Imeros

by Paul Hina

she'll say anything. She'll wait and see if I say something, and, if I don't, it'll just fade away."

  "She might not say anything, but you can't possibly believe that it'll just fade away."

  "Well, either way, I don't think she'll spend much time dwelling on it."

  "Maybe not out loud."

  "What are you saying? You think she thinks last night was a big deal? It was a dream, David. I can't control what I dream about."

  "That's beside the point."

  "Then what is the point?"

  "You're not seeing it from her perspective. You're looking at it rationally, but emotions are rarely rational. I mean, her husband has called out the name of a woman he hasn't seen in over twenty years. The same woman that he was once crazy, and famously in love with. If something similar happened to me, I know I wouldn't be rational about it. I would wonder what was going on in the dream, and what, if anything, the dream was trying to communicate. In other words, I'd be dwelling on it."

  "I suppose it would bother me too. But I'm not sure I'd read too much into it. Though, admittedly, Rachael has been particularly sensitive ever since I talked to her about lacking desire. She's become more suspicious, more vulnerable than usual."

  "Then you should probably talk to her about it."

  "I guess," Jacob says, tracing his finger absently around his coffee cup, ready to change the subject. "Are you ready to go?"

  "Sure."

  They throw a couple bills on their table and leave the café.

  "She came to visit me yesterday," Jacob says as they move through campus.

  "The girl?"

  "Joelle, yeah."

  "Joelle. Finally, I can hear her name."

  "She—"

  "Wait. Joelle? Brad's fiancée?"

  "You know her?"

  "We've met."

  "David, you can't say anything. Seriously. Not a thing. To anybody."

  "Jacob, come on."

  "Look, nothing's happened anyway."

  "I understand. Don't worry about it," David says, trying to put Jacob's concerns at ease. "She is pretty, though."

  "Right. And smart."

  "This could be bad, Jacob."

  "How do you mean?"

  "Not only are you becoming involved with a student, but you'll be involved with a student who is engaged to someone in the department. If someone found out—"

  "Involved? I told you nothing's happened," Jacob says, clearly becoming annoyed with David's hand-wringing.

  "OK, relax," David says, shifting gears. "So, she came to visit you, and—"

  "She wanted to talk about Imeros. Specifically, she wanted to talk about Melissa."

  "What'd you tell her?"

  "I didn't tell her anything," Jacob says, still sounding a little defensive. "I brushed her off. I rattled off something about the truth never being as interesting as what our imaginations can make."

  "But, in your case, the truth is interesting."

  "I know that. You know that. But she doesn't know that. Really, I just wasn't prepared to revisit it with her right then."

  "But you have been revisiting it."

  "Right."

  "Hence the dream."

  "Hence the dream. Yes."

  "So, we know that Joelle's interest in Imeros is anything but casual. If she's coming to your office to ask you personal questions about a book—and not just personal questions about the book, but personal questions about the life behind the book—then that is a peculiar amount of interest. Don't you think she's being a little too forward? No student's ever asked you these kinds of questions before, right?" David asks, lowering his voice now that they've entered the English building.

  "It's funny, David, you've been so openly critical about this whole thing ever since I first brought her up, but you were the one who encouraged me to find someone in the first place. You were the one who essentially told me to look around at all the girls on campus, insinuating that I should have no trouble finding inspiration. Then I find someone and all you do is sound all these warnings," Jacob says, stopping in front of his office.

  "I did say that I thought you should look around. I think I may've even said something about flirtation, but I didn't insinuate anything specific. And, besides, I didn't think anything would come of it. I mean, let's face it, Jacob, this isn't exactly normal behavior for you. And I've known you a long time. I've never seen you this erratic. Anyway, I thought we were just talking," he says and looks around to see if anyone is near. "I just have a bad feeling about this whole thing. It seems like you're growing attached to this girl too easily, too quickly."

  "And what makes you such an authority on the dangers of my attachments?"

