Passion Play

  Now, in her car, Fabian placed his forefinger gently on her lip, tracing lightly the furrow of the scar.

  “You frightened me so!” Vanessa said again. She glanced at him, and he caught the change in her mood; she brought her hands tentatively to her face, as if testing it for traces of Fabian’s hand. She lifted her arms and blotted the sweat on her face with the billowing sleeves of her dress. She touched a slight swelling by her mouth, then smiled. “Your left hand is a bit strong for making passes, Mr. Fabian. You haven’t become left-handed, have you?”

  “Left-handed? A southpaw can’t play polo! You’ve forgotten all about me, Vanessa,” he said in mock grief.

  Her hair tumbled in auburn disarray as she slumped against the door. “It’s been so long, Fabian! You used to tell me that you wanted to adopt me and be my make-believe father. You said we’d share our own special bond, a bond to be free, to surprise each other with freedom, which blood fathers and daughters don’t have.” She was pensive, her eyes on the darkness outside. “I felt such freedom only with you.” Slowly she turned and rested a hand on Fabian’s shoulder. “Will you promise, Fabian?”

  “Promise what?”

  “That you’ll surprise me.”

  “Surprise you with what?”

  The pressure of her hand increased, then she removed it. Abruptly, she started the engine. “You’ 11 think of something. Since I saw you last, you must have done more than pitch flowers to young ladies.”

  She shifted into gear, backed the car onto the road, and drove it slowly forward.

  She pulled up at his VanHome. He waited for her to say that she wanted to go inside with him, but she said nothing. The thought that this might be their last meeting, that she might not want him, gripped him, and suddenly he did not know what to say, how to tell her that since he had left her, he had had too little money to return to her and that now he had not expected to find her still in Totemfield instead of away at college. They sat in silence for a few moments, then, just as he was about to get out of the car, she again placed her hand on his shoulder; the hand rose to his neck, resting there, not committed to a full embrace.

  “Why don’t you take me with you?” she asked.

  Her scar was a saber cut in the night glow. He reached out and touched it; moisture tipped his finger.

  “Take you where?”

  “You used to say that one day, when I’d be free to go places, you’d return to take me with you. I’m not that little girl that visited you in your VanHome. I’m old enough, and free to go with you.” As she withdrew her hand from his shoulder, the aluminum panels of his VanHome, reflecting the headlights of her car, silvered her face, her hair.

  “I’ve thought of you often,” she said quietly. “At times, I believed you were my only reason to grow older, to mature. I’m glad you came back to give me a rose at my party.”

  He stepped out of the car and shut the door. “Tomorrow night?” he asked.

  She nodded, and the car began to crawl away.

  It was almost midnight. Fabian steered his VanHome through the city’s teeming, narrow heart, crowds spilling from its side walks into streets narrowed by double-parked cars. Policemen threaded between the cars, methodically fixing parking tickets to windshields. As he waited for a traffic light to change, Fabian reflected that, only a short distance outside this packed zone of energy, the rest of the city, muffled, was caught in the inertia of the night.

  Vanessa stretched lazily at his side and looked at him. He returned her gaze. In the stream of passing light, now sharp, then blurred, her eyes on him, the scar gleaming on her lip, she seemed tranquil, almost voluptuously at ease. Fabian sensed that, like her, he could readily succumb to the seduction of passivity, let himself flow toward her.

  He chose to rupture the mood. “How do you feel?”

  Her answer surfaced through the weight of her lassitude. “It would be nice to go swimming,” she murmured. “That would feel good.”

  “A swimming pool?”

  “Yes, a pool with lots of cool water.” She was musing; her hair tumbled over the headrest.

  They had reached a park and were driving into its leafy blackness. The VanHome’s headlights slipped over police cars drawn up discreetly along the pathways, picked out a solitary cyclist, the bloodshot eye of the bicycle’s tail light winking back at them, then a sudden flurry in the underbrush, a scramble of small animals. At the fringe of the park, they passed two men, dim shapes on a bench, tucked into each other. The VanHome glided out of the park.

  “You’ve never told me anything about your life,” Vanessa said.

  “What do you want to know?”

  “Why don’t you ever use your first name?”

  “Most people can’t pronounce it. ‘Fabian’ is so much easier.”

  “Were you ever married?”

  “My wife died while you were still a child.”

  “How long were you married?”

  “Six years.”

  “That long?”

  “Six years seems long only to someone your age.”

  “Did you love her?”

  “I was attached to her.”

  “Any children?”

  “No. We never wanted any.”

  “And your family? Where are they?” she kept prodding.

  “I have no family.”

  “How come?”

  “My relatives died in a fire.”

  “All of them?” She turned sharply to look at him, incredulous.

  “Except my parents. It was arson. One of the biggest fires ever.”

  “Is that why you won’t settle down under one roof?” She was pouting slightly, the scar a sullen blemish.

  “Roofs catch fire,” Fabian said.

  “Whom do you miss most from your past?”

  “My father.”

  “Why?”

  “Because he loved me most. Ever since he died, I regretted that I told him so little about myself.”

  “Why didn’t you tell him more?”

