Jasmine

by Winston Aarons

  His office was a long rectangular room. It had no windows, just a glass door with a Venetian blind that he always left open, especially when he was in conference with a student. He was put there because there was no office space for him in the Arts and Science building where the other members of the English faculty had their offices, a situation he didn’t mind since it kept him away from faculty politics. The walls were bare. He had ordered some prints and posters but they had not yet arrived. The only thing that suggested his personality was the stone on his desk that a friend brought back for him after a trip to Israel. It was a small, clay-colored stone. His friend had picked it up when he visited Masada, and remembering that Sor collected stones, had pocketed it and brought it back for him. It stood on a tiny pedestal near his phone. Sor loved stones because they symbolized stability, permanence.

  It was after five when Sor left his office. On his way home he turned on Camino Real and pulled into the parking lot for Fresh Market. He often stopped there after his late class to pick up something to cook for dinner, or something already prepared if he felt exhausted after a long day of teaching and didn’t feel like cooking. He was the cook at home. Jasmine got home much later than he. Her job with Jam Pak, a successful firm that did a high volume of import and export trade with Pacific Rim countries, was very pressured. She was the assistant director of marketing, and most of the responsibilities fell on her shoulders, since the director was constantly away on business trips to one of the countries they did business with. She never complained, but sometimes Sor did not think she was happy.

  He was lingering at the prepared-foods counter, wondering if he should get some of their pre-cooked wild rice to go with the roasted chicken—it had nuts and cranberries and Jasmine loved it—when he heard the familiar “Hello Sor” behind him, his name slipping softly, childlike, off Marguerite’s tongue. He turned around. She was standing before him, smiling, looking happy to see him, her hands filled with neatly wrapped items from the meat and fish counters. She had so many things in her hands that she had to hold them against her stomach and breasts to prevent them from falling.

  “How are you?” she said, smiling, her lips painted with a glossy red lipstick. “We have to stop meeting like this, Sor.”

  Sor could not mask the joy and excitement he was feeling. He was so surprised to see her, so caught off guard, he didn’t know what to say.

  But seeing her smile, and sensing that she was happy to see him, made Sor brave. “Let me help you,” he said, and clumsily took some of the packages from her, being careful not to brush her breasts as he did. As he followed her to her shopping cart, parked at the end of the aisle, it again struck him that he must definitely have been harboring thoughts about her from the first time they met. How else could he account for the intense emotional state he was in, and the joy he was experiencing?

  When they reached her cart and unloaded what they were carrying, they hugged. They held each other closely, tightly, and though briefly, it seemed a lifetime to Sor, but not long enough. He wanted to hold her forever. She kissed him on the cheek. He smelled her perfume, the one she was wearing when she came out of the library.

  “It’s good to see you, Sor,” she said, almost in a whisper.

  He did not see the two boys at first. All his attention was on Marguerite. Maybe the boys had wandered off and did not see them when they embraced. But now they were standing next to the cart. Her children, Sor thought. She had told him at Plum’s dinner party that she was married and had two boys. Adolfo had mentioned them as well. One looked to be about eight and the other about twelve. He felt awkward, uncomfortable. He did not want the children to see him being so familiar with their mother. Marguerite, though, continued to hold his hand. He should leave, he thought. Sensing his discomfort, Marguerite introduced him to the two boys. “This is Professor Avraham,” she said. “He’s one of the teachers at my university.”

  He still felt awkward. He kept wondering if they had seen him embracing their mother. It was an innocent hug, but still, you never know what goes on in the heads of kids. Feeling awkward herself—the boys were staring intently at Sor, questioningly, suspiciously—she very formally, as if she hardly knew him, told Sor it was nice to see him, but that she could not stop to talk. She was in a hurry. She had to take one of her boys to soccer practice. He shook her hand, holding it for a long time in his. She did not try to pull it away. Holding her warm and relaxed hand, he felt something between them. They were comfortable with each other, he thought. They were reaching out to each other. Some void, some special need in their lives must be driving them toward each other. That strong, musk-scented entity was at work, that randy bastard had entered his life, which he thought was immune to such distractions. He watched her go as she turned and walked down the aisle with the spices and other condiments she had plucked from a nearby shelf, toward the cash registers, her boys trailing behind her. She never looked back. He wondered when he would next see her.

