Jasmine
A Novel
Winston Aarons
iUniverse, Inc.
Bloomington
Jasmine
A Novel
Copyright © 2011 by Winston Aarons.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, names, incidents, organizations, and dialogue in this novel are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
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ISBN: 978-1-4620-6144-0 (sc)
ISBN: 978-1-4620-6142-6 (hc)
ISBN: 978-1-4620-6143-3 (ebk)
Library of Congress Control Number: 2011960050
iUniverse rev. date: 11/08/2011
CONTENTS
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
Twenty-One
Twenty-Two
Tweny-Three
Twenty-Four
Twenty-Five
Twenty-Six
Twenty-Seven
Twenty-Eight
Twenty-Nine
To Alene, my wife, for her constant support and
unwavering belief in me.
ONE
“Hello Sor.” That’s what started it. Maybe the way she said it. Maybe the way she wrapped his name around her tongue, the way it swam in the warmth of her mouth before coming out, the way it slid into his ears, like a deliciously sounding mantra, as if she were happy, as if she were ecstatic to see him. If he could catch and solidify the sound, it would be like fine silk, like honey. At first he didn’t know whose voice it was. It was familiar, but he couldn’t pin the voice to a face or body.
Hello Sor. It had come to him from the opposite side of the revolving door of the Bernhardt School of Engineering building. He was going to the library on the other side of the campus to do some additional research on Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground, which he would be lecturing on in a few days in one of his classes. He often used the building as a shortcut to the library.
Several members of the faculty were leaving through the revolving door when he got there. He stood back to let them through. She was part of the group. Sor figured they must have had a meeting in one of the conference rooms on the fourth floor—sometimes the other colleges used them for meetings. Maybe they were part of the task force that was looking into student retention; too many freshmen were leaving after their first semester, and there was an even greater exodus at the end of the school year.
When she came out of the building—she was the last person in the group to come out—she was smiling, her full, deliciously red lips slightly parted, revealing her flawlessly arranged teeth, her thick reddish hair loosened and alive with curls. It was Marguerite. Marguerite Spares.
Sor had met her several months before at Julian Plum’s birthday dinner at a restaurant in Boca Raton. Plum was one of Sor’s closest acquaintances at the university. Like Sor, he also taught literature, but mostly upper-level classes. His concentration was nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century Russian literature. He was considered a Dostoevsky expert. Often, during Sor’s office hours, Plum would drop by to discuss some new insight he had on a work he was teaching, or the latest research paper he was working on for one of the journals that periodically published his papers. Sor loved their discussions. They made him feel intellectually alive. Their discourse reminded him why he loved academia as much as he did. Why it was the only life he cared for.
Marguerite taught art history to first-year students and was herself a painter, she had told him, a watercolorist. She had a studio in her home. That evening in the restaurant when they spoke, she was preparing for an exhibition of her works—her first—at a gallery in Miami. Julian had introduced Sor to Marguerite; he had known her since college. “Sit together,” Julian had told them. “You’ll find each other interesting.”
Marguerite was dressed in a long green dress of a very light material. Although it was loose fitting, it accentuated rather than concealed the curves of her body, especially her breasts, thanks to the red belt tightly clasping her tiny waist. Her full lips were dressed up in a glossy, red lipstick. Her shoes—Sor noticed them as they walked to their table—were more like sandals, backless, with straps. They revealed her stocking-less feet, and toenails with the same color polish as her lipstick. Sor liked her hair, a reddish-coppery color, thick and curly. She wore it loose. He didn’t even mind the small birthmark on the right side of her neck. But it was her smile, her laugh, her easy, spontaneous demeanor that immediately attracted him to her. And there was something about her walk. He likened it to a light, flirtatious dance, and formed in his head the idea that she could lift off the ground at any moment and fly away.
Julian was right. Sor not only found Marguerite interesting, but he immediately felt comfortable in her company. Conversation came easily to them, as if they were old friends. They talked and laughed freely. They were so wrapped up with each other it was as if they were sitting at their own private table. Neither of them knew the person sitting next to them, and, almost rudely, ignored them. The only time they stopped talking to each other was when Julian opened his gifts and gave a short speech. Then the waiter brought a small cake to the table, a single candle stuck in its center, and joined by the other waiters, sang Happy Birthday. Plum, in his unhurried manner, blew out the flickering flame.
