Santa Steps Out: A Fairy Tale for Grown-Ups (6 page)

"Anya—"

"Don't you touch me!" she screamed. "You touched
her
with those hands, didn't you? I know your way. Get a woman all fired up under those incredible hands of yours. Dear God, I'm going to—"

She bolted for the bathroom and slammed the door. Santa heard the sharp report of the toilet lid striking the tank, then the sudden uprush of vomit and a splash as of diarrhea into the bowl.

He went to the door and called her name.

"Don't you come in here!" she threatened. He heard her spit into the water, wad up lengths of toilet paper, flush them away. The water ran as she rinsed her mouth.

Then, eyes watery, white strands of hair gone astray, Anya walked past him and collapsed on the bed, staring up at the ceiling. She had left her glasses in the bathroom. Without them she looked older.

Santa, weak-willed as a dreamer, felt the mattress yield to his weight as he sat upon the edge of the bed, careful to avoid all contact with his wife. Words came into his mouth, words not of his own choosing, the wily intruder's words. Powerless to stop them, not even sure he'd want to if he could, he heard them fall from his lips.

"Dearest Anya," they began, "I never wanted to hurt you. Far better to sink into the earth than hurt you, my perfect mate, my beloved friend. As much love as God has given me for the boys and girls of this world, never have I loved any of them with one scintilla of the love I hold in my heart for you."

It sounded so stilted to him, this speech. It amazed and appalled him. The sentiments were undeniably true, but the words felt absolutely false in the speaking—as they must, he thought, in the hearing.

"You're the only woman for me, Anya," he assured her, blinking back tears, fighting against the raw hurt in his throat. "That's the way it's always been. That's the way it will always be."

Santa dug into his pockets for a handkerchief. Just as his right hand found one, the fingers of his left hand closed on silk. Red silk.

(Ah, that's it, now you've laid hold of a piece of reality, the good stuff, a sweet reminder of the breached gates of heaven.)

Enough. No more. Leave me alone.

Clutching the panties, he felt the tingle of flesh-memory woven into them and became aware of his manhood's demand for stiffening blood. Later, he thought, he would discard them, toss them into the fire while Anya slept.

(Oooh, don't even
joke
about such a thing. Lord o' mercy, you gonna make me keel over and die with talk like that. You keep those babies around, hear me, Santa?)

Yes . . . yes I think I must. It made him ill to picture the red silk falling upon the fire, catching slowly at first, then quicker, seething into oblivion. They were too precious for that; an icon, a totem. He could never bring himself to destroy them.

"Please believe me, my beloved," Santa's false voice continued, "the Tooth Fairy means nothing to me, nothing at all. It was a mistake, a terrible mistake. I'm sorry for the pain I've caused you. If you could see your way clear to trust me, I give you my word it will never happen again."

He was sobbing now, but only partially in repentance. The rest were tears of rage, tears shed for what he seemed to have become. For he knew, even as the words reeled out and honestly begged Anya's forgiveness, that any promise he made to stay away from the luscious body of the Tooth Fairy was an empty one.

The lies lay like spoiled meat in his mouth.

And yet (heaven help him, was he going mad?) he felt good about lying to Anya, liberated somehow, reveling in hidden guile, tasting the fruits of a newfound freedom. Or was it new? At the fringes of his memory, forgotten images, tantalizing and elusive, teased his senses—forest smells, the thick richness of moss beneath his back, the feel of nymph tongue on genital.

"If she appears again next Christmas, I swear to God I'll stand strong against her wiles. I'll send her packing." Anya lay there looking at the ceiling, but her breathing had slowed. "I know that the memory of this terrible time will never fade entirely, not for either of us." The tingle of silk made visions of nudity dance in Santa's head. "But I want to try to get through this with you in a way that, hard as it may seem now, strengthens our love for each other."

Anya had calmed considerably. She looked at him. "All right, Claus. Let's see how things go. I believe we're strong enough to weather this. But don't expect me to want to . . . to engage in intimacies any time soon. It's going to take some time, some adjustment."

Santa nodded. "Take all the time you need."

"I don't know about you," said Anya, attempting a half-smile, "but I'm exhausted." She touched a hand to his knee. "The elves are probably wondering what's keeping us. Go take your shower and let's do what we can to survive the rest of today. We'll start fresh in the morning."

Thank God, he thought, I haven't destroyed it. Not yet.

But in the depths of his coat pocket, Santa's left hand luxuriated in lust.

3. Twenty Years of Secrecy

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 brought 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.