The Coming of Bright (6 page)

She drew out a dramatic pause, an enticing pause, her eyes shimmering with as much shadowy light as her smile.

Zora thought she saw a vein rise up, beat against the surface of Judge Ras’s neck, flutter against skin like a bird against a cage.

“Fine, fine, how’s this—you become the first female member of the Juris Club. How does that strike your fancy?”

So it
was
true, the Juris Club was a patriarchal bastion. Those bastards.

“I’m listening.”

“I can make it happen. I hold a lot of sway. And it would take a lot. Even President Heath isn’t a member and she’s been trying for years. She appealed to me personally. I told her I might in exchange for a favor. You’d still be the first.”

The clemency plea. That would be the favor. Why does he care so much about the Gatekeeper?

“Why me, Judge? A favor to a student? I know I asked real nice, but I doubt you bestow such kindnesses on all your students.”

“I already told you. Every semester I read the resumes of all my students. Every one. I want to know them inside and out. And you I like. You have the mark of the idealist. I consider myself an idealist just like you, in a very different way perhaps. You’re an idealist of the weak, I’m an idealist of the strong.”

“You really believe that social-Darwinist crap, don’t you?”

Her face lit up with instant shame. On some level she still knew her place, was not totally oblivious to the imbalance between them, his eminence and her imminence. To say nothing of basic courtesy.

“I’m sorry, that was totally out of place Judge, please don’t think . . .”

“Ah, yet another confirmation of your gift. How many law students are actually idealists, instead of bullshitting about it simply to get admitted? Strange considering that admissions committees would rather hear them grovel in the greedy dirt than pander to the high and noble heavens.”

Her lips flatlined. She considered his species of bullshit more insidious than some poor kid’s pathetic ruse to the Committee of the Elect.

“I’m willing to let you into the Juris Club, on one condition.”

He paused for the inevitable rushing in of the waters of curiosity. They never came. Only silence and a soft glare.

“I’m going to leave you a series of clues, just like I would leave for Becky Love. Not that you know who that is.”

Fuck, he could read her mind. Nonchalance had no chance.

“You’re going to have to decipher them, one at a time.”

“Sounds exciting.”

As much as she admired the Becky Love Mysteries, fawned over them, she prayed to God he didn’t have murder in mind.

“Let’s not waste any time, do tell.”

“For that you’re going to have to close your eyes.”

“You’re kidding. Why would I close my eyes? I want to see what you’re up to, Mr. Judge.”

No point in hiding anymore.

“Let’s just have the champagne instead, savor the spider orchid, toast to your new novel.”

She’d read that his publisher, Vintage, was coming out with a new Becky Love Mystery in about a month’s time.
The Ivory Chamber
it was called. The plot was hush-hush, but you didn’t have to be clairvoyant to figure out the stuff the mystery was made of. Knowing the author simply confirmed it, hinted at the thrills of ivory, the thrills of pleasure and of pain that ivory could bring about.

Zora had pre-ordered a copy for herself and one for her mom. Historians needed a fantasy life too. Alice swore by that rule. Jordan swore at it.

“Trust me.”

“There you go again with ‘Trust me.’ You
are
a lawyer, remember.”

Her words of protest still hanging in the air, she obeyed. Her curiosity, her desire to know, that oldest of desires, holiest and unholiest of desires, forced her to obey. She journeyed back to the mythic garden. Her eyelids met in the middle, little wisps of light playing off their insides, tricking her retinas, her lips suddenly dry, a quick wetting, a rhythmic wave of breath flowed from her nostrils to her chest and back again. She waited.

Sounds of the Judge stirring, sinuous, broken, moving in and out of her perception.
Where the hell was he?
After mere seconds her outer senses no longer furthered awareness, shadows dancing on her lids didn’t help, light itself was meaningless, he could be anywhere in the room. Her senses were rudderless.

Apparitions of apprehension rose in her mind. Her eyelids pressed even tighter together, a binding attraction of skin and desire. The sum of her will was powerless to open them. Her tongue began to swell again, as it had in the Gatekeeper’s wake, seized by the insanity of the woman, by the perversity of their bond, the strangulation of her words. Eyes closed, tongue swollen, lips dry, perceptions dead: the strangulation of the unknown.

A sudden burst in the center of her brain. With the passion of an artist, the palette of a painter, the caress of a sculptor, the Judge had started to kiss the back of her neck.

Every kiss carried the kaleidoscope of his feelings, his resolve, his devotion to Law—but all of that was transmuted, elevated, into the tenderest of kisses that Zora had known. Could even conceive in a moment of boundless wish.

His lips, capable of the greatest authority and the gospel of justice, were also capable of the deepest eroticism, of the perfect balance of force and release, of wet and dry, of body and soul, care and abandon.

Her first impulse was to squirm away, turn and hurl insults at his audacity, slap the shit out of him, turn his testicles to mush, but the truth of his kisses,
their
gospel of justice, held her fast. Fast as gravity she submitted to them, her hands clenched, her fingernails sinking into her own thighs, that pain mingling indistinguishably with the asphyxiation of every nerve in her body. She was so overwhelmed with feeling, his passion transforming into hers, that she seemed to lose the very capacity to feel. She lost herself in the ebb and flow of breath.

Now he was in front of her, her eyes as clenched as her hands, she was locked in place like a statue. With the barest of force he used the thumb and forefinger of each hand to unfold her eyelids. No words at all, the mirroring of eyes, two lakes of vision shimmering together, two reservoirs of self, he began to kiss her on the mouth, their lips swimming against each other.

