The Coming of Bright (13 page)

Victor didn’t care about making a scene. This was a primal scene. An antediluvian rivalry. One rival who felt entitled to the trappings of success, up to and including the adoration, the devotion, of a fierce woman on the cusp of the world. The other who saw only hubris in front of him.

“Jack, what do you think you’re doing?”

Victor stood askew their table, arms flared. Fortunately his colleague in the back couldn’t possibly see what was going on, those happy pachyderms got in the way. And too far away to hear, with all the intervening chatter. Who knows how the Judge had excused himself from their dinner meeting. He’d probably claimed a sudden need to smoke his pipe outdoors. He
was
a known aficionado of tobacco, never far from a well-lit pipe, a disciple of nicotine whose teeth somehow, sparklingly, never showed it. For his sake, let’s hope his lungs didn’t show it either.

Zora hated him now, miraculously white teeth and all, hated these primal antics, this gorilla posturing. Why the fuck when two men started pounding their chests and clawing at each other over a woman, did they pretend she didn’t exist, even when she was standing right in front of them? Or sitting. That’s exactly what Victor was doing now: no acknowledgment of her presence whatsoever, of her feelings, her inalienable value, her womanhood.

“Having dinner with Zora, Judge. Nice place, isn’t it?”

Jack wasn’t going to be the first to descend to the level of brutes. Victor would happily oblige.

“The question is,
why
are you having dinner with her? I really don’t like you fraternizing with one of
my
students like this. I saw how you were touching her.”

He pointed in the general direction of where he’d been sitting. If there was one thing that Victor had mastered—aside from collecting ivory, writing novels under a pseudonym, and kissing the asses of politicians high and low, how else do you think he rocketed onto a federal appellate court practically still in swaddling clothes?—it was hypocrisy. And unfortunately for him at that moment, those elephants weren’t helping him any now, if there was one thing that Zora had mastered—aside from keeping everything perfectly centered, maintaining the highest possible academic marks, and mixing a mean mojito, it’s a long story, don’t ask—it was loathing hypocrisy. Her pesky, unlawyerly idealism again.

“One of
your
students? With all due respect—” Jack’s tone clearly indicated the meager amount of respect he thought was due—“I don’t think you own her Judge.”

The allusion to slavery was unmistakable, lingered in the air, ugly. Jack was hardly finished with the insinuations.

“And I should be asking you the same thing about fraternizing with a student.”

Victor’s muse of fury inspired him now. Zora expected him to start bellowing like an ape at any moment. He managed by some miracle to form coherent, if rather belligerent, speech. Sounds that were identifiably human. Sinner more than saint.

“You little shit. Get out of here now, before I kick you out.”

“Oh, so you own the restaurant too? Pretty soon we’re going to find out you own the state of Texas. Your ego’s big enough.”

“I’m leaving.”

Not that they were paying her any mind anyway, but Zora needed to remove the root cause of their primal confrontation. Herself. Mimetic desire looking itself in the mirror saw nothing whatsoever, oblivious to its origins. As she spoke, stood to leave, neither man removed his glare from the eyes of the other. She had never felt more invisible in her life. She could easily have written a book called
Invisible Woman
, a riff on the Ralph Ellison classic with a healthy dose of misogyny. Maybe even sell enough copies to knock Victor off the top of the bestseller list. Who’s invisible now, asshole?

She walked out. On her way out, she heard, “You’re fired Jack. Don’t bother coming to any more of my classes. Don’t even think about it. I’ll find another TA. You guys are a dime a dozen.”

She fought the urge to go back in. Give both men a piece of her mind. Give Victor in particular a piece of her hand, followed by the whole rounded curve of her heel. Use your imagination about where, and with what degree of pressure. Forget imagination: use foreshadowing.