  Two weeks later, they met again at Fresh Market. Sor did not plan it. He did not go there hoping to meet Marguerite. He didn’t expect to see her. It just happened. Life is sometimes like that. Unpredictable. Loaded with surprises.

  Sor was coming out of the store carrying a halibut steak and asparagus for dinner that night and a bottle of wine, an Australian Shiraz. He was looking forward to a relaxed evening, a casual dinner with Jasmine, a glass of wine, and reading a few chapters of Perfume afterwards, the book a French student from one of his English composition classes had given him the previous semester.

  Since their last meeting, Sor had tried to put her out of his thoughts. He knew he should be cautious. The chemistry between them was volatile. If he started seeing her, things would spiral out of control. It could damage their marriages. He had found her number in the campus directory, but though the urge to call her was overwhelming, he hadn’t. Back and forth in his mind he argued against starting anything with her. But now, seeing her, he immediately knew that his decision to be cautious, and all his arguments against being with her, would have little or no effect on what he would do. In her presence, all resolve would crumble.

  He was walking to his car when he saw her. She was coming toward the store from the parking lot. She was wearing a black dress, clinging, long—she must have attended a special luncheon earlier that day—almost reaching her ankles, and a pair of bright red sandals made up entirely of overlapping straps. She looked radiant. He could see her toes, painted with a bright red polish, poking out of her shoes. He loved when women didn’t wear pantyhose and he could see their toes exposed, naked. She had a red scarf around her neck. It had toucans hand-painted on it, their enormous beaks protruding from a background of lush tropical foliage. One end of the scarf was tossed behind her back and the other, longer portion, fell over her right breast and down to her stomach. She’s an artist, he thought. Look how she dresses. Coming toward him, she seemed to glow in the afternoon sun.

  They rushed toward each other and embraced recklessly in front of the store. He felt her body against his, her warmth. They hardly spoke. As they held each other, he thought how coincidental their two meetings at Fresh Market were. He had been going to the store several times a week and had never run into her before, and now he had run into her twice in two weeks. It was as if they had to meet, that it was preordained, their meetings orchestrated by some benevolent, knowing entity who saw their lives and figured they should be together, that they needed each other. Still, he felt it was happening too fast. But he couldn’t help himself.

  Neither of them wanted to disentangle from the embrace. They were in the open, the afternoon sun hot on their bodies, people passing them, observing them, but they were oblivious to it all. It was as if something had snapped in both their lives. Some deep, unfulfilled void, some long-suppressed hunger, was driving them toward each other. They had to have each other.

  Sor had abandoned all his previous resolve to stay
clear of such entanglements. Whatever was happening to him, he loved it. If the emotional upheaval he was feeling was love, whatever the cost, he wanted it. He felt helpless. He was drawn to this woman. He knew his feelings were irrational, that he shouldn’t be thinking this way, but his moral, rational self had abandoned him.

  “I have to see you again, Marguerite,” he said finally, reluctantly pulling away from their embrace, but still holding her hands. “Please call me. The fact that we keep meeting like this must mean something. It’s too coincidental.”

  “I would prefer if you e-mailed me Sor,” she said. “It’s more private.” She gave him her address, spelling omphalos for him.

  Sor repeated her address to make sure he had got it right.

  Suddenly Marguerite’s motherly instinct reminded her that she had left her two boys in the supermarket; she had left her purse in the car and had gone back to fetch it when she ran into Sor.

  “I must go, Sor,” she said. “My boys are waiting for me in the store. I don’t want them to get anxious.”

  Before parting, she kissed him on his lips. “Write to me, Sor,” she said. “Write to me tonight, please.”

