Angles

I've had a few really nice connecting moments with my ex over the past couple of days -- we went out to talk about her trip and see photos on Tuesday night -- and then I offered to update her ipod. Had some technical difficulties, so I had to go over last night and pick up the USB cord from her -- my former -- house.

I was fiddling with the controls and wondering if it was going to rain as I walked past the house A and I lived in from 1991 to 1996, just before we bought our house. Our former landlord was in the front yard, briskly raking leaves in the dark. I hadn't seen her for at least 10 years, and I stopped abruptly, sort of surprised that she still lived there.

When we lived there, she was half of a slightly oddball, endearing couple. She's a housing economist, and her husband is a Brit nuclear physicist who also has a master's in English and was given to declaiming Shakespeare at the most unlikely moments. Most evenings, he curled up with heavy duty dark beer and his computer to write science fantasy novels filled with highly sexed literary characters come to life. He looked like a Seuss character -- grinchly -- but kindly. They have a son who was about 12 or 13 when we moved in, with lead soldiers still scattered about, and who, when we moved out, had reached a theatrical stage that involved fencing, silk lounging gowns, cigarettes and glasses of wine at 11 a.m. on the terrace.

The woman is a prof at a university about an hour outside of Toronto, and lived in that town during the week while the son and the husband lived downstairs from us. They were always a bit quirky -- Marion was given to shouting a little when she got excited, a sort of displaced English headmistress type, and D maintained all sorts of fictions about his level of cigarette consumption (M reported 6 a day, which we knew to be a gross underestimation) and general debauchery. They were excellent landlords -- M built us a little balcony for our barbeque off the living room before we even moved in, and added a terrace on the third floor for us, both times hiring people she thought needed the work, with the expected vagaries of excellent storytelling while the work was underway and slightly off centre results.

After we moved out, and the son went away to school, a couple of our friends moved into our flat. Left to his own devices, D apparently gave full rein to his appetites, and L&N reported Outrageous Shenanigans -- L spotting D at Full Mast through a window about to roger two spritely chicks when she was walking her dog; a visitor to their place accidentally ringing the wrong doorbell and being greeted by D in a leather codpiece, etc.

So. I heard through the grapevine that eventually they'd split up, that D had moved to the east coast and was living with an opera singer in a very dirty house and regaling the locals with his many tales down the pub. But I hadn't seen either of them in years.

Last night, when I saw M, we chatted, and we had the weirdest conversation all about our breakups, framed entirely from the perspective of a housing economist. "Are you still in the house up the street, or have you moved up?" "Actually, we're not together anymore, A is still in that house, I bought a loft in Kensington Market." "Ah, well, see, you both benefitted from that investment, it let you both be in the market. D bought me out and has a nice house in L--, though he complains about his property taxes."

Then there was a bit of chatter about her gay nephew in Calgary and why he had never procreated, and why he would live in Calgary of all places as a gay man, and how she and D were on good terms, which is best, really, and all of the lesbian couples who had inhabited our old flat, and how now two straight grad students were there, Americans, who disturbed her a little in their straightness, and then the size of my flat and the likelihood for the market to continue increasing, and well wishes all around, and then she muttered something about trying to get tulip bulbs into the ground despite the tree roots (um,and the fact that it's DECEMBER?) and then we bid farewell, both a little chuffed by the encounter.