Jasmine

by Winston Aarons

  Sor connected these changes in Marguerite with his outpouring of love two weeks before, yet he did not want to believe that she was deliberately distancing herself from him because of what he had said. After all, they had had a wonderful morning together. She had loved him spiritedly, hungrily, afterwards. And they did have their usual Tuesday rendezvous the following week. He told himself that it would be irrational of him to believe she would not have days when she would not be able to see him.

  By ten-thirty Marguerite had still not shown up. Sor called her cell. No answer. He then called her home number, which he did only when he knew Edgar was away on business and her boys were at school. She answered the phone with a low, cold hello.

  “What’s the matter, Marguerite? Why aren’t you here?” Sor asked.

  “I’m not feeling well, Sor,” she answered. “Maybe I just need to stay home for the day. I’ll be fine tomorrow. I also want to concentrate on a painting I’m working on. I feel inspired.”

  Sor did not find her answer satisfactory. He felt it was out of character, that she wasn’t saying what was really on her mind.

  “I wish you had told me how you felt when I spoke to you this morning before I set out for the hotel. I wouldn’t have booked the room.”

  “I’m very sorry, Sor,” she replied, cutting him off. “I’m in a strange mood today. I just want to be left alone. I’ll e-mail you later. I don’t want to talk at the moment. I’m sorry for everything. I’ll be canceling my class, so don’t look for me on campus. I promise you, I’ll write to you later.”

  Sor left the hotel with the sweating bottle of champagne in his hand. She must be upset about something. Maybe something with one of her boys. Or with Edgar. Maybe, as she said on the phone, she wasn’t feeling good. Maybe she was upset that she could not dedicate herself to her painting, especially now that she was so productive. Sor remembered she had told him that her dream in life was to someday concentrate solely on her painting.

  When he got to his car he did not know where to go, what to do. He could go to the university. He had a lot of preparations to do for his classes—make up exam questions, answer e-mails, mark the essay papers he had promised the students they would get that week. An important faculty meeting was scheduled for twelve o’clock that day in Grange Hall. In his e-mail announcing the meeting, Dean Solomon had stressed that he expected all full-time faculty to be there. Sor would not attend, not in his present state of mind. He would not go to the university.

  Instead, he drove east toward the ocean, stopping at a small French pastry shop near Mizner Park that he used to frequent for lunch before he met Marguerite. He didn’t take Marguerite there because Marie, the owner of the shop, knew Jasmine. Jasmine liked French pastry, and often on a Saturday, they would stop there for coffee and one of Marie’s chocolate Napoleons or blueberry tarts, Jasmine’s favorite.

  Sor ordered a raisin Danish and a cup of coffee. Sitting at one of the tables outside, he thought about the way Marguerite had sounded on the phone. Suddenly, some powerful impulse overcame him. He got up from the table, and without taking his empty plate and cup inside as he usually did, walked to his car.

  The drive to Marguerite’s house was a blur. What was she doing to him? Why this sudden shift? He didn’t like that. He liked people who were honest, forthright. He liked to be told the truth—however damaging it might be, he could handle it. He preferred that to deceptions.

  He parked in the driveway when he got there and walked toward the front door. It was some time after he rang the bell before she opened it. She was in the studio painting, he decided, and had to stop what she was doing, wash her hands, and put herself in order.

  “Sor, what are you doing here?” she said. She sounded confused, upset, and a little frightened.

  She was wearing one of the loose housedresses she used to wear when they still met at her house. He knew it wasn’t what she would wear when she was painting. Her dresses would be ruined.

  “I had to see you, Marguerite,” Sor said. “I want to know what’s going on. You are behaving strangely. Something’s wrong. For Christ’s sake tell me what it is.”

  “I told you I wanted to be left alone,” she said, holding the door against her as if she had no intention of letting him in. “I told you on the phone I would e-mail you later. I can’t see you, Sor, not now.” Her voice was decisive and firm.

