Chapter 28 — Peter Has an Erotic Experience with Ballet Elves & a Cringe Experience with Tchaikovsky
To call Tchaikovsky’s room a bedchamber was an understatement. He expected her room would be somewhat similar to his own in size and furniture— an Amish Air BnB, but when Jumeau flung wide the doors Peter quickly realized that he was cheated when Santa gave him his own room. For Tchaikovsky’s room was an entire opera house, with theater seats, and box seats, and twinkling crystal chandeliers, an orchestra pit, and a grand stage with velvet red curtains. And in one of the box seats there was an opulent golden bed that no doubt must have been where the undead composer slept, but the great echoing emptiness of the theater suggested that much of the room went unoccupied.
True to Jumeau’s word, up on stage were dozens of elven toy makers, dressed up like fairytale shako-clad soldiers and an adorable rat infantry. The troupe of elven ballerinas were in the midst of rehearsing the great battle. They delicately touched sword tips high in the air as if making a saber arch at a wedding, and then the two armies laid down on the stage and hop-frogged over each other. The Rat King kicked as if flicking a slipper off her foot, and sent the Nutcracker reeling. Then the Rat King delicately lifted the Nutcracker up, held her upside down, and twirled. The combat on display filled Peter with doubt. Were these the same girls who would be fighting to the death against the Holy Spirit in just a few weeks? Did they actually know how to throw a real punch?
When Peter entered Tchaikovsky sat up from a theater seat, confused and half asleep. The weary composer, disheveled from sleepless nights and long hours of rehearsing, shouted “Peter!” All the dancers on stage paused mid-pirouette and the music halted. A hundred blonde elf heads peeked out from the orchestra pit at him.
Immediately he was mobbed by the elves, who elbow checked and shoved at each other to be at the forefront of Peter’s attention. Like piranhas they surrounded him and nipped at him with questions about the validity of prophecies and apocalypses and chosen ones, which Peter answered with a head scratch and a maybe. Their echoing voices came to a halt when one elf dressed as an Arabian dancer kicked her leg up and planted it on the wall beside Peter’s head in a lewd kabe-don.
“Will you help me unwind after rehearsal?” she asked.
“I can do that too!” another elf cried.
“Me too!”
Three elves around Peter did perfect standing splits, a single leg stretched far up above their heads, and looked at him expectantly, as if waiting for him to judge the shape and form of their bodies. The other ballet dancers, sensing that they were being upstaged, contorted themselves backwards into spine crunching stretches in an attempt to impress Peter. But all he could think about were horror movies where the demon possessed girl walks like a crab down a flight of stairs. It wasn’t particularly erotic for him.
“Peter! Look at me!” said one elf as she did a taekwondo illusion twist, flipping herself upside down and rightside up without ever lifting one foot off the ground. A dizzying flip that seemed to defy logic and human anatomy.
“Peter, can you do ballet? Can you try throwing me?”
“I’ve never danced in my life but now I suddenly want to join.”
The elf girls all laughed and giggled far too much at Peter’s less-than-mediocre joke, as girls are wont to do when they like a boy.
“Peter, do you want to hear us play a song?” the conductor waved from the pit.
“I’d love to.”
Just as the Waltz of the Flowers began Tchaikovsky waved her arms in the air to silence everyone. The orchestra sadly ground to a halt.
“Peter doesn’t want to hear some tune I wrote a hundred years ago! It’s so embarrassing! Let me play you something I wrote to commemorate your arrival to the North Pole. I think that this is the best song I’ve ever written!”
Maybe it was the black stockings, or the remnants of insomnia upon her face like a mask, but Tchaikovsky appeared to be the oldest girl in the workshop, despite being the youngest— a spry 190 compared to everyone else. But in this gleeful moment before a grand performance she looked childlike.
