The Coming of Bright

by Sadie King

  “Um, I don’t think that he is.”

  “Oh, really.”

  He curled and warped his voice, his palate, his face, around the word “really”—as though the very notion of her dissent, of her independent will in a utopian world of male minds, was inconceivable. Absurd.

  “And where did he stray from your path of righteousness, exactly?”

  He was getting ugly. Unconscionable. Cruel. The monster that Jack had warned her of. She needed to hold her own, not allow the turmoil of her emotions, her confusion and consternation at his ugliness, to break her down. Make her break down right there in class.

  “Slavery—I don’t think that anyone can freely be a slave. It’s offensive. There’s always coercion, bigotry, wrong. It’s like saying that Africans sold into slavery freely took the risk—that by going to war with each other, they accepted the risk of being captured, becoming slaves.”

  “Well, didn’t they? And let’s say for the sake of argument that some Africans in the slave trade did freely assume the risk—knew full well if they were captured in internecine wars, they’d become slaves. Why say that’s wrong? Do you not believe in freedom, Ms. Bright?”

  For the sake of argument. What a scumbag lawyer ploy. Everyone knew the slave trade was evil. Christ. She wanted to scream at him, Shut the fuck up, you prick! You’re not thinking like a lawyer, you’re thinking like a fascist!

  She held her tongue. And hoped for his sake he didn’t believe what he was saying, or she’d never let him touch her again. Shake hands even.

  Zora spoke without fear, without thought, of the gulf between them.

  “Judge, with all due respect, let me speak in a language you can understand. The language of money. Economics. Just because there might be a supply doesn’t mean there has to be a demand. It was the demand for slaves that fueled the whole process. It was a vicious cycle. If you criminalize the demand, the supply will dry up. That’s why slavery finally ended, and none too soon.”

  “Ouch, Ms. Bright, that hurts.”

  He affected a stab in the chest, complete with imaginary bodkin, right out of Shakespeare.

  “You think I care only about money. You’re wrong. I care about people taking responsibility for their own lives and their own actions and their own choices, not expecting the government or the legal system to do it for them. New Deal bullshit. If someone wants to be a slave and can find a willing master, it’s their choice. If someone wants to be killed and can find a willing killer, it’s their choice. That’s what Nozick is talking about. I suggest you take it to heart.”

  “Over my dead body.”

  She said it in a loud harsh whisper which most of the class could make out.

  “Excuse me, Ms. Bright. What did you say?”

  “Nothing. Just coughing a little.”

  She could tell from his furrowed face that his question had been rhetorical. He’d heard her perfectly well.

  “The real question is, Ms. Bright, why are you taking this so personally? Care to share? We’ll lend you our ears.”

  Once he got started with Shakespearean allusions, there was apparently no stopping him. He might have had countrymen in that classroom, but he definitely had no friends. And he was on the verge of losing a lover. A few people who’d taken Latin in high school were as close to Romans as he was going to get.

  He was no Caesar, let’s put it that way. Based on how the class was going, though, he’d have to watch his back when Zora showed up at his house. Not to mention his collection of ivory-handled mizu-honyaki knives.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about Judge.”

  He won’t bring up our tryst in class, will he? Is he really that cruel? That self-destructive?

  “Sure you do—your mother’s ancestors were slaves, weren’t they? That’s why you can’t see this issue clearly.”

  Her mind reeled. How the hell could he . . .

  Then she knew. Of course. He’d read her admissions essay, like he’d pored over her resume, raking in her life. Being a rake pure and simple. A scoundrel.

  She’d written about her parents, the symbolism of their lives, the redemption of their union. The marriage that their marriage signified—of the laws of the heart and the laws of the land. After so much wrong, so much injustice. So much history.

  It had been classic Zora, the idealist that Victor mocked so openly and admired so profoundly. With such high-minded ideals, it was a miracle she’d gotten into Founders at all—a law school whose favorite Founding Father seemed to be Ben Franklin. Not so much for his diplomacy or inventions as for his face on the $100 bill.

