Passion Play

by Jerzy Kosiński

  Patrick Stanhope stumbled slightly as he rose, and when Fabian steadied him, he felt the other man’s rush of feeling, unstoppable, his arms closing in clumsy relief around Fabian.

  “But remember,” Stanhope said thickly, “she’s easily hurt; don’t make her feel rejected.” He stepped back and looked at Fabian, stressing each word. “Try to make her know you’re leaving her because you have to—because of a commitment,” he faltered, “to your way of life.”

  “Vanessa knows me quite well,” Fabian said. “She won’t have to ask me why I am the way I am.”

  Stanhope was recovering now: the executive overtook the father. “I think Vanessa ought to leave Totemfield. With you gone, she won’t stay here one day longer anyhow—the memories are all wrong.” Action and decision had rallied him. “I’ll arrange to have her flown to her aunt in Virginia tomorrow, then send her on a long trip abroad.” He stretched his arm and led Fabian briskly to the door. “Time to get back to the party,” he said, the automatic smile returning. “Somebody might think we’ve eloped.”

  In the library, Vanessa again attached herself to Fabian, at once basking submissively in his presence and yet radiant in her claim on him. But Fabian felt a decisive shift in the atmosphere. Warmth had supplanted Doris Stanhope’s earlier amiability; Patrick Stanhope was almost effusive on several occasions, bringing Fabian forth as a family friend. Only Stuart Hayward kept his distance, ignoring Fabian with studied politeness.

  Vanessa registered the altered mood of her family, puzzlement yielding slowly to resignation.

  The Stanhopes were to attend, with others of their guests, a charity dinner later in the evening. As they prepared to leave, Patrick Stanhope insisted that, if Fabian were to depart on the following day, before they awoke, then he must return for another visit soon.

  Stuart Hayward remained in the library, sullen, trying to arrange a moment alone with Vanessa. As she moved away in rebuff, Fabian went to her, whispering that he wanted to see her and would wait for her in his VanHome. She nodded.

  He left the house and went out, back through the cluster of trees. Shafts of light from the main house threw the sculptures on the lawn into somber relief. From the side of an upstairs wing, cubes of brightness shone into the night.

  At his VanHome, he left the door open, switched off all the lights and stretched out on the sofa in the lounge. He was waiting.

  The image of her face returned, the surprise and hurt that had twisted her features when he said he would be leaving in the morning. He thought of Vanessa in the evening gown, the womanhood that was hers now, the assurance with which she had fended off young Hayward.

  Fabian wondered how she would come this time. Would she slip out of the main house, through the darkness, the welcome fugitive noiselessly invading his VanHome, a small girl tempted by the game of hide-and-seek, perching somewhere in the lounge or the galley? Or, would she tiptoe up to the alcove or along the corridor to the tack room, lurking behind the wooden horse or in the stall with the ponies, signaling her presence with a first deliberate hint of sound, alerting him to the spell of the hunt?

  “Why are you leaving me?” Vanessa’s voice came at him as if from above, detached from a body that he could not see. He sat up and reached toward what he thought was its source, but she was not there. He was reaching out into vacant darkness, a blind man without his cane.

  “Why are you leaving me?” The voice came again, below him now, as though muffled by the floor. He fell to his knees and crawled silently toward the sound, one arm extended, an antenna.

  “Why are you leaving me?” Now her voice was muted, drifting from behind the galley or the bathroom. He began to move swiftly through his VanHome, surprised at how well another might know it, even in the dark.

  He reached the stairs to the alcove, certain that she was waiting for him in his bed. He was about to walk up the stairs when he was arrested by a sound; it came from a small cleft between the tack room and the stall, a secret area Fabian had turned into a sleeping berth, a hideaway that he had devised solely for Vanessa in those days when, insisting that they both be naked, she had rushed to be with him, and he had agreed to her demand, confident that the berth, opening into the tack room through a concealed door, would protect them and allow them time to dress or to stay hidden should anyone intrude.

