Passion Play

by Jerzy Kosiński

  The three of them dined together that night. Stella’s husband mentioned that he had to leave the next morning on a business trip to New York, and that from there he was scheduled to fly directly to Europe for a week. In his presence, Stella asked Fabian whether he could stay in Washington for a day or two. She was anxious, she said, to help him find a stable around Washington where he could exercise his ponies; she wanted to ride Ebony’s Ebony again. When Stella’s husband joined her in the invitation, Fabian decided to stay.

  On the following day, diffidently, with a vague rustle of curiosity, Fabian went to see Stella. He did not know what to expect; nothing in her manner, no inflection of her voice, no inclination of her body betrayed the memory of what once had taken place between the two of them.

  She greeted him alone. A thickly embroidered caftan covered her from neck to ankle. She served coffee, mentioning, as if in confirmation, that her husband had left as scheduled; she was glad, she said, to be with Fabian again, but she spoke in a tone so empty of feeling, of emotion, that Fabian, startled, looked up to catch her expression. She was staring at him as she had during that summer, each time she was about to enter his VanHome, in her eyes that onslaught of feeling that he had once come to know. She was still waiting for a sign, in its absence unwilling to take one step toward him or to move away.

  Fabian did not ask; he got up and walked slowly across the living room, to the bedroom. The thick carpet muffled his steps—and those of Stella, following in his wake.

  He closed the bedroom door behind them. The shutters were drawn, the faint attempts of morning light defeated by the darkened chamber. He sat down on Stella’s bed, recalling the bed in his VanHome and the rites enacted there. In wonder at the laws of darkness that kept their sway over him and Stella, he began to undress. Stella stood motionless, awaiting his signal; Fabian gave it with one hand. As if heaved on a reef, she foundered, sinking in a smooth, unraveling curve to his feet. Another sign, and she uncoiled, the brilliance of the caftan, a tapestry of snakes and leaves and birds, spilling onto the carpet. Once more, a sign. He looked for a note of hesitation, but time had not eroded the meaning of his gesture. It came to him vividly that he must know how far she would go with him; he remembered too well that the brand of his hands, of his body upon her skin had marked her for days; only with time had the marks disappeared. She was free to act however she chose; he would no more curtail her than he would impose a restraint upon himself.

  After a long while Fabian heard a sound, a man’s voice, strong, buoyant, carrying. A moment later, Stella heard it too. “It’s me, honey! Had to come back!” The space of the room contracted as Stella rushed to the door—her first movement not governed by a sign from Fabian—but before she reached it, her husband’s figure filled the space.

  Framed in the light of the hallway, he fumbled at the wall and turned on the switch. “Stella, are you here?” he asked, just as his eyes, blinking in the rush of brightness, wandered across the savaged field of the room. He saw Fabian standing by the bed; then his glance slid to the pillows and sheets. He turned finally to Stella, his eyes stopping at her breasts, belly, thighs, gliding over the patches of blue, the freshets of wetness that were too recent to have dried. In an unbroken stare he took in the man and the woman, then he left as quickly as he had appeared.

  In his permanent state of transience, Fabian rarely quit his mobile world for the confinements of a room or house, places that made him feel disembodied, a pony without a field. With no address or family ties, he was accessible only by chance or when he initiated the connection: to renew a friendship, to bridge an absence, he had to make the first move.

  He could not recollect, then, whether it was at a polo tournament or at one of the horse shows he occasionally scouted that he heard that Stella’s husband had divorced her and that she had moved to Totemfield, in Arkansas. She had not remarried, the report went, but with the money from her divorce settlement had taken over an old, dilapidated stable, the Double Bridle, where some years before Fabian had given a series of riding classes. Fabian remembered having told her about the place, urging her to visit it.

  In his roamings, Fabian lost track of her again; and now, in her presence, he felt the unmoored weariness of the void, the fugitive, the revenant.

