by Sadie King
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.
She picked up. His voice was soft, lilting, charming, sad.
“Zora, I’m worried sick about you. You didn’t show up for class at all this week. You didn’t show up Friday night.”
“Victor, why are you tormenting me? Every time I put my trust in you, you treat me like nothing. Less than nothing. Some kind of object for you to toy with. You are the most selfish person I’ve ever met.”
A wide gulf of sound and feeling on the other end. Zora came close to hanging up and not picking up ever again.
“I don’t want to lose you Zora. I behaved terribly in the restaurant. Believe me, forgive me, you are not an object to me. You’re a beautiful, sensitive, exquisite creature. The most enchanting woman I’ve ever met.”
He paused, waiting for her words to fill the void of his words. When they didn’t, he filled the void himself.
“I am selfish, absolutely. No excuses my love. But please understand, it’s not easy being who I am and getting to where I’ve gotten. I have to be strong, and yes that can mean selfish.”
“I do understand that, Victor. But you have to understand something, very clearly, once and for all: you can’t be selfish to me. Or people I care about. I’m not a colleague you need to compete against to get published in some fancy journal. I’m not another judge you need to jostle with to get nominated to the Supreme Court. I’m someone you have to love.”
“What can I do, Zora, tell me. I need more than words.”
“You can start by re-hiring Jack. That was unfair, what you did to him. Jack is my friend, one of the few I have here.”
“I can’t rehire him, I already hired his replacement, her name’s Mary Jackson and . . .”
“I don’t fucking care!”
She shouted into the phone. No doubt curious ears up and down the hallways of her dorm perked up. Finally, something scandalous, something salacious, to break the endless tedium of law school.
“You asked me what you could do. You have to make it right, no matter what. That’s all I care about.”
“Fine, have it your way. I’ll rehire him. What do I care if the class has two TA’s? I’ll talk to Dean Pollard about requisitioning him back.”
Victor was not a quick learner, he was still talking about people as objects, commodities to be priced and traded.
“Good, a step in the right direction. I’m sure the law school has enough extra money floating around for something like that. With how much they gouge us.”
“Speaking of which, why don’t you come over? You can gouge me. Face to face. Heel to groin if you want. I deserve it.”
Zora smiled to herself at that. A smile of malice. Her mood was improving already, acidifying. She was tempted to take him up on that particular offer. Aside from her heel, there was any number of sharp objects in his home that would work quite nicely. And blunt ones would work even better.
“Not tonight. I’m still too angry at you, confused about everything. You’ve made me really depressed, you know that.”
She wanted to rebuild a tendril of trust between herself and Victor before confronting him about Chloe. She wanted their lines of communication to be clear. She needed her feelings and mind to be equally clear, not clouded with doubt, to be able to know whether he was telling the truth about the fallen girl. His role, if any, in her plunge to the hard earth.
“That’s why I want you to come. I want to raise your spirits. I have something very special planned. Think of it as my way of washing away all your doubts about me. And that’s much more than a metaphor. Don’t forget about the password either. An extra thrill.”
Zora had to admit that all of her depression had been rather depressing. Wallowing blindly in the dark. She did yearn for light and joy. To feel like Icarus before the fall, seeking the sun. Basking in its rays. With Victor in her life, maybe she co
uld forestall the fall for good. Fly with him, on waxen wings, into the bright above. Most of what she had known at Victor’s house had been stratospheric joy. It pulled her back there on its radiance. Just not yet.
“Not tonight. Tomorrow is another day. Or the next. Or I may not. You may never see me again by my own will. Only by chance, unacknowledged. Good night.”
“Wait, let me say one—” She hung up the phone. Smiling.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
By the following day she’d come around. She’d changed her mind before it had been made up. Light needs only the smallest opening to shine forth into the darkness. She did feel herself like Icarus, flying too high on wings fashioned of wax, much too high, and Victor was her sun, his hubris fed hers, could make her plummet to the earth, drown in the depths of the watery earth.
