Passion Play

by Jerzy Kosiński

  “Why do you miss me?” he asked impatiently.

  “I just do,” she said, smiling, her breasts, under the jacket, pressing against him. “Have you missed me?”

  Fabian’s irritation grew as he remembered that, by the pool or in the gardens, the divorcée might be talking to another man; he had no time to lose.

  “I remember you,” he said sternly. “But I haven’t missed you—at least not yet,” he added, to soften the impact of his words.

  “Can I stay here with you?”

  He could not hide his annoyance. “Stay with me—here?”

  “Yes. Until you have to leave. I took a week off from my job.”

  He was angry now. “No, you can’t,” he said coldly. “You haven’t been invited.”

  A couple from the garden appeared in the doorway. They glanced at the paintings across the room and were about to move in to look at some photographs when they saw Fabian and the girl. Fabian shifted in the love seat, turning his back to the couple. Smiling wanly, they left.

  The girl refused to notice the implications of his manner. “You can invite me now,” she said. “I can stay with you in your room.”

  “You can’t and won’t. I don’t want you here!” Fabian said decisively, standing up. “You’re going home, and you’re leaving now.”

  She sat there, lumpish. “But why? I can help with the horses,” she said, convinced that what she wanted would come to pass.

  “You’re going home. Now,” Fabian announced, reaching down to take her by the arm. But she still made no move, and instinctively he pulled at her, suddenly rough. She winced at the pressure and stood up.

  “Please let me stay,” she said. “I want to see you. I want to see you ride.”

  “Home. Go.” He dragged her by one arm toward the door. Reluctant, her pants flapping, she followed. Outside, he steered her toward the front gates, until he remembered that he might come face to face with other strolling guests. He quickly guided her to a service road reserved for deliveries.

  “I brought my sleeping bag with me. I could sleep in the woods and just see you during the day.” There was a note of stubborn pleading in her voice. She attempted once again to embrace him; once again, he pushed her away.

  “You’re going home,” he insisted. As he pulled her remorse lessly forward, the bobbing of her Mountie’s hat kept time with their steps.

  They reached the gate of the service road. In the haze of the solitary lamp, he saw the sullen resignation on her face. He pushed her firmly through the gate and, without a backward glance, quickly returned to the main house. The divorcée was where he had left her, graceful, draped along a lounge chair beside the pool, one finger idling in his book. But she was practiced in resistance that Fabian found a challenge and the episode with the girl soon faded from his mind.

  The next morning, at stick-and-ball practice with several of the other guests, Fabian was riding along the field when a spot of familiar shape and color blinked out at him from the spectators in the stands: the Royal Canadian Mountie’s hat and a shabby jacket. In a flush of rage, he reined his horse in sharply, wheeling, then drove it straight at the stands. The girl clumped down the wooden planks toward him, eager, her sandals clapping against the wood, her shoulders plunging, coming at him, the landscape of her chest bouncing.

  Fabian loomed over her, his pony snorting, his mallet erect, almost poised to strike. A few women in the stands looked down, murmuring, amused at the mismated pair. Fabian kept his voice low.

  “What are you doing here?” he asked.

  She came closer, her face next to the horse’s muzzle. From it, a trickle of saliva dribbled onto the bulge under her jacket. She did not seem to notice; her eyes were on him.

  “I came to see you,” she said smiling. “I miss you.”

  “I told you to go home,” he said. He prodded her with the mallet.

  “I slept in the woods,” she said. “It was nice. I liked waiting for you like that.”

  He was aware that their encounter was being observed on the field. From a distant corner, two players started to ride in his direction. “You have to go home!” he hissed.

  “I’ll wait for you over there,” the girl said evenly, pointing at the woods beyond the limits of the field. “Please come.”

  “You’re going home,” he said. Bristling uneasily, his pony was quicker to pick up his agitation than the girl. She looked up at him again. When Fabian saw her smile, he knew his words had passed over her mind like yet another image from television.