  He reached the tack room and pressed his face to the hideaway’s door. Even before he heard her breathing, the sense of her presence came at him. He began slowly to open the door, but suddenly it was pulled open from within, and he was swept in. The light above him went on abruptly.

  Vanessa was naked, her gown and shoes heaped on the shelf high above the berth. She did not repeat her question, but came to him avid for his touch, the heat of her mouth dry, her cheeks burning, her eyes seeking out the answer he had not given her.

  To escape that scrutiny, to impel her back to herself, he laid her on the berth. Vanessa’s gaze was still on him as, grounded between her thighs, he watched her, his face hovering above hers.

  There was a moment when her tension alerted him, compressing and inciting her as it sought release, a force opposing his presence in her depths. Her breathing came in tidal spasms, the rhythm of each tide broken, now impetuous, then spacious, the beat of it persistent, her tongue sliding urgently along his fingers and the palm of his hand. Her nostrils distended, her only sound was a sigh, a spill of air warming his hand and face. As he raised his eyes to gauge her sense of him, she broke into a wrenching gust, a volatile pitch constrained no more, unbound, fusing in flight with the air about the body to which it had been captive. Her stare slid over him, tears anointing her nose and lips, falling over her shoulders and breasts, a salty flow merging with the other, remote fluids of her body.

  Now the rhythm of sobs was unleashed, its pulse inconsistent, her breath imprisoned. He saw that her face, pale now, was no longer turned to him. She lifted herself, her feet and hands away from him, but just as he was about to reach out for her, to reclaim her to his touch, to her sense of him, she fell back, the sobbing gone, her breath fluent, tears pendant from her eyes.

  “Why are you leaving me?” she murmured, his silence and his hand on her body the only answer she wanted when she fell asleep in his arms under his hand, a child tired after a long voyage.

  At dawn, he attempted to wake her, to tell her that she would have to return to her own bed in her own house. But she refused to stir and bound herself tightly in his plaid blanket of coarse wool, only the hand that had drawn the blanket over her body and face resting limp on top.

  Beyond sleep, Fabian sat next to her, guarding her rest, aware that, if compelled to relinquish that last moment at her side, driven to retract it in time, deny it in memory, he would rather have renounced what was left of his life.

  He dressed and went to the cab. He sat down behind the steering wheel, a captain about to take again to the sea, switched on the ignition, and felt the warming engine send a tremor through his VanHome.

  He opened the windows. The morning air blew Vanessa’s scent from his face and body. He heard the muted snorting of his ponies, chafing at the long confinement in their stalls.

  He shifted into gear; the massive trunk of the VanHome shuddered and moved. He guided it quietly around the house, near the main entrance. He left the engine running while he went back through the lounge, the galley, the tack room, to the berth where Vanessa was still sleeping, just as he had left her, her hand on the blanket. He slipped his fingers between Vanessa’s body and the sheets, wedging his hand under her, receiving her weight, lifting her gently. He brought her to his chest, and held the inert warmth of her body there a moment. She opened her eyes.

  “It’s time,” Fabian said.

  Knowledge of what he meant dawned on her, and the two of them looked at each other, pain the only presence in her face.

  He put her down and reached for her clothes and shoes on the shelf above the berth. In silence, he held them, waiting for her.

  “You wo
n’t come back to me anymore, will you?” Vanessa asked, huddling in the blanket.

  Fabian avoided her eyes. He let his memory wander over her hair, her shoulders, her hands, the rough blanket that separated her from him: she had already gone beyond his reach. “No I won’t, Vanessa.”

  Awkwardly, she gestured with the blanket cloaking her. “May I keep this?” she asked.

  “You may.”

  She walked ahead of him, padding barefoot through his VanHome, her hands kneading the blanket. In the lounge, she waited, her eyes lingering for a moment on the staircase to the alcove.

  Then she was at the door to the cab.

  She turned to face him, her eyes a screen of tears. She caught her breath sharply, her teeth trapping her scar.

