The Gum Thief - Douglas Coupland [82]
Kyle realized that Brittany had been gone for a long time—when was she coming back? How much fresh air could the woman need?
Gloria stirred. “I know what I’m going to do,” she said. “I’m going to go out and find Brittany, and I’m going to ask her to perform cosmetic surgery on me so I can be young again. I can change things. I can fix myself. I’ve read brochures. Women’s Lib has changed everything. We can do many things now that we never could before. I’ll sell the silver to pay for the procedures.” She stood up and looked towards the door. “And while Brittany’s fixing me up, she can remove whatever it is that’s bothering my spleen.”
“You’ll never find her,” said Kyle. “She’s a speedy walker.”
“Well, I can try.” She turned and looked at Steve. “The next time you see me, I’ll be young and beautiful again.”
“Gloria—”
“No, Steve. I must go.” She wove her way through Kendall’s plastic toys. She grabbed a coat from a hanger and walked into the night. For a few seconds, the house felt as quiet as a photograph, and then Steve looked at Kyle and said, “What would you do right now?”
Kyle shrugged.
“You’re too young to know, anyway,” Steve said, surveying the plastic surrounding them. “Are you and your wife ever going to have kids?”
“I’m not sure if we’ll stay together.”
“Kendall was a good kid.”
Kyle had no idea how to deal with Steve’s charade.
“I’m sure he was.”
“You think Gloria and I made him up, don’t you?”
“I never said that.”
“You wait until the world messes with you for a few more years, Kyle. Wait and see.” Steve walked to the door. From the closet, he removed a thick navy peacoat, which he buttoned up. He put on a deerstalker cap and turned to Kyle. “You have a good night. I’m going to look for my Gloria.” He left.
Kyle walked around the living room. It had the air of charged blankness that haunts all rooms immediately following a party. Every chair and every nook held a recent memory. He tried to piece together the evening by darting his eyes from door to door, from glass to glass. And then he remembered Steve’s study, and he felt a chill. He headed for it, feeling as though he were in a cave, cold and wet and alone. He felt like he was holding a candle and that his sole link to light and humanity was only a puff of breath away from vanishing. There was no sound as Kyle walked down the hallway and into Steve’s study, unchanged since his visit an hour ago, and probably unchanged for decades. He walked to Steve’s desk and looked at it, contemplating the bottom drawer and its secret.
He sat down in Steve’s chair.
He contemplated the drawer’s handle.
He thought about writing.
He thought of how people in books are never based entirely on only one person, and of how characters evolve along the way—of how he sometimes created characters in a story and didn’t know why, but he had to trust his guts and run with that character. He thought of how, sometimes, a character he thought was based on one person was actually based on another person altogether, and of how far along in a book he could go without understanding that.
Did Kendall ever exist? Were Steve and Gloria gaga?
He realized that Brittany wasn’t coming back. He felt like a beautiful glass vase with a chip in it.
He looked at the oak drawer. What, he wondered, could have happened to two people to damage them so badly? What sort of event could warp them, or any of us, to the point where they became mere cartoons of the real and whole people they once were?
He opened the drawer, but its contents made no sense to him. He felt as though he was looking at Mount Rushmore or Niagara Falls. He felt like a tourist in the world, dropped here like Superman, not belonging, never to belong. Evidence of his fall from grace lay before him now inside a dusty oak drawer—nothing cosmic and nothing poetic that might describe the sadness of life and the unending pain of the human condition, merely a bright