Throughout much of the following year, caught up in the invention of a softer teddy bear, a whizzier gyroscope, a more meticulously detailed dollhouse, Santa was certain he had conquered his lust completely. The intruder's voice had fallen away. Santa hoped he was gone for good.
But alas, in elf as in mortal man, concupiscence is not so easily quelled. Despite his honorable intentions, despite the ardency with which he nightly knelt and prayed beside his bed, despite the endless stream of cold showers he shivered under as Christmas Eve approached, Santa fell and fell hard for the Tooth Fairy. The mere sight of her naked flesh—lying open for him the following Christmas beneath the frosted spruce of George and Bertha Watkins of Augusta, Maine—swept aside all resolve and brought his alter ego fully awake and panting. Into the wanton profusion of her limbs he plunged with all the abandon of some parched wayfarer, desert bound and nigh unto death, who, stumbling upon an oasis, tumbles headlong laughing into its lake of living water.
That Christmas she seduced him once in each of the fifty states, letting him anticipate her presence in every dwelling he gifted, then looming up under his nose when he least expected it and drawing him down into a maelstrom of desire. She had him in hovels, in palatial mansions, on worn runners in dark apartment buildings. She had him in dens, in basement playrooms, in cramped attics thick with time where their oozings left heart-shaped stains in the dust. She lured him into hall closets, where, as she knelt among snowboots, Santa clung to the thick dowelling overhead. And there, his face flushed among the hangers, his breath tightening, urgent love leapt out of him like a surge of panthers into the darkness below.
*****
After their fifth such encounter, Santa, feeling soiled by his infidelity, resolved to call a halt, to plead with the Tooth Fairy to save him from himself.
Sweeping down Broadway in the midst of a blizzard, past Columbia University on his left, Santa banked over Barnard until his team pounded against flurries of snow above West End Avenue. They touched down at last on the tarred roof of a four-story brownstone on West 91st, its black surface aswirl with driving snow. Drifts washed off like capped waves in all directions, their shifting crests blue in the moonlight. And there she lay, upon a soft mound of white near the roof edge—the Tooth Fairy, sleek, round, and ready, her breasts stiff-nippled and flecked with flakes.
She twisted toward him as he stepped down from the sleigh, the wind fanning his beard out around his face. Her arms reached up. "Take me," she whispered, more to groin than ear. Although her voice was low, Santa could hear what she said as plainly as if the boom and moan of the blizzard were no more than a deaf man's dream.
(You heard the lady, bunkie. Have at her.)
That's enough. It's time to call it quits.
(It's never enough, fat boy, never. You know that. We both know that.)
Santa stroked Dancer's flank and lifted his eyes to his team, whose heads were turned every one to take in the naked fairy banked in snow. Lucifer's antlers pulsed in what Santa took to be disapproval but which was really arousal. Santa gave them a comradely shrug, as if to say, "What's a fellow to do?"
Beneath his boots, packed snow squeaked and crunched. Santa crouched beside her. "Listen," he shouted into the storm. "We can't go on like this."
Her only answer? A mock pout. She traced with thumb and forefinger the long fat arc of his erection. Then she unbuckled his wide black belt. In the fury of the wind, her crimson hair blew all about, trapping snowflakes like stubborn gems.
Feeling his saintly goodness crumble once more—far too easily, he thought, for one who had been selfless for centuries—Santa closed his eyes momentarily against the force of her charms. Then, in a last grasp at purity, he snapped them open and grabbed her wrists in a tight grip.
"Don't you hear me, woman?" he pleaded. "I've got a wife. I love her. I've vowed by all that's holy to be faithful to her."
(Don't be a chump, fat boy. Take her.)
You've had your say. Now shut up, whoever you are.
The Tooth Fairy smiled and stretched. Her thighs parted. Santa saw, with sinking heart and rising petard, the hot fluid of her lust pooling there, demanding intimacy. She drew her mouth up past his cheek and gasped, "Fuck fidelity, you fucking stud! Fuck me!"
The feel of her lips against his ear, her hot breath, the carnality of her fricatives were too overwhelming to be denied. Sobbing against his fate, Santa fumbled at his suit—(That's the ticket, Nick old buddy; you and me, we're halfway home, oh yes indeedy, and what an inviting little dwelling place it is)—stripping himself bare against the blizzard.