  SIX

  Flesh is shit, Sor thought, as he drove home. It’s weak. It gives in easily. It’s all that water in the human body. It smells a woman and it crumbles. It becomes slush. Look how his flesh went crazy with lust for Marguerite. If he could, he thought, he would exist solely in his skull, secure under its crisp, boney covering, away from the frailties of the flesh.

  But the mind, too, gives in just as easily, he thought. Flesh, the mind, the presumed rational self, feelings—they’re accomplices. They work hand in hand. Look at what was happening to him. His life jammed up, tossed off course by feelings for Marguerite. A glance, a touch, a smile, a few words, a sniff of her flesh, her perfume—and the remembered kiss she placed on his mouth months before—and he becomes a howling sex-driven primate. Damn feelings. Damn passion. Look at Rene Descartes, the iconic French philosopher, look how feelings, knocked him off his feet. Yes, Descartes, one of the truly big-brained humans, man of logic, capable of disciplined reasoning, a rational man. He believed thinking was the ultimate stuff, the root, the very essence of being human. There’s nothing like thinking, he said. Thinking makes us human, separates us from the animals, from the sheep in the field, the mud-enticed hog, and those brainless ninety-eight-percent-like-us primates—the orangutans, apes, chimpanzees. But while he was deifying thinking and writing one of his famous works, Mr. I-think-therefore-I-am, Mr. Cogito Ergo Sum was busily screwing one of his servants, getting her pregnant. How did it happen? How could it happen to such a man? Was it the movement of her limbs under her rough peasant’s dress that led him astray? Was it her ankles? Her slightly exposed breasts when she leaned across the table to serve him his meal one evening after he had put aside his books and experiments, his work with prisms, lenses, algebraic formulas, the cogito, his work with cadavers? Was it the way she made his bed, circling its feathered softness, straightening the pillows with her flattened palms? Was it her peasant songs, unfamiliar but sweet, which she sang as she moved about his room, dusting, polishing? Ah, Descartes, in the musk-odor world of lust, how easily feeling unbuckles the mind, straps fluttering wings to our hearts, and turns us into randy goats.

  Always, Sor thought, it’s the great ones, the sharp minds, who stumble over their own feet, succumb to flesh, sex. Descartes was not alone. Thomas Jefferson, too, scintillatingly bright, the American Renaissance boy, writing the Declaration of Independence, putting down in stubborn, clinging ink, that all men are created equal, but leaving out slaves, leaving out women, leaving out the young house slave who bore his children. Sex is a bitch, a vice, its iron fingers gripping our testicles, strangling us, taking us away from ourselves. Sex is the oversized elephant in the room, the wild unpredictable beast in our lives.

  But why was he thinking about Descartes and Jefferson? What did Jefferson and Descartes have to do with Marguerite? What was the matter with him? Damn it, a woman comes into his life, and he gets all balled up. And why was he so upset because of what was happening to him? Why didn’t he simply acknowledge that some heavy-fisted god was bringing him and Marguerite together? He should be running home to e-mail her, write her a hot, passionate letter. That scent she wore—he smelled it again today on her body—she must put it between her breasts, behind her ears. It must be a kind of oil, the essence of something wild, aromatic, a magical unguent. He smelled it on his clothes and in the car. He’d have to bathe as soon as he got home. Jasmine must not smell it on him.