  What she found so irksome, goading, and she was feeling sick now, positively feverish, was how Victor was trying to use her family, her heritage, against her. He’d better put those fancy Japanese knives under lock and key, or his flesh was going to be butter.

  She was even starting to see creative uses, diabolical ones, for the Kama Sutra figurines—one of those copulating couples, shoved with enough force down the throat, could turn an Adam’s apple into Eve’s fist, life size.

  She wasn’t fucking seeing clearly?! After she’d taken his ivory fountain pen to his eye sockets he’d know what it meant not to see clearly. At that moment she thought herself capable of making the Gatekeeper look like a Girl Scout.

  She rose above the fray of these frantic thoughts, murderous thoughts, bouncing around, searching for blood. Baying for it. Well, not totally above the fray.

  “Yes, my mother’s ancestors were slaves, and yes, I can see this issue clearly. You’re the one who is blind, arrogant, selfish. Without pity for the downtrodden. I happen to disagree with Nozick, and I happen to disagree with you. Strongly. I suggest you move on before I come up there and slap you.”

  Twenty members of the class gasped in unison, as though they were witnessing up close a terrific accident in the midst of human triumph, at the apex of triumph, like a high-wire walker who had never faltered before, not a single time, on a single step, plunging unexpectedly, wordlessly, to his death on the brightest and stillest of days.

  The rest of the class was shocked dumb. Jack turned to her, his mouth stupidly ajar, his lower jaw hanging loose under its own weight. Pure, unadulterated shock. She winked at him. As if gravity had gotten stronger, instantaneously intensified by virtue of her wink, his jaw fell further toward the floor.

  Victor laughed at her words, her impudence, and she smiled at that, for she knew him well enough to know that his laughter was the only betrayal of his weakness, her power over him. His sign of submission to her will.

  “We wouldn’t want that, would we? Might be too much fun.”

  Now it was his turn to wink at her. His classes were turning into a circus of winks. At his gesture, in the wake of his words, another dozen jaws fell loose like Jack’s.

  A surreal atmosphere of shock and confusion had settled over the class. Not unlike a Supreme Court session where a lawyer tells the Chief Justice to fuck off and then gets kisses blown at her in return. A scene so far beyond the pale of proper conduct, the theatricality of the polite, that metabolism simply shuts down, can no longer continue to function.

  “Very well, Ms. Bright. Let me pick on someone else. Put Nozick behind us.”

  He didn’t have to go far. Time to make the TA suffer.

  “Mr. Carson, clamp your jaw together and explain to us the difference between ‘malice’ and ‘wickedness’ in Regina v. Cunningham.”

  Jack responded like a statue.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  With all the force, all the fury, she could muster, Zora hurled the open palm of her hand against Victor’s rude cheek. She stood in his doorway, just before the threshold; he stood barely beyond it.

  He did nothing to block the blow; nor did he flinch when it came. His stoic pose could not conceal the sting of her hand, the skin of his cheek turning ruddier than rose, twitching like an eel.

  She cursed him, a slew of choice phrases that pilots are prone to use as they crash to th
eir death. To repeat them here would cause unnecessary offense to the reader. Sully the purity of the reader’s mind. Above all else, an author must not offend the reader’s tender sensibilities. Heaven forbid, and hell rejoice.

  “Victor, don’t ever do that to me again. Humiliate me. Debase me. Treat me like I’m your plaything.”

  “Well, you are my plaything, aren’t you?”

  He rotated his jaw as he spoke. Maybe she’d bruised a muscle or two deeper than soft cheek tissue. Hell hath no fury.

  His tone had tendrils in it of reminiscence of a recent evening, of play as something liberating, free and fierce. Anything but cruel.

  It was her hand that was once again free and fierce, flying back toward his cheek. This time he blocked it, caught her by the wrist, his strength overwhelming hers, his energy rechanneling hers. He brought her hand up to his mouth, having to strain under the recoil of her arm as he did so, its backward tension, and kissed her palm as gently as he could. A kiss of glaze on porcelain. Diaphanous.