And there, with his faithful team looking on, blowing and snorting impatience and arousal, Santa dug his toes into frozen slush and brought them both to the heights of ecstasy, he feeling the chill winds of winter blasting along his spine and freezing his buttocks, she opening her lips wide to orgasm and choking with delight upon the deluge of snowflakes that swirled down into the depths of her throat.
*****
That night, after Manhattan, Santa found it less and less difficult to give in to lust. His pleas to God to steel his will, his regrets that at his creation there had not been included some small inoculative mix of baseness, if only to remove the element of surprise which befuddled him now—these diminished as his prayers for a stronger back and finer taste buds increased.
And beyond that night, other Christmases saw the two of them scheming to cross paths with increasing frequency. Santa's first stop, and his last, became always his fairy lover's wind-whipped island. There upon the rocky shore, beneath the blasted cypress—its twisted limbs decked in shells and seaweed, a dead starfish nailed aloft—the two of them humped and plotted, plotted and humped, bringing into precise and satisfying conjunction their bodies and their evening's itineraries.
Santa preferred things that way. Once he knew where she'd be when, he could give his giftgiving the attention it deserved. The blessed children, after all, had first claim always on his love. Lifting aloft drained and happy from her island, Santa pictured the uncountable millions of sleepy wee ones, nightie'd and pajama'd. The special dreams of Christmas wrapped them round snug and warm. But it was his visitation, the nocturnal touch of Santa Claus, which brought the magic of selfless giving into their homes.
And if, at times, he turned away from the holly and the ivy, set aside his pack, and pressed the lurch and lunge of his gotta-have-it desire up against that of the fairy with the ravenous eyes and the necklace of teeth, where was the harm in that? There was enough of him, by heaven, to go around. He could be Anya's loving mate; he could be the Tooth Fairy's hump-and-grunt of a fuckfriend; and he could be Santa Claus, jovial, roly-poly bestower of gifts and goodies upon children young and old.
Only in the minds of the pinched and narrow, he assured himself, did these roles conflict.
*****
Santa's elves are sturdy creatures. Never growing older, always in the best of health, they laugh and toil year in, year out, free from the vicissitudes of change.
However.
Sometimes, whether it be in the gruff and grumble of a snowball fight, or in the misjuggle of a fistful of ball peen hammers, or in some other such hapless circumstance, sometimes an elf loses a tooth.
In the fifth year of Santa's affair with the Tooth Fairy, Friedrich the globemaker, whose head was as oblate as the earth he modeled, lost his right lateral incisor to a doorframe that didn't look where it was going.
He placed it beneath his pillow.
And the Tooth Fairy, welcomed thus to Santa's domain, ate the elf's tooth, replaced it with one thousand newly-shat shiny copper pfennigs, drifted across the commons, passed through the door of Santa's cottage, hovered over her lover's bed, glared at the dozing Anya, kissed Santa out of slumber and into magic time, lured him across the snow to his workshop, and fucked out his lights amid pinwheels and piccolos, race cars and rockets, gizmos and gadgets galore. The glazed eyes of countless stuffed dolls and animals looked down upon their maker as he brough
t adultery most foul to the North Pole.
Truth be told, Santa grew uneasy there in the near-darkness with all those unblinking eyes staring at him. But where else could they go? Up here, in this tight little community, no ideal place existed for them to have at each other with complete abandon.
So when the Tooth Fairy drank him spermless one last time and slipped away, Santa remained in magic time and built them a cozy hut way off in the woods where no one had ventured before.
It was the perfect locus for love. Concealed in a copse of ash trees, its stones rose from snow, solid and inviting. Inside, a great stone fireplace roared its paean to love. Blazing Yule logs splashed into every crevice and corner waves of liquid light. Down across surfaces of fur and quilting they went and up over a huge four-poster built of ashwood, its large mattress awash with pillows and stuffed with swan's down. At each side of the bed, wide windows looked out on moonlit snowdrifts and the silhouettes of trees.
Despite his pride in its workmanship, Santa knew that this hut represented a sharp departure from his old ways. Pure selfishness. An absolute concealment from those he had always been open with. Yet the trees themselves seemed to conspire with him, to remind him of some former life he had forgotten utterly, a life his sly intruder had played a leading role in. Names came to him from their swaying limbs: Syce, Crania; Ptelea, Morea, Carya; Ampelus, Balanus, Aeiginus; and repeatedly and with peculiar urgency, Pitys. Names meaningless to him, yet freighted with meaning.
