Jasmine

by Winston Aarons

  “What about feelings?” a student asked—the girl who was always gnawing at her cuticles, or playing with the ends of her bleached-blonde hair. “Doesn’t feeling count, and passion, Professor Avraham?”

  “And what about love?” a timid, quavering male voice asked from the back of the room, without raising his head from whatever he was looking at on his screen, and before Sor could give an answer to the young woman’s question.

  Their minds are all knotted up in their Fruit of the Loom shorts and thongs, entangled with their libidinal needs, he thought. He wanted to tell them that the kind of love and feelings they thought were so important was shit, but instead he walked over to the window before answering them and looked out at the New Mexico landscape.

  It was a year since he had arrived in Albuquerque. He had come to love the treeless hills and mountain ranges, packed up one behind the other. He felt at home in the barren, almost desert-like environment. In some ways he even preferred it to Florida, though he missed the ocean. Still, the New Mexico landscape seemed to fill some genetic hole in his being that wanted the desert, wanted uncluttered, unobstructed, panoramic views. There was no heavy vegetation to shut him in. He felt free. Freer than he had felt for a long time.

  What about feelings? What about love? The students’ questions awakened in Sor thoughts of Marguerite. Not that he needed any outside stimulus to remember her. He still thought about her. Even though he never e-mailed her, or tried to contact her after Edgar’s visit to his office, he still felt, or hoped—some part of him still clung to the idea that they should be together, that one day she would write to him.

  “One should live life passionately, love passionately, and be passionate about everything one does,” Sor said, coming away from the window and facing the class. “Passion comes from loving the things you do. But feelings are another matter. If what we feel could only be curbed, it would be a beautiful thing. But feelings are not based on reason. Feelings can make fools of us, because our feelings are often impulsive, irrational. And because feelings are the antithesis of reason, they can lead a man or woman astray. I am speaking particularly of feelings pertaining to romantic love—I assume that’s what you are referring to. Also…”

  Sor had followed Dean Solomon’s advice. He was less experimental with his teaching methods, at least with freshmen. He didn’t destroy the university’s property anymore to get a point across. But he still did things in the classroom that students probably considered eccentric and a little manic, especially those who were in his class for the first time and were not used to his teaching style.

  Along with sticking out his tongue to demonstrate the power of language, he once removed his shoes and socks to demonstrate man’s bipedal origins. He showed the class his naked feet, his toes. “Aren’t they primitive looking?” he had asked the students. “Don’t our toes look as if they belonged to some lower primate? Thank God for shoes. When our feet are encased in leather, when we are wearing our Nikes and Cole Haans, how unlike the apes we are, how human, how special.”

  Sor lived a good distance from the university, on the outskirts of Santa Fe. But he didn’t mind the long drive to and from Albuquerque. His house was an adobe structure, old, small, without an air conditioner. He kept his doors shut to keep out snakes. In the back of the house there were numerous potted plants, all jasmines. Through the Internet, he had linked up with fellow jasmine lovers and found out where he could get the different species of jasmine plants locally. Some struggled to survive. Some died. Some, stymied by the climate, refused to bloom. He knew he would probably lose most of them when he brought them inside during the winter months.

  He had a wide variety. He had Spanish jasmine, from which many of the more expensive jasmine-based perfumes were made. He even had a Sambac jasmine, the type that grew in Asia, and a yellow jasmine, which he named Marguerite, even though its flower did not provide much of a scent. One of the plants would always be blooming, filling the house with its fragrance at night. He cared for them like lovers. He spoke softly to them when he watered them, and affectionately fondled their leaves and flowers. When the plant he named Marguerite bloomed, he knelt down and kissed one of the flowers and inhaled its subtle fragrance.

  He had a carpenter build a crude desk for him, which he placed amidst the pots of plants. It was there that he did most of his work during the summer months, marking students’ papers for the summer class he taught, and slowly, diligently, organizing the research material he had gathered for the book he planned to write on folklores associated with jasmine plants and their fragrances. There would be a chapter in which he discussed the commonly held belief that jasmine was an aphrodisiac. He figured he’d have a book ready in a year.

