Girlfriend in a Coma: A Novel Read online

  “But you know what, Richard?”

  “What?”

  She caught herself. “Nothing. Oh, never mind, Beb. I think I’m tired of talking about this.” She reached into her jacket. “Here. I want you to hold onto this envelope for me. Don’t open it. Just hold onto it for me overnight. Give it back to me tomorrow.”

  “Huh?” I looked at the Snoopy envelope with the word “Richard” Magic-Markered on its front in her maddeningly girlish, rounded-sloped, daisy-adorned handwriting. Her handwriting was actually the subject of an argument the two of us had a month previously. I’d asked her why she couldn’t write “normally.” Idiot!

  Karen watched me look at the handwriting. “Normal enough for you, Richard, you daring nonconformist, you?” I stashed the envelope in my down jacket’s pocket and then the chairlift jumped into motion again.

  “Remember—tomorrow you give it back to me, no questions asked.”

  “It’s a done deal.” I kissed her.

  The chairlift started with another lurch, causing Karen to drop her pack of Number 7s from her lap. She cursed, and instantly the mountain was again electrically lit with energy from the great dams of northern British Columbia. The skiers on the slopes below whooped, as though whooping for energy itself; our moment was lost. Karen said, “Look—there’s Wendy and Pam.” She deafened me by shouting instructions to Wendy to meet at the Grouse Nest in half an hour; she asked Pam to rescue her dropped pack of cigarettes, now many chairs behind us.

  Our intimacy reduced, we quickly and soundlessly chairlifted up the Blueberry Chair’s slope while Karen discussed plans for the rest of the night. “Look, there’s Donna Kilbruck now. Arf Arf!”

  I thought of Jared.

  Jared was a friend of ours, as well as my best friend while growing up. In high school, Jared and I had drifted apart, as can happen with friends made early in life. He became a football star and our lives increasingly had less and less in common. He was also the biggest male slut I’ve ever known. Girls would hurl themselves at him and he was always there to catch. While Jared was definitely inside the winner’s circle humping himself silly, I, on the other hand, seemed to be on a vague loser track. We still got along fine, but it felt comfortable only back in our own neighborhood and away from the high school’s intricate popularity rituals. Jared’s family lived around the corner from mine, up on St. James Place. One hot afternoon during a game at Handsworth Secondary, Jared simply keeled over and was wheeled off to Lions Gate Hospital. A week later, he’d lost his gold curls; two months later, he weighed less than a scarecrow; three months later he was … gone.

  Did we ever really recover from the loss? I’m not sure. I had been, in a way, Jared’s “official friend,” and thus many of the consoling stares and words came my way, which I hated. All of the girls who once mooned over Jared began mooning over me—Jared’s sex energy still filled the air—but I wasn’t about to take advantage of the opportunity and emulate his life of sluttery. I acted stoic when in fact I was angry and scared and sad. Jared had thought of us as best friends before he died, but we really weren’t. I’d made other friends. I felt guilty, disloyal. The next year was spent not talking about Jared, pretending that everything was proceeding as normal, when it wasn’t.

  3

  IF IT SLEEPS IT’S ALIVE

  I was quiet in the gondola descending the mountain while Karen was lightly bantering with Wendy and Pam. Our skis were strapped together and faintly clacked. Karen and I were transformed from the two who had gondola’ed up just hours earlier. Lilting and swooping across the gondola’s middle tower, we looked at the lights of Vancouver before the 1980s had its way with the city—an innocent, vulnerable, spun-glass kingdom. We tried to spot our houses, which twinkled across the Capilano River inside our sober, sterile mountain suburb.

  I felt faraway as I then looked underneath the gondola at the white angel-food snowpack and the black granite that poked out from within it. I had the sensation that I was from some other world and had fallen onto Earth like a meteorite. Instead of being an earthling I had crash-landed here—Ka-thunkkk!—and my life on Earth was an accident. First-time gondola riders and fraidy-cats tittered and screamed as our gondola swooned downward. I looked at Karen, with her head resting atop her ski poles. She had the extra pulse of beauty people have when they know they’re being fondly admired.

  The gondola moored at the base; we clomped to my Datsun B-210, where we removed the plastic anchors of our ski boots and luxuriated in the freedom of recently unfurled toes. We hopped into the car and drove to a party we had been warned might be a house-wrecker—up to a winding suburban street on the mountain of West Vancouver. It was a party where a now forgotten teen of questionable popularity had been left minding the house while parents gambled away in Las Vegas.

