The Gum Thief (7 page)

It started out well-a few drinks and each of us blowing off steam about our jobs. Halfway through the meal, she was drunk enough to be lighting the wrong end of her cigarette, but not drunk enough to become indignant when told that smoking in the restaurant wasn't allowed.

Of course, we discussed changes in our lives and the world. In particular, we discussed all of the ugly houses and apartment buildings that had been built here in the city in our lifetime. Back when I was young, I told her, I assumed that within my lifetime they'd all be quickly demolished and replaced by something newer and better. "Imagine all of our dumb, ugly, contractor-built little houses standing there long after we're gone."

"You're being depressing, Roger."

"All they'll ever do is draw attention to our narrowness of ambition and vision." "I'm ordering another drink." DeeDee changed the topic and told me that her condominium's co-op board was on her case for keeping a cat. I said I didn't see why cats were such a big deal, but she told me it wasn't the actual cat that was the problem; it was the $600 plumbing bill to snake out the clots of kitty litter choked inside the bathroom pipes. She confessed that this had happened not once, but twice.

You have to remember that two years ago my freefall had just begun. I'm used to it now, but it was all very fresh then. A chronology of my life would read:

Thorpe, Roger

•
         
Wife's cancer diagnosis: 2003

•
         
Totally cancer'ed out: 2004

•
         
Seeks diversion as stagehand in local theatre production of Neil Simon's
Same Time Next Year: 2004

•
         
Canned from desk job at insurance firm: 2004

•
         
Makes one stupid mistake he pays for the rest of his life: 2004

•
         
Dumped by embittered wife: 2004

•
         
Learns the disturbing financial cost of anything legal: 2004

•
         
Old friends pretend not to notice him in a checkout line: 2004

•
         
Rents basement suite from condescending yuppies: 2004

•
         
Seborrhea inside hairline: 2004

•
         
Begins work at Staples: 2005

•
         
Ugly phone calls with Joan: 2004, 2005, 2006

•
         
Unable to afford Halloween candy, so he sits in basement apartment with all the lights off: 2004, 2005, 2006

•
         
Weekend highlight: learning how to use a photocopier's collating function: 2005

I was hypnotized by the speed of my life's implosion, but DeeDee was having no truck with my self-pity. She said, "Guys forget that women have to make their peace with their half-assed lives too, and earlier than men. Women get more realistic far faster than men do, so don't expect tears in your beer from me, Roger. To me, you're a rookie at this failing life shit."

I
reached over to touch her hand, and she yanked it back.

"I want to go home."

"But ..."

"Roger, I feel so ...
old."

"Tonight was supposed to be about making you feel young again."

She slid a twenty under her water glass. "Nothing about the past ever makes me feel young."

I watched through the window as she got into her car and drove away. I got sloshed.

Glove Pond

Gloria was in her boudoir-a delirious vision of a 1930s Hollywood set director, pushed
to
the farthest, pinkest extreme. Not a hard surface existed anywhere in the room. What was not carpeted was covered in velour or velvet or star bursts of ostrich and marabou feathers. The room smelled of violets and tuberoses, breezeless and claustrophobic, as though heaps of rotting blossoms were concealed behind drapes and beneath the divan.

Gloria was trying
to
decide which colour she would try on her lips, but the sound of the doorbell not ringing was driving her crazy.

She reached down to touch her spleen, which was puffy and irritable. Fortunately, she'd paid attention during her Vassar biology Lessons and knew that a spleen is a ductless gland not strictly necessary for life, and which is closely associated with the circulatory system, where it functions in the destruction of old red blood cells and the removal of other debris from the bloodstream.

A puffy spleen-what could that mean?

She looked at her artillery of lipsticks. She remembered how her mother always used to throw out all her old makeup and how it drove Gloria crazy. As an adult, she overcompensated by never throwing out anything. Steve once told her that her makeup table resembled the road tour makeup kit for the entire cast of
Cats.
To punish him, Gloria withheld sex for several months.

Falling Blossom Pink. Perfect.

She looked for some Kleenex to blot the previous colour from her lips, but realized she had run out. All that remained were some used sheets hastily stuffed into her dresser drawer the previous spring-long enough ago that any microbes they once harboured would have disintegrated, thus making them reasonably safe to use again. So she blotted her lips, sipped a gin and tonic, and wondered about the evening's guests-an academic and his wife. This young chap had recently published a novel that was selling countless copies and was receiving wonderful reviews. He was handsome, and his wife was good-looking. Steve's nerves were in ribbons over his very existence, let alone his imminent arrival in their home. Gloria was going to savour every minute of it.

