“That’s so horrible,” Hugo said, his forehead resting on my arm, his hair tickling me.
The existence of these accidents in our lives, the sudden violence of them, bonded us. I skipped my classes and we spent the rest of the morning together, sometimes drifting off to sleep, sometimes awake and talking, and after that day I rarely slept in my own bed in residence at school.
I never believed in love at first sight, but I did believe in love as a leaping flame, a freshly struck match. When it came I assumed it came suddenly. Or rather, I started believing this once I met Hugo. I was sure that what I felt for him wasn’t infatuation or naivety or desperation. It was simply a beginning.
Hugo was a few years older than me and wasn’t working. He painted, though. Sometimes he’d sell a painting, sometimes he’d work at a café or sometimes his parents would give him money, but he didn’t spend a lot. He’d lived in the same apartment since he was eighteen and the rent had barely increased over the years, so it was still very cheap. It was a studio, long and skinny, the sleeping area on one end, the kitchen in the middle, and a living room at the front. When I’d come over, we’d hang out in the living room, the only room that got direct sunlight, and he’d show me the progress he’d made on a painting. I’d decided to get an English degree, but was having trouble concentrating on my classes. I was mostly interested in writing poems, so instead of studying, I would take out my notebook and write while Hugo painted, the two of us working in a steady, quiet rhythm. I loved these afternoons with Hugo. The hardwood floors gleamed in the sunlight and it was beautiful to sit there on a cold winter afternoon, the two of us talking about the meaning of his paintings or me shyly reading aloud my poetry, our socked feet pressing against the slick floors.
All of my poems were about love, which by default meant they were about Hugo. I was going through an e.e. cummings phase, so I wrote about bodies a lot and used too many parentheses. I always wanted Hugo to paint me, but he was painting trees that winter. Their energies, he said. His paintings were mainly abstract, rusty hues of paint scraped into swirls with stiff brushes or pallets, and they would dry into glossy, textured pieces that I would touch lightly afterwards to feel their bumpiness, exactly what you’re not allowed to do in an art gallery. When I couldn’t think of anything to write I’d look at his assembly of paints. I decided that if I were to paint him I’d use only yellows and oranges and reds. A fiery sunset, a flaming prairie.
Since starting school I hadn’t made many friends and after I met Hugo, I didn’t pursue the few I’d made. My roommate Susie was nice, and we’d gotten drunk together our first week at a bar with a bunch of other students from our residence drinking the worst watered-down beer. That evening I saw my undergraduate life clearly: going to class, trudging to the library during snowstorms, drinking the same watery beer with these new friends, staying up all night to write a paper or to exchange drunken sloppy opinions. I didn’t mind my single bed, the shared bathrooms, the lack of privacy. I’d moved to Montreal craving something different and transformative, and at first I thought the experience of attending university would be enough, but then I met Hugo and realized that love was even better. His apartment was warm and easy to escape to. Whenever I went to my dorm to get clothes, Susie would be out. We started communicating through notes after I came by and found one folded on my pillow. Are you still alive? I haven’t seen you in days.
My classes in my first semester were all introductory level and there were so many people in them that it was hard to strike up a conversation. I’d take a seat at the back of the lecture hall and be the first to slip out. Hugo’s friends were mainly Francophone and because I didn’t speak much French, I would often stay home to study when he saw them. I got used to us as a self-contained unit and couldn’t visualize us in the company of others. I sometimes wondered what we looked like together. I’d catch glimpses of our reflections in his front window at night, and we were maybe ridiculous—he was so much taller than me, and his hair was always so messy, despite the hair products—but the strangeness was also what made us special.
I’d mentioned Hugo to my mother over Christmas when I’d gone home for the holidays, but she didn’t know many details about him and I didn’t have any pictures to show her, but I’d brought one of his paintings as a substitute. “It’s interesting,” she’d said, but I couldn’t tell if she’d actually liked it.
It wasn’t until a few weeks after Christmas that I got the chance to prove to someone that Hugo was a real person. My mother told me she was going to visit me in Montreal for the weekend, her first visit since driving me in the fall.
