“I’m sorry I fell asleep,” he said, apologetically. “There’s nothing for dinner. I was so tired after my two-thirty class I came straight home. The beach, the sun—I was totally exhausted.”
“That’s all right,” she said. “We can make do. Maybe some eggs, one of your omelets with tomatoes and mushrooms. If you’re too tired, I’ll make it.”
Sor did not think Jasmine suspected anything, even though it might appear strange that he went to the beach without having mentioned it to her. But Sor knew Jasmine. If she thought it odd, or suspected him of anything, she would not mention it. She would not hastily accuse him of anything. She would wait until she had hard facts to back up her accusations.
He got up and showered. With the water running over him he thought about the dream. It was the first time since his father’s death that his father had appeared in one of Sor’s dreams. He didn’t know what to make of it. The frown on his father’s face in the dream was the same frown he used to wear when he was displeased with something Sor had done, or not done, or when he had not lived up to his father’s expectations. In the dream Sor wanted to smell what was in the bag. Why did his father prevent him? What was in the bag? Why the x’s? What did they symbolize? As for Mrs. Cassal’s “hide your nose” comment, what was she alluding to? Hide it from what? And why couldn’t he go into his apartment? And the x on his door? Sor had no idea what it all meant. He was still too groggy from his long sleep to concentrate on its interpretation. But he knew instinctually that it had something to do with Marguerite.
After his shower, Sor went into the kitchen. Jasmine was making a fruit salad for the two of them with blackberries, grapes, strawberries and blueberries, and pieces of pineapple, which he loved. He made them an omelet. After their meal, their evening and night proceeded as it usually did.
At nine, Sor went into the study. He went over his notes for the two classes he had the next day and read some students’ papers. At ten, Jasmine came in and stood behind him, both arms on his shoulders.
“You still smell of suntan lotion, Sor,” Jasmine said, as she leaned over and kissed him on his cheek. “And you do seem a little tanned. How long were you at the beach?”
“Not for very long,” Sor said, trying not to sound defensive. “I mostly walked along the beach looking for seashells, but I found nothing interesting. And I did sit on our favorite log for quite sometime—maybe that’s how I picked up a little color.”
Jasmine kissed him again, said goodnight, and went into the bedroom. She’d watch some TV, bathe, and go to bed. At eleven, Sor heard her final “good night” from the bedroom and the click of the switch as she turned off the light.
When he was sure Jasmine had gone to bed—he heard the tell-tale springs of their bed as she made herself comfortable—Sor checked his e-mails. There was a letter waiting for him.
My Dear Sor,
What a delicious day we had together. And finding your letter on my computer when I came home was a wonderful surprise. It was that unexpected gift that makes a day perfect. I was truly disarmed by it. It made me want to open up myself to you as much as I can, be naked for you in every way. I know that would make me vulnerable, but at the moment it doesn’t matter. I’m touched and overwhelmed by the things you said. You are a truly beautiful soul. I’ve never had anyone write to me like this. I feel you healing my wounds with your strong, forceful, penetrating love.
You say I’m a gift. You are a gift, too. I don’t know why you came into my life. But I know you are in it. I know you truly care for me. You have come into my life just when I needed you. You are that special medicine my life has wanted for a long, long time.
Today, on the beach, I saw another side of you. You were like a young boy, giddy with life. Watching you today, freed of all cares, uninhibited, you seemed to hungrily bite at every single morsel of life that came to you. I’ve never met anyone like you. You were like a boy, but at the same time a man, strong, sophisticated, sure of yourself. I could smell your virility. Your strength outmatched the ocean, the salt air, the blue, pure, cloudless sky above our heads.
And, no, you’re not a madman. If I’m cautious, it’s because I don’t want to be hurt. I also would not want to hurt you. You’re more secure with yourself than I am. You know what you want and when you see it, you go after it. I do not have that kind of confidence or spontaneity. In my situation—my two boys need me—and maybe I owe them a settled life. I have to be so careful. If they were grown I would probably have fewer reservations, be less cautious. I don’t know. Maybe.
