Ho! Ho! Ho!
“Ho, Ho, Ho. Can you help me with something, young lady?”
She closed one eye and adjusted a stocking top as she peered into the open window of the old VW bug and forced a smile. Seemed she wasn’t the only one having to work Christmas Eve. “Sooo, is Santa ho, ho horny?” she laughed, and leaned just a bit closer to the window. His cheeks and nose were rosy, of course, but she was intent on seeing just how red they could get.
“Oh, no, ma’am, Misses Claus keeps me...uh, quite happy,” he replied, wiggling his frosty brows one at a time. “I was just crossing off the last of my list and...well...”
“Oh, Santa baby, it’s been a LONG time since I was on the good side of THAT one!” She leaned down and shook her ample chest at him and felt the zipper of her sweater slowly slide down a few more notches... “I got TWO bowls full of jelly!”
“Uh, yes, well...” He turned to the passenger seat and fumbled around with some paperwork that she couldn’t quite make out, “I was looking at my list and got a bit confused...”
“Honey, how ‘bout you let me in the other seat there and I’ll...’help’ you look.” She quickly moved around the back of the small vehicle and grabbed the handle of the passenger door. For his part, “Santa” was busy pulling an old dot matrix printout out of a small box on the floor of the passenger side and was peering at it as she managed to slip into the tiny seat beside him.
“Ah, here it is,” he said, quite cheerily, pointing to one extremely small entry among hundreds. “A Miss Angela Gervis of Albany New York sent in a letter saying the only thing she wanted this year was the safe return of a friend...”
She was warming her hands in front of the tiny heating vent in the floorboard of the bug and marveling at how much warmer it seemed inside the car than it was on the icy city street corner...Santa was saying something about someone she didn’t know and couldn’t care less about...
“You’re not...a cop, are you?” she asked. Felt kind of embarrassing, but she HAD to ask.
He laughed. “Santa’s been asked a lot of different questions, but that’s a first.” He turned his eyes back to the list. “Now, I had the elves check and this Miss Gervis has been an EXCEPTIONALLY good girl this year, what with helping in the battered women’s shelter and volunteering time to the state’s Amber Alert organization...”
She slid a hand over to the tip top of his black boots to run her fingers through the fur lining. Everything was all tingly now. Whenever she got in a car with a strange man, her skin flushed and her mouth watered. Her toes, frozen solid only moments ago, were now burning up. Even the withdrawal shakes were gone. For the moment. Her hand moved up his boots to his red pants leg...
“Ho, Ho, Ho!” he laughed low and intercepted her hand with his. “Such lovely hands, young lady, so soft and white...surely the hands of a good girl.” He moved their hands to her neck and together they tenderly touched the dark roots of her bleached blond hair...
His caress was...different. Instead of sending sparks through her neck and breasts...a red coat of calm. A wool blanket of home. A glimpse, dim and distant, of somewhere else long ago. A house. Two full stockings above a roaring fireplace. Another woman ... tiny rivers of life flowing from green eyes, swollen from sadness...
The shrill whine of a siren off in the distance shattered the moment and she caught her fingers as they walked through her roots. “We need to leave!” she chirped, her body bending backward and lowering in the seat. Reached out to touch his beard, just to see if it was real. “Do you...have...a place?” she whispered.
“Ho, Ho, Ho!” he laughed again, and released the parking brake, “Do I?” The little car lurched forward out of the dirty wintry slush of the city street. “I know JUST the place!”
She barely managed to suppress a giggle as she continued to play with his snowy beard, which was very real and very soft. Soft as a snowflake. Clean. Impossibly clean. Perfectly white. She got lost in it as she stared at him. Easy to get lost in it. So many whiskers, each one absolutely perfect, each one winding and meandering and mingling with each other, each one leading back to...