She wanted to soar. His bipolarity fed hers, suspended her certainty over a precipice of mind, the most burning vertigo she’d ever known. She’d pulled herself out of her depression, pulled herself from the brink of suicide, by convincing herself that she could climb higher into his rays without fear of falling. So she went back to him, her only thought, her only infatuation, to fall back into his arms and be consumed by his body. By his love.
“I hope you’re wearing one of those cup protectors. You may need it.”
She knew his greatest strength, the seat of his masculine power, was also his greatest vulnerability. A well-placed blow could reduce him to a tangled moaning mass of crushed nerves. She put him on alert, phallic foreshadowing.
“I am so happy to see you. I thought I’d never see you again. Your tone scared me, threw me into a panic.”
She moved past him into the house, went straight into the kitchen, picked up the razor-sharp ulu with the oosik handle. It had taken one well-endowed walrus to make that thing. Held it out in front of her.
“I swear Victor, if you ever hurt me again, I’m going to come to your house and make you bleed with this thing. Gallons of blood. I’ll make Lorena Bobbitt look like a surgeon. It’ll be messy. Much messier than it has to be.”
“Ooooooh . . . sounds kinky. Will you reattach it when you’re done? I have some needle and thread in that cupboard over there . . . we can see if it’s still in good working order. All the blood loss, the nerve damage, might make the sensations very different . . .”
Zora could not believe he had just used the word kinky to describe the worst possible damage to the male body, short of decapitation. Come to think of it, that was a form of decapitation—and most men would probably prefer the regular sort of decapitation, the sort perfected by the guillotine, to that catastrophe of male identity. Zora had one overriding message to send to Victor: as easily as women could give head, they could also take it away. Completely sever it from the body.
If he wanted to play kinky, she could play along. She could add brinkmanship to kinkiness.
“You know what lover, I’m in the mood for a foot massage right now. Let’s head over to the couch, make ourselves comfortable.”
Off popped her heels, and onto the couch, seductively supine, sprawled her lean lithe frame. Victor followed, sitting in his customary spot and taking in his hands her feet, artistic feet, Bouguereau feet, delicate and diaphanous, kneading them evenly through layers of skin and muscle. She wasn’t wearing nylons this time.
“Ooooooh, feels good, you really are an artist . . . close your eyes for me.”
“Close my eyes? I thought that was your job.”
“Not this time. Better close ’em tight.”
He obliged. Not oblivious in the least to what was coming. What he hadn’t expected was her resolve, her indifference to his suffering. With double the force she had used during their last foot-massage session, she drove her heel between his legs.
He hurled into space the unearthliest cry she had ever heard. It reminded her more than anything of the impassioned bellow of a walrus in the heat of the rut. Victor balled up like a fetus and rolled off the couch, started tossing around on the living room floor, voice and torso vibrating in torment.
In the process he knocked over several small tables holding ivory artifacts. The precious pieces tumbled helter-skelter about the room. One of the Kama Sutra figurines, a man and woman sexually joined in the wheelbarrow position, hit the floor at such an angle that the man’s ivory penis broke off inside the woman, then tumbled out of her as she bounced a couple times away from the point of impact.
Zora found this whole scene refreshingly amusing, a symbol in the flesh of Victor’s just desserts. But after a while, his rolling and tossing and torment began to get ridiculous. Pathetic. Take it like a man, you ass. It took him many unmanly minutes, more ivory on the floor than off it, to gather up his wits, and what was left of his testicles, and plant himself gingerly back on the couch.
Without another sound, he took Zora’s feet back in his hands and resumed the massage. No sore words to match his sore genitals. No withering look to match his withering sperm count.
Simply lavishing attention on her Chiparus feet, a ballet of fingers and toes. And Victor was no stranger to Chiparus feet—he had two Chiparus pieces in his collection, Antinea and the Dancer of Palmyra. Both of them chryselephantine. The Palmyra dancer had fallen face up onto the carpet in front of the couch, looked like she was doing a lap of backstroke in the shag. Her feet, swimming in the air, were the most erotic display of ivory Victor had ever seen. He was glad he had knocked her over.
He rolled off the couch again, into a kneeling position. Nothing fetal about it. No bellowing either. Still no words, no apologies, no barbs of seduction. He kissed her feet in a posture of supplication, as though praying to a goddess while kissing her. Prayerfully he moved his way up the couch, massaging along her body. With every movement of his hands she forgave him a little more. Isn’t forgiveness the point of prayer?
