The Gift
By
elle` attend
God Rest Ye
Merry, Gentlewomen…
The
pristine flakes drifted into her disheveled hair and snagged on her dark
eyelashes, their dazzling purity a stark contrast to the dirty gray
accumulation of the last week that was banked against the storefronts, and piled
on the curbs. It was early in the city for a snow that stuck, but that
knowledge didn’t make it any the less cold, or depressing.
Kriss Lafontaine gave her head an impatient shake, dislodging the
frozen crystals from her face and her hair in a little mini-blizzard that
formed a foggy white nimbus around her face.
“Snowing
again,” she muttered dispiritedly to herself. “The perfect ending to a perfect
year…”
As
she turned west off 9th Avenue, Kriss
squinted against the snow swirling on the breeze that had stiffened into a
brisk wind in the last few minutes, driving the flakes almost horizontally into
her face. At last she spotted the pale violet canvas awning that she was
looking for, the one heralding Lure, in deep mauve lettering. She ducked
down the short flight of steps beneath it, and in the door.
The
blast of humid heat that greeted her nearly took her breath away. Redolent of
warm bodies and warmer desires, riding lightly atop a vaguely more melancholy
undercurrent of stale perfume and even staler dreams, it never failed to give
her a little pang of…of what? Nostalgia? Regret? She
stamped her feet, dislodging the icy accumulation of dirty snow clinging to her
scuffed rubber overshoes, and the memories crowding in on her, and moved toward
a booth on the wall opposite the long mahogany bar on her left. A few
bored-looking women were sitting there, nursing martinis or rum toddies. One or
two of them ran a lazily appraising eye across the newcomer, like tired buyers
looking for a bargain at a picked-over yard sale. Kriss
pointedly ignored them, keeping her eyes fixed instead on the permanently
watermarked pine table top before her, and her hands folded tensely upon its
surface. Even her fingers depressed her. She needed a manicure desperately.
“Something, doll?”
Kriss
glanced up at the young barmaid, her eyes drawn as always to the tattoo that
adorned the left side of the girl’s throat, a serpent coiled around a naked
woman. She gave her a tired little smile.
“A
Gibson, Danni, three onions, please. And just show the Vermouth to the gin,
hmmm? Thanks.”
“You
got it, hun.” The young girl – she didn’t really look
old enough to buy a drink, let alone be dispensing them – popped her gum and
rolled her denim-clad hips enticingly back toward the bar. If that’s for my
benefit, you’re sniffing up the wrong skirt this morning, darling…
Kriss
didn’t normally start drinking this early in the day, but the NYC public
library on 5th Avenue had thoughtlessly decided to close early, it
being Christmas Eve, and the Museum was closed all day. The thought of
Christmas shopping (for whom?) left her feeling vaguely defeated, and
she tried never to return to her drab three-room ‘penthouse’ until she had
consumed enough alcohol to smooth out its rough edges, and lend a nice warm
blur to the place.
“Want
some company, sugar?”
Kriss
turned resignedly toward the husky voice’s owner, a crop-topped redhead in a strappy tank top sporting a pair of the most enormous tits that
she had ever seen. The woman’s nipples seemed to menace Kriss,
poking at the thin material of the men’s undershirt like unsiloed
missiles. The tiny silver dagger piercing the woman’s lower lip was a nice
touch, though, she had to admit.
“Fuck
off,” Kriss muttered, turning her attention back to
her drink. This was how it had all begun six months ago, this short, sharp
roller coaster ride of hers that had ended finally in a lesbian bar on
The same bar
where she had first met ‘Becca.
“Yeah,
well fuck you too, Princess,” the woman snarled in reply. “I can catch your
act any night in some alley, anyway. Save myself the price of a drink, and the
bullshit conversation before I fuck your brains out…” She gave a contemptuous
snort and turned back to her friends at the bar. She said something to them,
and they all looked at Kriss again, several of them
laughing in an anything but convivial manner.
