The Sand Trap (22 page)

They all agreed they had indeed had such
silly notions.

“Ok,” Gord announced. “So – so no wife, kids
gone, a little money tucked away, still healthy, well mostly – I am
going to quit the university and take a year off from anything but
golf to try to qualify for the senior tour.”

There was silence.

“You’re fucking serious!” Peter
exclaimed.

Gord just nodded his head slowly.

“Damn!” Harold proclaimed. “That deserves
another drink.” And the four friends, even Richard, spent the
afternoon dissecting Gord’s golf game to try and find the road to
the senior tour.

As Gord left the club that afternoon he
wondered to himself just what he was doing. He knew it was time for
change in his life. Fifty-eight had not been a banner age and for
the first time he remembered he actually felt like he was growing
older. He had kept good care of his body, partly because of the
role he was called on to occasionally play for the Agency, partly
because he had been proud of his athletic ability and did not want
it to diminish, but mostly because it just felt good.

It felt good to exercise. He still did a
hundred push-ups and a hundred sit-ups each morning. That was just
one of his obsessions Gail was constantly ridiculing since she lost
her appetite in her fifties for fighting age with anything other
than a surgeon’s knife. She once tried to talk him into having
liposuction on his double chin but much to her chagrin he demurred.
He mostly ate right. One of his other obsessions she ridiculed was
oatmeal every morning. Not the quick Quaker kind but the raw
Scottish steel cut that he cooked in large batches for hours and
warmed up in the morning. He even took pouches of it when he
travelled since steel cut oatmeal was not a hot ticket item in
places like Japan or Saudi. He liked fruit, fish and vegetables and
only enjoyed red meat on occasion; so he didn’t think it was fair
that he should be showing the signs of old age.

His genes were good so he figured he was
safe on that account. Both his parents had led active, relatively
healthy professional lives. Both were university professors and in
retirement they worked and travelled extensively with CPSO,
Canadian Professional Service Overseas, a group that sends retired
professionals on volunteer work in developing countries. His mom
had some minor heart problems and at eighty-nine his Dad’s
arthritis was kicking up. They were a pair of quite healthy
octogenarians when they were killed two years ago in a car accident
in the first winter pile up on the 401 between Kingston and
Toronto. Gord was an only child, he had been close to his parents
and he missed them. Neither of them knew exactly what he did for
the Agency, but they were very bright people and they knew their
son was more than a sales agent for a small university, although
neither of them ever questioned him too deeply concerning his
travels. He didn’t figure it was fair that he felt arthritis so
soon. His doctor just called it “aging” and told him to take a
Naproxen Sodium based product whenever it hurt. The injury-related
aches and pains he just stoically accepted. The wonky knee had
destroyed his hockey career. The minor restricted movement in his
right shoulder he considered a blessing after the crushing it took
after falling down a precipice skiing at Mount Tremblant. Two
surgeries later and his golf game looked safe, although his
shoulder aches became a very accurate predictor of weather pressure
changes.

And he needed reading glasses. That was a
recent addition to his human frailties and it severely pissed him
off. He needed glasses to read restaurant menus, pill box labels,
golf score cards and the Globe and Mail and he never had a pair
when he needed them. He bought literally dozens of the right
magnification from COSTCO and left them all over the house, the car
and his office.

That was another thing that ticked off
Gail.

Fortunately none of these human frailties
interfered too much with his three passions in life.

He was a professional caliber bass player.
He had actually been a music minor in his undergraduate days before
moving on to the study of linguistics for his masters and
doctorate. Over the past twenty years he had focused on blues and
was a well-known fixture on the blues bar circuit, often sitting in
with local and travelling bands at local blues bars. The biggest
thrill in his music life was sitting in one night for a whole set
with Downchild when they played a guest appearance at the Rivertown
Pub in Hull. He often sought out the open mike sessions in blues
bars across the world. But mostly he just put on headphones and
played along with one of the two thousand blues songs he had in his
music album. He had a nice set up in one corner of the basement
where he could go to play and leave the cares of the real world
behind.

That pissed Gail off as well.