  And indeed the party was a grand house-wrecker—larger than any of us had seen to date. We arrived around 10:00 P.M., and the Datsun was one of dozens of cars parked up and down Eyremont Drive. Teenagers leaped out of cedar hedges and spruce shrubberies like protons, their beer boxes clutched under knobby jean-jacketed arms, bottles inside carrying imprisoned genies offering just one last wish.

  From all directions came the sound of excited voices and smashing bottles. Silhouettes of teens sparkled atop broken bottles lit by streetlights. Several of us were just arriving from Grouse Mountain. I heard a hiss—my friend, Hamilton—my own personal patron saint of badly folded maps, damp matches, low-grade pornography, bad perms, tetracycline, and borrowed cigarettes. He beckoned me from inside a hedge of laurels just ahead of the parked car, hissing, “Richard, drag your butt in here.”

  I complied, and inside I found a branchy wigwam rife with headache-inducing Mexican pot of the weakest caliber. Roughly ten of Hamilton’s drug buddies were toking furiously. In no mood for a headache, I said, “Jesus, Ham—it smells like an egg fart inside a subway car. Come out and meet me and the girls. Where’s Linus?”

  “Down at the party. I’ll be out in a minute. Dean, please, pass me those Zig-Zags.”

  Back at the car, Karen, Pam, and Wendy were discussing Karen’s new diet. I said, “Karen, you’re not still hell-bent on starvation, are you?”

  Karen had been obsessed with Hawaii and dieting. “Richard, Beb, I’ve just got to be a size five by next week or I won’t fit into my new Hawaii swimsuit.”

  Pam, wafer-thin, asked, “Are you still taking diet pills? My mom gives them to me all the time. I refuse.”

  “Pam,” Karen replied, “you know I was raised on pills; Mom’s a walking pharmacy. But if I take even one speeder, I spazz out and climb the walls with my teeth.” She paused to sweep hair from her eyes. “Most drugs, even vitamins, send me to the Moon. But downers are okay. I take them to cool out. Mom gave me my own bottle.” To all of us, this sounded glamorous and wanton.

  Wendy, trying to be cooler than she really felt, said, “That’d be just so loser-ish—you know, OD’ing on vitamins,” and her quip was met with polite stares.

  Pam broke the silence. She was then trying to break into the world of modeling, and she said, “Oh—I was at a shoot yesterday—do you want to know what models sound like when they talk?” We agreed enthusiastically. “Like this,” she said, “like Pebbles Flintstone: ‘Koo goo koo baa baa baa diet pills goo koo koo.’ Promise me that if I ever start talking like that, just pull the plug.”

  Slaphappy Hamilton, beanstalk-tall, black-booted, bolo-corded, with hands as big as frying pans, appeared from behind, saying, “Richard: It’s imperative we check the party right now, man. The house is just getting demolished. Hey there, Pammie …”

  Pam stuck out her tongue. He and Pammie had been blowing hot and cold for three years; that night, they were in a cold spell. Hamilton turned back to me: “If we don’t rescue Linus, he’ll be cat food by midnight. It’s berserk down there. Besides, Mr. Liver here wants a drink.” Hamilton squeezed the side of his stomach; below us something lurched and crashed.

  Pam asked the sky, “Why do I hav
e to like aloof jerks who couldn’t care less if I exist? Please, O gods of love, send me a winner next time.”

  We all discussed skiing for a while, and I felt myself pulling back, again looking at Karen, Wendy, and Pam. As a trio, they resembled three different-looking sisters, but sisters nonetheless. They called themselves Charlie’s Angels, but then, so did many other trios of girlfriends at that time.

  Personalities.

  I sometimes wonder what can be said of people when they are young, whether the full expression of their personalities is truly discernible. Do we even offer hints? Do murderers seem like murderers at eighteen? Do stockbrokers? Waiters? Millionaires? An egg hatches. What will emerge—a cygnet? a crocodile? a turtle?

  Wendy: wide shoulders earned on the swim team, a friendly, earnest, square, slightly mannish face capped with a chocolate-brown wedge cut. Hamilton and I once tried to pin down Wendy’s looks, and Hamilton wasn’t far wrong when he said she looked like she was twenty-seventh in line to the British throne. At our family Christmas party every year, when introducing ourselves to the older crowd, Wendy always said, “I’m the smart one.” And she was.

