St. Agnes' Eve

by Malachi Stone

  “Wouldn’t be right.”

  “And what with that daughter of hers gone missing, I’ll probably wind up spending a lot more time over at her place, you know, consoling her and wiping away her tears and that.”

  “I know what you mean.”

  “That’s not to say I’d ever take selfish personal advantage of a tragic domestic situation like Mad’s disappearance, you understand.”

  “Of course not.”

  “But sometimes one thing leads to another.”

  “I hear you.”

  “Besides, once I find her kid—and I will find her—Janis’ll naturally wanna show me her gratitude.”

  “Naturally,” I agreed.

  “Fuckin’ A,” he observed.

  We had reached my block. The house was dark. “Maybe,” I said, my hand reaching for the door handle, “pretty soon you’ll be checking out Janis’s mole.”

  He slammed on the brakes, the cruiser jerking to a tire-screeching stop parallel to Diane’s shop windows. “The fuck you talking about, Janis’s mole?”

  “I—I don’t know.”

  “How the hell would you know anything about that goddamn mole!” He slammed the wheel with the heels of both hands.

  “John, I—”

  “Get out a’ the car.”

  “You’ve got the wrong idea, man.”

  “Must have thought it was pretty damn funny, letting me go on and on about her,” he said with a deadly calm. “Get your ass outa the goddamn car before I throw it out.”

  My guts roiled. I had barely enough time to fling the door open and let go into the gutter. I coughed and spit, gasping for breath, then heaved another load.

  He waited until I had finished before saying, “Stay the hell away from her, understand? You got a wife. I don’t. You get any strange urges to do something with Janis, stay home and do it to your old lady instead.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  The Big O

  Our house was dark. Our car was gone. After a moment, I realized that I had left it parked downtown when I took off with Diaz.

  A late-model red Mercedes sports car was parked in my spot behind the house, parallel with the van and hidden from the street. The vanity plate caught my eye: THE BIG O. Seven letters. How had Sandra gotten it past the Secretary of State’s bluenoses? More to the point, what was Sandra doing at our house at two-thirty in the morning with the lights out?

  I slipped my key into the back door lock as quietly as possible. The familiar house smell and rush of warmth brought on another wave of nausea. I fought it off. Best to creep into bed and let everybody sleep until morning. I slipped off my shoes at the door, then carried them, walking on tiptoe like every drunken husband in every Saturday Evening Post cartoon I could recall from my childhood. Past the icon parade stand—could they see my shame in the dark?—careful to stay on the runner and avoid the creaking floorboard roughly parallel to Saint Alexander Nevsky. Up the stairs, pausing at the landing to listen to the quiet house. I undressed there; the rustling of clothes might rouse Diane from a no doubt angry slumber.

  I sneaked into our bedroom naked. The door hinge creaked.

  Diane sat up in bed. The streetlight shining through the mini-blind louvers traced Zebra stripes over the topography of her nude body. Without turning on the lamp, she stared at me with a rage she must have taken to bed with her.

  “Where the hell have you been?” she said. Someone sighed dreamily next to her, then sat up. Sandra, also nude, had taken my place in our bed. The same Zebra stripes outlined her ample cleavage.

  “What’s Sandra doing here?” Always answer a question with a question to keep them off-balance. Only this time it didn’t work.

  “Answer me, damn you to hell!” Diane almost never cursed, and then never at me.

  It was Sandra who reached over to switch on the lamp. Without bothering to pull up the sheet and cover herself, she said, “Just keeping a place warm for you, Dick.” She was sporting big blue shiners under both eyes this time.

  “You’re drunk, aren’t you?”

  Sometimes it’s best to say nothing. Especially when returning home from the Sphinx Lounge to an enraged spouse.

  “Lighten up, Di,” Sandra said. “Boys will be boys, you know. At least he cares enough to bring it on home to momma.”

  “Sandy’s going to be staying with us for a while,” Diane said coldly. “You see what that beast did to her?”

  Sandra pointed to the shiners and twitched her eyebrows like Groucho.

  She looked to Diane, then me, and said, “Well, three’s a crowd, I guess. Unless I’m outvoted?” Hearing nothing from either of us, she shrugged, then slid out from under the sheets. I watched her walk three slow, swaying steps to the door of the adjoining guestroom. It was what they call a Christian door, with bevel-edged wooden crosspieces in the center.

  “I’ll help you get set up, Sandy,” Diane said, studiously ignoring me. I crawled into the spot Sandra had vacated. The two of them whispered and giggled behind the closed guest room door as I lay there trying to keep the bed from spinning.

  Everything was too hot. I rolled first on one side, then the other, riding out the bedspins, but found no comfort. Finally the door to the darkened guestroom opened. I heard Sandra saying, “‘Night, Di.”

  Diane whispered, “Night, Sandy.” Then the audible kiss.

