Passion Play

by Jerzy Kosiński

  “That’s just so sweet of you, Stuart, really. But you’d better start for town before it gets any later. I can drive home alone-it’s only a couple of miles, you know.” Vanessa’s voice was as unaffected as he had remembered it.

  “Wednesday, then? I’ll see you in town?” It was one of the men.

  “I don’t know yet,” she answered. “I’ll let you know.” The two young men got into the sedan, and one of them called out good-night through the open window before they drove off. Vanessa opened her car door, and tension gripped Fabian. He was about to speak to her when she hesitated, threw the rose on the dashboard and, with an air of distraction, as though she had forgotten something, walked quickly back to the house. Suddenly unsure of himself, of her, Fabian resisted calling after her. He watched her disappear inside the house. Waiting, he became afraid that she might return with someone to take her home. He got up, brushed wet grass and leaves from his pants, and, unwilling to ponder the consequences of what he was about to do, slipped quickly into the back of her car, drawing up his legs and clutching his arms around them, concealing himself behind the high headrests of the car’s contoured front seats.

  More than sensations, images stirred and sustained desire. Now, huddled in Vanessa’s car, waiting, Fabian wanted to reappear to her as a new presence, a fresh image to erase the familiar one. He heard her opening the car door, slipping into the driver’s seat, pulling the door closed. In the shadowed light filtering through the car’s rear window, Fabian caught only the wreath of her auburn hair above the headrest of her seat. The drift of her perfume broke over him as he heard her insert the key to turn on the ignition. The car jerked, moved forward, then swerved so abruptly that, in order to remain undetected, Fabian had to grab the seat. They passed the house, its light slashing through the car’s interior in staccato flares. She shifted again and, veering the car, picked up speed. The darkness outside told Fabian they were on a country road, and he assumed she would soon reach the main highway. Lifting his body slightly and leaning to one side, he looked between the front seats and discerned in the greenish glow of the dashboard the ghostly shells of her hands resting on the wheel.

  He could not decide what to do. How could he reveal himself without frightening her? If she panicked, they might crash. What if she were to pull a gun from the glove compartment and shoot him?

  He tried to decipher the darkness. Woods seemed to border both sides of the road, its surface rough. Vanessa was now driving warily, with a slowness that would lessen the chance of an accident if he frightened her. He would wait no more. Inclining to the right, he inched toward the front passenger seat. She had depressed the clutch and was about to shift when he loomed over her.

  She opened her mouth in terror, gasping, but no sound came; she slumped over the wheel. The car rolled forward, still in neutral. Her right hand clutched the gearshift, and her left gripped the steering wheel before her. Fabian could not tell whether she found the brake pedal by instinct or consciously, but he pitched forward as the car skidded to a halt. Only then did Vanessa scream; it was a scream that seemed to pierce the windshield.

  The headlights flooded trees; the car was pointing off the road. The oil indicator light on the panel glowed red. Fabian lunged between the seats, throwing his left hand over Vanessa’s mouth and switching off the ignition and lights with his right. Vanessa struggled under his hand, unable to turn her face toward him. He eased his grip slightly, but kept her mouth sealed. His middle finger sought the scar on her upper lip, sliding into the deep groove; involuntarily, he further eased his grip, as if fearful of opening an old wound.

  Vanessa was trembling; a wave of heat came from her body, her sweat wetting Fabian’s hand.

  “I won’t harm you,” he whispered tensely at her ear. “I won’t, I won’t,” he repeated, his hand loosening against her mouth.

  She nodded, the muscles of her chin unclenching beneath his fingers. He took his hand away from her face.

  Clinging to the steering wheel, she seemed about to collapse. Slowly, she pushed herself up and turned toward him. Her mouth opened in recognition, but she remained speechless. He moved closer, placing his arm around her. She was still trembling.

  “I gave you that, Vanessa,” he said, pointing at the rose on the dashboard.

  “Fabian!” She coughed, gagging as she cleared her throat, her voice hoarse and uncertain. “You frightened me so!” She threw her arms around him, then she pulled back, studying him intently. “You haven’t changed, not at all!” In the greenish light, Fabian saw how her scar broke the line of the lip, cutting into one nostril.