To the casual observer it looked like Gord
was a Tai Chi guy. Wherever he was, he did a set of slow moving Tai
Chi motions where he pushed imaginary walls, slowly lifted
imaginary weights and turned on one foot too slowly to face
imaginary friends. To anyone who knew, it was obvious that while he
did series of slow Tai Chi like movements it was not Tai Chi. Once
when he was practicing early in the morning in a park opposite
their hotel in London an elderly Asian lady came up and observed
and just smiled and watched a while before she began her own
routine. Gord could tell from the wistful smile that something in
her past brought back knowledge of just what it was he was doing.
During his first training session with the Agency they taught basic
self-defense. The theory was you were never supposed to get
yourself into a situation that needed it, but if you did you would
know where to hit someone so they would stay down. It had to be
something you could practice without raising eyebrows. A university
VP who chopped bricks in half, would be noticed. However Tai Chi
was a growing fad and the Agency taught two very old forms of
martial arts that took basic Tai Chi non-violent movements and
completed each move to attack specific pressure points on the body
that would incapacitate, or even kill. The Agency gave its
‘recruits’ the choice of learning either forms; one an ancient
Korean martial arts form called Kwa Hang Do, the other was called
Wing Chun, from China. Gord chose the latter since Bruce Lee had
practiced it and he was a fan of Bruce Lee movies. Although he
never gave any thought to actually using it in a real situation. As
was his nature, Gord became obsessed with the “art” and, along with
his one hundred push-ups and sit-ups, practiced Tai Chi movements
for an hour beside the bed each morning.

And that really pissed off Gail.

He had now decided he would put aside these
other obsessions for his third passion – golf. His parents had
loved the game as well. At least his mother did and his Dad went
along for the fun. They belonged to a private Country Club in
Ottawa. Gord could not remember a time when he hadn’t played golf,
from the first cut off clubs his Dad made him when he was four
years old through to the club junior championship and then as a top
ranked provincial junior player. Golf had been a central part of
his life. He had been offered some golf scholarships to the states,
but his parents were not in favour of athletic scholarships and
insisted that he attend a Canadian university where they said he
would get a better education. So while he played some university
golf and led his Western Ontario team to a provincial championship,
it was more recreational than competitive and for his university
years, golf was a distraction not an obsession. That was where it
had been for most of his life up to now. It was a mental
distraction from the other parts of his life that he sometimes
didn’t want to be reminded of, so regular Saturday golf with a
group of regular friends became his third obsession.

And Gail really hated that.

He often wondered if it would have been
different for them if she had played golf as well. From his last
confrontation with her he doubted it. They had been separated for
over a year when he arrived home from the last trip to Korea. When
he reached their house there was a big moving truck in front and
Gail was standing on the front porch of their Queen Elizabeth Drive
bungalow giving directions to the muscled young men carrying boxes
and pieces of furniture.

Gord just stared as he walked up the
driveway.

“I left you, your golf clubs, a big bucket
of oatmeal, and your music stuff downstairs,” she announced.
“Combined, they should probably give you a big hard on.”

The anger and bitterness in her voice was
profound even after a year of separation. “But I get the rest. If
you recall, the house is in my name and I have listed it and I've
asked for a quick sale. I’ll send you your half when I feel like
it.”

Gord now remembered how they had put her
name on the ownership 30 years ago for tax purposes. “I don't
understand Gail?” Gord asked. “I thought that we were going to do
this in a civilized manner, if not for our sake for the kids'?”

They had been attending “separation”
counseling once a month for over a year now and while Gail made it
perfectly clear that she was not interested in getting back
together, she had agreed to try and find an amicable way to
separate.

“Fuck the kids,” she yelled.

The passing moving man carrying a heavy box
of books looked up.

“They are both married and gone for Christ’s
sake!” She started to cry a little. “They have their own lives and
they don’t care a fig for either of us, and they shouldn't. We’re
hardly the Ozzy and Harriet of role models for a blissful married
life.”

