St. Agnes' Eve

by Malachi Stone

  Hot, dry spittle still crackled in the hollow under my Adam’s apple. The stinging heat of Diane’s slap across my face still burned my cheek. My Diane’s name captured in that leering title taunted me until I broke down and sobbed. I couldn’t even see the lug nuts through my tears. Cars whizzed by like bullets, stinging me with road grit. Finally, out of necessity and reflex, I managed to put on the undersized spare and eased warily back home.

  The van was gone. Sandra’s car sat parked in its space. I carried the gift bag into the house. It was after midnight. The big cathartic argument with Diane I had both feared and relished was not to be—at least not yet. Maybe she wanted me sober for it. Maybe she didn’t want me at all.

  I pulled the pocket doors to the family room half-closed and slipped Diane Pulls the Train into the VCR. Thank God it still worked. Couldn’t afford the fifty bucks for another one. Even the rushing hiss of white noise seemed to usher in a chorus of Elizabethan voices calling me a cuckold. The clock cuckooed once for twelve-thirty.

  I rewound the tape. Someone had already watched it or a copy of it. Maybe the overflow crowd at one of Kokker’s orgies, half-bored and half-entertained by Diane’s clapping a prize set of horns on my head. The cheap, dirty thrill of degrading something pure was what they all wanted. The tape clicked and buzzed. Rewind complete. The random numbers on the counter read 666. I reset it to zero. Pressed play, though I didn’t feel like playing.

  Her hair was done up with the aigrette. It had to be the night of our dinner at Kokker’s. The sound was lower than on a commercial tape. I turned it up just as Kokker’s bleating voice said, “Relax the muscles of your neck.” He stepped behind her where she reclined on some kind of contoured bench and wrapped the crook of his elbow around her throat. He leaned forward for a better angle and tightened his grip, pressing the heel of his other hand against her temple. With a sickening crunch, he jerked and twisted her head ninety degrees. Her body sagged, and her head lolled when he released her.

  Kokker stripped away the hospital gown Diane had on. He tweaked her nipples, mugging and playing to the camera. The hand-held camera focused on the unconscious Diane. Suddenly others were in the room: early comers to Kokker’s festivities. I hadn’t even suspected their presence in the house.

  “She’s out,” Kokker assured them in a normal voice level. “We’ve at least twenty minutes.” Primal rage welled up in me, even as I realized that at that very moment, Sandra and I must have been getting it on, conceiving a child in the rathskellar.

  None of the men wasted any more of that twenty-minute window than necessary getting naked. They were like boys in summertime eagerly stripping down for the ole swimmin’ hole.

  Kokker, wearing some kind of horned Viking helmet, waved to the camera with one hand while he worked himself erect with the other, announcing to nervous laughter, “Look at me. I’m about to get my ashes hauled with Ricky Galeer’s wife, and it’s not even Ash Wednesday.”

  The camera’s prurient eye panned back and forth to distraction, trying to capture all the action both stem and stern. Two other men stood by, impatiently urging State’s Attorney Peterson to hurry. The camera struggled to take it all in, catching the face of one of the waiting men. I recognized him: Coroner Lester Ruggles. A moment later, the camera lurched to record him prematurely popping. I heard his voice saying, “Oh, no! Oh, shit!”

  Someone said, “They gotta be really dead for you to hold out any longer than that, Les? Not just unconscious?” to general male laughter.

  Ruggles ruefully smeared his wad all over Diane’s breasts. It glistened there like Vaseline. “We never been properly introduced,” he said.

  Not to be outdone, Kokker introduced himself in true porno interruptus style. I thought of her thanking him for the treatment later.

  Peterson held on next to the longest, but soon his ample load adorned Diane’s neck right about where her sputum had clung to mine. He obligingly left her mouth hanging open for the next gentleman. Her body lying so still while they changed positions, her gaping mouth, the clinical surroundings—it all resembled some kind of alien autopsy.

  Even with his massive semi-erect penis in my wife’s mouth, the last man needed to give himself a little extra help. He managed to get off after applying a few rodent-quick hand strokes of his own. The camera slowly angled upward to get a peek at his face. It was Diaz, eyes closed. His eyelids popped open and he raised a hand to shield his eyes from the glare of the white light. Turning away with a shy smile he said, “Get that fuckin’ thing off me. I got a reputation to maintain, not like you assholes.”

  Diane moaned. Someone warned, “She’s comin’ around.” The shoemaker’s elves put away their tools, gathered up their clothes, and stole away, leaving only Kokker and Hephzibah, silent zombie camerawoman, to clean up the mess. Kokker took over camera duty while Hephzibah sponge-bathed the evidence from Diane’s skin and nether hair.

  Oblivious to everything except the action on the tape, I hadn’t noticed Sandra standing behind me. She stroked the guard hairs of my neck, saying, “Throws a hell of a party, doesn’t he?”

  The clock cuckooed one.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  The Kokker Maneuver

  “Those demons—the ones that attack you when you’re asleep,” she went on. “What do you call them?”

  “Incubi?”