  I lurched to the master bath and grabbed the porcelain ring not a moment too soon. When it was over I lay on the cool tile floor. The touch of the cold bowl soothed me like the condensation from a glass of icy lemonade against my forehead on a sweltering July day. Sometime in the night, after one or another bout of dry heaves, I must have pulled the bathroom rug over my chest for a makeshift blanket.

  I woke about seven, judging from the sunlight angling through the bathroom window. Someone had just flushed the toilet. I looked up to see Sandra towering over me, wearing Diane’s robe and doctoring her eyes in the mirror. Her stench was everywhere. In no hurry, she finished with her eyes and started brushing her teeth with Diane’s toothbrush.

  “You sure know how to make a girl feel like part of the family, Dick. Wish Kirk could still get an early morning riser like that one you’re wearing.”

  Another surge of vomit doubled me over the toilet. As my own spasmodic wheezing and coughing echoed in my ears, Sandra taunted, “Hey! I’m the one should be having the morning sickness around here!”

  My hangover made going to the office out of the question. Leaving Sandra still working on herself in the bathroom, I slouched back to our bed. My place was newly warm again.

  Sandra chose that moment to flounce out of our bathroom. “Hey, sleepyhead, time to rise and greet the morning sunshine,” she sing-songed. My head banged with a trepanning pain.

  “Sandra,” I began, “I want you to stay out of our bed—”

  “No you don’t, Dick,” she said, throwing herself prone and crossways over the bed to face me, her borrowed robe agape. Diane was down in the kitchen banging pots and slamming cabinet doors loud enough to be heard upstairs.

  Sandra reached for my hand and stroked it, her blue-blackened eyes scary in their intensity. “You want all three of us here in this bed, admit it. It’s what all men want; I don’t have to be a mind reader, even though I am one.” She looked to me as though for validation.

  “Diane would never go for it,” I whispered hoarsely, my throat painfully dry.

  She smiled indulgently. “Maybe there’s things about Diane I know better than any man could—even you, Ricky. Secrets she might not even know she’s been keeping. Ever think of that?”

  All I knew was that sleep would deaden the sick throbbing in my head and quell the surging nausea. “You want to talk about secrets? What the hell am I supposed to tell the kids when they ask me about your living here, sleeping with their mother? And when they ask about your license plate? That it means ‘The Big Orgasm’?”

  “Is that what you think it means? Oh, Ricky!” She shook her head with amusement
.

  “I’m not talking about just that. It’s everything about your being here. I don’t know. It’s weird: all of us walking around naked in front of each other, using the same bathroom like we’ve been drafted into the same unisex army.”

  “All behind closed doors,” she reminded me. “All the kiddies need to know is that Aunt Sandy’s here for a visit. You worry too much, Dick.” She crawled on her elbows toward me. Her robe yawned open.

  “Diane would never go for it,” I repeated.

  “You let me worry about Diane,” she said. “I’ll save your marriage, maybe even spice it up for you a little.” She planted a toothpaste-fresh kiss on my lips.

  “What does it mean, then?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Your vanity plate. What’s the Big O?”

  “It’s the shape my mouth makes,” she said, “when I’m sucking a man’s cock. And the matching shape his mouth makes all the time I’m doing it.”

  “You haven’t told Diane about us, have you?”

  “What do you want me to tell her?”

  “I don’t want you telling her anything.”

  “That can be arranged,” Sandra said, climbing off the bed. “I’ll go see if Di needs any help down in the kitchen. Thanks for letting me stay, Dick. I’ll make it worth your while.”

  I rolled over. My brain was like a corpse floating in oil. It seemed I had barely closed my eyes when I felt Sandra’s cool breath on my face again like a succubus. “By the way, did you happen to give you-know-who the, ah, item we discussed?”

  “Why don’t you read my mind for the answer to that one?”

  “Don’t be a smartass. It’s because of trying to help that bitch that I wound up on your doorstep last night. So I just want to make sure you gave it to her, is all.”

  “I did.”

  “Put it right in her hot little hands yourself?”

  “You got it.”

  “And of course you didn’t even sneak one tiny little peek inside the box, did you?” Sandra’s middle finger was riding my pulse—her lips and tongue caressing close by my carotid artery. She stopped. I felt her intake of breath. “Well? Did you?”

  “Did I what?”

  She raised herself up and regarded me suspiciously. “Come on, Dick. Did you or did you not look inside the fuck-nuts box before you gave it to her? Now is not the point in our relationship you want to start lying to me, man.”

  “What’s the difference?”

  “Not the right answer, Dick. Because some things are sacred, you know?”

  “Spoken like a true Satanist.”

  “Fuck you. I give you a simple request—”

  “It was a quest.”

  “Say what?”

  “Janis called it a quest. It was all very mysterious.”

  “Then do me a favor, okay, Dick?”

  “What’s that?”

  “Keep it that way. All very mysterious. As my attorney, you have to anyway, right?”