  Pam (Pamela, Pammie, Pameloid): thin as water streaming from a tap, a perfect oval face, a face like a tourist attraction crowned with a wispy corn-silk Farrah perm. Glamour vixen Pammie: eyes always looking a bit farther than your own: “Whatcha lookin’ at, Pam?” “Oh—just. Something. Up there. In the clouds.”

  Karen: small face with straight brown hair parted in the center. Moss-green eyes. As comfortable with boys as with girls. A guy’s gal. Skiing? Touch football? Wounded animal needs mending? Call Karen.

  As a trio, their six arms were perennially crossed over either brown leather or down jackets, hands clasping purses full of high-tar cigarettes; Dmetre ski sweaters reeking of Charlie perfume, sugarless gum, and sweet-smelling hair. Clean and free and sexy and strong.

  Karen asked for a drink and Wendy said, “Are you sure you want to drink, Kare? I mean you’re looking kinda frail. All you’ve eaten today is a Ritz cracker and half a can of Tab. Let’s go to my place and get something.”

  Pammie said, “Don’t say that—don’t tempt me—because I’ll be the one who ends up eating too much.” She paused: “Is there much in your fridge?”

  Karen ignored them. She climbed into my Datsun to put a new lace in her runners just as I walked to the car to get my sweater. I saw Karen slip two pills from her makeup compact into her mouth. She caught me catching her. So she stuck out her tongue jokingly. “It’s Valley of the Dolls, I know, Richard—but let’s see you in a size-five bikini.” I could feel myself trying to mold my face into a nonjudgmental scrunch; I lost.

  “Christ, it’s only Valium. It’s totally legal. My mom gave them to me.” She was slightly angry at my having caught her. I think it made her seem less in control.

  I said, “Karen, I think you look great; you’ve got a great body, you’re perfect the way you are. And I should know …” I winked, but I think it looked dirty, not friendly. “You’re nuts to even think about dieting.”

  “Richard, that’s sweet, you’re the bestest, bestest boyfriend on Earth, and I really do appreciate it. But listen: It’s a girl thing. Drop it, okay?” At least she was smiling. She leaned over the seat and gave me a quick kiss before I went back to the makeshift bar Pam had set up on the top of her car’s hood. “Roll up your window and shut the door,” Karen said to me, a Valium underneath her tongue, “God may be watching.” It was the last thing she said to me for almost twenty years.

  Pam cradled a bottle of Smirnoff vodka, and she and Wendy began pouring itty-bitty drinks into stolen McDonald’s paper cups, with Tab as a mixer.

  Wendy was talking about her Friday meeting with the school guidance counselor. She was considering applying for the accelerated pre-med program at UBC, but she couldn’t decide if she’d be missing out on all the college fun: “You know, drunken piss-ups, drug orgies, unchained sex, and afterward writing fake letters to Penthouse Forum.”

  Pam was in no mood to discuss careers. “Hey, let’s booze-and-cruise tonight, eh, Wendy? This housewrecking crap is such a guy thing.” We looked down at the house; from the racket it generated, we thought the house would implode, as if in a horror movie.

  Hamilton said, “What’s that, Pammie? You’re just scared of those North Van chicks in their white jeans. Admit it.” In 1979 white jeans among partying females were the tell-tale code that the wearer was up for “a scrap.”

  “What … and like you’re not scared, Hamilton?”

  Wendy said, “Touché, Pamela,” then looked at me. “Are you going down there, Richard?”

  “Umm—I’d rather not. But Linus is down there. Ham and I told him to meet us at the party and we can’t just leave him among the pagans. As we speak, he’s probably sitting inside a boiling cauldron reading a World Book Encyclopedia.”

  Pam fondled the amulet on the chain around her neck, which Karen told me contained a curl of Hamilton’s pubic hair. Wendy chugged her cocktail completely and said to Pam, “ABC.” I asked what that meant, to which the two of them chimed, “Another Bloody Cocktail! Now go rescue Linus, you wee laddies. We three are gonna stay up here and guzzle hooch.”

  And so Hamilton and I went down the steep driveway—reluctantly, with forced bravado and a patch of giggles behind us—down into the pale yellow rancher then being smashed by angry, dreadful children, ungrateful monsters, sharks in bloodied water, lashing out at this generic home, their incubator—a variation on their own homes—homes for the prayerless, homes that imbued their teen occupants with rigid sameness and predictability while offering no alternative.

