Passion Play (8 page)

“In any case, your name came up recently,” said Stockey. “At Grail Industries, we feel that polo is the game of the future—the fastest and most dangerous sport in the world. Half a ton of man and horse smashing into seven other horses and players on a thirty-five-mile-an-hour collision course—and all chasing a five-ounce ball! Every second the player risks life and limb for his competitive edge! What a blitz of a game that is!” He began to warm to his vision. “Polo, the supersport: the hazards of steeplechase, the speed of racing, the violence of ice hockey, the tension of football, the precision of baseball, the challenge of golf, the teamwork of roller derby. Polo—the ultimate action sport.” He paused, pleased with himself, then continued. “The game of kings is still the king of games. If boxing, baseball and hockey made it to TV, so will polo. Grail Industries wants to underwrite international tournaments in various polo resorts and put them on nationwide television. When you have ponies famous for their prices and players famous for their looks and their high point ratings, not to mention all those celebrities brushing elbows at the various tournaments, polo will be a real winner. What do you say, Fabian?”

“It’s like no other sport,” Fabian said.

Stockey shifted his weight from one leg to the other. “Then that’s where you fit in, Fabian: a host for our series. Who could be better? You wrote books about polo. You helped write the amendments to the Horse Protection Act. You’ve lived half your life abroad, played polo all over the world. You personally know some of the best polo players.” He stopped, anxious for Fabian’s reaction.

“Whose idea was I?” Fabian asked guardedly.

“Patrick Stanhope himself asked me to track you down and sound you out about it. He’s very grateful for all the attention you gave their little Vanessa, teaching her to ride and jump so well; she’s never had a fall. Of course, not everyone was on your side.” Stockey paused. “Some polo association people—well, privately,
they say that no team will have you. That you’re the ball hawk who plays solitary, that you seldom miss a goal—and never another player.”

“I know what they say,” Fabian said.

“There’s a story.” Stockey coughed nervously, then went on. “They say you learned those trick shots as a kid, during the War in Europe, when you were forced to work on a horse in some peasant bullring, that you belong in a circus, not on a polo field. They don’t even want you as an umpire or a referee.”

“I know.”

“And I suppose you also know that some people say that what happened—well, that Eugene’s accident was no accident—that the two of you were fighting a kind of duel.”

As Fabian maintained his silence, Stockey folded his hands into a steeple, wagging them pensively. “Mind you, though, a duel—even when there’s a death—well, the law doesn’t call it murder.” His voice was trailing off slyly. “You know what I mean.”

Fabian gave no sign.

Stockey released his clasp, throwing his hands wide with a deep gusty sigh of confirmation. “The groom who was there that morning said you both played fast and rough, but that Eugene rode straight into the ball that smashed his face. What’s more, you rode with a hand badly hurt the day before!”

“I cut off my finger,” Fabian corrected him.

Stockey twitched anxiously. His teeth crept into view as he forced another smile. “Mind you, Patrick Stanhope knows his brother’s death was a plain accident. Is there any serious player who was never injured at polo?”

“I was never injured at polo,” said Fabian.

“Good for you!” Stockey exclaimed. “Although most experts are supposed to have gone through many accidents.”

“If you have many accidents, you’re not an expert,” Fabian said.

“That’s a pretty extreme view,” Stockey said cautiously. “You sound like your books, Fabian. People like to think they’re pros even when they fail.” His voice dropped. “Your books spoil the sport for them.”

“Accidents spoil the sport, not books about accidents,” Fabian said.

Stockey gave him a long reflective look. “But come to think of it, your books make you a spokesman for polo safety—and even a better prospect for our TV show. What d’you say, Fabian?”

“I’ll have to think about it,” Fabian said.

Stockey clapped him on the shoulder. “We can help to set you up in Florida—say, in the Palm Beach Polo and Country Club—and think what fun you’re going to have then! The best players from all over the world, great crowd, all the celebrities you can handle!” He handed Fabian an engraved card. “Call me sometime soon and say yes, will you?” He walked away, toward the bar.

At the center of the room, a group of women in rippling flowered dresses spooned mounds of ice cream into long-stemmed silver bowls from a raspberry-and-vanilla polo player on a chocolate-mocha pony: a mock Stanhope Tournament polo trophy. The rain that had gone in the afternoon had come back for its revenge, trickling along the glass walls of the club room, one flash of lightning pursuing another.

