The Coming of Bright (12 page)

Finally he pulled out the pestle. She opened her eyes. Shining with love more than desire. She pulled him fully up to her and they kissed gently several times, gingerly.

He said, “Let’s go take a bath together. I’ll wash you off.”

In the bathtub, a Victorian porcelain basin on clawed feet of gilt gold, he cradled her body above his. His chest tickled her back. She saw him naked for the first time as he undressed in front of the tub. This was a time for cleansing, not for consummation, with a bar of golden soap encased in golden sponge. Bronnley soap, from a boutique in London. Enough chocolate and blood had gotten onto her body that the warm bathwater quickly turned ruddy.

On her way out of his house that Wednesday night, bathed, skin clean but soaked and pruned—they’d spent what seemed like an hour in the tub together—he invited her back with a kiss.

“Come again on Friday. I’ll teach you the password. It’s the last thing you’ll need to know.”

CHAPTER NINE

Thursday, Zora had a date with Jack. Or at least she suspected that’s how he conceived it. Knowing him.
Jacques
Merde
. Full of shit. Full of
savoir faire
too. That was the problem. She doted on his tongue-in-cheek—as long as he kept it there. Victor’s tongue was another story, for another day.

Jack had asked her out after that disastrous class. When Victor had mocked the tragedy of slavery, mocked her, when she’d wanted to turn Victor’s ivory collection into implements of their owner’s lingering torture. Death by ivory. Jack had asked her to go to a Thai place near campus,
Currying Flavor
. Popular spot among the MSU crowd. She’d agreed. That was before the chocolate. And the spices. And the pestle.

Rage at Victor, pity for Jack. Hardly a good pretext for agreeing to a date with her TA. But that question in class, the one about malice and wickedness, had reduced the poor guy to silence first and stammers second. All he could do was say
mens rea
about five times in a row, a stream from his mouth of Latin diarrhea. Far from a model TA for the school’s brightest faculty star.

Rage at Victor, pity for Jack. Had made her soft and sultry as silk for any overtures Jack might throw her way. But now she was much more pre-occupied with getting the password, with
how
the revelation of the password would unfold, in the air, on the tongue, on her body. She’d still make the best of dinner with Jack, deflect anything intimate radiating from any part of his body. And help herself to some red curry and Thai iced tea in the process.

She was on time. No Jack. Looking around the place. Dragons everywhere, on the walls, the long snaky kind you see in lunar parades. Not the four-legged kind that Lancelot liked to skewer.

Seated, sipping, contemplating. She contemplated picking out one of the fish in the enormous tank separating the kitchen from the dining area, having that curried up red. One of the fish resembled a koi. Her stomach turned, contemplation came to an end. Her parents had raised koi as a hobby. She’d tried to pet them as a child, chasing them around the pond in the backyard, brightly laughing when they splashed water in her face, fish flying away from girlish grasping hands.

She’d stick with duck. She picked but didn’t order.
Gaeng peht beht yahng.
Roast duck in red curry sauce. She read the blurb on the back of the menu about the owners. A couple. New Texas. Clint and Cindy Miklic,
née
Shinawatra, immigrants, originally Slovenian and Thai. Both former Founders students, had met and married at Founders, gotten their JD’s and had promptly gone into the restaurant business. Decided it was better to curry flavor as restaurateurs than curry favor as lawyers. Bravo.

Where the fuck is Jack?

She ordered the duck. Another iced tea. If Jack ever arrived they could share her dish, she wouldn’t be able to finish half a duck anyway. Jack came right when the duck did. A spill of apologies. Typical male excuses. Car trouble. Groin trouble. What difference did it make?

Sitting, the first thing he did was cup his hand around hers, palm on palm. She didn’t retract hers. Appreciated its fresh overlying warmth. Affection of fingers and palms. A hand was a hand, appendage creep be damned. She liked Jack. His friendly smirks, his smarts, his love of playing the smartass, evoking the smartness in her. Even in the wake of the Amedei Porcelana, she trusted Jack more than she did Victor. A smirk on her face to rival his, she insisted they’d have to share.