  “In the woods,” she said again, as if confirming instructions. “Right behind the cactuses.” Her smile was gentle, a homage. She grasped nothing of his anger. “But if you can’t come, don’t worry; I’ll wait anyhow.”

  “Do what you want.” His voice was savage. “I won’t be coming.” He kicked the pony into a sudden turn, spraying her with dirt as he took off across the field.

  After practice, a picnic lunch was served in the meadow next to the polo field. The guests lounged on a brilliant patchwork of cloths and pillows on the grass while waiters in white jackets dispensed the generosity of the household. A flurry of sprouting champagne corks ruffled a flock of pheasants from their roost in the distant tall grasses; in pluming alarm, they streaked toward the woods.

  Fabian sauntered away from the picnic, crossing the fragrant meadow. Flushed with champagne and the exertions of the morning, he stumbled slightly at a break in the ground. The meadow gave way to a stretch of cactus plants, and he carefully began to pick his way through the shaggy blanket of prickles. In the midday blaze, a cadaverous breath rose from the plants’ spiny branches, their corpselike stems.

  He came to the end of the cactus field and followed a narrow path that led him to a bower deep within a wooded thicket. There he saw the girl, framed in bramble. She was humming a song, waiting. When she saw him, she heaved herself up, pushing her way through a maze of wild hops.

  “I knew you’d come,” she said. “I just knew.”

  As her arms reached toward him, the heat thick about them, Fabian submitted to a tide of rage and shoved her away with such force that she fell backward, tumbling into a bed of blackthorn.

  “Why did you do that, Fabian, why?” she asked, puzzled, without fear, clumsily getting up. “All I want is to see you. Please let me.”

  She was on her feet now, again moving toward him, her hair and jacket strewn with brambles and crushed white petals.

  “You are going home!” he screamed. A bird, cawing, took flight at the echoing sound. The pitiful look of entreaty on her face, her stubbornness, enraged him more.

  He began to hit her, the palm of his hand slapping one cheek, then the other, the back of his hand tearing across her face. He was screaming, “You’re going home, you’re going home.” The girl swayed, her breasts pouring from side to side with each blow, then she stumbled to her knees, her eyes misted with tears. She covered her face with her hands. “But why, Fabian, why?” she moaned, unleashing another crest of fury within him.

  Abruptly lucid, he stopped, drained, the rage spent. He raised a quivering hand to his parched mouth. Drawing breath in quick gasps, he looked down at her, prone at his feet, grass bending dreamily over her.

  “Why, Fabian, why?” It was a whimper.

  “Because I don’t want you here. That’s why! Do you understand?” Trembling, he tried to regain his steadiness. She rose slowly, small forking reeds sticking to her face.

  “Without you, my life just isn’t much,” she mumbled through her tears.

  “If it’s not much without me, it’s not much with me,” Fabian said.

  “All I want is to see you.” The refrain was unrelenting. “To be near you, where you are. All I have is you.”

  As quickly as it had fled, the fury took him again. He grabbed the girl by her hair and, twisting her head, brought his face close to hers. Her hair was sweaty and matted in his hand, her pale, freckled skin already swelling from his blows.

  “All I wa
nt is to see you, to be near you,” he mimicked, her hair still clutched in one of his hands as the other ripped open her jacket, spilling her breasts. He went on, ripping the suspenders that held up her pants, then pulling at the pants until they fell in a heap about her ankles, revealing gray shorts underneath. “I’m not your TV, you can’t turn me on when you want to!” he shouted, shoving her away. She tumbled, trying helplessly to stop her breasts from slapping about her rib cage, her fleshy thighs a rash of reddish insect bites. “Not your TV!” he screamed. “You have nothing but yourself,” he went on shouting, “and do you ever think about yourself? See yourself? Listen to yourself? You haven’t read one book, done one thing that would force you to find out what it is you want from life or what it is life still might give you.” He could hear his voice raging in the silent grove. “You think of nothing, you see nothing, you understand nothing.” He was breathless, but he went on. “You’ve got nothing to give, nothing to share. Your emotions are as crude as your body, your mind as slow as your ass, your life as empty as your feelings. Your TV deserves your company—I don’t.”

