and you're absolutely vital to my sanity, but things have gotten too familiar between us. We've been together so long that there are no surprises left."
"What a terribly cynical thing to say."
"It's not you. It's nothing you've done. I just need something to desire. Desire is the only thing that will wake me up, I think."
"Is this your way of letting me know that you're thinking of having an affair?"
"No. God, no. Are you kidding? I'd never—"
"Well, what do you expect me to think when you talk about needing something to desire? If you don't desire me anymore then what will you find to desire."
"I'm not saying that I don't desire you. It's just not the.. I don't know. I'm just thinking out loud, I guess." He realizes that his words have not been well thought out, and that, even though everything he has said was true, her conclusions were sound, and he knows that if she had said the same thing to him, he would also suspect something worrying under the surface.
"What do you expect me to do with all this?"
"What do you mean?"
"Should I be worried about us?"
"No, please. I just... You're probably right. It's probably just Gary. It's shaken everything up for me. That's all."
"Do you think maybe you should see someone?"
"A psychologist?" he asks. This is typical Rachael. He's trying to talk to her about all of this in an honest way, and, even though some of it may be difficult for her to hear, he is talking things out with her. But instead of listening to him, she throws accusations at him until he realizes that he can't talk to her honestly. Then she tries to push him toward someone he might talk to instead.
"Yeah," she says.
"No, I'll be fine," he says, but he knows he won't be fine. Really, he knows that she has every right to worry. Jacob knows that he is on the precipice, and he will take the first opportunity to jump. And he knows that if he doesn't take the opportunity to jump, then he will never remember what it was like to fall again, and the falling is the only thing that will give the poetry back to him, the only thing that will bring back that old joy, that old desire to fall further and further.
Jacob's last collection of poetry was released three years ago, and has sustained modest sales ever since. But he knows it was a disappointment to his small band of readers. And he's been watching his readers thin out a little more with every new volume that doesn't measure up to Imeros, and none of them have come close to measuring up.
For a long time, he convinced himself that his new work was just as important as Imeros. He rationalized not having that old magic, that feeling that something was pushing the poems out of him. He would tell himself that it was because things weren't as new as they were during Imeros, that he had become a more practiced poet, and that with practice any profession loses some of its magic. He spent enough time making excuses for his new work that he began to believe his own spin. But there was always that nagging feeling that he had already peaked, and that he might never get that high again.
During Imeros, every stanza was effortless. Lines would come to him in the middle of the night. He can remember nights when he would sit up in that half-sleep state and feel around for the pen and paper by his bed, and frantically scrawl letters into the darkness. He can still remember the joy of finding the wonder of those words, wobbled and winding across the paper when he woke in the morning. Whole phrases seemed to fall from the trees during the day. He would trip over alliterations on late night walks. Pieces of poems would sprout up from the ground and bloom as he sat to record them. Things like this were happening everywhere and he had trouble keeping up with the words, grabbing great handfuls of inspiration whenever he could, like some abundant fruit.
But he took it for granted. He was only twenty-four years old and assumed things would always be that easy. But it hasn't felt that good in twenty years. It has felt like work since Imeros. And he only continues to search because he has known the ecstasy of pure inspiration.
He has been chasing it everyday since.
Not to say that the Imeros period was a happy time. It was anything but. He was devastatingly heartbroken. He had lost Melissa and there was nothing he could do about it. The poems seemed to grow from the sense of helplessness he felt—the desperation that starts off quiet and cagey, and then, eventually, starts to speak more lucidly.
He's spent twenty years trying to get that intensity back, and there has been moments when he thought he would happily take all the pain again just to have his muse back, just to feel something a little more dangerous than the benign emotional life he leads now.
He is sitting on the edge of his desk looking out the window, nervously bouncing a pen on his knee. Rachael is gone. She is probably somewhere on campus, probably in her office. She works better at work. Jacob has always worked better at home, until recently, when he can't seem to work anywhere at all.