...brown eyes. Stunning brown eyes, guarded by blue contact lenses. A voice of aged wine, a soprano marvel, mauled by years of whiskey and cigarettes. Tender expanses of pale perfect innocence, crisscrossed by scars and welts and piercings laid down by the whips and whims of imperfect men.
She shuddered at the image somewhere in the back of her mind as the vehicle hit a bump. Her eyes broke away from his beard to look out the window, which was fogged up so much she could only make out passing shades of darkness and light. Her hand went out to adjust a vent. “Uh, don’t you have a...you know, defogger thingee?” she asked, but lightly, under her breath. She knew from painful experience that if she upset the stranger, all the sensations that made her life worth living went away.
“Oh,” he smiled and waved a hand in front of his face, “we don’t need one of those contraptions.”
She moved an arm to the side windshield and tried to wipe away some of the cloudy moisture, to no avail. “But how do you see where you’re going?”
“Ho, Ho, Ho!” he laughed yet again, and pointed to the dashboard. “Oh, they make sure ol’ Santa NEVER gets lost!”
She shook her head in surprise. Even a stupid street whore couldn’t miss that line of nine little reindeer figurines stuck to the dashboard by suction cups, but somehow she did. Heck, the one in the middle even had the red nose...
“Cool!” she chirped and she reached out to touch Rudolph’s nose. Laughed as his little nose lit up. It was bright, then dim, bright, dim, bright, dim, bright...
...like a blinking Christmas tree light in a dimly lit room. Her fake lashes blinked in time with the nose and the tiny lights in the room that shone on...the small figure of a woman curled up at the base of the tree in front of the fireplace. Light, dark, light, dark. The white lights made redness of her hair, the red lights turned it black. Red, black, red, black... As her eyes tried to focus on the mysterious woman in the strange room in her mind, somewhere below, her gut started to knot, the same monstrous urge she always got when the strange men would ask her about the one and only perversion...
“Whoa, there, missy!” Santa reached out to steady her when she clasped both hands about her mouth and began to gag. “I know the old thing doesn’t run as smoothly as it used to, but...”
His touch on her shoulder was all it took for the calmness to come back. She took deep breaths and swallowed hard, then forced a smile as she regained her composure. “Uh, I got to tell you, mister, that I...don’t do women...if you and, you know...Uh, ‘Misses Claus’ are into that kind of shit.”
“Ho, Ho, Ho!” His nose managed to get just slightly more rosy and his free hand went down to his belly to keep it from rolling from side to side. “Misses Claus is FAR too jealous for that kind of thing, young lady,” he laughed.
She let out a tempered sigh at that, happy that that awful feeling had passed. Because there was something about that strange room. And strange woman...was tempted to reach back again, reach out again...only to be met with that ugly urge again. Much, much weaker this time, but still enough to prod her mind back to the here and now...
“Got any tunes?” She instinctively reached for where the little car’s radio should be...only to find something else she didn’t recognize—and wasn’t even there seconds ago? Four simple buttons and a large slot in the dash. “What’s...?”
“Ho, Ho, Ho! Got JUST the thing!” he said with a wry smile, reached back into the dark emptiness of the back seat and came back with a goofy-looking artifact from the distant past—a largish rectangular monstrosity with a thin strip of brown magnetic tape sliding along one end. Slipped it into the mysterious slot where the radio should be... “Just got this earlier tonight,” he winked at her, “been dying to hear it.”
She leaned down to inspect the strange device, which now had about an inch of the plastic cassette protruding from the slot. There was something handwritten in pencil on the white label on the end of the plastic... “Something Naughty, Something Nice—Christmas 2005.”
“Something...naughty,” she giggled to herself. Something nice. Hmmm... Violin strings. Cello. Oboe. Bassoon. What in the HELL is a bassoon? But, yet, there it was, low and mournful. She put her hand to her nose and tried to concentrate on something other than the happy, joyous orchestra that now filled the whole of the empty areas of her mind.
