Girlfriend in a Coma Read online

  Occasionally, I'd pick Megan up at school to drive her home: Ding dong, hello, Lois … "You know, Richard, I just don't understand why she enjoys school so much. She has a lovely house here with stacks of toys, plus I have worthwhile activities planned for almost all of her waking hours, so she has no reason to go gallivanting up to your house. No offense, but your house has nothing in it for a baby. Not one single thing. I had coffee up there last week and it was the most I could do to locate even a bouncing ball—and then it turns out to be Charlie's [our golden lab]. I'm going to have to be much more strict from now on. Or figure out a much more elaborate containment system. Come inside, Megan. We have flash cards to do. Goodbye Richard, and please, cut your hair, because I know shorter hair is now in style and you're a father now." Door closed; muffled yaps; Megan squalling as French language flash cards are produced. Poor baby.

  Shortly after enrolling in first grade, Megan's classmates—having heard it from their parents who heard it at the Super-Valu who heard it from wherever—these vicious little oiks told Megan, then six, that her mother was a "vegetable." As little brutes will do, they howled grocery lists at her across the gravel playing field: "Lettuce. Corn. Green beans, carrots—Megan's mother is a carrot." And so forth. On the day of the 1987 stock crash, just moments after it sank in that I'd lost most of my assets, Megan's school principal phoned my office around noon—Lois was out, so he called me. He said that Megan was in "a state."I drove from downtown to fetch my daughter and then we cruised aimlessly around the neighborhood, the crisply changing leaves that hinted of wine amid the lengthening shadows of fall. The radio was off. "What's up Sweetie Pie?"

  "Dad, everyone's saying my real mother's a carrot."

  "Well she's not a carrot. That's impossible."

  "Lettuce?"

  "Megan! Of course she's not lettuce—nor any other vegetable. Your mother is not a vegetable, Megan."

  "Then why does everybody call her a carrot?"

  "Because kids are cruel, Megan. They say stupid untrue things and have no idea what they're really saying."

  "Did / used to be a carrot?"

  We came to a stop sign at Hadden Drive. "Megan, stop …"

  Megan opened the door and dashed out into the trees beside the golf course. Shit. I left the car running at the stop sign, door wide open, and chased after her. Fortunately, I knew my way through the surrounding trees as well as any child, having spent so much time there myself when young. "Megan, come back."

  "Kleek. Kleek. Kleek."

  What was this strange noise she was making? I followed the sound over a series of logs, over a dewy patch of psilocybin mushrooms, then into a glade where as teenagers we'd spent many a Friday and Saturday night. Megan was sitting fetal beside an old rotted log that had probably been felled back in the 1920s.

  "Kleek. Kleek. Kleek."

  "Megan, there you are." I stopped to catch my breath and looked around at the dry cool dent in the forest floor, untouched by undergrowth as the shade canopy above was too dense. Between the yearly layers of pine, fir, and cedar sheddings lay bits of uncountable cigarettes packs, weather-yellowed pornography, candy wrappers, condoms, dead flashlight batteries, and clusters of stolen Mercedes hood ornaments.

  "Kleek."

  "Megan, what's that sound you're making?""Kleek."

  Two could play at this game. I said, "Kleeg Kleeg."

  Megan rolled her eyes. "Daddy, you're not doing it right."

  "Kleeg. Kleeg."

  "Daddy, that's not what carrots sound like. They sound like this: Kleek. Kleek. Kleek."

  "How silly of me. I forgot."

  There was a quiet moment and I thought of the summer Jared and I borrowed a golf cart from an elderly twosome and drove it through the woods, bailing out just before it ran over a small cliff. We never got caught.

  "Megan, for God's sake, stop the carrot stuff. You know it's not true."

  "Where's my real mom?" She was getting teary.

  "Okay, Megan. I'll tell you, okay?"

  "Okay." Her posture slackened and she relaxed visibly.

  I caught my breath. "Your mom was eighteen when she became sick. She has the same birthday as you."

  "Really?"

  "Really."

  I told Megan about her mother—everything—and afterward we walked out of the forest and back to the car, still running, still waiting to drive us away.

  Of course, Megan wanted to see Karen—the sooner the better. We went that night. My mother and the staff at Inglewood spruced Karen up as best they could. Once inside Inglewood, I greeted the staff as I'd done hundreds of times before, and all the while my stomach felt lightweight and bilious. We slowly marched down the echoing hallway into Karen's room, where a small radio played Blondie's "Heart of Glass," then a song by the Smiths. Her bed had a blue chenille spread. "It's okay, Megan," I said. "There's no need to be afraid. We all love you."