She
had been Mrs. Stephen Lafontaine, then, and
nearly at the end of her frayed rope on that swelteringly hot afternoon last
July when she stumbled into Lure, the first place she encountered that
offered refuge from the blistering sidewalk that had seemed on the verge of
melting her high heels. She had ducked inside and collapsed gratefully in a
booth in the delicious air-conditioned darkness. She felt the thin glaze of
perspiration slicking her body beneath her light voile dress beginning to
evaporate almost at once, lifting goose-flesh on her bare arms and tightening
the skin beneath her collarbones. The sensation was one of almost sexual
voluptuousness, and she had shivered, and touched her throat lightly with her
hand.
It
was only after her eyes had begun to adjust to the bar’s dim lighting that she
had realized that she was not alone in the booth, and that the gamine-faced
young blonde sitting opposite her was studying her closely, a slightly crooked,
quizzical smile on her pale young face.
“Oh,
I’m terribly sorry!” Kriss stammered, making
motions as if to rise and leave the girl to her privacy.
But
the blonde had only smiled, and begun talking to her in an easy, off-handed
way, as if the two women had known each other for years. As
if she were simply picking up the thread of a conversation that had been going
on between them for hours, for days, forever. Kriss
had been taken at once with the girl’s openness and easy-going manner, and her fragile, Limoges-like
beauty.
And quite shortly thereafter by her
enormous, and enormously twisted sexual appetites.
Her
stomach still knotted in revulsion and self-loathing whenever she thought of
the depravity that had lurked behind that innocent, Botticelli
angel’s face and smile. Depravities that the girl had shared generously;
depravities that Kriss had very quickly come to look
forward to, even to crave, like a junkie does her next fix.
Their
affair had been brief, and intense. ‘Becca had known
all the right buttons to push, buttons that Kriss had
never dreamed existed in anyone, let alone a staid, just-so-slightly
disenchanted thirty-ish New Rochelle housewife and
mother of two such as herself. And push them the girl had, with a casual
cruelty that would have made the most hardened
It’s been fun.
See you maybe, sometime.
‘Becca
When
her husband confronted her with the notes signed by ‘Becca
asking for money, notes threatening to send pictures and letters to his
employer - a prestigious Wall Street investment banking house - and to the Post,
Kriss had been too stunned to even deny the affair.
Their marriage, never on the firmest of footings anyway, seemed only to have
been waiting for something like this to sink it altogether. The divorce had
been a relatively quick and rather clinical procedure, giving full custody of
her children to her husband, and allowing her only severely restricted
visitation privileges. ‘Unfit mother’ was a phrase that had been bandied about
during the proceedings, and quite often. The alimony settlement had been
adequate to furnish her with her marvelously ‘luxurious’ third floor walkup
accommodations on east 85th, a leisurely half-block’s stroll from
mugger central, and enough liquor and pills to keep her from thinking about any
of it too much, on most days. From there her aimless drift into pro bono
prostitution had seemed like the most natural progression in the world to Kriss.
She
felt a presence looming on her right, and with a weary sigh steeled herself to
do battle with the copper-topped dyke again. Instead, she was confronted with a
man. Quite possibly the most unusual looking man she had ever laid eyes on, and
certainly the most unusually attired. He was dressed from top to toe in
gleaming white, an all-leather chauffeur’s outfit, from the button of the cap
on his dark, brutal looking head, down to the tips of his highly polished
boots. Kriss felt her jaw drop, rendered momentarily
speechless, unable to do anything but stare at this almost ludicrous apparition
that had materialized at her elbow in a west side gay bar on Christmas Eve.
As
she gaped, the specter slipped a small gift-wrapped box into her hands, then
turned without a word and walked out of the bar. Kriss
stared after him a moment, turning the small package over slowly in her hands. She
glanced toward the bar again, but none of the women sitting there gave any
indication that they were aware that the man had even been there. She looked
down again at the silver paper-wrapped box, then slipped a nail under the
ribbon and opened it.
What
she saw inside it literally took her breath away.
For
a long while she simply sat staring at the white cotton batting within the box,
and at the diamond resting on it like a star in a snowdrift. It was the size of
a very small cabernet grape, five carats at least. She picked the stone up
almost reverently, lifting it just far enough from the cotton batting to get a
feel for it’s shape, and weight. It was a flawless deep-cut round, of unmatched
brilliance and clarity. The last diamond that Kriss
had pawned, in October – the last of her jewelry, in fact – had brought five
thousand, a fraction of it’s appraised worth, and that had been only a
two-carat stone. This one had to be worth a hundred thousand dollars, easily. More, maybe.