  Sor had never been unfaithful to Jasmine. He had never thought of having a lover, sleeping with another woman—even a one-night stand—even if it wouldn’t get back to Jasmine. In the last few years he had felt certain deficiencies in their love life: the lack of spontaneity, their restrained activity in the bedroom. But at forty-five, he figured he had reached that stage in life when sex was not all that important. When you are married long enough, the luster, the monkey-rush, the eagerness wears off, marriage becomes habit, and couples depress their mattresses with less frequency and enthusiasm. He had learned to live with its deficiencies. One can’t be satisfied at all times with all things. The old Rolling Stones song, “I Can’t Get No Satisfaction,” was everybody’s song. Marriage, he thought, as he drove the four remaining blocks home, has to do more with compromises than satisfaction, it’s about habit rather than change. Complete satisfaction in life would be a bore, he thought. To be satisfied would mean there is nothing left to strive for. But where was he going with this? What was the matter with him? Some horny ape was grunting down his back, beckoning him. What was he going to do about it? He smelled Marguerite on his clothes. It was as if she were in the car with him. Will she be as clinging as her perfume, he wondered, if they became intimate? When they crumpled the sheets on some motel bed, would it change their lives? He did not feel she was the type of woman a man tires of easily. He knew he was already falling for her. She was pulling at his being with an intensity he had never experienced before. He didn’t know anything about her. All he knew was that she was embracing his thoughts and feelings, pulling him toward her like a voluptuous, seductive siren. And he was helpless.

  As soon as he got home he took a shower. He had to wash Marguerite’s fragrance off his body. But he couldn’t wash her out of his thoughts. As he bathed he thought about the woman in Steinbeck’s story, “The Chrysanthemums,” which he sometimes had his freshman students read in his Introduction to Literature class. In the story, the wife, frustrated both as a woman and as a spouse, almost gives herself to a traveling repairman with a smooth poet’s tongue among the chrysanthemums in her garden. The fenced-in garden, he told his students, symbolized her pent-up, male-prescribed existential condition as a wife in 1930s America. She had not been adulterous. She had not done anything, but she felt guilty nonetheless for exposing her frustrations and sexual needs so blatantly when she let the repairman into her garden. She had rushed to bathe when he left. Using a pumice stone, she scrubbed her body until her flesh was red and raw. She had to cleanse herself, purify herself, even though all she did was harbor impure thoughts. She was starved for sexual love. As Sor vigorously washed Margeurite’s scent from his body, he felt like the woman in the story. Yes, he wanted to have sex with her, but he hadn’t. It was only a feeling, an idea. A wish. A desire.

  There I go again, thought Sor, taking things to the extreme. He hadn’t done anything wrong. Even if he went to bed with this woman, slept with her, would it be improper, evil? Immoral? She was married. She had children. He was married. He rubbed himself harder with his soaped washcloth to get rid of Marguerite’s scent, to erase her from his mind and body.

  After his shower, Sor put on the pair of lightweight exercise trousers he wore in the house during the winter months and when he went to the gym, along with a long-sleeved shirt. Though it was hot outside, he felt a little c
hilly in the apartment.

  In the kitchen, he thought of Marguerite as he unwrapped the fresh halibut steak, brushed on his special marinade, placed it in a baking pan, and stuck it in the oven. How odd, he was making dinner for his wife but thinking about another woman. He remembered how they had hugged outside Fresh Market. They were reckless. Their behavior bordered on lunacy, he thought, as he cut off the hard ends of several asparagus spears.

  He was bringing two wine glasses to the table when he remembered Marguerite’s e-mail address. He must write it down. He must not write her name, though. In his study he wrote it in the back of his pocket calendar, where he had already written the e-mail addresses of some faculty members. Then he placed it in one of the compartments of his briefcase. He’d write. He’d write to her later, he thought, after dinner, when Jasmine was watching TV.

  What would he say in his e-mail to her? He had to be careful. She might just be the overtly friendly type who likes to touch and hug people, the touchy-feely type. Her display of affection might mean nothing. Maybe she’s lonely. Maybe she just needs someone to talk to, someone she can exchange e-mails with, chat, have an intelligent discourse. Maybe she and her husband had grown apart, didn’t talk much, had little to say to each other. It happens. The whole thing might be nothing. Damn it, just because a woman embraces you, holds you tight, lets you feel her breasts and belly pressing against you, holds her face up to yours so you can look longingly and tenderly into her eyes, and in parting, almost begs you to e-mail her, doesn’t mean she wants to go to bed with you. But maybe she does. Maybe he wants to sleep with her. Damn it, he knows, he is certain, if the opportunity came, he could not resist her. He must write to her. He must write to her later, after dinner, when Jasmine was watching TV.