  He stared at her across the shabby, cluttered desk. There was Stella, whose every apparition, on the field or the trail, in the paddock or a coffee shop, and, finally, in the wordless chamber of his VanHome, had once roused in him an anguish, a surge of possession that shorted out the steady currents of pleasure and pain. He was left with a rush of slipping images from the past; his imagination declined to conjure new ones.

  Waiting, Stella returned his scrutiny. He avoided the conventional inquiries. “Would you have anything for me to do here?” he asked in a low voice.

  “How about reading a book?”

  Without shifting her gaze from him, Stella pointed at a shelf heaped with books on horsemanship that she used for her riding classes. Fabian got up and went to the shelf, to look at the books. The glossy jackets of the three he pulled out—his—were hardly thumbed.

  “Down here they don’t buy your books,” Stella said. “They complain there are no pictures, not even drawings. And they get upset by what you write about riding.”

  Fabian shrugged. He wrote only about what seemed to him self-evident, yet always he found himself having to defend his books.

  “Why don’t you write something easier to take?” she continued. “Why bring up all those accidents, those traumas?”

  “Because horses are not living-room pets, Stella, as smart as cats or as faithful as dogs. Sports on horseback are dangerous. You and I and a lot of horse people know that. But many don’t, and many get injured or crippled or killed.”

  “Well, they still won’t read your books.”

  “So what? Neither will eight hundred million Chinese. Still, what I know about riding is the only truth I feel I must share.” Abruptly Fabian replaced the books on the shelf, ready to change the subject.

  “How do you make a living these days?”

  “Certainly not from my books. That’s why I need a job. Would you have one for me?”

  Stella fidgeted. “Not really,” she sighed. “Totemfield is not what it used to be when you taught here. Breeding and showing Tennessee Walkers and Saddle horses is all big business now—too late for me to catch up.” She glanced around the walls of her office. “This place will probably fall apart soon.”

  She saw that she made him uncomfortable. “But don’t worry,” she said, smiling. “It’s all set for you. On weekday mornings you can have the whole field and our arena for stick-and-ball and a little jumping to keep yourself and your ponies in shape.” She paused. “But make sure the ball doesn’t hit the windows, or you the dust.” She looked at her calendar as if recalling something that had troubled her.

  Fabian was aware that they were marking time. He sat down, waiting for her to allude to their past mute sharing, but she did not. Nor did she speak of her life in Washington that had ended so abruptly.

  “What kind of job do you have in mind?” she asked.

  He stretched in the chair. “Well, maybe teaching a rich Southern kid a little polo?”

  She looked at him in mock surprise. “Polo? In Totemfield? This is our fabled Old South, Fabian. This is where your gaited horses come from!”

  “Anybody can ride a gaited horse, but they have to learn polo.”

  “If they’re rich, they learn it in Retama, Boca Raton, Oak Brook, Fairfield, anywhere but here.”

  “Then, could you fix me up with a one-on-one polo match?”

  “One-on-one?”

  “A rodeo of the rich. How do you think I make a living these days?”

  “I didn’t know people still played games like that.” There was a break in Stella’s composure.

  “Maybe they don’t. But I do.”

  “Why would anybody rich want to play one-on-one polo with you?” she asked.
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  “Why do the rich play anything? For fun, for money, to show off.”

  She continued to bait him. “Around here, polo isn’t exactly a big deal, you know. At your age, neither are you. Why don’t you switch to golf—polo without a pony? Or, better yet, water-polo—just to keep you afloat?”

  No hardcover bookstore ever carried more than one or two copies of each of Fabian’s books, few of which, he discovered to his sorrow whenever he stopped in a city or large town, ever seemed to sell. When at times he had questioned the managers of bookstores about his slow sales, they replied with some hesitation that what the general public seemed to want on the subject of horsemanship were illustrated guides to riding, books that portrayed it as an easy diversion, as fun; what the public did not seem to want were reflections on the state of equitation, without illustrations or photographs. Fabian’s books failed as mass-market tributes to the pleasures and rewards of riding.