She
quickly snapped the lid shut on the jeweler’s box, and fumbled in her purse for
a few coins, dropping them clatteringly on the scarred wooden tabletop. She
slipped the small velvet-covered box into her purse, and slid hurriedly out of
the booth, pulling her entirely inadequate cloth
coat on and nearly running for the door. Eyes turned to watch her curiously,
but she was oblivious to them as she pushed the door open and stumbled out onto
the icy sidewalk. A white Bentley stood at the curb, motor idling quietly, a
plume of exhaust rising from its dual tailpipes in the frosty air. The
odd-looking chauffer stood by the passenger side rear door, holding it open for
her, staring impassively at a spot just over her left shoulder.
Kriss Lafontaine barely hesitated before crossing to the car and
slipping into the deep, white leather upholstery. Whatever this was leading to,
it couldn’t possibly be any worse than the
prospect of spending Christmas Eve fending off the advances of turbocharged
diesel dykes until she could put on enough of a buzz to be able to face her
dingy apartment.
The
Bentley’s door closed behind her with the quiet finality of a coffin latch.
***********
‘Our cheeks are nice and rosy…’
“So, this is a
kind of hobby of yours, taking in strays on Christmas Eve? Sort
of a ‘good Queen Wensceslas’ act, giving hundred
thousand dollar diamonds away to all the good little girls?”
Kriss
regretted the antagonistic tone of this almost at once, and placed the rim of
the Waterford crystal glass to her lips, more to avoid blurting out an
immediate apology than for the sip of wine, although it was very good
champagne. She may indeed have become a recreational whore, she thought
sullenly, but she’d be damned if she would just yank down her pantyhose and
spread her legs the instant that the customer put the fee on the nightstand –
even a fee as impressive as this. She glanced again at the midnight blue velvet
jewel box on the low cocktail table between them.
She
let her gaze wander from there to the wall of double-paned glass at the end of
the parlor, and watched as the fat white flakes drifted slowly past, frosting
the tips of the evergreens and ornamentals in the improbable garden below. What
must it be like to be able to afford a garden this size on the
But
for that matter, what must it be like to be able to give away priceless
diamonds on a whim to complete strangers in lesbian watering holes?
The
woman seated across from her simply smiled. Indeed, her contributions to their
conversation had consisted of little else since Kriss
Lafontaine had been escorted by the ‘Man from Glad’
into her presence on the second floor parlor of this toney, four story
“Look,
this is getting a bit too odd even for me,” Kriss
blurted out at last. “I’ll just finish my champagne and be on my way, and let
you get on with your Christmas, Ms. ahh…”, she hesitated, not able to dredge up the woman’s name to
save her life. Now that she thought about it, she wasn’t sure that she had ever
actually introduced herself at all.
In
reply, the woman only gestured in the direction of the ten-foot snow-white
Christmas tree standing at opposite end of the parlor, adjacent to the
fireplace, and to the single gaily wrapped present resting beneath it.
“Please,”
she said. “It’s for you, as well…”
Kriss
eyed the package somewhat suspiciously, then turned
her skeptical gaze back to the woman. She was dressed in a hand-beaded, white
silk chiffon off-the-shoulder affair, an evening gown that reached to the
slender ankles of her gracefully crossed legs, attire more suited to a Lincoln
Center opening night than a casual Christmas Eve tęte-ŕ-tęte with a total
stranger. She blended almost eerily into her surroundings - the white silk
brocade settee she sat upon, the white-on-white white walls behind her, the
ivory rug, her platinum hair cascading around her
lovely alabaster face. Only her eyes gave her away, two chips of glittering ice
blue, dancing with an intensity that belied the numbing banality of the
conversation up to this point. Kriss frowned at the
woman, then again at the gift beneath the tree.
“I
really think that this has gone far enough, don’t you? I mean, I may not be
presentable in the social circles that you like to swim in, but I
haven’t quite reached the status of finger food for bored, wealthy Upper East
Side socialites just yet…” She set her champagne flute down on the cherrywood cocktail table with a rather too-loud bang and
rose, somewhat unsteadily, looking about for her coat.
