His pink nose twitched. "I have the power to become invisible as the wind," he told her. "I've made us both so, though not to one another. They can neither see nor hear us."
He led her straight up to the blazing window.
The first thing she noticed, oddly enough, were his shiny black boots standing at attention by the fireplace. Beneath the bootheels, a pool of melted snow twisted with reflected firelight. Anya had never seen Yule logs burn so feverishly. They lay thick and numerous in the inner hearth, falling all over one another and flaming high and savage in the heat of consumption.
A vision invaded her head. Darting through sunwash, him hot on her heels, her fir tree in sight, putting on a burst of speed, sweet balsam flaring in her nostrils, diving into the smooth gray bark, yanking her hair free of his fists as he sent up a volley of yowls outside. Then the vision was gone, abruptly lost to memory.
Anya swallowed. She did not want to look at the bed. The corner of her eye had caught shapes moving there that confirmed all.
"See that little girl there?" He placed one paw on her shoulder, pointing into the hut with the other.
Involuntarily she followed it, saw for one instant her naked mate plunging into naked fairy, and beyond him, against the far wall, a tiny bed in which a little girl lay sleeping.
Anya let out a cry.
"She's not real." A whiff of bunny breath wafted against her left cheek. "I checked. She's just a doll with detachable teeth. It's how he summons her."
She shrugged off his paw and leaned into the window. Her beloved husband lay upon the four-poster, his knees and toes dug into the mattress between the splayed thighs of his lover.
Again the elusive vision swept in and out of her. His lustspurt splashing her branches, that brute forehead pounding madly against her trunk until two conical gouges spilled drops of resin where his horns sank into her. Again gone, again elusive, again a rollback.
When she could focus once more on the interior of the hut, Anya's eyes began to tear.
She remembered how it had been for them centuries ago when they were living hand to mouth, giving from their bones to prolong or brighten the lives of others. How God stepped down from the sky, enfolded them, and carried them to the North Pole. How He birthed each elf and reindeer out of the snowbanks in the commons, explored the grounds and buildings with her and Santa, and blessed their new home with effulgent grace. And she remembered how, with one all-giving sweep of His arm, God had granted them eternal life.
That first night of immortality had been so sweet. She had stood on the porch with Santa, listening to him address the elves, basking in their answering enthusiasm. Then he winked at her, ushered her inside, and, to the all-night warbling of elfin choirs, she and Santa made immortal love for the first time.
But now, he topped the Tooth Fairy, covering her fairy face with kisses and performing pushups with his pelvis. Anya lowered her head and wept.
"Shameful, isn't it," said the Easter Bunny, standing close beside her. "A man like that, with his reputation for kindness, for selfless giving—"
She looked at him through the steam on her glasses. "Why would he do something like this? I've been a good wife to him, I know I have." As her lenses cleared, the blur of his face resolved into furry eagerness. His stare chilled her, made her step away.
"Of course you have," he soothed. "Santa must be out of his mind to deceive a good decent beautiful woman like you with a wanton harlot like her."
Anya whipped her head about and again the horrendous sight assailed her.
A flood of vision consumed her, clearer than before. Sapwood oozing for him, even her heartwood moistening at his heartache, relenting throughout her xylem and phloem, taking back flesh and blood, untreeing herself, extending her arms along her branches, rejoicing in the hot savagery of his delight, feeling his shaggy limbs engulf her, snake inside her, swirl her up into the sweep and surge of his ravening hunger. It took longer to leave, ungraspable still, but her body tingled inside with a vitality that stayed with her. There was anger there too and a new restlessness in her belly.
"He's not going to get away with this."
"I wouldn't let him."
"I swear I'll get even. I'll show him what it feels like to hurt this way."
"Goose and gander, Anya," he said. "Tit for tat. Sic semper tyrannis." He brushed his wet nose tentatively against an exposed earlobe.
Savagely she wheeled on him. "Don't touch me!" she said. Then she jammed her face against the pane, saw the flex of her husband's buttocks, heard his muffled screams of release.