  Sor had by now completely abandoned the novel he had started. It was relegated to the bottom drawer of his filing cabinet. Maybe one day he’d be inspired to finish it, he thought, but he didn’t expect it to be anytime soon. He knew he had Marguerite to thank for the idea for the jasmine book, and without mentioning her name, he would dedicate the book to her. He had already composed the dedication.

  This book is dedicated to the fragrance that once stole my life and took me away from my self. I confess, I have not been the same since. I am speaking of the scent that comes from the jasmine plant, and the woman who introduced me to its fragrance. It is because of her that this book is possible. She is its inspiration, and integral to its creation.

  Inside the house, on top of his bookcase, Sor had numerous bottles, all shapes and sizes with jasmine extracts, diluted and undiluted fragrances squeezed out of jasmine plants from all over the world. Sometimes he would open one of the bottles, smell its contents, moisten the tip of his finger with the scent and rub it on his chest. It brought back memories he cherished. Memories he hated.

  Sor’s life in New Mexico was simple and uncomplicated. It had almost returned to how it was before he met Marguerite. As the months passed, he began to feel comfortable with himself again, unencumbered by the orangutan lust that had usurped his life and thrown him off balance when he was seeing her. He felt as if he had emerged slowly, safely—though not totally unscathed—from their short-lived love affair. “I no longer carry the strong odor of the ape with me,” he told Dick Olephant on the phone. “I think I have safely dispossessed myself of the imbecilic primate. I am almost myself again, Dick. I am almost Sor Avraham.”

  He had met a woman in Santa Fe, Ann Rolands. She ran one of the galleries on Canyon Road, a street famous for its abundance of art galleries in the city. She had just been divorced, and though she said she found herself becoming more and more attracted to Sor, she made it clear to him she did not want a serious relationship. Neither did Sor. He didn’t want to lose focus on his jasmine project. They would have dinners out, and sometimes he cooked for her at his place. They spent time together when they were free and had sex, sometimes at his place, sometimes at hers. Once she had asked about his collection of jasmine plants and the numerous bottles of jasmine perfumes on his bookcases. “You seem to have an obsession with the jasmine plant, Sor, and its fragrances. Is there a reason?” she had asked. Sor did not mention Marguerite. He told her they kept him focused on the book he was writing.

  Sor had not spoken to or e-mailed Julian Plum since his departure from Florida. He felt Julian was too close to Marguerite. He felt, too, that Julian must have known about Marguerite’s relationship with the other man, and her nervous breakdown, and that he should have mentioned it to him. The fact that he had not done so upset him. There was also still some residue of jealousy and suspicion going back to the day when he saw Julian leaving Marguerite’s house. The image of him and Marguerite having sex on Marguerite’s daybed still occasionally popped into his mind, vividly, painfully.

  Dick Olephant was Sor’s sole Florida contact. He informed Sor of what was happening in the university and in his own life. Nothing had changed for him. He was still the same. Still chasing
women. Still feeling used and persecuted by his ex-wife.

  Olephant, of course, couldn’t tell Sor anything about Jasmine. They had never met, and he would have no way of finding out what she had been doing with her life since Sor’s departure. Sor sometimes got the urge to call her, find out how she was doing, and say he was sorry. But he felt she was probably still bitter about their breakup and would not care to speak to him. And he wouldn’t call any member of her family. He had not become very close with any of them. They probably wouldn’t look forward to hearing from him anyway. He thought of her sometimes, fondly. Sometimes he even wondered if they would still be together had Marguerite not come into the picture. But he felt no inclination or desire to go back to her, even if she would have him. The mad, all-encompassing love he had had for Marguerite during the short time they were together had taken care of that, deleting it as an option.

