Read Online Miss Wyoming by Douglas Coupland - Free Book Online Page B

in a painting? What will we eat?” This made the hunter laugh, and he said, “We'll have everything we'll ever need in here. It's not like your world. In paintings, you can go visit other paintings. We'll go visit the feast paintings the Dutch did in the 1700s. We'll go have coffee inside an Edward Hopper diner. Please — come on in. I'm so lonely.”
    «Marie-Hélène said she needed to think about it, but the next day she came back to the painting, dressed in hiking clothes, ready for the forest. The hunter asked her, “Marie-Hélène, will you come into the painting and join me?” and she said, “Yes, I will.” »
    Piers wore Eau de Cédrat, a French citrus concoction that Doris said made him smell like Charles de Gaulle. His already sexy cigarette smoke would mix with his cologne like a spring fog alerting the bulbs beneath the soil to sprout. Piers would say, «The hunter then stuck out his arm and he pulled Marie-Hélène into the painting, into the forest, and slowly the two came together and Marie-Hélène planted a kiss on his lips. She pulled something out of her pockets, and the hunter asked her what it was, but she didn't reply. It was a book of matches and a bottle of her father's lighter fluid. She squirted the fluid out onto the floor of the mansion and lit a match and threw it onto the fluid. The house caught fire and Marie-Hélène said to the hunter, “Come on, let's go now. Don't look back.” So off they walked, away from the flames, and away from the world where Marie-Hélène could never return.»
    «The catch fights back!» Doris would say.
    Doris and Piers married against her family's wishes in a Manhattan civil ceremony. («Dor-Dor, he has no family —
none.
Life just doesn't work that way. Johnson — what sort of name is that?») The two traveled the world and then moved to Panama, where Piers had stud farm connections, and Doris became pregnant. One afternoon in her eighth month, Doris was taking an ikebana flower—arranging class in the living room of the wife of a Nestlé executive in Miraflores Locks. Without warning, she fell to the floor in labor pains, screaming like a gorgon, taking with her a zinc bucket full of untrimmed ginger stems. John's birth was so powerful and fast and hot — the air-conditioning had been broken and the room so sweltering — that for decades afterward Doris was unable to tolerate heat or anything that smacked of the tropics, living her life from one air-conditioned space to the next. John was born on the mahogany floor surrounded by tropical flowers and perplexed executive wives. At the time of the birth, Piers was checking out horses in the Canary Islands. His twin-prop plane was lost in a squall, and he vanished.
    Her family tsk-tsked and I-told-you-so'd. Her father assigned her to a small family-owned apartment on the Upper East Side, doled out a child-support allowance for young John, plus limited expense accounts at a few grocers and clothiers. Her days of waxy Chianti bottles, Japanese paper lanterns and peacoats were over before they'd even fully begun. She was to become a New York matron. She was to play the part of rich — she was bred to
be
rich — but she wasn't rich, and this powerless position defined her life. Yet she cherished her lovely memory of Piers in this red roast beef of a baby who wailed like the thrashed clutch of a Chevrolet.
    Thirty-seven years later, when John met former child star Susan Colgate, he skipped many pages of the family's story. John was a member of Delaware's Lodge clan — pesticides originally, and then all forms of agrochemicals, plastics and pharmaceuticals, eventually forming a monster that spat out everything from mousetraps to orange juice to nuclear weapons components. The firm was largely privately owned, and headed by Doris's uncle Raitt, who reigned from the family Tara in rural Delaware.
    The family had decided, though not in these exact words, that Doris was a flaky financial drain who had willfully