Passion Play (11 page)

As a waiter poured champagne, Fabian felt Alexandra and Costeiro staring at him. He looked quickly at Alexandra across the table. Her face shone with a soft luster, almost childlike, he
broad, mobile mouth framing wide teeth. Only her green eyes pierced intensely.

“Do you still play polo one-on-one for stakes, Fabian?” she asked with that easy, ingenuous smile.

“It depends on what stakes and against whom,” Fabian replied.

“Against me, Señor Fabian,” Costeiro interjected, leaning forward and smiling evenly. He paused, his eyes bright and hard; then, when Fabian remained silent, he continued. “Two ponies, and first to score five goals—with no time limit.” He fingered his glass; then he proposed a sum.

“That’s about three times as much as I can afford, Mr. Costeiro,” Fabian said.

“I know you write books about horsemanship and appear on television talk shows; you can’t be a poor man, Señor Fabian,” Costeiro said.

“In this country, writing books and appearing on television are vanity sports. I make my living on a horse.”

Costeiro’s eyes softened as they rested on Alexandra. Then, as if the sight spurred him, he turned back to Fabian.

“How about this: If I lose, you take the full sum. If you lose, I take one-third. Agreed?” He waited, full of force, eager.

Alexandra cocked her head, observing Fabian. No expression betrayed her thoughts.

“Agreed,” Fabian said.

“Tomorrow morning, then.” Costeiro sat back pensively. “Nine o’clock in the practice field closest to Brook Forest and the Hunter Paces trails. No spectators—just my grooms, don’t you think?”

“Gentlemen, gentlemen.” Alexandra broke her silence vivaciously. “Since I arranged this game, do I get my agent’s cut?”

“You’ll get your cut from me,” Costeiro said, all smiles.

He looked at his watch. Alexandra interpreted the signal and stood up languidly. Both men rose with her.

“Can’t I even watch the game?” she asked, pouting, draped against Costeiro’s shoulder.

Costeiro embraced her amorously. “Of course you can. But only if Señor Fabian doesn’t mind your being there.”

“Fabian is my friend. He wouldn’t lift his finger against me. Would you, Fabian?”

Fabian raised the ring finger of his left hand. Since the severing,
the wound had healed, but the finger remained slightly crooked. “For you, Alexandra—not even a finger,” he said with mock courtesy.

He watched Alexandra and Costeiro cross the room, then slowly left the club and returned to his VanHome. He climbed the stairs to the alcove and slid the dome open to the night sky. As he shed his party clothes, he contemplated the easy guile with which Alexandra had arranged this match. What was she hoping for? In the coming game, Costeiro would have advantages over Fabian: he was younger and stronger, with superbly schooled Argentinean ponies at his command. What if, to unleash Costeiro, Alexandra had told him that she and Fabian were once lovers? Wrapping himself in a warm blanket, still unknowing, he lay down to unquiet sleep.

The sun woke him at dawn, moist air cool on his face. Shivering, he looked out through the open dome. Aimless patches of fog roamed the woods, then slipped away, baring a grove of elms. Rising from the thick carpet of underbrush, the trees stood bare, inexplicably stripped of their foliage.

He slipped coming down the steps from the alcove, bruising his shoulder against the door. An accident, he wondered, or was he losing his coordination under stress? In a game, a blur, a smudge, a single break in the chain of coordination might bring him to earth.

He knew that his own apprehension and fear were hazards that might, at any moment before or during his fight with Costeiro, bend him to the humiliation of gagging, vomit or the wrenching flood and waste of the body.

As a precaution, he began his preparations for the match by quickly forcing his stomach and bowels to rid themselves of food and waste, a cleansing evacuation without pain or any other unpleasant side effects. He had learned to do this during his travels in countries where the practice of voiding one’s stomach, intestines and bladder was done at will, a recourse when people wished to pleasure themselves at table without distraction or where a failure or reluctance to continue partaking of the largesse of one’s host would be construed as an insult.

Fabian then turned on a tape recorder, raising the volume until it consumed the space around him with random songs and
melodies he had recorded from his VanHome radio, the music reminding him of an evening with a lover, an afternoon of ease among friends, a day of writing, the whiling away of a forest noon, no menace to cloud the enclosure of his thought.