  She sat up, turning toward him, brushing the grass from her face. “Maybe one day you won’t mind me.” He heard her burp suddenly, like a child.

  “‘One day’ is a long time away. Too long for me.”

  He started to move toward the path. She scrambled to her feet, hiking up her pants, her hair rumpled with the debris of the woods, her skin mottled and livid.

  “I know you’re alone, there’s no one to look after you,” she stammered. “I’ll wait for you. I’ll be here.”

  Thought abandoned him. He stopped at the edge of the grove, turned back and walked over to her. Seizing her shoulders, he began to shake her, her head careening, her eyes lifeless, her body pulpy, jerking, her breasts bobbing as if they would break loose from her body.

  “Don’t bother!” he screamed. “Don’t bother to wait! I’ll be on another channel!” He pushed her and saw her thud to the ground.

  Sweat glazed his forehead and neck. Without feeling, his heart pounding, he looked at the blur that lay sprawled on the ground, snuffling and sobbing quietly into the grass. He leaned against a tree for support, his thoughts as shapeless and undefined as the girl on the grass.

  He turned again into the forest, dragging greedily, in gasping relief, on the air that flowed back over him. He plunged along the narrow path, crushing berries beneath his feet, staining his boots, the tangled burrs and knifing weeds pulling at him.

  Trembling still, he stopped every few moments to get his bearings, his mind a vortex of sensation: fury at the girl, a rankling resentment that he had succumbed to such a flood of obliterating vehemence. As he approached the cactus plants, a flock of birds broke cover, sallying back to the dense safety of the thicket. A brood of tiny plover, hovering, agitated, marked his passage through their covert.

  At the guesthouse, Fabian found a note, from the divorcée, slipped under the door of his suite. She hoped that he might be free, after breakfast the following day, to instruct her in polo. He made himself a strong drink and ran a hot bath, savoring the promise and intimacy of the note. As his eyes returned to the fluent elegance of the note rustling between his fingers, Fabian resolved with a certain grim finality that, whatever he might lack in magnetism or glamour, in the resonance of family or name, in money or fame, he would never again permit himself to be made the puppet of a creature so maddeningly pathetic as that girl he had just left in the woods. After his bath, he fell asleep, and the lump of the girl kept slipping into his dreams of the divorcee. Drained by the incident in the forest, he slept all afternoon and had dinner in his room, then went back to bed.

  The following morning he awoke alert, swept clean. In sanguine high spirits, he rose and dressed with meticulous care for his encounter with the divorcée. At the stables, he picked out a string of ponies for their stick-and-ball practice. He was just about to mount one of the ponies when he heard a man, scuttling along in an electric golf cart, calling out his name. Fabian, unable to place him securely in memory, stopped, with a vague tug of recollection. The man, nondescript in dress, left his cart and came toward Fabian, poised at his horse.

  “Excuse me, sir. It was I who brought to you the young lady the other night,” he explained, cap in hand, a touch of halting servility in his voice.

  “Yes, you did indeed,” Fabian said. He was convinced the man had come to announce her return. “Has she sent you to me again?” he asked coldly. He briskly checked the tension of the straps in the pony’s bridle.

  The man hesitated. He would not meet Fabian’s eyes. “In a way, yes.” His reply was a mumble.

  “Then you can tell her I’m busy,” Fabian said, vaulting onto his pony. He looked down from the saddle. “And that I won’t see her.” He pivoted his pony in front of the man as the animal frisked, eager to break away.

  “I’m afraid I won’t be able to do that,” the man said, his voice firm.

  “I think you will,” Fabian insisted. “Just tell her I asked you to deliver that message.”

  His manner stern, the servant raised his eyes to Fabian. “That’s a message I can’t deliver,” he said.

  Fabian shifted uneasily in the saddle as the apprehension rose within him that the girl once again might ruin a tryst with the divorcée.

