With the knowingness that made her so proficient a model, Alexandra splayed her fingers over her ankles, coiling and unraveling her hands, showing the red stain of her nails, molded for exhibition, then interlocking her fingertips with her enamel-glazed toes.
Fabian watched the complicity of hands and feet, fingers and toes: all elongated, tensile, nervous, they seemed at moments like the fragile plaster features on a religious figurine, in perpetual danger of snapping off.
She raked her fingers through her hair, cosseting it as if gathering the silence of the room, then glanced into a mirror on the wall: twins, one arrested in glass, one flesh, each chary of the other. The woman in the mirror caught his stare; he could no longer watch, unobserved, the bare shoulders of her twin. Alexandra smiled.
“At work, they call me the centipede,” she said.
“Centipede?”
“Yes. Legs, feet and hands.”
She shifted to one side of the saddle, her hands on her lap, her legs drifting apart, the dress snaking even higher. She knew he could see the insides of her thighs.
“What are you thinking, Fabian?”
“I wonder who inhabits such a perfect being.”
“Take a look, then.” Alexandra slipped off the saddle, her dress slithering down her legs. She walked to the bar and picked up the bottle of wine Fabian had opened for her. Bottle in one hand, glass in the other, she leaned against a wall and looked at him. She was waiting.
Fabian felt himself at a crossroads, forced by the will of another to unsettle the harmony he had achieved between his codes and inclinations.
He liked Eugene and was comfortable in his company. Even when Fabian was in a low mood, he never resented or envied Eugene’s sturdy health, good looks and fortune. Possibly because Eugene recognized that Fabian was living his life precisely as he wanted, Eugene returned that steadiness by never belittling his own money, power and position, or by pretending that he chafed at the confinements of being rich. His wealth was like a toy he had chosen to share with Fabian; they would play with it together. It was Eugene’s co-signing of the loan that had permitted Fabian to acquire the VanHome; then a cash gift from Eugene on Fabian’s birthday had helped to pay for Big Lick and Gaited Amble. Now, by asking that Fabian be on call for him to hire, Eugene had become the chief source of Fabian’s income. Eugene was aware of the complex tangle of friendship and debt and, as if to put Fabian on a more independent footing, had mentioned the possibility of underwriting a series of manuals on horsemanship, with Fabian as the editor.
Fabian felt Alexandra’s gaze steady on him. She was still waiting. He knew she was Eugene’s emotional property, another facet of his measureless wealth, but was that sufficient to impose a check on Fabian, to bridle his desire for her? Did her affair with the French film producer not intimate her availability, a sexual field on which many could sport? Finally, did Alexandra herself, intent on ensuring Fabian’s connivance, now choose to invest her body in that silence?
To decline Alexandra’s challenge, to thwart his instinct toward her, would ratify an indolence or lapse in value. Either would subvert his trust in himself. Without looking at Alexandra, the balance of his mind restored, Fabian abruptly turned off the overhead light in the lounge. A single blue bulb lighted the narrow staircase to the sleeping alcove.
For reasons of mental economy, Fabian chose to think of certain people as polarized, their unity sundered into compatible or antagonistic hemispheres. There were the symmetries and the asymmetries. In the symmetric, the halves, the face, the body and the soul were harmonious; the symmetric rested in calm, a stranger to compulsion, seldom bent to the extremities of life. In the asymmetric, the halves were at variance, constrained by no uniformity; undulant, the asymmetric gave way to spasmodic eruptions of play. Character defined the symmetric, personality the asymmetric. The symmetric was driven, the asymmetric enacted. To a casual eye, the symmetric was comely, the asymmetric interesting.
Alexandra had seemed to Fabian a classical symmetric; during their night together, however, in lovemaking that was unrestrained, even obsessive, she divulged that chasm between her external poise and her inward turbulence. Fabian responded with fascination.
In this freedom to make love to her, in his awareness of that gift of herself as an incarnation of his need, he scanned the waxing of his own excitement, revealed himself naked before her, to signal to her that there was nothing in him that was not hers. She accelerated the mounting spiral of his pleasure with a deliberate rhythm.
