Jacintha

by Lorraine Davies

  TWENTY-THREE

  RICHARD HAD LEFT a phone message telling Jacintha to report to his office on Monday at 11:00 a.m., and now she sat across from him. The office was overheated and sunlight blazed in, making him squint. He got up and pulled the blind down. A philodendron wilted on the windowsill. He would have taken off his jacket, but didn’t want to show any hint of casualness in his appearance or demeanour.

  For three days and nights he had struggled with his devastating visions of Carol with her lover. But on the fourth night, the previous night, he had slept undisturbed by graphic dreams for a solid eight hours — no thighs, no toads — and felt relatively sane again. Let it go, it’s in the past, he kept telling himself, and it seemed to be working. The images had recurred only twice this morning, and only for a few seconds.

  He looked at Jacintha. She was wearing a grey tweed jacket over a pale-blue turtleneck and grey slacks. She’d tied her hair back into a low ponytail.

  His jacket was tweed as well. Was she mocking his seriousness, the formality she’d expected?

  “I’m sure you know why I called you here.”

  “Yes.”

  “You committed a serious breach of student-teacher …” He was going to say “relationship,” but decided against it. “Student-teacher ethics,” he said. “Why did you do it? Come to my house? Do what you did in front of my wife?”

  My wife. The vision of Carol with horrible Ari flooded in, and for a moment he forgot everything else.

  “Are you all right?” Jacintha asked. “You look a bit stunned.”

  “Yes, I’m all right. Why did you do it?”

  “I didn’t know she was your wife. Sorry. It was on the spur of the moment. The kiss, I mean. I came to your house because I wanted to give you pages of the play. In the end, I forgot to.”

  Was she lying? Most English literature students knew Carol was his wife and knew her by sight.

  “You did more than that,” he said.

  “I can be a bit too impulsive. Will you make a complaint against me?”

  “No, I don’t want to waste my energy on the complications a complaint would entail. I’m prepared to let it go if you promise to curb what you call your impulsiveness.”

  She smiled happily, as though he’d called her in specifically to compliment her.

  “But you must promise not to come to my house again, or to …”

  “Kiss you?”

  “Yes. That should go without saying.” Now the memory of the kiss was uppermost. His lips felt acutely sensitive and his cock throbbed. Carol had every right to rail against that kiss.

  “I’ll put it in writing, and then you’ll have evidence against me if I break my word,” Jacintha said.

  “That isn’t necessary.” He was having trouble concentrating now. Must remain stern. “Look, I want you to know you’ve hurt my wife and our relationship. Made her doubt me.” Shit, what had happened to his resolve not to get personal?

  “She loses faith easily.”

  “You’ve no right to say anything like that,” he said.

  “No, sorry again,” she said, but she didn’t sound sorry.

  Her brashness was back. Richard had seen another side of her in the two meetings he’d had with her as a representative of the rewriting foursome. When he had confirmed that her group could take over the work, he and Jacintha had spoken again in his office.

  She had elaborated excitedly on an idea she’d mentioned earlier. They would build on the original scene where a great feast is offered to the villains and then snatched away before they can take a bite. They would “take it over the top,” with luscious-looking props and exciting music and seductive women dancing, until the men were convinced they were guests of honour, and then the music would clang horribly and the dancers would jeer at them, mock them, call them vile names.

  “Maybe they could bite them and pull their hair, too,” she had said, laughing. “In a few other scenes, I want to have some of the enchantment of the opening scenes in the film of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. You know, the one from the nineteen-thirties, with fairies flying like sparks in the darkness? So beautiful. Have you seen it?”

  “Yes,” Richard had said, and had had an almost irresistible urge to touch her cheek.

  His attention was jolted back to the present when Jacintha stood up, went to the bookshelf, and picked up a clay figure Imogen had made, a black dog with short legs and pointy ears and small blobs pressed on to simulate fur. “Did a child make this?” she asked.

  “Yes, my daughter, when she was six years old.”

