Passion Play

by Jerzy Kosiński

  Watching from the bed, Fabian still retained his post of detachment. Heedless of her own nudity, the girl was preoccupied only with Manuela’s hands that slipped about her, undressing and dressing again, no longer stealthy in their search, brushing her nipples, skimming over her thighs, brief but insistent in their return, hesitant no more at her mound of flesh.

  Extravagant in her adulation of the girl, Manuela would murmur in tribute to the subtleties of beauty enhanced by the new makeup, the teasing fantasy of the antique Victorian gown, its waist cinched, its ribbons and laces dangling in pretty disorder. She would embrace the girl, as if solicited only by the artifice of the paint and dress before her, and then, even more abruptly, kiss her on the mouth, the caprice of her own theatricality a license for the bluntness of the need.

  Manuela’s spell was now complete. Unmoored from the bonds of time outside the alcove, adrift in the sensation and possibilities that Manuela had forged for all three of them, the girl was free to interpret the events in the alcove as moments without reference to an external world of cause and consequence, a dream gathering passion unto itself, a destiny plundered. She, who had never been aroused by a woman before, was aroused by Manuela, although she glanced constantly at Fabian to reassure herself that he was part of what was taking place. The girl still allowed Manuela the freedom to undress her, but when Manuela helped her to emerge from the gown, the fantasy of lace and satin and velvet, it was now the girl who would reach out to her. Manuela disrobed and, masked only by the narrow strip of cloth that trapped her hips, lowered herself onto the bed, bringing the girl with her, the two of them kissing and caressing as they fondled each other, makeup smudging their cheeks, hands and shoulders.

  Thrashing in their union, the girl would thrust her breasts against Manuela’s, her mouth searching the mouth of the other, her hands fretting with the nipples, teasing at the brink of descent, threatening to move down, to tear at the narrow strip of cloth that still estranged Manuela from her. Then Fabian would place himself between Manuela and the girl, claiming the girl for himself, offering himself to her. Manuela would recede in response, her body dissolving from the space between the man and the girl, only her face an intermittent invader of the seal of their kiss, the third party in the triptych of their embrace. The girl, now as abandoned with Fabian as she had been with Manuela, finally gave herself up to her own sensation and ambivalent quest to touch and taste the flesh of either, avid to receive the badge of her adventure. The contagion of her need prompted Fabian to probe her deeper, with more force, while Manuela wedged in between them, offering her mouth to kiss and to be kissed, eager to know that the girl loved her as a woman and that the presence of Fabian—of any man—could not alter that infatuation.

  Later, Fabian would let his curiosity play about Manuela and the girl. Retreating, he wondered whether Manuela’s need to be a woman could remain more urgent than the need for fulfillment that would compel her to take off the narrow strip of cloth and reveal herself; whether she might choose to turn to Fabian for still another homage to her feminine power, now that he had seen her triumph in so exacting an arena of accomplishments; or whether she might reach her fulfillment later, alone, beguiled by the memory of herself with the girl, one woman loving another. He also wondered whether, with Manuela naked and aroused, the girl’s passion would prevail over the sudden mutation, in an image more ideal, more persuasive, more complete in its power to please than the one that Manuela offered; whether the girl could accept, as easily as he did, this mode of loving for what it was, a quest for beauty, for its expression, in whatever form or image or manifestation of touch, a love no different in kind, at root, from that in the appreciative eye of a horseman for a stallion, a mare or a gelding.

  With his legs thrust wide, Fabian would sprawl on his back, then slowly pull the girl onto him, her body a firm blanket covering him, her back against his chest, her head, the face upturned, tucked between his neck and shoulder, his knees and calves bracing her legs, urging her wide, fastening her to himself, her buttocks straddling him, his flesh planted, settling deeper in her, his hands snaring her wrists, binding her more tightly to him, then scooping her arms wide, lapping her breasts outward, her belly flat, her thighs forked, tempting Manuela with the locked and coiling rhythm of their bodies. From behind the girl’s head he could not see Manuela crouched at their feet, but within the instant, he felt the warmth of her touch on his flesh. A shiver ran through the length of the girl’s body; lying, still bound to her, he became the monitor of her passion, of her every moment, as she let herself be opened to the touch of the other woman while remaining open to his.