The
woman simply went on smiling, and gestured with a
slender, bare arm at the tree again, nodding slightly.
Kriss
stared at her for another long moment, then turned in exasperation and stalked
angrily to the tree, snatching up the rather heavy package. She tore at the
expensive paper, taking perverse pleasure in shredding such a lovely, and fastidiously wrapped gift. She slipped the hook
on the rosewood case beneath the wrapping paper, and flipped the lid back
carelessly.
“Oh,
my God…”
Kriss could feel her lips numbing even as she
uttered the words, staring witlessly at the blindingly white leather cuffs and
collar, set against a background of black baize. The brass fittings on the
things glittered up at her obscenely, an unspoken invitation to immerse herself
again in the world of filth and perversion that she had been struggling so
desperately to extricate herself from for the last two months. She felt the
case slip from her nerveless fingers, clattering to the hardwood floor.
“I’m
outta here,” she muttered furiously, her knees
wobbling beneath her as she took a first shaky step toward the curving
staircase that led to the ground floor entrance. At her second, her legs failed
her entirely, and she collapsed with scarcely a sound to the soft white lamb’s
wool rug.
******
The
first sensations that Kriss became aware of were an
excruciating ache in her shoulders, and an answering throb
in her splitting head. The next was a more evocative one, and brought her to
sudden and complete awareness with a sickening surge of mouth-drying
adrenaline.
Cuffs. There are cuffs on my wrists, and ankles.
Her
eyelids fluttered open, her vision still clouded and somewhat unfocused. Her
brain sent a cautious message to her arms, telling them to relax, and return to
her sides. It came back at once, marked undeliverable. She tugged ineffectually
at the cuffs holding her arms stretched wide above her, anchoring her wrists to
the two stainless steel posts, one on either side of her. She looked down at
her ankles; they were also cuffed, spread-eagled, and clipped with ‘D’ rings to
the poles. Her toes fell just an inch short of reaching the white marble tiles
beneath them.
Kriss
spent the next moment or two trying to produce enough saliva to allow her to
swallow.
The
stiff white leather posture collar held her chin up, head erect, so that she
was unable to take her eyes from the woman who now entered the small circular
chamber through a door in the wall opposite her. She was nude (as was Kriss herself) with the exception of mid-thigh white patent
leather boots with stiletto heels, and matching white opera-length gloves, both
decorated with apparently non-functional silver buckles. A diamond choker
encircled the woman’s neck, and she was trailing something behind her as she
sauntered across the white tiled floor toward Kriss,
suspended like a pale pink ‘X’ between the shining steel posts. Kriss licked nervously at her dry lips as the woman’s heels
came to a clicking halt before her.
God, please let this be a dream.
“Comfortable, Mrs. Lafontaine? I’m afraid I took the liberty of
anticipating your desire to repay my gifts with one of your own.”
She
ran a gloved finger, tipped with a splinter of polished silver, lightly across Kriss’s cheek and down her neck, tracing the rapid, thready pulse beating in her carotid artery like a panicked
hummingbird’s. Kriss stared at her dazedly, the
woman’s eyes the only spots of color in her entire ghostly presence, blue darts
beneath perfectly plucked arches of dazzling white that seemed to pierce her to
her very soul.
“All
gifts require a reciprocation, wouldn’t you agree, Mrs.Lafontaine? Some more so than others,
of course. But sometimes it is difficult
for the recipient to decide on the the proper
gift to give in return, don’t you find it so?” The shimmering metallic claw
caught the light, and refracted it back across Kriss’s
cheek for an instant in a wild spectral rainbow of color.
“Some
of the most appropriate responses may not even occur to the recipient herself,
at first, though they are none the less fitting, in spite of the … ’thoughtlessness’,
shall we say?…on her part, not to have offered them freely in the first place.”
The woman’s finger worked lower, a gleaming shard of chromed vanadium steel
gliding icily across Kriss’s collarbone, wandering
briefly to her underarm, examining the nervous
dampness already forming there. Kriss shivered
noticeably.
“You see, I knew
that you would want to give me a gift in return, Kriss.