Unwilling to be recognized again after the conversation with Stockey, Fabian sat down at an empty table in the room’s dimmest corner. Two waiters rearranged chairs and changed the cloth.

A woman approached his table, the sheath of her gown yielding to every movement of her body. He recognized Alexandra Stahlberg.

“How are you, Fabian?” she asked with a faint smile. Her large oval eyes took on a mischievous glint as she smiled, her slightly parted lips revealing the milky perfection of her teeth.

Fabian rose. She extended her hand and he took it—smooth and narrow, firm, cool.

Memory summoned at once the pressure of her hands on him, the recollection of fingers probing, opening the way for lips and tongue. He glanced at her hands.

She caught his look. “Are you still fascinated by a ring finger, Fabian?” she purred coyly, stirring and shifting toward her escort.

“I am—by you,” Fabian said, as he pondered this second entry of Alexandra Stahlberg into his life.

In the time since Eugene’s death, Fabian had seen Alexandra many times, but only in advertisements—tempting him in an airport waiting room, enticing him from the ranks of glossy magazine covers arrayed under the harsh lights of an all-night newsstand. Once, standing in line at a public telephone, he glanced up to find himself the target of her seduction. She loomed, demanding, on a billboard that announced some new lip gloss, her chin resting on those intricately twining fingers, one of them erect, brushing the provocation of her lips, as if to signal, to silence, to alert, her eyes locked in a duel with those who gazed up at her.

Fabian and Eugene Stanhope had been friends. Eugene often hired Fabian as his partner in polo practice or matches, and they traveled in Eugene’s private plane to various clubs and tournaments around the country and abroad. Together they played against the Central Romana team of Maharaja Jabar Singh, the legendary Indian polo player, at La Romana, the resort in the Dominican Republic. On one flight to La Romana, Eugene introduced Alexandra, a young fashion model, to Fabian. She was an old friend, Eugene said easily, not troubling to conceal what Fabian could recognize at once—that Eugene and Alexandra were lovers. Later during the trip, to dispel gossip and to distract the vigilant eye of his wife, Lucretia, he asked Fabian to pretend that Alexandra was Fabian’s girl. Fabian agreed. From then on, he was frequently Eugene’s guest at Stanhope Estates; Alexandra would usually show up a day or two after his arrival for her trysts with Eugene.

About a year after Fabian met Alexandra, Eugene again hired him as a practice partner before a tournament and invited him to stay at Stanhope Estates.

A few weeks before he was to see Eugene, Fabian ran into Alexandra. She was with a French film producer; although only a casual polo acquaintance of Fabian’s, the Frenchman pretended intimacy, expressing a lively pleasure that Fabian and Alexandra, whom he apparently had known for a long time, also knew each other. Alexandra maintained a sullen silence, but the Frenchman revealed freely that he and Alexandra often traveled together, and that, with an eye to her obvious allure, he was planning to build one of his sexually explicit films around her. When with a
kiss he sent her off to go shopping, Fabian, who had been attracted to Alexandra from the moment of Eugene’s introduction, caught her anxious stare.

Alone with Fabian, the producer boasted with elaborate detail and relish about his affair with Alexandra. What he said fueled Fabian’s fantasy, replacing old images with new, spurring his initial attraction. Fabian felt he should make a determined effort to know Alexandra.

He arrived at Stanhope Estates eager to reassure her that she could trust his discretion; he would not betray to either man the critical presence of another in her life.

Eugene had been called away on a short business trip, leaving orders that a comfortable old house on the grounds should be put at the disposal of Alexandra and Fabian. Alexandra took an upstairs bedroom; Fabian moved into a room on the ground floor. He released his ponies to be groomed and exercised at the Stanhope Stables, then parked his VanHome near the house.

After dinner at the Polo and Golf Club with several players and their wives, Alexandra suggested that she and Fabian walk across the deer park sloping gently between the club and their house.

Overhead, wind ruffled the treetops, but on the sandy path, where moonlight hung like smoke, the quiet was broken only by a steady whir of grasshoppers beckoning them from the ground. Aware that for the first time he was alone with Alexandra, Fabian’s thought flowed in strands, shifting with the slightest pulse of the uncertain moment.