“I want you to meet my mother,” I said to Hugo that night.
“Sure.” He was sitting on the couch reading a magazine.
“She’s visiting this weekend. I told her about you.”
“Oh,” he said.
Hugo wasn’t close to his parents. My mother and I had naturally gravitated to each other after my father’s death, but Hugo distanced himself from his parents, who, unable to cope with the sprawling mess of grief associated with Marie’s death, became crazy in a way that pushed Hugo away from them. They’d decided that if they answered two fundamental questions, they would somehow get over their sadness. What concerned them most was whether or not Marie was safe and happy in the afterworld and what had they done to deserve her death. They shopped around for opinions. For their first question they found a medium who, with the help of one of Marie’s unwashed t-shirts, fell into a trance as she attempted to make contact with her in the realm of the spirits. Hugo imitated the medium’s voice for me—low and reedy and definitely otherwordly. Marie was fine, she told them.
For their second question, they settled on religion and concluded that the cost of their sins had been too great. Less than a year after Marie died, they sat Hugo down and confessed their sins to him. Affairs they’d had, money stolen from jobs. His father urged him to confess his sins too, but Hugo couldn’t speak. He wracked his brain and couldn’t remember anything he’d ever done wrong in his life. What did anyone do to deserve anything? Fat tears rolled down his parents’ cheeks as they spilled their secrets and Hugo just sat there, silent. It occurred to him that his parents could do whatever they wanted and maybe they’d get goodness, but they could just as easily get fluky tragedy. It didn’t matter. After he moved out, he hardly talked to his parents again and he told me that other people’s parents made him feel uncomfortable too.
“I don’t know, babe,” he said. “Maybe it’s too soon.”
“What do you mean?”
“We just started seeing each other. Let’s take it easy.”
I’d assumed that this step was a natural part of the trajectory of our relationship. We’d been together for over a month, and although I knew it wasn’t a long time, it felt more substantial than that. When I wasn’t with Hugo, the yearning I felt for him was overwhelming, a rumble in my belly, something gnawing and impossible to brush away. I’d never felt that way about anyone else. Hugo looked up from the magazine and saw my disappointment.
“Fine,” he said. “I’ll meet her.”
As much as I loved every bit of Hugo and told myself I didn’t care what my mother thought of him, I cut his hair the day before she arrived, just a trim because it was frizzing out into clown wig territory. We were by the window and he kept his eyes closed as I cut the shaggier parts. My hair was a bit longer than his, and I would use his mousse to scrunch it up into curls. They came out more like frizzy waves, but there was something vaguely comforting about matching my boyfriend, or at least trying to.
“What if I don’t want to meet her?” he asked.
“Why wouldn’t you?”
“Adults make me uncomfortable.”
“You’re an adult,” I said to him. “And it’s really important to me.”
“Is that a threat?”
When we were done, he swept the hair off the floor. Later I picked up a lock he’d missed. I recalled my high school geometry class,
using a compass to draw perfect circles. His hair in my hand curled just like a Fibonacci spiral, the kind of perfection you find only in nature.
Maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised that Hugo never ended up meeting my mother. Not only shouldn’t I have been surprised, but I also should’ve known, guessed it from his original reaction, just as I should’ve known that the image I held of him had more in common with his paintings than real life. Unlike the first explosion of love, the unravelling was slow, a leak that I constantly scrambled to patch up.
My mother arrived, and I met her at her hotel. After we’d dropped off her bags, we went out into the city, walking to the restaurant I’d chosen for us. We settled in and ordered drinks, and twenty minutes later Hugo hadn’t appeared. My mother suggested we order anyway, that he could order separately later, but by the time our food had arrived, I knew he wasn’t going to come.
“Something must’ve happened,” I told my mom. I used a pay phone out front and called, but he didn’t answer.
I spent the rest of the day with my mother, and she only asked about Hugo one more time and then changed the subject. She asked me if I wanted to stay with her that night in the other bed in her hotel room, but I needed time alone. It was such a minor thing—a missed dinner date—but it was the first time I’d felt betrayed by Hugo. I hugged my mother goodnight and told her I’d come over in the morning.