  Because he mistrusted pictorial representation, Fabian would not permit his publisher to include illustrations in his books. He felt that an excessive appeal to the sense of sight was insidious and debilitating, a specious claim to the reproduction of the world as it really was. He resisted the lulling implication that knowledge was above all what was to be seen, and refused the passive luxury of the spectator’s chair, the flattening of reality, time arrested in one angle of vision. He suspected that to submit to that vision would be to clog the active play of images that were fluent and mobile within each person, fantasy and emotion that written language alone could quicken.

  The Runaway, Fabian’s first book, concentrated on the trauma an accident had on riders, and it won particular praise, even though it disturbed many critics and book reviewers by what they labeled as Fabian’s mistrust of the established principles of horsemanship. Obstacles was his second work, a detached rehearsal of the still more complex variety of potential mishaps that might ensue within the riding arena. The audacity of its technique was widely acclaimed, and even though Obstacles was singled out for the prestigious National Horse Lovers Award, the book further alienated a large number of critics, who chose to ignore the wisdom of its warnings to unseasoned riders, electing instead to warn unseasoned readers of the unwisdom of exposing themselves to such a pessimistic book. The pattern continued with his subsequent books, the critics disowning his conception of the equestrian art as too bleak, a brutal excess of case histories that passed the bounds of credibility.

  One bookstore owner, an educated man and a fine rider, who counted himself among Fabian’s fans, had been particularly upset by the failure of Fabian’s books to attract a larger readership. While passing through town one day, Fabian stopped by the store to see him and to inquire how Prone to Fall, his latest book, was selling. As Fabian entered the store, he noticed a handsome, well-dressed woman in her thirties who was preparing to pay for two books she had selected; Prone to Fall was one of the two.

  At the sight of Fabian, the owner lighted up, happy that, for once, the sale of a book by one of his favorite authors would take place in front of the author himself. Quivering with pleasure at such a coincidence, expanding with smiling grace, the owner bent deferentially toward the woman just as she set both books before him.

  “Forgive me, madam,” he began, and when she raised her eyes quizzically, he flourished a hand at Fabian. “This gentleman is Mr. Fabian, the author of one of the books that you’re buying.” He lifted Prone to Fall from the counter, turning it over, a precious stone offered for her scrutiny, and triumphantly revealed the photograph of Fabian on the book’s reverse.

  “That’s Mr. Fabian, the author himself,” he repeated, waiting for her to rejoice with him in this favor of chance. Her calm unruffled, the woman raised her eyes from the photograph to look at Fabian. Her glance rested on him a moment, returned once more to his photograph on the book, then rose again to his face. The owner still hovered, his face a flowering smile, anticipating her admiration.

  “I don’t think I’ll take this one,” the woman said, evenly meeting the owner’s astonished gaze as she decisively set Fabian’s book to one side. There was no discourtesy in her manner, no attempt to offend. The owner was stunned. He began to stammer, unable to release his distress in words. Fabian quieted him with a gesture. Unperturbed, the incident behind her, the woman paid for the other book and, with a slight nod of farewell addressed to both men, left the shop.

  Fabian did not look at Stella as he spoke, fixing his gaze instead on a large wall poster of the Tennessee Walking horse, a kind of scientific diagram of variations in the skeletal measurement and angles of articulation in the breed. From the web of captions he gathered the poster sought to prove that anatomy enabled the Tennessee Walker to perform the running walk.

  He turned to confront Stella directly. “I need a job,” he repeated sharply, almost urgently.

  “You’re supposed to be the one with the connections,” she said. Then, softening: “What about that rich polo-playing friend of yours—what was his name? The one who helped you to get your VanHome.”

  Fabian shifted his eyes to the diagram of the Tennessee Walking horse. “Stanhope,” he said curtly. “Eugene Stanhope. He died in an accident.” His tone closed the subject.

  “Stanhope.” Stella was unwilling to abandon it. “Stanhope, Stanhope,” she murmured, tapping the desk pensively. Then she cocked her head almost provocatively. “I think I may have a little job for you.”

  “How little?”

  “One of our riding students, Betsy Weirstone, is giving a party tonight for Vanessa Stanhope, one of her boarding-school friends. Would Vanessa be related to that Eugene?”