  “That’s it. Incubi. They say to overpower a demon, you first have to get it to tell you its name. I mean, how’re you going to do that if you’re asleep?”

  “I know all their names,” I said.

  “God, I’ll say you do.” She circled around the couch and sat down beside me, her attitude demure. “Kirk’s an asshole. I feel like I oughta apologize to you or something. I can’t believe I was ever part of that scene, you know? It all just seems so...cold and impersonal. Like a bad dream I’ve had over and over.”

  “You’ve seen this kind of thing happen before?”

  “Oh, honey bunny,” she said, “more times than I care to remember.”

  “Did he drug her? Is that how it works?”

  “No. He puts the Kokker maneuver on them. That’s what you saw him doing with his hands, like he’s breaking loose a stuck jar lid, only it’s her head, you know?” She assumed a dour Alfred Hitchcock parody. “When skillfully administered, inducing profound and prolonged vasovagal syncope.” She drew out the final E sound in a death-rattle groan. “He claims it’s his own invention, but he really picked up the whole idea off that other tape I gave you. It’s something the Lilith cult has used for thousands of years to induce sudden unconsciousness in its victims, a kind of sleeper hold from hell. Kirk’s trying to figure out a way to license it and then sell the authorities on letting chiropractors use it to do surgery without an anesthetic. Creepy, huh?”

  I’ll say it was. Janis had used it on me that first night in the office. That crackling flash of red, then time-out.

  “Kirk calls it ‘giving him twenty minutes.’ Like for instance, he’ll say, ‘Give me twenty minutes, I’ll make a new woman out of you.’ Only when she wakes up, the new woman’s been had. It was one of Kirk’s favorite games.”

  I gazed into her doe eyes. Her hair was down, her expression open yet unreadable. Her full breasts strained against Diane’s robe. Aunt Sandy. In Diane’s absence she had no doubt fed our children and tucked them in. Would she do the same for me now that we were alone? Heart pounding, I reached for her.

  “How could you have stayed so long with a man who treated you so badly, Sandra?”

  She let me embrace her for nearly a full minute, even rested her head on my shoulder. But when my wayward index finger wormed its way inside the lapel of my wife’s robe and found new purchase there, she sighed and shimmied away, whispering only, “I can’t.”

  My reptile brain took over. I had to have the feel of her against me again, the cool firmness of her skin, her gamy esters when I lost all reserve and went down on her, my shuddering ecstasy all come inside of her. With a lizard’
s forked tongue I spoke these words: “You and I could go a long way on a million dollars, baby.”

  She stood facing me, arms barricading her breasts against my threatened onslaught. “Excuse me?”

  “I said—”

  “I heard what you said. Where the hell are you going to get your hands on a million dollars? No offense.”

  “None taken. I happen to be entertaining an intriguing offer. Through an intermediary, Kokker’s offered me that sum in untraceable—tax-free—cash, simply to divorce Diane, marry you, and get you out of his hair, apparently. A can’t-lose proposition for me, now that Diane’s already left.” I tried for a crooked worldly smile but literally choked on the last few words.

  Sandra’s eyes welled up with tears. “That sweetheart,” she sobbed.

  “Say what?”

  “Don’t you see? It’s like the rube who puts up a No Peddlers sign—a red flag the guy’s got no sales resistance. Kirk can’t resist me if he’s willing to pay a million dollars to get rid of me. It’s a dead giveaway I must be worth over a million bucks to him. He’s telegraphing how much he loves me in spite of himself!” She ran to me and planted an exuberant, sisterly kiss on my cheek.

  “Thank you,” she gushed. “I’m going to pack a few things. I’ll send Hephzibah for the rest later.” Within moments, her lingering lavender perfume was the only clue she had ever been in the room. I heard banging drawers and closet doors upstairs. She came clumping down with a single suitcase, gave me her trademark little-girl wave at the door, and was gone.

  I decided Diane Pulls the Train wasn’t worth a second viewing, even though it seemed to be all I had left of my wife. After Sandra’s car peeled away heading west, I dragged upstairs. I checked on the kids: all four sleeping soundly. What story had Sandra told them to account for their mother’s absence? How would I care for them now? Maintain two separate residences when I couldn’t afford even the one?

  These thoughts haunted me when I tried to sleep after picking up and draping my pants over the rocking chair. I had nearly given up on sleep when I realized that the pants weighed less.

  The talisman was gone; Sandra’s gypsy fingers must have lifted it out of my pants pocket while I was embracing her. She had packed it and taken it with her. I leaped out of bed and fished in my pocket. It was gone, all right, but there was a note in Sandra’s boxy, eighth-grade-style handwriting:

  Dick,

  Pleeze don’t think of me as an indian giver.

  I gave you what you wanted, but now its time to take it back. After all, it was never really mine to give you in the first place.

  All my love,

  Sandra

  P.S. Diane’s at Kirk’s.

  All I could focus on were the last three words: Diane’s at Kirk’s. I shut off the lamp and went back to bed. Tension and shock stiffened me like rigor mortis, but somehow I eventually drifted off to troubled sleep.