Marguerite got very excited when Sor asked her about the work she did as a watercolorist. She spoke at length about her upcoming exhibit and the paintings she would be showing. The show would be made up mostly of Florida landscapes, and quite a few seascapes. There would also be some still life, she said, the usual vase with flowers, bowls of fruit, and one, which she loved, that showed her chair and desk in her studio, with her gardening hat—a straw hat she’d bought in Haiti many years ago—on the seat of the chair, a yellow hibiscus flower lying next to it. She got even more excited when she described what she considered her largest and best work: her two boys sitting on the grass under the gumbo limbo tree outside her studio window. “Ah, my boys,” she had said, after describing the painting, “they’re a lot of work, but they keep me focused and in place. Without them, my life might be quite different.”
Sor found himself speaking just as freely about his own life. He told her that he was married—without going into details—and about the novel he had started to write
five years ago but had not finished. She asked what the story was about. Sor described it for her in detail. “You’ll complete it one day, Sor,” she had said. “The thing’s not to give up. Just keep writing. It will happen.”
Marguerite then asked him about his ethnic background. “Where are you from? I can’t quite place your accent,” she had said. “You sound British, but I don’t think you are. Your facial features, you know, are very Semitic. You look like someone from the Middle East or North Africa. You could easily pass for a Moroccan or Algerian. In fact, you remind me of a Moroccan friend of mine in New Orleans. But with your olive complexion, and curly hair, you could be from a lot of places.”
Sor was used to such confusions and questions about his background and ethnicity. Most everyone who met him, because of his accent and facial features, would, at some point, ask him where he was from. Hardly anyone suspected he was Canadian. Most of his students thought he was from a Central or South American country, or the Middle East. A friend of his wife thought he was a South African Jew when she first met him. In Florida and in New York, people with Hispanic backgrounds often mistook him for one of their countrymen. Once, when he lived in New York, he was on his way home on the subway after work, and a Puerto Rican man spoke to Sor in Spanish. Sor had answered “No habla Espanol,” one of the few things he remembered from his high school Spanish class. It was a mistake. The man got angry. He said Sor was a Puerto Rican pretending to be a Yankee. The man was a little drunk, and at the top of his voice in the subway car, he repeatedly, and with much hostility, rebuked Sor for being a traitor to his island. “Just because you have a little money,” he said, “and some education”—Sor was dressed in a jacket and tie and was carrying an expensive-looking briefcase a girlfriend had given him as a gift—“and live in a good neighborhood, you don’t want to be a Puerto Rican. You want to disown your people.” Sor had silently put up with the man’s tirade until he reached his station—he knew if he tried to talk to the man, or attempted to prove to him that he was not a Puerto Rican, the situation would only get worse. When Sor got off the train, the man repeatedly shouted after him from the open door of the subway car, “Traitor… traitor…” He repeated several times, too, a word in Spanish that must have been the equivalent of traitor, but Sor could never remember what it was.
His accent, Sor explained to Marguerite, was probably something he picked up from his father. His father was born in Jamaica and was of Jewish, African, and Welsh descent. His mother was a first-generation Canadian whose parents were born in England. His father had moved to Canada shortly after he graduated from one of the top British-style boarding schools on the island. Jamaica was still under British rule when his father left, and coming from a wealthy, educated, upper-class Jamaican family, his parents were very vigilant that he speak grammatically correct English, “the Queen’s English.”
“As an only child, I spent a great deal of my early childhood with my father,” he explained to Marguerite, “and naturally acquired some of his speech patterns. What you probably hear, and what confuses everyone, is my Jamaican-Canadian-British accent. That, and my mixed racial background, makes it difficult for people to pin me to some single ethnic group. And some people always want to put people like me into one of their little boxes and label us like some rare, exotic, freshly discovered specimen. Oh, how I hate that. Can’t a man be just a man? Can’t he be just a Homo sapiens? Isn’t that what we all are? Didn’t we all come from the same ancestral mother?”
As the evening progressed, Sor found himself becoming more and more attracted to her. At first it was just their conversation that interested him, but soon he thought he felt something more, like a door that had been shut for a long time slowly opening. Marguerite began touching his hand as they spoke. At first she would just brush his hand with the tip of her fingers as she excitedly spoke about her work. But soon she began resting her hand on his on the table. Sor also noticed the way she looked at him, her eyes lingering warmly on his face as he spoke. Maybe she had had too much to drink, he thought. But he, too, found himself letting go, abandoning his usually guarded self. He had actually at one point, later in the evening, discreetly rested his hand on hers. She did not resist. It was then she had told him, almost in a whisper—making sure she was not overheard by the other guests—that she liked him: “I like you, Sor. I’m glad Julian had us sit together.” Sor had held her hand in response, and quietly acknowledged that he felt the same way. There were no rings on any of her fingers. She wasn’t wearing a wedding band.
“No wedding ring?” he had said, tapping gently her ring-less finger. “Are you sure you’re married?” he added, teasingly.