She moved out of earshot, didn’t hear anything further from either posturing primate. She’d confront Victor later. She’d start with his hubris, move on to his covetous nature, then the bipolarity of his soul. Her leverage would have to be love, the heart of his soul, the soul of his heart, beneath all of his cynicism, his pretensions. She could get there, she knew it. It might take a few more applications of her heel, but she’d get there.

If she and Victor ever got married, she hoped she wouldn’t have had to hurt him so badly, so crushingly, that he’d be devoid of any viable seed for a couple little Victors. Or Vickys.
That
was a frightening prospect, little versions of the Judge, wielding miniature ivory gavels. Not if their mother had any say in the matter.

Before any of that, before marriage, before little Vickys and Victor Juniors could run around wreaking havoc with miniature gavels, she’d have to satisfy her curiosity about Chloe. A sadness that had been gnawing at her, tempting her toward its darkness, for a while now. A Pandora’s box that Jack had bestowed upon her, that she felt powerless to leave unopened. She had a name to go with the face of torment, of betrayal, in her head.

Back at her computer, she searched the news archive for anything about Chloe. Almost of its own accord, as though it had only been waiting for the faintest prompting from her, her very own Pandora’s box sprang open before her eyes. Up popped an article from the local paper, the
Madison Springs Intelligencer
. The news about Chloe’s death hadn’t spread far, Zora didn’t even notice a listing in the
Dallas Morning News
or the
Houston Chronicle
. Sad that a bright young life could be snuffed out by her own hand and hardly a soul would care. The malaise of the world, Camus was spot on about that. He probably would have nodded, smiling knowingly, as he read the article.

A first-year student at Founders School of Law, Chloe Ming, 23, killed herself yesterday at approximately 7:30 AM, jumping from the tower of Memorial Chapel, the ecumenical church building on the Madison Springs University campus. Campus and local police are investigating but say there are no signs of foul play. Ms. Ming did not leave a note. Observers on the ground were horrified by the death of the young woman, who screamed at people on the ground to move shortly before she jumped. She was pronounced dead at the scene by emergency medical personnel.

In her time at Founders, Ms. Ming was an accomplished student and community activist. Aside from receiving top marks in her first-semester coursework, she spent countless hours outside the classroom working for the Christian Legal Aid Society and Habitat for Humanity. Her faculty advisor at Founders was Victor Ras, the Lyndon Baines Johnson Professor of Law and a sitting judge on the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals. Professor Ras said of Ms. Ming: “A young woman I will never forget. Always smiling, always full of joy. Her untimely death is truly a tragedy, totally senseless.”

Prior to matriculating at Founders, Ms. Ming attended the University of Texas at Austin for two years, graduating magna cum laude with a degree in sociology. She spent her first years of higher education at Tsinghua University in Beijing, China, where she also studied sociology. Ms. Ming was born in Harbin, Heilongjiang Province, China, and is survived by several family members there, including her parents, according to school officials. A service for Ms. Ming will be held tomorrow at 8 PM in Memorial Chapel; members of the general public are welcome to attend. Her body will be laid to rest in her hometown of Harbin, a city famous throughout the world for its annual ice sculpture festival.

Zora’s heart turned to ice and shattered. She could see, hear, taste, smell, feel with sickening palpability the hypocrisy of Victor’s words.
Never forget
. . .
Always smiling . . . totally senseless
. Words slicker than the blackest oil. She wanted to vomit. Rising in her mind, unstoppable, was the premonition that Victor had sold his soul, was a Faustus of the bench, a Mephistopheles of the law. Whether she was being unjust to her lover, whether she was being paranoid in the face of a tragedy in which he played no tragic part, whether she was putting more faith in innuendo than sweet words and flesh, didn’t matter in that moment.

All of her empathy for the dead girl, the misery of the girl’s parents, all of her instantaneously vanished faith in her lover, converged in a hollowing out of self. A snuffing out of her last inner light of optimism. In a twilight-passed of bitter tears. She balled herself up on her bed, cried until her eyes had no more tears to give, hoping that sleep would come quick, would give her relief from the perversity she had entangled herself in, the lies she had embraced with an open heart. Sleep never came, only spiraling sorrow and maddening thoughts of the worst.