Let’s go day by day. Be patient with me. Every day I feel closer to you. I’m touched by your sincerity and your love for me. Your words leave me speechless. Tonight I will sleep like a child. Tonight I sleep with another, but you will be in my bed.
Marguerite
Sor read and reread Marguerite’s letter. He was ecstatic. He walked out onto the deck. Some of the houses along the Intracoastal still had their lights on. He could see the red neon Walgreens sign pulsing in the distance, and the lights in the cluster of apartment buildings in Boca Raton. The Delray Princess, a sightseeing boat that went back and forth between Delray and Deerfield, was coming back from its last trip. They were playing reggae on board. He could make out figures dancing. He did not hear when Jasmine came on the deck until she was standing beside him.
“It’s late, Sor,” she said. “You should come in now. It’s almost midnight.”
He turned and followed Jasmine into the bedroom.
Goodnight, Marguerite, goodnight. I’m the warmth in your bed.
SEVENTEEN
When Jasmine came home and found Sor sleeping on their bed, still wearing the clothes he wore to the university, she knew something was wrong. Sor was a man of habit. He would always change out of his work clothes as soon as he got home, and if he wanted to relax, he’d stretch out on the sofa in the living room, never on the bed. The only time you would find Sor in bed during the day was if he were sick.
Sor would usually be preparing dinner when she got home, and if he had finished before she arrived, she’d find him seated on the sofa reading one of the literary journals he subscribed to, or marking students’ papers, or listening to one of his jazz or classical recordings on the new Bose CD player they had just bought. He rarely swerved from his routines.
When she had leaned over to kiss him on his forehead she had picked up an unusual smell on his body. Suntan lotion, but something else, like a perfume, mixed in. It was the same fragrance she had smelled on him the other night when she had gone into his study to kiss him goodnight. She’d figured it might have been transferred onto his clothing when he hugged someone at the school. Sor often embraced acquaintances when he met them rather than shaking hands, it didn’t matter what sex they were. He thought handshakes too impersonal, a form of greeting he reserved for strangers and people he was meeting for the first time. She had smelled the same fragrance, too, when she went on the deck later that evening to tell him it was time he came to bed; odd, since he had showered that afternoon.
But it wasn’t the fragrance that bothered her, or his going to the beach on a day when he taught classes—something she had never known him to do. These things surprised her but did not make her suspicious. She had no reason to be. She knew she could trust Sor.
What bothered her was finding him asleep on the bed in his work clothes. It reminded her of something they both suppressed as much as possible, didn’t bring up in conversation, blocked out, relegated to their unconscious. It was the only other time she ever found Sor asleep in their bed in his work clothes when she got home. As she looked at him, she relived the event of that morning four years ago, when Sor found their only child, Daniel, dead in his crib at the age of two months.
It was Sor’s turn to feed Daniel that morning. He had warmed Daniel’s milk and gone into his room and found his lifeless body. At first Sor thought D
aniel was sleeping. But when he lifted the child out of the crib and held him in his arms, he realized something was wrong. Daniel’s body was abnormally cold. He had died several hours before, the coroner would later determine, having suffocated during the night. The doctors attributed it to Sudden Infant Death Syndrome.
The child still in his arms, Sor walked into the bedroom and woke her. It was like a dream, a nightmare, Sor standing beside the bed with their baby in his arms, weeping. She knew immediately once she saw and touched her child that he was dead. His cold flesh, his little arms dangling. She knew. She heard herself saying it over and over: “He’s dead, he’s dead.” But it was as if Sor didn’t hear her. “He isn’t dead, he isn’t dead, it can’t be,” he kept repeating, to no one, to himself, to Jasmine, to the world, to the dawn.