When he got to her neck, she felt a frisson of fear. A woman’s exposed neck is the seat of her vulnerability, just as a man’s crown jewels are the seat of his. Zora’s favorite painting was The Execution of Lady Jane Grey for that very reason. Lady Grey, upstart queen, ruler for a mere nine days, beheaded as a teenager, kneeling blindfolded to die, was one of the most touching, one of the most disturbing, subjects for a painting Zora had ever seen. Her trickle of fear with Victor’s hands around her throat was a murmur from her subconscious mind of the palpable fear that Lady Grey must have felt. Might Victor strangle her, take away her life before he could take away her will to live?
A firm no. Victor transmuted death’s dominion into love’s eternity. His hands around her neck did not crush, did not choke off life; they took the right amount of blood from her brain, and breath from her lungs, to give her the euphoria of the helpless. The jouissance of the abject. He was kneeling. She had surrendered.
His hands stayed at her neck, worked their sorcery of force and sensation there. As she became giddier and giddier, more and more lightheaded from the pressure of his hands, never enough to endanger life, more than enough to entrance the self, she wanted to join with him. Become one with him. As his whitening hands had become one with her reddening neck.
With her left hand, she seized the hair on the back of his head and pulled his face violently to hers. Her face was upraised a few inches from the purple pillow on the couch. Their noses crashed and teeth audibly clicked together, but such was her determination that she wouldn’t let his head recoil from the shock. Nor did she let hers fall back. She kissed him with the need that pulses through all the world’s greatest myths, the need to transcend death through love, a power, an alchemy, he had convinced her he possessed, through actions more than words. He did not release his hands from her neck.
Before long she needed air, was desperate for it. As violently as she had pulled his face to hers, she threw it back, away from her. His head snapped back, and his hands came off her throat. He nearly fell over backwards, almost did a backstroke of his own onto the coffee table. Could have been a real vein-shearing mess, with shards of glas
s everywhere—and if his body had then ricocheted onto the floor, who knows what the upraised leg of a dancing figurine can do to a man, impaled in his chest up to the figurine’s waist.
But he caught himself just as she sucked in a lifeful of air, knelt there in silence at the edge of the couch, his hands folded on his legs, while she dropped her head onto the pillow and arched her neck and upper back in newfound breath. The veins in her neck surged with blood, gorged so much with the juice of life that they appeared like thick purple threads against her almond skin.
“Wait here.”
He ascended from his knees, stood tall over her for a moment like a champion on a field of battle, a commanding presence, imperious, cast his shadow in a dark ray over her gorged self, walked away from her. She didn’t look to see where, tried to focus her thoughts away from the tide of sensation to which they’d succumbed, tried to give her mind back to reason, prepare herself for whatever he had in store, prepare herself to choose.
Focus wouldn’t come, nor would the flow of blood in her veins subside.
He returned, wheeling in a stainless steel tray table, the kind they use to deliver room service in starry hotels, complete with a white linen cloth draped over the tray. He was missing only the tux and the obsequious manner. She half-expected to see something there from the menu of The French Laundry, some terrine of gingered melon to get the tastebuds freshened, then some sherry-braised sirloin of rabbit for its savory charms, finishing with a dish of custard from the eggs of Jidori hens—with just enough fermented candied cod roe on top for the necessary umami.
But no—no food at all. A set of glass bottles, filled with liquids, starting with two bottles of tequila on one end of the tray. Gran Patrón Platinum and Ultra Premium Tequila Ley .925 Pasión Azteca. Next to these, continuing the theme of the blue agave plant, was a bottle of the nectar of this botanical oro azul, a nectar sweeter than honey and smoother than milk. Finally came the oils, ten of them, each in its own little bottle: Oil of Peppermint, Oil of Myrrh, Oil of Sandalwood, Oil of Lemongrass, Oil of Chamomile, Oil of Jojoba, Oil of Rosewood, Oil of Vanilla, Oil of Lavender, Oil of Bergamot.