by Sadie King
Footfalls approached a matter of seconds after the fleshpot face had kissed the brass knocker plate for the third time. There was the Judge in houndstooth socks, white silk slacks and a light purple silk shirt, untucked, his few gray hairs glowing against disheveled black. Zora was wearing the same goldenrod pantsuit she’d been wearing earlier that day at the Drome. Luckily she had not gotten any of the Gatekeeper’s blood on it, at least any that noticeably blotched the hand-me-down polyester. The spittle she couldn’t see. The suit had belonged to her mother.
Judge Ras opened his mouth to speak; her voice crossed into it first, resonated against his tongue.
“It was a disaster, Judge. She’s satanic. Evil. I can’t do it, I just can’t do it.”
His eyes had a sheen of kindness without sacrificing any of their inner hardness. Wordlessly he turned, right hand on polyester shoulder, gentle pressure leading her inside. Threshold crossed, narrow doorway, polyester inevitably brushing silk, skin imagining skin beneath fabric, she heard him as she scented him, a mixture of cardamon and cedar with the odor of freshly washed pores.
“Calm down, Zora. Let’s talk about it in the living room.”
So now it would be Zora instead of Ms. Bright. Putting her in the same league of endearment as Dorothy. A dubious distinction to be sure.
The only name for him that seemed right on her lips, that played well against her palate, was Judge. As though that were his name instead of Victor. What would have to happen, what mysterious events would have to transpire, for her to call him Victor?
She crossed another threshold, into the living room, fabric still brushing fabric, skin still imagining skin, and entered a world of ivory. The Judge was a serious collector, morbidly serious, a connoisseur of tusk and tooth. Nor did he hide away his collection in some vault, where it would just as soon gather dust as value.
Like the gavel, like the callipygian head on the door, he filled his everyday life with his artifacts. Entwined his deeds with their movements, gave them life beyond the decorative. An ivory pipe here, a pair of ivory Kama Sutra figurines there. Actually he had a number of those, an entire auction’s worth of erotic Murshidabad ivory, from the time when Jafar Khan was the diwan of Bengal.
An ivory fountain pen resting on an end table. An ivory-handled ebony cane leaning beside the faux fireplace. And what was that sitting just beyond the room on the kitchen counter, Zora couldn’t help but ask. A totem stick with an eagle’s head made from the penis bone of an Alaskan walrus.
He used it occasionally he said as a meat tenderizer. He already had an ulu topped with an oosik handle, for cutting meat, and figured the two pieces should complement each other in the kitchen.
As they looked around the living room together, she standing in rapture, eyes wading through waves of ivory, he snatched from the coffee table an antique stethoscope with an ivory chestpiece. Held it to her chest, right between her breasts. The thing was rumored to have been owned by Benjamin Rush, but the provenance wasn’t ironclad.
“Just want to make sure your little encounter with Dorothy didn’t give you arrhythmia.”
She swatted his errant hand away: “Judge, be serious.”
He set the stethoscope down, gestured to a chair a few feet away, cater-corner to the table, an island in the room.
“Please Zora have a seat, we’ll have that champagne I promised you in a few minutes.”
The chair was no wood-veneer bourgeois luxury: it was a throne. It had been bartered by an important chieftain in the Congo, back in those heady days of colonial dismemberment of the continent. For a dubious right—the chief could control the flow and prices of ivory in his kingdom, so long as all of it ended up in the hands of King Leopold’s traders.
Needless to say, the white traders soon accused the chief of inflating prices, and siphoning off ivory for himself, not to mention the worst sin of all, conserving the herds. They turned his subjects into serfs of ivory under force of arms. The chief himself was murdered by Leopold’s mercenaries—killed on the pretext that he was fomenting rebellion against the liberators of his people. It was called Congo Free State, after all.
None of that bloody history lessened the majesty of that throne, which the Judge had bought at Sotheby’s at their African Heritage auction a few years back. It had all the trappings, all the official forms, of proper ownership, enough paperwork behind it to fill every orifice of the body.
Now Zora sat in it. Sank into it. Comfortable as fuck. Not a traditional African stool, not an imperial throne either, more like a sitting-room chair in the Palace of Versailles. It was made of bubinga wood, seat upholstered with leopard skin, preserved beautifully after all those years and all the distance it had been forced to travel.