  “But we must speak, Marguerite. We must speak now,” Sor implored, trying as best he could to camouflage the anger that was rising up in him. “I can’t live like this. I need an explanation. I have to know why you don’t answer my calls, why you have me waiting in a hotel room without a phone call, without letting me know why you can’t join me. I don’t understand the sudden change in your behavior. You owe me an explanation. Damn it Marguerite, you can’t treat me like this. I deserve an explanation.”

  “I have a visitor, Sor,” she said. “That’s why I cannot see you now. Please try and understand.”

  Aunt Rachel, Sor thought. But her aunt’s Volkswagen wasn’t in the driveway. “Who is it?” Sor demanded.

  “An old friend I went to college with,” she said. “I can’t introduce you. You know that,” she said pleadingly, almost in a whisper. “Please, Sor, please try to understand. I will e-mail you later.”

  Sor, one hand against the door, felt like pushing Marguerite out of the way to see who was inside the house.

  “Okay,” he said, “I’ll go. But I expect to hear from you soon. I expect an explanation. I have to know where I stand.”

  Sor wished he were the type that could force his way into her house. He wanted to. He wanted to know who she was seeing. But he had not become that irrational—yet.

  Marguerite waved to him from the door as he pulled out of the driveway. She was smiling. She seemed herself again. This made Sor even more confused. Why, now that he was leaving, had she slipped into her old self, the old Marguerite he loved?

  Sor was almost at the end of Marguerite’s block when another impulse grabbed hold of him. He had to see who her visitor was. He turned the car around and parked on the side of the road, about two hundred yards from the entrance to Marguerite’s house. He’d wait and see who came out. Whoever it was that was visiting, he thought, must have parked their car in the garage.

  Sor had students’ papers in his bag that he could grade while he waited, but he was too wound up by Marguerite’s strange behavior to even consider it. Plus he wanted to keep his eyes on Marguerite’s driveway. He attempted to read the biography of Pushkin he had borrowed from the school’s library but couldn’t concentrate. He closed the book after reading a few paragraphs.

  While he waited, Sor remembered the dream he had had a few nights before—Christ, what was the cause of all these dreams he’d been having of late? What did they mean? They were all about falling, falling helplessly as he plummeted downward off cliffs, skyscrapers, into bottomless ravines, like falling into the Grand Canyon without ever reaching its craggy rock-strewn bottom, he continued falling, falling, falling. In another dream he was in an elevator that kept going down, down at a tremendous speed, and he sensed within the dream it would never stop, there was no basement to stop it. Most of the dreams he could remember only vaguely, but this particular dream he remembered in its entirety. He had written it down in his journal. It’s a habit he had picked up from a Jungian psychologist friend in New York. “Dreams are important,” he had explained to Sor. “Write them down. Think about them. Their meaning will come to you.”

  In his latest dream, Sor is in a car. He is not driving. He is a passenger in the back seat. He does not see a steering wheel or the driver of the car. The car is going down a steep incline at a tremendous speed over an unpaved, rocky road. He keeps looking back as the car plunges downward. He is frightened. But what makes him most afraid is his helplessness. There is nothing he can do to extricate himself from his predicame
nt. He is a helpless occupant in a doomed vehicle. The dream then makes a sudden shift. He is now pinned down in his bed in his apartment. It is as if he is awake, but he is unable to move. He feels Jasmine’s body next to him, pressed closely to his. It’s as if a great force, a tremendous weight was pressing down on him, preventing him from moving. He sees everything in the room, the chair with the black and white zebra-like upholstery near the door leading into the living room—one of Jasmine’s panties is slung over the arm, something she would never do—and the small table next to it with the yellow lamp and a photograph with him and Jasmine, happy, smiling, taken in some Caribbean island they visited five years before. But his gaze is stuck to that one perspective, he cannot move his head or shift his vision. He cannot see anything else. He tries desperately to move but he cannot. He screams in his sleep, waking Jasmine. He wakes up frightened, his heart racing, pounding.

  What do they mean? he asked himself. Why am I having such dreams? Looking back, he realized he started having them when he began sensing that Marguerite was acting coolly toward him.