“Can I give you the first bite?”

Already he was testing the waters. Cupped hand didn’t move, didn’t flinch. A nod of approval. It wasn’t as though they’d be sharing bodily fluids just because they shared curried duck. Get a grip.

He reached over to the dish in front of her, got a lime leaf and chunk of duck in the same fell swoop, quite the expert at using chopsticks, ladled the food into her open mouth. She coughed, shit that curry was hot, had to pull out her hand from his, drown her mouth in iced tea.

“Your turn.”

Both hands back in their own territory. She was far worse at chopsticks than he, and after several failed attempts to pincer some food between them, had to resort to the infallible stabbing method. She impaled a piece of pineapple, pushed it up the chopstick with her fingers, then stabbed a piece of duck onto the end. Forget about a lime leaf, not going to happen. She shoved the food into his mouth, indelicate, rough. He didn’t cough or sputter from the curry—but her shoving the food so close to his uvula almost made him gag.

He’d gotten an extra plate, shoveled some of her food onto it with his chopsticks. Most of it in fact. They burrowed in. He hadn’t forgotten about her hands, their smallness, their innocence, oh what he didn’t know, what he couldn’t begin to imagine, and when she made the mistake of resting her left hand near the center of the small table, he wrapped his own hand around it, stroked her fingers gently with his.

“Jack, what are you doing?”

“I want to protect you Zora. Let me protect you. I saw the way the Judge looked at you. Everyone did. The remark about the slap. You need someone who actually cares about you, someone to look out for your best interests.”

She withdrew her hand. Colder. The red curry sauce left on the plate congealed.

“Goddammit Jack. Why does everyone think I need protecting? I’m no damsel in distress. I don’t need you or Victor or anyone else to protect me. I don’t need a father figure. Or an older brother for that matter.”

“You called him Victor again. You’re falling for him already. I know you are.”

He looked at her expectantly, earnestly, as though she might challenge him on that last point.
Your Honor, I object
. . .

No objection came. He had no choice but to keep arguing his case, to stoop to the scandalous as a final desperate ploy for victory.

“You’re going to end up like Chloe if you’re not careful.”

Silence from Zora, eyes down, another bite of duck. Curry on her lips. Long steady sip of tea. Jack didn’t move a muscle, relax his eyes from her face. Lips already wiped clean.

“Who the hell is Chloe?”

“The girl I told you about. She killed herself. Because of
him
. They were having a relationship, it got messy, everybody knew it. And then she killed herself. Jumped to her death.”

Zora began to feel enraged but checked herself. The sheer audacity of bringing that up again, after how she’d reacted the last time. She was mortified, humiliated, infuriated. He was one persistent bastard to take the risk of provoking her righteous rage—of her taking a chopstick, stabbing him all the way through his uvula. Out the back of his throat. His timing had been smart, safe, waiting to bring up the suicide until
after
she’d shoved the chopstick in his mouth.

As quickly as it had risen, anger receded. She was ready to give credence. She knew there may be some truth to the story of Chloe, the tragedy, some substance to rumors of the poor girl’s fall.

At the same time, she was positive that Jack’s interest in her flowed from Victor, sprang fully formed from Victor’s affection. Was borne like a bastard child of the other man’s desire. She might have been a fresh novitiate into the sacred ways of Eros, but she was a model of an educated woman. She’d read René Girard, she believed in his theory of mimetic desire. She believed that one man could desire a woman just because another man already did, especially a man the other man already envied. Or a woman desire a man.

And if there was one man in the world that Jack envied more than any other, it was Victor. Jack wanted her because Victor had her. It was that simple, that complicated, that convoluted. His protectiveness was a ruse to bring his desire, his mirroring coveting, to fruition. To allow him, the underling, the yearling, to surpass the seasoned master at his own game, a game in which a beautiful innocent woman was the one and only pawn.

