The Gum Thief (20 page)

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 hook-up, 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 do01; 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 unopened bills, interdepartmental memos, nude sunbathing magazines from the early 1970s, and stacked phone books that became successively older as one descended through the strata. There was a pizza box in the midst of this, and Kleenexes stuffed into available nooks and crannies. To the right sat an ashtray the size of a hubcap, filled with a powder keg volume of ash, burnt matchsticks and scorched wads of spearmint chewing gum. Several pipes rested around its edge.

Kyle opened the main drawer and found a couple of empty packages of gum and two old passports, the more recent of the two having expired in 1979. There was a menu from a Greek takeout restaurant, clipped newspaper articles on the theme of colon health, and dozens of empty matchbooks dating from the era when steak, jumbo lobsters, A-framed buildings and anything tiki were considered the peak of dining sophistication. There was no computer or typewriter, but by the window, leaning into the room's corner beneath its requisite nicotine wash, sat a 1980 Daewoo Heavy Industries OfficeWrite 2300 Word Processing System. Below it was an unopened carton of dot matrix tractor-edged paper. The corner was an eloquent haiku for yet another past era, one in which democracy remained under constant threat from female Soviet weightlifters and sleek East German technology.

He opened the topmost of two large drawers on the desk's right-hand side. It contained mostly empty tins of pipe tobacco, plus framed desktop photos, their standing mechanisms folded inwards, the group of them stacked atop each other. Some were ancient, and
their subjects unidentifiable. But there was one of a pubescent Gloria atop a hunter with a braided mane, and one of a post-pubescent Gloria clipped from a
Town
&
Country-style
magazine:
Who will nab this year's jewel in the crown, the delightful Gloria Harrington?
There was a shot of movie-star-handsome Steve and Gloria sharing a daiquiri at San Francisco's Top of the Mark. But, as with everywhere else in the house, there was no evidence of any remotely current time period.
If
Steve and Gloria had a child of any age, Kyle had yet to locate the evidence.

Kyle closed the top drawer and reached for the handle of the bottom drawer.
It
occurred to him that in this drawer lay the secret of Steve-if one was only to open it, in a flash, the reason why both Steve and Gloria were disasters would be revealed.

He was about to pull it open when he heard thumps from the basement.

Bethany

Hi Roger, I guess
I'd
better confess that I actually know your ex-wife-Joan. Does that weird you out? She was in my aunt's cancer survivor group, and I remembered her because of the code word: "spleen." You're right, a spleen is a strange thing-we technically don't need one, but maybe spleens are kept in our bodies in case we mutate or evolve, and if we grow wings or tentacles we need to have the spleen in place in order for them to work. That's my theory.

I don't know if Joan would remember me. That was back before I decided to win the heart of Johnny Depp through the inventive application of scary makeup. Also, my family overshadowed me at cancer meetings. Imagine a group of people even more annoying than mimes, with the added bonus of loud, grating speech and no sense of manners or propriety. That would be us. Mom and her ex-husband were in this war over who could do a better job of caring for Aunt Paulette (long story), and the caring portion got lost along the way. Cancer is, among many other things, a spectator sport.

Like you need a depressing letter like this.

How many times have you heard the expression about cancer patients, "They were never sick a day in their life, and suddenly, bang, they're gone"? Well, it turns out that being sick is actually good for you. Colds and flus are like these constant refresher courses that teach your body how to combat cancers when they first occur. Some people think that the moment you get your diagnosis you should run out to the children's coloured plastic ball pit at
IKEA
and coat your body with kiddy germs and get as sick as you can. While you're in the process of fighting the colds and flus, the cancer gets taken out with the trash. Cool, huh? You might think this sounds stupid, but after sixty years of antibiotics, we're right back to maggots as the best way to get rid of dead tissue. This was all to say that I can put a face on your ex, and isn't the world a small place?

I'm on the cash register until closing tonight and am going to be one grouchy little Goth at the end of it. Something about Wednesdays makes people cruel.

The
Glove
rocks. Keep it up.

B.

PS: Okay, I confess, I went to Joan's house. She was easy to find. Google. I was worried about you-you vanished, dammit!-but I promise I didn't come across as a stalker or a psycho, and I've seen enough nasty divorce shit in my life to know how to avoid accidentally inflaming people. So the encounter went smoothly, and you don't have to worry that I messed your life up. She was nice, and didn't say anything bad about you, and I was
so
worried about you, Roger.

There.

I feel better. But, Roger, you have a beautiful daughter you almost never mention. That's pretty great!

DeeDee

Roger, I've been doing some thinking, and what do you know about Kyle? It's great that Bethany's got a guy, but ... okay, here's what's confusing me: he's way too good-looking to be working at a pit like Staples (sorry, Roger). He seems to like Bethany, but-and this is so cruel, and I am a bad, bad mother-isn't he really way out of her league? This from me, the thrice-divorced mess. But you know I have a point. Is he dumb? He doesn't strike me as a druggie. Maybe pot, because he's pretty mellow. Why couldn't Bethany fall for some pimpled stick figure at a record store? That's what I always had planned for her. But then, I don't know if record stores still exist. Do they? Maybe that's where my plan went wrong.

Okay, there was a triggering incident. Kyle was over at our place and we were watching TV. He opened the fridge door to look for something to eat or drink, looked at what was inside, and then closed the door and came back into the living room like he'd never gone near the fridge. He didn't make a face or anything. He said nothing, as if he'd never looked inside it. So I got up (we were watching more reality crap, what else?) and looked for myself, and in my head I was seeing Kyle, raised by a succession of trophy wives, each of them primping in front of a mirror and selecting their daily sunglasses, and each of them saying words, to the effect of, "There's tons of expensive, nutritious food in the fridge, Kyle, but if you go to someone else's house, for the love of God, don't allow them to feed you crap. Otherwise, you'll end up like them."

Our fridge was filled with fatty, sugary crap, and no wonder I'm turning out the way I am. No wonder Bethany's going in the same direction. Why couldn't she have been a vegetarian? That might have whipped me into shape. But no, when this Goth thing began, we were at the IGA and she asked the butcher how to order blood by the quart.
It
was one of those few moments in life when you literally freeze. And now she's dating way too high up the food chain and I'm at my wits' end. Who is this guy? What does he want?

If
you ever tell Bethany I wrote this, I will kill you.

DD

Glove Pond

"The soy sauce has mummified," said Kyle.

"What do you mean?" asked Gloria.

He shook the La Choy bottle. "It's turned into a little black hockey puck, bonded onto the bottom." He handed the bottle to Gloria.

"It needs to be warmed up a bit is all. I'll go put it in the double boiler for a few minutes. It'll melt in no time." "There was no soy sauce in the fridge or cupboards,"

said Kyle, under his breath. "I looked."

"Of course not. This bottle was part of our honeymoon gift from Daddy's lawyer. It was a Japanese home cooking kit, and I've been keeping it down in the nice cool basement so it would be fresh for a festive occasion such as this."

"How
long have you been married?" Brittany asked.

"Thirty-six years."

"It's okay," said Brittany. "I don't need soy sauce."

"Me neither," said Kyle.

"Let me see that bottle," said Steve. He opened it and began digging at its contents with a disposable chopstick. "It's not hard," he said. "It's granular." Steve sprinkled some soy shavings onto the cold, oily glacier that was once moo goo gai pan, and then ate a fork load.