  Karen, even dolled up by Mom, was a heartbreaking sight. They tried to make Karen as natural as possible with foundation plus a dab of blush, with a trim of her hair, all crowned with an Alice-band. Shewore a lavender cardigan. Not having seen Karen dolled up since 1979, I felt a pang of intense loneliness. For Megan, the initial shock of seeing her mother seemed to wear off quickly. She gave no initial reaction. I stood still while Megan approached Karen's bedside. She placed her hand on her mother's forehead and with her other hand stroked Karen's hair and touched her hollow cheeks. She smudged her fingers on Karen's eyelids. "She's wearing makeup," Megan said. "Sleeping people don't wear makeup." She moistened her fingers to try to wipe clean Karen's cheeks and forehead, erasing Mom's makeover effort. Having accomplished this, she jumped up onto the bed and lay down beside Karen. Karen was inside a sleep cycle, her mouth rasping. Megan looked closely at her face. "How long has she been like this?"

  "Since December 15, 1979."

  "Who visits her?"

  "George does," I said, "every day. And I come here once a week on Sunday."

  "Hmm."

  Megan looked at her mother. "She doesn't scare me, you know."

  "Well, she shouldn't."

  Megan ran her fingers over Karen's face again, then said to me, "Can I come with you on Sunday from now on, Dad?"

  "Deal."

  "Do I look more like you or Mom?"

  "Your mother," I said with relief.

  Megan looked at Karen's face right up close, as though trying to locate the watermark on a forged banknote. She gave out a puff of air indicating satisfaction, and then lay down beside her and rested. I went outside for fresh air, flummoxed by Megan's casual acceptance. I thought of how life ought to have been as opposed to what it became. After that day, Megan drove with me to Inglewood Lodge on Sundays.

  In the 1980s, Hamilton and I would party often. One morning in particular I was awakened by Hamilton tweezing unmetabolized coke from my nostrils. Life was big.

  I recovered somewhat from the 1987 stock crash and continued treadmilling within the city's financial district selling low-tide stocks. This was around the time where I started to drink. My compatriots were machine-bronzed fiftysomethings decorated with gold nugget rings and pin-curly hairdos lying into telephone headsets at 5:00 A.M. Lord—the scammy little push-me-pull-you's we enacted over the phones from within our bleak putty-colored office cubicles.

  A minor scandal about a spurious core sample knocked me out of the Stock Exchange. With my savings, I bought a Kleenex-box house in North Van where I lived alone, seeing Megan only rarely—baaad father. I took that first house, spackled, sanded, and painted it, then flipped it for a twenty-five-thousand-dollar profit. This became a pattern: I'd buy the worst house on a good block, work and drink like a demon on weekends to whip it into shape, then flip it for a reasonable profit. My behavior wasn't greed, it was … it was me doing anything but speaking honestly with myself—countless silent moments hastily varnished with vodka and thoughts of renovations. I was visiting Karen twice, thrice a week. At Inglewood, I drank vodka and orange juice from
a carton.

  10 ONE DAY YOU WILL SPEAK WITH YOURSELF

  After some years I realized I'd landed myself a major drinking problem—a device for coping with life's endlessly long days. I truly wondered if I was in some kind of coma myself, shambling through life with an IV drip filled with Scotch. My twenties were vanishing and the only good thing I had going for me was a daughter who I hardly ever saw. For her sake I bucked up a bit in the early 19905 and began to sell residential properties with a modicum of success—my years of renovating claptraps left me with a good instinct for the true value of a house.

  I also began doing things I couldn't have imagined doing while sober: I'd often lose my car when I went out at night—forget where I parked it, then call all the towing firms the next day to see if they had it. I woke up one morning to see I'd peed onto the wall. For the most part, I maintained a good front while inner deterioration grew. My breath stank permanently like wine left inside a stemmed glass overnight.

  And time ticked on.

  Pam sent me a card from Athens:

  DINNER WITH DAVID BOWIE. GLAMORAMA. DRANK ABSINTHE FOR THE FIRST TIME, P.