  “The truth would have hurt him; I loved him too much to cause him that grief.”

  “What was the truth?” The languor in her voice had dissolved.

  “When I was about your age,” Fabian said, “my family shared an old house with two other families and a single girl. She lived across the corridor from the two rooms we had, in a single room of her own. She was a factory worker, plain, ordinary, withdrawn. In the evening, after work, she went to night school, and she wasn’t around the house much. But often, when she came home and my parents were asleep, I’d sneak over to her room. We were both lonely; what we lacked in passion we made up for in urge. Usually I’d stay with her all night and leave just before dawn.”

  “One morning, when I got back to my room, I found my father—he was a professor of classical drama—in his pajamas and robe waiting for me. I was barefoot and had nothing on under my raincoat. My shoes and my clothes were near my bed. I was convinced that my father knew where I’d been, so I said nothing. What was there to say? But then he reached out to hug me, and he kept looking at me through his thick glasses, looking at me anxiously. I bent down to kiss him on the forehead, and he patted my hair, as if he wanted to find out whether it was wet; of course, it was dry. ‘Thank God it isn’t raining,’ he said. He brought my head closer until my face was next to his. I could feel the stubble on his cheek. He said, ‘On a night like this, you went out only in a raincoat? Not even a hat and scarf?’ Then he saw my bare hands, but he didn’t notice my bare feet. ‘Not even gloves? That’s asking for pneumonia!’ But he wasn’t angry—he just patted my head and trotted out in his old slippers. All my father saw was what he wanted to see. That’s how he was.”

  Vanessa was silent. His eyes on the road, Fabian felt her stare. He pulled his VanHome up short and, swerving, drove into a crowded parking lot. Outside, in the humid air, Vanessa watched him while he attached to each side of the VanHome the quarantined signs. He took her arm and led her across the street to an imposing buil
ding. At Fabian’s ring, the door, a slab of heavy stainless steel, glided open.

  A young man stood squarely before them, the powerful muscles of his upper arms and shoulders outlined in a black T-shirt announcing, in gold script, the legend DREAM EXCHANGE. He stepped back and directed them to a desk, where a young woman, in a DREAM EXCHANGE. T-shirt so snug that her nipples threatened to pierce it, asked Fabian to pay the admission price and gave him a card to sign. When he complied, she pressed a button, allowing Fabian and Vanessa to pass through a turnstile. They went past black-padded, vinyl walls rimmed in gilt, down a carpeted staircase. Iridescent panels of mottled glass, mosaics of glittering pebbles, peacock-hued and lighted from behind in subtly suggestive shapes, threw a rippling, splintered glow on their path.

  “Who’s allowed in here?” Vanessa murmured.

  Fabian held up the membership card and read the small print aloud: “Valid for any man and woman of legal age who enter as a couple, contingent on the payment, in cash or by credit card, of the full price of admission. Initial admission fee confirms membership in DREAM EXCHANGE. for a period of six weeks and permits members subsequent admissions at reduced rate.”

  “If it’s open to anyone, why the membership?”

  “As a club, DREAM EXCHANGE. is free from most regulations that govern places serving the general public.”

  “What do you get for your membership?”

  “Free drinks, free food—and of course, the free use of other areas set aside as meeting places for consenting couples.”

  “Consenting to what?”

  “To a certain way of being with other men and women.”

  They stood at the brink of a steamy cavern, the air beating with an urgent disco sound. The cloying odor of marijuana, mingled with vaporish trails of cigarette smoke, hung over a raised oval dance platform, where a crush of men and women jounced under strobe lights.

  Almost half the dancers were naked and barefoot; others wore slips or swimming trunks or towels; only a few danced in street clothes. At the edge of the platform, two women moved in a steady rhythm, each twining her arms about the other’s neck, their bare breasts in contact, their mouths joined in a kiss. Near them, another woman, her hips bucking, reached down and, without losing the beat, clasped her naked partner’s organ, gently twisting and tugging it, then crouched, burying her mouth in the wiry hair on his underbelly, nuzzling the insides of his thighs.

  Other people, many of them naked, lolled on sofas or stood leaning against the mirrors that framed the room, watching the dancers. A man wearing a towel tucked around his waist snapped his fingers to the music while his partner, a naked girl, observing herself impassively in a side mirror, cupped her hands under her breasts, lifting them, pinching and squeezing the nipples. A young man, cradled between the knees of another, rubbed himself in long, slow strokes. From a couch, a woman glanced at the men, then trailed her hands up and down her thighs, along dimpled fat; the muscles of her stomach contracted; lost in sensation, she closed her eyes as she slid one hand between her thighs. Her gesture was beautiful, though the woman was not; and Fabian admired it.

  Shifting in surprise and fascination, Vanessa moved closer to Fabian. A streak of cobalt light, bluish, flared on the whites of her eyes, veiling the pupils; rebuked by the mystery of her face, it illumined only her body.

  “Who are these people?” she asked.

  “Just people, their appetites traveling without break between desire and gratification,” Fabian said. “When DREAM EXCHANGE. first opened in New York, television and the papers announced that it was the most infamous orgy palace since the last days of Pompeii. Thanks to their coverage, it quickly became more famous, and soon DREAM EXCHANGE. opened up branches all over the country.”

