The Coming of Bright

by Sadie King

  Zora powered down her PC, grabbed her keys and pocketbook, and headed over to Welch. Once she had a cup of java from Starbucks in hand, soy milk swirling into creamy diffusion, it would be merely a matter of time before she tracked down the head of Voltaire. That would point her to the meeting-place of the Juris Club. The first step in the ecstatic journey Victor was taking her on.

  It had become obvious to her that the revealing of the clue was a much more fulfilling process, a vastly more passion-stirring process, than the solving of the clue.

  Seven busts down, at least a dozen to go. A voice. One she knew.

  “Zora, wait.”

  She hesitated, she was walking fast, frenetically fast, buoyed along by the promise of the next revelation, the next mysterious touch. She turned her head to the slant of the voice. There was Jack, striding at her pace, stumbling and bumbling to keep up, parallel, one aisle of books to her left. She’d been looking to the right at the gold-painted alcoves that held the busts, perched disembodied on four-foot marble pedestals.

  He’d first spotted her about five aisles back, three over. He’d been sitting at one of the study tables, he should really have been glued to his Oil and Gas Law casebook, finishing up Enron v. Worth, shit he was sick of reading about surface easements. Instead he’d been looking around, people watching, careful not to stare, fashioning stories of their lives, their secrets, plotting out in his mind their trials and tribulations. And ecstasies.

  Jack shot down the aisle, stood before her huffing.

  “What’s the hurry, Zora? Trying to get the last copy of The Bramble Bush on reserve?”

  Classic Jack, smirk written all over him. His sense of humor danced for her. Where Judge Ras had a wit that waltzed, Jack had a smirk that flamencoed.

  She skipped over pleasantries, time was running short and so was her coffee. Law school loans being what they were, she couldn’t afford to keep refueling at Ahab’s caffeine shack every half hour. Her parents were historians, for Chrissakes, not fucking hedge-fund managers.

  “If you must know, I’m looking for Voltaire.”

  “Which one, I’m guessing either Candide or The Man of Forty Crowns. Not one of his better known works, but let me tell you, the Geometrician is a riot. I could read it to you in the original, you know.”

  “Jack, what in God’s name you talking about?”

  “Oh, you wouldn’t know this, I was a French major. At Harvard.”

  His H-bomb made a muffled explosion among the cavernous stacks.

  “Actually they’re not called majors there, little known fact, they’re called Concentrations, and—”

  Zora cut him off. She was plenty proud of Vanderbilt. Go Commodores!

  “Good to know, I’ll put that in the mental file.”

  She made a gesture of a metal file drawer closing against her head, a mocking metal clanging noise from the back of her throat.

  “I’m looking for the head of Voltaire. You know, one of these busts.”

  She gestured to a bust on her immediate right, which turned out to be the bronzed head of Arabella Mansfield, the first female lawyer in America and one of the most ironically named.

  “Of course—I know exactly where that is.”

  He started to walk, not forward, but back down the aisle whence he’d come.

  “You do? What are you, obsessed with busts or something?”

  Jack smirked for the umpteenth time in the short time she had known him. She could have sworn his glance radiated downward from the slight cleft in her chin, went just slightly south of the crescent-shaped birthmark in the hollow of her neck. She straightened her back, trying to assume a more professional bearing, but only made his pupils dilate. A straightened back, a fuller chest: not the best response to his wayward eyes.

  “No, actually I’m more into buttresses.”

  A wink. She slapped his shoulder. Hard. He mock winced.

  “Just take me to it, OK? Stop playing around, Mr. French-at-Harvard.”

  She said Harvard with her best faux French accent.

  She hoped that whatever he did, he didn’t stray into the territory of wordplay involving France and tongues. That might make her blush. Important to keep her body language straight, not allow her desire to become as wayward as his eyes, allow the freshness and fragility of her passion to overflow and be terribly misconstrued.

  “Fine, Ms. Elle Hache O O Ku.”

