Bats or Swallows (11 page)

When the two of them separated, neither wanted to keep the apartment. Hillary bought a condo across the city by the lake and Basil stayed in their neighbourhood, in the Annex, near the University of Toronto where Hillary had been thinking of returning to start a new degree. To go to her new place he would have to take the subway to Union Station and then walk or take a long, slow streetcar ride. There was little chance of a random run-in at a grocery store or in the streets.
Basil was surprised that she chose to buy the condo. She had a view of the lake, which was nice, but that was it. She also had a view of the highway and who wanted that? But, Hillary didn’t want to pay rent anymore. She didn’t like any of the other places she’d seen. She could always sell it if she didn’t like it. Her father was paying. All valid reasons.
Basil walks over, even if it will take a long time. He smokes a cigarette, more than half. A man standing outside the Scott Mission asks him for a smoke and he gives one to him, self-conscious about the mark, but the man doesn’t notice. Basil stands with him and smokes his cigarette down to the filter, until it tastes bad.
“Did you feel the earthquake?” Basil asks. The man looks at him like he’s crazy, shakes his head and walks away.
Hillary lives on the seventeenth floor and the elevator gets him there in less time than it takes to get to the sixth floor of his building. She’s in her bedroom painting it pale blue. Basil picks up a brush and tells her about the earthquake. She laughs at him.
“Things like that don’t happen here,” she says. “You were dreaming.”
She tells him about the dream she had the other night. She got up, put on her slippers, and walked to the bathroom. When she switched on the bathroom light, the kitchen light went on. When she tried turning off the kitchen light, the living room light went on. It gave her a headache, so she crawled back into bed and pulled the covers over her eyes to block out the lights. And then she woke up. “I hate dreams that feel like real life.”
They talk as they paint and the arm motions, the grandiose brush strokes, loosen them up. It’s been so long since they’ve talked. After separating, they thought it was best if they didn’t speak for a while. She broke the silence a week later and then they met for dinner once a week. They would eat and drink wine, but their conversations always felt halting and half-hearted. “Does Henry mind that you’re seeing me?” Basil ventured once, carefully. “No,” she said and kept drinking.
Basil asks about Henry again while he’s painting and Hillary hesitates, but then starts talking. She’s no longer dating him. She says, “I’m confused.” She says she doesn’t know what she wants.
“Oh? What do you mean?”
“I think a divorce is still a good idea.”
“And you’re sure about that?”
“I think so.”
This makes Basil’s eyes water. “Maybe we should give it another shot.”
“Maybe we shouldn’t have gotten married.”
“I don’t even know how to get divorced,” he says.
“I’m sorry.”
Mostly Basil does a good job of living, of going through his days assuming everything will work out for the best, but this afternoon, it all feels like too much. He excuses himself and goes to the bathroom.
He locks the door and sits on the bathtub hunched over, grabbing the edge. He wants Hillary back. He’d tried to block out this desire since they’d moved apart, but here it is, punching him in the face. He sits the way a person with a nosebleed is supposed to sit, his head above his heart. He tries to breathe. His shoulders feel tight. So do his calves and his stomach and the muscles running up and down his abdomen. He hadn’t expected this, physical pain. A delayed reaction. A buildup of lactic acid. He doesn’t want to lose Hillary, even after the mess of the past few months. Basil closes his eyes and tries to pinpoint the origin of this pain. The top of his stomach maybe? Behind his throat? He sits for a while, and then takes a Tylenol from the bottle sitting on the sink.
“Is the paint making you dizzy?” Hillary asks when he comes back. “I forgot to open a window.” At first he thinks she says “pain,” but realizes she means the chemicals. They look at each other. Before he can answer she says, “Maybe we shouldn’t get divorced. I still love you. What do you think?” She’s holding the roller in one hand and the pale blue paint is dripping onto a square of hardwood that hasn’t been covered in newspaper.
“I don’t know either, Hill.”
“Okay,” she says. “Do you want to have a paint fight?” It’s the kind of thing she used to say when she wanted to cheer him up, but it stings when she says it and Basil doesn’t understand how she can act like this, so flippant, while he feels wholly serious.
The two of them focus on the walls and Basil’s pain slowly ebbs away. They chat as if nothing has happened, as if maybe they’re still married or as if they never were.
The blue of her bedroom is the same shade as the sky in the Greek painter’s painting. His parents had given them the painting when they got married. Hillary had been so moved by the gesture and she’d choked up when his mother told them. The painting was a standard landscape of a field bathed in sunlight. Too by the book to be something they would buy from a store and hang up, but the sentimental value made it transcendent. Basil used to study the painting in the same way he studied Joan Baez in the documentary. He could never find any signs of depression, nothing that would’ve indicated that its painter was about to kill himself. The landscape was cheerful, maybe uninspired, but bucolic.
“The painting would match your room,” Basil says. It was their only painting and he knew she would know what he was referring to.
“Where is it now?” she asks.
“My room.”
Hillary is putting tape around a light fixture. She stops. “Don’t give me the painting, Basil.”
When they’re finished, Hillary says he can stay, but Basil goes back to his own apartment. He walks again, and by the time he gets home he’s so weary, so goddamn tired. He takes off his clothes and closes his eyes, and listens to the water in his bathroom drip from the ceiling into the bathtub. The dripping is more persistent than it was the night before, like rain on a tin roof. He gets up, goes to the bathroom and checks it out.
The water is dripping in more than one place. He stands on the edge of the tub and presses up against the ceiling. The plaster yields against his touch. There are paint bubbles pregnant with dirty, dripping water and the ceiling feels alive, warm and moist, like skin. It reminds him of how Hillary used to sleep with her forehead pressed against his back. When she would get hot at night, he could feel little beads of sweat from her forehead against his skin. He goes back to bed and thinks about calling her, but knows that he shouldn’t.
He takes deep breaths instead, what his mother used to tell him to do when he couldn’t sleep. He breathes and hopes that he will sleep soundly and deeply, that the ceiling will not collapse in the middle of the night, that his dreams will feel like dreams and that he will not be woken by an earthquake.

Earlier versions of these stories have appeared in
Room Magazine
,
Kiss Machine
and
carte blanche
.

Many thanks to my editor, Sacha Jackson, and to Robbie MacGregor and everyone at Invisible Publishing.

For tireless support and exclamation marks thank you to Tony and Lita Vlassopoulos, Bonnie and Larry Emond, Kim Astley, Leesa Cross-Smith, Darcie Friesen Hossack, Samantha Garner, Christopher Manson, Emily Materick, Caroline Pelletier, Soraya Roberts, Susan Toy, Lesley Trites and Panagiotis Zervogiannis.

And thank you to Andrew Emond
for everything, everything.

Text copyright © Teri Vlassopoulos, 2010
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form, by any method, without the prior written consent of the publisher.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Vlassopoulos, Teri, 1979-
Bats or swallows / Teri Vlassopoulos.
ISBN 978-1-926743-12-7
I. Title.
PS8643.L38B38 2010           C813’.6           C2010-905210-2
Cover & Interior designed by Megan Fildes
Typeset in Laurentian and Slate by Megan Fildes
With thanks to type designer Rod McDonald

Printed and bound in Canada

Invisible Publishing
Halifax & Toronto
www.invisiblepublishing.com

We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts which last
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