Jacintha

by Lorraine Davies

  “I’m sorry you weren’t as successful as you wanted to be.”

  “I guess we’ll have to go bigger next time.”

  “I hope that won’t involve violence.”

  “No, it will just be a lot showier.”

  “I see.”

  “Wow, it’s gloomy in here,” Jacintha said, after she had sat down at the kitchen table. She said she had just come from Beth’s house, where she, Beth, Anna, and John had been working on the play. Richard had given them permission to not attend classes and to work on their own. She had brought some manuscript pages with her for Richard to read.

  Richard had told the rest of the class that they wouldn’t be working on the rewrite anymore, that they would be studying Shakespeare’s Tempest and would be assigned essays on it. Most seemed very relieved by the news. He was probably more relieved than they were. It had been a brave experiment, but it was failing. Maybe it was more foolhardy than brave.

  Jacintha looked around the apartment. “Is that a mousetrap by the fridge?” she asked. “You should have a cat, but on the other hand, I’d fear for the cat, given the state of this place. What’s that smell?” She peered into the sink at the caked, piled-up dishes.

  “I wasn’t expecting a guest.” Richard was in sweatpants and a T-shirt, both in need of washing, and he hadn’t shaved or combed his hair.

  “Oh, sorry, that was rude of me,” Jacintha said. “How long have you lived here?”

  “Two weeks.”

  Richard’s embarrassment was growing. He could smell his sweat, feel his hair signalling his haplessness in a spiky semaphore.

  “Do you have any coffee?” Jacintha asked. “Shall I put the kettle on? Unless you want me to leave.”

  “No, sit down. I’m fine. I’ll make some coffee.”

  As he fumbled around with the kettle and the coffee tin, Jacintha startled him by saying, “You suffered a great shock, didn’t you, with that landslide? Has it made you depressed?”

  At first, he was tempted to say, “I’d rather not talk about it.” But her eyes held such a look of concern that he said, “It’s been hard, but I’m coping. How do you know about it?”

  “It’s general knowledge on campus. Everyone feels sorry for you. I don’t mean in a pitying way. I mean everyone, including me, empathizes.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Do you believe in karma? You know, that things happen to us because of past sins? Oh, I don’t mean you. I was thinking about Prospero’s exile. What was his sin? Being too bookish is what Shakespeare suggested. Maybe out of touch with the needs of the people. You’re bookish, but being interested in saving the planet keeps you in touch.”

  “Saving the planet?”

  “The environmental theme you were originally keen on.”

  “Ah, yes, but you and I agreed that love and magic and poetry were to be more central.”

  “We’re having fun giving the villains their punishment. But about karma: What do you think of the concept, generally?”

  “Well,” he said, “millions of people in the world suffer through no fault of their own. When an individual crime is punished, that’s cause and effect, not karma. Maybe some people call it ‘karma’ without really knowing what it means. I’m unclear on it myself, but from what I do know, I don’t think I believe in it.”

  He thought suddenly of Emily. “For example, what have those poor young women in the Downtown Eastside ever done to deserve being abused or murdered?”

  “I wouldn’t have thought you knew much about the Downtown Eastside.”

  “You can’t live in Vancouver all your life without knowing about the Downtown Eastside,” Richard said. “And I’ve had occasion recently to pass through the area.”

  “Pass through. Yes.” She gave the phrase a significance that puzzled Richard.

  “I knew a young woman who lived down there,” she said. “A desperate young woman.”

  “Knew?”

  “She’s not there now.”

  “I knew a young woman there, too.”

  “What happened to her?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “That’s where we differ.”

  He could feel she had a lot more to say about it, but her sombre expression made him think he’d upset her by asking questions.

  “Well, maybe punishments aren’t karmic,” Jacintha said, “but there can be a nice symmetry. Like when a rapist gets cancer, or a murderer dies in a car accident while leaving the scene of his crime. Although probably that happens in fiction more than in real life. Too bad, really.”