  She’d picked up some French language tapes prior to a summer trip to Paris with six of her Zeta Rho sisters at Vanderbilt. All she remembered of “The Joys of Conversational French,” unfortunately, was l’alphabet and some oft-used lines from her trip like “Parlez-vous anglais?” and “Où sont les toilettes, s’il vous plaît?”

  “What the hell does that mean?”

  He apparently wasn’t done playing the cunning linguist, wanted to lead her further down the Champs-Élysées of confusion.

  “Vous semblez aimer les hommes célèbres français, alors pourquoi ne pas Duchamp et son Mona Lisa avec une moustache.”

  “Did you just call me Mona Lisa with a mustache?”

  His double-edged compliments were starting to earn him more rancor than humor. Zora was on the sensitive side about her facial hair—she’d had a facial waxing at Bella Spa on Pearl Street, next to the Cantonese take-out place, less than a week before. The slate should have been wiped clean. Her hand shot up to her face to check. Nothing, not a hint of fuzziness, simply a blank slate of glowing skin.

  “No, no, not even close—but here, let me get a closer look.”

  As they walked, wove through the aisles, he maneuvered right next to her. If she’d moved any further right to avoid him she’d have bruised herself on treatises of torts. Peered intently at her lower face as though he were a doctor with a dermatoscope, looking at skin lesions. She shoved him away with enough firmness to send a message. Next time she’d leave a mark.

  “Better not try that again or I’ll slap the hair right off your face.”

  “Nope, no mustache. A few freckles though. Cute. Taches de douceur.”

  Her revenge sprang upon her tongue, her lips, a ruse for his wayward eyes, another expression she remembered from those tapes, one meant for the careless pedestrian in the wake of a dog-walker, or a traveler on a dusty country road.

  “Tu viens de marcher dans la merde!”

  The ruse worked. He stopped cold, looked down, back, lifted up one shoe, then the other. And then his shock gave way to laughter as he grabbed her arm and continued on, faster.

  “Good one, Miss Bullshit, you already have sterling legal credentials.”

  “Takes one to know one Jack, and I don’t have to remind you of your surname de merde, now do I?”

  He stopped cold again.

  There it was, finally, the bust and engraved plate.

  François-Marie Arouet (Voltaire), 1694-1778, Who Freed the Human Spirit from its Chains.

  From his sarcophagus in the crypt of the Pantheon. Chains or no chains, Voltaire could have done a passable impression of the Mona Lisa. The bust-makers had chosen a younger likeness as their model, had accentuated in bronze the natural softness of his features, their sensitive and mysterious androgyny. Like most of the philosophes, he was a pretty boy.

  To the immediate left of the alcove that bore the head of Voltaire was a door, oak, locked, that said in stenciled silver letters, “Faculty Reading Room, Soviet Law.”

  Zora might not have known Lenin from Trotsky, but she was pretty damn sure that not a single faculty member at Founders currently taught or would ever teach Soviet law. Not unless by some catastrophic miracle the Soviet Union reappeared on the world stage.

  Even at the height of the Cold War the room probably was not much of a hotspot of intellectual activity—the prominence of any field at any prestigious law school is inversely related to the likelihood that one would have to receive a paycheck from Uncle Sam by studying it.

  She’d found her prize, the sanctum of the Juris Club. The first step
. In what she hoped would be a long process. She was consumed by the desire to have the saga of discovery play out as slowly and sensuously as possible. Of the secrets of the Juris Club, the secrets of her own desire—unlocked by Victor.

  “Tell me, why the curiosity about the head of Voltaire? I don’t get it.”

  Within limits, Zora had always preferred honesty to evasion, and thus far Jack had been frank with her—too frank. But he had gotten her to the head of Voltaire while her coffee was still hot, and she owed him a straight answer.

  “I met the Judge a couple hours ago, at his townhouse. He told me how to find the meeting place of the Juris Club, gave me some clues about Voltaire. Ever heard of it?”

  “The Juris Club, sure, who hasn’t. It’s the Skull and Bones of sharks. Nixon was a member, Ford was too, shit why do you think Ford pardoned him? But what are you doing meeting with the Judge at home?”