I wasn’t ready to go home yet and wasn’t even sure what counted as home. I didn’t want to go to the dorm and see Susie and most of my things were at Hugo’s. My mother had given me one of her hotel keys so I had access to the entire building. I took the elevator to the basement, but there was nothing there, so I went to the top and found the pool and gym. The change room was humid and empty and there was a tall stack of folded towels by the door. I picked one up and quickly decided to go swimming. I hadn’t been in months, and felt like doing something that would tire me out. I could go in my underwear; no one would know.
I jumped into the deep end, both arms straight in the air. When I was a kid, my father used to tell me that although he knew how to swim, something about moving from Greece to Canada made him forget. He said he couldn’t imagine swimming in a pool or a lake and that even the ocean was different from the sea. When I was younger, I was terrified that I would jump into a pool and it would be the day I forgot how to swim too, but of course it never happened. He was teasing me. When I bobbed back up to the surface I rubbed my eyes and flipped on my back. The pool had a domed white ceiling with a skylight on one end. It was getting dark outside and the skylight was a rectangle of grey among all the white. I floated.
Swimming is one of those things best learned when you’re young. Foreign languages too. You pick up these skills without realizing you’re doing anything special or complex. My parents insisted on swimming lessons, but I never learned Greek. My mother didn’t speak it and my father only spoke it with his family who still lived in Greece. I’d hear him on the phone enough to get accustomed to the lilt of the language, but it wasn’t until after he died that I decided I wanted to learn myself, as if it would bring me closer to him. I sat down with a book called Learn Greek in Three Months, but fell behind when it took me over a week to learn and memorize the alphabet. For hours I would sit and practice writing out the letters, learn the new symbols.
In Greek, there are two letters that make the O sound. There’s omicron, which looks like the English O, and there’s omega, which, in lowercase, looks like a little rounded W. Usually the omega will come at the end of the word, while the omicron will be the O buried in the middle, but this isn’t a hard and fast rule. In my name, Zoe, the O in the middle is omega, not omicron. It’s spelled zita, omega, ita. Ζωη. I remember being satisfied that my short name had two alphabet endings: the English zed and the Greek omega.
After my father died, I would sometimes find my mother crying. The first time I caught her was in the kitchen at breakfast, and I had no idea what to say, so I asked her what was wrong, even though I knew.
“Zoe,” she said. “Do you know that your name means life?” I shook my head. “Your father picked it. Your grandmother was so mad when he didn’t name you after her. He’d promised he was going to.”
“I didn’t know that,” I said. But I did. My father loved this story, and would tell it to me often. Normally I’d cut him off, bored by my familiarity with the anecdote, but this time, my mother telling me the story and looking so sad, I pretended I didn’t know, that it was the first time I’d ever heard it.
In the pool, I closed my eyes and wondered if I could fall asleep like this, in the water, on my back. I probably could. Maybe I could spend the night here, my mother asleep upstairs in her hotel room, Hugo in his apartment, Susie with the dorm room to herself for the hundredth night in a row. The water was warm. At that moment, it seemed inconceivable that anyone could die like this. Bodies float. You don’t even have to try too hard; your body fat does it for you. I imagined my father floating in the sea on his back and looking up at the sky. Maybe in his last moments he didn’t struggle or choke; maybe he was just carried away.
Eventually I got cold and annoyed in the pool, so I got out of the water and shimmied back into my clothes, wringing out my wet bra and underwear and stuffing them at the bottom of my bag. I took the bus to Hugo’s, let myself in and hoped that he wouldn’t be home either. But there he was, working on a painting, and he didn’t apologize for not coming.
Hugo and I didn’t break up until weeks later, but after the weekend my mother visited, things weren’t the same. I was still staying at his place, but not as often, and sometimes he would outright ask me to leave. Finally, one afternoon as I sat on his couch watching him paint, he stopped, sat down next to me and told me that he thought it would be better for us if we didn’t stay together.
