Jasmine

ONE

“Hello Sor.” That’s what started it. Maybe the way she said it. Maybe the way she wrapped his name around her tongue, the way it swam in the warmth of her mouth before coming out, the way it slid into his ears, like a deliciously sounding mantra, as if she were happy, as if she were ecstatic to see him. If he could catch and solidify the sound, it would be like fine silk, like honey. At first he didn’t know whose voice it was. It was familiar, but he couldn’t pin the voice to a face or body.

Hello Sor. It had come to him from the opposite side of the revolving door of the Bernhardt School of Engineering building. He was going to the library on the other side of the campus to do some additional research on Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground, which he would be lecturing on in a few days in one of his classes. He often used the building as a shortcut to the library.

Several members of the faculty were leaving through the revolving door when he got there. He stood back to let them through. She was part of the group. Sor figured they must have had a meeting in one of the conference rooms on the fourth floor—sometimes the other colleges used them for meetings. Maybe they were part of the task force that was looking into student retention; too many freshmen were leaving after their first semester, and there was an even greater exodus at the end of the school year.

When she came out of the building—she was the last person in the group to come out—she was smiling, her full, deliciously red lips slightly parted, revealing her flawlessly arranged teeth, her thick reddish hair loosened and alive with curls. It was Marguerite. Marguerite Spares.

Sor had met her several months before at Julian Plum’s birthday dinner at a restaurant in Boca Raton. Plum was one of Sor’s closest acquaintances at the university. Like Sor, he also taught literature, but mostly upper-level classes. His concentration was nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century Russian literature. He was considered a Dostoevsky expert. Often, during Sor’s office hours, Plum would drop by to discuss some new insight he had on a work he was teaching, or the latest research paper he was working on for one of the journals that periodically published his papers. Sor loved their discussions. They made him feel intellectually alive. Their discourse reminded him why he loved academia as much as he did. Why it was the only life he cared for.

Marguerite taught art history to first-year students and was herself a painter, she had told him, a watercolorist. She had a studio in her home. That evening in the restaurant when they spoke, she was preparing for an exhibition of her works—her first—at a gallery in Miami. Julian had introduced Sor to Marguerite; he had known her since college. “Sit together,” Julian had told them. “You’ll find each other interesting.”

Marguerite was dressed in a long green dress of a very light material. Although it was loose fitting, it accentuated rather than concealed the curves of her body, especially her breasts, thanks to the red belt tightly clasping her tiny waist. Her full lips were dressed up in a glossy, red lipstick. Her shoes—Sor noticed them as they walked to their table—were more like sandals, backless, with straps. They revealed her stocking-less feet, and toenails with the same color polish as her lipstick. Sor liked her hair, a reddish-coppery color, thick and curly. She wore it loose. He didn’t even mind the small birthmark on the right side of her neck. But it was her smile, her laugh, her easy, spontaneous demeanor that immediately attracted him to her. And there was something about her walk. He likened it to a light, flirtatious dance, and formed in his head the idea that she could lift off the ground at any moment and fly away.

Julian was right. Sor not only found Marguerite interesting, but he immediately felt comfortable in her company. Conversation came easily to them, as if they were old friends. They talked and laughed freely. They were so wrapped up with each other it was as if they were sitting at their own private table. Neither of them knew the person sitting next to them, and, almost rudely, ignored them. The only time they stopped talking to each other was when Julian opened his gifts and gave a short speech. Then the waiter brought a small cake to the table, a single candle stuck in its center, and joined by the other waiters, sang Happy Birthday. Plum, in his unhurried manner, blew out the flickering flame.

Marguerite got very excited when Sor asked her about the work she did as a watercolorist. She spoke at length about her upcoming exhibit and the paintings she would be showing. The show would be made up mostly of Florida landscapes, and quite a few seascapes. There would also be some still life, she said, the usual vase with flowers, bowls of fruit, and one, which she loved, that showed her chair and desk in her studio, with her gardening hat—a straw hat she’d bought in Haiti many years ago—on the seat of the chair, a yellow hibiscus flower lying next to it. She got even more excited when she described what she considered her largest and best work: her two boys sitting on the grass under the gumbo limbo tree outside her studio window. “Ah, my boys,” she had said, after describing the painting, “they’re a lot of work, but they keep me focused and in place. Without them, my life might be quite different.”