The Coming of Bright (15 page)

Focus wouldn’t come, nor would the flow of blood in her veins subside.

He returned, wheeling in a stainless steel tray table, the kind they use to deliver room service in starry hotels, complete with a white linen cloth draped over the tray. He was missing only the tux and the obsequious manner. She half-expected to see something there from the menu of
The French Laundry
, some terrine of gingered melon to get the tastebuds freshened, then some sherry-braised sirloin of rabbit for its savory charms, finishing with a dish of custard from the eggs of Jidori hens—with just enough fermented candied cod roe on top for the necessary
umami
.

But no—no food at all. A set of glass bottles, filled with liquids, starting with two bottles of tequila on one end of the tray. Gran Patrón Platinum and Ultra Premium Tequila Ley .925 Pasión Azteca. Next to these, continuing the theme of the blue agave plant, was a bottle of the nectar of this botanical
oro azul
, a nectar sweeter than honey and smoother than milk. Finally came the oils, ten of them, each in its own little bottle: Oil of Peppermint, Oil of Myrrh, Oil of Sandalwood, Oil of Lemongrass, Oil of Chamomile, Oil of Jojoba, Oil of Rosewood, Oil of Vanilla, Oil of Lavender, Oil of Bergamot.

For mixing his latest erotic elixir, Victor had a carafe of Baccarat crystal and matching stirrer. Zora turned her head to the left, rested her cheek with soft curiosity on the pillow to watch him work. She wore a smile on her face of impish reveries. She was starting to fancy him an alchemist, in the pantheon of the alchemists of yore, long-dead tinkerers with the mysteries of matter. Men with mysterious, ponderous names like Hermes Trimegistus and Albertus Magnus.

In the same way that they had searched for the
prima materia
, the quintessence of the physical world, Victor was searching for the
prima erotica
. And his was no pure dream as was theirs, no pseudo-scientific quest: Zora had every expectation that Victor the Alchemist, with her body and soul as the stuff of his experiments, could achieve his goal. Could find at long last, in her and through her, the
prima erotica
.

He filled the carafe half full of the Gran Patrón. It would be the base of his golden concoction. He poured in a lesser amount of the Pasión Azteca for good reason: the second bottle had cost him over $200,000, and he reserved it for special occasions like this one. This occasion was more special than most, by several orders of magnitude, and his hand in its excitement furnished the carafe with more of the Pasión than he had ever used before. By several orders of magnitude.

Along came the trickling treacle of the blue agave nectar, to give the tongue the sweetness it desired. With a dropper he extracted the oils and added them to the sweetened tequila blend, needing only a few drops of each to impart the essential flavor of the plant from which it had come. Some of the most magnificent distillations that Mother Nature had to offer. He gave the elixir a few firm crystalline stirs to get everything mingling.

From the back of the tray table, he lifted up the linen, revealing another lower tray obscured from Zora’s view. She appeared to be mesmerized by his mad-scientist, randy-alchemist routine. Not to mention the fact she hadn’t yet fully recovered from having her brain robbed of oxygen, ever so slightly, ever so delectably, by his life-and-death hands.

He lifted the contents of the lower tray onto the top tray, where the only response they could possibly elicit from her was a giggle. Facing her was an ivory bowl with two brushes protruding from it by their ivory handles.

The bowl itself was not giggle-worthy. It was about 8 inches in diameter, carved from a section of mammoth tusk. Zora might not have cared that the piece was incredibly valuable, had come from one of the largest mammoth tusks ever discovered, the find of a lifetime for Siberia’s Yakut herdsmen. What got her giggling were the 6-inch brush handles, a twin set of Japanese ivory. The bowl itself had been carved in Canton in the 1920’s. Victor had acquired the bowl and brushes separately.

One of the brush handles was a pair of bare geisha legs pressed together, sultry feminine legs, seamless, culminating at the narrower end in feet pointing along the line of the legs. Exactly like the legs of a diver entering the glassy waters of a hidden grotto. The toenails were painted cherry blossom.

