The Coming of Bright (19 page)

She grinned a big incisor grin. Pale stayed painted on his face.

She didn’t speak for the rest of the night. When the meeting was adjourned, and Victor motioned for her to wait, she ignored him. She rushed instead over to Jack.

“Walk me home, Jack. We need to catch up, and I need to vent.”

She held his hand as they left the room, jackets doffed, their bodies and words showing the mutual affection of the weak. Something stronger than friendship. In the fluorescent light of that room, seeing that bond of sympathy deeper than all of his power could muster, Victor had a greenish tint in his eyes. A look that Shakespeare would have understood, had written about in fact. A fatal flaw of man.

Which doth mock the meat it feeds on.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Zora arrived late to class the next day. She was fuming at herself for showing up at all. She’d wanted to punish Victor, test his fondness, with her absence. But that was like cutting off her nose to—well, you know. She’d rather spite
him
by cutting off—well, you know.

The point was, if she missed one class too many, tested Victor’s forbearance not as a lover but as a teacher, she might get an incomplete in his class. Put her entire legal career in jeopardy. That made her fume even more. Shit. The impossible situation he had put her in. Academically, emotionally, erotically, everything. The prick bastard. She had never met his father, but the figure of speech would have to do.

She made an entrance guaranteed to make him fume. Seating herself next to Jack, she leaned over and kissed him on the cheek. A simple gesture. Arguably the most beautiful gesture in the repertoire of human intimacy. True, Jack was a pawn in the game between her and Victor. Without him there wouldn’t be triangulation, there wouldn’t be envy, there wouldn’t be the deflection of desire. There wouldn’t be love
and
hate, devotion
and
sin.

But to say her intimacy with Jack was false would be falser still. Not after their conversation of the previous night, him walking her home, the two of them sitting on her bed. She got a 3L’s take on the 3 L’s—life, love, and law. They both bitched about Victor, commiserated about how fucked up law school was, about how it turned life into a dry brittle thing, love into a shallow imitation of love.

He spoke to her rhapsodically of the Juris Club. Which made her weary of his company. When he offered to show her his Blackcoat brandings, the scars on his chest, she declined with the hint of a hiss. The suggestion of a departure. She fell asleep alone. She would have anyway. His offer had shortened their sharing of words, that was all. It didn’t lessen her respect for him as a man. Scratch that: it did. But of all of her virtues, Zora was proudest of forgiveness. Of all her vices, she was proudest of vengeance. To be fully human is to be completely paradoxical.

If Victor noticed the kiss—which needless to say he did, he never for one instant let Zora slip from the front of his perception—he ignored it with the flair of a lawyer overlooking the truth. He didn’t dare single her out for Socratic ridicule. Even hours upon hours later, the paleness of the previous evening hadn’t fully left his face. We will never know whether her allusions had haunted his dreams that night. Assume for the sake of sordidness that they did.

The class was uneventful, right up until the very end. Jack proved his worth as a pawn once again: he passed her another note from Victor. She waited for a moment of privacy, an hour later, to read it. The note had no greeting.

Who would have guessed that a Plebeian could have more power than Caesar himself? You have rendered me powerless. All I have to offer you is the truth of myself. Truth as bare as each of us before the other. At the bottom of this note, write a question that I must answer. No limits; spare me no pain. Place the note in my faculty mailbox as soon as you can. Come to my house tonight and I will reveal the answer to you as an unfolding of love.

V.

Immediately she decided to take him up on his offer. She knew what she must ask. A question he must answer. The horrible riddle of another life, of the death of another, that had thrown her life into disarray for a time. That had made her question the very foundation of her judgment and the very purpose of her life.

The trembling of unspeakable deceit beneath the sincerity of passion. On the bottom of the note, she scribbled out her accusing words. Words of a cold bitterness that Hamlet might reserve for his mother, or Othello for his wife.

Did you drive Chloe Ming to her grave?

She hurried over to the faculty mailroom in Jasper Hall and slid the note into the slit of his box. Gone into oblivion. For the rest of the day she dreaded his answer. She dreaded even more how she might respond.

He answered the door smiling more warmly than she had ever seen him smile. Every contour of his face, every texture and line, spoke of kindness and sincerity. She deflected the glide of his lips toward hers. That would depend on his answer. She gave him instead her smooth left cheek, as she had taken for herself Jack’s stubbly right.

He led her into the library. They sat side by side on a Victorian mahogany loveseat, sheathed in sultry plum damask fabric. Two rows of colorful buttons across the back. Peering closer, she noticed that each button had a portrait of a literary figure on it. As Victor got comfortable, leaning back, Zora saw him smother some illustrious faces with his back. Shakespeare, Hurston, Plath. She knew those. And wait, was that Kafka he covered up so uncaringly?

Zora felt afraid to cover the face of Virginia Woolf, exactly why she couldn’t really have said. She perched herself on the edge of the seat. Victor put his hand on her leg; she let him. Where Victor was concerned, she could let bygones be bygones in a heartbeat, and his body next to hers on a loveseat certainly didn’t hurt.

“I’m not afraid of your question Zora. And you have nothing to fear from my answer. Chloe was very special to me.”

“What are you saying Victor? I need to know. Did you push her over?”

Zora had meant the last part figuratively, but in the shadow of the horrific other meaning her question carried, the second murderous shade, she betrayed just how fragile her love for Victor really was.

“I said you have nothing to fear. I will show you the truth—on one condition. You must let me do with you whatever I choose. If you surrender yourself to me, I will surrender the truth to you.”

“Do I have any choice?”

