by Sadie King
Even after he had fully risen, she knew not where, her body curved further upward of its own accord, reaching into the space left by his absence, then finding nothing there, no counterpoising force, settled slowly back into the depths of the chair, the cold dead embrace of leopard skin.
She could hardly have located herself precisely in time and space. Her only law at that moment was the law of entropy, of the wayward scattering of every thought and feeling that crossed her heart and mind. Her radiating, trembling soul.
It did not take him long to return. He knew how to control himself, prided himself on his subservience to Law and to Will—but Zora had put all of that in doubt, had made him practically rush to her, he unbearably missed her presence as soon it had been taken away by distance. This impulse to return to her, to create from their bodies a new work of art, carved from the marble of the senses, painted on their corporeal canvas, orchestrating their music to fill the air, was beyond his capacity to judge. A Law unknown to him.
He brought with him the bottle of champagne. And an object from his ivory collection. A champagne glass, a flute, once owned by Voltaire.
The bowl was of Bavarian crystal, of Schwarzwald origin to be exact, Spiegelau crystal, heavily leaded. The stem and foot of the flute were ivory. By far the most intriguing feature of the glass was the inscription on the underside of the foot.
E du C.
Voltaire had commissioned the glass as a gift for the love of his life, Emilie du Chatelet, a kindred spirit. In the words of the author of Candide himself—“a soul for which my soul seems to have been made.”
After she died in childbirth in 1749—the girl was not Voltaire’s, and tragically died a mere 18 months after her mother’s soul departed—Voltaire had sold many of her things, the flute among them. To do so was not, he confided in a letter, to desecrate or slight her memory, he would never, could never, contemplate such a thing. It was rather to distill her away from the world of objects, to transform her into something of pure spirit, of essential mind.
Before Zora the Nude—her eyes were closed tight but he almost lost himself in his vision of her, the pastel swirls and kinetic shapes of her unclothed body, the dry heat and the cool humidity that enveloped her, forgot his purpose with the wine and glass, the mystery for her to unravel—Victor filled the flute with champagne, set the bottle on the table.
Whispered into Zora’s ear: “Open your eyes.”
She did, and he spoke: “The inscription is the first clue.”
He said nothing of the history of the glass, of Voltaire and his lost love, simply lifted the glass full to the brim above her face to show her the letters carved into elephant tusk. His hand, normally as steady as something mechanical, had lost some of its poise, its smooth fluidity, and he spilled some of the champagne, not much, a trickle more than a stream, onto her right cheek.
In one fluid motion, the torsion of her neck more confident than the line of his hand, she turned her head to the left, so that the champagne flowed into her mouth. She curled her tongue against the meeting place of her lips, and further out, against the faintest, softest hairs of her cheek, to harvest the remaining drops. He was right, the taste transported her to the flora of Brazil, to some place hot and moist, rife with vegetation and pollination, and the carbonation of the wine sizzled in her mouth and down her throat.
“Your body is the second clue. A map. Close your eyes again.”
Darkness prevailed again in her mind, she had only the vision of emotion and perception, the light and shadow of the sensual. He cupped his left hand around the base of her right breast, and with his right hand holding the flute of chilled champagne, poured a stream of liquid down her shoulder, over and around her breast, the florid liquid beginning to pool in his hand.
The warmth of his hand overwhelmed her, and when the wine hit her humid skin, its chill sending a shiver reverberating through every limb, she could not stop herself from crying out. He murmured from deep in his diaphragm as she did so, a murmur of gratification at her show of rapture.
He began to drink the wine, her breast the vessel of his libation. Like a beast he lapped the wine from his cupped hand, like a connoisseur of pleasure he licked the trails of wine from the contours of her chest. The ballet of his tongue added a dimension of Eros never before known in the sacrament of wine.
It need not be said that her nipples gained a life of their own, moved of their own will with the play of his tongue. She squirmed uncontrollably in the chair as some of the wine, slipping through his fingers, splashing away from his mouth, cascaded all the way down her stomach and pooled between her legs.
A new kind of ambrosia was born, a mixture and a mingling of the juices of her body’s inner sanctum and the essence of the distilled grapes. After a few minutes he moved his hand, sticky with champagne and his own saliva, over to her left breast. The alchemy of liquid, the chemistry of tongue and chest, began anew.
When he was done with her breasts he kissed his way, slowly, back up to her mouth. There was still wine in the glass, he had intentionally reserved some for this, and as they kissed he poured the rest of the wine between their faces, creating a cataract of champagne around their noses, down into their interlocking mouths. They drank of each other and of the grapes, and their saliva as it flowed between them, from mouth to mouth, seemed to bubble even more than the wine itself.
Finally he rose again. Her eyes opened without needing his words. Victor Judge was gone. In his place was the Judge, the man with all the lofty titles, the beacon of legal scholarship. A man whose life was the story of Law, of cold dominion over others and over himself. Author not of the Becky Love Mysteries, but of books that could murder the senses, butcher the mind, dismember the imagination. The best known of his masterpieces, his magnum opus, a frightening thing to contemplate, much less confront:
Applying Principles of Economic Efficiency to Justice.