  A car backed into the street from Marguerite’s driveway. It was a silver Mustang convertible. It swung into the road and turned in the direction of Sor’s car. Sor brought the Pushkin biography up to his face, as if he were reading, and looked over the top of the book as the car went by.

  Sor recognized the driver.

  It was Julian Plum.

  TWENTY-ONE

  “Julian, you bastard,” Sor shouted out in his car. He felt as if a piece of his world was torn violently away from under him, as if it had shifted drastically on its axis and suddenly become unstable. The next moment he was caught on the crest of an enormous wave and, teetering there, could feel its churning force beneath him. Would he be borne down gently onto shore, or would he be pitched violently, as if carried by a typhoon, onto a rocky beach?

  He wanted to go back to Marguerite’s house and ring the front bell again and demand an explanation from her, but he knew he couldn’t. He’d have to wait for her e-mail. Maybe she’ll mention Plum, he thought. Plum is an old friend. They went to the same university. She told him that Plum also helped get her the job at the college. But why did she lie? She knows that I know Plum. Why did she lie?

  Sor knew he would not be able to teach that afternoon. He was already emotionally devastated after Marguerite didn’t show up at the hotel that morning. But what really crippled him, shattered his day, dismantled him as a man, was when he saw Julian Plum leaving Marguerite’s house. The emotions that came over him and ran amok in his being—many of them he had never felt before—left him confused, drained, incapacitated, feeling desire and distrust simultaneously. A part of Sor was telling him to walk away from Marguerite, another part was telling him to stay. He knew he could not stand in front of a class with so many conflicting, troubling thoughts running through his mind.

  When Sor got home he called the English Department and told the department’s secretary, Carmen, that he could not make it to his two-thirty class, and would she please place a cancellation notice on the classroom door. He told Carmen he had a flood in his apartment from a burst pipe and was waiting for the repair people to come and fix it. Sor was one of Carmen’s favorites in the department. She told him that Dean Solomon was disappointed he had missed the noon meeting, and that Solomon had sent him an e-mail to that effect. She also told him that some students had complained to Solomon about Sor, and that when they left his office, Solomon was openly furious about the incident. She wanted to warn Sor, so that he would not be too surprised if Solomon called him to his office. Sor thanked her.

  He did not expect to get Marguerite’s e-mail until after ten that night. It was one-thirty. It would be eight hours before he heard from her. He could not stand it, waiting, thinking about Marguerite and Plum together. He’d have to go somewhere, do something, leave the apartment for a few hours.

  He changed and drove to the beach road. He put three hours worth of coins in the meter and walked onto the beach. For a few minutes he sat on the log where he and Jasmine sat when they took their beach walk together on the weekends, but then decided to walk along the shore, skirting the waves in his bare feet. Sometimes a large wave came in so fast, he could not get out of its way in time. The water was cool on his ankles and feet.

  The beach was strewn with clumps of seaweed. They were still fresh, as if they were just uprooted from the ocean’s floor, not yet discolored by the sun. He picked up a small clump. It was the color of Marguerite’s hair, he thought, rust-red.

  Sor walked and walked. He came across a black sandal, half concealed under seaweed. It was made up of straps like Marguerite’s red ones. He picked it up. It was about her size. Dyed red, he thought, it would fit her feet. “Oh God!” he said quietly to himself, and to the wind and waves, the shoe in his hand. “Why, why are you doing this to me? Why are you punishing me?” He threw the shoe into the surf.

  As he walked on, his thoughts kept going back to Marguerite and Plum. He wasn’t giving her an opportunity to explain. He was being accusatory without having any real proof of misconduct on her part. He didn’t know that she slept with Plum. So why was he thinking she did? This is what jealousy is, he thought. It had crept up on his being, stealthily, like a snake entering a tent in the middle of the night. He now knew how Othello felt, and Pushkin, when he suspected his wife had given herself to another man. It was like a sickness under his skin. He felt like a wild beast caught in a net from which there was no escape. The image of Plum sleeping with Marguerite strapped itself to his pupils. Sor saw them. He saw Plum removing the leopard panties he had bought her. He saw Marguerite touching Plum on his most secret places with her jasmine-scented fingers. He saw them, in his mind’s eye, going at it like apes on her daybed, over and over and over.

