Santa Steps Out: A Fairy Tale for Grown-Ups (7 page)

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 turned the head this way and that, trying to read its enigmatic expression. He loved crafting dolls, puppets, figurines of every kind. Especially the faces. Their prevailing emotion—joy, anger, sorrow, grief—was usually bold and transparent. But this face, emerging now from the wet womb of his imagination, troubled him with its uncertain mix of emotions. It grinned stupidly up at him. He wished it could talk. Then he quickly changed his mind about that, chuckled wryly, and set it upon a heap of rags to dry.

*****

The Tooth Fairy's island looked, from the stormclouds above, like a gray-green gash knifed into the wet flesh of the sea. Where the waves washed against it, jutting rock alternated with stretches of strand. The sand was finest, the tough dune vegetation least choked together, at the gash's two jagged extremities. From the sparse beaches and ocean-dashed rocks, the island rose abruptly into steep wooded slopes, as though God had placed His hands to either side of a flatland forest and bunched the earth together between them. Save for the blasted cedar at the north tip of the island, the trees were exclusively ash.

When she was in residence, the mistress of the island preferred either to squat upon the shore near the cedar, brooding into the ceaseless storm, or to take refuge up among the ash trees in a grim cavern punched into the mountainside and decked out with bone-furniture. She sat now at the cave entrance on a bleached-white armchair, munching on a bowl of molars and staring past the wind-tossed treetops. Incessant rain beat at her breasts and belly. But her mind was fixed on the fat fellow with the generous cock and the sensitive hands.

These days he called himself Santa Claus. But she knew who he really was, who he had been before the Christers had wrested control from their pagan predecessors.

A rough wind set the tops of the trees to rioting. Vacant now, every one of them, despite their animation. She could still hear, as if it were yesterday, the shriek and moan of her sister nymphs as they perished. She could feel the jaws of death close over her. She recalled how the rescuing hand of Almighty Zeus—in the midst of his own self-transformation—sealed a pact with her and infused her with life.

Bitter pact. Grim life. Sundered from the ecstatic community of nymphs and satyrs—constant byplay, constant sensual delight, life lived to the full. Set down alone on this island, given a craving for bone which could never match, marvelous though it was, her old cravings for wine and fruit and the frenzies of the flesh.

Their god, the One-and-Only-God, he who sometimes glared at her in patriarchal admonishment through swirls of stormclouds, had obliterated Santa's memories of those days, slipping more convenient myths into his head. But whenever she tried to speak of these things, her words would not come.

"You really don't remember," she'd say.

"Remember what?" he would ask.

"The time before you were . . . the time he who calls himself God was . . . back before you were . . ." The hut walls shook with her frustration.

"There, there, don't trouble yourself over it."

But she did trouble herself, and greatly. She wanted Santa to know. Together, they would conspire against the big blowhard in the sky; they'd topple the turncoat whose betrayal had led, in spite of his rescue of her, to the slaughter of her sisters and their goatish lovers.

At times, it was hard to see the old satyr in Santa. From time to time she caught hints, a special stance, a casual scratch behind an ear. But he looked so different. The hornless forehead, the kind eye, the impossibly white curls. They thrilled and disgusted her.

Desolation blew through the dripping forest before her now. A curious feeling harried her heart these days when she thought of Santa. In the beginning her lust had been pure, her desires wholly selfish. She had wanted the jolly fat man because he, of all beings, could best cater to her insatiate whims, could give give give until there was no giving left—and then give some more.

But of late, his selfless giving had seeded her gut, had sent out runners from her viscera to her every soul and limb. More often than not, to her astonishment, she found herself mouthing her lover for the sheer pleasure of hearing him moan, without a thought to the payback to come when he turned her about, as he invariably did, to feast on her fairyhood.

She wondered—perverse thought—if it could be love she felt. "Love. Love for the fat man. Love for Santa," she said. She liked the way that sounded. It made her skin shiver, that word. Seeing him turned her ravenous; she wanted desperately to devour him. But then, fighting that urge had always been the most harrowing part of the copulations of nymphs and satyrs. She recalled the old community, roused by the smell of blood, circling about and egging on a thrusting couple who had lapsed into total anarchy and died feasting on one another's innards, the green moss beneath them drenched red.