CHAPTER TEN

She stayed like that for days. She was adrift, rudderless. Since she’d been a child, Zora’s innocence, her idealism, had carved out a space for itself in the middle of the world, the world’s casual, smiling viciousness, but at a psychological cost. Her obsessive need to center. That one obsession was the price she’d had to pay for her idealism, the only way she had found to maintain a barrier between her self and the world.

Seeing with her own eyes, convincing herself with her innermost intuition, that Victor was involved in Chloe’s death, that he really could be a monster, that she could be his next deadly prize, his next sanctified sacrifice, brought down the fragile barrier. She suffocated under the weight of that horror.

Not once in five days did she leave the immediate area of her room; she barely ate; she barely slept; she felt her mind slipping away, disgust at herself, her decisions, her body, its desirability. If she’d had a knife near her bed, she dreaded what she might do with it in a moment of weakness. Dreaded becoming another Chloe, with sharpened steel instead of dull concrete her means of escape.

Over light’s absence, the human heart, her heart, began to prevail. Her lack of concern for herself fleshed out, made stronger, the concern of others for her. Their care and compassion answered her loss of faith in her own humanity.

Jack’s call was the first, a few days later. He hadn’t been in class that following Monday, Victor had quickly replaced him with another TA. But he’d been loitering outside of Mather Hall, hoping, waiting for Zora to file out with the rest, wanting to apologize for his behavior at the restaurant. Never mind that Victor had been the instigator. When she didn’t, he reached out to her over the air. She took his call, had some residual sense of courtesy even in the midst of melancholy.

“Zora, what’s going on? I waited for you a couple times outside Mather but you didn’t show.”

She didn’t have to tell him
everything
, did she? A half-truth would suffice. Her favorite excuse, the failsafe of the malingerer.

“I’m sick. Case of the flu. But thanks for calling. I’ll run into you when I’m feeling better. Bye.”

And that was that. Better to keep him away from her for the time being. He was so prying, so obtrusive, an interloper. A good friend.

She couldn’t be quite that curt when Professor Jacobs called, her academic advisor, Harriet Jacobs, wanting to know why she’d missed three days of class. Same excuse, symptoms more graphic. Professor Jacobs said she’d take care of it, one of the most sympathetic advisors on campus. She warned Zora that if the absenteeism dragged on for too long, she’d need medical paperwork. Or run the risk of incompletes, suspension from the school.

Of course, of course, I understand.
I’m feeling better already.

Zora knew better than to tell the truth—any admission of mental illness, of the rumblings of a disturbed mind, could came back to haunt her, a long deep shadow, could prevent her from joining the bar. She was sure the sympathy of Professor Jacobs had its limits. The sympathy of a law professor always did. A reflection of the limits of the sympathy of the law itself. She’d be deemed “unfit” to be a lawyer, as though lawyers were saints. Laughable. Absurd. Society much preferred lawyers who could bend the truth, bend justice itself, to the breaking point and then bend it some more. Demanded nothing less of them, in fact. But an honest lawyer with a history of depression? Screw him! Fuck her!

Finally Victor called. On the seventh day of her crisis of heart and mind. Actually she didn’t pick up until he’d called three times. She dreaded hearing his voice, what effects it might have on her mind, already full of fear and trembling. How his charisma, his honeyed reasoning, might break her lack of trust in him, restore his place in her heart.

She doubted herself more than she doubted him. Everything was conflict in her, polar opposites battling for supremacy, a see-saw of extremes. When he called for the third time, she was second-guessing her pessimism, questioning her cynicism. She wanted to love him, desperately, frantically, wanted a soulmate who could show her the world, teach her to handle its power, to avoid its pain. And teach her how to love, without reservation or the need for remembrance.