“You really do seem to believe that, Jack. I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt, since we’re already having dinner and I’m enjoying this duck. But I’m warning you, stick to what you know. Tell me what happened with Chloe.”

“Honestly, I really don’t know much more. They were fucking, that’s for sure. And who knows what else. He twisted her mind, poisoned her, with his power over her. A Svengali.”

Zora tried on her budding talent: thinking like a lawyer.

“Okay Jack, let’s assume for the sake of argument he committed a crime. That he deliberately drove her to suicide. With malice aforethought. Why wasn’t he arrested? Why wasn’t he charged with anything?”

“She took her
own
life, Zora, he didn’t kill her. They were obviously both adults. As far as I know, she never reported him to the school for sexual harassment or anything like that. Founders had no reason to intervene before her death, or take action after it. Neither did the police. There’s no rule against a student and professor having a consensual relationship.”

“Exactly—and even if they were sleeping together, you don’t know she committed suicide because of Victor. Maybe she had a history of depression. Maybe she flunked her Contracts exam. Maybe her cat died. You can’t prove a thing.”

Zora immediately regretted speaking so flippantly about a tragic death, a young woman so burdened with heartache, whatever the cause, to hurl herself from a high place. Not her place to judge the dead. Nor was it Jack’s.

She merely felt an urge, an impulse of care, to defend Victor from malicious innuendo. She trusted him enough, not unreservedly mind you, but enough to think him incapable of using his power, his charisma, to drive someone to suicide. Purely out of spite.

“Quite the lawyer Zora, aren’t you? Proof this and proof that. You’re right, I can’t prove it, nobody can. But you know what they say about smoke and fire.”

“And
you
know what they say about smoke and mirrors. We need to put this behind us. For the sake of our friendship, whatever it’s worth. And that’s all it is. All it can ever be. I don’t need a protector and I don’t need a boyfriend. A friend. Think you can manage that? Someone to agree with me how much of a bitch Professor Reynolds is.”

“She’s an ornery one, ain’t she?”

He tried on a Texas twang. Right away, thankfully, mercifully, went back to twangless.

“Know why she’s so anal? Someone shoved a fat contract up her ass. You can still see part of it when she turns her back to the class. That bulge back there.”

“That’s what I’m talking about. I’d much rather talk about that, well maybe not about her ass per se. It does kind of bulge out though, doesn’t it? Really far. I’d just rather not discuss Victor on a personal level. Especially all these accusations. Him being a Svengali. Makes me sick to my stomach.”

“Fine, fine, I’ll try not to keep bringing that up. But I wish you would think about what I said. Don’t skirt the truth and don’t underestimate the man.”

With that he reached across the table and brushed her cheek in a singular gesture of simple compassion. Like a saint, he picked up her left hand and kissed it on the open palm.

Those two gestures were more than Victor could bear. He had been sitting at the opposite corner of the restaurant with a colleague, partially obscured by a decorative screen with elephants all over it, their trunks upraised. A traditional token of good fortune. Behind the elephants, behind their lucky trunks, he had gone unnoticed by both Jack and Zora.

When Zora had walked in, his first impulse had been to go over to her, touch her hand, her face, her waist, in greeting, exchange a few warm pleasantries. But after the server had laid down a second menu at her table, he’d decided to see what would transpire, who would join her. And when Jack Carson had turned out to be her dining partner, he was only mildly surprised. Jack and Zora were seating partners in class, seemed to have good rapport, and he’d specifically asked Jack to look after her, relay choice information to her and about her.

But of course the other side, the darker side, of mimetic desire is mimetic envy, and when Jack’s envy of Victor led him to pursue Zora, shower her with unmistakable affection, radiate affection toward her with every gesture and expression, Victor’s envy of Jack began to strain against reason, until it finally engulfed reason. He had been able to restrain himself up until the brush of the cheek and the kiss of the hand.