by Sadie King
Sitting, the first thing he did was cup his hand around hers, palm on palm. She didn’t retract hers. Appreciated its fresh overlying warmth. Affection of fingers and palms. A hand was a hand, appendage creep be damned. She liked Jack. His friendly smirks, his smarts, his love of playing the smartass, evoking the smartness in her. Even in the wake of the Amedei Porcelana, she trusted Jack more than she did Victor. A smirk on her face to rival his, she insisted they’d have to share.
“Can I give you the first bite?”
Already he was testing the waters. Cupped hand didn’t move, didn’t flinch. A nod of approval. It wasn’t as though they’d be sharing bodily fluids just because they shared curried duck. Get a grip.
He reached over to the dish in front of her, got a lime leaf and chunk of duck in the same fell swoop, quite the expert at using chopsticks, ladled the food into her open mouth. She coughed, shit that curry was hot, had to pull out her hand from his, drown her mouth in iced tea.
“Your turn.”
Both hands back in their own territory. She was far worse at chopsticks than he, and after several failed attempts to pincer some food between them, had to resort to the infallible stabbing method. She impaled a piece of pineapple, pushed it up the chopstick with her fingers, then stabbed a piece of duck onto the end. Forget about a lime leaf, not going to happen. She shoved the food into his mouth, indelicate, rough. He didn’t cough or sputter from the curry—but her shoving the food so close to his uvula almost made him gag.
He’d gotten an extra plate, shoveled some of her food onto it with his chopsticks. Most of it in fact. They burrowed in. He hadn’t forgotten about her hands, their smallness, their innocence, oh what he didn’t know, what he couldn’t begin to imagine, and when she made the mistake of resting her left hand near the center of the small table, he wrapped his own hand around it, stroked her fingers gently with his.
“Jack, what are you doing?”
“I want to protect you Zora. Let me protect you. I saw the way the Judge looked at you. Everyone did. The remark about the slap. You need someone who actually cares about you, someone to look out for your best interests.”
She withdrew her hand. Colder. The red curry sauce left on the plate congealed.
“Goddammit Jack. Why does everyone think I need protecting? I’m no damsel in distress. I don’t need you or Victor or anyone else to protect me. I don’t need a father figure. Or an older brother for that matter.”
“You called him Victor again. You’re falling for him already. I know you are.”
He looked at her expectantly, earnestly, as though she might challenge him on that last point. Your Honor, I object . . .
No objection came. He had no choice but to keep arguing his case, to stoop to the scandalous as a final desperate ploy for victory.
“You’re going to end up like Chloe if you’re not careful.”
Silence from Zora, eyes down, another bite of duck. Curry on her lips. Long steady sip of tea. Jack didn’t move a muscle, relax his eyes from her face. Lips already wiped clean.
“Who the hell is Chloe?”
“The girl I told you about. She killed herself. Because of him. They were having a relationship, it got messy, everybody knew it. And then she killed herself. Jumped to her death.”
Zora began to feel enraged but checked herself. The sheer audacity of bringing that up again, after how she’d reacted the last time. She was mortified, humiliated, infuriated. He was one persistent bastard to take the risk of provoking her righteous rage—of her taking a chopstick, stabbing him all the way through his uvula. Out the back of his throat. His timing had been smart, safe, waiting to bring up the suicide until after she’d shoved the chopstick in his mouth.
As quickly as it had risen, anger receded. She was ready to give credence. She knew there may be some truth to the story of Chloe, the tragedy, some substance to rumors of the poor girl’s fall.
At the same time, she was positive that Jack’s interest in her flowed from Victor, sprang fully formed from Victor’s affection. Was borne like a bastard child of the other man’s desire. She might have been a fresh novitiate into the sacred ways of Eros, but she was a model of an educated woman. She’d read René Girard, she believed in his theory of mimetic desire. She believed that one man could desire a woman just because another man already did, especially a man the other man already envied. Or a woman desire a man.
