Jasmine

by Winston Aarons

  I want to see you again, soon. I want to hold you, be with you, spend more time with you, get to know you. We both don’t teach until 2:30 tomorrow. I’d like to go to the beach with you, something I’ve not done in quite a while—my sons go with their friends, and Edgar hates the sun and sand. We could go to Deerfield. It’s far enough away, and it’s mostly tourists down there. There’ll be less chance of running into people we know. We could meet behind the Embassy Suites hotel. There’s lots of parking there. We could meet early, about 9:30, and have a few hours together. Please, let’s do it. I want to get to know you. I think there is so much more to you than you present to the world. I’d like you to know me, too. Please write me back tonight and let me know. I do hope nothing will prevent you from coming.

  Marguerite

  As he was with her first letter, Sor was surprised by Marguerite’s openness. He found her to be even more outspoken and aggressive than he was. He loved it. He could be who he was, be comfortable and open with her.

  He got up from his chair and quickly e-mailed her a short note.

  Marguerite,

  Your centaur is looking forward to being with you. He’ll come clopping by, breathing heavily, lustily, at 9:30 in the morning. Be warned, he’s love drunk. He wants to plunder your body. At the moment he is half-man, half-animal. He’s separated from reason. He’s pure lust and passion. Your centaur is half man, half ape.

  Sor

  FOURTEEN

  It was a sweet day. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky, and there was a brief respite from the heat of the previous days. A slight breeze came in from the ocean. It was like a gift, and like a gentle kiss it stirred the hairs on Sor’s arms. Where he parked his car behind the Embassy Suites hotel to wait for Marguerite, there were two large poinciana trees. They were not in bloom, but he found their delicate, lacy leaves beautiful. Behind them, several sea grape trees, thickly leafed, blocked his view of the ocean. It didn’t matter. He let himself drift into the sounds and cadences of the waves, gulls, scraps of conversations coming from the beach, a woman’s laughter. His eyes closed, his thoughts drifting away.

  Sor had always loved the ocean. It was where he went when he wanted to distance himself from the world, the things that preoccupied his mind, and bring balance to his life. Lakes didn’t do it for him, or mountains, or the woods. It had to be the ocean. It was where he had to go to restore peace in his life. In New York, when he felt out of sorts, he’d get in his car and drive to the tip of Montauk in bumper-to-bumper traffic, more than a hundred miles from his apartment in Manhattan, to be alone, to be freed of the city, to lie on the sand in the sun on a quiet beach for a few hours. The ocean was his restorative balm.

  Sitting in the car, his mind emptied temporarily of all pressing thoughts, even thoughts of Marguerite, he began to reminisce. He let his thoughts go free. The sound of the waves and the rustling sea grape trees pulled him back into another time, a different place. He fell into a deep childhood reverie. He was back on a pristine beach on the south coast of Jamaica, near Negril, an area not yet frequented by tourists, when he was thirteen years old. He was there with his parents. His parents loved Jamaica. They visited it several times when he was growing up. On this particular trip, he had secreted Byron’s Don Juan from his father’s library in Calgary—a leather-bound edition his father had ordered from England. Hiding the book under his beach towel and with his back toward his parents, he read secretly, his young mind consumed with the escapades of the great lover. Sometimes he’d close the book and think of Byron, the waves slurping the shore, tossing and frothing. Later he’d wander off, out of his parents’ sight, collecting shells, picking up bleached branches the sea brought in, wondering where they came from, from what foreign shore.

  He found a coral, bleached white by the sun, porous as an abandoned wasp’s nest, and shaped like a skull. He pretended it was the skull Byron kept on his desk in his old castle in England. He walked slowly with it, reciting passages from Don Juan, walking as if he had a club foot like Byron, looking out to sea, his head filled with wild adventures. He remembered what his father told him about Byron.” ‘He was a lustful man,” he said. Still, his father loved the debauched lame poet, and so did Sor. His father had him read a book on Byron’s life. He read about Byron’s affair in Italy with the young Italian countess, Teresa Guiccioli. She was married. They started the affair when she was pregnant with her husband’s child. He couldn’t understand—she was carrying on with Byron right under her husband’s nose. How could she… how could he…

  A knock on the car’s window, Marguerite’s smiling face, the unmistakable fragrance she wore as she put her head into the car and kissed him on his cheek, pulled Sor back into the present. “Good morning, my centaur,” she greeted him.