I also knew that it would perhaps be difficult for you to hit upon the proper
mode in which to reciprocate… although it is the one in which you are the most
eager to respond, even if you can’t allow yourself to acknowledge the truth of
that just at the moment...”
The spectral
woman’s silvered talon worked its way from Kriss’s
moist armpit down her ribcage and across the supple ellipse of her breast, meandering
almost aimlessly to her nipple. Kriss drew a
shuddering breath as her aureole contracted beneath the nail, the adjacent skin
puckering into tiny goose bumps, forcing her nipple to stand up at attention.
She felt a sickening surge of animal heat in her loins, and a corresponding
wave of revulsion sweep through her at her weakness, and her failure.
This
is NOT happening, she told
herself again, casting about frantically for some more plausible explanation
for this grotesque hallucination that she was having. This is what comes of
drinking one’s lunch. This is a bad onion from my last Gibson, or that
post-dated duck paté that I had for breakfast this
morning…
“…’there’s
more of the deli than the Devil about you,’” she mumbled nonsensically.
At
this, the wintery phantasm threw her head back and laughed, a ringing musical sound that echoed from the walls
of the small chamber.
‘Oh,
very good, Kriss darling…I like that!
And you, you may think of me as the ‘Spirit of Christmas to
Come’… of all your Christmases to come, in fact …” She leaned in more
closely, her arctic breath whispering across Kriss’s
cheek, her cool lips close to the girl’s ear.
“And
come, and come, and come…”
She
slid those icy claws through Kriss’s luxuriant pubic
thatch, and slipped two of them peremptorily into her already-slippery folds,
thrusting still further up into her, exploring the gentle curve of her rapidly
swelling anterior wall before hooking them against the pubic bone and pulling
her pelvis forward in a lewd parody of sexual invitation. She brushed her
chilly lips teasingly across Kriss’s own hot mouth, then unhurriedly withdrew her fingers from the girl’s eager
body. Kriss gave an urgent little moan.
“And
have you been a good little girl?”
The
ghostly apparition smiled, and stepped away from the now-thoroughly aroused
young woman, giving an almost imperceptible little shrug of her ivory shoulder.
Kriss’s attention was drawn at once to her right hand, and the susurrant sound that
seemed to suddenly emanate from the tile floor just behind the woman. Her eyes
fell on the white snake whip trailing from her hand, six feet long, at least,
but looking every inch of twelve to Kriss’s
disbelieving eyes. The woman shrugged her shoulder insouciantly again, and the
whip jumped on the snow-white tiles like a living thing, its split-tip hissing
along the marble, an albino serpent loosed in a Garden of ice.
“Merry
Christmas, Kriss darling,” she breathed, as the
velvety tones of Mel Tormé suddenly flooded the
chamber.
“Just hear those sleigh bells ring-a-ling,
ding-ding-ding-a-ling toooooo…”
The
odd selection, so incongruously light-hearted and gay juxtaposed against the
panty-wetting terror that was gripping Kriss now -
had she been wearing panties to pee, she would certainly have soaked them by
this time - only served to enhance the nightmare-like quality of the whole mad
tableau.
“Come
on it’s lovely weather for a sleigh ride together with
yooooooooou….”
But
the whistling crack of the lash that ended the tune was real enough. As was the scream that it tore from Kriss’s
tender throat.
******
Fresh
snow danced on an indecisive breeze in the grimy alley just off 5th
Avenue north of 90th, collecting in little mini-drifts against the dumpsters
and discarded boxes strewn along its length. A leaden dusk was falling,
brightened only marginally by the lowering clouds that reflected the city’s
lights back onto the fresh dusting of white slowly collecting on the dirty
pavement.
Drifted,
too, upon the inert form propped against a wall at the far end of the alleyway,
showing even whiter against the silver fox fur wrapped around it. The fur’s occupant must have been seated
in this attitude for some time, for a rather substantial quantity of snow was
banked against her outstretched legs. Shivering violently, the fur suddenly
moved, and the woman wearing it raised her pale, blue-lipped face, teeth
chattering audibly in the cold air.