Gord agreed she was right on both counts.
Their two children, Robbie and Marianne, had both left the nest
years ago and both were now married. Robbie was an actor. He lived
in Montreal and was one of the rare successful ones. Marianne was a
Petroleum Engineer making tons of money in Calgary. Other than the
perfunctory duties of good children, neither paid much attention to
their parents. Then again, thought Gord, other than the perfunctory
requirements, Gail and he had not spent much attention on the
duties of parenthood. While there was one eight- year old
granddaughter in Calgary, Gail was only interested in seeing her on
special occasions. Their daughter had an affair on a trip to South
America and Gail never approved of the husband or the fetus that
she brought home. Gord on the other hand kept in constant contact
with his granddaughter, always sending her things when he was on
his trips. They shared little secrets and Gord told her his
favourite blues song was "Better off with the Blues" and she wasn't
to tell anyone. She told him her favourite stuffed animal was the
Panda he sent her from China, but he wasn't to tell her mom.

He wondered if more grandchildren might have
softened Gail up a bit.

He and Gail had been university lovers,
exploring each other’s bodies and minds in a haze of hallucinogenic
smoke in the early seventies. He was into language and music. She
was a science student. They were married after they both were
awarded their Ph.D.s. He went to Ottawa Valley College and she went
to the NRC, the National Research Council, as a research scientist.
But from that point forward they gradually drifted apart. He went
into his secret world with CIDC and found solace in his golf and
music. She developed an interest in politics and became obsessed
with a string of left wing MPs from across the country,
volunteering to run the Ottawa side of one fledging politician or
another. She was especially interested in young women politicians
and their struggle for equity. She claimed that some great aunt of
hers was a leader in the original Canadian suffragette movement in
Canada and she had a legacy to fulfill.

Gord had an apparent total disinterest in
either politics or any social movement.

And that really pissed Gail off.

She found other more sympathetic bodies and
the proverbial cuckolded husband came home early from one of his
trips and found a young naked, female politician from Quebec who
had rented the house next to them sitting in his living room
smoking grass. Gail walked out of the bedroom equally naked and
only said, “What the fuck do you care – you can’t get it up
anyhow.”

He wondered at the time where such anger
came from.

Shortly after that, Gail moved out of their
house and in with the young politician and they entered separation
counseling. Now she was taking most things they had accumulated
together in thirty years of marriage. As he walked through the
empty rooms of the house he had to admit it was freeing in an odd
sort of way. The sense of relief was somehow outweighing the sense
of loss. “So here he was,” he thought as he wandered through the
mostly empty rooms. No wife. No kids. Soon no house. An aging body,
still very sore from the North Korean’s kick. It only remained for
him to have no job.

On Monday morning after the May golf lunch
where he announced to his astonished friends his intention to join
the senior golf tour, he drove into the parking of Pierre Trudeau
University in his ten year old Honda Civic – the first choice of
good spies he used to tell himself – and pulled into the spot
reserved with his name. There were perks to the VP level position.
The nameplate would be gone by lunchtime he figured. So would he.
He had no intention of drawing out his departure from the
University and even though he had served faithfully and well for
twenty-five years he really didn’t feel any deep attachment to the
place or anyone there. His other international staff were wonderful
young people, many from different parts of the world, and them he
would miss. The President wasn’t a bad guy for a frustrated
academic turned administrator. But he had found the politics and
the meetings and the budget backstabbing and the mostly spoiled
students something of a bore. He did his job well though and the
international student body had grown quickly since he started the
office in the small university when he arrived. The university was
new enough and was changing so much that no one at the time
wondered why a brilliant Ph.D. in linguistics would take such a low
paying and low profile job in such a university. He could have been
on a fast tenure track at any major university in North America. A
few even wondered at the time why a fresh out of university
thirty-three-year old won the job over a number of candidates with
much more experience in university international activities than
he. But he knew how he got the job and had a few moments of early
guilt until he started to do the job, found out he actually liked
it and over the years had consequently built one of the premier
international recruitment offices in the country. It was important
that he liked his visible job because it was the nature of his
secondary one that he was called on only once a year or maybe less
often. There was once a gap of four years between assignments and
if it hadn’t been for his constant contact with Richard through
golf he would have thought they didn’t need him anymore. But since
he was quitting that job, he didn’t need this VP job so he headed
directly to the President’s office to hand in his resignation to
take effect after the two months holidays Gord had accumulated. It
turned out to be easier than he had anticipated; like the guy
already knew what Gord was going to say. The President
congratulated him on his long career and effusively told him how
much he would be missed and how Gord was not to worry, his office
would take care of the paperwork. Oddly he never even asked what
Gord was going to do now that he was retiring.