  Richard’s head was beginning to ache. He was still picturing Emily — thin, bruised, and permanently wounded.

  “The kettle’s boiling,” Jacintha said.

  “I’m sorry, but I’m not feeling well. I can’t offer you that coffee, after all.”

  “Oh, no, I’m sorry. I’ll be going, then.”

  Richard held the door open as Jacintha put on her coat. She hesitated for a moment on the threshold, turned around swiftly, and darted at Richard.

  Carol arrived just in time to see her kissing Richard on the lips. Jacintha pivoted slowly, looked Carol up and down, smiled, and glided away, disappearing around the side of the house.

  Carol stared open-mouthed at Richard.

  “It’s not what it looked like,” Richard said. “She came here uninvited, a student, to bring me some of the play rewrite. I have no idea why she did what she just did.”

  “Oh, really?” Carol said. “Here’s the cashmere sweater I bought for you.” She threw the bag with the sweater in it, striking Richard in the face. “Bastard! Liar! That was the woman who was on your street yesterday!” She turned and ran from the door.

  “Come back — I didn’t do anything. Carol, please.”

  He chased her, grabbed her arm. She struggled, punched his shoulder, ran again. He stood defeated, watched until she was out of sight, and went back into the gloom of the apartment.

  He tried to think what to do. Should he phone Carol, write to her? Surely he could convince her of his innocence. And then, unbidden, it was Jacintha’s beautiful, glowing face he saw, Jacintha who filled his mind. Her mischievous look after she had kissed him was, god help him, charming. He could still feel her mouth on his, ran his tongue along his lower lip. A taste of berries. He realized with horror that he felt aroused for the first time in a long time.

  No. Not her. It should be Carol. If anyone were to reawaken him, he wanted it to be Carol.

  He stumbled to the sink, scooped cold water from the tap, battered his mouth with it until his lips were numb and the front of his shirt soaked. He leaned there for a long time, elbows on the rim. He tried to pray. Please, God. But a buzzing in his head that seemed to spill out into the room mocked him like a spirit unconvinced.

  TWENTY-ONE

  JACINTHA THOUGHT HER visit to Richard had gone well, although the kiss might have been too soon. She had vowed to move slowly, but there was something about his bedraggled appearance that had touched her in spite of herself. And then when she saw his wife near the door, she couldn’t resist the opportunity to stir things up.

  On the whole, she felt satisfied with what she’d done and had expected to sleep well that night. But she’d been awakened by her own scream at 4:00 a.m. She’d dreamed about her childhood rape again, for the first time in a long time. She hadn’t had one of those since she had recovered from a kind of breakdown while she was at Simon Fraser University. She had been working on a short film with some fellow students. The premise of it was hers and she had written most of it. (She was an English major but was taking one film course.)

  The short was called The Portal and was about a gate that the dead could step through from a parallel world, neither heaven nor hell, to visit the living. She had taken a lighthearted approach to it. Period-costumed actors played the parts of Keats, Jane Austen, Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, and Cleopatra, all of whom, individually, had brief, enigmatic conversations with present-day student
s as they strolled together around the campus. The film was well received and had earned those involved an A.

  Not long after the film was shown, she’d told a friend that she had seen The Dirty Man, a man who had raped her, come through the Portal, and that was good because it meant he was dead, but she was still frightened. She’d said evil people shouldn’t be allowed to come through, not just Jack the Ripper and Hitler and people like that, but all murderers and rapists. Maybe they could still do terrible harm.

  “Anyway,” she’d said, “evil people must not be allowed to come back to revel in how they’re still thought about and talked about, and gloat over how abuse and carnage are still rampant in the world.”

  One day, after she had been feverishly ranting along those lines for several days, and cowering in corners to avoid being seen by her rapist, a friend took her to the nurse’s office and from there she was escorted home. The family doctor prescribed a tranquilizer and recommended that she return to her therapist, but she ran away instead, to a boyfriend who always had a good supply of pot.