  “You bastard, you fucking bastard.”

  The feeling behind her words was full, ramrod full, but not of rancor—of the final storm of pain before the calm of forgiveness. Before the return of pain’s antagonist. Pain’s other half, its hell. More than anything she wanted to cry, she desperately needed catharsis of her pain, of her confusion, of the torment he had already caused inside her, in such a brief span of time and space. Her eyes were bone dry.

  Still he held her hand, kissed it again on the palm. On the tips of her fingers. The breeze of his breath, its moisture, shivered against her hand’s fresh sweat. The sweat of the Texas dusk. She brushed her fingertips as gently against his lips as he had pressed his lips to them. He let her hand fall.

  “Come in.”

  She did, a marvel to his eyes, a masterpiece of the desirable, in a sheer black chiffon dress, sultry down to her calves, over a sleeveless black blouse and black cotton shorts, wrapped loosely round with a cinnamon leather belt. A good inch below the shorts, not yet halfway down her thighs, the black pantyhose began, a slender line all the way to her toes at the end of simple black heels.

  She was not wearing a bra, and her breasts moved freely under the silk of the blouse. She was to fabric what Tiepolo was to clouds: an artist of angelic imagination.

  Victor had also attired himself in black, Gucci shirt and slacks, silk by default, fashionable yes, artistic no. He’d worn a turquoise-and-malachite belt buckle with a trickster figure on it, out of deference to Southwestern style. To balance out the blackness.

  He had to close his eyes as she passed to keep his desire in check, to let the evening unfold, unspool itself, at the proper pace, passion unspoiled.

  As she walked down the short entrance corridor, she passed on her left a small walnut side table, topped in alabaster. On it she set the two-page handwritten clemency plea she’d been holding in her left hand. Crane paper, ecru finish, monographed “ZHB.”

  Her parents had each fallen in love with Harper Lee in college and years later, had a meeting of the minds about what their daughter’s middle name should be. The paper itself had been a gift from her parents, the writing in navy ink was a gift from her. She kept walking. He left the plea there—he’d deal with it later, mail it to the White House.

  “There’s the plea, Victor. Hope you’re happy. Hope Dorothy is too.”

  Saying that, she knew the Gatekeeper was utterly incapable of happiness. Capable only of ecstasy. A seizure of self by the joy of loathing, the giddiness of sadism. The most miserable of human beings, for whom the only release is death. Of others before self. That was the tragedy. The travesty.

  She doubted the value of the plea, even if it worked, and Victor seemed sure it would, doubted it was right for Dorothy, truly the help she needed, salvation from her perversion.

  “Thank you Zora.”

  He continued walking behind her, wanting to rest his hands on the curve of her hips, the hollow above her waist, chiffon yielding to flesh. When she’d extended her arm to drop the plea, he’d wanted to trace a line with the point of his finger, nail and skin together, along the entire curve of her body, one line of infinite sculptural grace, starting from the tip of her middle finger, along her palm, through the pit of her arm, moistened there, down her side, down her leg, the pantyhose tearing a bit, down, down, she’d lift up her foot then and he’d finish tracing along its sole, to the end of her toes.

  He felt this the only way to truly know her, possess her, to trace with careful, certain pressure the lines of her body with his fingertip.

  “Let’s sit on the couch.”

  He gestured to the far end of the couch, away from the kitchen, and she sat there, somewhat tense. He sat next to her, pressed into her, their bodies settling into the sharkskin, requiem for a shark. Even tanned, the leather had a sandpapery quality. He leaned over to kiss her. She demurred, moving her lips away with their hint of ochre lipstick, the tension in her limbs yet to be settled, satisfied.

  “Victor, please, we really need to talk.”

  He looked at her, earnest, and nodded slightly, as much to himself as to her. He knew what she wanted, what she needed—to hear from him, in the timbre of his words and the content of his convictions, that his soul had enough integrity to join with hers.

  “Of course—but let’s at least talk comfortably.”