The next night Santa couldn't sleep. He lay awake beside Anya, staring into the darkness, imagining the Tooth Fairy's return, how he would take her to their new-minted hideaway and have her there.
But she didn't come that night.
Nor the following night.
The third night, Santa got smart. First he went to the stables and, one by one, woke the reindeer. No, each of them shook his antlered head, blearing up at him. None of my teeth are loose, none need pulling. Nine times he asked the question. Nine times he took denial, kissed the soft tufted fur between the reindeer's eyes, and let him lapse into sleep.
Next, cloaked in magic time, he visited each of his multitude of dozing elves. His fingers probed their tiny mouths, testing the seating of every molar, every cuspid and bicuspid, every incisor both central and lateral. For hour upon hour, he searched in vain for that one loose tooth which, wrenched free and placed twixt sheet and pillow, would summon his paramour to his side.
Then the lightbulb went on.
To his workshop he went, cursing himself for a fool all the way. Feverishly he snapped on his worklights, gathered materials and tools. His seasoned hands flew among them. Out of the chaos scattered across his workbench, he whipped together a child's bed. Simple, functional, inviting. The sort of bed an eight-year-old would dream wonders in after a trying day battling giants and ogres at school.
Another swatch of chaos, another miracle: a doll so lifelike that in the dimness of a room lit by fire, one would swear she was a real little girl, eyes gently closed, lips parted in sleep. Inside the lips? Teeth. Just a few, made of soft wood with a thick coating of ivory from a store of cast-off piano keys. Teeth that snapped firmly into place in the girl's plastic gums, teeth that snapped out just as easily.
Santa prayed it would do.
To the hut he carried her, bed balanced on his back. He brought the fire to a fine blaze, then turned away to decide where to position the little girl, whom he had begun to call Thea. He settled on one corner of the room, just past the window on the far left side. Thea's bed fit to perfection there. She looked as if she'd been sleeping for eons. Santa bent, like a protective parent, to kiss her forehead. With fingers that shook, he brushed past Thea's lips, took hold of one of her two front teeth just at the gumline, and drew it from her mouth. Scarcely had he slipped it beneath Thea's pillow when two fairy arms enwrapped him from behind and the Tooth Fairy's hot breath thrilled his ear.
"What a lovely gesture," she said, turning him about and tugging his workshirt out of his pants. "And what a lovely little love-nest."
"You like it?"
"I do." Her eyes took the place in as she caressed his clothed erection. "Such industriousness deserves its reward."
Santa's heart pounded. As why should it not? The old ticker had a lot of work to do over the ensuing hours, keeping up with his lover's demands. Just as a tomcat, settling into new surroundings, sprays urine here, there, and everywhere to establish his territorial rights, so the Tooth Fairy, delighting in the romantic rusticity of the woodland hut, brought herself and her fat lover to a boil anywhichwhere she could. Upon every couch and quilt, sprawled over pelt and pillow, pressed to every square inch of Santa's deft handiwork, they oozed love.
Once, she caught him off-balance and they tumbled straight into the fireplace. "What are you—?" he said. Then the flames engulfed them.
She lay upon the logs, burning.
Santa's flesh was afire too. But instead of searing torment, he felt the gentle brush of sunlight on skin. Though his eyes were goggled in flame, he could look down upon her, watch her hair crimp and crinkle yet defy the fire's insatiable hunger. For as fast as it entwined among her flowing tresses, consuming them, so fast did those tresses grow out. Flames licked at her nipples like the tongues of greedy lovers.
Below, her juices stewed.
Santa's manhood flamed from testicles to tip. Everywhere, his hair crisped and tickled like seething centipedes. Closed round by a wall of restless flame, Santa pressed his burning flesh to hers, breathed fire, giggled sparks and cinders. Like a smith's beaten iron plunged hissing into water, Santa drove his fiery rod into his lover's boiling stewpit, so that their flesh seethed and sizzled there.
That night, in the matter of consuming passion, the god of fire took lessons from them.