  One night, stoned and unable to stop crying, she’d shot up heroin with him. The next day, she’d realized with horror that she had broken the most important promise she had ever made to herself: that she wouldn’t follow her mother’s path into addiction and self-destruction; would never use heroin or any other hard drug.

  She’d moved back in with her parents, who convinced her to see the therapist who had helped her as an adolescent, and with the additional help of medication she got better. But she wouldn’t go back to school. She asked her adoptive parents to give her money for travel instead of for tuition, and they, always kind, agreed. She went to England, France, Italy, Germany, India, and Indonesia, spending several months in both France and Indonesia, taking lovers from time to time. Finally, feeling rootless, she’d returned to Vancouver.

  For a while she was idle, not knowing what she wanted to do. And then one day she had seen a protest against the Olympics on TV and thought it might be exciting to join in the drama. She had energy and skills to offer. And then, almost simultaneously, she’d found the Richard she thought she was looking for, and had a more important reason to stay.

  But why the nightmare now? Was it some kind of warning? About what? If it was about her plan, too bad. She wouldn’t give it up.

  She found some pot at the back of a drawer, put on a Miles Davis CD. Jazz and pot had always helped when she had sleepless nights. (She rarely smoked at other times.) She let the abstract patterns created by the smoke and the music carry her away to a place where fear couldn’t touch her.

  She would tell Richard what had happened to her as a child. But not yet.

  TWENTY-TWO

  THREE DAYS AFTER Carol had arrived at Richard’s doorstep and seen Jacintha kissing him, Richard received an email from Carol:

  October 2005

  Richard,

  I’m disappointed in you. And hurt. Even as I was writing my tender memories of you and me in Venice, you were probably asking your “student” to tell you about her sexual experiences. She’s probably had more than her share, by the look of her. She’s a criminal, by the way. I saw her being arrested on your street the day of that ridiculous display.

  You always liked my stories. Do you know I made most of them up, in the spirit of fantasy? It was what you wanted. Examples: I never left a restaurant table to fuck a waiter in the washroom, or fucked a fellow passenger in an airplane washroom. And I never had an English teacher who quoted poetry while he finger-fucked me, or had sex with my professor on his desk. Those last two make me shudder now.

  I know you’d like to know who I was recently mainly unfaithful with, but I won’t tell you, mostly to protect him and partly just out of stubbornness. Yes, mainly. I took another lover while my interest in the first was waning.

  His name was Ari. I picked him up in a bar. He was gorgeous, tall, and muscular with a smile that made me weak in the knees, and sex with him was juicy as hell. We met in a hotel five times in a two-week period. He wanted me more often, but with work and home, I couldn’t manage it.

  He spoke English, but it wasn’t his first language. He would lie naked next to me and whisper words I couldn’t understand between kisses. I suspected he might just as easily be whispering crude words to me as loving ones, but he was such a skillful lover that I didn’t care. His voice was honeyed, and his thigh bones — oh, his thigh bones — were so long that they alone could have seduced me. After we made love I would curl up inside the tent of his chest and arms and long legs and wait, knowing that soon, without preamble, not even whispers this time, he’d fuck me again, quickly and hard. After he left, I wouldn’t wash. If we’d been together in the morning, I’d walk around wet all day. My pelvis and thighs felt loose and so receptive that I fancied if he’d suddenly appeared around a corner on a street, I’d have taken him right there, behind a bush or a parked car.

  He had been in Vancouver on vacation and went back to his own country. I missed him a lot for a while. I hadn’t intended to tell you about him, but I’ve been so unhappy and I want to hurt you as you hurt me with her.

  Carol

  Richard read Carol’s email with horror. He would have shouted, sworn, but he could hear the footsteps of the upstairs tenants. His pain was familiar, the kind he’d felt when he found out about Grace and James. He went to the fridge and pulled out an open bottle of white wine and took long gulps straight from the bottle.