Alexandra broke the stillness. “I have always supported myself.” She spoke, as if to herself, in a cool, detached voice. “And as long as I am not abused by the men I live with, I choose to live with those I do.”

Fabian was quick to reassure her. “I won’t tell—”

“I know you won’t,” she broke in, “although even if one day you do, neither of them would mind. They know what they want.”

“What do they want?” Fabian asked.

The forest was dry, the air sultry, the clatter of grasshoppers incessant. A lightning bolt, swift and thunderless, carved the sky. As Fabian strained his eyes to fill in the contours of the night,
another flash of lightning revealed Alexandra, standing near him.

“I promise better than any woman in the world,” she said, “and they want to follow through on what I promise.”

They were close to their house now, about to pass his VanHome. As if she were leaving a mark in ghostly dust, Alexandra drew one finger across its surface.

“Can I see the inside?” she asked.

Fabian looked at the mesh of shadows on her face and bare shoulders. “Could it wait for another time?” he asked, confessing the impotence of reason.

“It could. But should you?”

He entered the cab of the VanHome and turned on the lights in the lounge. She stepped in behind him.

“So this is where you hide out?” She looked around the lounge, then peeked up at the alcove.

“This is where I live and work,” Fabian said.

Alexandra asked for red wine. Relieved to be able to conceal his anxiety, Fabian went to the wine rack, where he pulled out the last bottle and uncorked it, pouring her a glass. She sipped the wine slowly. Her eyes rested briefly on a boxed collection of Fabian’s polo books, but she did not reach out to touch them. She was amused by the writing chair he had made by setting a polo saddle on a wooden tripod. Lifting the hem of her evening dress, she slid astride the saddle; the movement pushed her dress up, above her thighs. She leaned back, and her mane of copper-colored hair, trembling with a sheen of light, rippled in waves over her neck and shoulders. In her shimmering dress, straddling the chair, the head of the saddle between her exposed thighs, her feet nude in their high-heeled sandals, leather straps binding her ankles, she tantalized.

With the knowingness that made her so proficient a model, Alexandra splayed her fingers over her ankles, coiling and unraveling her hands, showing the red stain of her nails, molded for exhibition, then interlocking her fingertips with her enamel-glazed toes.

Fabian watched the complicity of hands and feet, fingers and toes: all elongated, tensile, nervous, they seemed at moments like the fragile plaster features on a religious figurine, in perpetual danger of snapping off.

She raked her fingers through her hair, cosseting it as if gathering the silence of the room, then glanced into a mirror on the wall: twins, one arrested in glass, one flesh, each chary of the other. The woman in the mirror caught his stare; he could no longer watch, unobserved, the bare shoulders of her twin. Alexandra smiled.

“At work, they call me the centipede,” she said.

“Centipede?”

“Yes. Legs, feet and hands.”

She shifted to one side of the saddle, her hands on her lap, her legs drifting apart, the dress snaking even higher. She knew he could see the insides of her thighs.

“What are you thinking, Fabian?”

“I wonder who inhabits such a perfect being.”

“Take a look, then.” Alexandra slipped off the saddle, her dress slithering down her legs. She walked to the bar and picked up the bottle of wine Fabian had opened for her. Bottle in one hand, glass in the other, she leaned against a wall and looked at him. She was waiting.

Fabian felt himself at a crossroads, forced by the will of another to unsettle the harmony he had achieved between his codes and inclinations.

He liked Eugene and was comfortable in his company. Even when Fabian was in a low mood, he never resented or envied Eugene’s sturdy health, good looks and fortune. Possibly because Eugene recognized that Fabian was living his life precisely as he wanted, Eugene returned that steadiness by never belittling his own money, power and position, or by pretending that he chafed at the confinements of being rich. His wealth was like a toy he had chosen to share with Fabian; they would play with it together. It was Eugene’s co-signing of the loan that had permitted Fabian to acquire the VanHome; then a cash gift from Eugene on Fabian’s birthday had helped to pay for Big Lick and Gaited Amble. Now, by asking that Fabian be on call for him to hire, Eugene had become the chief source of Fabian’s income. Eugene was aware of the complex tangle of friendship and debt and, as if to put Fabian on a more independent footing, had mentioned the possibility of underwriting a series of manuals on horsemanship, with Fabian as the editor.