Read Online The Coming of Bright by Sadie King - Free Book Online

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