by King, Sadie
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.
Zora was in for a shock that only 6000 vibrations per minute of full A/C electric power can provide. Leave it to those masters of modern technology, the Japanese, to find the perfect machine for the lush contours and infinitely sensitive nerve endings of the clitoris. It was as though millions of years of evolution of the female body had culminated in the invention of the Hitachi Magic Wand. And Zora was going to experience its full evolutionary potential. Technology pumping new blood, rushing gushing bright blood, into the heart of nature.
Victor brought her down to the bare hardwood floor of the library. It was cold, shiveringly cold. He had already taken the book from her, the first edition volume of Keats, a $20,000 find at an antiquarian bookseller in San Francisco. It sat on the floor nearby. He plugged the Magic Wand into the wall and lay behind her, maneuvering his body into the curves of hers.
“Count the number of times I turn the Magic Wand on and off. If you can concentrate.”
He had hardened up again, without needing any assistance from her. She felt his penis slide into her vagina. His breath on her neck. As he moved in and out of her, methodically, meditatively, he turned on the Magic Wand. He reached around and vibrated it in little circles against her clitoris, moving it around to find every note, every tone, of gratification she could muster. The sharpest, most sultry moans. After her first refrain of music, he turned off the device, taking a moment to kiss her neck, rub his hand across the side and front of her higher thigh, the raised fleshy curve of her hips and buttocks. Their toes curled against each other, tickling and playing.
He turned the Magic Wand back on and began the process anew. The problem was that the damn thing was so good at doing its job that Zora had almost no mental capacity to form her own name—much less count how many times Victor had turned it on and off. He had to start over several times when she lost count. It was a contest to see which would burn out first from pure exhaustion, her libido or the Magic Wand’s motor. In the end, to spare the overheating motor as well as Zora’s surging heart, Victor simply told her the number she needed to know.
“Thirteen. Add a hundred to that, and you’ll have the page to look up in the book.”
They were both lying face-up on the floor, unable to keep their hands and feet to themselves, their bodies steaming the library’s cold surfaces. Zora pulled the book to her, finding that the leather binding was actually an encasement for the smaller paperbound book of poems. She turned to page 113.
Ode on a Grecian Urn.
She knew this poem! Keats’ most famous. And from the poem, before her vision, leapt a most famous line.
Beauty is truth, truth beauty—that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.
In the light of the truth of her beauty, Victor would reveal to her the shadow of the beauty of his truth. No matter how ugly it was. She noticed then that Victor had changed the title of the poem. He had defaced the book to show her his truth.
Ode in a Grecian Urn.
She closed the book.
“The truth about Chloe Ming is hidden inside a Grecian urn somewhere in your home?”
“Yes, I put it there after she killed herself. Her family got her remains, this is what I got—my ode to her, from her. Go find it Zora—it will answer all your questions.”
Silently Zora got up, put her clothes back on, leaving her feet bare. Victor continued to lie there on the library’s ivory wood floor. The planks had come from Mozambique. He closed his eyes.
“I’ll take a nap and wait for you.”
She trod back into the living room, didn’t see any urn there, she would have remembered it anyway. Oh, the memories seared into her mind from that room. The kitchen—no urn. She found his Pilatesium and its assortment of medieval machines—no urn. A bathroom, drenched in green serpentine marble from the quarries of Connemara—no urn.
In his bedroom, where surprisingly she had never before set foot nor lain by his side, she found the urn. On a platform at the head of his bed, a masterpiece of sleep designed by Giuseppe Vigano for Italian furniture maker Bonaldo, lo and behold there it was. A single Grecian urn.
The urn had been found in nearly perfect condition in the sealed tomb of an Athenian noblewoman and had been sold at auction a number of times as it moved from one private collection to another. Victor had bought it for $1.7 million.
On the urn was painted, in a series of scenes, a terrible story: the kidnapping of Persephone by Hades. One scene showed Hades erupting from the bowels of the earth on his chariot, Persephone nearby picking flowers in a sweet meadow. Another scene showed him carrying her roughly in his arms, her semi-nude body flailing in a vain attempt to escape. The final scene showed her on a throne in the underworld, sitting next to Hades, fated for a time to be captive queen of the dominion of the dead.