An unstoppable surge of youth flooded her body his meaty breath in her face, his holy sweat and she couldn't understand it. The sight mortified her, yes, the animal fullness of him thrusting at her loins but it also shot hot life through her veins. Something was digging at her skull like a claw, raising all sorts of memories or ghosts of his tongue licking her chin, licking her lips, filling her mouth with tickles of wine memories flickering in her. It was obscene, that the sight of Santa's rutting could sweep away her bodily ailments and start wicked thoughts of her own spinning in her head, thoughts even of a taste of nymph she knew not what.
"I didn't mean to—"
Anya cast a contemptuous glance at the Easter Bunny, who had retreated a few feet but craned now to see past her head. He had one paw over his erection, trying, or was he, to conceal it from her.
"I've seen enough," she said. She plunged into the bleak forest, tracking along their snowprints. The Easter Bunny hopped after, offering thinly disguised propositions veiled as mewls of apology. But her eyes saw only snowy depressions and her mind entertained nothing but wild and terrible revenge.
*****
Halloween, 1990. Late Wednesday afternoon. Rachel McGinnis had taken the day off from work. She sat now at the kitchen table, hunched over her mom's reliable old Singer, putting the finishing touches to Wendy's costume.
She glanced at the clock over the sink. Almost time to pick up Wendy at school. Where do the hours go? she wondered.
Concentrating into the hum of the sewing machine, Rachel gathered net tulle onto a ribbon of baby-blue satin. She couldn't imagine why, but this costume made her nervous. Her daughter had seen the Disney version of Peter Pan recently and still remembered vividly her last viewing of The Wizard of Oz. She wanted to be a good fairy "with wings and a magic wand and pretty Tinkerbell eyes, Mommy."
Rachel raised the presser foot, pulled the material free, snipped the thread with her orange-handled Fiskars, and switched off the sewing machine light. She needed to apologize to Wendy, she thought. "Fairies don't have wings and they don't have wands," she had insisted, amazed at her own vehemence. She kept pressing the point, as if it were arguable, until Wendy burst into tears and Rachel regained a semblance of self-control.
But six-year-olds, thank goodness, forgive and forget with blessed ease. By the time Rachel arrived at the Montessori school her daughter attended, Wendy fairly leaped into her mother's arms. In the living room now, having pulled on her new ballet tutu over her sky-blue leotard and tights, Wendy stood patiently while Rachel made up her eyes.
"Kim lost a tooth today."
"Kim Rogers?"
"Uh-huh. I can move this front one a little I think with my tongue."
"That's nice, honey. Close your eyes. Okay, now let's tie those wings on." Rachel brought them out, crisscrossing the ribbons on Wendy's chest and tying them in back. Not bad, she thought, admiring her daughter's loveliness as she adjusted the wingtips. But beneath her calm, a dark premonition hummed. Absurd, she thought. It was as if she were afraid she might invoke some savage fairy by dressing Wendy this way. Yet everyone knew that fairies were creatures of myth, no more substantial than Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny.
"There." Rachel smiled. "Now stand right here and don't turn around."
"Why, Mommy?"
"You'll see." She went past Wendy to the tall hutch that had been her mother's, opened the middle drawer, and drew out the wan
d.
Wendy gasped and reached for it. It was nothing more than a dowel with a cardboard star taped to it and covered with aluminum foil, but Wendy loved it. Rachel delighted in her daughter's reaction, wishing that Frank were here to share it. His death had happened more than six months before, but she still woke in the night expecting to find his huge bearlike body beside her.
Wendy tugged her outside then and Rachel escorted her winged wonder from house to house, standing on the sidewalk while Wendy strode boldly up porch stairs to demand her due. The eerie feeling stayed with her during their hour on the streets. The shadows of bushes and dumpsters and alley-ways concealed not so much the human terrors she might dread on a normal night in Sacramento, as something unnameable that touched the nape of her neck with a cool hand.
"Look, Mommy," said Wendy, tearing down the steps of a house with a dozen blazing pumpkins grinning from the porch. "The funny lady let me reach into her bowl of steam and take two handfuls of candy."
"Did you say thank you?"