“What?” I asked. When Marie was struck by the horse, she didn’t die right away. She was still breathing when the ambulance arrived and kept breathing for a few hours more. The doctors couldn’t control the swelling of her brain and one by one her organs started shutting down. When Hugo broke up with me, I thought first of little Marie lying in the hospital, her life slowly extinguishing. We’d talked so much about her and I wanted to keep talking about her.
“I’m sorry, Zoe,” he said and gently patted the top of my head. “I think we need time apart. Things happened so quickly.”
I understood what he was saying. I had become aware of it while I waited for him with my mother, but the problem was that I felt like I had too much love for him, that it had somehow exploded into a poofy atomic bomb mushroom cloud when I wasn’t looking.
When I made it back to my dorm room, I was sheepish and heartbroken. Susie was there and I saw a fleeting look of irritation when she saw me slink in, but when I started crying she softened. I’d almost forgotten the way people treat you when something bad has happened. Tentatively. She took me out and we drank slightly better beer and for a few hours we played the role of girlfriends, laughing and close. She hugged me when I cried again when we walked home.
“What are you going to do now?” Susie asked softly from her bed after we’d returned, as if it wasn’t an option to return permanently to our shared room anymore. She didn’t mean it as if she were kicking me out, but she’d also gotten used to me being away so much.
“Maybeor a few days,” I said.
I had classes in the morning, but the thought of leaving was suddenly appealing, so I simply left. I left a note for Susie on her bed. I’d misread the bus schedule and arrived at the station three hours early. Hugo’s was the only number I had memorized, so I called him while I waited. We hadn’t spoken since I’d left his apartment, but I knew he would show up if I told him what I was doing, maybe not out of love, but out of curiosity. It wasn’t like he had any other obligations, anyway. He came a half-hour later, his hair stuffed into a toque. Soft grey. I knit it for him for Christmas. It was lumpy and loose and when I held it in my hands I felt like I was holding the discarded ski
n of a baby elephant.
We sat next to each other and he put his hand on my knee and for the next three hours we drank coffee and talked. When it came time for me to board the bus, I swung on my backpack. It was heavy and threw me off balance.
“You can call me whenever,” he said.
“Thanks,” I said and turned and walked on to the bus. I didn’t believe him. I took a window seat that didn’t face in his direction, so even though I looked, I never saw him lope away. I thought about it, though, how his body curved over, the way he tucked in his chin and jammed his hands into his pockets. He walked like he was aerodynamic and as I thought about his walk, I wondered if anyone would ever study the way I walked the way I studied him.
I don’t remember much about the last time Hugo and I had sex, just what happened afterwards. He fell asleep and I rolled on top of him. When he slept he’d curl into a ball, the smallest shape he could make, and I’d reach over and hold him. It was most effective if I just smothered him with my body, slipping my arms and legs into the floppy loops of his limbs, the way you’re supposed to warm a person with hypothermia. Skin on skin. I loved the feeling of his breathing beneath me, a steady, comforting whoosh. That night I climbed on top of his sleeping body, and his hair got caught in my mouth and instead of disturbing our position, I just blew it away, working the hairs out slowly with my tongue. I wanted to say something embarrassing like, “You’re the first person I’ve ever loved,” but I didn’t, and even if I had, I imagined the words would’ve gotten jumbled up in his curls or shot haphazardly into the black depths of the bedroom.
My relationship with Hugo lasted only three months, barely the length of a single winter. I felt kind of illuminated by the feeling of love even if it was over, like I was shrouded in a thin, lacy veil. It made me see things differently. Hugo’s apartment was in a house that was over a hundred years old and when I first started staying there, I would lay awake at night and listen to the erratic banging in the pipes. The sounds made me think of poltergeists or restless spirits and at first I was afraid, but then, eventually, I relaxed. I didn’t believe in that stuff anyway. I reminded myself of this as the bus pulled away, that I had nothing to be afraid of. This bloom of courage didn’t come from Hugo, but at first, and for a while afterwards, I thought it did.
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