In the haze of morning, he watched her sleeping. He had scheduled stick-and-ball practice for early that day, and when he rose, leaving her in his bed, longing and doubt streaked through him, intermittent, unruly, leaving him numb and uncertain.
At lunch, he was told that Eugene, who had not been expected back for two or three days, had returned and wished to see him in the old house.
He went directly to the drawing room. Eugene and Alexandra were waiting for him. Eugene, formal in a gray business suit and white shirt, sat in a heavy leather armchair guarded by the sweep of an ornate hunt table. Alexandra was perched on the thick arm of his chair, one of her legs swaying slightly. Her breasts showed through the sheer halter of her jumpsuit. Fabian started to hold out his hand, but something in Eugene’s expression arrested him midway. He looked at Alexandra, and she turned her head. He pulled a chair up to the hunt table and sat down.
Eugene scrutinized him. “I thought you were my friend,” he said, measuring the words.
“I am your friend,” Fabian replied quietly.
Eugene circled Alexandra with his arm and brought her closer. She let her weight rest on him. Both of them looked at Fabian as if he were a schoolboy called to account.
“Alexandra tells me that, last night, under the pretext of showing her your trailer, you tried to force her to make love to you,” Eugene said.
Fabian felt out of his element, alien and solitary. “Alexandra is lying,” he said. His eyes turned to Alexandra. She sat calm and indifferent, regarding him with an expression that remained long after the emotion that formed it seemed to have dissolved.
“Alexandra admitted that the wine you forced on her made her a bit drunk.” Eugene paused. He looked up at Alexandra, and she nodded as if to prompt him in what he was about to say. He turned back to Fabian.
“She also told me,” he went on in a harsh voice, “that, even though she remained fully dressed, she spent a few minutes next to you, on top of your bed, before she felt safe enough to run out on you.” He paused again. Alexandra pressed his shoulder and, as if ashamed of herself, lowered her head.
“I know everything there is to know, Fabian, and I know it from Alexandra,” Eugene said. “Alexandra and I have no secrets from each other—that’s the secret of our love. Did you think you could destroy that with one bottle of wine?”
Fabian looked at Alexandra, a soft glow on her cheeks, her lips parted. She wore a look of an obedient daughter submitting to the wisdom of Eugene, her all-knowing father.
Fabian’s memory had not yet edited out her presence when she lay next to him. As he watched her now, the memory of what had happened between them brought her words back to him: “I’ve been stuck, Fabian. Stuck waiting on men and what they want, always what they want, their weary flesh in search of an easy hole. All that sweating, their clumsy kisses and useless embraces, and moaning and humping—that constant in-and-out missionary commuting. They leak into me, then off to sleep they go, and then on to the office.”
He had glided closer to her, one hand under her waist, rising, the other lingering on her neck, her shoulders, hesitant to descend onto her breasts, to know again the sensation of their firmness, their sculpted shapes. He kissed her on the mouth, and it came back to him, pressing, a response vigilant and insistent. She watched him, commanding his gaze, not allowing him to lose or deny the expression in his eyes, or for a moment, even in thought, to withdraw to another world, one that might be entirely his own—or one that he migh
t share, in recollection or fantasy, with another woman.
He thought of her legs upon his chest, her calves girdled round his ribs. Her skin lapped him with a smoothness that Fabian imagined to gleam in the darkness. She sought him with her feet, her narrow ankles, her soles supple against his cheeks. He was conscious of the high arch of her instep, the roundness of the heel grazing his jaw, her toes, lithe and fragile, prodding his lips, splitting the furrow of his mouth, prying open the clenched gate of his teeth, plying his tongue. Her hand deep within him, her foot mastering his mouth, he labored as if to summon life, but each time she brought him to the brink of orgasm, her hand refused to allow him to yield to it: consenting to submit to passion, he was denied the thrust of the gift.
Now he stared across the hunt table at her hands, their slender, carved fingers linked in her lap. He thought of those hands, in the night: how they had summoned the muscles of his body to their collusion, kneading him at will, exploring him with boldness, the cool enamel of her nails tracing the taut membranes of his depth, ignoring his resistance, unlocking him to her plundering mouth, inciting him to submit to her tongue.