He had listened to this music often, the current of his memory moving toward those interludes of harmony and light. Now, as always when he played it before a game, the music came at him like a rallying cry, a call to arms, the bugle that would alert the line of emotional defense he needed to stave off fear.

He let the heat of a bath invade him, unraveling the knot at his center. Then he lathered and rinsed his hair until it slipped between his fingers. He was careful not to burn his scalp with the hair drier, and he brushed his hair as if he were polishing it, arranging it by habit on both sides of the widow’s peak, a gesture that had become mere reflex by now, a shadow of an atavistic belief that his vigor depended on how much pelt covered his scalp.

He brushed his teeth with the firmest brush he had and the powder to which he was accustomed, then he massaged his gums with yet another brush, soaked in a solution that scaled the tissue, a prelude to the jet of water he finally shot into his mouth, laving his teeth and gums, until he felt vivified, without stain.

Then, with precision, almost surgically, he shaved, planing his skin to the polish he would bring to a night of love. There was still time to kill, and he trimmed his fingernails and cuticles, vigilant not to cut himself; he proceeded then to his feet, trimming his toenails, dislodging the dead skin that had formed around them and under the toes. Next he swabbed his ears with wads of cotton, scrutinizing the film of yellow wax, the dirty smudge that soiled the cotton, scouring the channels that curved behind the lobes.

Fabian performed all this in earnest, with diligent objectivity, as he had prepared for earlier sieges and combat, much as if his power was determined by the amount of clogging food, fat, wax, husks of dead skin and nail or decay he could strip from the apparatus of his body: a rite of purification, of priming, for the unsullied summons of the encounter.

The slight wrench of pain in his back was by now a familiar companion; he went to sleep with its pressure and awoke at its
prod. He had devised a routine to subdue and mitigate it: sleeping with a pillow under his knees, avoiding sharp or abrupt movements, saddling his ponies only when he was squarely balanced on both feet. Still, at polo or on the practice field, each time he stood up in the stirrups—a mallet in his hand, his shoulders and trunk parallel to the line of the ball, whether veering to the right, poised to strike, or swiveling at his hips, then tilting sharply across the horse to hit on the left—each torsion of his body was as adamant as the swinging of an iron gate, pushing the joints and ligaments of his back beyond the point of tolerance, risking a spasm that could immobilize him not only for the instant but for days to come.

To support his back now, he wound an elastic brace around his hips, tightening the fabric like a corset until he felt the middle of his body as an unassailable sheath. He took pleasure in that sensation of tautness and inner compression, curiously relishing the knowledge that even though he had to enlist an external instrument, he could still affect the involuntary mechanism of his body.

Ready at last, he left his alcove and released Big Lick and Gaited Amble from their stalls in the rear of the VanHome. He saddled them meticulously, strapping a bundle of polo mallets to the rig on Gaited Amble, who would follow on a lead rein, then mounted Big Lick. The practice field was about a mile away, and, relishing what time remained to him before thought must yield to habit, he began to advance on it slowly, the sun like a vast ball in the distance.

He slid back in the saddle, without will, his gaze sweeping the shallow meadows, the redolence of thyme and the tart fragrance of damp weeds pricking his nostrils. A surge of longing for the city rose within him, the anonymous lure of its streets, the vortex of men and women, of shape, feature, color making a discordant frenzy in which he could immerse himself—a mortal forest, uprooted, divested of its past, of all that bound it to earth.

He had acted always in the conviction that to master his life, to assert dominion over that indifferent span, what he must do was to shape it into drama, each scene so charged, so unrepeatable, that no interval could be permitted to divert him from the spectacle of which he was both protagonist and solitary witness.

Now it broke on him savagely that in the theater of his life he had contrived to make of himself a grotesque figure, a Don Quixote of the turnpike, a Captain Ahab, moorless in his big ship of a VanHome, and from the void at his center, a hideous, soundless laughter spilled out, derisive, racking him, buckled, polished, poised astride the horse.

Contempt for himself, for Alexandra and Costeiro, for deeds of this world and its ways assailed him like an unbearable stench, a wave of vileness he could not breach. In his imagining, the film of Alexandra in his VanHome began again to unwind, the images unrelenting, a whip of vicious poignancy, goading him to desolation, spiking and bloodying a depth of anguish in which he drifted as the reel revolved.