  He led her past bodies glistening with sweat on couches, bodies stretched on mattresses or pillows banked against the walls, bodies kneeling or curving beside each other, bending, moving above or beneath one another, sliding from kiss to embrace, lips to groin a damp circuit of voyage and return in the misty air.

  “My friends would never believe me if I told them what people do here in public,” Vanessa said.

  “When we disbelieve what others could do, we end up disbelieving what we could do ourselves. That’s how we’re punished for our failure to imagine.”

  “Have you been here before?”

  “I have,” Fabian replied.

  She spoke after a long silence. “Have you ever made love in this place?”

  “I have.” There was simple declaration in his voice.

  “Did you ever share a woman here?”

  He nodded.

  “A woman you brought here?”

  He nodded again.

  “What made you come here with her?”

  “A need to change,” Fabian said evenly. “I felt stagnant, a tired actor in a dull play—every night the same entrance, same lines, same stage. Here, at least, the stage was different.”

  DREAM EXCHANGE had entered Fabian’s life some years back. One night, the owner of a well-known stable on the East Coast, a generous and expansive host, invited him to the benefit performance of a singing star, once legendary, whose recordings now no longer led the charts and who had not appeared in public for years.

  When Fabian and his fellow guests took their seats, toward the front of the auditorium, he was curious to note the presence of a broad cyclorama, a bandage of white across the stage. Suddenly the hall darkened, and the cyclorama was swept with a wash of color and light, a film that splashed images of the star in an unrelenting tumble: the star in close-up or at Olympian distance, as an infant in her mother’s arms, a child in school, a nymphet, a leather-clad teen-ager—advancing seductively, retreating provocatively, frozen in gesture or careening in speeded-up movement—her bust for drugs, her arrest and conviction, her imprisonment, her release, her marriages, her divorces, her children, her record hits, her movie roles, her figure filling the screen, an icon above audience and stage, then diminishing to a magnetic, throbbing dot as her voice rose from a whisper, gathering volume, swelling, magnified by the sound system almost beyond the audience’s endurance. Fabian felt invaded—his clothes, nostrils, skin—and bound, not only by the strip of images, but by the intersecting beams of light that remolded color, shape, sound into a whirl of sensations.

  When the star herself finally appeared on stage, she seemed to Fabian to have been born of and from and into the images that had preceded her, a Venus rising from the foam of technology. Now, her voice and her songs hardly mattered: she was as triumphant as the images that had heralded her.

  From the orgiastic turbulence of that spectacle, in the heat of that frenzied, stampeding audience all roused to a pitch of exaltation and surrender by an elaborate strategy of invasion and manipulation—an impact that no single effect or device, however powerful, could have achieved—Fabian drew back.

  He understood the radical mutations that techniques of light, sound and projection had wrought upon her performance. He realized that, against the drama brought about by technology, the contours of his life had gone flat, the secret pulse of his energy and quest slack, without spirit.

  Not long afterward, Fabian arrived at the reality of the sex clubs, the elaborate fraternity of health spas and massage parlors and baths, DREAM EXCHANGE was only one of them, a link in a network of establishments, national in scope, that were opening in response to changes in habits of intimacy. For some time, within the familiar domestic boundaries of living rooms and bedrooms, men and women had had access to a prodigality of images, first in various pictorial guides to the joy of sex and unabridged “how-to” manuals of love-making, in a book or on a video tape, ordered through the mail, then on cable and even regular commercial TV, in films that once had been confined to the movie houses and peep shows of the aggressive, even lawless, sexual combat zones in a few large cities. At newsstands, in drugstores, at airports and bus stations, any adult person could now buy magazines—slick or pulp, chic or gross, expensive or ch
eap—on every aspect and variation of sexuality. In the torrent of images, no possibility went unexamined.

  The sex clubs offered the next stage for the exploration—and exploitation—of the new intimacy. Fabian was among the first to accept the offer.

  When, at dinner or a party, in a riding competition or during one of his seminars, usually among friends but not always, Fabian came upon a woman who attracted him, he would invite her to the theater or a movie, to dine with him or have supper. Later in the evening, he would propose that she accompany him to DREAM EXCHANGE or a club like it. Possibly because his invitation was always extended with decorum and detachment, in language and manner divested of palpable sexual intimation, it was seldom refused.

  Inside the club, Fabian would take his companion first to the locker room which adjoined the dance floor. There, against rows of regimental gray, the metallic bark of metal snapping open and shut around them, he would suggest that they disrobe and go out in towels only. Though they were surrounded by men and women who were naked or half-naked—adjusting their towels or preening in DREAM EXCHANGE T-shirts—the woman often held back, shy, reluctant. Fabian would point out that she should expect to feel uneasy about undressing for the first time in a public place, but that her nudity in the club, among other nude people, would not leave her uncomfortable: the mode of dress there was undress. In a world of panties and socks, of jock straps and brassieres, men and women, fresh from the showers, stood drying themselves, confirmation of the truth of Fabian’s observations. The woman would usually begin to disrobe—her first commitment to abandon herself to the situation.