He grasped the back of the chair, one hand on each side of her head, he was arced over like a crouching diver to kiss her, the insides of his legs pressed and rubbed against the outer sides of her thighs. Her hands moved from her own thighs over to his, her fingernails dug sharply into the skin of his legs. She had lost all control over her own strength, the force she used was not her own. He grunted at the vice of her grip, its absolute lack of inhibition, and a new look came simultaneously into their widened eyes, a look of the free.

As they kissed he began to undress her. She released the vice, loosened her arms, to let him. He remained clothed: her body was his masterpiece, her flesh his medium, her spirit his
objet d’art
, his work of creation, she could be her own artist when the time came, first she must learn the subtleties of his artistry.

He undressed her with the mysterious knowledge of the blind, not needing sight to achieve the rarest feats of the tactile. Her body moved to accommodate the movements of his hands, along her entire length she arced upward as would a spark, while he removed her lower clothing—their bodies momentarily met in a graceful, careful curve, her naked breasts smashed against silk, the rise of her hips following the fall of his torso. Her fingernails were back where they belonged: forcing his skin to acknowledge the sharpness of her desire. Her legs shimmied as her pants and panties fell off of them. All the time they kissed, absorbed, the music of the celestial spheres could have stopped and they’d not hear the void, each pair of eyes buried deep within the other.

It was as though the artist, the painter and sculptor in one, had abandoned any intermediate material, the need for any canvas, paint, or bronze to show the meaning of the nude figure, the symbolism of woman unmasked, had molded the erotic itself into the vehicle of the work of art.

All of a sudden the Judge arced over her even further, her torso started to rise on its own to meet his, but his intention was only to whisper in her ear: “Close your eyes again.” Secretively, self-consciously, knowingly, as though they were confidantes in the middle of a crowded room.

She obeyed. What choice did she have? Artistry had become destiny, and destiny artistry. He rose off of her, had to peel himself off, such was the stickiness of her skin on silk, her pores frantically working, glistening, perspiring, to release the combustion of their welded torsos, her breasts under the tension of his weight, the confused hair between her legs wanting his touch to break its cushion. The paradox of her physical self, the heart beating furiously, the brain in pure turmoil, was the same as that of any other soul caught in the ecstatic misery of desire: the bluer the heat at the core, the more the surface will be suffused with moisture, trickling, dampening, sticking. Melting.

Even after he had fully risen, she knew not where, her body curved further upward of its own accord, reaching into the space left by his absence, then finding nothing there, no counterpoising force, settled slowly back into the depths of the chair, the cold dead embrace of leopard skin.

She could hardly have located herself precisely in time and space. Her only law at that moment was the law of entropy, of the wayward scattering of every thought and feeling that crossed her heart and mind. Her radiating, trembling soul.

It did not take him long to return. He knew how to control himself, prided himself on his subservience to Law and to Will—but Zora had put all of that in doubt, had made him practically rush to her, he unbearably missed her presence as soon it had been taken away by distance. This impulse to return to her, to create from their bodies a new work of art, carved from the marble of the senses, painted on their corporeal canvas, orchestrating their music to fill the air, was beyond his capacity to judge. A Law unknown to him.

He brought with him the bottle of champagne. And an object from his ivory collection. A champagne glass, a flute, once owned by Voltaire.

The bowl was of Bavarian crystal, of Schwarzwald origin to be exact, Spiegelau crystal, heavily leaded. The stem and foot of the flute were ivory. By far the most intriguing feature of the glass was the inscription on the underside of the foot.

E du C
.

Voltaire had commissioned the glass as a gift for the love of his life, Emilie du Chatelet, a kindred spirit. In the words of the author of
Candide
himself—“a soul for which my soul seems to have been made.”

After she died in childbirth in 1749—the girl was not Voltaire’s, and tragically died a mere 18 months after her mother’s soul departed—Voltaire had sold many of her things, the flute among them. To do so was not, he confided in a letter, to desecrate or slight her memory, he would never, could never, contemplate such a thing. It was rather to distill her away from the world of objects, to transform her into something of pure spirit, of essential mind.

Before Zora the Nude—her eyes were closed tight but he almost lost himself in his vision of her, the pastel swirls and kinetic shapes of her unclothed body, the dry heat and the cool humidity that enveloped her, forgot his purpose with the wine and glass, the mystery for her to unravel—Victor filled the flute with champagne, set the bottle on the table.

Whispered into Zora’s ear: “Open your eyes.”

She did, and he spoke: “The inscription is the first clue.”

He said nothing of the history of the glass, of Voltaire and his lost love, simply lifted the glass full to the brim above her face to show her the letters carved into elephant tusk. His hand, normally as steady as something mechanical, had lost some of its poise, its smooth fluidity, and he spilled some of the champagne, not much, a trickle more than a stream, onto her right cheek.

In one fluid motion, the torsion of her neck more confident than the line of his hand, she turned her head to the left, so that the champagne flowed into her mouth. She curled her tongue against the meeting place of her lips, and further out, against the faintest, softest hairs of her cheek, to harvest the remaining drops. He was right, the taste transported her to the flora of Brazil, to some place hot and moist, rife with vegetation and pollination, and the carbonation of the wine sizzled in her mouth and down her throat.

“Your body is the second clue. A map. Close your eyes again.”

Darkness prevailed again in her mind, she had only the vision of emotion and perception, the light and shadow of the sensual. He cupped his left hand around the base of her right breast, and with his right hand holding the flute of chilled champagne, poured a stream of liquid down her shoulder, over and around her breast, the florid liquid beginning to pool in his hand.

The warmth of his hand overwhelmed her, and when the wine hit her humid skin, its chill sending a shiver reverberating through every limb, she could not stop herself from crying out. He murmured from deep in his diaphragm as she did so, a murmur of gratification at her show of rapture.