  Straining as he thrust into the girl, he waited for Manuela to respond; then, as he heard the girl’s moan, felt her taut above him, he was aware of Manuela’s weight upon them, a man entering the girl from above, just as he had entered her, as if she were a boy, from below. Now all was tightness and tension within the girl’s body, a substance thrashing between him and Manuela, aware no longer, caring no more who it was that brought her the sensation she could barely contain.

  Fabian began to chart his own sensations. The girl had ceased to be a space sundering him from Manuela; he felt Manuela as a tide within his own flesh, he within hers, the girl only a veil or tissue uniting them, yielding to their common pulse and surge, an agent of communion, avid to transmit sensation from one to the other at the pitch of unaltered intensity she herself knew in the receiving and the recording.

  Fabian’s thoughts drowned in the onslaught of pleasure. Lost on a periphery of knowledge, he let himself vault into the midst and flight of his dream, the scope of his fantasy the vastness of a polo field, the grass fragrant and dewy, a blue dome of sky, the morning heat a rising mist, he on a horse, mallet in hand, the ball ahead.

  In the seduction of a perfect shot, charging at the gallop, his legs prompting and gripping, he was set on the ball, his thigh against the saddle, his weight gathered in his foot, digging into the stirrup, his toes clawing; then, bending his body forward, his eye and thought strained to the target, he swung his mallet, striking faultlessly the center of the ball. A crest of feeling broke above him, elation at his feat. Just then the straps that fastened his saddle to the horse tore under his weight. Instantly his saddle gave way, keeling with him to the side. As his pony veered off, he pitched, then, plunging dreamily, free at last from the reins, the dew splashing him like cold sweat, he rolled through the grass, yielding to this jet and spume that seemed to rise not from the grass but from his being, making him one with his own flesh.

  Neither polo nor ponies were fashioned for the stony wastes of high plains without horizon, the thin air, the snow drifting in thick billows of silence. And so Fabian always made for the hot, marshy lowlands, steering his VanHome to gentle ground where he and his ponies could wander at will, play, take their pleasure without rein. He shunned the featureless lure of the sleek turnpike and expressway, the heedless thruway, preferring the fellowship of the backwoods spilling before him, the intimacy and promise of the rural bypath, narrow, alert with surprise.

  On warm nights, his VanHome parked deep in some wood, he might sleep wrapped in a blanket in the moist grass under a bush or in a juniper grove, perhaps sheltered by a stack of grain or hay. He would listen to the whiffs of wind, trees in their rustling, the swift rush of birds. When the last echo subsided and life hung suspended, the night air would flicker with sound, distant, sharp, close: a stranger, uncertain, timorous, sidling by his VanHome; lovers whispering in search of a retreat; a dog tracking the pungent smell of Big Lick and Gaited Amble; the meowing of a stray cat.

  In that solitude, Fabian did not envy other people their thronged existence. They appeared to him, most of them, to have consented to the manufacture of their lives at some common mint, each day struck from the master mold, without change, a duplicate of what had gone before and was yet to come. Only some accident could bring to pass upheaval in the unchallenged round of their lives.

  It was not conte
mpt he felt for them, merely regret that they had allowed the die of life to be cast so early and so finally. He preferred individuals whose singularity gave him insight into himself. He reasoned that, if in the course of his adult life, he chanced upon no more than perhaps twenty or twenty-five men and women, each of whom mattered to him as friend or lover, he would still be faithful to his calling. If this was true for him as a polo player, ever on the move, it would have been no less true for him as a lawyer, businessman, artist or politician.

  For Fabian, nature offered a spectacle absolute in scope. In his parade of admiration for it, the barter of his wandering, he seemed to himself an explorer in quest of a vantage point from which he could more fairly contemplate himself.