  Sor got out of his car and embraced her tightly. He held her for a long time in his arms, her head on his chest, before saying anything. Then he told her to get back into her car and follow him. She began to say something, to protest, but he told her firmly to say nothing, that it was a surprise.

  As soon as Jasmine had left for work that morning, Sor had begun calling motels in the Deerfield area. He thought it would be good to have a place where they could change their clothes and relax after the beach. He found a place that rented daily to tourists. They would have to be out of the room by one, but that was fine with him. He had arrived before nine o’clock to make sure the place was in order and comfortable enough for their meeting. It was fine. It consisted of several small bungalows, very private, and inexpensive. He had gotten one with an ocean view. A few yards from the porch and you were on the beach. It was perfect. It would be mostly tourists on the beach, with little chance of running into people they knew.

  Marguerite was surprised and happy when she got out of her car and Sor took her to their bungalow. She sat in one of the two white plastic chairs on the porch and sucked in the ocean air. “I love you, Sor Avraham,” she said softly to herself, but loudly enough for Sor to hear. Sor was filled with joy but pretended he didn’t hear her.

  As soon as they got into the room they made love, wildly, loudly, passionately, abandoning all restraints. In their haste they forgot to shut the blinds on the window. It was later they realized, too, that the door to the cottage was ajar and people walking by could see them inside. They laughed—it did not matter.

  Afterwards, exhausted, they lay in each other’s arms. They shared the grapes and cheese and crackers and wine Marguerite had brought. Their joy was like the innocent joy of children. Life was simple. The complicated world did not exist for them. There was no Edgar, no Jasmine, just their love, their bodies, their voices telling each other how much they loved each other.

  In the ocean they held hands and waited for the incoming waves to knock them over. They laughed incessantly. When two pelicans went by, their wings almost touching, scouting the ocean for shoals of fish, Sor pointed out that pelicans mated for life. Marguerite followed the two birds with her eyes until they were out of sight, and without saying anything, walked toward Sor and held his hand. Waist deep in water, Sor pulled her to him and kissed her.

  They found a huge log on the beach. Sor sat on the sand with his back against it, while Marguerite sat between his legs like a little child. “Speak to me, Sor,” she said. “Tell me who Sor Avraham is. I want to know him.”

  “I used to know who I am,” he said quietly, contemplatively, his eyes following a sailboat far out in the ocean, “but now I do not know who I am, or where I am, or where I am going. I am so different from the man you met in the Bernhardt building, or the man you met at Plum’s birthday dinner. My life was in order. I felt secure, balanced. I did, though, suspect—damn it, not suspect, I knew there was something missing in my life. I knew it had something to do with wanting a passionate love. But then, I did not know if I really wanted it. In my logical mind, I felt it might become a disturbance, that it would upset the way I live, that exc
essive passion could be dangerous. I know myself. I know how intensely I throw myself into whatever I do. And here I am now, with you, as proof, my feelings for you eclipsing the way I have lived for years, the way I have trained myself to live, thinking it is the best way. Now, I love the feelings I have when I’m with you, the joy. I have not been happy for a long time, Marguerite. I felt comfortable with myself, but not happy. My students think I am. But what they see is the passion, the excitement I exhibit as a teacher. Maybe I use the classroom to substitute for what I’m missing, to vent my passion, to make up for what I lacked and am now experiencing with you.”

  When Sor had finished speaking, Marguerite told him a little about herself and her family. She was born in New Orleans, an only child, like Sor. Her father was a doctor. Her mother came from a family of artists. Her mother’s father had gained a reputation in his time as a portraitist and landscape artist. He did the portraits of most of the wealthy families in the area. Unfortunately he died young. She told Sor that she, too, was of mixed racial ancestry. “As if you didn’t know that.” Her father’s people, she said, could trace their descendants back to several continents and races. She then laughed and ran her fingers through Sor’s low-cropped curly hair.