  Vanessa Stanhope had first entered Fabian’s life smiling up at him from the pages of an issue of The Saddle Bride.

  He had focused on her not only because she was a Stanhope, a name that stopped him instantly, but because of the note of seduction the photograph had arrested in her: the expressive eyes, high cheekbones, lush hair, the wide mouth, even teeth-all that exerted a command on him. Accenting her mouth was a deep cleft in her upper lip, a scar that invited speculation about her. The caption under the photograph extolled her as “a fresh and vibrant beauty, an honor student, an accomplished rider.” It also informed the reader that Vanessa Stanhope lived with her parents in Totemfield. So it was that, as Stella had earlier prompted his trip to Shelbyville, Vanessa now became the chief cause behind Fabian’s selection of the Double Bridle Stables in Totemfield. Soon after receiving Fabian’s letter of inquiry, the owner of the Double Bridle Stables hired him as a riding instructor.

  Once settled in, with his classes in horsemanship well attended, Fabian telephoned Vanessa. He complimented her on her riding accomplishments cited in The Saddle Bride and, casually alluding to his own expertise and distinction, invited her to join one of his classes.

  Flattered by his phone call, Vanessa exclaimed that she had read all his books on equitation. The following morning, with the approval of her parents and her school’s headmistress, she appeared for Fabian’s class. When he saw her, the full force of his obsession—a longing to own her—frightened him.

  She became his pupil. Watched by friends and parents of some of the other students in his classes, she would enter the arena, riding one of her family’s horses. Fabian could hear murmurs of approval, or surprise, from the spectators. He would follow Vanessa on one of the stable horses, the two of them cantering in circles, half-turns and serpentines. Years later, the image remained with him of her sloping forward in taut breeches, her thighs and buttocks pressed into the saddle or rising in a trot; he remembered her burst of laughter when he caught in midair like a polo ball in flight the training helmet that had flown off her head during a jump.

  He instructed her in how she was to follow the movement of the horse with the propulsion of her loins and back, her pelvic bone pushing now sideways, now forward or back in starting, turning, halting or backing up the animal. Sometimes he stood close to her, his hands correcting her foot and heel, then, while checking her seat, brushing the inside of her thigh; his fingers lightly kneaded the cloth of her breeches, inches away from her groin.

  Once, under a pretext of correcting her position in a canter, Fabian took Vanessa out along the stable’s bridle path. Alone in that private wooded track, they were cantering easily when he suddenly brought his horse close to hers and, seizing her reins, teamed the horses, startling them into a full gallop. Bluntly Fabian reached out and slid his hand, knuckles down, between the pommel and Vanessa’s seat, digging deep into her breeches, until he could feel her every move.

  She turned to him, staring, her mouth open, the scar pale against the color staining her face. Fabian slowed the horses and swerved them deeper into the woods. He dismounted; Vanessa, vaulting off her horse, followed. He tied up the horses, then without a word went to her. He took off her helmet and dropped it on the grass. For a moment, they looked at each other; then, lifting a hand, he laid his fingers on her mouth, delicately tracing the scar. She began to lap his fingers with her tongue, licki
ng his thumb, sucking his fingers into her mouth. Her tongue between his fingers, the palm of his hand warming against her mouth, he began to kiss her neck, then buried his face in her hair. She trembled, her teeth kneading his fingers, her body resisting, pulling away from him. He held her fast, searching the fragile shell of her ear with his tongue, coaxing it deeper, licking and darting, her heat mingling with his own breath. She no longer tried to pull away, her breath, in short spurts of fervor, breaking over the palm of his hand.

  Aroused, he wanted to take her, but his purpose was stronger than desire. He knew that if Vanessa were to come to him as he willed, it must be to imprint him in her memory; like a colt, she was to be schooled, he at the lead, she following at liberty, without rigs, harness, reins. A fresh tide of heat surged through her clothes, warming his chest. As her orgasm burst forth, Vanessa slid to the grass, her head against his thighs; he had yet to kiss her mouth, to touch her naked body, to enter her flesh.