  “Little children have a knack for getting to the essence of things, don’t they? This is the very essence of Dog.” She ran her fingers over its rough back, then looked up at Richard. Her gaze lasted only a moment, but the sadness in her eyes, and something more than sadness, a deep hurt, stunned him and time stood still.

  He was tempted to take her in his arms, say soothing words.

  Instead, he said, “You’d better go now.” Oh, hell. What just happened?

  She placed the dog carefully back on the shelf and when she turned to him, her invulnerable face was back again, her smile bright and hard. But he had seen her, had seen behind the facade. His heart was pounding.

  A moment after she left, Gabe came shambling in. “I just saw a beautiful girl leaving here. So lovely and innocent, some of these students, aren’t they? But these beauties can be too seductive. We have to watch out for what amounts to transference in the Freudian sense. They admire us, Richard, not just for our intelligence or even our virility, but because they want their daddy.”

  “What?” Richard had never heard Gabe expound this theory. “Not fucking Freud!”

  “He wasn’t wrong about everything,” Gabe said. “Didn’t someone else say that? Someone recently, someone famous? Anyway, most of the little dears never got enough encouragement from their fathers, and they see us as the father figures who can give it to them, if you’ll pardon the expression, with the added charm of possibly helping them further their academic careers.”

  “Oh, I don’t think that’s the case. Rare, anyway.”

  “They want to fuck us, Richard, to get approval. But if we let them, there’s a good chance they’ll ruin our academic careers.” Gabe burped loudly, and a strong smell of pepperoni filled the air.

  A vision of Gabe lewdly embracing one of the “beauties” made Richard feel a bit sick.

  “Are you all right?” Gabe asked.

  “Yes. What brought on this cautionary little lecture?”

  “Well, you’re more or less single now — so sorry about that — and more at risk than you used to be. As head of the department, it’s my duty to remind you of the danger. Besides, that young woman who was in your office got my juices flowing.” Gabe grunted his way out of his chair. “Must be going — busy man. I have a budget meeting, where, by the way, I might be able to get you a raise in salary for next semester.”

  “I won’t be here next semester.”

  “So you say. We’ll see.”

  As Richard’s annoyance subsided, a terrible thought arose. Did Gabe know what had happened with Jacintha? The kiss. How could he know? And anyway, nothing further of that kind was going to happen. Ever.

  But Carol could have told him. She and Gabe were friends, something he’d never understood. Presumably he didn’t speak so coarsely, or burp so enthusiastically, when he was with her. She said he was a kind person underneath the bluster.

  He’d wanted to ask Gabe if he’d seen Carol lately, if she’d confided in him at all, but decided it was too demeaning.

  No, he didn’t think Carol would have told. She was hurt, but surely not that vindictive, and she wanted him to keep his job. If she’d told Gabe, he would almost certainly have mentioned it. “Carol tells me you’re having some trouble with a female student,” he would have said, frowning with false sympathy. No, Gabe didn’t know.

  And then, as he thought of what had just happened with Jacintha, his whole body b
ecame suffused with tenderness. His arms and legs felt weak, and he slumped in his chair.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  ON THE FRIDAY before the Thanksgiving long weekend, Doug Price, a fellow English literature professor and friend, knocked on Richard’s office door and asked him if he’d like to go for drinks on Saturday afternoon.

  Richard had always enjoyed Doug’s company — he had an enthusiastic nature, was cheerfully witty — and before the landslide, they’d lunched together at the faculty club every couple of weeks and had often chatted in one or the other’s office. But after it, Richard had socialized with no one, had made excuses. What could he say? Even if it were possible to explain his limping psyche, he had no wish to reveal it.

  Maybe he could have confided in Dan, his best friend, but he was in New Zealand. And he wasn’t even sure about how honest he could be with Dan. Everything was so complicated.

  An ache stabbed Richard’s chest and he realized he was lonely. He hadn’t been in touch with Carol since the email. He’d tried to compose an email telling her how hurt he was and that he was willing to forgive her, and also to renew his plea of innocence regarding Jacintha. But he couldn’t get the tone right, and anyway, how strong could his claim to innocence be now, in light of his recent feelings?