Zora reached over and pulled the urn close to herself. She felt the presence of the dead girl come near to her. She removed the lid, gingerly, sensing the value of what she was uncovering, the value of Chloe’s life, the meaning of her death, much more than the worth of the urn itself.
In the shadowy depths of the urn she found the final trace of Chloe’s self: a rolled-up scroll of plain white stationery. She withdrew it from the urn. It was secured with a thin piece of black silk. This she untied. The urn stood there empty, forbidding and dark as the River Styx. Beside it she unrolled the note and began to read the wavering handwritten text.
Victor, my once and only love—
This is the last thing I will ever write, and the last piece of me you will ever have. I go to my death. By my own choice, of my own free will, probably the only truly free expression of myself I have ever had in this life. Do not blame yourself. Because of you, I have realized who I am in this world, and who I am not. Who I can never be. You told me, in a moment of the purest, most beautiful honesty, that you could never marry me, that I was not strong enough to be your wife, that no woman was. Least of all me, a foolish girl of twenty-two years. That is all the time I have had to learn about life and love, and that is all the time that I want. I hope that once I am gone, I can grow in your mind, mature in your soul, into the woman you could not imagine, a woman strong enough for you, a woman you could love without reservation.
Remember me always, Chloe
At the end of the note, Zora bowed her head as if to pray, and her body racked with sobs for Chloe’s fleeting life. Rage flowed together with her sorrow, each deepening the other, until she could no longer bear the horror, the agony, the vindictive pain cascading through her. She was sure that Victor felt vindicated by those words, Do not blame yourself, sure that he felt justified in the callousness of his cruelty. He cared only for himself, for his own pleasure, his own ambition, his own warped sense of right and wrong, of life and love.
He had but one purpose: to bend everything and everyone to his will, bring the world around him under his power. His was the charisma of the megalomaniac, the smile of the tyrant. Every corner of Zora’s mind, every ounce of spirit and will, flooded with the realization of Victor’s arrogant blindness, the barrenness of his heart, the hollowness of his soul. She knew what she must do. The only recourse of the weak: to show the strong that pain is a great equalizer, that the pain of oppression can be met with the pain of the flesh. That pain is the highest ideal of the weak.
She put the note back—it was Chloe’s wish that Victor have it as a final piece, a mortal token, of his dead lover, and Zora respected that wish.
She stood from Victor’s bed, rising erect upon her own tears.
Her rage faded to nothing, and her sorrow. She no longer had a self. She was nothing more than a reflection of Victor’s self, joining him in the idealism of pain, dissolving with him in torment, the weak becoming one with the strong.
She walked back toward the library with no life left in her eyes, nor any light shining forth from them. Her eyes were like the urn without its lid, open to darkness. On her way back to where Victor lay, she passed the kitchen. She went to a spot she had seen earlier—a large wooden block holding Victor’s collection of hand-forged, razor-sharp mizu-honyaki knives. She removed each one, studied it carefully, looking for the right fineness of the tip of the blade, the feel of the blade in her hand.
She chose the yanagi-ba-bocho, the sashimi knife, designed to move cleanly and translucently through raw fish, without noticeable friction, like a shark’s fin slicing through calm water. She gripped the knife with barely enough force to avoid dropping it, not tightly, not with the clenched hand and fiery eyes of a maniac.
She arrived back in the library. She stood several feet from Victor’s body. His eyes were closed. Having felt the stir of the air as she entered, having heard the bare patter of her feet on the ivory wood, he opened them. He saw her standing there with the knife and quickly sat up. He didn’t stand.
“What are you doing, Zora? Why are you holding a knife?”
Her voice was flatter than his floor of the space they were in, her thoughts at that moment infinitely less rich in color and texture and tone.
“I read the note Victor. I found the truth. As you promised I would. The same truth that Chloe found. I have felt what that truth means, now you need to feel it as well.”
“Zora, listen to me. Put the fucking knife down. Just tell me what you want to tell me. Lie down next to me. Let me hold you.”
“No, Victor. No. Not this time. This time you will learn something from me. This time you will have to trust me.”
“Well, what the fuck do you want me to do? Eat some sashimi? I don’t know if you noticed, but there isn’t any raw fish lying around here.”