  He would leave his VanHome in a wood or field and ride his ponies in tandem, catapulting in play from one to the other, companioned by a wind that tossed bits of grain in his face and mouth or whipped him across desolate reaches of stubble. He might trot Big Lick or Gaited Amble under the slender trees of Idaho, still in their summer uniform, or race the horses through the supple grasses of Wyoming or over Utah flats blazing in a shower.

  Sometimes, as he cantered through dry moss in Arizona or Nevada, the skeleton of some old mining town, a relic of boom-and-bust, would loom in the ghostly space before him. A church spire pierced the unanswering sky; the shells of long-deserted houses lay about him. Far away, a coyote howled, its long sour moan pricking Fabian’s ponies to prance uneasily. Enthralled by so measureless a domain, he would race his horses at the rim of the desert, stampeding the whitish gardens of borax, vaulting the silver furrows that slit the salt fields, refreshing his steaming ponies in the tepid green of the pupfish marshes, stalking the hollow cages of sagebrush scudding over the broken mud flats.

  Here, in this burning void, this landscape of heat and light and space as pure and luminous as a cube of metal or a shard of mineral so crystalline that no pool of rain water could impose on it a reflection, Fabian felt that he was nature’s own conscience. Without him to see it, the natural world would remain unseen, unknown, a thing unto itself, radiance in a galaxy strewn with distant light.

  The shelves on the walls of his compact living area were densely packed with books. When in his voyaging he came upon a large bookshop, a rare occasion in the country, rarer than some of the wildlife he encountered—whose survival was protected by law—he would browse among the counters and shelves for hours. He had to be discriminating: in his VanHome, space was tight, and to make room for a new book, he would have to relinquish one he already had, dropping it off at a community library along his way.

  What survived his scrutiny in the bookshop, the books he took back with him to his VanHome, promised a landscape his imagination had not yet explored and could not scan in advance.

  When he was in pain—bruised, or suffering the wounds of a rough game, apprehensive and restless, reminded of the vulnerability of his condition—it was to one of those books that he would turn, and always a novel. A private trailer for his mind, that novel would take him where his VanHome could not, permitting him travels to a reality outside the dominion of nature, a fusion of what the present was becoming with a history of what the past might have been, a weightless passing through time and place and thought, coasting with a freedom unmatched by any spaceship. At any point in such a voyage, Fabian would find himself no longer the solitary passenger of his VanHome, but a fugitive from an exhausted view of himself, a displaced person in an uncharted landscape, an émigré to the frontier beyond the scope of his transit.

  Fabian shared with many Americans of his generation a dual past. The years of his childhood and youth had been spent in the stony, rural life of one of those marginal “old countries,” their borders and boundaries forgotten now, during a decade of wars, of political and social upheavals that ravaged them every so often like a natural calamity.

  The simple farmer who brought him up in a small village was blessed, or burdened, with too many children of his own; but, encouraged by the local priest to placate a not easily placated God, he took in Fabian, a refugee from the city where, for the time of yet another war, his parents chose to remain without him. The farmer had the grudging hope, the expectation, that the boy’s advent would be the forerunner of more tangible gifts of favor and grace. When it was not, the farmer decided to make use of him, even though he was still a boy, as a farmhand, and the days of his childhood were spent in tending to horses, pigs, goats and poultry.

  The horse was an inescapable presence in Fabian’s early life, as inevitable and taken for granted as the car would become in the years of his maturity.

  In the village, horses were used to pull plows, as well as to haul carts and carriages; they were treated no differently from other domestic animals, herded and penned in, their labor long and exhausting, their time at pasture brief. The whip was used to speed them up; at the first sign of illness, they were killed for meat.

  As an outsider, Fabian was often sport for bands of other children, first in play, occasionally in fight, when they would turn on him in the bond and unity of their family kinship. It was during one of these games, threatening at any moment to erupt into combat, that, for the first time, Fabian found himself riding bareback.

