The Coming of Bright (33 page)

And now she would satisfy a deeper hunger—to lap the god from a spoon, to skewer him with a fork, to slice him with a knife. Lick him up, swallow him down. Sever his every sinew between her teeth, dissolve him away in her innards, down to the last fragment of bone. She would cannibalize a god, every immortal atom—highest and lowest of the gods in one, tyrant and savior, the most savage and the most beautiful.

“What’s on the menu?”

She gave him a pinch, hard, in a place that need not be mentioned. He grunted.

“Not that, not today. I hear you are fond of all things French, so . . .”

Shit. Jack spilling secrets again.
Jacques Merde
. Did he have to tell his dad
everything
about her?

“Jack told you. I can’t believe him. He’s such a . . . such a . . .”

She hesitated, searching for the right insult. Savage and beautiful at the same time.

“
Salaud
!”

A choice term she’d learned in Paris with her Zeta Rho sisters. One they’d had to use a few times, on a few men, men in various states of inebriation, who had propositioned them a little too gropingly.

Otez vos mains de moi, salaud!

Get your hands off me, you dirty fucker!

“Interesting you mention that, because the first course
is
a salad.
Mesclun de rubis à la vinaigrette de framboise et de macadamia
.”

Victor knew his salad from his
salaud
. But it was better to play ignorant, move along, than acknowledge that your lover just called your son a dirty fucker. A dirty bastard. What would that make you?

Zora wasn’t going to let him move along that easily. Two could play at his clever little game of tongues.

“Served by a
salaud
, no doubt.”

“Don’t push your luck. Or it might be. We’re going to serve each other. And make it together. Ruby greens with a raspberry-macadamia vinaigrette.”

“Well, let’s not waste any time. I’m hungry enough to start eating you.”

She could imagine which part of him to have as an appetizer. Something that would need some tenderizing first. With her teeth.

“Believe me, I wouldn’t try to stop you. What a delicious way to die. You might choke on me though.”

“Don’t flatter yourself—you’re not that hard to swallow. Especially not if I chew on you first.”

“Now you’re really starting to tempt me. But let me get the
real
main course started.”

With that he grabbed a saute pan, threw in some butter and threw it on the burner. He reached into the fridge and pulled out a bloody mass of meat that overfilled the breadth of his hand.

Zora had a disturbing premonition what it was. She expected the mass to start beating at any moment.

“That better not be what I think it is.”

“It absolutely is.
Coeur de chevreuil
. Heart of venison. Courtesy of my dear brother and his trophy buck.”

Zora cringed—more at hearing Vane called
my dear brother
than at the sight of the once-pulsing, once-living slab of flesh.

“I’m making it
saignant du vin rouge
. Bleeding red wine. You’ll love it. An old family recipe, my dad did it this way.”

Under any other circumstances, Zora would not have touched that carnivorous filth. Bad enough it had come from Vane. And the
heart
of the deer? She was the kind of person who wanted her flesh anonymous, unrecognizable, a generic hunk of meat that could have easily popped from a machine, not once clothed an animal’s bones.

The heart was way too visceral, way too recognizable, way too
human
. Like eating a piece of herself. Her own heart. Cannibalizing her own emotions, her own identity.

But being with Victor, as with everything else about him, bent wariness into temptation. And she was touched by his piety as a son, making his father’s recipe—she was even touched by his piety as a brother.

Most of all, she was touched by his piety as a lover. In that spirit, if he wanted to cook her a fucking heart, bleeding all over her plate—red wine or actual blood, who cared—then she would eat it in the same spirit. She would smear her lips with its redness, coat her tongue with its grease. If she started to feel it pulsing in her mouth, coming back to life, she would only chew faster, swallow harder. She would eat the heart of Eros.

She watched him work. She watched Eros, working through Victor. He sliced into pieces the lifeblood of the deer, and then sprinkled the slices with salt and pepper, dropping them into the sizzling butter. He seared the heart in the golden fat, to the reddest shade of brown.

And leave it to Victor to spare no expense on wine, even wine for cooking. Ready on the kitchen counter, ready to make the heart of the deer, the heart of the god, bleed, was a bottle of 1945 Paul Jaboulet Aine Hermitage La Chapelle.

The wine was the perfect symbol of modern France, of
terroir
liberated from terror. An earthier wine from an earthier grape from an earthier year you could not find. The first full year of liberation. The first time in years that wine spilled in the streets might not be mistaken for blood.

Victor uncorked the wine, which hadn’t tasted air since Nazi leather retreated across the forests and fields of Europe. He bathed the seared slices of heart in the sweet fermented juices of liberated soil. The heart had the color of darkly tanned leather. He tossed in some dried herbs with a flash of his hand. The heat went down, the top went on, and he turned back to Zora. Twenty minutes was all they would need for the heart to bleed, for the life of the god to render itself fit for mortals.

“Ready to get your feet wet?”

Zora was taken aback by the question, almost as much as she’d been by the sight of a bloody deer heart in Victor’s hand. She didn’t know what the fuck he was talking about. Did he want her to bathe in blood now, as if eating the heart weren’t bad enough?

“I hope you’re speaking metaphorically.”

“Here, sit down. I’ll help you.”

He brought around a stool from the other side of the kitchen counter. She sat. She hadn’t gotten dressed yet. Her white cotton pajamas were covered in light pastel flowers of different shapes and shades, scattered across the fabric as though someone had thrown them into the breeze and they had imprinted themselves where they landed. On her feet were plain white socks, with the faintest hint of dirt on the bottom. Victor was dressed. Old faded blue jeans and an ebony t-shirt that hadn’t faded in wash after wash after wash. He wasn’t wearing socks.