  Marguerite then told Sor how she met Edgar. It was while she was in New York, where she lived for a year after graduating from college in North Carolina. She was working at a gallery in Soho. Edgar had come in with a friend who was interested in buying art for speculative purposes. Edgar had no interest in art. While the owner of the gallery showed Edgar’s friend around, she and Edgar began chatting. He invited her out for dinner. She accepted. Shortly after that she moved in with him. “I thought I was in love,” she said, “when I married Edgar, but there has never been any passion or romance in our marriage. I figured that was how it was in marriages. I had my children, brought them up in a secure environment. I had a caring husband. It was sufficient.”

  She confessed that teaching art appreciation courses at the university was not really what she wanted to do. She’d prefer to dedicate her time to her art, painting without restrictions. She just wanted to paint, she said. It was during the act of painting, brush in hand, creating, that she was her most authentic self. Deep down, she confessed to Sor, she felt like a bohemian. “Sometimes, Sor, I feel the life I am living is not the life I was cut out for. I need space. Freedom. Marriage restricts the artist in me. Sometimes I feel like leaving Edgar, but I stay for the sake of my boys. I know how divorces damage kids. I would never hurt them, or bring them unnecessary pain.”

  After almost two hours on the beach, they went back to the bungalow. They made love again, and Sor experienced something he had never felt with a woman before. He wanted to insert his whole being, his whole body into Marguerite, climb into her womb like a child, for only then, with his whole body in her, would he be satisfied. “I want you, I want you,” he kept saying. “I don’t care what the circumstances are, that I am married, that you are married, that you have children, I want you, Marguerite.” He couldn’t control himself. The words gushed out of him, spilled from his being. “I did not know a woman could make me feel the way I do, that I could be so devoured, that I could lose myself like this, and love it so. I am yours, Marguerite. My life is yours. I want to be with you. Not just for an hour, or two, but every night, every day, for always. I want to spend the rest of my life with you. I want to be with you. I am in love with you.”

  “Sor, Sor, you are melting my heart,” Marguerite said, overwhelmed by Sor’s outburst. “I have never felt like this either. I feel like a woman for the first time. For the first time, I have no doubt that I am loved, truly, without reservation, unconditionally. I feel certain that you mean what you say, when you say you don’t care about our circumstance, and that you want to be with me. I feel I can trust you, that what you are saying isn’t just coming from your mouth, but from your entire being. You are a sweet man. I feel blessed to be loved like this.

  “But I ask you one thing, Sor,” she said after a long pause, a pained expression on her face. “I beg you, do not go too fast. I must be careful. You see, Sor, I was involved with another man two years ago. It was a disaster. I had rushed into it. I fell in love like a fool. He used me and threw my love away as if I was a piece of garbage. He treated me cruelly. It took me quite a while to get over him and regain my self-respect as a woman. It was a very bad experience. I didn’t have to reveal it to you, but I think you should know. I tell you about it so you will understand why I sometimes seem cautious. Anyway, here I am, with you, my centaur, close to your healing love.”

  Sor did not question her about her relationship. He did not ask for details. It didn’t matter in the least to him that she had had an affair with another man. He was too much in love for it to matter. It’s not that she still felt something for this man. He had brought her pain, and it was over.