  “Good-bye, Fabian,” she whispered. She reached out blindly for her clothes, her shoes. The blanket opened on a shimmer of her breasts, then closed.

  Suddenly, she was gone. At the door of the house, she did not turn to look back. The door closed behind her.

  He drove through the streets of Totemfield, noting mechanically the road to the Double Bridle Stables and the other road, to Betsy Weirstone’s, the deserted shopping mall, an occasional gas station intruding on the monotony of highway and field. Finally, he turned into a road that took him past the abandoned railway station, past the garbage dump, deep into the woods.

  The route he took now was familiar, still unpaved, a track of wilderness. He had traveled it often when he was teaching at the Double Bridle Stables. It led to a clearing in the woods, broad enough for his VanHome, the ground firm enough for its weight, a traction for its wheels, the brush and trees a ready camouflage. Now, again as he had done in the past, Fabian backed into the clearing, facing the road, ready to drive out as quickly as he had entered.

  The clearing seemed unchanged since he had been here last. Beyond its shallow plain, the stretches of land were dappled with milkweed and mayapple, with spongy beds of cypress; from the stubbly fields pungent with the tartness of autumn, the tide of memory, of waiting for Vanessa, broke over him, as he listened, even now, for the faint signal of the bell from her bicycle.

  He wondered why, when he had come here for the first time, so many years ago, he had not paused to search himself as closely as he had searched this clearing; and whether, if he had, he might have foreseen that he would come back here time and again, that no matter what he sought, he would always find himself, alone in this clearing. Now as then he felt the inexorability of the past and was baffled by his failure to thwart its cycle of repetition.

  The weight of memory, of his own thought and fatigue, overtook him. He dragged himself up to the alcove and onto the bed. He remembered his ponies, hungry and untended for so long, as he drifted into sleep.

  Fabian woke at midday. In the bath, the reality assailed him, as scalding as the water on his body, that until now, whenever he had left Vanessa, she could be certain of his return. Now it was she who would be leaving, and he could be certain that, lost to her future, she would never return.

  Time would no longer be the span that had passed since they had been together, and no more would he be the architect of time, devising a form to arrest its ceaseless motion. Chaos spilled in on him again, a tangled maze of action without intent, emotion, wanton and fugitive, closing over, sealing irrevocably the serene space of that morning at the Double Bridle Stables, when he had first seen her.

  He wanted to speak with Vanessa once more, a last time, even though all that was to be said between them had already been said many times. What he longed to tell her, could say to her, eluded him in his solitude. He knew he would not want to say anything that might disturb or wound her.

  He acknowledged the nature of his despair: confronted by the reality of her feelings for him, he could no longer sustain the image of himself as the heir to her time, the witness and sole chronicler of her history as a woman, the image of the two of them as the reef that divisive time, healing one wound and inflicting another, could not wear down. To give her the right to confront her life on her own, he had to unfasten the chain that bound her to him. The spring and hidden purpose of what he had done so many times, of what was now the only reality of his past binding him to his future, broke on him—how, at times, in the middle of the night, when he chanced upon a hospital, a home for the aged and abandoned, a warehouse for those whom the world had discarded, he would stop his VanHome, lock it, and go there.

  Once inside such a place he would ask for the doctor in residence, a nurse in charge or a guard on duty. He would introduce himself as a man in transit, a horseman to be sure, but a writer too, a teller of tales, stories about people who ride horses, stories it would please him to give pleasure with, gladly tell to one who, at such a late hour, was lonely, could not sleep and was willing to listen. His credentials established, Fabian would be escorted through corridors and lobbies to a post between oxygen tanks, kidney machines, the grotesque armory of weapons in the defense of what was least defensible, most vulnerable—life, solitary in its evanescence, the flesh in decay, beyond healing, a cancer in the innards of time, death having already dispatched its calling card, the pungent scent of mortality.