“Ho, Ho, Ho,” his voice came low, the voice of the conductor, a baton which dived and swept this way and that, wiping cobwebs from places she hadn’t visited in...years? “Wonderful, isn’t it?” The somber horns punctuated as if to answer for her. “A sad story told in music.” Closing her eyes, her head lowered itself slowly, ‘till she found herself nodding in time with the music. And the voice. “The tale of a long ago and far away. And yet not so long ago, not so far away.” The strings stirred up dust in her attic, the woodwinds winds blew it this way and that, out the open windows, down the stairs... “A tale of the lovers at the dawn, harmony, music...and the demon.”
She trembled in her seat as the music suddenly fell silent, replaced by the black light that turned everything in her upstairs dark and buried her possessions under a filmy sheet of sticky white.
“You sing my heart purple, Soprano, but my will is supreme. If you will not be my woman, you shall be my whore.”
Her eyes shot open and she bit her lower lip. Her pussy burned. A hand instinctively went down under her miniskirt. Between her thighs.
“Ho, ho, ho!” “Santa’s” voice was not so cheery now as he thumped the end of the cassette with his index finger. “Now I remember why I stopped delivering these things,” he muttered to himself as the music paused, replaced by a series of awkward clicks coming from the 8-Track player. He turned to her and wiggled his eyebrows. “Sorry ‘bout that, missy.”
His hand reached out to rub her shoulder and her breaths shortened. She quickly smoothed out her skirt. “Uh...” she started...
“Sorry if I scared you,” he interjected in that same, kindly, calming manner, “I just thought it might be something you might like.”
“Uh, that wasn’t a fairy tale, mister, that was a cantata from one of Bach’s Christmas Oratorios,” she said, staring out the white window, trying her best to figure out exactly how she knew what the fuck a “cantata” was.
“Ho, Ho, Ho!” He raised one eyebrow and smiled. “Really?” He patted her on the shoulder. “I guess you DO learn something new everyday. Heck, I guess the feller I got it from really deserved his lump o’ coal then!” he laughed. “Imagine that, lying to Santa.”
“Probably deserved more than one lump...” he sighed to himself. An afterthought, barely audible. “Traveling orchestra conductor, indeed...devil isn’t far off.” She had closed her eyes now, still searching for...something, when she caught the reference. But before she could manage to say anything, the little vehicle hit more turbulence and the music kicked back on.
“Now, that’s more like it,” he said, tapping his fingers on the dashboard as the choral music filled the chilly air inside the car.
“Don’t you have anything like, I dunno, Gwen Stefani?” she sighed, trying her best to hum “Hollaback Girl” over the string section...
He chuckled. “Got a lovely voice, I bet,” he said slyly.
“Yeah, right.” She rolled her eyes. “I get drunk and everyone pays me to sing karaoke so they can laugh.”
He scratched at his beard and gave a heavy sigh, again muttering something about a devil. Then the music came to a quick pause and his cheeks lit up again. “Oh, c’mon, missy, you’ll absolutely love this part.”
She turned away from him towards the window and lifted a finger to the cold glass. Running the finger this way and that across the moist pane, she smiled slightly at the lines she made...made her think of ripples on a pond...or maybe it was the new voice rising above the strings and horns...ripples on smoothness...she shivered... That voice, colder, much colder than the glass...so cold she could taste it in the back of her throat... Shrill. Frigid fingernails pressed against the skin of her tongue. She started to turn, to reach for the door handle that suddenly wasn’t there...
..but felt the firmness of his hand on the back of her neck. And the other voice. The woman’s voice, the sharp piercing...thing. Found she couldn’t move. Didn’t want to move. Again, his voice joined with the music. And the other. The strident...
...soprano...
“I remember when it was Mister Microphones,” he whispered in her ear, his beard moving softly up and down her arm. “Now it’s karaoke machines. Everyone used to dream of Broadway, then Hollywood, now it’s ‘American Idol.’” She felt wetness forming under one eye as his peppermint breath waltzed with the tender hairs on her neck. “But there have always been those who know better. Those who have the soul to match the voice. Who pray for the gifts within, instead of without. Those who make music live, not simply keep it alive.”
