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was.”

chapter three
    The slightest thought of him—a letter in the mail, a phone message, the mention of his name—was enough to send a tsunami of exhilaration through my brain. I quit eating, lost weight, got pimples (I
know
it’s true love when my face breaks out). I woke up each day delirious, gregarious, in an optimistic, euphoric, stuttering, agonizing, blissful,
adjectivey
state. Love, I felt in my blood, was to die for. There could be nothing better, nothing hotter or holier on this earth.
    Vernal and I lived for nine months, in sin and a single-bedroom apartment, in Vancouver’s Kitsilano. “Who will ever marry her now?” my father asked.
    I was the one who proposed. My brain couldn’t go on forever in a heightened state of etherized romantic bliss, andwhen the excitement began to subside I suppose I thought marriage might be some kind of a solution.
    My father fought back tears when it came time to give me away. We had to wait outside the church for Vernal, who arrived late. That was Vernal. Late and hung-over. He never changed. Whenever I tried to talk to him about drinking, he’d say, “The graveyard is full of sober men.”
    There were a lot of things I didn’t know about Vernal when I married him. I didn’t want to know. All knowledge is loss, I know now, when it comes to love or being married to someone.
    We flew to Mexico for our honeymoon. (Like Frenchy, I’ve made a few mistakes in life I probably shouldn’t have, and marrying Vernal was definitely one of them.
And
Vernal and I were both snorting more cocaine than we probably should have at the time.) I took a copy of Malcolm Lowry’s
Under the Volcano
to read on the train from Mexico City to Mérida. Vernal read as far as the title. “I won’t be taking you anywhere like
that
,” he promised.
    When we got back from our honeymoon and neither one of us had proposed divorce, I felt there might be hope for our marriage. We decided to stay together “because of the kids”—the kids, I believed then, we both wished desperately to have. We gave notice on our apartment and bought a 4,000-square-foot mock-Georgian manorhouse in the walled community of Astoria, twenty minutes from downtown Vancouver, because Vernal wanted a safe place for our kids to grow up. At the entrance to what I nicknamed the Walled-Off Astoria, we had a gatehouse manned twenty-four hours by two security guards. Ourhouse had an eight-foot-high decorative stone wall built around it, and when you drove through the electronically controlled, floodlit gate you looked straight into the big brotherly eye of a surveillance camera.
    I had my own office overlooking our heart-shaped swimming pool. I worked, every morning, translating a book by a Colombian sociologist about growing up homeless, eating shoe leather and whatever else he could scrounge from the dump. Vernal was dead against my making the trip to South America my publisher had planned—he said I’d be taken hostage and he’d have to cash in our entire RRSP to buy me back, or I’d contract an incurable tropical disease and he’d have to keep me on life-support, next to his filing cabinet, for the rest of my natural life. More likely—and I knew this was his worst scenario—I’d fall in love with my bodyguard and give birth to his love-child in some bug-infested jungle guest-house, then bring the baby home and expect him to take care of it. Vernal had begun to blame himself for my inability to bear his children.
    When, after eighteen months of trying, we still hadn’t conceived, Vernal went to a breeder and paid $3,800 for a dog. Brutus turned out to have a heart condition and had to be driven to Saskatchewan to have a pacemaker installed.
    Our first heated argument, about something other than the prospect of my infidelity or Vernal’s continued drinking, was over the swimming pool. Vernal wanted to hire staff to maintain it. I said there were children starving right in our own city—how could he justify spending