“I need you to get dressed. It’s time for you to track down the clues I gave you. No rest for the wicked.”
What the fuck, but she was not really surprised. Several times she had tried to draw off his clothes, to pull silk away from flesh and bone. He hadn’t let her, had drawn back.
His goal was not yet consummation, his aspiration not yet to feel, to map out, the innermost geography of her body, to follow to its inevitable conclusion the oldest law of all, the original dream, toward which all humanity has always striven, will always strive as long as it can, as long as nature and her twists of fate and misfortune will let it.
The final victory of Eros over Thanatos. Of Love over Death.
As she left his townhouse that night—they kissed a while longer, fully clothed, the skin beneath her polyester a pandemonium of dry and wet, standing near the doorway, the Judge was not too cold and forbidding to kiss or be kissed, thank God, praise Eros—he gave her a parting gift.
“The throne is the key, the cipher, that ties the other clues together. It will take you to the location of our meetings.”
CHAPTER SIX
It was later than she’d realized, past 10. She was exhausted, burned through and through, every cell of nerve and muscle in her body ready to implode. Suffocated by a story. The narrative of her body, written by Victor, with his tongue and with his mouth and with his hands, inscribing the emotional and physical language of her erotic self. A slow, incendiary process that had every trapping of ritual, time out of time and space out of space.
Still she had no thought of sleep, could not fathom her consciousness of what had just happened winking out, the risk of not dreaming of the consummation of their passion was not worth taking. She was possessed by a manic energy unfamiliar to her, and the frantic pace of her thoughts, and the beating in her chest, had scarcely slowed since she had left his house. The stakes of their game had become the stakes of her life.
She’d made her way back to Ford by instinct drained of perception, by experience drained of thought, the buildings and the people and the cars along the way had no
true existence, were a great blur of flickering colors and the shadows cast by artificial light.
Had she been pulled over by the police, in her faded brick Honda hatchback, the officer would have thought her in a narcotic stupor. Would have been mystified by how someone with almost no alcohol in her system—less than a third of a glass of the bubbly had actually entered her bloodstream—could appear to be such a textbook case of intoxication.
She made it home without incident, unless yielding to the desire to touch herself along the way, only one hand on the steering wheel, to imagine him touching her while doing so, her hand acting as a surrogate of his, should be called an incident.
What she should have done once she got ensconced back in her room: crack open a few cans of energy drink and a couple weighty casebooks. Unfortunately for her, Zora was not one to resort to the Nutshell Series or the Black Letter Outlines.
She should have devoted herself to reading, underlining, memorizing until dawn cases like Cheek v. United States for Crim Law and Jacobellis v. Ohio for Con Law. Some Immanuel Kant and John Rawls thrown in for good measure. She should have been categorical about it.
The thought of it now was alien to her, like the thought of death to one granted immortality. She went straight to her computer to string together the clues that Victor had given her, the mysteries he had written on her skin and in the air.
She started where he’d ended, with the chair, the African throne. It had proven to her the dialectic of love and death, pain and pleasure, for now as she recalled her body in that chair, arcing forward against Victor’s silken form, then sinking back into the recesses of his kisses, her muscles contorting within the confines of the chair, she also imagined the body of the Gatekeeper, not dying from lethal injection as she was slated to, but dying in the electric chair, every muscle bending away from bone with the power of the current, every nerve burning out with the surge.
She focused her mind back on the chair, the leopard and bubinga chair, the cipher that bound. She might not have been an impresario of the erotic as Victor was, as he had proven to her he could be, but she hadn’t gotten as far as had, to one of the best law schools in the country goddammit, by being a slouch at research.
She pulled up a catalogue of images, 45,000 strong, with the keyword string “African + throne + leopard + skin.”
She knew nothing of the provenance of the chair, Victor hadn’t had any other plans for her than a history lesson. That it had been an African throne she could easily surmise from the craftsmanship and the motifs, as easily as she knew that the skin upon which her skin had rubbed had once belonged to a leopard.
By page 69 of the images she began to feel as though Morpheus had varnished her eyes, the endless variety of images radiating from the screen had the dulling effect of morphine. She still had 42,000 pictures to go, plus or minus a few hundred.
Will they ever fucking end?
There it was, bolt from the screen, the bottom row of page 69, thumbnail for a 740x1140 pixel image on the Sotheby’s website, the chair, archived, she revved up like an engine, her heart throttled forward, she clicked the image, and there it was:
Sold. Bubinga wood frame, leopard skin upholstery, engraved ivory paneling. c. 1898, Congo Free State. This throne, handcrafted by native artisans of local materials, was originally owned by King Miko Mbweeky III of the Bakuba people. He later bestowed it upon the emissaries of King Leopold III of Belgium as a token of the mutually beneficial trade relationship between the two kingdoms. Resembling the Voltaire chair popularized by the French writer, it serves as a fine example of the adaptation of European styles of craftsmanship to native African customs and techniques. A truly irreplaceable piece of African heritage and a worthy addition to a private collection of the finest taste.