"Uh-huh," said Wendy, then raced to the next house. A heavyset man stood on the porch, watching what Rachel guessed was his son—a cowboy of perhaps four—hold out a pillowcase for a Tootsie Roll Pop. When they passed her on the sidewalk, the heavyset man smiled at her.
Rachel liked the conspiratorial camaraderie that bonded Halloween parents. Except for single mothers like herself, it seemed that mostly fathers escorted their young ghouls and goblins about. There was something very attractive about a man who displayed his love for a son or daughter in this way.
It was even better when he was large and bearded like Frank. Her girlhood friends had watched Batman or The Fugitive and swooned over the Beatles. But Rachel's favorite shows had been A Family Affair with Sebastian Cabot and the short-lived The Bold Ones with Burl Ives, whose records she bought exclusively for two years solid. More recently, she had been drawn to William Conrad and Dom DeLuise and Luciano Pavarotti. Nothing thrilled her—indeed inflamed her with desire—like the sight and sound of the huge tuxedo'd singer, absurd handkerchief in hand, caressing those liquid Italian syllables with all the love in his expansive heart.
"Mommy, my arms are getting tired."
"It's time to head home anyway," said Rachel. "Do you want to hit one more side street?"
"No, I'm getting cold. Mommy?"
"Yes, honey."
"Can I have a Snickers when we get home? I got three of them."
"Yes, but I'll need to look them over first. And then, lovely lady, we'll get you out of that fairy outfit and into a nice warm bath. Sound good?"
Wendy gave an enthusiastic yes. As they walked home hand in hand, Rachel had a sudden urge to hide the fairy costume in the hall closet during Wendy's bath and bury it in the trash the next day.
And though she kept telling herself as she ran the bathwater that the idea was absurd, that's precisely what she did.
III. Consequences
God sends meat and the devil sends cooks.
—Thomas Deloney
The prerequisite for a good marriage is the license to be unfaithful.
—Carl Gustav Jung
Jealousy is the greatest of all evils.
—La Rochefoucauld
7. Anya Confronts Her Husband
When Anya woke the next morning, her world had been transformed. She distinctly recalled the long trek back to the cottage. She had glared at the Easter Bunny as he sniffed the red panties and shoved them back into Santa's workpants. But once he had leaped through the window, all was a morass of vague thrashings and feverish dreams.
Her nightgown clung now to her back. She lay there stunned, her eyes roving, cataloging all things drab and diminished.
A dull stirring on her right. Something bulky rolled toward her, its arm heavy across her belly. A hairy upper lip brushed her cheek, a voice babbled alien words: "Good morning, Anya my love."
Whatever she replied seemed to amuse the creature beside her, for his eyes wrinkled up wet and demonic, and intermittent bursts of noise erupted from his lips like genuine laughter. She remembered laughter—what it felt like, what it meant. She wondered why this creature thought it necessary to perform such a pale imitation of it for her.
The bed shuddered when he rose. Then she was alone under the blankets, watching him move here and there, into the bathroom and out again, to the window for a hands-on-hips appraisal of the day, to the closet—Santa's closet, where red panties lay concealed in pants pockets. She fielded sound blips from him, tossed back blips of her own.
Thus it went that morning.
Over the weeks that followed, Anya walked about in a daze. She felt no great urge to re-embrace the myth of free will nor to begin making conscious choices. In fact she was moderately surprised—though she didn't show it—when she heard herself lie to Santa and knew at that precise moment that it was a lie.
"While you and the elves are busy in the workshop this morning," she said, "I think I'll drop in on their quarters and clean up a bit, maybe leave them a surprise."
"Wonderful, dearest," he said. "I'm sure they'll appreciate your thoughtfulness." He raised a bottle of Coke and smiled fatuously at her.
In the empty dorm, she straightened the sheets on a few beds, those belonging to the more voluble elves whose jabber would corroborate her story. Then she opened the windows to let in fresh air and set a potpourri beneath each pillow. When she was done, their quarters smelled like herb heaven.
To avoid being seen from the workshop, she slipped out the back, weaving in and out of the towering fir trees, deep into the woods. Not once did she falter in her steps, nor did the clearing where the lofty trees were thickest fail to appear as expected, nor did the dark stone hut refuse to rise from new-fallen snow like a rotten molar jutting up out of healthy gums.
