Bats or Swallows (10 page)

B
ASIL IS WOKEN BY AN EARTHQUAKE.
The floor shakes and the one painting he has on the wall rattles, but stays in place. He holds the sides of his bed and wonders what he should do. He closes his eyes and when he opens them again, the shaking has stopped. He gets up and stands with one foot in front of the other, arms out. Steady. And then he quickly pulls on his jeans and a shirt, grabs his coat and runs down the stairs. The ceiling of his bathroom started to leak on the weekend—how sturdy can this place be?
Outside he faces the building. It isn’t swaying. He takes a cigarette from his jacket and smokes half. Each cigarette in the pack is marked off halfway down. He initially estimated halves as he smoked, but caught himself cheating. With the black marks he knows exactly when to stop. Basil decided to quit when he first moved into the apartment. He sat on the newly varnished parquet floors, shook the cigarettes out of the pack and measured and marked. He’s still doing this two months later.
After two half cigarettes (the point is also to remind him of how much money he’s wasting), he goes back to his apartment, this time taking the elevator to the sixth floor. The neighbour he stole Wi-Fi from locked the signal a week earlier (network name: GET OFF MY ASS) and because he doesn’t have a television or a working radio, he feels alone, deprived of breaking news updates. He sits on his bed, takes out his cell phone and calls his wife, Hillary. He leaves her a voice mail.
“Hi Hillary, it’s Basil. Did you feel the earthquake? I hope your new condo’s okay. And that you’re okay too, and Henry, if he’s with you. I’m fine, in case you’re wondering. Anyway, call me if you weren’t crushed alive.”
Basil presses the pound key and then six to delete the message. He leaves another one, but doesn’t say anything about Henry. He deletes it a second time, this time leaving out the part about the earthquake. He’s starting to doubt it happened. The final message is calm, casual and short, “Hi Hill, it’s Basil. Gimme a call when you get this.”

Basil and Hillary met at a New Year’s Eve party almost five years ago. He noticed her because of her skirt. He saw it from across the room: short in the front and long in the back, sort of pleated. There was some denim in there and maybe plaid? It was ridiculous (“whimsical,” a friend of his mused politely) and Basil was intrigued that she could pull it off and still look sophisticated. Sexy. He later discovered that Hillary often wore complicated items of clothing. She bought him a complicated shirt once. It had zippers all over and he was disappointed when he learned that none of them were functional.
Basil’s parents named him after the man who owned the basement apartment they lived in when they were newlyweds. He was an old Greek man, a painter, and he lived upstairs. He would invite Basil’s parents over for drinks on his balcony or in the backyard, and in the winter he poured them cloudy glasses of ouzo to drink in his kitchen. When his mother got pregnant, she mentioned to him in passing that the only craving she had was for lemonade. For a week straight he delivered pitchers of cold lemonade to her in the morning until the craving passed.
The Greek painter killed himself when his mother was six months pregnant. Not at the house, but in the penthouse suite of a hotel downtown. Basil’s parents were shocked when they found out. His children claimed the house and evicted them in the middle of the winter and so they packed up their things quickly and found a new place, this time in a real building where they wouldn’t get the chance to develop a friendship with their landlord.
His parents never read the Greek painter’s suicide note, but in it he left them a painting, one of his last works. It arrived at their new apartment a week before Basil was born. His parents knew they were having a boy and had already picked the name “Michael,” but Basil’s mother decided at the last minute that she wanted to name him after their old landlord instead. His father thought it was bad luck to name their son after a man who committed suicide, but his mother insisted and he gave in, worn out from the move and the stress of the birth of their first child.
When Basil was older he learned about Name Days. Greeks are typically named after saints and each saint has a day designated to them that’s celebrated with even more fanfare than a birthday. Basil was the English translation of “Vasilis” and his Name Day was January first.
At the New Year’s Eve party, when Basil was introduced to Hillary she said, “Tomorrow’s your Name Day!” and kissed him on the cheek. Basil wasn’t used to people knowing that or being kissed by strangers. He looked at her funny, sophisticated skirt and her big smile and his love began to grow. They kissed again at midnight and then an hour later, and then for a sizeable chunk of his Name Day.
Hillary wasn’t Greek, but her last boyfriend was, and she’d always liked the concept of Name Days, even though her own name didn’t have an Orthodox saint cognate. They celebrated Basil’s Name Day for the next few years. The last time was right before they separated and Hillary threw a plate against the wall. The act could’ve been mistaken for a Greek tradition, but they were just fighting.
Basil and Hillary were married within a year of knowing each other, both of them twenty-three years old. Neither had expected to marry so quickly or so young, but Basil proposed spontaneously and Hillary accepted, and before they changed their minds they followed through. They went to City Hall and she wore a grey-silver sheer dress and he wore the only suit he owned. Basil was secretly relieved that she didn’t wear one of her complicated outfits. Their respective roommates and his parents were the only people who came. They deliberately kept the ceremony small because they thought it would be more meaningful that way.
Hillary’s parents were in Europe, her mother was in Switzerland with a friend, her father on business in Germany. They came to Toronto two weeks after the wedding, stayed in a hotel and brought the newlyweds out to dinner one night and Basil’s parents the next, before catching an early morning flight to Calgary to see Hillary’s sister. For a wedding present, they gave them a cheque for fifteen thousand dollars. Basil was offended by the short visit and embarrassed by the large sum of money, but Hillary merely shrugged. He later found out that she hadn’t told them about the wedding until the week before, precisely because she didn’t want them to be there.
The first few months after the wedding were peaceful. They cooked together and watched movies and in the evenings Hillary would fall asleep in Basil’s arms on the couch. They walked everywhere. The excitement of the first year of their relationship was replaced by moments of extreme, simple tenderness. Sometimes they would happen one after the other, quickly, incredibly, like multiple orgasms. Basil would lie in bed and think,
I am happy
.
There were little signs that things were going wrong. There are always little signs. The littlest: Hillary would get mad at him for not folding his clothes when he took them off or for leaving half-empty cans of beer around the apartment. She wouldn’t just get lovingly annoyed, she would get angry. He got a sinking feeling about their relationship when they started saying mean things to each other without hesitation. “You’re pushing my buttons,” Hillary would say, shaking her head. And then she would lean over and push his, tentatively, like a tap on the shoulder, the way schoolboys fight, threatening, but never striking. They didn’t hit each other, but they could feel the potential of it in their fists.
The biggest sign: when they decided to open their marriage and allow each other to sleep with other people. They were friends with a couple that had done this and were happily together. One night Hillary had drinks with the woman and when she came home, tipsy but not so drunk that she took back her words the next morning, said it would be the perfect arrangement for them.
Hillary had confessed earlier that she was getting crushes on men she knew and was becoming resentful that she couldn’t act on them. The resentment, in turn, was poisoning their marriage. “It’s just sex,” she said. “I don’t want a relationship with them, not like what I have with you.” Basil agreed that maybe it could work. They read literature about open relationships together, found advice on the Internet, and worked out rules for themselves. It made them feel closer to each other, mutually flattered by the level of trust between them.
Basil created an online profile for himself on a dating website, but when he showed Hillary the messages a few girls had sent him, she thought using the Internet was cheating. “It would be too easy that way, you know?” she said. Basil didn’t protest; he realized he wasn’t actually interested in meeting anyone else anyway. Before he got the chance to discuss it with her, she’d already slept with Henry, and then everything fell apart.