  A volatile stallion, taunted by a sheepdog lunging and snapping at it, thrashed about its enclosure, heaving against the bars, on the verge of breaking out. Fabian was tending a flock of geese when a group of boys seized him from behind, pinioning his arms, and heaved him onto the stallion’s back. Caught off guard by the sudden ballast, the stallion halted; instinctively, in the moment before the horse reared, Fabian grabbed its mane. His legs flanking the ribs, he careened on its back, fighting desperately to keep from sliding off. The dog renewed its attack, and the stallion broke its bounds, kicking the gate aslant, picking up speed as it shot toward the open field, leaving the snapping, hapless dog and the raucous boys far behind.

  Freed from the restrictions of its pen, the stallion bolted into frantic, unchecked flight, crossing a wide, pitted road in one leap, dashing into the hedges, its hoofs spraying the soft, sandy loam, the sharp branches of a cedar flogging Fabian’s legs as the animal plunged through it heedlessly.

  In a quiver of time swift as light, Fabian saw a fly attached to the horse’s neck, perched just behind one ear, persisting, undisturbed by the pounding of the huge, sweaty mass that was ferrying it through the brush. He knew that, like the fly, his hope depended on clinging fast to the horse’s neck, that if he were to fall, he would be pitched onto the ground with a force that could injure or kill him.

  He edged himself up, his hands tangling in the stallion’s mane, centering his chest and stomach to cradle in the niche of its back, no choice open to him other than to yield to the motion of the animal. And there he remained, the horse’s head a shield against the branches as he moved through time, calm as the fly.

  The barn that quartered horses had also been the pen of much of Fabian’s boyhood. It was a lair of intimacy he often shared with them, and the scene of his initiation into the lore of sex and birth long before he could decipher the world around him, the world of men and women, girls and other boys.

  A horse bristled and shook off another, bit and kicked at it in retaliation when nudged, tried to ignore it. Then the horse changed, became so gentle that Fabian at first worried that it was sick. But then, when it nuzzled and nudged the other horse, the sight stirred Fabian. It was a mare rubbing against a stallion. Her ears were now erect, vibrating to the stallion’s breath and pulse, prickling when he snorted, alert to his every move, yet she stood passive, primed for the assault of all his weight. The stallion, too, was changed, his sex engorged, his moods seesawing between playfulness and violence; sometimes he mounted the mare as if determined to pierce her entrails, to wound her before she could escape his dominion. Yet what appeared to the boy a tide of violence, the mare’s submission first to her own heat, then to the assault of the stallion, did not seem a breach in the cycle of nature. From the
moment of their coupling, nature hoarded the time needed for new life to emerge from the moist enigma of the mare’s insides.

  The door of the stable, like one sovereign arm of an invisible clock, opened to admit the flush of summer and the chaff and thistle of fall, closed to shut out the onslaught of snow, opened again to acknowledge the moist scent of spring, a prelude to summer’s return. The mare slumped, restless, then lurched, uncertain whether it should trust its belly or legs for support, panic in its eyes and movements.

  Soon it lay down, reluctant, even unable, to get up again. A massive shudder ran through its body, and swiftly, between the mare’s raised hind legs, the narrow muzzle of a foal appeared, its two forelegs a frame in a heaving sac of glistening filament, pliant, almost translucent.

  Fabian had been ordered to tear the sac if it had not broken open while moving through the mare, and he touched the mysterious fiber in awe at this envelope that delivered new life. But the sac had already been split by the pelvis, and he saw the foal’s legs protruding without obstruction, ready for further delivery.

  The mare, exhausted, waited to muster more strength; the foal, most of it still huddled inside the sphere that had formed it, attempted to move on its own, already another presence in the world that would soon claim all of it.

  Fascinated and afraid, Fabian moved closer. As if responding to his gaze, the foal, prodded by the mare, pushed itself forward, sloughing off the rest of the sac, eager to leave the home that was not large enough for it anymore, even though, once it was outside the mare, the foal was still bound to it by the umbilical cord, a pulse of blood.