Jasmine remembered taking Daniel’s lifeless body from Sor and holding him in her arms for the longest time, kissing him, talking to him, as if he were still alive. Finally she put him on the bed and called 911. She had asked Sor to call, but he was too distraught, too torn down by his emotions. When the ambulance came and the paramedics pronounced Daniel dead, Sor kept insisting the child was alive. “Daniel isn’t dead,” he shouted at the paramedics, “he’s only sleeping. Wake him, wake him, please.” When the paramedics left, Sor and Jasmine wept loudly, uncontrollably, holding each other for a long time.
After the funeral, Sor didn’t speak for several days. She, too, spoke little. It was a time of denial. They clung to each other for support. They would embrace without saying anything to each other. But they retreated into their separate zones of silence and slipped into their own cocoons. A powerful quietude took over their lives. Neither wanted to mention what had happened, afraid that bringing up the incident would open up the wounds. They didn’t want to cause each other pain.
For several weeks after that Sor would come home and fall asleep on the bed in his work clothes. She’d come home and have to wake him.
As the months went by, they resumed their lives, concealing their pain as best they could. She dealt with her pain by pouring herself into her work at the office. She started going to work early and leaving late. It took her mind off Daniel.
Even though four years had passed, she had not gotten over his death. Neither had Sor. They existed as if it never happened, but it had, and it had changed their lives and their relationship irrevocably. They seemed to speak less and less with each other. There was not much humor in the marriage anymore. A quiet dullness had taken over their lives. Sor never asked her to attempt to have another child. She didn’t want to. She was afraid. She thought, too, that she was getting too old. The risks. She couldn’t bear losing another child. Though he never mentioned it, sometimes she thought that Sor would have loved for her to have another child. Maybe it would have been good for the marriage.
They had moved to Florida soon after, leaving New York, the apartment, the room with Daniel’s crib. Somewhere new and far away, they thought, with perpetual sun and warmth, would help them get over his death. Sor believed the worst thing a man and woman could do was to carry the past with them, and that one should learn from one’s experiences and move on. But they couldn’t shake the memory of that morning. It seemed to be permanently and painfully clamped to their memory.
Why did I marry him? The question had come into her head unbidden. Maybe it was the solidity she saw in him. He was dependable, bright, intellectually astute. Maybe she even took his stubbornness into consideration. But he was not dogmatic. He stood up for what he believed in, but if he could be convinced that he was wrong, he would modify his views. She loved this in him. And he was a kind, caring man, disciplined, solid. He would have made a great father.
Since Daniel’s death something had died in her, in him. Maybe they lived together out of convenience, neither saying how they honestly felt lest they hurt each other. She poured herself into her work. Sor poured himself into his teaching. During the summer he read and wrote in his journal, and sometimes, though he did so less and less in the past year, would work on the novel he had started a year before Daniel’s death. He was very excited about the novel at first, but his excitement soon waned. He had not approached it in months. It’s as if he had abandoned it. It was unlike him. He liked to finish what he started. And writing a novel was one of his dreams. She had asked him about it, but he became testy and was reluctant to discuss it. “I’ll finish it,” he had said, gruffly.
After dinner that night, the television turned low—she was watching, but she wasn’t watching—she was thinking about her life in America, and her life with Sor. Except for an uncle who lived in New York—her father’s brother—and Sor, she was alone in the United States. She had come to America from Israel to study in the university. Her father and mother were still living there. Her father and mother’s parents had immigrated to Israel from Morocco. Her parents had divorced, a bitter parting in which she had at times felt as if she were used as a bargaining chip as they fought over child support and who should get what property. The constant quarrels and the animosity they continued to hold toward each other drove her to come to America to be with her uncle.
She met Sor in New York. Maybe it was his Middle Eastern appearance that attracted her. She was getting her MBA at Columbia. She had given up philosophy, her first love, because both her parents and her uncle felt she would not be able to make a proper living with it. Sometimes she regretted it. Sor was doing graduate work at NYU in English, and doing research for his thesis: Becket and Joyce: Carvers of the New Wood. She had felt comfortable with Sor from the moment he met her at another graduate student’s walk-up apartment on the Lower East Side. Her mother always told her that when she met the right man she’d know; she’d feel at ease and comfortable with him, she’d be able to be herself. She had felt that way with Sor as soon as she met him.