  When Olephant called him on his cell phone one Sunday morning—Sor was repotting one of the jasmine plants, his gloveless hands smeared with potting soil, dirt under his nails—he informed Sor that Marguerite had left Edgar and her two boys for a New York artist she met in Miami, and that they were living together in a loft in Soho that also served as their studio. There was a long silence on the phone as Sor absorbed the news. She had deceived him. What had happened to the great, unshakable love she had for her two boys, Sor thought. They were the main reason why she aborted their relationship. She didn’t want to cause them too much pain, she had said in her letter to him. I can’t leave my boys. How often had he heard that? But he should have known. There was never any mention about her husband. That should have told him that their marriage was not in the best of shape. Sure, she spoke of Edgar as a good man, and that she didn’t want to hurt him, but how often he had seen women abandoning guys like Edgar in the novels and short stories he taught in his literature classes. It was just a matter of time before she would leave him. She’d be through the door as soon as the right man came. He obviously was not that man.

  Olephant had gotten the information from Julian Plum. “Forget her, Sor,” Olephant told him. “You would not have been happy with her. She is too bohemian, and if I may say so, a bit too wild and unpredictable for you. You’d know nothing but pain with her.”

  When he hung up with Olephant, dazed by the news, an anguished look on his face, Sor sat down at the crude desk he had had built at the back of the house, the jasmine plants surrounding him in their terra cotta pots. Some were struggling to survive. One or two were actually blooming, giving off a faint scent—they gave off their fragrance mostly at night, but sometimes, if Sor was close enough to them, he could pick up a hint of their fragrance during the daytime. He’d cut them down to their roots with his pruning scissors, he thought. Fuck it! He’d uproot them and toss them onto the heap of dead leaves and other vegetal debris he had started to collect in a corner of the backyard to use as mulch for the garden he planned on making the following year. But he changed his mind. He would show no violence toward them. He’d let nature take care of them. Let the cold and frost squeeze the life out of them. Kill them. And one by one, he removed each pot and placed them near the mulch heap. The cold would quickly kill them, he thought. When he had finished and was walking away, he thought he detected a faint fragrance following him into the house.

  The next morning, he got a garbage bag from the kitchen and, very slowly, reluctantly—but he knew it had to be done if he was to bring closure to the madness he had experienced with Marguerite—proceeded to remove each vial and bottle from the bookcase. He kept one bottle, the bottle of Spanish jasmine perfume he had bought in Delray Beach on that day when he saw Julian Plum leaving Marguerite’s house, thinking the worse, thinking Julian had fucked her on her daybed. He told himself that he was keeping it not to remind him of her, but to keep him focused on the book he was writing. He removed it from the bookcase and put it on his desk in the small room he had made into an office, next to his computer and piles of research material he had gathered for his book.

  It would be three days before the truck came to collect his garbage. He was miserable in those three days. It seemed like an eternity before it came. On several occasions he felt impelled to retrieve the bottles from the garbage bin. He wanted them back on top of his bookcase. He wanted them back in his house, in his life. But he refused to give in, and was relieved when the truck came. He watched from his window. He heard the crash of the glass bottles when the truck hoisted the contents of his bin into its already tightly packed metallic stomach. When the truck pulled away, he repeatedly whispered to himself, “Goodbye, goodbye,” until he could no longer see it, or hear the whining, grinding sound of the truck as it made its way slowly down the street, house by house.

  He felt a sense of closure as he walked from the window toward his desk in the living room. The researched material, sorted out in neat piles, each pile representing a chapter for his book, beckoned to him from his desk, and on the floor, and on top of the bookcase where he had stored the jasmine fragrances. He could focus on his book now, he thought, unencumbered by thoughts of her.

  The months passed. Sor made great headway with his book. Marguerite was no longer an item of distraction. But still, sometimes at night, while he wrote, and the coyotes howled in the hills, and the wind shook the trees outside his bedroom window, the smell of jasmine (though the plants had all died by then, perished from nocturnal frost and cold) seemed to seep through the window into his study, and he would briefly reflect on the bittersweet time when he loved her.