“Miss Gervis’ friend was one of those.” She closed her eyes, the swirls of light darkness on the back of her empty eyelids replacing the frigid patterns on the glass. Listened to the voices as they danced between her ears, one high, one low, a kind of harmony of hollowness, echoing this way, touching all the soft places in her mind.
“When she was five, her friends wrote and asked for Barbies and bikes. She wanted Beethoven. At ten, it was Inge Borkh and Elektra. I remember I had to search high and low for a good copy of that one, but her Mom stumbled across it in an estate sale...”
She smiled despite herself as those swirling patterns of dark lightness arranged, then rearranged themselves as he spoke with the music. “At fifteen, she was touring the country and every Christmas she would plead for nothing more than to better feel and understand what she was singing. To know the words of those who came before her, in dozens of languages she never learned.”
“You can hear the longing in her voice if you listen for it.” She pressed her eyelids more firmly now, the patterns formed lines of white that shot across the darkness from one side to the other, then back again...and there it was. Stronger than the yearning she felt when she went without the strange men...stronger even than the scowl of the devil...and older, much older than either. A bottomless chasm opening up between then and now. She looked down...
“Enter Professor Angela Gervis, mistress of languages...among other things. Green eyes of experience. Lover of all things young and talented. But most of all, an expert spelunker.”
Her eyes shot open as the music abruptly came to a stop. Pulling her fingers from the window, she gasped. Looked down at the moisture on her fingertips, then back up at pattern on the window. Or rather, through the pattern on the window.
“Ho, Ho, Ho! Looks like we’re here!”
“This isn’t Brooklyn, is it?” was all she could manage. Shook her head twice, closed her eyes, then opened them again.
He stretched out his legs as well as he could, considering the lack of leg room in a VW bug. “Oh, no, missy, we’re a long way from Brooklyn...”
“But...how in the hell...?” she pressed her face to the window. “This is...”
“Home,” he laughed. “Well, not MY home, obviously.”
“I don’t understand...” she squinted outside and reached for the door handle, which had mysteriously reappeared.
He took her by the shoulders and held her firmly. “Careful, now,” he said with a wink, “it wouldn’t look good on ol’ Santa’s record if his Christmas presents got damaged before delivery, now would it?”
“Christmas present?” she repeated. And turned around in the seat. Looked into his eyes.
“Ho,” he said with a sniffle as he smiled at her. A sad smile or so it would have seemed to her if she’d noticed. But she was beyond noticing now. She was hopelessly lost in the neverendingness of his eyes. Shifting from green to blue to brown, before settling on empty. Empty. The chasm from her before was shallow compared to the kind of emptiness in his eyes.
“Sorry to have to do it this way, you understand, but even Santa’s got rules.” He gave a hefty sigh and ran his hands through her hair, gently wiping away the blondness. “We all got rules. Some good, some not so good. Some easy and some not so easy. People complain when they have to stop at red lights during rush hour. They’ve never had to read a tearstained letter from little Sue asking if she could have Grandpa back for Christmas. Or from Jimmy wondering if I could get mommy and daddy back together this year.”
He brought a finger to his empty eyes to brush away a tear, moved it to her face and moaned softly into the wind as the layers of make-up and mascara melted away. “But every once in a while, I get to bend ‘em. When a thirty-nine year old woman writes a letter to Santa, it’s the kind of thing that just gets attention. Besides...” he hesitated for a second to catch himself, “what happened to you was just plain wrong by anyone’s rules. And I’m not the only one who really hates to see that kind of talent abused.”
Kindly taking her by the wrist, he snapped his fingers and watched as the roof of the vehicle faded slowly, giving way to the coldness of the midnight snowfall. Glancing at the smoke spewing warmly from the chimney, he paused once again to wonder how long he would be remembered once all the chimneys were gone...