For a long time they were just friends. She had begun to wonder if he didn’t find her sexually attractive because they went out for several weeks and he seemed content to just talk. It had bothered her, but still she felt good in his company. She felt it was just his way of going about things. Maybe he felt playing the aloof lover would be more effective. But it wasn’t a pose. She had felt, thought, sensed—no, knew—that he was a passionate man, that under his almost disinterested demeanor resided a very sexual man. And so it was, as she would finally find out later.
Eventually, she and Sor rented a studio apartment. Sometime after that, he passed a bit of paper to her in the New York Public Library—the main library on Fifth Avenue with the two sculpted lions in the front named Patience and Fortitude. “Would you like to go on a very long journey with me?” it said. That was a long time ago, she thought. Their marriage had lost something. She wasn’t even sure that they still loved each other. Maybe they were living together out of convenience, two old friends supporting each other, being there for each other, without the excitement of sex, their flesh no longer filled with desire. Ever since Daniel’s death, that part of their lives had come to a standstill. She figured it was all right; Sor never complained. Maybe everything was all right.
When she went to bed, she found herself thinking about the fragrance she smelled on Sor. It was nothing, she thought.
EIGHTEEN
Sor and Marguerite became love’s addicts. They met whenever, wherever they could. They had lunch almost every day; they brought their lunch from home so that they could drive off campus and park somewhere and eat their lunches in each other’s car. Sometimes, when they could not avoid it, they ate in the school’s main dining hall, something they had both considered a bad idea when they first started seeing each other, knowing it could lead to gossip and rumors. They tried to meet after their classes those days when they were on the campus before going home—they had to get their last kiss, their last embrace, their last lover’s glance. They met in their cars in parking lots, on quiet streets, next to playgrounds, anywhere that offered them a few moments of pri
vacy.
Sor became so reckless that on several occasions he invited Marguerite to his office after their late classes, when most of the faculty and cleaning crew were gone. The blinds down, they would relinquish themselves to their passions. Sor would shut off the glaring fluorescent lights in his office, lock the door, and the two of them would make love on the floor behind his desk.
They e-mailed and phoned each other every chance they got. Their letters to each other were filled with passionate, personal, sometimes erotic confessions. Lust, love—whatever name the force that drove them went under—ruled their lives.
Sor spent almost every Tuesday morning at Marguerite’s home. Conveniently for them, Edgar went away on one of his business trips to Jacksonville or Tallahassee almost every week, spending Mondays and Tuesdays away from home, thus opening the door for Sor.
On their Tuesdays together, Marguerite and Sor spoke a lot about art when they relaxed in her studio after they had made love. Their little after-sex conversations were their dessert, she would tell Sor. She found his opinions about art and her own work to be quite incisive and valuable. Because of Sor, she thought her work had risen to another level. She recognized in her latest works that finally, what she painted was coming from her, and was the product of Marguerite Spares. One could not confuse her works with that of another artist, or find traces of the influences of those she studied under, or those whose works she had copied in museums when she was a student. What she painted now came from her, belonged to her spirit, soul, eyes, hands.
She also felt Sor was partly responsible for her shift from watercolors to oils. It was quite a drastic change, considering how much she had abhorred working with oils when Sor met her. She started working with them three weeks into their relationship. She could not describe what brought about the change. It just came to her, out of the blue, one morning on her way to work, like an epiphany, and in the afternoon she was buying oil paints and canvases. Even the idea for her first oil painting was, as far as she was concerned, a little miracle. It was as if the canvas were waiting for her brush, and what she would paint was waiting for her. Sor often used this as an excuse to point out how important it was for them to be together, since his presence in her life was obviously the catalyst that was providing her with her new creative and artistic growth. He was her muse, he told her.
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