  Linus, one day in 1990, without telling anybody, left the city. He drove to Lethbridge in Alberta, parked his VW Bug on the side of a ridge, the Continental Divide, donned his knapsack, and went walking through the stubble and chaff on the fields, across the prairies, flushing out the partridge and pheasants, slouching eastward, then south as winter approached, never again to return to his VW. He spent the next few years gadabouting the southern United States, growing his beard, doing spare jobs for food, and sending a postcard from here or there in his microscopic print:

  DEAR RICHARD, THIS IS LAS VEGAS. VIVA. IT'S WINTER NOW. I'M

  WORKING AT AN ITALIAN RESTAURANT AS A WAITER. IT'S OKAY. THERE'S NOT MUCH TO DO HERE. THERE'S A TARGET RANGE NEARBY, SO I'M LEARNING TO SHOOT. IT SOUNDS DUMB, BUT IT'S SOMETHING TO LEARN.

  THANK YOU FOR YOUR KIND LETTER PLUS THE SNAPSHOTS OF HOME. I

  APPRECIATE YOUR BEING CONCERNED FOR ME, BUT I ASSURE YOU I'M OKAY. YOU ASKED WHY I'M DOING THIS AND THAT'S A REASONABLE QUESTION. I THINK I COULDN'T SEE ME FITTING INTO THE EVERYDAY WORLD ANY LONGER. I FOUND MYSELF DOING ELECTRICAL WORK DAY IN/DAY OUT AND REALIZED I WOULD HAVE TO DO THIS THE REST OF MY LIFE AND IT SPOOKED ME. I DON'T KNOW IF THERE'S SOME ALTERNATIVE OUT THERE, BUT I SPEND MOST OF MY TIME WONDERING WHAT IT MIGHT BE. I SUPPOSE THERE'S ALWAYS CRIME, BUT THAT'S NOT GOOD WHEN YOU'RE OLDER. THERE'S DRUGS, BUT YOU KNOW, I'VE NEVER SEEN ANYBODY WHO'S BEEN IMPROVED BY DRUGS. LIFE SEEMS BOTH TOO LONG AND TOO SHORT. THIS BEING SAID, I HAD A GOOD DAY TODAY. THECLOUDS WERE PRETTY AND I BOUGHT A SACK OF CLOTHES AT THE GOODWILL STORE FOR FIVE BUCKS. PAMMIE WAS ON THE COVER OF ELLE. PLEASE WRITE IF YOU CAN. CARE OF THE POST OFFICE, LAS VEGAS. YOUR FRIEND, ALBERT LINUS.

  In 1989, Hamilton married Cleo, a hiker he met while triangulating land up north near Cassiar. They moved into a small town house near Lonsdale Quay and became ultra-domestic, hosting theme dinner parties ("Provence!"), allowing themselves to pudge out a few pounds ("Dove Bars … dare we?"), and spending their weekends wallpapering ("Love to play baseball but the den molding just arrived today."). Hamilton seemed to have settled down and lost much of his sarcastic edge. He left my radar for a while, even though he lived nearby.

  In 1991, Wendy became a specialist in emergency medicine. Also, her mother died of liver cancer that year, so Wendy returned home to the old neighborhood to live with and take care of her father, Ivor, a trollish grump with never a kind word for his daughter or anybody else. Wendy was occupied, but her life really wasn't much of a life. I know she'd wanted to fall in love during med school, but it never happened, and I know she was unhappy about this.

  This was also the year that Pam began vanishing from magazines, until she finally went completely AWOL at year's end, nary a lipstick-smudged postcard to any of us. Hurt feelings, yes, but we knew there had to be a reason. Hamilton, in a less generous mood, said, "She's in rehab. Don't glamorize it. Serves the cow right."

  "In what way does it serve her right, Ham?" I asked. We were in Hamilton and Cleo's nest at the bottom of Lonsdale: matching pine furniture, wacky animal fridge magnets, and white wine. Cleo positively glowed every time Ham took a swipe at Pammie.

  "In what way?" I asked again. He didn't know in what way. He harrumphed and said he had to make a phone call. "Aren't / Mr. Pissy tonight." Cleo looked miffed.

  In mid-1992,, Pam returned home to her folks' place—shaky, fearful, thin, and eerily gorgeous. The modeling lifestyle had wiped her out.We were sitting on her parent's front patio, "You know, it was fun, Richard. I grant you that. But it's over now. There's only a small fraction of 'me' left. I used to think there was an infinite supply of 'me.' Wrong-o. I have to be calm now. My small seed needs to grow and become a whole person again. I blew it all—a whole decade raking in dough and not one effing penny."

  "Where'd it go?"Iasked.