  Sometimes, during class, Fabian would reprimand Vanessa openly in the presence of other students, citing a defect or carelessness in her riding. Signaling to her in a code of brow and smile, he would observe aloud that she did not settle deeply enough into the saddle or thrust her heels sufficiently down, or that her calves had slipped back and her elbows jutted out.

  He would demonstrate her errors in readying her horse for a jump: how, by straightening her legs too rigidly and releasing the grip of her calves, she permitted the animal to come too close to the fence, denying it space to gather momentum for its spring. Then he would suggest that Vanessa needed to practice in a larger area than that offered by the cramped arena, and he would schedule a private lesson on one of the bridle paths that webbed and threaded the sprawling woods around the estates of Totemfield. It amused him, at times, to announce boldly in front of others that he would be waiting for her at a certain time, the place confirmed, his own ponies at the ready, the lesson planned. At other times, he and Vanessa rode out together openly, taking the stable horses past the indifferent gaze of instructors with their students.

  Many of the bridle paths, once a pleasure of the hunt, were now narrow and disused, their jumping obstacles—a pile of timber, a fence, the barricade of a fallen tree—collapsed, or mottled with patches of grass and moss, ragged bushes shoring them up like bats with outspread wings. In serried ranks along the paths, monumental firs, their shaggy peaks heavy with cones, bowed.

  Soon Fabian would signal to Vanessa to turn off the path and, guiding their horses through the clawing underbrush, they would wander over the parched beds of streams, cantering along banks of sand that had caved in, past wasted trees felled by lightning. Roots dragged at the hoofs of their mounts as they lingered at the brink of humid gullies.

  The heart of the woods, a chapel of silence, was invaded only by the scuttling flurry of the tender creatures of the ground, the chaste quiver of a fawn. Spent, drained of desire by the exhilaration of the chase, Fabian and Vanessa would dismount and lie down enfolding each other, brother and sister now, leaves of the same branch.

  In the eyes of the other, each spanned measureless time, the frontiers of memory abolished. Heady with the dew of ferns, the scent of cold resin, they would talk of those hazards of the mind exposed to none until this, a privileged intimacy as limpid and inevitable as a forest brook, their revelations cloaked by branches hanging like whorls of dark smoke.

  Through these exchanges of silence and confession, Fabian came to know Vanessa as he felt he had never known another. In the wisdom with which she set aside conventions, however binding or plausible their force, in the candor with which she saw herself, she never ceased to be, for him, sovereign in her possession of a flame of life.

  There were times when Fabian was immobilized with the old pain in his back, unable to ride or to teach, confined to bed in his VanHome. After her classes let out, Vanessa would go to him, having told her family that she was studying with friends. She would prepare a meal for him and, when he had eaten, she would smooth bed sheets, plump the pillows around him. Tenderness displacing passion, she girded him with a steady flow of patience, to ensure that, as he moved, no limb would be wrenched, no nerve strained. Under her hands, he would turn onto his stomach, and she would straddle his back, her weight on her knees, her hands kneading and easing his shoulder blades, pressing into his muscles until the last knot of rigidity was gone.

  The sole grace of his age his ability to suffer quietly, he found himself contemplating whether his longing for her—the attraction of a man garnering loneliness brought by time to a crib of solitude—was the lost thread of some primordial quest of the child in him, of his need for a mother, the solace of her touch.

  After Vanessa had tended him, she never forgot to feed, water and groom his ponies. Drowsy with the pleasant rustle of her moving about the tack room or kitchen or alcove, he would fall asleep, a last balm the certainty that, when he woke, there would be tucked under his pillow or waiting next to his bed a note of love from her.

  As long as Fabian taught riding at the Double Bridle Stables, he and Vanessa saw each other regularly. Under some excuse-having the suspension of his VanHome checked or a tailgate light fixed—Fabian would leave the stables and take a winding country road to a clearing in the woods beyond Totemfield. Vanessa, alert not to be followed, would ride her bicycle toward the same retreat. She would enter his VanHome, dragging her bicycle behind, dropping it with the indifference of a child abandoning a toy, then rush to embrace him.

  Fabian would then steer the VanHome onto one of the state highways around Totemfield and drive until he reached one of those seldom-used rest areas at the side of the road. There, among trucks and other trailers, his VanHome would not be noticed.