G-God, Kriss Lafontaine thought to herself. I’ve never b-been so
c-c-COLD in my entire LIFE! She glanced down listlessly at her body,
shrouded in the luxuriant ankle-length fur. She quite possibly would have
frozen to death by now had it not been for all the little foxes that had given
their lives so selflessly for the coat that she was now swaddled in. She moved
her legs, and then her arms tentatively, groaning aloud as she did so. She felt
as if she had been put through the fluff-fold cycle of a dryer with a bag of
rocks.
Kriss
moved to draw the coat more closely around her. As she did, her hand slipped
beneath the folds of fur, and encountered only unencumbered skin beneath it.
She opened the coat slightly, and stared in bewilderment at the improbable
assortment of bruises, scratches, cuts and contusions decorating her bare
breasts and abdomen. Still hypnotized by the macabre chiaroscuro painted across
her pale body, she let her other hand wander absently over the swell of her
belly, gingerly exploring before finally dipping into the warmth between her
thighs.
Oh
God, Oh no, please, not again, don’t let this be happening to me again, oh sweet Jesus please please…
Her mind
spiraled crazily in upon itself even as her fingers explored the sticky proofs
of her backsliding. They twisted at tendrils still damp with her complicity in
her own debasement, then skated across the cool
tackiness still riming her inner thighs like a carnal hoar frost. Another
shudder ran through her body, but not from the cold this time. With a soft cry
of dismay, she hastily pulled the coat closed, gripping its edges with a
white-knuckled ferocity born of sheer despair.
What
on earth is HAPPENING to me? Her mind
shrieked at her hysterically. God, I want so badly to understand what is
HAPPENING TO ME!!
With
something approaching real panic, she tried to remember where she had been,
what she had done, how she had ended up in this dirty blind alleyway at the
southern boundary to Harlem, naked underneath a five thousand dollar fur coat.
Only an inchoate collage of feelings and dimly glimpsed images came to her, an
indecipherable maelstrom of horror and degradation. From somewhere above her,
she heard the sound of Christmas carols being played, ‘Hark the Herald Angels
Sing’ drifting down across the evening air with the snowflakes that tumbled in
slow motion against her. She clenched her eyes shut tightly, willing the filthy
pictures out of her mind. Slowly, painfully, she struggled to her feet, leaning against the cold brick wall, panting and
clammy already simply from the exertion required to stand. She stared
sightlessly at the graffiti-covered wall opposite her, thrusting her frozen
hands into the coat’s deep pockets, and encountered something in one of them..
Something
small, and hard; wrapped in paper of some sort.
She
dragged her hand quickly from the pocket, fingers clenched in a death-grip
around the small article, holding it beneath her face with her eyes closed,
afraid to open her fist, afraid to see what it held. Afraid
of what it might tell her about the last twenty-four hours – or was it still
Christmas Eve? – afraid of what it might
tell her about herself. She wasn’t certain that she could stand any more
revelations along those lines just now.
And
then it came to her in a flash, another revelation.
The diamond! It’s got to be the DIAMOND!!
She willed her
blue fingers to open, and stared stupidly at the tiny object in her hand as her
mind raced ahead at a million miles a minute. She peeled the paper away with
her numbed fingers, nearly dropping the thing in the fresh snow accumulating
around her feet. The tiny black piece of compressed carbon winked back up at
her from her palm in the ambient snowlight filling
the deserted alleyway, as if sharing some enormous joke with her.
Coal, she thought to herself, a bitter smile twisting
her lips. A lump of fucking coal…
She
stared at it miserably, crumpling the piece of notepaper unconsciously in her
other hand. At last, she let the tiny piece of hard anthracite slip from her
palm, to disappear into the snow collecting around her
feet, and slowly unfolded the scrap of paper that it had been wrapped in. The
paper was heavy, an expensive embossed personal
stationery, but smudged and discolored by the coal, the writing on it barely
legible in the dim light. Kriss squinted at it, her
lips moving slightly with the intensity of her concentration.
Merry Xmas, Kriss.
Our dreams are obscene love letters
From the woman hiding in our heart,
To the woman imprisoned in our mind.
We ignore them only at the gravest peril
To that woman awakening in our
soul.
Come and see me when you feel that you are
ready to
begin living your dreams...
SC
END
MEB, ©2002