She glossed over most of the names and facts—that sort of thing always engrossed Kyle more than it did her. God he could drone on about Cromwell as if he were the second coming of Christ. Part of her thought she had broken up with Kyle just to avoid having to listen to him say “Roundheads” one more time.
The mention of Voltaire shot to the forefront. Hadn’t the Judge, in only the first two Crim Law classes she’d taken, quoted from him as though his words were some kind of sacrament? She even remembered one of the quotes verbatim, she’d thought it out of place in a discussion about the Constitutional basis of presumption of innocence:
It is difficult to free fools from the chains they revere.
He had a bizarre, and to her very disturbing, theory that he had foisted upon the class, torturing people Socratically with it. Presumption of guilt—not presumption of innocence—would be more cost-effective for society as a whole because it would shift the economic burden of trials away from the government and onto the defendants. Now how fucked up is that?
The perversity of his little pet theory reminded her of another wise saying:
The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich and the poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.
That was Anatole France, a guy she’d read at Vanderbilt in her Law and Literature class. The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard was one hell of a book, not as richly textured as Les Miserables maybe, but she thought of them, and had argued for them in a term paper, as two sides of one great literary coin.
Yes, the clue had to be Voltaire. She started to read an online bio. Now she was really making headway, because halfway into the bio she stumbled onto gold:
Approaching his fifth decade of life and third of fame—infamy in some quarters—Voltaire embarked on the love affair of his life, the object of his affections being none other than the very married, but very available, Emilie du Chatelet, about whom he penned a very Enlightenment ode:
I shall await your coming,
Under my meridian, in the fields of Cirey,
Observing only the star
Of Emilie.
Very many veries there, Zora thought. That sealed it—the “E du C” on the sole of the flute’s foot was Voltaire’s star. Nor was it lost on her, her romantic sentiments waxing, cascading on memories of cold champagne and shivering skin, that she was Victor’s star.
His terra firma too, the way he’d loomed over her, pressed down on her, trodden upon her with touches.
How Victor had come by the glass she could only speculate. She hadn’t really the inclination at that point to wade through thousands of images to find out. She’d already seen so many her brain cells were fast becoming a pixelated mush. She knew one thing—for her virgin lover, virginal to her, the thrill of the new, a man with more treasure in his coffers than the Pope, money was no object and sanctity no obstacle. He’d probably buy the scepter off the Pope if the thing had any ivory in it. New owner, old phallic symbolism.
What was that Victor had said?—Your body is the second clue. A map.
She might have been Victor’s star, but based on what she had already seen and felt of the man, his tastes didn’t exactly ascend to the heavens. They ran more to the organic, to flesh and stone and juices. To the teeming erotic possibilities of life that evolution had made possible, that the complexity of nerves and the creativity of mind had made possible. The lust of the living earth. She thought of his mouth, his tongue, his saliva, on her breasts, the champagne, his lust, her bust. Her bust. That was it? A pun worthy of a Shakespearean rake?
No wonder Victor had lavished so much attention on her breasts. She’d wondered why he hadn’t gone lower, into moister climes. Lusher fields. He had a deeper purpose than turning her nipples to marble, making her areolas dance with beads of sweat.
It was yet another Victor play on words, something else she’d noticed in class he had quite a penchant for. His tongue definitely was playful. She was getting the full range of its playfulness. One day professorial, the next pheromonal.
His classroom puns had made her want to moan in quite a different way as well. On the very first day, he had “accidentally” referred to Richard Posner as “Richard Poser” in
the midst of explaining how some people were not really serious enough about the sacred precepts of Law and Economics. Dead silence.
She was looking for a bust of Voltaire. Right away she thought of her sanctuary, her home away from home away from home. Welch Law Library. No, it hadn’t been named for the general of General Electric, he was more of a Strayer than a Founder.
Nor was it named for that Welch, the fruity one, the teetotaler who thought the blood of Christ should be non-alcoholic. Whose claim to fame was the immaculate conception of virgin wine. Otherwise Founders might as well have put the Welch’s grapes on the building’s frontispiece. And sell non-alcoholic Beaujolais to all the beleaguered law students who entered the hallowed halls of the library. Instead of the liquid caffeine the students so ravenously imbibed from the 24-hour Moby-Dick coffee shop on the first floor.
Not that Zora had anything against wine, or juice for that matter—she’d found out quite happily what organic juices, and bubbling wine, could do in the right form, lubricating hidden places, and wouldn’t mind repeating that experience.
No, like so many spectacles of money in the Lone Star State, the Bush family was behind it. The family had gotten tired of slapping their own name on everything in the circles of power, and when it came time to shovel money into the coffers of Founders, they stipulated that the law library be named after Jenna and Harold Welch. The parents-in-law of George Walker Bush. So much for the John Quincy Adams Law Library.
And it just so happened that the place was bursting with busts. Oliver Wendell Holmes and Clarence Darrow were two that Zora remembered reading the names on out of idle curiosity. She’d passed by at least a dozen more without paying them much mind. The head of Holmes had jumped out at her because of the freakishly large handlebar mustache it sported, something out of an impossibly hirsute Oktoberfest. And Darrow’s head stood out because it faithfully reproduced one of his many failed combover attempts.