  “Yes,” he said to Saturday drinks. “Yes, that would be great.”

  Doug named a pub on Pender Street, downtown, where they could meet. “It’s a place I go for an hour or two sometimes when I need to be by myself. It’s good because I’m unlikely to run into any of my students there. My wife’s unlikely to find me there, either, and tomorrow she’ll be hell on wheels, getting ready for Thanksgiving dinner.”

  “At least you know where she is,” Richard said.

  “Oh, damn, sorry, Richard. You and Carol. So sorry.”

  “It’s all right.” But of course it wasn’t.

  On Saturday morning, Richard left his apartment much too early for his appointment, unable to bear the smothering gloom. He walked around for a while, looking for a café that served something other than pizza or sushi, and, failing, sat on a bench on Pender Street, resting his aching legs. Someone was crouching a few feet away and pointing a camera in his direction, and before Richard could react, the young man jumped up, grinning broadly, and said, “Do you want to see it?” He thrust the screen of his digital camera a few inches from Richard’s nose.

  What Richard saw made him laugh for the first time in a long time. It seemed that a seagull was sitting on his head. It had actually been perched on a sandwich board advertising a sushi menu, and the photographer, by shooting from a low angle, had created the illusion of Richard behatted by a bird.

  “You like it?” the young man said. He was hardly more than a boy, dressed in baggy jeans, an oversized sweater, and a knitted hat of orange, green, and yellow stripes.

  “Yes,” Richard said. “It’s quite funny. I look the fool, which is good for me at the moment.”

  “Are you a teacher or something? You talk very proper.”

  “Yes, I am.”

  “Don’t get me wrong, man. Like, I’m okay with properness, only not everybody has to talk proper, and if they don’t, they don’t need to be looked down somebody’s nose at, you know what I mean?”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “I’m Tom,” he said and held his hand out to shake.

  Richard took his hand. “Richard,” he said.

  “I’m kind of a Zen guy, like, you know, take it like it comes. Do what feels right, you know? Like, I don’t frame my pictures, and if that means some potty little gallery won’t show them, I don’t, like, give a shit. You gotta be true to yourself, you know, like everybody has a seed or something that’s just theirs. A youness. Is that a word?”

  “Well, I think you mean ‘essence.’”

  “It’s a word now, anyway, because I said it. You’ve got your youness and I’ve got mine. Shit! Just thought of something. If I had a kid, I’d call it Youness. Holy fuck, that’d be great. Would you like a copy of this photo? I could send it to you if you give me your address.”

  Richard thought of Emily’s “visit” and the debacle that had followed. He couldn’t risk another orphan on his doorstep.

  “Sure, I’d like a copy,” he said, “although I think the image will be firmly planted in my brain for quite a while. Can you email it to me? It’ll cheer me up whenever I look at it. Keep up the good work.” He wrote his email address on the back of someone else’s business card he found in his wallet. His own card had his phone number on it and he didn’t want Tom to have it. “This isn’t my card,” he said. “Don’t even know where I got it.”

  “Thanks, Prof. Thanks for digging the pic. I’ll send you some other stuff, too.”

  As Richard watched him walk away, Tom waved the card in the air and smiled so joyfully that it made Richard’s heart ache. The boy had the kind of gait that makes a person look like they’re bouncing on springs, a happy gait. Richard hoped life wouldn’t take too much of Tom’s bounce away.

  Richard walked back toward Granville Street, found the bar Doug had suggested, and settled in a corner dark enough to suit him. He downed a beer quickly, ordered another, and thought about “youness.” Was it just delusional to think there was some part of oneself that was unique? It was a popular idea. As a young man, he’d been sure of who he was. He was consistently himself, a solid, unified entity. Now, at forty-eight, he knew he was different than he had been, but not better. He was a suffering, guilt-ridden ass, completely unlike his twenty-five-year-old self. If he had an essence, it was deteriorating. His youness was fucked.

