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A weird thing about my chronic insomnia is that I sometimes have the ability to sleep in the afternoon. Not always, but just enough to screw up my ability to sleep again at night. Since it had been a particularly bad week for sleep, I could not wait to get home to my comfortable Kitsilano condo and crash on the couch for a couple of hours. I knew I would pay for it in the middle of the night, but my body was giving me the signal that the sleep deficit was getting bigger than I could expect to cope with.
I was so tired that I approached my apartment building as though I were approaching the gates of Heaven. Unfortunately, St. Peter was at the gates: my ex-wife stood guard outside the front entrance to the building. After having my car broken into on numerous occasions, I had abandoned parking in the building’s underground “secure” parking garage and now parked on the street. Since that necessitated my entering through the building’s front door—currently blocked by my ex-wife—I sensed a need to rethink that decision.
Sandi Cuffling, formerly Patrick, is a very attractive woman. Not the cover of Glamour magazine kind of attractive, but a woman who has the ability to turn heads when she walks into a room. Over our years together, she had come to cherish that ability and wore it like a merit badge. Some days I still missed her. Today wasn’t one of those days.
“Look who’s here. Did we change the shape of future generations today?” Sandi was fluent in a different dialect of the English language. Sarcasm. In the past four years, I’m not sure I’d heard her speak without it.
“Hello, Sands,” I said, doing my best to seem relatively interested to see her. In Sandi’s world, the fact we were divorced was no reason we ought not to be part of each other’s lives. Hostility between ex’s was so nineties. It’s much more sophisticated to still be friends. I was about as interested in continuing a friendship with my ex-wife as I was in re-marrying her, but I was raised as a polite gentleman and couldn’t bring myself to tell her to go piss up a rope.
“I’ve been waiting for you,” she said. Her tone held just a hint of accusation.
“And here I am.”
She looked at her expensive watch. “It’s almost four thirty.”
“You and the general population are under the mistaken impression that the working day of a teacher ends when the three o’clock bell rings. There is slightly more to it than that, but until such time as you become a teacher, which would entail mixing with the rabble that is the teenagers of the world, you would not understand.”
“You are a bitter one today.”
“It’s been one of those days.” I opened the front door and headed into the lobby. It was tempting to close the door, knowing Sandi didn’t have a key to the building. But again, I was raised polite. Sandi followed me into the artificially ornate entrance hallway, looking over my shoulder as I checked my mail box. Sandi could never stand it when I received mail addressed only to me. I thought she would be over it now that we were not living together any more, but apparently not. Not satisfied simply with reviewing the contents of my mailbox, she proceeded to follow me up to my apartment.
“So how have you been?” she asked as we travelled down the hall.
“Fine.”
“That’s it? Fine?”
“What were you looking for?”
“A little detail about how your life is going. Do you know how long it’s been since you called me just to chat and say hi?”
“No.” Reaching the door to my suite, I unlocked it and paused long enough to throw Sandi a question with my eyes. My question was: what the hell do you want? She interpreted the look as: do you want to come in?
“It’s been a long time,” she informed me, following me into my apartment.
“I’m not sure. Do you think it could have anything to do with the fact we’re divorced?”
“You know I still care about you, Win.” She stopped and looked at a painting I had recently hung on the wall. “Hey! That’s new.”
“Yes.”
“That’s weird. You buying art.”
“I like art.”
“Well, I know, but it’s just strange, you know? It was the kind of thing we used to do together.”
I gave her a sideways glance as I kicked off my shoes. “Actually, it was the kind of thing you did for us. My job was to hang up what you purchased.” Sandi walked slowly around my apartment, stopping in front of the large glass patio door to take in the view. Admittedly, it was a good view, but Sandi seemed out of sorts, even for her, and it was clear she wanted to talk to me about something but didn’t seem to know how to begin. I decided not to say anything and see what would happen. In the classroom, we call it “wait time”, the period between when the teacher asks a question and someone volunteers an answer. It’s often awkward, but sooner or later someone will speak just to break the uncomfortable silence.
Sandi continued to stare out at the rain beating down against the patio door. Her long blonde hair, dampened by the rain, hung past her shoulders. Her strong shoulders, sculpted in the gym through dedication bordering on fanaticism, sagged with the weight of whatever she wanted to tell me. In fact, it wasn’t like her to allow rain to affect her appearance. I’m not proud to admit that a large part of the power Sandi held over me for so long was her physical strength and strong beauty.
“Aren’t you going to ask how I am?” she finally asked.
“How are you?” I supplied her with what she apparently wanted to hear.
“Fine,” she answered coolly.
“Good. I’m glad we cleared that up.” Sandi’s sarcasm could be contagious.
Another of Sandi’s amazing arsenal of talents was her ability to pout, which she did in the classic “stick out your lower lip” fashion often favoured by ramp-walking fashion models. To be fair, Sandi had, in fact, worked as a model, principally when she was twelve years old, displaying training bras and adolescent undergarments for the Eaton’s catalogue. Somehow, Sandi’s modelling career had stalled at the ripe old age of fourteen. But she could pout. She was putting it into use now as the unwritten signal I remembered from the tumultuous end to our marriage. It still worked on me now as it did then. I’m nothing if not pathetic.
“Okay,” I sighed. “Sandi, I’m sorry. Obviously something is upsetting you and you want to talk to me about it. Although why you continue to choose me as your confessor in lieu of one of your numerous confidants at the spa never ceases to baffle me.”
“Because I know I can always count on you to listen to me. You don’t judge me.”
“Sands, I always judge you. Often disparagingly, sometimes even to your face. Do you not remember our marriage at all?” Sandi waited patiently for the signal that I would be quiet and let her speak. Eventually, I always did. It’s part of her charm and her power that she manages to wield over me to this day. “I’m sorry. Carry on.”
Sandi finally turned from her post at the window to face me. “I hardly know where to begin.”
“I generally find things go best when you just