She pulled off a mitten and touched the pane. The kingdom and the power. It was smooth and cold. The glory and the ecstasy. In the dim interior she made out the blackened fireplace, the four-poster dusky with shadows, the tiny bed with its dozing doll tucked snug under her coverlets. The grape and the grope, the wild abandon. Holding her fingers to the hut, Anya walked once around it, reading the rough stone of Santa's betrayal with her fingertips. Encirclement by satyrs, goat hoofs in clover, their needy hands touching her breasts, their eyes transfixed by her vulva. She tried the front door, opened it, felt the pull of youth and . . . something else tempting her inside. She closed it again, leaning against it until her head cleared. Skin breathing on skin, polyrhythmic grunting, she being slowly spun and spindled, they like four rich flavors alternately sipped. But when she returned to her original spot by the window, Anya, tears in her eyes, rapped sharply, slowly, repeatedly on the glass as if to rouse the little girl lost in slumber beneath the far window.
*****
Fritz grinned into the mirror, turning his head this way and that to admire himself. His bunkmates Karlheinz and Max on either side of him fluffed their beards up around the red and green ribbons they had tied into them and flashed killer smiles into the glass. At the door to the washroom, envious faces, stacked like cordwood clear to the top of the doorframe, glared at them and shouted taunts.
"Simpering sycophants," growled one.
"Dumb luck for dumb clucks," sneered another.
"May you choke on a drumstick," cursed a third.
Fritz chuckled. Every year it was the same. The chosen three would elbow their way through a barrage of insult and invective to the dormitory entrance, link arms and stroll proudly across the commons to the jeers of their fellow elves, and be welcomed into the cottage to share Thanksgiving dinner with Santa and Mrs. Claus.
At first it was all they had dreamed.
"Max, Fritz, Karlheinz, my dear friends," boomed Santa. "Come in, come in, come in." Slaps on the back, warm hugs, and glad hands all round. The vestibule glowed with candlelight. The inviting aroma of roast turkey and honey-baked ham wafted in from the dining room. Then, a tinkling bell sounded in the next room and Mrs. Claus's melodious gr
andma-words: "Dinner's on the table!"
Karlheinz and Max, squealing with delight, dashed under Santa's arms and disappeared through the archway. Santa broke into a belly laugh. "Your bunkmates always were eager little devils, Fritz."
Fritz tried to look arch and disapproving. "Thank God some of us know our manners. Shall we in?"
"After you," said Santa, sweeping as low as his bulk would allow, and Fritz passed at a measured pace through the archway, hoping that Santa's laughter was not at his expense. But when the dining room opened out before him in all its splendor, Fritz forgot his misgivings.
In the fireplace, subdued flames sizzled along three neatly stacked logs. From the large beam that stretched across the dark wood ceiling depended a simple but elegant chandelier. Two dozen beeswax candles rose slim and tapered from their holders, spilling soft light onto the great oak table below.
Fritz knew this table well. Long ago, he had been one of a score of elves who had helped Santa apply the finishing touches to it, planing and sanding and staining and polishing and buffing deep into the night so that Anya would have it in time for Christmas that year. Tonight, of course, the craft that had gone into its manufacture—the turnings, the friezes, the knees, the stretchers, the fluted edges—was covered, splendidly, in the finest damask.
But as beautiful as the tablecloth was from where he now paused, it paled in comparison to the spread of food that covered it. Mrs. Claus stood at the head of the table, a carving knife in her hand, a plump roast turkey on the platter before her. Steam rose tantalizingly from its gleaming brown body. The rich aroma that permeated the air nearly made Fritz swoon, it was so warm and full and inviting. Spilling out as though from Mrs. Claus's bountiful bosom were dish upon dish of cranberry sauce, fresh piping-hot peas and carrots, white whipped potatoes, fanned rolls and firm dewy pats of butter, breaded dressing barely contained by the rim of its serving dish, brimming gravy boats, and pumpkin stewed in maple sap.
Santa Steps Out: A Fairy Tale for Grown-Ups Page 9