  After he’d guzzled a third beer, he thought, Shouldn’t that be Me-ness? Or I-ness? Or I Am the Ass That I Am? He was tempted to say the last sentence aloud for the other lurkers in dark corners to hear, but luckily Doug arrived at that moment.

  “I just talked to a kid who told me about ‘youness.’ Said it was a word because he’d made it a word. The arrogance of youth, eh?”

  “U-ness?” Doug spelled it.

  “No, y-o-u-ness. As in the essence of a person.”

  “Aah. Clever, in a naive way. How are your students these days? Any of them insufferably clever?”

  “One or two.” Jacintha immediately danced into his inner vision and moved toward his lips. He took a large swig of beer and wiped his mouth with the rough tweed of his sleeve.

  “Have you noticed,” Doug asked, “how most of the male students, regardless of their background, have Celtic first names? My classes are full of Kevins and Keirans and Seans and Liams. Any idea why?”

  “Yes, I have them in my class, too. As to why — who knows? Influence of the movies, maybe?”

  “Speaking of Celts — are the Scots Celts?” Doug went on. “Anyway, there’s this young Scottish guy in one of my classes and he keeps using the word ‘kanga’ all the time, until finally one day I asked him if there were kangaroos in Scotland and he was highly puzzled until we both figured out that he was saying ‘kinda’ for ‘kind of.’

  “And then there’s ‘like-speak.’ Drives me crazy, although it occurs mainly in the hallways, thank God. Do you want to have a contest with me? See how many ‘likes’ we can use in one sentence?”

  “No, no, my head’s too fuzzy,” Richard said. “But you go ahead.”

  “I don’t know like if I can like do it because like I’m not like young like anymore you know like not you know in that like demographic.”

  Richard began to laugh. He laughed until he hiccupped and went on laughing and hiccupping until he was gasping for breath.

  A couple of beers later, Doug said, “I’ll get us a taxi.”

  Richard hiccupped half the way home.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  RICHARD WAS GOING out for Thanksgiving dinner. He’d been unsure about whether he should go, and decided in favour of it at the last minute.

  A week earlier, he had talked to Beth at a local grocery store. He’d run into her a few times before, once on the bus they were both
taking to the campus and another time at the same store. They had chatted easily and he had learned a bit about her, that she was planning to be a teacher after she got her MA, and that she also wanted to continue writing poetry and maybe publish her work.

  He found her intelligent and sensible.

  She said she was shopping for some things for Thanksgiving dinner, and Richard asked if she’d be celebrating with her parents. She said, “No,” they were away, travelling.

  “What about you?” she asked. “Will you be with your family?”

  “No, I don’t have any family in town,” he said, swallowing hard at the implication of the words he had uttered.

  “But you won’t be on your own?”

  “Yes, I will be.”

  Beth’s forehead creased with concern. “Oh, that’s not right,” she said. “On a holiday.”

  “I’ll be all right,” he said, smiling.

  “No, look, why don’t you come to my house for dinner on the Sunday. I’m having a few friends over and you live so nearby and …” Her face had flushed pink.

  “That’s nice of you, but I’m not sure it’s appropriate.”

  “Oh, well, my old history teacher will be there — a friend of my parents.”

  “You mean as a chaperone?”

  “Sort of, I guess. Not that we need a chaperone.”

  “No, of course not.” Richard was about to decline as kindly as he could, when he pictured himself on the day, sitting in his dingy apartment, eating scrambled eggs and crying into his Scotch.

  “Yes,” he said. “Thank you. I accept.” What, after all, could go wrong? He would eat and, after a reasonable time, politely take his leave and let the kids and the old history teacher go on partying.

  “Great, see you next Sunday, then.” She was about to walk away when she turned and said, “Oh, I guess you’ll need my address. We’re neighbours, sort of, but just in case. And here’s my number, if you want to call.”

  Does she look a bit too happy about it? Richard wondered. No, she was just a kind young woman, happy he wouldn’t be alone on a holiday.