And if there was one man in the world that Jack envied more than any other, it was Victor. Jack wanted her because Victor had her. It was that simple, that complicated, that convoluted. His protectiveness was a ruse to bring his desire, his mirroring coveting, to fruition. To allow him, the underling, the yearling, to surpass the seasoned master at his own game, a game in which a beautiful innocent woman was the one and only pawn.
“You really do seem to believe that, Jack. I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt, since we’re already having dinner and I’m enjoying this duck. But I’m warning you, stick to what you know. Tell me what happened with Chloe.”
“Honestly, I really don’t know much more. They were fucking, that’s for sure. And who knows what else. He twisted her mind, poisoned her, with his power over her. A Svengali.”
Zora tried on her budding talent: thinking like a lawyer.
“Okay Jack, let’s assume for the sake of argument he committed a crime. That he deliberately drove her to suicide. With malice aforethought. Why wasn’t he arrested? Why wasn’t he charged with anything?”
“She took her own life, Zora, he didn’t kill her. They were obviously both adults. As far as I know, she never reported him to the school for sexual harassment or anything like that. Founders had no reason to intervene before her death, or take action after it. Neither did the police. There’s no rule against a student and professor having a consensual relationship.”
“Exactly—and even if they were sleeping together, you don’t know she committed suicide because of Victor. Maybe she had a history of depression. Maybe she flunked her Contracts exam. Maybe her cat died. You can’t prove a thing.”
Zora immediately regretted speaking so flippantly about a tragic death, a young woman so burdened with heartache, whatever the cause, to hurl herself from a high place. Not her place to judge the dead. Nor was it Jack’s.
She merely felt an urge, an impulse of care, to defend Victor from malicious innuendo. She trusted him enough, not unreservedly mind you, but enough to think him incapable of using his power, his charisma, to drive someone to suicide. Purely out of spite.
“Quite the lawyer Zora, aren’t you? Proof this and proof that. You’re right, I can’t prove it, nobody can. But you know what they say about smoke and fire.”
“And you know what they say about smoke and mirrors. We need to put this behind us. For the sake of our friendship, whatever it’s worth. And that’s all it is. All it can ever be. I don’t need a protector and I don’t need a boyfriend. A friend. Think you can manage that? Someone to agree with me how much of a bitch Professor Reynolds is.”
“She’s an ornery one, ain’t she?”
He tried on a Texas twang. Right away, thankfully, mercifully, went back to twangless.
“Know why she’s so anal? Someone shoved a fat contract up her ass. You can still see part of it when she turns her back to the class. That bulge back there.”
“That’s what I’m talking about. I’d much rather talk about that, well maybe not about her ass per se. It does kind of bulge out though, doesn’t it? Really far. I’d just rather not discuss Victor on a personal level. Especially all these accusations. Him being a Svengali. Makes me sick to my stomach.”
“Fine, fine, I’ll try not to keep bringing that up. But I wish you would think about what I said. Don’t skirt the truth and don’t underestimate the man.”
With that he reached across the table and brushed her cheek in a singular gesture of simple compassion. Like a saint, he picked up her left hand and kissed it on the open palm.
Those two gest
ures were more than Victor could bear. He had been sitting at the opposite corner of the restaurant with a colleague, partially obscured by a decorative screen with elephants all over it, their trunks upraised. A traditional token of good fortune. Behind the elephants, behind their lucky trunks, he had gone unnoticed by both Jack and Zora.
When Zora had walked in, his first impulse had been to go over to her, touch her hand, her face, her waist, in greeting, exchange a few warm pleasantries. But after the server had laid down a second menu at her table, he’d decided to see what would transpire, who would join her. And when Jack Carson had turned out to be her dining partner, he was only mildly surprised. Jack and Zora were seating partners in class, seemed to have good rapport, and he’d specifically asked Jack to look after her, relay choice information to her and about her.
But of course the other side, the darker side, of mimetic desire is mimetic envy, and when Jack’s envy of Victor led him to pursue Zora, shower her with unmistakable affection, radiate affection toward her with every gesture and expression, Victor’s envy of Jack began to strain against reason, until it finally engulfed reason. He had been able to restrain himself up until the brush of the cheek and the kiss of the hand.