He shriveled at the thought of what kind of figure he cut in their arena, baffled at what distorting mirror in his vision and character had seduced him into that image of himself as the gallant knight in a tournament of passion, rather than as the paltry clown in a carnival play. The gall of life, a fever of contempt for the part he had consented to enact, fell on him with all its futile weight.

He thrust back in a panic of survival, panting, hot with sudden thirst for the drama before him, tugging at the horse’s bit, goading his spurs deep into its flanks. He punished it with the snaffle and the curb, and the animal reared as if scorched with a hot iron. Fabian began to lash at its neck and belly and flanks until Big Lick, a captive of the bit, whip and spur, hurtled forward, the heave of its bulk parrying the wind, the space ahead a promise of blows that would cease, pain that would end. Gaited Amble, behind, snorting and squealing, careened at the end of the lead rein.

Fabian arrived at the field shaken. He lifted his eyes only to halt, numb with astonishment. The field was broken up with posts and rails, oxers, parallel and triple bars, hedges and fences—the kinds of obstacles used for jumping competitions—perhaps a dozen of them placed at various angles, strewn about without any seeming order of progression.

Instantly it dawned on him what Costeiro had done, and with that rush of awareness, a throttling sense of entrapment stormed
over him, provoking a spasm of nausea, brief and intense; he steadied himself on Big Lick, swallowing in quick, deep gusts. In the distance, parked at the far edge of the field, he caught the gleam of a sports car, its top down. Alexandra, her helmeted head a white dazzle in the sun, sat at the wheel. Costeiro, spruce in his riding gear, lounged against the convertible, toying with his mallet, his head hovering over Alexandra. To the right, at the viewing stands, two grooms were adjusting the saddles of the Argentinean’s ponies.

Fabian rode across the field to the stands, where he hitched Big Lick and Gaited Amble, the ponies calm again after the turbulence of their ride to the field.

He began to stride deliberately toward Alexandra and Costeiro, trying to tug off his riding gloves, sharply aware, as his fingers fumbled with the supple leather, of how cold his hands had gone, gelid sticks, almost rigid. The air was hot on his face and shoulders; sweat brimmed under his helmet. He looked at his hands, marble with chill pallor. Their cold seemed to him a frost of premonition.

He could not tell whether his fear was a response of his flesh, in revolt against a threat to the dominion of character and will; or whether fear had usurped the very province of that character and will, exposing further some critical lesion in their authority.

What he drew strength from was a consciousness of the fitness of his presence, the note of readiness for combat that he gave off in his taut shirt and breeches, the padded leather knee guards, his thick leather boots, the blade of brass zipper that split each of them, glistening.

Coming at Costeiro in the full blaze of morning, watching the springy power of Costeiro’s shoulders and thighs, the gleam and luster of his face, how fluent with a molten grace his gestures were, Fabian had to acknowledge, envy twitching within him, what a worthy rival the Argentinean was. He remembered Alexandra telling him that what she found most alluring during her Latin American tour was the sight of the native Indian men, their bodies smooth and muscular, always hairless, flesh moving toward sculpture, sculpture mobile as flesh. The thought of Costeiro molded with Alexandra, the two of them at night together, one sculpture in love with another, rankled, yet he knew that his
envy of Costeiro was at root an adolescent urge to escape his own shape, to become, if only in transient fantasy, someone else, another being.

Costeiro’s wealth, too, was an insolent rebuke to him, and the humiliation of his own last few hundred dollars hidden in a box inside his wooden practice horse galled him. He knew he could still cancel the bout with Costeiro, return to his VanHome, stable his ponies, and wait until he was restored. There was time still to retreat to the turret of the cab, switch on the ignition, take up his own rhythm from the surge of the engine, and move ahead, slipping onto the vacant ribbon of the highway.

He knew, also, how brief was the time before he could no longer afford to buy fuel for his VanHome, feed his ponies or himself. He might soon have to put his whole way of life up for auction. Interest in his books had been dwindling for years; now there might be no serious clients to bid on his VanHome, his ponies, his gear and tack. He could live for months on the money that he might win—had to win—from the Argentinean.