  The faintest hint of jealousy permeated his voice.

  “Well, Mr. Prying, I went to talk to him about the Gatekeeper and the clemency plea he wants me to write. Remember that? And I wanted to ask him about the Juris Club, I mentioned that to you in the Cave.”

  “Don’t get too close to Judge Ras, Zora. You don’t know what he’s capable of.”

  This time it was Zora who smirked, more like muffled laughter with a scowl.

  “What he’s capable of? Are you nuts? One of most highly respected jurists in the country, if not the world? And he’s showing an interest in my studies and my career. You should be happy for me, not throwing insinuations around. What gives you the right?”

  Jack was taken aback by her defensiveness. He sensed if he pushed too far, their growing rapport would wither in the bud. He still couldn’t resist one Parthian shot before steering away from the subject. He cared about Zora. Compassion more than passion.

  “Fair enough. But he loves to play mind games, makes Socrates look like an amateur. And believe me, unlike Socrates, he wouldn’t be the one committing suicide. There’s a rumor that a student a couple years ago, a young woman, a 1L like you, committed suicide because of him.”

  Zora had had enough.

  “Jack, I’m seriously not listening to any more of your shit. Victor is a good man.”

  Aware that she had called him Victor, she flushed brilliantly, radiantly. The shame only fueled her anger, and her anger masked her shame. She caved to her urge to flee from Jack, from the situation, turning furiously on her heels and walking toward the nearest staircase to the first floor, out the main entrance.

  Jack followed behind her, chastened into silence, she shamed into it. Once they were out on the path in front of Welch, she stopped, turned to him, curtly:

  “Good night Jack. See you in class.”

  “I’m sorry Zora. I really am. I’m just looking out for you. Law school can be a vicious place. A tragic place.”

  He reached out to her as she turned to walk away. His hand brushed the exact spot on her neck where Victor had first touched her. For a split second her eyes closed, her lungs suspended their movement and she hesitated, her feelings in complete disarray. Then her eyes opened, clear as night and she hurried away, leaving Jack fixed in place. Staring at her body receding rapidly in the lamp-lit black.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Next class, Wednesday. Zora and Jack settled into their seats. Zora centered, Jack scattered.

  Walking off into the black that Tuesday morning, barely Tuesday, after the longest Monday of her life, the most memorable for its extremes of fear and frenzy, loathing and longing, Zora had forgiven Jack.

  She knew his type, or thought she did: the over-protective brother figure. He took his TA duties too seriously, as far as she was concerned anyway, allowing feeling to interfere with doing.

  She chalked up his solicitude, overbearing as it could be at times, to a by-product of Victor’s brooding interest in her. He resented Victor, whether out of rivalry or genuine distrust she didn’t yet know. And very likely it was a by-product, one Victor hadn’t foreseen and couldn’t forestall, of the professor asking the TA, the lowly cog, to be a go-between with a favored student. A middle peg.

  Zora prayed to God, as much as she found Jack charming in his wayward way, that his being the middle peg wouldn’t extend to ménage à trois. She hoped with a rising inner heat that Jack’s knowledge of French didn’t extend to the intricacies of that term, the tangled meaning of that phrase. She’d been raised a traditional girl, and ménage à trois between a professor, TA, and first-year student—not necessarily in that order in the way it actually played out—was definitely pushing the conservative envelope. Maybe even the liberal one, though from stories she’d heard she doubted it. She was no stranger to TMZ, let’s put it that way.

  Jack was far from done playing the middle peg. After they’d exchanged pleasantries, and Jack had casually, playfully touched her arm, knowing the Qi meridians of her body, his touch instantly relaxed her, his fingers could perform their own acupuncture without needing to break the skin, calibrating the rhythms of her self back to their natural state, he handed her a small envelope.

  It was sealed in red wax with an impression of the Chinese character for “forbidden,” jin, a complex symbol of 13 strokes, the bottom meaning the revelation of God and the top signifying two trees, the Tree of Knowledge and the Tree of Life. An allusion to the forbidden fruit. A symbolic bond between ancient China and the Judeo-Christian world.

