“Jealous because he was better at something than I was. Something that came so easily to him was impossible for me. I wasn’t accustomed to being bested at anything.”
“You have thousands of strengths. If you didn’t have a few failings, you’d be even more insufferable than you already are.”
“He was a natural with her. I’d never seen anything like it. He was born to be a father.”
“Ah. There we go. Now I see all. You were jealous because you saw he was not only good with children, but he wanted children. And you two can’t have children together. You were jealous because you discovered he wanted something you couldn’t give him. That’s why you felt jealous when you saw him with your sister.”
“I don’t want to talk about Claire and Kingsley.”
“Fine. We’ll discuss only Kingsley. How often did you fuck him?”
“Magda.”
“Answer me.”
“These questions are unduly personal.”
“You’re tied up in my bedroom. Did you expect a quiz on Roman architecture?”
He exhaled. “At first we only met once a week for three weeks. He was impatient for more time with me, and I let him believe I was doing him the greatest of favors by allowing him more time with me.”
“But you wanted more too.”
“I did. Not that he needed to know that.”
“So how often then?”
“We would sneak out to the hermitage three nights a week. Then four. Then five. Then nearly every night, every chance we could.”
“How many nights?”
“Fifty-seven.”
“You counted.”
“I remember them all.”
“From anyone else I would consider that romantic hyperbole. Not from you. You aren’t the sort to exaggerate.”
“And I have a very good memory where my body is concerned.”
“And your heart.”
“And my heart.”
She drew a cross on his back with her fingernail—one line down from the nape of his neck to the small of his back, one line across from shoulder blade to shoulder blade. Then she pressed her lips to the spot where the two lines intersected. He shivered.
“You like being kissed?” Magdalena asked.
“You caught me off-guard.”
“You’re never off-guard,” she said, scoffing. “You like being kissed? Yes? No? Answer me, Bambi.”
“Who doesn’t?”
“You never kiss Caterina.”
“Kissing is for lovers,” Marcus said. “We’re friends only.”
“You flog her, cane her, cut her, burn her, and ejaculate on her back when you’re finished.”
“This is why I have so few friends.”
“Do you like kissing?”
“I remember liking it.”
She kissed his right shoulder blade. “Does kissing arouse you?”
“No. But neither does petting Mus, eating your pasta, or looking at the stars, but I enjoy them all the same.”
“Most men find kissing arousing.” She bit the center of his back—not hard enough to break the skin but hard enough to leave teeth marks in his flesh.
“As you said earlier, I’m not most men.”
“And me touching you doesn’t arouse you.”
“No. But again, I enjoy it.”
“You enjoy being touched?” She licked the center of his back over the bite mark she’d left behind
“Not usually. I can count on three fingers the people I would enjoy touching me.”
“Me.”
Behind his back Marcus extended one finger.
“Kingsley,” she said.
Marcus extended a second finger.
“Who’s number three?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” he said. “According to you, I haven’t met her yet.”
“I’m honored to be in such exalted company. Your two soul mates…” She slipped her hands into his trousers pockets to squeeze his hips. “And me.”
“Magda—”
“Oh, what have we here? A love note?” She pulled a folded sheet of paper out of his right pocket.
“Hardly,” he said. “It’s homework. You may put it back in my pocket now.”
“Not yet. Mamma has to check your homework before she lets you turn it in. What was the assignment?”
“We had to write a few hundred words from the first person point-of-view of a character in the Nativity scene.”
“You Jesuits are turning into such…such hippies. I remember when Jesuits were terrifying.”
“That’s hardly something to aspire to.”
“Speak for yourself.”
She unfolded the paper and smoothed it in her hands. Marcus had lovely handwriting, very strong script, masculine. Not surprisingly, he pushed down so hard with his pen so that the page bore not only his words on the front but the raised indentations from the words on the back.
“It’s a silly assignment, but it’s due right after the Christmas holidays. So again, I need that back. Please.”
“Patience, patience. I hope you wrote in the point of view of Mary’s ass.”
“Melchior of Persia, one of the three Magi. And it’s really not worth—”
“The more you protest, the more I want to read it,” she said in her most teasing tone. “And of course you’d choose to play the part of one of the three Wise Men, wouldn’t you?”
“Yes, well, considering I’m tied up in your bedroom, I’m now questioning that decision. Wise man I am clearly not.”
She glared at him over the top of his homework assignment. “Quiet,” she said. “I’m reading.”
With an exaggerated throat clear, Magdalena began to read aloud. Marcus looked upward as if beseeching the heavens for deliverance from her. Let him pray all he wanted. She wasn’t going anywhere.
The king was behind them now as was the star they had followed to find him.
“Good first line, Bambi.”
“You’re the worst person on earth.”
“Flattery will get you everywhere.”
Their steps were heavy and slow, the steps of tired men who’d walked far to attend a birth and found themselves instead at a funeral.
Magdalena stopped reading and glanced at Marcus. He didn’t meet her eyes. This wasn’t quite the story she’d expected. More curious than ever, she read on.
Behind them arose the cry of a child—a hungry child longing for his mother’s breast. Balthazar winced as if it were his own son who wept thusly and he powerless to comfort the boy. I felt as he felt but kept my feelings off my face.