  “All right, then,” he said angrily. “Just tell me where I can find her.”

  The man lowered his gaze. “She is at the service gate,” he said.

  Fabian squeezed the pony with his legs and cantered off along the path that circled the stables, leading to the kitchen wing.

  At the gate, he saw the morning sun blinking on chrome: two police cars, a huddle of black men and women about them. As he dismounted, faces turned toward him. He strode to the gate, noting almost mechanically the odd angle at which some of the field hands held their hats, as if in tribute. His eyes swept the crowd, grimly expecting the Canadian Mountie’s hat. He finally saw it, settled neatly on a picket fence nearby. Then he saw the girl’s familiar shape.

  Heart pounding, his throat gone rigid, mouth caked, knees braced only by his boots, the polo mallet trembling in his grasp, he moved along the road toward the fence, toward her. The small crowd, silent, parted for him. From the boundary post that marked the limit of the fence, the girl’s body swayed. He stared at the coarse, dun-colored rope that furrowed her neck, the thick wooden column climbing above her head, the empty fruit basket, yellowing straw, its load of grapefruit strewn about, kicked away when she did not want its support anymore. He saw the familiar jacket, its buttons ripped off, hanging open, the dull flesh of her breasts, her baggy pants, their suspenders drooping around her hips, the sandals, their straps cracking, their heels worn down.

  His eyes returned to her face, which had been wrenched by the drag of the rope to one side, tilted upward, her mouth open, the tongue frozen upon a lip as if to cover a scar. A butterfly, a shimmer of amber, flickering, tremulous, hovered in descent on a glassy eye that could not blink it away, defenseless before the assaulting sun. He saw the marks and bruises his mauling hands had left on her cheeks, the scratches on her breasts, the reddish patch on her thigh.

  A hand on his shoulder scalded him. He turned to face one of the policemen.

  “We’re told she came here to see you,” the policeman said in a matter-of-fact voice as he gestured toward the body with an open notebook in his hand.

  “That’s what she told me,” Fabian replied. He tried to measure his tone against the other man’s.

  “And what did you tell her?” the policeman asked.

  “I told her,” Fabian began to stammer, “I told her to go home.”

  The policeman looked up from his notebook. “What else did you tell her?”

  “I told her—to leave me alone.”

  The policeman scribbled something in his notebook. “What else?”

  “To leave me alone. Not to bother me anymore,” Fabian said.

  “That’s all?”


  “That’s all.” Fabian stood silent.

  The policeman snapped shut his notebook. “I guess she took your advice,” he said.

  For a long time, Fabian had been in the habit of leafing through The Saddle Bride, a trade journal of the horse world that also chronicled the social milieus of tournament, turf, stable and show. Each month, he would examine the feature “Ladies of Horse: Who’s Who Under Seventeen,” columns between advertisements for riding apparel and gear, notices of forthcoming meets, trivia of the track. The glossy pages would slide through his fingers: photographs of young horsewomen-jumping, at the paddock, in full show regalia, in ball gowns or riding breeches—accompanied by brief accounts of their rich and usually prominent families, the medals and competitive standings the girls had received, their parties, their aspirations and engagements, their homes, the stables they frequented, their favorite mounts. Fabian would thoughtfully sift through an issue of The Saddle Bride, selecting young women, his intention to approach each subtly and to engage in an intimate partnership.

  One summer, at the onset of school vacation, Fabian arrived in Shelbyville with a solitary polo pony in his VanHome’s stall, a Morgan acquired for a third of its value because the brown stallion had no proof of ancestry. Fabian had been hired by a group of prominent Tennessee horse breeders to conduct a series of lectures for young teachers of horsemanship, in which he would explore developments and revivals in riding and jumping. He had accepted the job because, some months earlier, he had been drawn to a photograph of Stella, in The Saddle Bride, receiving her award as champion of the Plantation Pleasure competition; the caption went on to cite her accomplishments in numerous other amateur shows of the Walking Horse Breeders Association, as well as in the Breeder’s Futurity event for young riders.