...but only for a moment. He bent over and kissed her on the forehead.
“Good-bye, soprano. Have a good life,” he whispered. Led her gently towards the smoke...
“Cuckoo! Cuckoo!”
“Oh, shutthehellup.” Slurred. Opened one eye and glanced up at the clock. Then over at the bottle of sleeping pills on the coffee table. Adjusted flannels underneath the wool blanket. Reached out across from the sofa to the table towards the half-empty glass of merlot with one hand and the pill bottle with the other...
“Pop!”
The last of the knotted pine logs in the fireplace surrendered, but not without a final farewell—it fairly demanded the other eye open. Yawned loudly, with no one to hear. Downed the last of the wine and tried to set the glass back on the table...
...failing miserably. “Figures.” Tried to catch the glass before it rolled off the edge of the polished wood onto the white carpet...knocked over the open bottle of pills instead...
“Fuckfuck...FUCK!” Rolled off of the sofa with a dull thud, onto the thick rug, alongside an empty wine glass, a newly empty plastic pill bottle and eight doses of prescription strength night time sleep medicine now hiding in the white shag of the carpet.
“MerryFuckingChristmas, Angela Ann Gervis.” Grabbed strands of white carpet in one hand and strands of dark red hair in the other. Pulled. Pulled hard. Still felt a whole lot of nothing.
Nothing except the sudden breeze coming from above...
Rolled over onto her back and stared up at the ceiling fan, silently turning. Why was it turning? Strange thing to think about. Two in the morning. Christmas morning. Twenty degrees outside, seventy inside. And the damned ceiling fan was running. Never had been turned on. Not in three fucking years. Only Addie did that. Even in the middle of winter...
Addie. Reached for the glass, grasped it tightly. Threw it towards the two stockings hung over the fire...
“Aaaack!” Her voice sung out in surprise as a wine glass flew above her and shattered against the stony mantle. Her voice? Singing? She rolled over and felt the thick of the carpet over her entire body, the warmness of the dying fire nearby was heating places on her that it had no business touching. With yet another shout of surprise, she sat up and covered her nakedness. “What the...?!”
Drawn by her song, a woman was staring at her from across the room. Two very green eyes. Very wide green eyes and apples and cinnamon hair, flowing this way and that in the breeze. Crawling towards her in fading flannel pajamas. Familar flannels. Red and green in the rapidly blinking white of the lights from the tree. Lights that weren’t even on five seconds ago.
“Addie?” The woman was on her knees now, her eyes a blurry green. Suddenly sprang to her feet and ran across the room, screaming.
“OhMyGod, Addie!” Loud. Louder than the music from the stereo that abruptly filled the room. The house. It rose above even the singing...and that voice.
Her voice? It bounced from wall to wall, carpet to ceiling, filling every room. Even those vacant for three long years...
Her voice. She rose to her feet and, even as the arms, shoulders and necks embraced away three years of now-forgotten memories, she sang.
Soprano.
Peering in through a smallish clear spot in the window pane, he smiled. Pulled back and paused to wipe yet another tear from his eye. Slowly, sheepishly, he lowered his eyes to his belly. Below his belly.
And once again laughed. Long and hard.
“Ho, Ho, Ho!” He twirled in the air this way and that, rising through the air to the roof, adjusting his large black belt as he rose.
From above him, somewhere on the roof, came a herd of replies, a chorus of cackling voices and stomping hooves...
“Santa’s got a woodie!”
“Santa’s got a woodie!”
“Santa’s got a woodie! Who knew he was into that kind of thing?”
“Oh, hush!” he chuckled, waving at the nine as he gently settled in his seat. “Some of us just love our job!” Grabbing the reins, he pointed off into the horizon... “Ho, Ho, Ho!”
“Just get me home before Misses Claus goes to bed!”