Passion Play

  In every town or sprawling suburb, pastoral outpost or even city where he gave lessons in horsemanship, lectured sometimes or took part in various horse shows or polo meets, Fabian kept a watch for two or three girls who would, he hoped, yield to him without mistrust.

  Sometimes as he watched a young girl off in the corner of a stable, wholly absorbed in the patient ritual of waxing, flexing, polishing, buffing the riding gear and tack that lay clustered about her, he understood that horses were another embodiment of the dolls the girls had coddled and chided in their childhood, the vulnerable babies they had nurtured in their adolescent fantasies. To horses they brought devotion and a passionate loyalty that did not falter. They cosseted them, were sensitive to their needs, anointed lovingly their lesions and sores. In the routine of grooming—the combing, soaping, brushing—they took a quiet pleasure, almost domestic. He understood, also, that with conventions of family and school weakened or discarded, myths and traditions of physical weakness and submission challenged, a girl riding at hunt or dressage, taking a jump, revealed and claimed her power to master, direct, and bend to her will a horse, a living creature so much larger and more powerful than herself.

  Quickening to ripeness more swiftly than boys of the same age, girls revealed a more balanced temperament, coordination whetted to a tauter pitch. They often seemed to Fabian a curious union of ballet dancer and gymnast, and in his classes he found that he could treat them as his equals, independent, responsible, alert, complete. He responded to their persistence, their strong motivation, a certain competitive heat. Many of them had been bred on banal tales of life in the Old West, romantic fictions and fantasies of adventures in the saddle, and they projected themselves into the roles of those pulp heroines or heroes. They were determined to attract notice: fame was the spur, and they rode to win.

  Sometimes, after the initiation had been successfully accomplished, the inoculation had taken, the brand burned indelibly, Fabian’s interest in a girl began to wane. He might have considered her a bad prospect for a future relationship, unimaginative, the life of her fantasy already depleted. Rather than waste his time arranging future meetings with the girl, or sustain her belief that he was going to see her again, he would break with her. He was wary, though, never to reject her too abruptly or with too visible finality. This he had learned shortly after the publication of his first book on equitation.

  The book, a novelty in its time, had been a considerable success; it won him a small reputation, as well as a steady flow of invitations to lecture or teach at various riding schools and academies. Among the first invitations he accepted was a request to join a house party—at which, of course, Fabian would be expected to show off his polo skill—at the Florida estate of a rich and powerful businessman, who had made his fortune in turnstiles and was celebrated for the horses he bred to race, as well as for the formidable array of breeds he maintained for polo and pleasure riding. Enclosed with the invitation was a gracious note from the millionaire, expressing the hope that Fabian would feel free to remain at the estate for several weeks as his guest.

  To adjust to changes in climate, which often affected his health and his riding performance, Fabian was in the habit of arriving for any assignment at least a day or two before he was expected. On this occasion, still in the grip of a bad cold, he had left the Northeast a week earlier to escape the height of a brutal winter.

  In Florida, when he stepped off the plane, released from the pressure of its claustrophobic cabin, soporific with the medicine he had been taking, he felt dazed by the wash of heat, the hypnotic lull of the palms, the distant glare of sand. He knew he should go directly to one of the small motels nearby, but, weak and light-headed, decided to inquire first at a horse and tack supply shop about renting a horse challenging enough for the few days’ workout he felt he would need before showing up—and showing off—at the millionaire’s estate.

  The shop was cramped, a bit forlorn, but even in his distracted state, Fabian was pleasantly surprised to find his book displayed on a counter, near a blaring portable radio. He was leafing through the book when a salesgirl came out from a back room. Impulsively, he held up the book, with his photograph on the back jacket next to his face, and asked about local stables. The girl had no visible reaction to his four eyes contemplating her, but simply told him, with routine politeness, that the owner was on vacation, that she herself had only started this job a few weeks before and that she knew nothing about horses or stables or where he might make any arrangements. Swept by a sudden vertigo, Fabian slumped against the counter still clutching his book; the medicine he had been taking, the plane trip, the onslaught of Southern heat had taken their toll. The girl hurried around to him and helped him to a chair.