Victor didn’t care about making a scene. This was a primal scene. An antediluvian rivalry. One rival who felt entitled to the trappings of success, up to and including the adoration, the devotion, of a fierce woman on the cusp of the world. The other who saw only hubris in front of him.
“Jack, what do you think you’re doing?”
Victor stood askew their table, arms flared. Fortunately his colleague in the back couldn’t possibly see what was going on, those happy pachyderms got in the way. And too far away to hear, with all the intervening chatter. Who knows how the Judge had excused himself from their dinner meeting. He’d probably claimed a sudden need to smoke his pipe outdoors. He was a known aficionado of tobacco, never far from a well-lit pipe, a disciple of nicotine whose teeth somehow, sparklingly, never showed it. For his sake, let’s hope his lungs didn’t show it either.
Zora hated him now, miraculously white teeth and all, hated these primal antics, this gorilla posturing. Why the fuck when two men started pounding their chests and clawing at each other over a woman, did they pretend she didn’t exist, even when she was standing right in front of them? Or sitting. That’s exactly what Victor was doing now: no acknowledgment of her presence whatsoever, of her feelings, her inalienable value, her womanhood.
“Having dinner with Zora, Judge. Nice place, isn’t it?”
Jack wasn’t going to be the first to descend to the level of brutes. Victor would happily oblige.
“The question is, why are you having dinner with her? I really don’t like you fraternizing with one of my students like this. I saw how you were touching her.”
He pointed in the general direction of where he’d been sitting. If there was one thing that Victor had mastered—aside from collecting ivory, writing novels under a pseudonym, and kissing the asses of politicians high and low, how else do you think he rocketed onto a federal appellate court practically still in swaddling clothes?—it was hypocrisy. And unfortunately for him at that moment, those elephants weren’t helping him any now, if there was one thing that Zora had mastered—aside from keeping everything perfectly centered, maintaining the highest possible academic marks, and mixing a mean mojito, it’s a long story, don’t ask—it was loathing hypocrisy. Her pesky, unlawyerly idealism again.
“One of your students? With all due respect—” Jack’s tone clearly indicated the meager amount of respect he thought was due—“I don’t think you own her Judge.”
The allusion to slavery was unmistakable, lingered in the air, ugly. Jack was hardly finished with the insinuations.
“And I should be asking you the same thing about fraternizing with a student.”
Victor’s muse of fury inspired him now. Zora expected him to start bellowing like an ape at any moment. He managed by some miracle to form coherent, if rather belligerent, speech. Sounds that were identifiably human. Sinner more than saint.
“You little shit. Get out of here now, before I kick you out.”
“Oh, so you own the restaurant too? Pretty soon we’re going to find out you own the state of Texas. Your ego’s big enough.”
“I’m leaving.”
Not that they were paying her any mind anyway, but Zora needed to remove the root cause of their primal confrontation. Herself. Mimetic desire looking itself in the mirror saw nothing whatsoever, oblivious to its origins. As she spoke, stood to leave, neither man removed his glare from the eyes of the other. She had never felt more invisible in her life. She could easily have written a book called Invisible Woman, a riff on the Ralph Ellison classic with a healthy dose of misogyny. Maybe even sell enough copies to knock Victor off the top of the bestseller list. Who’s invisible now, asshole?
She walked out. On her way out, she heard, “You’re fired Jack. Don’t bother coming to any more of my classes. Don’t even think about it. I’ll find another TA. You guys are a dime a dozen.”
She fought the urge to go back in. Give both men a piece of her mind. Give Victor in particular a piece of her hand, followed by the whole rounded curve of her heel. Use your imagination about where, and with what degree of pressure. Forget imagination: use foreshadowing.
She moved out of earshot, didn’t hear anything further from either posturing primate. She’d confront Victor later. She’d start with his hubris, move on to his covetous nature, then the bipolarity of his soul. Her leverage would have to be love, the heart of his soul, the soul of his heart, beneath all of his cynicism, his pretensions. She could get there, she knew it. It might take a few more applications of her heel, but she’d get there.