She looked at the Kleenex box.
Is the plural Kleenices? I
do
love words and writing and art and music.

The doorbell continued to not ring.

Silence disturbed Gloria because of something she had once heard on PBS. Apparently, the first thing a baby hears upon being born is silence. It's spent its entire life prior to that surrounded by heartbeats and valves gushing and liquids sloshing to and fro. And then, suddenly, it's born into a new world, deprived of everything its ears have ever known. Who invented that?

Babies .. .

Children .. .

No time
to
think of that now.

She looked at herself in the mirror and pursed her Falling Blossom Pink lips.
I could easily be Elizabeth
Taylor
circa
1972,
approximately three weeks after abandoning a strict diet.

The doorbell rang.

Bethany

Okay, Roger, here's my deal.

My best friend in grade four was Becky Garnett. She didn't show up for school one day, and within a month she was gone from this freaky stomach cancer that prepubescent girls get. Dead? I was used to people vanishing, to people going out for cigarettes and never returning, but
not
to people dying.
Becky?

After Becky came this five-year death fiesta. Both my grandfathers in the same year (car crash; kidney failure); my twenty-year-old stepsister (internal injuries sustained in an assault by her now behind-bars-for-thirty-years ex); my grandmother (emphysema); my favourite music teacher, Mr. Van Buren (car crash on the 99, driving up to Whistler); Kurt Cobain; both my cats (Ginger and Snowbelle); two of my smokehole friends, Chris and Mark, who smoked some pot cut with PCP and were found waterlogged two days later in the lagoon beside the sand traps at the local pitch and-putt; my step brothel; Devon (hanged himself); and then my eerily, disturbingly, relentlessly perky Aunt Paulette. She had lightning-onset breast cancer, and all the money we raised doing car washes to send her to the Revlon Center in Los Angeles didn't work, and she wobbled away into nothingness-no drama, only silence.

At the end of all of this death, death, death, I began to find myself dreaming about all of these dead people at night-pretty much to the exclusion of living people. It scared me that I was spending so much time with dead people, and then I realized this was snobbery. Why should only living people count in your dreams, while dead people get relegated
to
"filler" status, unable to be taken seriously? Imagine the dreams of a thirty-year-old living a century ago. There couldn't have been a living soul in their dreams. I think we forget that growing old is as much an invention as electricity or birth control pills. Long lives aren't natural. God or Whoever didn't want millions of ninety somethings hanging around forever, and if he did, there had to be a reason beyond simply staying alive for the sake of staying alive.

Me? I expect people to die soon. Dying is what people do in my universe-I'm a statistical freak. Most young people don't know a single person who's died. I'm a throwback.

Last week, Kyle wanted to know if I worshipped the devil or something like that, and I wanted to blow him off, but then I realized maybe he was worried about something, so I calmed down and asked him how things were going. Turns out his grandmother died and he doesn't know how to deal with it. What you were saying about not having faith in place when things go bad-well, there's your proof. I asked him what he thought the afterlife might be like, and I got the impression that he thinks death is like a resort where everything is pre-decided for you and all you have to do is lie back and submit to the regime.

I disagree.

Much of the time I want to be dead. It must be nice to be dead, to know that the sheer work of having to constantly learn lesson after lesson is over and you can coast for a while. I think our souls are totally rigged for this.

Here's something that happened to me last summer. I was visiting Katie in the house beside our condo building the Divorcee Who Got the House-and she'd installed a fish pond where the barbecue used to be. Katie, despite her bimbo demeanour, is tough as nails, and smart. She said, "A pond needs to be an ecosystem, and it has to be able to take care of itself in case I have to fly to Cabo for a week or something." So she had these jumbo snails put into the pond to balance the ecosystem. I'd never spent much time looking at snails, so I lay down on my stomach and put my head close to the water's surface and looked deep into the water-it was dark but not too dark, like decaf coffee and I saw the snails sliming their way over rocks and across the pond's rounded concrete bottom.

And that was that.

And then, for the next five nights, I had snail dreams snails crawling over everything-not in a gross way but in a natural "that's what snails do" way.

I mention this because in total I've watched maybe five years of TV in my life and I don't remember once having a TV dream, and yet I look at snails for five minutes and I'm having snail dreams all over the place.