The early evening light has begun to fade. It will be dark soon, and he recognizes that if he wants to take Sam, he and Rachael's Boston Terrier, for his usual evening walk then this is the time to do it.
There is a girl moving in across the street, and he has spent the better part of the last thirty minutes watching her. When he first saw her, it was like seeing Melissa all over again. She has the same hair that Melissa had all those years ago: long, straight, and dark. She's tall like Melissa, and moves with that same confident stride. It was like watching Melissa coming unfrozen in time. Twenty years has passed since last he saw her, and yet there she was, young and happy—just as he remembers her.
Once he is outside in the evening air, the subtle scent of the near-emerging blooms on the magnolia tree reminds him again that it is spring. The warmth still feels new and injects some hope into his thoughts. It had been a long winter—particularly because he has been so blocked up creatively.
He takes a deep breath and walks to the end of the block before turning back up the other side of the street to get a closer look at this new girl.
First, though, he sees Brad, a grad student from the English dept., and an acquaintance of Jacob's.
"Brad, hey, are you moving in?"
"Yeah, you live in this neighborhood?" Brad asks, surprised to see Jacob.
"Yeah, I'm right there, just across the street," Jacob says, pointing at his house.
"Wow. I had no idea. What a happy coincidence."
The girl, wearing short shorts and one of those baggy college sweatshirts, comes out of the house.
"Honey, this is our new neighbor, Jacob Schorr, he's the poet—"
"I know who he is," she says, smiling at Jacob.
"This is my fiancée, Joelle."
"Joelle? What a wonderful name."
"Thank you," she says, beaming. Her face is perfect, radiant. And when she smiles it feels like a light switches on inside Jacob. He can feel his whole body brighten just by standing in her proximity.
"Well, it looks like you guys still have some moving to do. I'll leave you to it. I'm sure I'll be seeing you around."
"You bet," Brad says.
"It was nice to meet you, Joelle," he says.
She looks at him with her muddy eyes, and smiles again. She says something, but he misses the words. She has bent down to pat Sam on the head, and Jacob can hardly keep his eyes off of her long, tan legs. She looks so much like his memory of Melissa that he can hardly catch his breath as he moves away. His heart is racing, and he can feel the blood rushing to his head. His thoughts are so cloudy that all he can do is repeat her name, Joelle, over and over again like some song—the kind of song you know you just won't manage to get out of your mind even if you wanted to.
He doesn't want to.
That night, on the couch watching television, he still couldn't concentrate, couldn't keep his attention on whatever facile program he was watching. Rachael is sitting beside him reading a book, but he might as well be a thousand miles away from her. All he can think about is Joelle and what David had said to him earl
ier. Maybe David was right to say that Jacob needed a muse. And though Jacob was hesitant to accept the terminology, it is inescapable that Jacob needs something to push him back in the direction of Imeros. If the poems in Imeros were sparked by a great love affair, then it would seem to follow that the potential for another great love affair could open up that world to him again.
In fact, Jacob inherently knew that David was right. He did need a muse. But he is also not twenty-four anymore. He is an older man now. Joelle is probably half his age. She certainly looks like it.
She'd said she knew who he was, and he assumes that this means that she knew he was a poet, and maybe, even, it means that she has read Imeros. If she has read Imeros, then she's probably built up an idea of him as the tortured, romantic poet. But he knows that he could hardly act out that myth at this point in his life, not even a little bit. He doesn't feel that he even resembles a shadow of the poet he once was, though he certainly was once tortured.
Just as well, too, because he doesn't have the heart to take advantage of some young ingenue. Of course, he's had ample opportunities. There have been many girls through the years who have openly made their attractions known to Jacob, but he has dutifully ignored them all without reservation.
He loves Rachael. She saved him at a point in his life when he could hardly know he needed saving. After Melissa, he didn't believe there would ever be anything as intense again in his whole life. He