  She was in her twenties, short and plump, with an open face. Her waist melted heavily into her hips. Her breasts, large and shapeless, seemed too heavy for her torso, and they shifted with every movement she made, pouring from side to side, slapping against her ribs, sloping down when she leaned over.

  She offered to call a taxi to take him to his motel, but when he told her he had not yet arranged for one, with floating neutrality she suggested that he come to her place, where he could wait until he felt well enough to move on.

  Fabian agreed. She quickly fixed the portable radio on a shoulder strap, closed the shop, brought her car around, and heaved his luggage into it. With Fabian lying on the back seat, she drove off.

  The girl lived in a one-room apartment in a housing development divided from the beach by a stretch of highway. In his feverish daze, Fabian did not object when she told him to go straight to bed, the only bed in the room, a slab of white in one corner. He undressed and climbed between cool sheets.

  He woke to a damp weight on his forehead, jolted into consciousness, unfamiliar with the place in which he found himself. The glare of a bedside lamp filtering through a plastic shade was raw on his eyes.

  Sitting beside him, the girl was impassively attentive, a blurred remembrance from that afternoon. As he stirred, she leaned forward and replaced the moist, tepid band on his forehead with the icy, welcome shock of a fresh cloth.

  “I had to wake you up,” she said, her voice without any Southern flavor. “You seem to have a fever, and you need to drink something. I found these pills in one of your suitcases.” She pointed to a small bottle on the bedside table and then, like a nurse, drew him toward her as she plumped up the pillow behind his head, brushing his face with her shoulder. He was dimly surprised to notice that his suitcases had been unpacked, the shirts stacked on a shelf, his suits, jackets, riding breeches and tuxedo all hung on a pole bracketed below the shelf.

  She brought him a cup of soup, and he drank it slowly. She watched as he washed down the pills with a large glass of orange juice. When he was finished, she turned off the light by the bed. “Now you go back to sleep,” she said.

  “Where will you sleep?” he asked.

  “Over there.” She pointed to another corner of the room. “I’ve got a sleeping bag.”

  In the dim light from the room’s single window, he drowsed, drifting on a skim of sensation: the taste of oranges and tea and some kind of broth, an egg trembling in a cup, deep tides of sleep, the murmur of words, doors opening and shutting, a sudden bark of traffic. Dreams obliterated the shapes and contours of the room he was in. Sometimes he would become aware that a stranger was lying somewhere on the floor, near him.

  Abruptly, in blackness, he awoke; alert, instantly sober, he knew at once the fever had gone. Thirsty, he got up and silently picked his way toward the kitchenette, past the girl lying curled on top of the sleeping bag, a blanket over her shapeless bulk. As the weak light of the refrigerator trickled across the room, she sat bolt upright; then, standing, trying to cover her breasts with the blanket, she plaintively urged him to go back to bed. When he refused, greedily draining the jug of orange juice he had taken from the refrigerator, she fell to coaxing and cajoling, her hand dragging on his arm. As he shook her off,
the blanket slipped from her grasp and rustled to the floor. She stood before Fabian, naked, her body softly nurturing. Unreasoning, he reached for her, drawing her close, her breasts pressing against his chest, her thighs parting. He pulled her across the room, and they fell on the bed, her hands pressing him into her belly. He took her rapidly, almost forcefully, overwhelmed by her opulence, her body unfolding to him in pleats, absorbing his weight.

  In the days that followed, Fabian, her patient, was also her lover. He was not yet strong enough to ride; instead, he would have breakfast with her before she left for the shop, then stroll down to the beach and doze in the shade, waking to sunbathe for a while, then withdrawing to the shadow of an umbrella to sleep again.