Not that she minded surrendering herself to Victor. The fact was that she had already abandoned herself to him, all of her love and fear, hope and despair, trust and faithlessness belonged to him. The worst thing that could happen to her was for him to give them all back. Returned unwanted. The essence of her self spurned.

“No. None. The truth of our love for the truth of my soul. That’s the bargain, a much better one than the devil gave Faust.”

He smiled. She flashed her teeth animalistically at him, a faint growl emanating from her throat.

“Do what you will Victor. Only don’t expect me to submit to you body
and
soul. I’m not Faust. Whether you’re the devil or not, I’m still not sure.”

To help her resolve her doubts about the home of his soul, heaven or hell, he began to slide off her clothes. With a few gyrations of her body, they were off. She sat there, a statue of sinew and skin and bone, not moving. Everything about her was human and pure, save for the bandage which marred her chest, the wound, the symbol, beneath it that threatened to mar her life.

“I’ll say again what I told you at the meeting—this might sting a bit.”

He ripped off her bandage. She slapped him in the face with uninhibited force. Said simply, without exclamation:

“Fuck you Victor.”

Mindless of her sting, he dove his head inward to her body. He kissed the raw violent flesh of her brand. He licked her seared skin like a frantic beast will often lick its own wound. With the index finger of his right hand, he traced the bloodied contours of her stigma.

She was touched by the piety of his tongue and the faith of his finger. She helped him remove his shirt. She became his mirror. Her mouth went to his chest, no hair to get in the way, she explored his scars with the tip of her sacred tongue. Its sensitivity helped her to feel the ridges and bumps in the brands, the grains of wheat, the arms of the golden statue, the rays of Caesar’s sun, the inscription on the collar of the slave.

Had she been able to read Latin with the tip of her tongue, she would have deciphered a few tiny words on the slave’s iron necklace:

Solum quando servio domino meo, vere liberum sum
.

An expression of evil, the inscription of a sickening sentiment, one that would have curled her tongue and made her retch and spit on her lover’s hairless chest.

Only when I serve my master am I truly free.

Her ignorance of those words was their bliss. Her tongue had possessed him. He tore off the rest of her clothing in a fit. Tore off his own. She twisted and turned with the force of his violence. He did not hurt her but easily could have. He was a bombardment of hands, a silent raving madman. She tried to peer into his eyes, to see if they held the lunacy of murder or the insanity of love. In the maelstrom of movement that enveloped them, she hadn’t enough time.

She submitted to him as she had agreed to do. As she wanted to do. She yielded her will and her body to his. The desire for supplication was stronger in her than the desire for pleasure. He hurled her up off the loveseat, pushed her hard against a section of books, painfully. He thrust himself into her in a fury, without a sign of concern for the return of passion, for endearment. She stood there stunned. He pinned her arms against the books, ramming her into their blunt shapes. They afforded her the comfort of a bed of stones.

Her consciousness overcome, her body adapted of its own accord to his body. Her hips spread and closed, slid up and down, sideways, in broad circles, the gyres of a flying bird. He was not wearing a condom and she felt his penis inside of her unadorned. Her instinct was to reach around and dig her fingernails into him, bloodily into his back, but he held her arms out and away with iron resolve.

He pulled out of her, abruptly. Stepped back. He had not even come close to ejaculation. Absolute control. She looked at him blankly, not even able to register confusion. Much less resentment.

“Turn around.”

She obeyed, and came face to face with dozens of books, many of which had spines decorated with beads of sweat, her sweat. A couple of the spines were partially crushed by the weight of Victor pressing into her. Her own spine felt no better, contorted by the powerlessness of her body beneath his thrusts.

“Look—a title that plays on what I touch. Your labia.”

He stepped up close behind her, reached his right hand around and between her legs, caressed with his fingers the lips of her vagina. His fingernails criss-crossed over them, sharply yet skimmingly, leaving faint trails in the folds and mounds of her labia. They were dappled with moisture and the ecstatic torment of his nails.

She scanned the books while he continued to trace lines around her vulva with his nails. Upon the nerve center of her brain, blowing through her consciousness, his hand was like a hot desert breeze that blinded with sand. A sirocco of erotic energy. What was his plan, to have her engage in some scholarly reading while he engaged in some scholarly arousal? To have her spout the wisdom of the ancients until she spouted a primeval cry?

Her eyes lingered on the spine of one book. Her mind started to sift through sand.
Lamia, Isabella Etc
. Below that,
Keats
. At the very bottom of the spine was a date,
1820
. She knew that name. She’d studied him at Vanderbilt, John Keats, the poet who’d died in his twenties of tuberculosis. A gift of nature cut short by nature. She took out the book and showed it to Victor.

“Quick work my love. A shame. I actually thought I’d get a little more time down there. Maybe venture a ways inside. In search of unexpected places, places that shudder in the dark when you touch them.”

He reached over to the shelf, his hand shiny with wetness, and removed a book of his own. He reached with his other hand into the space left by the absence of the book, all the way to the back of the shelf. He pulled out a strange looking plastic device that vaguely resembled a microphone—or a probe that aliens might use to explore the human anatomy, turning it to pulp in the process.

Zora didn’t know at first what the fuck the thing was. Of one thing she was certain though: with equal parts perversity and creativity, Victor would know how to put it to good use upon her naked skin.

It was white for the most part, with a short blue rod connecting the head to the body of the device, and a blue switch panel that said “Hitachi” and “Magic Wand.” That gave it away, and Zora smiled impishly—it was a tool for the sleight of hand of sensuality, the tricks of pleasure and pain, pleasure dissolving into pain and pain dissolving into pleasure, that the body in arousal can play on the mind. And now it was being wielded by a truly skilled magician of Eros.