  Here was the regency of pain that imprisoned time, drugs that could numb and stupefy, its only challenge, television’s images and sounds no longer a distraction, the presence and voice of a visitor a ritual in useless mime, one’s own imagination the sole messenger of consolation. Intent on the shape before him, Fabian would address himself to a man or a woman, on occasion a child—not to be cured, but breathing still, thought alive—as a traveler, with time and inclination to spare, eager to meet one who was, like him, traveling, but merely on a different path. He would settle in a chair and begin to tell some fable of his own or of another, his VanHome once more on the trail of life, of time lived or time left behind or time still to come, of nature that exacted and then forgave, of man’s greed and man’s love. He would set the stage for the play of passion for one for whom passion was no longer a play, for whom it had lost fascination and allure, mystery and enigma. Always careful to keep his fantasy in check, so as to release the imagination of his listener, Fabian might explain the art of horsemanship, talk of strategies of combat to one for whom victory was beyond reach, chronicle the embraces of lovers to one who would embrace no more.

  Fabian dressed quickly, snatched a handful of coins for the telephone and rushed to the stable at the back of his VanHome. He prodded Big Lick onto the path outside, saddling it in frantic haste, and, once mounted, threw it into a gallop, panic choking him at the thought that he might be too late, that Vanessa might already be on the plane.

  The sandy road reeled past him, muffling the beat of the mare’s hoofs, a track of dust rising from the earth to cloud and pursue him. He reached the telephone booth just as it began to glow in the afternoon sun. Now his panic encompassed fear that the telephone might not be working. He fumbled for a coin, found one, then, trembling, dropped it into the slot and dialed. The signal began, an electronic cadence, a long spill of sound sliced by silences that punctuated his anguished impatience, the phantom of the telephone in Vanessa’s study ringing, the sound piercing the quiet, Vanessa rushing, her hand reaching for the receiver.

  But the signal continued. He could not bring himself to believe that she was gone, that he had missed her, that the words she had spoken in his VanHome were the last he would hear from her. He hung up abruptly, let the coin return and dialed again. Now he could not be shaken in his conviction that Vanessa had answered just at the moment he hung up and that the line would be busy.

  The line was not busy. The signal went on—a moment, perhaps two, time an astringent on his heart, while outside, unperturbed, Big Lick nuzzled the glass wall of the booth. Standing with the receiver in his hand, hearing the insolence of its monotonous signal, Fabian knew that time had blocked his path, that it was too late to return to his VanHome and drive it to the airstrip. He bolted from the booth, mounted the horse and, cutting through the
woods, raced for the airstrip. He took a shortcut, following the path that ran along the abandoned railway, a road he had taken only once before, frantic as he saw it narrow after a mile or two, clogged with empty barrels and abandoned, corroded cars. His only goal now was to go fast, faster still, straining Big Lick flat out to jump the barrels, careening through the hulking rubble, hoofs hacking at the skeletons of glass and metal.

  The railway line ended in brush that was its frontier. Beyond, the airstrip spooled out, a shimmer of heat and asphalt. A small two-engine jet was the only plane on the strip. Readying for takeoff, it was slowly bearing down on Fabian, and even before the plane swung to turn, its colorful corporate symbol glinting on the silver bulk, Fabian knew its passenger. Now despair gave way to regret, and Fabian no longer thought of Vanessa: all that mattered was his horse, freed from the oppression of the brush, ready to race. He started along the runway, Big Lick unrestrained, whipping the withered grass to a fine dust. Fabian came abreast of the plane and glanced at the windows, a row of one-way mirrors. Its engines roaring, the plane started to roll for takeoff. As it wheeled past him, the mirrors of its windows winking, Fabian imagined the pilot turning to Vanessa, directing her gaze to the runway, relishing what he saw. “Take a look, Miss Stanhope! You don’t see many of those anymore!” he would say. Vanessa, her forehead bent to the cool glass of the window, would catch sight of a man on a horse, streaming along the black strip of runway, the man’s helmet, shirt and breeches all white, his horse black, the run of the horse unbroken, the rider tilting, as if charging with a lance, in combat with an enemy only he could see.