  Fabian gave no sign that he knew Vanessa. “I don’t know. There are a lot of Stanhopes all over the place.” He steered her back to the goal. “Do I get to go to this party?”

  “Not quite. But you can be part of the fun.”

  “How?”

  “Betsy is planning a surprise for the evening. She wants a mysterious stranger, dressed in white and on a white horse, to appear unannounced at twilight on the lawn in front of her house. Vanessa and all the other guests will already be there, nobody expecting anything. My helper, Tommy, was supposed to play this masked rider, but his wife is sick and he can’t make it.”

  “What else?” Fabian was guarded, noncommittal.

  “I’ll give you Trekky, our white Paso Fino. It was a police parade horse before I bought it.” Stella hesitated, looking at him with no trace of emotion. “You used to be fond of Pasos, of their inborn gaits that never call for any training.” She checked the fragment of her memory, then went on. “First, you’ll circle in the shadows. Then you’ll ride closer, let Trekky show off its classy gaits, then gallop toward the crowd of guests, stop just short of them, rise in your saddle to salute Vanessa, your beloved Dulcinea, the belle of the night, and—gently—throw a rose at her.”

  She gave him an appraising glance. “White will suit you fine. I’ve already gotten all the stuff from a school theater here. White pants, a cape, a golden mask, a hat with a plume, a sword, boots, gloves—you name it. You’ll be the real thing, Fabian—a knight-errant on your Rocinante.” She was provoked out of her usual impassivity into an indulgent laughter.

  Fabian ignored her laughter. “I’ll do it. In return, you’ll have my horses groomed and fed. Tomorrow morning I’d like to give them a workout in the paddock.”

  She looked at the clock and got up. “Get yourself some rest and be ready by seven, all in white. I’ll be there on the dot with Trekky.”

  Back in his VanHome, he opened the case Stella had given him, the costume for his night ride. A tumble of white spilled out, the pungent sting of camphor and bleach flooding the alcove. He fondled the oversized gauntlets, the boots of soft white leather, the cape which swung in a bold flare; they showed no signs of wear. The plume in the tricorne was a shade scrawny, hanging limply as he cocked the hat in front of a mirror. He laid the costume out, an array of white, on one side of his bed, and stretched out
on the other, finally free to think of Vanessa.

  Pain raked across his shoulders, near his neck—a strained muscle or a warning of arthritis.

  At the time Fabian had begun to teach at the Double Bridle Stables, he was invited to deliver a lecture on horsemanship at the private school Vanessa Stanhope then attended. The headmistress, an older woman he had seen occasionally among the spectators watching dressage or jump sessions, greeted him on arrival, flanked by student representatives of the lecture committee, Vanessa among them. He noted that Vanessa’s school uniform, a blazer and pleated skirt, concealed the shape of her body, a body he knew well. In his role as her riding instructor, he greeted her; in her role as his pupil, she answered, astonishing him with her poise, with her ability to hide how well the two of them had already known one another. He was reminded again sharply of Vanessa’s age, and of his, as he watched her among other girls of her own time and place, the sound and freshness of their laughter engulfing him as they took him on an impromptu tour of the school.

  They paused at one classroom, where an instructor was showing a film on biology. Fabian observed the serenity and knowing-ness on the faces of the girls as the screen disclosed a sequence of images of life’s processes: lovers linking hands, a kiss, an embrace, then the unstoppable flow of embryo and fetus and birth.

  The tour continued, and Fabian passed the school’s video center—banked with rows of television sets and screens, film and television cameras, monitoring instruments—then another room, dense with computers, a gleaming arsenal of technology, behind each computer a girl sometimes half Vanessa’s age. His tour guides in knee socks spoke easily to him about a computer’s retrieval system.

  He had pondered often what it was that separated him, a man already in the middle of his life, from these girls, and why the conventional barriers of time and age and physical strength seemed to play so negligible a role either in the initial attraction or ultimately in the impassable gulf he knew to exist.