  He moved down the couch, two-thirds of the way to the other end. She looked perplexed; he was adding actual distance to emotional distance. But when he tapped his hand endearingly against his knee, she got the message. Off came the heels, up came her legs, she put her feet across the top of his thighs.

  He was going to be her very own professor-cum-massage-artist. Through her nylons his fingers started to massage her feet, his hands wrapping halfway around them, molding them, sculpting them, and he knew just the right quantum of force to apply, just the right angles and just the right spots to pressurize and then release from pressure.

  She replied with a murmur in the range of mezzo-soprano. This might be all it took to get her back in the mood of the previous night. When sensation, not a hint of thought, controlled her voice, making her moan one moment and cry out the next.

  He kept working his Shiatsu miracle on her feet, but hadn’t forgotten the entreaty in her words of moments before.

  “I’m so glad you came tonight—I wasn’t sure you would. You seemed pretty angry in class.”

  That was the understatement of the last few billion years, since the proverbial fish slopped onto land to start the long hard slog of evolution.

  Her feet could take care of themselves, she needed to get to the soul of the Judge, of Victor, the core of the man so loving one minute and so unforgiving the next.

  “I want to know why you treated me like that. After what we shared, the bond, how could you do that to me?”

  “Zora, you are my student, remember? I can’t treat you any differently in that environment. Only in this one.”

  He dug his thumb, hard, into a place on the top of her left foot where the muscles had knotted up, screaming for relief. Made her want to scream.

  As much release as his fingers were giving every muscle and tendon in her feet, she wanted to take one of those feet and kick him in the chin. It would have been so easy, and so cathartic at the same time.

  “Are you joking? You didn’t treat me the same at all. You treated me worse than you would treat any other student. Much worse. I wouldn’t mind being treated the same, that’s understandable. But you were a real asshole.”

  “Well, okay, maybe. I wasn’t doing it intentionally. I overcompensated a bit. Mea culpa.”

  “Don’t do it again. Don’t you dare. I’ll never look at you again. I’ll withdraw from your class. Whatever it takes to put you behind me.”

  “Deal—can you put me behind you right now, on the couch?”

  He should have thought better of using wordplay on her right then and there, especially a dirty saucy Shakespearean pun like that, con
sidering the vulnerable position he was in. Her feet resting dangerously close to the crux of his legs.

  She took advantage of his vulnerability, thrusting her right foot over and down, digging her heel into the deepest deep of all male sensitivity. The ultimate source of all male pleasure and all male pain. In the words of a merry English ballad from the time of the House of Stuart:

  The store of his pudding.

  And that was all it took to turn his entire body into pudding. He moaned in agony and hunched over, sandwiching her feet in the process. She retrieved them to her side of the couch and waited. Considered whether to apologize and offer relief. A massage of her own, perhaps, below the belt?

  Decided against it, thinking it best to let the pudding settle back into the bowl, the blood start circulating again.

  After a few minutes it did, and Victor emerged from his hunch, red-faced but none the worse for wear. Well, let’s be honest, somewhat the worse for wear. But his progeny would still be progeny, she hadn’t rendered him impotent, not quite enough momentum in her heel to do that.

  “What the hell was that for? I ought to come over there, pin you down, and . . .”

  “Don’t even think about it, Mr. Bawdy Pun. Remember from now on what my feet can do. Not to mention my fists and knees and elbows. You’d better heed what I’m trying to tell you. We need to respect each other, trust each other.”

  “I respect your feet, that’s for sure. I’m going to keep an eye on them from now on—and your fists and knees and elbows. And I might keep something else on them as well.”

  He grabbed her right foot, the offending foot, and brought it up to his mouth. With enough torque to cause a ripple of pain, delectable pain, but not enough to break the skin, he sank his teeth into the middle of the sole of her foot.

  Before she could react, flatten his nose with her sole, he kissed the same spot on her foot with exacting sensitivity. He released her foot. She mock-jabbed it in the general direction of his crown jewels, stopping an inch or two short of inflicting another round of genital misery. And smiled as broadly, as innocently, as she could.