Passion Play (2 page)

Powered by its smooth diesel, Fabian’s VanHome, an ingenious hybrid of truck and trailer on its nine pairs of wheels, seemed to glide over the highway like a Hovercraft.

Shielded by large windows opaque to the world outside but transparent to the traveler within, a man could proceed from its spacious driving cabin to a sitting lounge, a versatile and carefully equipped studio for work, to an alcove above the studio, with a full-sized bed—a double bed, under a sliding transparent Plexiglas dome. Next came the galley, nautically precise, from which a narrow passage led to the bathroom; finally, passing between flanking storage compartments on both sides, he would arrive at his ministable, which housed his two horses. What Fabian’s VanHome announced was the dignity and economy of a free man who cared about moving fast and about his own well-being and that of those creatures under his will. The VanHome was a veritable mobile showplace, and the delight it afforded strangers confirmed Fabian’s taste, enhanced his own sense of reality. Its beauty was like the charm of a woman passed on the street, her image crystallizing a desire for something one had not before imagined.

In his VanHome Fabian could go anywhere but to the top of a business or profession that demanded the predictability of a permanent address. Any point on the country’s map was his potential address, and any community his place of rest. He carried the
who’s who
of the country’s polo players, horse breeders and stable owners, many of whom he had met in the past, as well as directories of city, community and private stables, of public and private parks that allowed riding, of garages high enough for his VanHome, and of motor-home recreational areas.

Fabian, who could afford only a second-hand motor home, had kept an anxious eye out for it, alerted by an advertisement cut from one of the horse and polo magazines. He kept calling the dealer, offering payment, but he was able to raise only half the price.

The VanHome had been built to order in Oklahoma, commissioned by a young Texan who resisted his family’s plan to make him settle down. Instead he decided to stay on the road, taking with him his girlfriend and two of his favorite horses. With the girl he played all the while; at polo, whenever he could find a field and a willing team.

Perhaps what set the young Texan originally in motion was that legend of Cortez’s conquest of the Aztecs, who, having never before seen horses, took mounted men to be invincible gods and yielded up their kingdom to him; but, immured in his metal-plated VanHome, the young Texan could not quite see himself as a new conquistador of America’s highways: boredom set in. After three years of living in and driving his mobile home, he put it up for sale. For a while, there were no buyers. But finally, with a bank loan, Fabian was able to meet the price. The VanHome belonged to him at last.

Just as he prized his VanHome for its compact and economical mobility, so also he admired the horse, a creature superbly engineered for stamina and utility. In the odyssey of landlocked man, the horse had been the oldest craft of voyage, the most prophetic ship through space. Man astride his mount—even that first man, his horse at a full run, its hoofs cleaving soil and space—had been the original passenger through air, the traveler borne by winds. To the horse, man had always entrusted the foundation of his support, his legs and his seat, permitting only that animal such
intimate access, allowing the horse to intercede between himself and solid ground. The horse carried him and his tools to work; it charged with him in battle; it permitted him his games of racing, hunting, jumping; it performed for him in a riding school, a show ring or a circus arena. And in polo, the horse shared equally with man in his oldest recorded ball game.

A professional polo player, as fascinated by the animal as he was by the game, Fabian reasoned that, if once man had traveled on a horse, or his horse had pulled him in a carriage, then now, in the era of the automobile, it was time for man to carry his horse with him—in a motor home.

Fabian reached the outskirts of a city. Acre on acre of cemeteries seemed to surround it; the dead watched the city like massed troops waiting for a fortress to submit. Against a smudged horizon, behind the giant ant hills of the city dumps, skyscrapers were strewn without pattern. He fixed to each side of his VanHome a sign that read
QUARANTINED
. The signs had proved useful: thieves kept away, and so did pedestrians and other drivers; but if he needed help sometimes, the signs let him more readily muster it.

Nature opened between men the chasm of forest and river, but a city offered that solitude which was not only freedom but refuge. To Fabian, a city was always a place of deliverance. Here in this enclosure of touch, of sidewalks, subways, buses, theaters, hospitals, morgues, cemeteries, where flesh was always only feet away from flesh, all streets led to his psychic home.

The city was a habitat of sex. Fabian speculated that if nature had given humans, in proportion to their size, the largest and most developed organs of sex, it had done so because, of all mammals, only they could keep themselves in a state of perpetual heat. Sexuality thus became the most human of instincts. Life gave them the fullness of time, to think and to do, to lust and to act. Because those powers were suspended in sleep and were to be retrieved in sex, Fabian divided his life into the sphere of sleep and the sphere of sex.

In sleep Fabian was time’s hostage, in a prison which muted action, now inviting dreams, now forbidding them entry. Sex liberated him, giving language to an urgent vocabulary of need,
mood, signal, gesture, glance, a language truly human, universally available. Sleep was the expression of his life’s inner design, sex its outward manifestation. In sleep, he existed for himself; in sex, for others. Thus, sleep imposed; sex proposed. He refused to think of “sleeping with somebody” as synonymous with having sex, the bed in which sleep and sex took place being often their only point of communion.