And the panels of the back were inlaid with ivory, engraved with a variety of geometric patterns alternating with silhouettes of wildlife. A row across the panels of okapi—Zora mistook them for giraffes. A row of lionesses, seated.
Judge Ras sat on the couch, got comfortable, houndstooth onto the coffee table. The couch was an exception to the room’s law of ivory, sort of—it was covered entirely in ivory-colored sharkskin. The company that made it had told him it was the tanned belly hide of some type of Requiem shark, could not narrow down the species for him.
Zora momentarily neglected the Gatekeeper, was entranced by ivory.
“Jesus, how did you get all this?”
She had meant the question logistically, geographically. He reckoned it to be about money. He was not beholden to money as he was to ivory, as he was to Eros, the two primary catalysts of his passions, Eros more than ivory, the god dancing across his worldview. He had money in spades.
“Ever heard of Victor Judge?”
A wry grin, the smirk of a secret, flitted across to her.
Instantly Zora made the connection, she thought herself a fool for having missed it before. She had read his books, each and every one, counted herself an ardent fan. She had blogged about them for strangers passing in the night, in cyberspace, to hook them as she had been hooked.
New York Times bestsellers, erotic murder mysteries. The wiles of Detective Becky Love. Becky Love was a femme fatale on the side of right, deadly to the deadly. The ideal blend of Eros and Thanatos. Freud himself would shudder if he met her, he’d beg to kiss her feet. Beg like a baby.
It made sense the Judge would use a pseudonym. The steaminess, the sordidness, simply would not do in the halls of academia, in the hallowed chambers of Law.
Shit, he’s richer than Stephen King!
“Yeah, heard of him, some kind of author, right?”
She affected a nonchalant tone, cool with irony. She wouldn’t stoop to the level of an otaku, regardless of how she really felt.
“Something like that.”
His smirk continued to flit across the table, flirting with her, as cool and ironic as her question.
Beneath the irony, repression’s hold on Zora weakened. She had always fancied herself the alter ego of Becky Love. She lusted after Love’s ability to play with fate, shed inhibition, to mock the power of death over love, of love over death.
She longed to surrender in victory to Eros, toy with the god, bend his will to hers, use him to kill for her.
Zora herself was no fantasy in ivory, no Pygmalion slave, no virgin bride. She’d had a lover at Vanderbilt, Kyle Schuman, the sex was certainly nothing to write home about—although she had written home about loving him.
Kyle had met Alice and Jordan, had passed the parental test with flying colors. He ended up graduating summa with a degree in history, wrote his thesis on the English Interregnum, boring beyond belief. He was on track to graduate summa from Stanford Law in a couple years.
They’d broken up for the usual reason—the man fucked up. Why he had slept with his co-editor on the student paper The Hustler she could not fathom. Who did he think ran the paper, Larry Fucking Flynt?
Zora was available, open, the laws of her body and her heart could be re-written, re
-inscribed in a new language, and the eroticism of the Judge, the sensuality beneath the stone, was an ordeal too intense, too liberating, for repression to bear.
She did not fear him now, as she had not feared him in his office.
What of their difference in status, in power? Was she not in every molecule, every atom, a woman, as powerful in her own thoughts and feelings, the sanctity of her sexuality, as any woman—as much the empress of her own world as Becky Love was of hers?
And the Judge couldn’t hurt her if he wanted to, or for that matter favor her, in the classroom either. Grading was anonymous, numerical. Shit, law students slept with professors all the time, that species of sex was practically a pre-requisite for the bar exam in some states.
While her inhibitions percolated in reverse, the Judge steered back to business.
“Will you write the plea for Dorothy?”
“I don’t think so. She really offended me. Told me I had the mark of the slave. My mom’s ancestors were slaves. Her great-great-great-granddad was lynched by a mob, falsely accused of the murder of a white man. I don’t know how I can plead for the life of someone like that.”
“That’s the point, Zora. She’s sick. Her mind is not her own, she’s possessed. Dorothy’s perfect for the LORD Project. Don’t make this personal.”
“Well, I’ll think about it, how’s that. I need to recover from my arrhythmia first.”
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.