The other brush handle, to put it bluntly, and bluntly is really the only way to put it, was carved in the shape of a rather bulbous penis. Unlike the first handle, the penis didn’t diminish in width along the shaft, it didn’t exhibit the converging grace of the feminine, but rather grew in girth down the length of the handle. Bulging all the way to the firm rounded end. The brush fibers themselves were sable hair from wild-caught animals on Hokkaido, a burnt orange color and sexy soft, softer even than the pubic hairs they were there to represent.

“Let’s start with our lips.”

Victor handed Zora the penis brush—she tittered holding it—while he took the geisha legs in his hand. From the crystal carafe he poured enough of the alchemy-infused tequila to fill the bowl about halfway. He wetted the sable bristles of his brush with the perfumed sweetened alcohol. And tickled Zora’s lips with the dampened animal hair. Quite the ticklish one, on her lips and in certain other choice places, she squirmed. Tittered again. Licked her lips.

Up until then she could only have guessed what the blood of the gods tasted like. Somehow Victor—an ivory knife, perhaps?—had opened the neck vein of Jupiter and poured for her, brushed onto her lips, the
élan vital
of the king of the Roman gods. What did it matter to long-dead Romans if a little of Jupiter’s blood went missing?

“Delicious, right? My very own recipe. Next time let me lick it off for you, and you for me.”

Victor dipped the brush again into the ivory bowl, varnished Zora’s lips with the drippings of sable fur. She did the same for him. They brought their lips together, tasting for a split second the divine blood before tasting the equally perfumed, equally sweet, essence of each other.

This ritual, this alchemy, this experiment to search out, to pinpoint, the
prima erotica
, would end differently than the previous ones. Yet it began in much the same way. Victor slid off her clothes, letting them lie where they fell. His tongue was clean, and so were his floors. She lay there on the couch, nude and sculpted, a Michelangelo dream.

“Your turn.”

He presented himself to her, invited her to let her hands play over his clothing, velvet or vicious, her choice. She raised herself up halfway, the light of mischief back on her face. She had chosen the latter. Revenge for the ecstasy of the neck.

So much for his blue Charvet dress shirt from Bergdorf Goodman, Victor had been a bad, bad man, she ripped with full force at both sides of the shirt, tearing it open, buttons flying. Off it came, so much torque radiating from her arms that he spun around and almost fell over again.

She stood, put herself in front of him, a dazed look on his face from her violence. She shoved him back, very hard. He fell seated onto the couch, the weight of his whiplashed body enough to actually lift the front of the couch into the air by several inches, pushing its back into the wall. The back of his head hit the wall, denting the drywall, stunning him momentarily. The bump wouldn’t form for another few minutes.

Seized by a rage for desire, or a desire for rage—the two things indistinguishable in that moment—she flung off his pants. Almost getting herself kicked in the face by his flailing legs. She forced open the zipper with such savagery that the fabric below the zipper tore a good inch down. She tossed the pants across the room, caring not one iota for the condition of the Burberry Prorsum herringbone trousers from Barneys New York. She didn’t even care whether he had a good tailor. All she wanted to see now was skin.

Paying attention, violent attention, to the little things, she tugged off his wristwatch, ripping the black alligator band from the dial in the process. She was rough but thorough. The band could be easily fixed; not so easily fixed was the cracked face of the dial after it hit the granite kitchen floor. Still Victor would have to try: he wasn’t going to let a Conquistador Tourbillon GPG go to waste, a watch he’d picked up on a trip to Geneva for a conference on international law. A mere 80,000 francs.

Undressing him had burned more than a few calories, and racked up more than a few dollars in tailoring and watch-repair costs. Zora fell back onto the couch with abandon, exhausted. Victor felt almost as ravaged as his attire. It’s fair to say the sharkskin on the couch hadn’t seen so much violence since it was removed from the sharks whose bodies it originally graced. Completely out of breath, the lovers shared a few breaths with each other, or at any rate that’s how it appeared from the way they inhaled as they kissed. Kissing revitalized them.