  An uprooted ficus tree straddled the billiard table, its soil and some beer making a mud puddle onto which a six-ball now rested; a sliding glass door was smashed, touting a hole wider than a fist where blood dripped down onto the carpet; the TV-room walls were Dalmatian-spotted with boot-kicked holes and dents; the remaining billiard balls had been tossed through the holes and shattered on the patio. The toilet had overflowed in the worst way imaginable; vomit had been seemingly flung, then sprinkled, onto the most unlikely surfaces. “It’s like an inmate riot at a maximum security prison,” Hamilton said. Only the stereo, with its ability to generate ambiance, had been spared, playing more and more loudly as drunken teenagers skulked around in their jean jackets and leather coats, walking amok, erupting spontaneously into beery rages, crashing chairs and pulling down the light fixtures from stippled ceilings. The girls, those tough North Van girls in the fabled white pants, sat in the master bedroom uninterested in the crashings. The bedroom was now converted into a smoking room, its occupants trying on silk blouses and orange lipsticks and combing their hair with pastel combs. Some of them sat on the kitchen counters hotknifing hash with heirloom silver, showing only marginal concern when a particularly loud crash was heard.

  We continued walking. Both Hamilton and I had never been to a party of this caliber of violence before, and we didn’t dare say we were frightened. We skulked about, hands in pockets. “Precisely what is it that’s giving me the niggling feeling we’re headed backward as a species?” Hamilton said. He was then almost slugged in the sternum by a partygoer offended by too many syllables. Shortly, he said, “Right. Well. Where’s the pisser then?” only to learn that the other toilet was in shards. Out the window, people were skeeting records across the pool, lobbing empty beer bottles at these bat-like targets.

  Walking by what was somebody’s bedroom, we found Linus—monkey-postured, stubble-chinned, and wiping his nose with the back of his ink-stained hand—poring over an atlas, oblivious to the toxic trashing about him. “Oh. Hey—you guys wanna go get, umm, food or something?” he asked.

  We considered. The unthinkable consequences to the poor kid who lived there was too depressing. Hamilton said, “Cops’ll be here soon, kids. Let’s booze-and-cruise. Come on, Linus.”

  Suddenly, out of a window a lime-green lightning bolt cut the sky above the patio; secon
ds later, a La-Z-Boy recliner went to sleep at the pool’s bottom.

  Linus walked behind us, lighting a cigarette and placing a book or two back into a bookshelf that had been tipped over. “Did you guys know that Africa has over sixty countries?” he asked, while Hamilton bellowed, “Be gone, you imbecilic avalanche of hooligans!” and led us up the driveway. We cut over a topsoil landscaped mound and into a neighboring yard. On the road above, police cruisers’ cherries pulsed American reds, whites, and blues. At my Datsun, Wendy and Pam stood over Karen.

  “Richard,” Wendy said, “Karen’s totally out of it. Not even two drinks and she’s almost passed right out. Not her style. Pam, go get a blanket. You should get her home, Richard. Hi, Linus. How was the, um, party?”

  “Smashing,” said Hamilton, cutting in.

  A jolt passed through me: Karen had only two drinks? She looked okay, but something was off. No vomit, no anything; she was weak and pale. Talking to her didn’t work; she was almost asleep and was making no effort to say anything or communicate with her eyes. I tried to sound casual to quell panic: “Let’s take her back down to her house. Her folks are out of town, so we can put her to bed, watch TV, and keep our eyes on her. It’s probably nothing.”

  “Probably that moronic diet,” said Wendy. “She probably just needs to sleep after skiing on several days’ worth of empty stomach.”

  “There’s a new Saturday Night Live on,” said Pam. Wendy and I lifted Karen into the Datsun, her clammy skin offering no shivers. Our small convoy of cars fled to Karen’s house, one house below my own. There, I carried Karen into her bedroom, removed her coat and shoes, and tucked her into bed. She still felt clammy, so I put another blanket over her. She seemed okay. Wiped out, but the day had been long.

  We sat in the living room, turning on Saturday Night Live just as the show was beginning. Wendy burned some popcorn in the kitchen, and we sat in beanbag chairs watching the first few minutes of skits. Hamilton was feeling upstaged by TV, and he tried to steal our attention with tales of boils, cysts and lame knock-knock jokes. We told him to shut up.