  Dreams of the children in peril. The children lost forever. I wept in my sleep, disconsolate over the fact that I’d paid insufficient attention to their growing up, clutching against the quicksilver of fleeting memory, terrified that I might forget the details of their childhood and that through my forgetting they might cease to exist at all. In my dream I ached to hold them, to tell them that all was well, that Diane and I were both there for them always. I slept fitfully, and every time I awoke it was to night terrors.

  Diane’s at Kirk’s.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Lupercalifragilistic-

  expialidoshus

  I lucked out. When I showed up less than prepared and totally unmotivated for the Misty Weegers trial, the defense attorney offered me seventeen thousand dollars before we’d even made it to chambers. Sticker price—policy limits—was only twenty. We both knew they’d never pay sticker because, as we also both knew, sticker minus three-halves of the two thousand dollars Kokker would charge me for an hour of his testimony equals seventeen thousand. In my business everybody’s a mind reader. Defense knew I’d have to accept, that I couldn’t take a chance damaging my client in hopes of getting my name in the jury verdict reporter’s fool-of-the-month column for obtaining an uncollectible paper judgment in excess of policy limits. There was no other choice. The only ones with any money in this country are the insurance companies and the people who worship Satan. Sometimes for me the distinction tends to blur.

  For all my emotion in my dreams, by morning the urgency of attending to the children’s basic needs overcame any unrestrained expressions of affection. I’d managed to call upon one of the church ladies to cover for me before and after Wolf’s preschool, and I drove the others to school myself before court. In answer to their inevitable questions, I kept repeating that Mommy was sick and that she was going to be all right. She’d be home soon, I assured them.

  Over the next several days we fell into an uneasy domestic routine. I brought in a lot of fast food while trying to resurrect what rudimentary cooking knowledge I’d managed to retain after fourteen years of being cared for. Laundry, dishes, and homework consumed mornings and evenings. Finally, on Valentine’s Day after midnight, with me still at the sink, the phone rang. It was Diane.

  “Hello, darling,” she said. Her voice was a caress that brought me back fourteen years and more. Nervous as a teenager on his first date, weak in the legs, I longed to sit down but there was no chair near enough to the kitchen phone. I tried to put all the emotion I felt at bay, to seem cordial and non-threatening. To bring her back home again.

  “I miss you, hon. We all miss you.” Mistake to use the plural pronoun? Diane had expressed rage against the children right before she’d left; it might even remind her of Sandra.

  “I miss you, too,” Diane sighed. I thought I heard music in the background.

  “Whatcha up to?” It came across too much like baby talk.

  “Oh, you know, the usual,” she lilted. “Fucking, sucking. There’s a lovely black gentleman—quite a big black gentleman, actually—who’s letting me catch the brass ring. You know, the one attached to his foreskin.” As if on cue, uproarious mixed laughter—loud and unmistakably at my expense—sounded in the background. She must have had me on speaker all along. I’d misjudged the malice in her voice for come-hither languor.

  “Happy Lupercalia, darling,” she whispered in a faux-Marilyn kiss-off.

  Ramses’ voice: “Yeah, happy Lupercalia, darling motherfucker.” More laughter from the peanut gallery of perverts.

  “Don’t you have that a little turned around, asshole? You’re the pimp motherfucker—”

  Someone had already slammed the phone down at the other end, probably saving me from a short lifetime of looking over my shoulder.

  Funny, divorce was still unthinkable to me. Some smirking third-floor jockey wanting to argue Quadros and 401Ks out in the hall while we threw the babies out with the bathwater seemed like something that only happened to clients, not attorneys. All I wanted to do was pull Diane out of that house, talk some sense into her, get her grounded back in reality. One thought tore at me, a singsong children’s taunt:

  Once she goes black, she’ll never come back.

  Once she goes black, she’ll never come back.

  Once she goes black, she’ll never come back.

  I pictured Ramses on that first tape with Sandra, skewering her with an organ that didn’t look human. Staring at my wedding ring, I visualized his, that vain affectation twinkling off the end of his foreskin like an OK sign. I wanted to come crashing into Kokker’s obscene mansion and guillotine the testicles of every man who ever even glimpsed my wife and had an impure thought. Like those Attis-worshippers Kokker loved to talk about, I wanted to take a bath in the blood of the bull.

  But I didn’t want a divorce. In fact, I loved Diane more at that moment than ever before. I’d asked for and deserved everything I’d gotten. I had learned that whatever you do really does come back to you three times over. I’d left my wife at home, sat in the dark, and stared at the bimbos on Ramses’ stag
e, paying him for the privilege. Now he was paying me back. Somehow the whole thing made me feel clean, as though I’d killed my Minotaur and the bloodbath was already over.

  The next two weeks or so, even though Cheesefare Sunday was still a month away we ate a lot of grilled cheese sandwiches. We often wore mismatched socks and iron-scorched clothing. We tried to make the best of things. The succession of church ladies—I think they saw me as the good guy in our separation—urged me to attend vespers with the children, saying it was the best thing to heal a broken marriage. Father Seraphim would know just what to do. Put everything in God’s hands. Finally I took their advice and got everybody ready on Saturday evening.