Victor stood. With a fraction of the pressure Zora had used to shove him onto the couch, he grasped her shoulders and moved her into a supine position.

“I’ll start.”

He grabbed the geisha brush from the bowl where it had been resting, in sable repose. He transformed himself from an alchemist of the erotic to an artist of lust. Time and again he went back and forth from the bowl to her body, brushing her skin with the eager bristles, imparting his alchemical elixir to her flesh with its delicate little bumps and delicate little hairs. Each time he used his lips and tongue to clean up after himself, to drink of the heavenly blood, to stimulate her skin and her nerves and her spine.

All the hairs on her body might have been delicate, but not all were little. When he meandered a certain distance below her belly button, not too far below, he got to a proud waving field of hair. The way a field of wheat would look in twilight. The bristles guided by his hand, and the bristles between her legs, brushed against each other in a perfect symmetry of hair, beckoning to his mouth to join them. He hardly needed an invitation. Still he waited to kiss with his mouth the part of her flesh unkissed by her own hair, her vulva in its true nakedness.

He went lower, bypassing for now the pink skin ringed by the field of hair—the same hair he’d just infused with his tequila elixir and then licked clean. He’d return there in due time, give that place the attention it deserved. He moved down the front of one of her legs, around one foot and then the other, up the front of the other leg. He turned her over, with the antithesis of violence, started the process anew at the back of her neck, down her back, the small of her back, his kisses and licks felt as sensual to him as they did to her—against the rounded cushioned fruitfulness of her buttocks. He made sure to give the backs of her legs a full proper measure of devotion.

To reach the climactic point in the story of her body, Victor took to heart, to tongue, the maxim of best for last. The finest tequila in the world, and the finest essential oils in the nature, have never been put to better use. Nor applied to a place whose tastes and fragrances were worthy of their own.

Only one thing on earth can surpass the blood of Jupiter: the secret juices of a resplendent woman, sweetened with agave nectar. With every part of his mouth, inside and out, he drank of those juices, suffusing himself with them, physically, animalistically. His lips became as wet as she was, with the same wetness that she possessed. Her pleasure elevated her beyond the earth, his lowered him into the depths of consciousness. He was man and animal at the same time, she was goddess and woman.

He got up, returned his brush to the bowl, handed her the other brush. They switched positions. Zora noticed that Victor was becoming aroused now to fullness, putting the ivory brush handle she was holding to shame. By a good inch, she estimated. That explained the Amedeo Testoni shoes, size 13. She reminded herself to do a side-by-side comparison, scientifically of course, brush and Victor, Victor and brush. When the moment was ripe. After she’d furthered along his arousal with the end of the brush and the tip of her tongue.

Which she commenced to do, starting with the front of his neck, following his lead, the contours of his body, in the same manner he had shown devotion to hers. She kissed and licked her way around the front of his body, kissing more than licking. For sensual reasons—she simply found kissing more erotic than licking. And for practical ones—kissing was less likely to uproot any of his auburn body hairs.

Profound kisses with a hint of tongue, kisses that showed worship of soul beneath skin. Victor would end up with more of the elixir on his body that way. A fine excuse to bathe again, another watery embrace, after the physicality of their evening had exhausted itself, had exhausted them.

She flipped him over as he had done her—she had already proven she could be firm when she needed to be. She had tempered the violence of the unclothing of Victor, but not by much. From the nape of his neck all the way down to the lower curve of his buttocks, she added a little extra tongue to the play of her mouth.

Her artistry was more interpretive than his, more emotionally nuanced, more impressionistic. More Monet, less Rembrandt. Moving her way around his feet, she refined with her palette their delicacy but also their muscularity. He was not a working man, a man of physical toil. He was a man who led a life of the mind, of books and high-flown ideas. Far from the sound and fury of tools.