  Zora ripped open the envelope, splitting the waxen symbol vertically, tearing the revelation of God in two and cleaving the Tree of Life from the Tree of Knowledge. It had to be from Victor. His version of a billet-doux. A love letter. She read eagerly, having to hold the note at an angle to banish Jack’s inquisitive eyes.

  Hello my luscious Pandora,

  Now you’ve done it, opened the forbidden note. Who knows what may come, daring love. The symbol in wax comes from my collection, my most valuable object, an ivory stamp once belonging to the Qianlong Emperor to enclose state secrets. To break its seal by the wrong hand was to invite death by a thousand cuts. Stop by my house tonight. Bring the plea for Dorothy and bring your desire to know. I have something for you, something that melts like wax and seals up skin. It will enclose a secret of its own, a secret meant only for your senses, every single one. Life by a thousand touches.

  V.

  Her hand clenched upon the note, crumpling it. Her teeth clenched even harder, straining at their roots. A seizing up of muscle, of sinew, from a rush of adrenaline. No one could take the power of death and magnify it into love like Victor could. It wasn’t until Jack tapped her hard on the shoulder that Zora realized her eyes had clenched shut as well. She must have looked like someone being electrocuted.

  Speak of the devil, there was Victor at the front of the class. She sought him out with pooling eyes, ripples of feeling on their surface, pulsing with the energy of connection, but he deflected them with indifference, the air of the regal professor for whom every student is a pauper, a peon. Her energy reflected back, rejected back, its warmth cooled into hurt.

  She glared but that made no difference. Searching for connection of any kind, she bored her eyes into Jack for making her the go-between. For passing information to Victor without her consent. How else could he know she’d already found the room? For someone who thought so ill of Victor, Jack sure was absorbed in him now.

  “Good morning, pe—”

  Zora thought he would say “peons” but he finished the greeting with “people.”

  “Let’s jump right into the Nozick reading, shall we?”

  That was a reading she’d actually done. Her whirlwind affair with Victor had thrown into disarray her carefully laid plans to make the law journal—through sheer, mindless drudgery. Drudgery was rapidly giving way to poetry of limbs and lips.

  Nozick was token drudgery, he came from a packet of xeroxed readings she’d picked up at the Founders Bookstore, the packet had the ominous title “Theory.”

  The reading was just a
few pages from the 70’s “classic” Anarchy, State, and Utopia. Not quite Fear of Flying, her favorite book from her favorite decade, but at least she could fly through it. She thought Nozick a fool, a dangerous fool, for thinking that virtually any injustice—slavery, murder, you name it—could be condoned. The only thing that mattered in his mind was whether everybody started out on a level playing field, and whether everybody “freely” agreed to injustice. If someone ended up on the losing end, ended up a slave, but still agreed to it, then so the fuck what.

  That was the basic argument as she understood it. Let the chips fall where they may, no matter if you end up signing your life away. No wonder Victor liked that reading—it seemed to follow the same kind of twisted logic of economic “freedom” that he and his esteemed ass subscribed to.

  She had a strong and extremely unsettling premonition that Victor would single her out, riddle her with Socratic barbs, and he didn’t disappoint. She’d already devised a feeble attempt to back out, an homage to his love of strained wordplay. It worked like paper steel.

  “Ms. Bright, care to tell us why Nozick is right?”

  What a loaded question. Fuck.

  “No, sick.”

  She feigned her best pneumonic cough.

  Not only did the pun not work, it emboldened his inner asshole.

  “Ms. Bright, if you can talk, you can answer. Let’s hear it.”

  A few more fake coughs, hand to mouth. She had to pretend that she was clearing phlegm from her lungs, and even added the flourish of wiping her hand with disgust on her right pantsuit leg, after recoiling from its drenching of imaginary cough-up.

  “Sorry Judge, what was your question again?”

  “Why is Nozick right?”