  The girl would bring lunch to the beach, her radio slung over her shoulder, and when they had finished eating, sit beside him, sometimes tossing an orange from hand to hand in mindless rhythm, sometimes reeling and unreeling a yo-yo, watching its motion in fascination. She seemed to wear no clothes other than a bleached denim jacket and shapeless pants. For these beach excursions, she was topped with an old Royal Canadian Mountie’s hat, its strap undone and trailing behind her shoulder. As she plodded across the sand, her face under that incongruous hat, Fabian thought of her as a refugee from some nameless war, forgotten, still in futile wandering, searching for a place she might call her own.

  She always stayed fully clothed on the beach. Fabian guessed that, conscious of her body, of its fat creasing in layers, she would not undress. He watched her covertly when small packs of teen-agers, their bodies lithe and tanned, easy in the sun, surfboards under their arms, passed by, giggling and snickering at the two of them. The girl pretended to ignore the mockery, but Fabian, wincing at their adolescent cruelty, felt uncomfortable and angered.

  She told her story neutrally, from a distance, almost as if reciting the history of someone else. She had been born in the slums of San Francisco, the bastard child of white parents whom she never knew. A Japanese-American family had boarded her as a foster child, but they had no interest in the education of girls and let her drop out of high school. Soon afterward, exasperated at the government’s many years of refusal to compensate them for their internment in a concentration camp during World War II, her foster parents decided to go back to Japan with their natural children. Alone, the girl drifted around the country, hitchhiking, taking occasional odd jobs, picking up stray bits of lore and skill, always migrant. She had arrived in Florida only recently, and in her tiny apartment Fabian could detect almost no testimony to her being—the Mountie’s hat, a large map of the United States, folded and smudged with use, the yo-yo, stubs of food stamps. In the bathroom, a plastic puppet suspended from a hook bobbed when he brushed past it. Paperback books, shiny and untouched, were lined up neatly on a shelf. The books—all practical, Fabian noticed, in the “how-to” vein, with nothing in common, and among them not a novel, a single work of reflection, an anthology of poems—were guarded by twin toy flags. A little sticker—“The Stars and Stripes Forever”—ran across one flag, while the other showed the rising sun of Japan on a cube of murky white.

  A bulky television set, incongruous in the cell of the girl’s apartment, claimed one wall wholly to itself. For the girl, after the routine of the shop, the drowse of lunch on the beach, the ritual of supper, it was her own rising sun, the reward at the end of the Canadian Mountie’s trail. She would hurry through washing the dishes each night—Fabian could not recollect her hurrying through anything else—and then she would settle down on cushions on the floor in front of it. Eating or yawning, she rose only to change a channel of which she was inexplicably tired or to replenish the plate of cookies that kept her company, the plastic dish of ice cream that seemed never empty, never full. She was not indifferent to Fabian, but merely unable to recognize that he might not share her delight and fascination with television, that its deafening sound and turbulent images ruled out any notice the two of them could take of each other’s presence or wishes.

  Fabian saw her as television’s faithful babysitter, standing watch over a child that never offered her an unruly face, never encroached on her world, never imposed on her energy. She did not resent that it lived a life so much more crowded, eventful and frenetic than her own. She seemed to take reassurance from its world without rank; its ordered rhythm; its slots of time; the steady punctuation of cheering commercials that reminded her of life’s arsenal of unrealized needs and wants but did not rebuke her failure to set out after them, that promised relief from pain; the unceasing parade of stars, their deaths never final; life’s mysteries exposed by lovers who marry or divorce; villains murdering or being killed; diseases that consumed or were cured; wars that began and quickly ended, planets lost and regained.

  Under the girl’s care, Fabian recovered, restored to the fitness he would require for the pleasures of the millionaire’s house party, if not for the demands of team polo there. The girl knew where he was going—he had told her of the invitation, asking about the route that led to the estate—but in his last day or two, whenever the subject surfaced, she would nod impassively and turn back toward the television set, the yo-yo unspooling between her fingers.

  On the morning Fabian had set for his departure, she drove him to a car rental agency, where, her breasts jiggling under the shabby jacket, she helped him to carry his luggage from her car to the one he had just rented.