“His death is on his forehead,” Balthazar said. “And he only a child.”
“I saw it too,” said Gaspar who looked at me as if hoping I would contradict them.
“As did I,” I said, unwilling to lie though I was tempted to comfort my companions. I hoped the child’s mother could not see his death as we could. Even in his laugh, in his bright dark eyes I saw the shadow of his suffering, black wings on a white dove—the angel of death hovering near. All men suffer and all men die, but to see such a brutal death in the eyes and on the forehead of a small blameless boy is to know that the price of knowledge is far greater than gold.
Balthazar stopped in his tracks as if the child’s cry had ensnared him.
“Is it wrong to look back?” Gaspar asked.
We faced East toward home, and the child king we left behind us in the West. Our steps coming to him had been light and quick. To leave him was to step with naked feet onto shattered glass.
“You can look back,” I told him. He did and so did Balthazar, but I kept my eyes toward home. If I looked back I feared I would stay, never to see home again. And yet, strangely, though I knew home was East in Pārsa, my heart pulled me West to the child as if he was where my true home lay.
“What do we do now?” Gaspar asked. While Balthazar and I sought answers to questions, it was Gaspar who sought the questions themselves, a different form of wisdom though no
less needful. “How do we go on?”
“One step. Then another,” I said. “As always.”
“How do we serve the king so far from him?” Gaspar asked.
“It seems wrong to leave him,” Balthazar said. “Yet wrong to stay.”
“He came to us first with his birth,” I said. “Then we came to him. We return home and wait for him to come to us again.”
The child’s cry had ceased at last, and I imagined him in his mother’s arms, a mere child holding a child. The king would be well cared for by young Mary and her older husband, Joseph. Wisdom taught us to love a child and fear a king, but it was the child I feared and the king I loved.
“How do we love the king from afar?” Gaspar asked as if he’d read my mind. Perhaps he had. “How do we keep our faith?”
“We wait.” I took a step forward and away from the king, another step onto shards. They went so deep into my foot I felt the pain in my throat. “The love is in the waiting.”
“The love is in the waiting,” Gaspar said after me.
Balthazar nodded his noble head. “Yes, the love is in the waiting.” They turned East again. We walked on.
By our clocks and calendars and charts, it has been one thousand eighty-nine years since that night we put our backs to the star.
I am still waiting for my king.
Magdalena’s hands shook as she slowly and neatly refolded Marcus’s homework assignment and slipped it back into his pocket.
“I hope you receive a good grade,” she said softly.
“I always do.”
“Thank goodness they don’t grade on personality.”
Marcus’s eyes flashed as if the insult had struck home instead of glancing off as her insults usually did. “But—”
“Interrogation over,” she said.
Magdalena quickly untied his hands. She shouldn’t have read his homework assignment and she regretted it. She’d read love letters less personal and intimate than those few hundred words in the voice of a man who loved a king and had to walk away from him. “You’re boring me now.”
“But you said you had a new toy to try out.”
“I do. But I don’t need you shirtless to test it.”
“Then why did you make me take my shirt off?”
“To see if you would.”
He grabbed his shirt off the floor and pulled it on in a manner both irritable and perfunctory. If she had to characterize his expression, she would have used the word “petulant.”
“Forcing me to remove clothing to earn a Christmas gift is not how normal people celebrate Christmas,” he said.
“How would you know?”
“I was trying to have a nice Christmas with you, Magda.”
“Why? You’re not nice. Neither am I.”
“Should I leave? Let me rephrase that: I should leave.”
He buttoned his shirt on his way to the door. She put herself between him and it and raised her hand, daring him to take another step forward. He didn’t.
“You do not have permission to leave,” she said.
“You call me a coward, but it’s you who shrinks back in horror when you see you me as human being for one single second. If you don’t want to know what’s in my heart, you should stop cutting it open.”
“It wasn’t horror, Bambi. It was boredom. And you do not have permission to leave,” she repeated. They had these contests of wills all too often. If she didn’t win, he would lose. This boy had to learn to lose or he would be more dangerous than he already was. For his sake and the sake of anyone he would ever pastor, ever befriend, or ever love, he had to learn to lose well.
“I didn’t ask permission.”
“You didn’t ask permission to come into my house tonight. You will not leave until you have been given permission.”
“Then give it to me fast or I’ll leave without it.”
“You are acting like a child. No, not a child—a brat. We have made too much progress for you to regress into the pouting, beastly little boy you were when we met. You asked me to help you become a ‘good sadist.’ Your words, not mine. You want to know how to be a good sadist, brat? Don’t make your kink somebody’s else’s problem, and as they say in your country…don’t dish it out if you can’t take it.”
For what seemed like an uncomfortable eternity, Marcus said nothing. He said nothing and he didn’t look at her. He looked past her at the wall. Give in, Marcus, she willed silently. You won’t break if you bend a little. You don’t have to win every fight. Giving in is a form of giving and Christmas is a time for giving. Give me your surrender. Give me your submission. I’ll reward it a thousand times over, I swear.