  David looks back down the hall, and then leans in close to Jacob. "Because I've been having an affair with a student for months, and it's fucked everything up. Everything," he whispers and then calmly walks away, leaving Jacob standing in the doorway of his office, stunned, staring blankly at the place David was just standing.

  Ever since David dropped the bombshell of his affair, he's been scarce to nonexistent, obviously not wanting to be put in the position to have to explain himself any further. But Jacob can't deny that he has been avoiding David at least as much as David has been avoiding him. He hasn't spent a second of unnecessary time in the English building, getting on and off campus as quickly as his classes permit. And on the occasions that he is required to observe office hours, he spends most the time hoping that David doesn't pop in to ask about lunch.

  Still, he can't deny his curiosity about David's admission. He's curious to know the extent of the affair, and what it all means for David's marriage. But most of all, he wants the risk that David represents to stop being the voice of his conscience. He keeps hearing David whispering in his ear, '...it's fucked everything up. Everything.' And he believes if David's voice had been more quiet this past week, he might've found more room for Joelle's voice.

  Joelle seems to have spent the past week trying to figure out how to deal with Jacob, at least as much as he's been trying to figure out how to deal with her.

  She's been hovering after classes, either waiting for Jacob to say something to her, or to think of the right words to say to Jacob.

  Of course, he's grown afraid to say anything to her out of fear of fulfilling David's warning. He knows if he continues to communicate with her outside of class that their attraction will create a downhill trajectory that he won't be able to contain.

  So, for the past several days, he has watched her pace outside the English building, and he imagines that she has been wrestling with the same internal monologues that he has been wrestling with. She, too, most likely fears destroying what she thought would be her future for an impulse that offers no promise of emotional return. But there is no denying the attraction, an attraction too complex to be dismissed as simply sexual.

  She's all he thinks about anymore. He gets out of bed with her smiling face burned in his brain. His days are filled with daydreams and imagined monologues so precious that he's sure they make him blush. Then, at night, he looks forward to the quiet of the darkness, the stillness that leaves the mind free to create whatever fantastic scenario it chooses.

  And the scenarios his thoughts wind around are fantastic.

  And from the look on her face during class—the dreamy look in her eyes as she stares up at him—he is sure that she is imagining similar dreamy episodes.

  But with these fantasies comes the nagging reality of the difficulty their attraction presents. And these risks bring up important questions. What if this attraction is that rare, precious thing: the truth of love? What if this is their life's last opportunity to touch that truth? If they don't act on it, then they might never find something as powerful, as full of raw emotion. Do they need to let it unravel—just surrender to the desire—and see what is under the surface of the attraction? But what comes after the action of giving into the impulse? What will their lives look like after the desire unravels?

  He's
afraid of unravelling with it.

  All this is why Jacob has been trying to avoid any private encounters with Joelle. He's afraid of what will happen when the talking stops and all that is left is the silence of their desire. This is why he's denied himself the pleasure of her conversation after classes, and why, when she hangs behind the other students, he hopes she doesn't engage him either. But, still, he watches her pace everyday outside his campus window, hoping she won't come up, trying to ignore the fact that his entire mind and body is screaming out for her company, needing the nearness of her.

  And he's desperate for her to continue pacing, wants to see that they're both sharing this turmoil. He wants to know that she is feeling the same tension he has been feeling, struggling with whether or not to test her restraint, or to just surrender to emotion's inclinations.

  But he's also desperate to keep things as innocent as possible. He just fears he doesn't have the strength. He wants to believe that he can admire her from afar, and use the attraction, the desire he feels, to help inspire some poetry in him. He wants to believe that he can fall in love with her without the emotional entanglements that would follow. After all, they are both promised to other people.

  Rachael.

  Jacob has put off saying anything about the dream to Rachael since it happened, and he has been operating under the assumption that she also hasn't wanted to talk about it since she hasn't brought it up. But it is clear that the tension in the house has grown exponentially since that night, and the communication between them has been as sparse as it's ever been.

  They