  At the curb, after he embraced her, Fabian made no promises to see her again, to visit, to keep in touch; he could not tell whether she was resentful at his leaving. The Mountie’s hat shielded her eyes. The cackle of country and western music spilling from her radio was in Fabian’s ears as he drove away, her features already fading in his memory.

  Installed in a guesthouse at the millionaire’s sprawling estate, Fabian succumbed readily to luxury. Each day, after breakfast—sometimes at the pool, usually in his own quarters—he watched as two of his host’s many helicopters rose from a nearby field, hovered briefly in the morning haze, then began to ply their rounds, bringing guests from airport to estate. Other guests came in chauffeured limousines and in cars of every vintage and make, racing drivers sometimes at the wheel; and guests arrived by yacht or private plane or even an occasional motorcycle, no place unfilled at the day’s end, the grounds a pleasure garden where the rich withdrew to consider providence, the powerful to manipulate simplicity, the industrious to manufacture leisure, the idle to play at occupation.

  In the stables and paddocks, where Fabian was most at home, horsemen trailing Olympic glory mingled with polo players and matchless jockeys who had ridden their host’s Thoroughbreds to victory. At the pool, they socialized with wizards of industry and finance, designers from Malibu and Big Sur, political impresarios and their cronies from Washington and New York, the sharks of Palm Beach bridge and backgammon tournaments. In the evening, nightclub performers, released from their Miami engagements, dropped by to hold court, perhaps to entertain, often staying over to lend their glamour to a game of golf or tennis.

  In the lounges of the main house and on tables beside the pool, several copies of Fabian’s book on equitation had been placed. Its presence was a consequence of two or three complimentary references Fabian had made in it to his host’s achievements in international polo as well as to his splendid stable of Argentinean ponies. To a number of guests in the party, those references became a token of Fabian’s intimacy with their host, and Fabian soon found himself, at drinks or dinner or while he was watching a game, the friendly target of those who had read, or merely seen, his book and now wanted to talk to him about polo, riding or horses.

  It was here, in the seductive atmosphere of easy acclaim, that Fabian met Eugene Stanhope, who initiated their friendship with that sudden whim of the very rich, so that, before Fabian quite knew what was happening, he found himself enlisted as a friend and working as a polo partner of a man he hardly knew.

  Soon after Fabian’s arrival, the host gave a supper party around the pool, to celebr
ate the birthday of another guest, an elegant young Texan socialite, a divorcée who had settled in for a leisurely stay. Her interest in Fabian was evident—she had asked him to inscribe a copy of his book to her as a birthday present—and Fabian was just about to ask her to dance when a small group of polo enthusiasts detained him on a fine point of technique. Impatient, he lingered with them for a few moments and was edging toward his Texan quarry when a servant approached and drew him aside, whispering that a young lady had just arrived, claiming to be a friend of Fabian’s.

  Baffled, Fabian followed him through the halls to a small drawing room. There he saw her, his unexpected visitor, the girl who had nursed him through his fever, awkward amid the ghostly network of rattan, the billow of cushions, a forlorn blur against the paintings.

  Still in the denim jacket and baggy pants, but without her radio, the girl saw him and ran forward, bobbing on her short legs, the Mountie’s hat slipped down her back, bouncing. “I missed you. I had to come to see you,” she said, reaching up to embrace him. The servant, his task accomplished, withdrew discreetly. Fabian gently sat her down on one of the love seats.

  “You should have called first,” he said, kindly but firmly, sitting next to her.

  “Your voice isn’t enough. I miss you,” she replied.

  Unnerved, Fabian glanced about. Through the French windows of the drawing room, thrown open to the night languor, he could see across to the terrace, with its steady promenade of guests, couples gliding between the manicured hedges of the garden, lingering at the carved iron benches strewn about the lawn, the cool white or black jackets of the men, the women in their drifts of chiffon, trailing Spanish shawls. He was acutely aware that at any moment someone might enter the room and come upon him and his guest. Caught in alliance with a girl whose very existence elicited condescension and incredulity, he would have to introduce her; he was afraid, also, that she might subject him to further humiliation by naively volunteering her reasons for having come in search of him.