  His laptop screen, shining with its awful artificial light, sat on the table next to a patch of sunlight that had managed to sneak in through the small, low window. What’s the point of sunlight, its innocent cheerfulness? he thought, or almost thought — it was more of an awareness at the edge of his mind of the contrast between himself and the oblivious, carefree world, in which everyone else was happy.

  A mouse suddenly appeared on the breakfast table in front of him, smugly eating a morsel of toast. Richard picked up a dirty coffee mug and aimed it at the mouse’s head. He missed. Immediately he felt ashamed — a trap was one thing, but blood and guts via his own hand was another. But he’d wanted the goddamned, contented little bastard dead.

  He jerked the curtains shut, dousing the sunlight, and took another swig of wine.

  It was the visuals that killed, the goddamned sticking images, the stick-it-to-the-sucker knife, the technicolour movie clips, moving him to tears and nausea. “I had an affair,” was one thing; revelling in the fucking greatest thighs and wettest cunt was another.

  Once, after he and Grace had separated, he’d gone back to the house to pick up more of his things and he’d walked in on Grace dressing for an evening out with James. She’d put on her sexiest bra and panties, black lace, ones she used to wear for him before they made love. That had hurt a lot. He’d pictured James slowly undressing her and had felt sick. But he’d never had a blow-by-blow description of them together. No visuals.

  How dare Carol do this to him?

  He moved to delete her letter, then stopped. He certainly had no desire to read it again, and yet he was unable to delete it. He turned off the computer, guzzled the last of the wine, then went to the fridge and got a bottle of beer. After a while, when he was somewhat numb from the alcohol, he thought that at least he hadn’t actually seen them in bed together. But he kept imagining Carol curled up against the guy’s stupid fucking thigh bones, waiting to be fucked again, and then Carol lifting her skirt and lying down behind a parked car on Hastings Street, legs in the air, and him — Richard couldn’t bear to think of him by name, even a false name — falling on her gleefully.

  He drank some more. He was definitely drunk. He should make some coffee. No, too much trouble. He got himself a glass of water. Sat down. Tried not to think of Carol and Mr. Thighs. Impossible. He thought of the example he had heard about suggestibility, “don’t think of a pink elephant,” and laughed a crazy-sounding laugh.

  After he’d been sitting numbly for a while, he got up and managed to make coffee. Afte
r he drank it, his head cleared a little and he remembered a story Carol had told him about one of her favourite painters, Oskar Kokoschka, who had been madly in love with Alma Mahler for three blissful and painful years. One day he’d arrived unannounced at the house they were redecorating and found that Alma had a man called Kammerer staying there, probably another lover, although she wouldn’t admit it. Kammerer was a scientist who’d been conducting experiments with toads, and the living room was full of them. They’d escaped from their tanks and were wetly, sloppily copulating by the dozens, jumping and sliding all over the floors and furniture. They must have seemed to Kokoschka like ghastly amphibian surrogates for the lewd couplings of Alma and Kammerer. Talk about a killing visual.

  No fucking toads here, anyway, he thought, and went and lay down for a much-needed nap. When the number of toads copulating on cars, under cars, and in the middle of Hastings Street got completely unmanageable, making him frightened to take a step — other people were squashing them as they walked and green slime and yellow ooze were spurting everywhere — Richard woke up, relieved, until he remembered what had inspired the nightmare. He was Kokoschka, and the slimy fucking toads were here.

  February 2012

  Richard,

  Beautiful Ari! I still think of him sometimes. Am I sorry I made you suffer? No, not entirely, which is an anomaly for me because I don’t believe in revenge.

  Carol

  Dear Carol,

  I believe you have just hit on a truth. I think that acts of revenge are rarely completely regretted, even by the noblest of us, and that a small thrill remains to trigger, now and then, a contented smile.

  All the best,

  Richard