In her eagerness to have him open to her, her refusal to permit him to retain some region of his body as inviolate, the license she extended to her mouth and tongue to venture where her hand and fingers had gone before, there was an unmasked avidity of possession. But he also sensed her conviction that what she was doing, although offered to him as pleasure, was exacted as proof that—in whatever manner she invoked—he would be hers.
She was able, finally, to abolish his last thin awareness of her will. He no longer cared what impulses she submitted to in her commitment to his need: whether they were stages in a drama, ordered by her and enacted by him, that would permit the revelation of his own nature, his pleasure at the discovery a tribute to her zeal; or whether, provoked by her, he was the one who would disclose what lay hidden in her, what she could not otherwise release, the pleasure she sought most.
The pensiveness of her voice returned to him now, musing: “I’ve always been turned on by a man’s rear, Fabian. Always. Doing it to a man’s rear, with my fingers, my hand, my mouth, my tongue, that’s the only sex that sends me up. But Eugene hates it. One time he got really upset. He screamed at me that it was a sick and savage thing; no other woman had ever done such a sick and savage thing, trying to make a fag out of him.”
As she spoke, Fabian reflected that her lawlessness in seizing her pleasure, bending him to her will, that very lack of constraint might have arisen from a vanity and terror at abandoning herself to the play of sex, to the risk that she might, in the presence of her lover, lose the carriage and control that her profession imposed. Knowing that, with his orgasm, her power over her lover waned, she would violate any taboo to prolong his craving, break any bond, penetrate any boundary.
Eugene let go of Alexandra and leaned forward across the table, his finger pointing at Fabian, his voice thick with menace. “Alexandra says you tried to force her to do a sick and savage thing, but she pushed you away and ran out.”
“Alexandra is lying,” Fabian said.
“You’re the one who’s lying!” Eugene shouted. “You’re the liar.”
In their time together, Fabian had seen Eugene defeated, his pride wounded. He had seen him in physical pain, seen him knocked unconscious. He had witnessed his control and easy bearing among simple horse breeders or trainers who had no idea of his position, had observed his tactful restraint among foreign polo players, some of them abusive, to whom the Stanhope name meant nothing. He had felt Eugene’s commanding presence in his offices, the fount of his corporate power. Yet nothing he thought he knew of his friend could have prepared Fabian for the flood of rage that now confronted him. Under that abuse, face to face with the contortions of fury, Fabian understood what a poor judge of character he had been.
“Alexandra is lying,” he said. “Last night I took her straight home.”
In the telling, Fabian regretted his own lie. Desperate only in his attempt to thwart Alexandra’s assault on the bond between him and Eugene, his mind denied her entry to his VanHome. The words betrayed his despair, and he realized it was futile to retract his lie.
“You’re a liar,” Eugene said. “The minute she saw you, Alexandra warned me to stay away from you. She said you wouldn’t lift a finger for me. Now I know how right she was. Get out of here!” His face still contorted, he leaned back in the chair, pulling Alexandra toward him again.
Fabian’s rage was now as uncurbed as Eugene’s. Reaching across the table swiftly with his right hand, he seized an Indian dagger that lay anchoring some papers. At the same moment, he smashed the table with the palm of his left hand, fingers splayed. In one urgent arc, he brought the dagger down and sliced off the tip of his ring finger. Blood spurting from the stump, the severed piece skidded across the surface.
As Alexandra recoiled, turning away from the table, Fabian picked up the fingertip and thrust it at Eugene.
“Here it is,” he said, dropping it and the dagger in front of him. “Alexandra was wrong: I have lifted it for you.”
Eugene shoved the bloody tip back across the table with the dagger. “You’re still a liar, Fabian!” he shouted. “Alexandra told me that, to make her drunk, you gave her your strongest wine. She told me she almost finished off the bottle. This morning, after you left for stick-and-ball practice, I went to that stagecoach of yours and, just as she said, I found the bottle where Alexandra said it was.” He caught his breath only to shout louder. “I ought to teach you a lesson in decent conduct. Get out!”