  "Clothes. Dinners. Drugs. More drugs. Bad investments—a mall in Oklahoma that never got built; a retirement community in Oregon that bankrupted." She was spitting out the words. "Shit. At least I'm allowed to smoke." The trees way above us rustled. A crow cawed. "And it's not even the drugs I miss, Richard. I miss the action. I miss feeling like queen of the roulette table. The black cars. Shallow shit, but I miss it. I miss feeling fabulous." A big silence, then: "Lois lets me baby-sit Megan sometimes. She's a fun kid. And gorgeous. She reminds me of Karen."

  "Thanks."

  "When I first saw Megan as a baby I thought she might as well go she-male and become your twin. By the way, my dear, you look like crap."

  "Thanks again Pam." I was making impatient gestures—I had to go pick up Megan from ice skating.

  "Richard, you're not leaving—not now, are you? Is it because I pointed out your boozy skin condition?"

  "I have to, Pam, I…" Pam's composure wilted. She was on the cusp of tears. I sat next to her and asked what was wrong. She sniffled and stared into her two clasped hands.

  "It's just that I'm … I'm … "

  "What, Pam? What?"

  A whisper: "Lonely."

  "I know. Me, too."

  I held her as she sniffled. "How's Hamilton? You see him much? Is he happy?"

  "I think so.""Oh, pooh." She was still wearing the pubic-hair locket. I asked her to come along with me to pick up Megan and she did.

  As fate would have it, Pam shortly ran into Hamilton and Cleo at a record store in Park Royal; they clicked instantly and they left the shop together, forgetting Cleo entirely. In those first few moments poor Cleo saw Pam and Hamilton together she knew she was out of the picture. Cleo had never seen that expression on Hamilton's face before: incredulous, worshipful, witty, lustful, and adoring—all of this love laser-beamed straight at Pam.

  Hamilton's marriage didn't just wobble, it crashed like a dynamited casino. In six months it was legally over, too: Cleo got the townhouse; Hamilton boomeranged into his parents' rent-free house, just a mere three-minute stroll to Pam's. At dinner at my parents' one night I saw the two of them moseying down Rabbit Lane. Every three steps a kiss. Every five steps a caress. Hamilton in love.

  It was great fun to have Pam among us again, with her tattletales of sex, drugs, and cannibalism. Her reputation in the fashion industry was shot, but this didn't bother her at all. "Much better for me to be here in Deadsville with chums. All very matey, isn't it?" I asked her if she had a plan yet. She said she was going to start doing TV and film makeup for some of the many U.S. studios shooting in their Vancouver branch plants. It turned out to be the best idea any of us ever had.

  And what of Karen? Neither alive nor dead after all these years, ever dimming from the world's mind—rasping, blinded, and pretzeled in a wheelchair, a chenille half-shirt covering the outer, exposed part of her body. She moves her head, her eyes flicker, and for three seconds she sees the sky and the clouds—she is briefly among the living, but no one is there to witness. She returns to the dark side of the Moon. We still don't know
what she saw that December night, nor may we ever.

  By the early 1990s, Karen's awakening had become a billion-to-one shot, but it was still a shot. No, Karen didn't "contribute" anything to society, but how many people really do? Perhaps she did contribute: She provided a platform on which people could hope. She provided the idea that some frail essence from a now long-vanished era still existed, that the brutality and extremes of the modern world were not the way the world ought to be—a world of gentle Pacific rains, down-filled jackets, bitter red wine in goatskins, and naive charms.

  11 DESTINY IS CORNY

  After four years of drifting, Linus returned in late 1992.. In that time he'd become more remote than ever. "Reading his facial expressions is an exercise in Kremlinology," Hamilton said. "Direct inquiry's no help: Gee, Linus, you're so remote these days—gee, what's the reason?" Discussion was awkward indeed, and in the end it was simply avoided. His years away were treated as though he'd popped out to get a pack of cigarettes and returned a few minutes later.

  Wendy met Linus for dinner a week after his low-key return. Afterward, she told me Linus had "gone inside himself, and hasn't quite emerged yet. He talked about sand dunes, ice, chocolate bars, and hitchhiking—the sorts of things that would be a big deal if you were a hobo. Chalk marks and stuff."

  I was envious of Linus's venture into nothingdom, but also ticked off that he hadn't had a revelation in all of his wanderings. I still lived, as did Hamilton, with the belief that meaning could pop into my life at any moment. I was getting—we were getting—no younger, yet for some reason not particularly wiser.

  Linus's parents had moved to the waterfront on Bellevue two years earlier—no spare bedroom. A homesick Linus rented a bungalow four houses down from his old house on Moyne Drive, paying the rent with earnings as a freelance electrical contractor. Generators were his specialty. It seemed an anticlimactic sequel to his romantic solo wanderings.