If she and Victor ever got married, she hoped she wouldn’t have had to hurt him so badly, so crushingly, that he’d be devoid of any viable seed for a couple little Victors. Or Vickys. That was a frightening prospect, little versions of the Judge, wielding miniature ivory gavels. Not if their mother had any say in the matter.
Before any of that, before marriage, before little Vickys and Victor Juniors could run around wreaking havoc with miniature gavels, she’d have to satisfy her curiosity about Chloe. A sadness that had been gnawing at her, tempting her toward its darkness, for a while now. A Pandora’s box that Jack had bestowed upon her, that she felt powerless to leave unopened. She had a name to go with the face of torment, of betrayal, in her head.
Back at her computer, she searched the news archive for anything about Chloe. Almost of its own accord, as though it had only been waiting for the faintest prompting from her, her very own Pandora’s box sprang open before her eyes. Up popped an article from the local paper, the Madison Springs Intelligencer. The news about Chloe’s death hadn’t spread far, Zora didn’t even notice a listing in the Dallas Morning News or the Houston Chronicle. Sad that a bright young life could be snuffed out by her own hand and hardly a soul would care. The malaise of the world, Camus was spot on about that. He probably would have nodded, smiling knowingly, as he read the article.
A first-year student at Founders School of Law, Chloe Ming, 23, killed herself yesterday at approximately 7:30 AM, jumping from the tower of Memorial Chapel, the ecumenical church building on the Madison Springs University campus. Campus and local police are investigating but say there are no signs of foul play. Ms. Ming did not leave a note. Observers on the ground were horrified by the death of the young woman, who screamed at people on the ground to move shortly before she jumped. She was pronounced dead at the scene by emergency medical personnel.
In her time at Founders, Ms. Ming was an accomplished student and community activist. Aside from receiving top marks in her first-semester coursework, she spent countless hours outside the classroom working for the Christian Legal Aid Society and Habitat for Humanity. Her faculty advisor at Founders was Victor Ras, the Lyndon Baines Johnson Professor of Law and a sitting judge on the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of App
eals. Professor Ras said of Ms. Ming: “A young woman I will never forget. Always smiling, always full of joy. Her untimely death is truly a tragedy, totally senseless.”
Prior to matriculating at Founders, Ms. Ming attended the University of Texas at Austin for two years, graduating magna cum laude with a degree in sociology. She spent her first years of higher education at Tsinghua University in Beijing, China, where she also studied sociology. Ms. Ming was born in Harbin, Heilongjiang Province, China, and is survived by several family members there, including her parents, according to school officials. A service for Ms. Ming will be held tomorrow at 8 PM in Memorial Chapel; members of the general public are welcome to attend. Her body will be laid to rest in her hometown of Harbin, a city famous throughout the world for its annual ice sculpture festival.
Zora’s heart turned to ice and shattered. She could see, hear, taste, smell, feel with sickening palpability the hypocrisy of Victor’s words. Never forget . . . Always smiling . . . totally senseless. Words slicker than the blackest oil. She wanted to vomit. Rising in her mind, unstoppable, was the premonition that Victor had sold his soul, was a Faustus of the bench, a Mephistopheles of the law. Whether she was being unjust to her lover, whether she was being paranoid in the face of a tragedy in which he played no tragic part, whether she was putting more faith in innuendo than sweet words and flesh, didn’t matter in that moment.
All of her empathy for the dead girl, the misery of the girl’s parents, all of her instantaneously vanished faith in her lover, converged in a hollowing out of self. A snuffing out of her last inner light of optimism. In a twilight-passed of bitter tears. She balled herself up on her bed, cried until her eyes had no more tears to give, hoping that sleep would come quick, would give her relief from the perversity she had entangled herself in, the lies she had embraced with an open heart. Sleep never came, only spiraling sorrow and maddening thoughts of the worst.