He peeled off her socks, her toes twitching slightly as they touched the air of the kitchen, and rolled up her pajama pants to the tops of her calves. Without bothering to sit, he rolled up his jeans.

From a cupboard beneath the counter, he pulled out a very large, and very shiny, red porcelain casserole dish. Zora noticed
Le Creuset
imprinted on the lid. Victor set the lid aside on the countertop, and set the dish itself on the kitchen floor. From the fridge he pulled out several small containers of fresh raspberries, glistening shinier than porcelain, and poured their contents into the dish on the floor.

“Time to get mashing. All this juice needs to be released. Hop into the dish with me.”

They were going to liberate the juice of the raspberries with their feet. Their toes squishing around in pulsing red pulp. Zora was delighted. A childlike delight. The dish barely had enough room for both their feet—they had to hold each other by the waist for stability. He held her waist loosely, she held his tight.

Their feet began to move and maneuver, crushing and grinding against the raspberries, juice squirting onto their calves, pulp coursing between their toes. They managed to sneak in a few kisses during the mashing—what else would you expect in such close, and juicy, proximity? These kisses convinced Zora that she would be better off steadying herself not by holding his waist, but by planting her hands firmly on his ass. She massaged his backside with her hands, fingers flexing, while her feet massaged the raspberries. Their feet rubbed and slid and played against each other, juice cascading around them as toes tickled and soles kissed.

Their calves played a game of their own, naked skin brushing, pushing, moving in and out, toward and away. Droplets of juice ran down their exposed lower legs; specks of pulp, jumping up from the dish, either stuck or slid.

After a few minutes everything was wet and mashed, and they stepped out of the raspberry basin. He poured the mash through a strainer, the juice going into a crystal bowl.

He ladled half the juice from the bowl into a crystal decanter, part of the same set as the bowl. This would hold the vinaigrette. Into the decanter he drizzled macadamia nut oil, half as much oil as there already was juice. Then he added just enough red wine vinegar to balance the sweetness of the raspberries. The bath of vinaigrette was ready; now to ready the bather.

The greens themselves he’d ordered from a gourmet grocery in Madison Springs. It had taken them a few days to get everything ready—some of the greens were prosaic, but some were exotic. Each type of green had been sealed in its own little produce bag. They were waiting in the fridge, eager to be joined.

Victor had dreamed up the interplay of the salad ingredients himself. He loved the beautiful argument of green and red—the marriage of the royal colors of nature. Green the color of things that leave, and red the color of things that bleed. The salad they made together, the colors and the lovers, would have
le plus beau fleurons de la couronne de la nature
—the brightest jewels in the crown of nature.

Fire red orach. Dandelion greens. Persian cress. Radicchio rosso. Lamb’s lettuce. Arugula. And Eros forbid we forget the flowers. The most sensual salads need flowers. Victor had chosen two, the brightest blossoms, the most radiant jewels, of them all. Red star hibiscus and red trumpet honeysuckle. The first, the petals alone; the second, the flowers whole.

He liberated each of these precious green and red things, these emeralds and rubies of sunny life, and let them fall into a macadamia wood salad bowl. He had bought the bowl on a trip two years before to Moloka’i, a bejeweled island in the Hawaiian chain.

All Zora could say was, the only words that cascaded from her lips as those jewels of nature cascaded into the bowl were, “That is beautiful.”

“It will be even more beautiful after we use our hands.”

He guided her hands into the bowl, palms up. Over her hands he poured the vinaigrette, so that the oil and juice and vinegar splashed through her fingers, falling from her palms onto the greens and reds below. As it fell, the liquid felt hot and cold upon her skin, its fragrance sweet and bitter upon her nostrils as it wafted upwards.

Once the cascade of vinaigrette had run its course, Victor put his hands into the bowl with hers, their fingers running down the sides of the macadamia wood. They started to mix the greens. Their hands had to be much gentler than their feet had been. The flowers in particular could be crushed by hands too strong, pulverized beyond recognition by fingers too eager, their beauty and delicacy lost.

And so their hands found a peaceful flowing rhythm, like spring waters easing themselves slowly from the earth. Each of their hands, each of their fingers, could not avoid seeking out the skin of the other, and so mixing the greens took much longer than it might have otherwise. If love and tenderness had not been the goal, but efficiency. A godforsaken thing. A truly sad thing. A truly dead thing.

“Ah, don’t let me forget. The
champagne framboise
. The perfect accompaniment to our meal.”

He extracted from the fridge a bottle of Armand de Brignac. A golden bottle which held a golden wine. He poured each of them a flute of the chilled champagne.

The rest of the raspberry juice would now make its entrance. With a spoon, Victor infused each of their glasses of golden wine with raspberry juice from the crystal bowl. The making of the
champagne framboise
reminded Zora of sacrifice, of blood spilling into honeyed water—the life of an animal draining, percolating, into the libation of a god. She blinked her eyes once and the thought of sacrifice was gone. But not the reality.

They each picked up a glass of the bloodied wine, and each brought the sacrificial glass to the mouth of the other. So close, they drank of the wine and of the scent of each other—one aroma sweet like nectar, the other musky like leather.

This would be a meal at once gourmet and primal. There would be no need for fork or knife or spoon. Such things would only get in the way. The grasping body of the other, the arms, the hands, the fingers, the fingertips, would be the only utensils. Taste buds, lips, tongues, teeth—they would be tainted by anything metal, anything without its own organic scent and life.