Tchaikovsky took out what appeared to be an electric guitar, but when Peter looked more closely, he saw that it contained no strings. Instead of pickups there was a glowing touchscreen, and the neck was studded with buttons. When she strummed her fingers across the kitara bass, it made a horrible dubstep wub wub, like a rhythmic electronic flatulence. With the Transformer-morphing baseline looped, Tchaikovsky switched to a theremin and began playing the melody on it with marxophone hammers. The resulting tune was like a hybrid of Plan 9 from Outer Space and an ice cream truck jingle by way of Skrillex. Or like combining peanut butter with used coffee grounds and putting it in a pierogi. And then Tchaikovsky started singing.
“Peter! Pee-ee-ee-ter!
Peter Peter! Oooooh!
Dreams do come tru—ue!
Drunk on cocoa! High on love!
Dancing with the elves! Dance the night awa—hay!
So put on your dancing shoes! SHOES!”
During the song an elf came over to Tchaikovsky with a melodica, a toy sized keyboard attached to a crazy-straw tube. The instrument droned like a bagpipe as she exhaled into the mouthpiece, and then Tchaikovsky started twinkling her fingers across the keys. It was two girls one melodica.
“Welcome to the North Pole!
Joy! Happy! Peace and love!
It’s Christmas every day! Whoo!
Girlfriends here have pointy ears!
Now kiss me! Kiss me!
Kiss me like you mean it! Whoo!”
Possessed by the muses of inspiration, Tchaikovsky tore the melodia away from her assistant and hammered away at the keys in a rococo solo. She kicked her legs up in the air, balanced sloppily upon the keyboard in a handstand— flashing her panties to all creation. Furious upside-down glissandos ascended and descended. Gravity brought her down, but she did a second handstand, and a third— overshooting— flipping over the table— crashing to the floor— but she sprang up and elbow dropped the poor accordion facsimile. The piece had gone full dadaist as she abused and flossed the melodica across her body and then dropped it to the floor with a reverberating finish.
A wave of cringe washed over Peter. He bit down on his lips and held his breath to hold the laughter within himself. The other elves reluctantly applauded, and Tchaikovsky— short and breath and panting hard— took a great and flamboyant bow. Then she looked at Peter with stars and sparkles in her eyes, awaiting his judgment.
Now children, what do you do when you receive a truly awful gift? Do you criticize it? Ask for the giver to try again with a new gift and not be such a moron next time? No. You hide your true feelings and say thank you. Which is exactly what Peter did. He said, “Wow… that was… great!”
“You hated it,” Tchaikovsky said. Her great grin melted away to nothing.
“No! No! It was… no!”
“You think my old music is better, just like everyone else. I can see it in your face.”
Tchaikovsky flung herself down in a chair and covered her face with her dark hair.
“No. I think it was even better than the Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy.”
An elf looked at Peter as if he were out of his fucking mind.
“You’re a liar, Peter! A liar!” She dramatically pointed an accusatory finger at him. “My best ideas as a composer are all behind me! I know it!”
“Can I get a copy of the sheet music for that song? So I can keep it? And could you sign it for me?”
“Really?” She looked up from her pit of despair. “You want a signed score?”
“Yeah, that way I can keep it with me all the time.”
Tchaikovsky guffawed and covered her mouth in embarrassment.
“I can get you a .flac file of it too, if you want.”
“Definitely. I’ll make it my ring tone.”
Tchaikovsky grinned from ear to ear and her face turned redder than cranberry sauce.
“A ringtone? Truly? Peter!”
“Well, it looks like you’re busy rehearsing. And I’ve got to go… do some stuff somewhere.”
And as Peter left Tchaikovsky was beaming with happiness. She clapped her hands together and shouted, “Lets go back to stanza ten! Remember, it’s allegro vivo! Not allegro giusto! Fagottos, I swear on my sister’s grave, if I see you tapping your feet again I am going to come down there with a hammer and nail your foot to the fucking floor! Rat King! You land like an elephant! Why do you hate the floor?!”