They were all standing now. The fingertip lay on the table between them, and for a moment Fabian had a wild urge to leave it there. Choking back his dread, his fury an anesthetic against pain, he reached out and picked the fingertip up, held it reluctantly between his thumb and forefinger. He almost expected it to respond to his touch, but the gobbet of flesh felt like bloodied rubber, the nail plastic. He quickly joined the fingertip to the throbbing stump and, grasping both firmly in his right hand, turned to go. Blood dribbled down his trousers and across the floor.
“You hired me to play polo with you,” he said to Eugene. “Play it tomorrow, six in the morning, and teach me to stick-and-ball any way you can. Training field. No witnesses.”
“I’ll be there!” Eugene was still shouting as Fabian left.
Back in his room, Fabian poured antiseptic over the mutilated finger, attempting to seal the amputated tip to the raw bleeding stump with a winding bandage. Pain dazed him in the car as a stable boy drove him at full speed to the hospital. In the emergency room, a surgeon stitched together the parts of the severed finger and, wrapping a bandage around the wound, reassured Fabian that there was a good chance the coupling would take and that in time the finger would be restored to use.
Fabian returned to his VanHome and lay down on the bed he had last shared with Alexandra. Later that day, feverish and a bit groggy from the injections the doctor had given him, he felt his pain yield to a mastering sense of defeat.
He slept poorly that night, waking each time his weight pressed on the wounded finger. At dawn, he walked through the misted woods to the Stanhope Stables. The morning air lifted from him the traces of narcotic stupor from the day before.
He then attended to his ponies. Gaited Amble and Big Lick were usually easy when about to be bridled, but this morning they were skittish, pawing the ground, sniffing the air. Fabian knew that they were responding to his wound: the dread of sundered flesh was a remaining link between man and beast. Anguish without ground, guilt without motive, the vice of scruples were the province of man alone.
Careful not to jar the bandage on his finger, he proceeded to select with precision the polo tack for the encounter with Eugene, almost as if every piece were an amulet of circumstance, an agent in shaping destiny—incapacitation, death or painless triumph—which could be influenced before it was brought to pass. He harnessed each pony with its double-reined bridle—ti
ghtening the noseband, checking the tautness of the bit, the curb chain and lip strap, the length of the martingale—then adjusted the slack of the girth under the animal’s belly, cinching the saddle to an exact fit, checking and rechecking the stirrup leathers, and fastening bandages on the horse’s legs. When all was in place, he brought Big Lick and Gaited Amble back to his VanHome. The smell of the stable they knew animated both ponies, and as they frisked, he checked again the snugness and fit of each saddle.
Drenched from labor and dull pain, he went inside the VanHome, undressed, and ran the water for a lukewarm bath. He sat in the tub, his bandaged hand wrapped in plastic, eyes closed, his sensations wayward, his pain the tocsin of conscience.
What he faced now was not of his choosing. He had no prior quarrel with Eugene, none with Alexandra. He had initiated no breach, sought no conspiracy. He did not see himself as a victim, bested by their hostility; neither was he impelled by an image of valor or gallantry, the avenger requiting his humiliation, the hero asserting his potency. He bore his own standard within.
The imminence of peril always evoked in him a peculiar fastidiousness. Like a dandy of combat, he surveyed his polo wardrobe, the assortment of his gear, refining his choices meticulously. He and Eugene would be alone on the field, but Fabian prepared for their contest as though they were going to play in the presence of spectators, under the scrutiny of judges, press, television. He pulled a fresh shirt over his head and sheathed his legs in new white breeches and his best polo boots, their stiff leather bracing each curve of his muscles; the resulting splendor appeared to him a conscious rebuttal to the clamor, the foaming sweat and whipping dirt of the game that was about to ensue.
He locked in place the zippers on his boots, tightened the supple leather thongs that fastened his spurs at the correct angle. Even though, quite likely, he would use only one mallet, it was his custom to take several with him, and he did so now, selecting each after he had thoughtfully tested its pliancy and springiness.
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