  I nodded, my body screaming out for sleep. With that nod of assent, I suppose I became Sandra’s attorney. What the hell—I was already her lover as well as her roommate and the putative father of her unborn child. One thing still bothered me, though. “I thought you said you could cream Kirk Kokker in a fair fight.”

  “Who said Kirk ever fights fair?” she said. “Get some sleep, Dick. You look like dog shit warming in a toaster oven.”

  Nightmares invaded my fitful sleep after that. A child once more, I cowered under the sheets, hearing my mother’s muffled taunts and jeers until one strange male voice or another rose in a roar to meet hers. Shattering glass. The slap and thump of flesh and bone. Her screams in the night, getting what she had coming to her. Don’t let the bedroom light come on. Don’t let either of them remember me until morning, I prayed over and over to a Sunday school God I couldn’t quite remember—who’d abandoned me like an orphan.

  When she was drunk, which was most of the time, I’d dreaded my mother’s kisses even more than her screams. I knew a beating would soon still the screams, as if something deep within her needed to be sated. Kisses on the other hand could without warning turn to anger, anger to rage, rage to blows. Most of all, there was a presence—vile and seductive—behind the drunken kisses, a nameless and disgusting abomination. Finally I awoke again, hangover barely manageable. Through the window that overlooked the driveway, I could see that Sandra’s car was already gone. I rounded the landing on the back stairs. Diane stepped inside the stairwell and blocked my path. I said the first thing that came to mind. “Before you say anything, hon, I want you to know I’m sorry about last night. As a matter of fact, I’m on my way to confession.”

  “You son of a bitch.”

  “At least you have your facts straight,” I said.

  “I’m in no mood for your smartass jokes. Telling me you’re on your way to church. The tavern, more likely.”

  “Diane, I have a problem with substance abuse. You knew I had that problem when you married me—”

  “Don’t you try and make this my fault,” she muttered through clenched teeth. “What’s the matter, I’m not good enough for you anymore?”

  I descended three more steps to face her. “What am I supposed to think, coming home and finding you in bed with another woman?”

  I had made the mistake of coming within an arm span of her. She hauled off and slapped me open-handed across the cheek. She hit me more lightly than either Cheryl or Janis had, but it hurt more.

  “What should I do now, turn the other cheek?”

  She backhanded me for that remark, this time with her left. I reached up to touch where the engagement diamond had bit into my cheek and drew back three bloody fingertips.

  “What the hell’s gotten into you, Diane?”

  “How dare you mock my church and make filthy suggestions about my friend. About me! I’m your wife, not your damned whore!” She picked up the dishtowel she’d dropped on the steps when she’d hit me and threw it at my face.

  “Did you ever stop and consider,” I said, following her into the kitchen, “how everything seemed to blow up between us at about the same time you accepted that dinner invitation from Sandra? I don’t know what lies she may have been telling you, but—”

  “What lies have you been telling me, Ricky? Every time you told me you loved me, was that a lie?”

  “You know better than that.” I moved to embrace her, but she shoved me away.

  “I love you,” I called after her as she ran upstairs. If I’d been a real man, I would have followed her. If I’d been a real man, I would have stayed and repeated it over and over to her until she believed it as much as I did. If I’d been a real man I would have stood up to more slaps in the face if that’s what it took to convince her.

  I tried not to let the storm door bang on my way out the back.

  Chapter Sixteen

  The Flip Side of Atlantis

  “I won’t ask how you got that cut.” Liz dabbed mercurochrome against my cheek with a q-tip, then rummaged in her first-aid kit for a butterfly tape. “You really ought to go to Memorial for a couple of stitches. I can’t guarantee there won’t be a scar.”

  “I’m not asking for any guarantees. You’re a grad student in nursing.”

  “Nothing as practical as that,” she said. “Biology.”

  “That’s practical enough for me.”

  I had been passing by Fox & Hare looking for my car, which since yesterday I’d left parked half a block farther down. The open sign was on, so I’d stopped in to pay my condolences. The tinkly new-age music that usually greeted me at the door had today been replaced by a golden oldie. It takes one to know one. I recognized it immediately: Donovan, Season of the Witch. On forty-five, I think it was the flip side of Atlantis. Liz had the volume cranked up loud enough to drive away the demons of her grief.

  “Okay, I’ll ask. How’d you get this?”

  So I told her all about it. My drinking, my falling down drunk, the fight with Diane.
I even opened up about our evening with the Kokkers. I left nothing out. The voices. Her eyes flashed as though in confirmation of all her worst suspicions when she heard about the dagger.

  “I knew he had it,” she hissed. “I knew it all along.”

  I went on and told her about Sandra living in our house. The last revelation brought a curious expression to her face.

  “Being as how you’ve seen this Sandra person naked, did you happen to notice any unusual markings on her? Anything strange or remarkable about her body habitus?”