“Oh, that.” she had replied, holding up both hands before her as if looking to see if her nail polish was still intact. “I remove my ring when I paint, and I had painted a little this afternoon before coming to the restaurant, and forgot to put it on when I left the house. It happens frequently. The truth is, Sor, I hate rings. I find them uncomfortable. The hard metal tightly gripping my finger seems unnatural, like a metallic noose. I panic when my finger gets swollen and I can’t get it off. I feel like I’m being strangled. Do you feel that way, too, Sor?”
“Not really,” Sor had said. “I take mine off at night, but it’s always on my finger when I leave the house. It’s like my watch and wallet… and my keys, and of late, my phone. If I were to leave the house without them I would feel naked, incomplete. I would know instantly that it’s not on my finger.”
“You strike me as someone who lives by rules and conventions, Sor. You adhere to the status quo, society’s demands. I like to break rules. It makes life exciting.”
“I suppose I do walk the straight and narrow, but not in all things,” Sor had replied, gently gripping the side of the table with his right hand. “Growing up as I did with a disciplinarian high school principal for a father, towing the straight and narrow at all times, doing everything in a prescribed way, being taught to live the life you choose, no matter what, sticks to you like a second skin. My only moment of freedom is when I’m in the classroom. There I become more spontaneous—at least the students say so—and flamboyant, maybe a little eccentric too, not the starchy academic type you would expect me to be.”
“I’d like to see the side of you that you bring into the classroom, Sor,” she had said, smiling.
Julian had stood up then—the dinner was over—and invited everyone to come to his place for drinks. Marguerite and Sor declined. They walked across the street instead to a Starbucks and spent another forty-five minutes talking over two servings of decaffeinated cappuccinos. Sor had told her how much he enjoyed talking to her and asked if he could call her at her office, and if she would meet him for coffee or lunch one day after her classes. She would love to meet with him, she had said, but asked him not to call her on her office phone. She explained that she shared an office with two other part-time instructors and would not be able to have a private conversation. Besides, she was rarely there. She spent little time on campus, she explained to Sor. As soon as her classes were over, she rushed home to work on a painting she was trying to complete for her upcoming exhibit, and to take care of her two boys. Her schedule was tight, she said, and it would be quite difficult to make the time to see him, but she would call him the next week.
Sor had walked her to her car. When they said good night, they hugged, and to Sor’s surprise, she kissed him on the lips before getting into her car, pressing her full lips hard against his mouth. He felt the warmth of her breath when, after kissing him, her face still close to his, she again told him how much she enjoyed his company. She promised she’d get in touch with him soon.
But she’d never called. Sor assumed she had gotten cold feet. He told himself she was happily married and did not wish to get involved with another man, even if it were only to meet for coffee and a chat. It was the conversation, even more than the kiss, why he wanted to see her. True, her kiss, and t
he way she held his hand in the restaurant, meant something. It was a special evening they had together. But she did not call. He stored the time they spent together away in his memory and partially forgot her, until Hello Sor.
Hello Sor. The joy in her voice rekindled what he had felt that evening at Plum’s birthday dinner. As she walked past him she stretched out her hand in greeting. Sor, in turn, stretched his hand toward hers. Their fingers met. They touched. Michelangelo’s God touching Adam in the Sistine Chapel—fingers hardly touching—could not be more electric, and profound. They more than touched. Their senses, the most primal, came in contact. He knew it instantly. This touch meant something. She had not stopped. She kept walking. The group of faculty she was with was in a hurry. They were probably going to have lunch together and had limited time. Some most likely had classes to teach that afternoon and could not spend much time over lunch.
As she walked past him, he picked up an unusual fragrance on her person, a fragrance that was unfamiliar to him. He did not recall her wearing such a fragrance at Plum’s birthday dinner. It smelled like a pungently sweet herb, something that grew in the wild. It was like a scent taken from some rare flower, exotic, found in some barely known jungle, or out-of-the-way valley tucked away in the foothills of the Himalayas. He loved it.
Hello Sor. Something in her voice, her smile, something in her eyes wakened a sleeping segment of his being, loosened some idea in his psyche, stirred, made something happen inside of him, a rush of blood, an awakening he had not felt in a long, long time, like a soft, noiseless explosion.
He watched her go. She seemed light on her feet, like a ballerina. There was something wild, too, in her walk that reminded him of some light-footed forest creature. He thought maybe he would not see her again, like the last time. He knew he would probably not run into her on campus again. Like him, she did not attend university functions unless she had to. They both avoided faculty drinking nights at the various local bars and eateries. She had her painting and her children, which she considered more important. Sor did not attend them because they were usually held on Friday nights, and on Friday nights, Jasmine, his wife, liked to have dinner out with him. It was her way of unwinding after a busy week at work.
Jasmine Page 1