  He bent down, scooped up a handful of the ocean, tasted it, splashed it on his face. “Why are you tormenting me, God?” he said to himself, staring up at the cloud-blotched sky.

  Later, when he got to his apartment—he had spent more than two hours on the beach—he changed his clothes and started preparing dinner. He was hardly aware of what he was doing. The whole process seemed surreal, as if he were in a dream, or sleepwalking, all his thoughts focused on one thing only, the devastating image of Julian Plum having sex with Marguerite on her daybed.

  When Jasmine got home she seemed disturbed by something. She didn’t want to talk. She had been acting this way since Saturday evening. Sor asked her what was troubling her, but she pretended she didn’t hear him. They ate in silence and spent the rest of the evening in silence. That was fine with him. His emotions were too scrambled as it was. Still, her silence was unsettling.

  She went to bed without saying goodnight. It’s me, then, he thought. I’m the cause of whatever is annoying her. He wondered if she suspected.

  At ten-fifteen Sor checked his e-mail. There was a long letter from Marguerite. Would it say anything about Julian Plum? Quickly, he printed it out.

  Dear Sor,

  I know I’m causing you pain. I’m sorry for everything that occurred today. I’ll understand if you’re angry. I’d be, too. But try to forgive me. My behavior is the result of the love I have for you, my indecisiveness, my not knowing what to do. I feel like the character in Waiting For Godot. He’s always saying, ‘I’ll go, I’ll stay, I’ll go.’ That’s how I’ve been feeling in the last three weeks. That’s why I didn’t join you today at the Banyan Tree. A part of me tells me to end our relationship. That it’s madness. I couldn’t leave my children for you. I’m also hurting Edgar. Sometimes I think he suspects something. My behavior has been so strange since I met you. I wouldn’t be surprised if he thinks it’s more than just my art that’s bothering me. He’s a good man, Sor. I don’t want to hurt him. You can see why I am torn. Part of me is insisting I should be with you and another part feels guilty for the pain I would be causing Edgar and the boys. I don’t know
what to do.

  When you came to the house, I told you I had a visitor. I wouldn’t tell you who it was. I knew I would make you even more upset if I did. It was Julian Plum. I called him this morning as I struggled with whether I should go to the hotel or not. I spoke with him on the phone for some time. He sensed I was experiencing some type of crisis in my life, and asked if I’d like him to come over. I said yes.

  Please understand, I had to talk with someone. Julian is my best friend. I can trust him. And please believe me, I’m not sleeping with him. Julian is just a friend. I have never slept with him, now or in college. In fact, I don’t think Julian cares much, sexually, for women. I can’t say that he loves men either, though I suspect it. I never asked. I don’t need to be telling you all this, but I can understand you becoming jealous when I tell you he was at my house.

  I told him about us, and how I felt about you, and what you expected from me, and that I was confused. He was surprised to learn that we were seeing each other. He never suspected it. I told him how I had climbed to a new threshold since I met you, and that I’d begun working with oils. He looked at my latest works and said that they were particularly good, and that he wanted to buy one for his house. I told him I thought my art was part of the problem, why I can’t make a decision. I probably just want to be an artist.

  Sometimes I think I’m more child than adult. Sometimes I think, in the end, that what I really want is to be totally free. More and more I think I have the true artist spirit in me. Maybe, deep down, I’m a bohemian at heart, no restrictions, no commitments, no spouses, just absolute freedom to be alone and do my art. Maybe, even if I left Edgar, I don’t know if I would want to be entangled in another relationship again. I don’t know if I would want to be married. I don’t know.

  I’m telling you all these things because it’s my way of sorting things out. It’s why I felt the need to speak with Julian. If I didn’t feel something for you, I would have had no need to discuss us with him.