*****
One morning, in the third year of his affair, Santa fished his master weaver Ludwig out from under a riotous sea of patterned bolts and took him aside. "Ludwig," he said, "we've known one another a long time, haven't we? We respect each other. I'm sure we've gone beyond having to sugarcoat a bitter pill when it's time to take our medicine."
"Medicine, Santa?" Recumbent question marks curled above the elf's puffy eyelids.
"Tell me, my friend. And please be candid." Santa draped an arm round his helper's shoulders. "Has my work been up to snuff lately?"
Ludwig wheezed out a long, slow, painful breath. His fingers worked the corners of his mouth. He cocked his head. "Truthfully?" he asked.
Santa nodded.
Ludwig looked with great deliberation into Santa's beard, pursed his lips, and squinted up into Santa's eyes. "I'd have to say, without the slightest hesitation, that your work is—as it has always been and shall, no doubt, ever remain—exemplary, superlative, without peer, if I may be so bold, among elfhood and humankind alike." The color drained from him as he spoke, and his voice dwindled in firmness from strong coffee to weak tea.
"Thank you, Ludwig," said Santa, shaken to the core. "I prize your good opinion, more than I . . . ." Santa's throat tightened.
Ludwig gave a curt smile and a nod, then ambled off as one scattered in his wits.
Santa watched him go. He felt a tangle of emotions. Deep sadness. Amusement over the elf's eccentricities. A feeling of superiority, which disturbed him greatly. And a fear that he had betrayed the love of the young people of this world.
But beneath all of those feelings throbbed the steady hum of desire. Santa marveled at it. He wondered if he had been this way as a mortal in Myra long ago. Perhaps the Heavenly Father had sanitized his memories, washing the worst of his urges out of him. Now, spurred on by a chance encounter with the Tooth Fairy, they were flooding back full force.
Which was as it should be.
Far better, he thought, to embrace his every side, damned and blessed alike, than to live on in ignorance.
Reaching into the depths of his left pocket, he fingered the cool silk of the Tooth Fairy's red panties. Pictures danced in his head,
pictures of scenes lived, scenes imagined, scenes hoped for.
Yes, he thought. Far far better.
*****
Santa dwelt much upon Anya, whom he dearly loved yet could no longer fully confide in. More was the pity. As with his toymaking, so with his marriage: The indefinable something at its core had turned strange or melted away over the years.
Yet she seemed not to notice. She appeared, trusting soul, to have taken him at his word. The day after her blowup that first Christmas morn, she had gone about her affairs as before. A homebody always, Anya strayed rarely from the bright confines of the cottage. Her days she spent in the kitchen or at her crafts, her evenings in the ebony rocker beside the hearth, sharing his delight in the letters he slit open at his writing desk and rushed out of his study to read to her. And when she lay beside him in bed and signaled, by backing up against him, that she was that night receptive, Anya was as earth-moist as the richest silt, chthonic and cavernous as a queen's tomb.
But, God forgive him, her subdued drives maddened him. Months would go by. There she would lie, nightgowned in the fire-toasty bedroom, a book propped open on her breasts—reading, page after page, while he tentatively touched her thigh and fantasized himself erect or fell asleep in the solitary envelope of his unmet needs.
It spawned dark thoughts about her. It made him want to hurt her, to shake the complacency out of her bones, to wrench open the sexless creature she had become and pull out the hidden body of the lusty wench she had once been.
Instead he resorted more and more to the hut.
"I'll tell you what it is," he confided to the head of a marionette one day after painting the tan curves of its ears and its bright blue saucer eyes. "The Good Lord never intended man to be monogamous." A question swam up from the paint drying on the wooden face. "Sure I'm an elf. But before that I was a man. I know what it's like."
He dipped a fresh horsehair brush into a jar of crimson and swept a smile across the shiny sphere cradled in his hand. "Grin all you like, little one. Your body, when I get to it, will be all wood and joints. No sex added because none needed. But the bodies of men are thrown on God's wheel, slapped together from blood and bone, flesh and fire, gristle and gland, then glazed with liquid lust and baked to a frenzy in the kiln of desire. A man's member hangs there between his legs like a dark talisman, directing his life, driving him hither and yon, distracting him from the uninterrupted enjoyment of other than sensual delights."
Santa Steps Out: A Fairy Tale for Grown-Ups Page 5