But she could say none of that aloud. He had to surrender freely or it would be a worthless gesture.
“I’ll stay,” he said. “Until you tell me I can go.”
“I want you to stay. I do.”
“I want my Christmas present,” he said.
That made her smile. He sounded so young when he said it. “You do? Why is that?”
“You know me…intimately. Few people do. I would like to know what someone who knows me thinks I would like for Christmas.”
Magdalena touched his face and straightened his collar. “Good boy. But first, we still haven’t tested out my new toy.”
“What is this new toy you’re determined to have me test?” he asked with an exasperated sigh.
“This.” She stepped aside and pulled back the room divider separating the main bedroom from a large alcove. A piano sat under the arched ceiling. A baby grand that her latest conquest—a former assessore in Venice or something of the sort—had given her last week. Marcus’s eyes widened slightly at the sight of the piano. She loved it when she managed to impress this usually inscrutable young man.
“Is that a Broadwood?” he asked.
“It is. A 1929. Giovanni gave it to me because I told him I’d never see him again.”
“Why would did you say that?”
“I thought I could get a piano out of him. I was right.”
“Do you play?”
“I do,” she said.
He furrowed his brow at her. “Why have you never told me?”
“Because you never asked. Someday you’ll learn people other than yourself exist. Maybe you’ll even like those people.”
“I doubt it. May I?”
“I insist.” Magdalena waved her hand at the piano bench.
“St. Ignatius had a Broadwood. My school, not the founder of the Jesuits. I have no idea what sort of piano St. Ignatius had.”
“You’re happy,” she said, lightly stroking his cheek. “You only tell jokes when you’re happy.”
“I…I have happy memories of playing the Broadwood at my school. I was playing it when Kingsley saw me the first time, when I saw him. He didn’t know I saw him. He still doesn’t know.” He took a seat at the bench and rolled up his sleeves. She’d forgotten just how attractive a man’s forearms could be when they were sinewy and strong, and a pair of large sculpted and terribly talented hands were attached to them.
“What should I play?” he asked.
“I have a piece if you don’t mind sight-reading.”
“I don’t mind.”
She opened the window seat in the piano alcove where she stored the sheet music and pulled out a very special folder. She didn’t hand the music to Marcus but placed it on the music rack herself. Then she sat at his side.
“A bit of the Red Priest to be played by my Golden Priest.” She ran her hand over Marcus’s golden-blond hair. He looked up at her. “You like Vivaldi?”
“I haven’t played ’il Prete Rosso since starting seminary. But ‘Winter’ is fitting for the season.”
“Yes, very fitting,” she said with a tight smile. “I’ll forgive you if you falter. Vivaldi is trickier than he looks.”
“I won’t falter. It hasn’t been that long.”
“Of course. The piano’s been tuned. Play when you’re ready.”
; She watched his eyes as he scanned the front page of the sheet music, re-learning the opening bars of the concerto with his eyes before playing. She hoped he wouldn’t turn the pages to look over the entire piece right away—that would spoil the surprise. But he had the arrogance of both youth and talent, as she’d counted on, and thus started playing at once.
He played slowly, more slowly than the movement called for, and yet the pace didn’t drag so much as it meandered gently around the room, calling to mind a walk in the snow, a morning walk on morning snow. She wondered if he thought of Maine as he played. He’d told her about his school days at St. Ignatius and the solace he’d found there in the forest with the Jesuits. He’d told her how much he liked the priests at the school, one especially who’d gone out of his way to help him and protect him from his father. He’d said he’d found Maine beautiful, especially its brutal and bitter winters that made one grateful for the smallest of things—a roaring fire in the library fireplace, the gift of a hand-knitted afghan and scarf sent from his sister Elizabeth, a hot cup of Lapsang Souchong tea in the mornings. And Kingsley. He had been grateful for Kingsley, Marcus had said. Kingsley who stole the covers and kicked in his sleep and swore most violently when attempting to start a fire in their little hermitage’s fireplace while Marcus watched over his shoulder, mocking Kingsley’s failures and trying not to laugh out loud at his French lover’s cursing. On the coldest nights, Marcus refused to touch Kingsley until the room was warm enough for them to take their clothes off, a refusal which made building the fire an emergency proposition for the ever-eager Kingsley. She could easily picture Marcus’s young lover, sixteen years old, in the first blush of his male beauty, long dark hair falling over his even darker eyes, narrowed in concentration, his fingers working feverishly with tinder and matches, his exhalation of relief as the fire finally took hold of the wood, and, of course, the kiss that would follow. The kiss of victory when Marcus rewarded Kingsley for his efforts…and then, soon after that kiss, Magdalena could imagine the first red flickers of firelight dancing over Kingsley’s naked olive skin as Marcus beat him with his belt or a cane. Yes, Magdalena could see it all as Marcus played the concerto. His steel-gray eyes were soft now, not steely at all, and only half open as he played like a man half-asleep and daydreaming. His lips were slightly parted as if in preparation for a kiss. She’d never seen him look this young, this peaceful, this unguarded and gentle. They did say music soothed the savage beast. She almost hated to destroy this lovely moment of peace with him.
Winter Tales Page 19