Once Hillary said,
being mean to your lover can be a form of intimacy
. It was after a fight. “I’m glad we fight,” she said, her cheeks rosy from yelling. “It means we’re honest with each other.” Initially Basil agreed. Real meanness is derived from familiarity and vulnerability, extracted from a moment of honesty. This was before they opened their marriage. They had been fighting about how she was feeling stifled. “You’re too dependent on me,” she sighed. In a healthy relationship, she said, you didn’t need the other person; you wanted them. The difference was very distinct and very important to her.
“But you grew up rich, Hillary,” Basil said. “You always had what you needed, and if you wanted something, you could get it. What do you know about needing anything? You can’t apply that theory to real people.”
This was the kind of honest and mean thing that he would say to her. Her wealth was a sore spot, and she was embarrassed by its vastness, its depth, though she would never admit it.
“That’s not what I mean. I mean I don’t want to
depend
on you. I don’t want to
need
you. Can’t you understand the difference?”
“I don’t see what’s so wrong with needing someone,” he said. “You have to be dependent on me, even a little.”
Hillary didn’t answer, which was her way of being honest and mean.
There was only so much honesty and meanness they could tolerate. Their lease was going to run out and they had to make a decision. Hillary said, “I want us to stay together,” but she didn’t look at Basil and he knew what she truly meant. Hillary, even in her most complicated of outfits, was easy to read. Basil stopped himself from saying this final mean thing to her.
Their goodbye was quiet. Maybe in the end all goodbyes are quiet. There was yelling and fights and tears at first, but at the end, after they’d packed up their belongings and found new places to live, there wasn’t a sound left. Basil thought of
Don’t Look Back
, which they’d watched together three times in one week the first year they were married. They rented it from a video store a few blocks away, but never returned it and when they split up, Basil was the one who kept it. There’s a scene in the middle of the movie where Bob Dylan is sitting at his typewriter, mouthing to himself. Joan Baez is there too, singing and playing the guitar, so striking, but resigned. She stops playing, they tease each other and then she gets up, kisses him on the top of the head and exits the scene. And that’s it. She leaves him. You can’t tell in the movie because of the way it’s edited, but that was goodbye—she didn’t see him again for another ten years. Basil and Hillary watched the scene a few times to see if they could sense it, the weight of that departure, but they couldn’t. Joan was quiet about it.

Basil is still in his apartment when his phone rings. It’s Hillary. She got his message and was wondering if he wanted to help her paint her condo. Basil doesn’t answer and she laughs at him.
“I’m just kidding. I feel guilty asking people to help me paint. I’m going to do it alone.” Basil isn’t sure if she’s using reverse psychology, but insists that he’s going to come by, that she should’ve asked him earlier. That’s what friends are for and they wanted to stay friends, right? And, best of all, Henry wouldn’t be there, although he doesn’t tell her that.
The extent of their open relationship was Hillary sleeping with Henry. He was a friend of hers from university and had apparently been understanding of the rules of an open relationship. He never gave Hillary any ultimatums and he didn’t ask her to leave Basil for him. This is what Hillary had told Basil, anyway. It was all her idea. After she slept with Henry, something clicked and she decided that she didn’t want to just sleep with many men. She wanted to sleep with only Henry, and date him too. Maybe that was a bad sign for her marriage.
“Why do you want to go on dates?” Basil asked. “We’re married.”
“It’s not like we act like we’re married.”
“How do married people act?”
“They don’t sleep with other people.”
“Sure they do. We’ve read books about it. They deal with it.”
“Well, maybe I don’t feel like being married to you anymore.”