When Brendan was killed on his bike (Capilano Road at Canyon Boulevard; Sunday afternoon; no drunk driver, merely an accident), I knew life was over and something else was beginning. I’d still be alive and all, but it couldn’t be called a “life.” Joan knew it too. We never discussed it, but since that afternoon we’ve never been able to look each other in the eyes, not really. Joan went the therapy route, and she likes to think she can look me in the eye, but it’s a fake look and she knows I know. Zoё was too young to remember any of it.
I quit my job selling off-season ski resort time-shares because I couldn’t stand the sensation of everybody looking at me at my desk and whispering about what happened to Brendan. I stopped seeing everybody who knew me before Brendan’s death. It’s why I joined that goddam dinner theatre company, because it was a clean slate. I can’t even act. I was just browsing through the Weekend Shopper, and I recognized it as a potential haven, full of strangers, and I could maybe get lost in it. It wasn’t hard. As in any milieu, there’s always an extra slot in the theatre world for somebody who’s punctual and who doesn’t gossip, so I was opening and closing curtains and stacking chairs right away.
Enter sex. Enter Diana Tigg. Enter the raging, self-absorbed hose-monster—the diseased harridan who played the lead in Same Time, Next Year. (Thinking of dinner and a play? Think of the North Shore Players and the Keg & Cleaver’s limited-time-only mid-week two-for-one Bard’s Buffet. Bravo!) I don’t expect any sympathy regarding the woman, because I don’t deserve any—I deserve heaps of scorn. I briefly fell for an actress, a remorseless pulsing quasar of infinite joy-sucking neediness and petty vengeance.
Like any so-so actress, la Tigg was more interesting in real life than onstage. There’s the old truism about how we’re all poor actors strutting about a stage and then we die—well, I don’t believe it. Next time you’re out in public, watch every ordinary person perform even the tiniest of gestures with total grace and fluency—picking up their dry cleaning, say, as they mumble about the day’s weather with the Korean mama-san who runs the place, all the while plucking coins from the recesses of their wallets and purses. Masterful. But if you’d beforehand given any one of these people the same lines in a script? They’d flub it. They’d botch real life.
That’s where Diana comes in. The woman was unable to be natural. She really treated everyday life as theatre, but instead of scripts she had only fragments she’d borrowed from other plays—words and mannerisms she’d copied from TV soap operas. She certainly couldn’t write her own material, and she had the God-given absence of any ability to analyze the effect she had on people. She never knew when to slow down or speed up or shut up, but before I figured out her act, we met at her place and things went . . . the way they did. Within forty-eight hours, she was leaving guess what kind of messages on my home answering machine, which Joan immediately intercepted, and out the door I went. And the worst part of it was that, in the end, Diana had made it with me only as pity sex—a ticket girl who used to temp at my ski office had blabbed my story about Brendan to the troupe.
So long to the remains of my old existence . . . and hello to a basement suite, as well as to Staples, a workplace so incredibly anonymous and depersonalized that I revelled in its sterility—the total absence of community. And I had Mr. Vodka to help me.
Until I met Bethany I was about as human as a box of discounted tax software. When Bethany accidentally started reading my stuff, suddenly I felt as if . . . maybe creativity could save me, maybe I could invent a more desirable world. And maybe I could salvage something from all the crap and loss and pain and—and maybe I could become rich! And maybe . . . well, all the typical wannabe’s maybes.
The last few weeks haven’t been my finest hour. I have Wayne and, once in a blue moon, Zoё.
I’ll try to work on Glove Pond. To have true readers on