  They had a leisurely lunch in the Embassy Suites hotel restaurant. Sor spoke a lot about himself. It was as if he wanted her to know everything about him, as if he wanted to strip back his skin and reveal his flesh and bones and soul. With Marguerite he didn’t feel he had to hold anything back. He told her things about himself that he had not told Jasmine until they had been married for several years. How his parents had sent him away to a boarding school when he was only seven years old, and had pained him deeply. “Just imagine, Marguerite, an only child, the center of attention in his home, being abandoned like that at such an early age. I know, abandoned is a strong word, but that’s how I felt. And though I remained for only three years at the school before my parents realized it wasn’t such a good idea, it left scars on me. The only positive thing was that the experience forced me to be tough and independent. But it also made me distrustful. I don’t love easily. I have to be sure the person I love will reciprocate with an equally intense love, and love me entirely. I’m afraid of being hurt, being abandoned. It all goes back to my early boarding school experience. Of course, my behavior with you does not adhere to what I’m saying. I love you without thinking of the consequences, though we are both married, and our relationship can only be fraught with problems.”

  Marguerite spoke about her children and her husband. She loved her children. Edgar was more like a friend to her, she said. He was a good man. He would never do anything to hurt her deliberately. He was a good father to the boys, they loved him, and Edgar loved her in his own way. She asked Sor to be patient with her. He had climbed so deeply into her life in so short a time that she was still in a daze, still unsure that it was really happening, that she was given all this love so quickly. “I’m afraid of your love, Sor,” she told him. “Your intensity frightens me.”

  “It is natural to be frightened,” Sor said, holding Marguerite’s hand. “To be in love is to be vulnerable. To be truly in love one must relinquish one’s armor, the fortress one builds around one’s self for protection, and become naked, in a way. That’s how I feel with you. I have stripped myself naked to meet your love, and walked away from my fortress. I’ve removed my armor. You’re still contemplating removing yours. You’re afraid of being hurt. But you have to make that leap. There are no guarantees in life, and especially in love. And no matter how much we’re in love, love can burn out like a match, die like a fire, at any moment. And once it begins to die, you can keep replenishing the fire with new woods, aromatic woods, exotic woods, but it dies anyway. All the words in the world cannot revive it. Love. What does it mean? I can only speak for myself. I can only look at my own life, Marguerite, speak from my own meager knowledge, my feelings, the way my heart rocks in my chest now. I only know what I want. You fill a void in my life. It’s not just your body, your sex—which I cannot get enough of—but your whole being, everything about you, what you do to me, the fires you light in me. I was asleep before you came into my life. When our bodies touch I cannot tell where your flesh ends and where mine begins. I can only tell you that I would never purposely hurt you. It would be
like harming myself.”

  Sor kept talking, still holding Marguerite’s hand across the table. “I consider my actions well before I do them, Marguerite,” he told her. “I’m not some babbling, immature schoolboy. Please understand, I don’t rush into things—even though I have been swept up by you—I’m not an impulsive man. I have never rushed hastily into relationships before now, and that’s why I think you are special. I usually, in all things, weigh and evaluate my actions. I have always tried to keep my life simple, free of complications. I know I must appear like an irrational idiot, shouting out my love for you when we have just met, and still hardly know each other. Maybe I’m mad, maybe I’m driven mad by my love for you, which I cannot control, which has overpowered me. Maybe I shouldn’t be saying these things to you. Maybe it’s dangerous to be exposing myself like this so early, but this I cannot help. I am vulnerable. Since I met you, I wander nakedly in the world without protection. This is what your love has done to me.”

  “I love being with you, listening to you, talking to you,” Marguerite said, when Sor had finished. “If only it could go on forever.” They spoke some more, until they realized it was almost two o’clock. They had to be on the campus for their two-thirty classes. They walked arm in arm to their cars, which they had parked next to each other behind the hotel. They were both in their cars, and were about to drive off, when Sor asked Marguerite the name of the fragrance she wore.

  “Jasmine,” she said, blowing him a kiss before driving off.

  FIFTEEN

  Jasmine… my wife’s name… she wears my wife’s name… she puts it between her breasts… between her legs, on her stomach, below her navel, she anoints her mound with it… she puts it… she puts it… she puts it there… He was supposed to follow Marguerite to the university, but he didn’t. Instead, he sat for several minutes in his car, its engine running, gripping the steering wheel tightly with both hands and staring blankly into the sea grape tree in front of him. He did not hear the waves, the seagulls, the soft rustle of the leaves on the sea grape tree.