“And to the kings and wise men who arrived from the East,” he said in French. In English he added, “Bearing gifts of frank incest and mirth.”
Masked Beauty, who hadn’t comprehended the English, asked earnestly if Egypt was by any chance east of Bethlehem. Domino, who’d caught the pun, asked him to please refrain from sacrilege. She wagged a scolding- mother finger at him, with an expression that seemed to say, “Just wait until I get you home, young man!”
He didn’t have long to wait. Following a brief songfest in front of the rather goofy Christmas tree that he had fashioned from date palm fronds and snowed with puffs of shaving cream, a caroling during which everybody sang “Silent Night” in French, English, and the original German, and Switters performed solo a paraphrase of “Jingle Bells” in a tootered-up chipmunk voice (“Jingle bells / Batman smells / Robin laid an egg”), the gathering broke up. He and Domino retired to the tower.
In one corner she had made a smaller version of his dining-hall tree, substituting satin ribbons for the aerosol foam. Beneath it, on a brass tray, she’d placed three items:
A bottle of arrack.
A jar of petroleum jelly.
A manila envelope with rumpled edges and an aura around it.
Before the silent night, holy night was through, they’d investigate all three.
The wine that Switters had helped press in October (from grapes that, on stilts, he’d helped to pick) was too young to be agreeably consumed. Domino had ordered the potent date liquor from Damascus as a holiday treat. He thanked her for her thoughtfulness, but, concerned that she might still be under the impression that he was a man who required alcohol’s flame to light the fuse of his zest, he attempted to assure her that arrack was a nonessential perk.
“Alcohol,” he said, “is like one of those beasts that devours its own young.” He told her that strong drink, early on, gave birth to whole litters of insights and ideas and joyful japes. But if you didn’t round up those bright and witty cubs and whisk them away from her, if you allowed them to remain in her lair as the postpartum depression set in (if you kept drinking, in other words, beyond a certain point), she’d whirl on them and chew them up or swallow them alive, and in her dark maw she’d turn them to shit. He held out his cup. “I’ll have just one,” he said, secretly wishing she had bought him hashish, instead. (Wasn’t it ever thus with Christmas gifts?)
Of course, he had more than one. More than two. But he didn’t overdo it, at least not by C.R.A.F.T. Club standards. Anyway, it turned out that the arrack was primarily for her own benefit. It prepared her for the other items on the tray. Starting with the petroleum jelly.
“Are you sure you want to do this?” he asked. Following an extended barrage of arrack-scented kisses, during which each of her sumptuous bulges had been lovingly measured and stroked; during which his lingam had been symbolically peeled and repeeled as if it were the principal effigy of a bacchantic banana cult, she had presented herself for lubrication.
“Why not? If I am to live like a desert woman, I should love like a desert woman.” But she
(The squish of the jelly. The socket that formed around his finger. The suction of the mouth that never eats. The flutter of the lashless eye. A pink noise that traveled up the spine like the whistle of a toy train. A troll burrow commandeered for a royal wedding. The bride stripped bare by her bachelors, even. The groom, in purple helmet, yet to arrive.)
“I’m sure I want every youness of you,” he answered, adding somewhat cryptically, “Ah, that road I’ve never traveled, where the oyster meets the fig!”
But
(The bridegroom muscling through the cellar door. The rattle of the plumbing. The furnace’s roar. Ceiling plaster cracking. Cans falling off the shelves. Basement flooding. Cat escaping up the chimney with a banshee yowl and its tail on fire. ‘Twas the night before Christmas and all through the house, everything was stirring and God save the mouse.)
Afterward, they lay quietly in each other’s arms, exhausted, awed, a little stunned; bonded the way people are who have shared an experience about which others can never be told, and which, they intuit, will be forever remembered yet rarely referred to between themselves.
Nearly an hour passed before Domino got up, lit several extra candles, poured them each another half-cup of arrack, and returned to their carpets, envelope in hand.
“Every girl who enters a convent,” she began, by way of a preamble, “does so for two reasons, only one of which is religious. The secondary reasons vary from the girl to the girl, though you are correct when you are thinking—I know how the Switters mind works—that the reasons frequently involve some aspect of sexual fear, sexual guilt, or compensation for rejection by the opposite sex. It is true that there are few physically attractive nuns. But then there is the case of Masked Beauty, who became a nun for the same reason she generated that escargot on her nose: she was sick and tired of always being stared at by men.”
Switters gulped the arrack. He was not a sipper. Domino didn’t notice. Her eyes were fixed on the envelope.
“Some novices hear the call to serve humanity, to teach or to nurse. Those who enter closed convents, cloisters, choose to serve by being rather than by doing. That was what I chose. For my God, I would be instead of do, believing that the penance and reparations of the few can effect the salvation of the many. But I had, I must confess, other, less admirable motives. I wanted, you see, to belong to a special group, to be a member of a secret society that stood apart from the world, that operated closer to the bone, closer to the truth, closer to God’s mysteries than the rest of humankind. Perhaps it was due to the way I was spurned by the girls in my American school, the ones who kept me out of their clubs and called me ‘French whore’ and so forth. It doesn’t matter why, I still was guilty of elitist aspirations.”
“Good for you. The right kind of elitism can restore the butterfat to a homogenized society. It multiplies nuance and expands the range of cultural motion.” He started to recount for her Maestra’s views on the virtues of true elitism, but Domino waved him off.
“I’m not looking for justification or approval, but I was sure you would understand, because in a sense it must be similar to your decision to belong to the CIA. I’ve come to suspect that we are somewhat alike in that way, having a desire not for power but for a status that lies beyond the consciousness of those who are merely powerful. Now, however, let me tell you that while I loved the stark sanctity of the cloister, it failed to entirely satisfy me. The secrets there were not especially secret, for one thing. The Christian select had essentially the same—how do you say it?—
“It isn’t that what is inside here is so amazing. You may well regard the last prophecy of Fatima as anticlimactic or even outright nonsense. The intriguing thing for me, silly sinner that I am, has always been the very secrecy of it, the fact that I have had access to holy information that not even the College of Cardinals, not even the present pope is privy to. By luck or design, our little maverick order was charged with the safekeeping of a . . . a
“Fun?”
“No, no. For all of the consternation it’s caused us here, it has been thrilling for me, as I’ve shamefully admitted, but I would draw the line at calling it ‘fun.’ How could I when there is nothing the least bit funny or, from the Western point of view, even hopeful about the third prophecy. In fact, it’s all quite horrible. Quite horrible.”
Her eyes suddenly became tight and intense. “But see for yourself.
It was sturdy, the old envelope, but scuffed and flaky, and might have felt to him like the dried skin of a sidewinder had not his fingertips been slick with petroleum jelly.
Switters offered a brief preamble of his own.
