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 West 13th Street on Christmas Eve.

 

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  42nd Street prostitute blanch. When it ended, it ended badly, of course. A terse two-line note scribbled on hotel stationery in a lower eastside by-the-hour, which Kriss read over and over as she distractedly massaged the fading marks that the handcuffs had left on her wrists, tawdry souvenirs of their farewell tryst.

 

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 Upper East Side, she mused, turning the rim of the glass meditatively against her lip.

 

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 East 61st Street Townhome. And that was ‘Townhome’, with a capital ‘T’, thank you very much. Twelve-foot ceilings, renaissance Italian marble fireplaces, a sweeping semi-circular staircase with a stunning hand-fashioned crystal balustrade, chestnut wood flooring laid in an intricate herringbone pattern. Yes, the woman who lived here probably could afford to dispense six-figure diamonds like gumdrops to slightly down-at-the-heels little girls who struck her fancy.

 

“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

 

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