  With the muted whirring of traffic the only intrusion of an alien world, he and Vanessa would be undisturbed, secure in the midst of his polo gear, among his books, Big Lick and Gaited Amble standing guard. Fabian knew that, because Vanessa was legally a minor, in so small a town as Totemfield the two of them had to consider the possibility of surveillance—by her parents or the staff of her school—as well as the curiosity of her friends and the nosiness of local authorities. His VanHome was not impregnable; the prospect of a sudden invasion was never to be overlooked.

  In imagining the possible circumstances of such an invasion, Fabian always considered the caprices and peculiarities of the laws regarding sexual relations wih minors. His behavior itself, he was aware, would be sufficient to support a conviction on the charge of statutory rape if it could be demonstrated that, “by circumstances and surroundings” alone, his acts had been indulged in with intent to arouse his passion; the consent, passion and sexual desire of his alleged victim were a matter of legal irrelevance.

  Moreover, the law drew little if any distinction between direct evidence and that which was purely circumstantial. Even if the girl had not been a virgin at the time she had first met him, for Fabian to be found guilty, medical authority merely had to establish that a lustful act had been accomplished with her by the accused, once only or many times, not solely at the time in question, but at any time in the past, however remote.

  In addition, Fabian knew that although a charge against him might designate Vanessa, his mature but legally underage companion, as “prosecutrix,” the law could excuse her, as a minor, from the obligation to testify should he be brought to trial. Nor could she be compelled to submit herself to cross-examination. In no scrupulous fashion, therefore, could Fabian effectively challenge charges brought against him.

  Vanessa’s hymen became in their encounters a focus of allure, of exaltation; to break its seal was the only taboo. Their love-making found license in the existence of that intimate veil. In accommodating both her virginity and their desire, they refined pleasure, amplified excitement.

  Sitting at Vanessa’s side, Fabian would bring her close. He might begin with his teeth to fret her neck, his fingers stroking its nape; she would arch up, her breath rasping. Gently he would lay her down, his
fingers fumbling with the buttons of her blouse; quickly she would brush his hand away and undo the blouse herself, yet leave it on, almost as if afraid to part with him for even a moment. He would unclasp her brassiere. However girlish its presence, the contours of Vanessa’s body were rounded and womanly; her breasts seemed small in proportion to her hips, her buttocks too full. His fingers would capture the nipples, twisting them gently, teasing, pulling, rolling them between his fingers until they hardened. He would move his mouth from one nipple to the other, then back again, sucking and pulling, until she started to squirm and moan, her head thrown back.

  When Fabian would begin to loosen her skirt, Vanessa would raise herself slightly, to help him slip the skirt off. He would spread her calves with one hand, the other between her thighs, stroking in rhythm, exciting her; his hand would quicken, his fingers sliding over the filmy fabric of her panties, feeling the crease, the mat of her hair; slowly he would stretch the fabric, revealing the flesh beneath, until, his lips swept by the heat she gave off, he would boldly bend his mouth to her flesh.

  It was broad and extended, long in shape, its outer lips spacious palms that were the mark of its beauty, lithe, fanning and outstretched, the shaft of the flesh a crest of frenzy surging under a hood. Fabian was intrigued by the bold protrusion of her inner lips, elliptical, yielding wafers, wet with her fluid. He remarked that one lip was distinctly longer than the other; she told him it was, like her harelip, a birth defect.

  Her hands splayed wide on Fabian’s bed, her legs flexed outward, the calves gently pinioned by his hands, her back lifting, Vanessa would rise lightly, as if to offer her inmost self to him. He would touch her breasts again, then gather them in a caress. In haste, listing to one side, Vanessa would shed her panties, impelling herself against his mouth and chin, her pelvis in spasm. He would kiss her, the long lap and lick of his tongue blending his own moist heat with hers. What began as a moan would swell in volume as his head bent to her, the flick of his tongue prodding the hood, in quest of the firm gland, then snaring it with his tongue, releasing it, moving lower, wedging between the inner lips that parted before him. As she plummeted to orgasm, she would open the wholeness of her flesh even wider to him, his tongue infusing her, unrelenting, until it arrived at her hymen, moving over the taut shield, then withdrawing to the chamber of her inner lips.