Sleep came easily to him, and it was deep; his sexual urges beckoned often, their span very brief; he went about their fulfillment as in the crafting of an artwork, ultimately independent of the artist’s own life. He did not see himself as sexually desirable; to be given sex was a favor, and he was always ready to return one favor for another—the gift of a meal in his VanHome or in a restaurant, a ride on his pony in some park, advice or money.

Recently, Fabian had noticed blood in his stool. Though he felt no pain or discomfort, he went to a hospital to be examined.

He parked his VanHome in the parking lot reserved for hospital personnel and suppliers, and replaced the signs on the sides of his vehicle. They now read
AMBULATORY
. Fabian’s experience had demonstrated that the word, even though meaning “itinerant, capable of walking or moving,” evoked in the collective mind of street and highway the image of an ambulance, contributing in his absence to the safety of his VanHome.

In the examination room, a young black nurse told Fabian to prepare for the enema he required before the examination. She asked him to take off his boots, jeans and underwear. Half-naked, he felt old and inept, his shame fused with self-pity. She asked him to lie down on his side on a cot as she inserted a nozzle. He could barely hold the fluid rapidly entering him. About to finish, unconcerned, the nurse told him to retain the fluid for five minutes. He turned around and saw her shapely calves and knees, her thighs firm under the uniform. He wondered whether, in approaching her outside the hospital, he would do so as an obscurely humiliated patient, as the invulnerable man he felt himself to be in his VanHome, or as a potent athlete sitting on his horse in a polo game.

Alone in the brightly lighted toilet, he noticed that his pubic hair had begun to go gray. This surprised him: the last time he had consciously examined himself—how long ago, he could not recall—the hair was all black.

Back in the examination room, he found the doctor, young, unusually good-looking, exuding the self-confidence and strength of a winning player. Fabian, naked except for his loose and dangling shirt, crawled clumsily onto the examination table. His thighs spread wide by the pedal-like traps clamping his feet, his braced knees and elbows exposing his buttocks below the doctor’s face, Fabian thought of himself as a woman explored by her gynecologist, then as a man entered in sodomy by his lover.

The doctor put on rubber gloves. Applying lubricant to a pipelike instrument, he noticed his patient’s uncertain glance. “Afraid of the sigmoidoscope?” he asked.

“Of pain,” said Fabian.

As the sigmoidoscope entered him slowly, his muscles offering little resistance, he felt discomfort, then pain. The doctor moved out of Fabian’s view.

“Does it feel sensitive?” he asked.

“It doesn’t. I do.” replied Fabian.

The mascot Fabian always kept on the dashboard of his VanHome resembled a heavy-duty letter opener. It was an aluminum blade, long, tapering and curved, dull, but crowned by a large knob of shining chrome. No visitor had ever guessed that the mascot was an artificial hip joint, used to replace an irreparably shattered or deteriorated one. It was there to remind Fabian of his fear of surgery. He recalled one of his uncles, a celebrated scholar and writer, whose lectures Fabian often had attended as a student. In the course of surgery for a minor growth in the ear, the surgeon’s hand slipped and injured a nerve. Fabian’s uncle came out of the operation with one side of his face drooping, unable to close one eye tightly, his mouth drawn down to the side, so that food and saliva dribbled from its loose corner when he ate and his words slurred when he spoke. When corrective surgery failed to remedy his deformity, Fabian’s uncle resigned
from the academy, then volunteered for the war. He never returned.

When Fabian had to have his tonsils removed, his parents, whose only child he was, insisted that the operation be performed by a famous surgeon, an eminent professor in the medical school. Then seventy years old, he operated only on serious cases and had not performed a simple tonsillectomy in decades. But he agreed to operate on Fabian for the benefit of medical students who would observe his performance.

A large auditorium was transformed into an operating theater. Fabian sat bound in the operating chair, his head extended backward, his mouth fixed open. Under local anesthetic, he felt no pain, only fear and discomfort. The surgeon began the operation, with a microphone under his chin, describing to his students each step of the process, his choice of move and instrument.

Suddenly, Fabian coughed. Taken aback, the professor dislodged and dropped to the floor a clamp that tied off a blood vessel. From the open vein, blood flooded Fabian’s throat. He began to choke. Reaching for a spare clamp on a portable tray, the nervous assistant knocked the tray down. Another assistant ran out to bring clamps from another operating room.

The students gasped in shock, then watched in silence. The surgeon grabbed Fabian’s tongue between the thumb and forefinger of one hand and pulled on it; with the fingers of the other, he palpated under Fabian’s throat, as if readying for an incision there. Mindless of his students, he alternately screamed at Fabian to keep on breathing and shouted instructions to his assistants.

The surgeon’s sweaty face and trembling hands were now only inches away; Fabian, his throat swollen with blood, finally caught his breath. In that moment, streaming through the auditorium like an Olympic torch bearer, the assistant appeared, spare clamp in hand; the simple surgery resumed.

At the wheel of his VanHome, Fabian tracked in the mirror above the dashboard—the mirror no longer ready to be bribed by vanity—the changes nature had worked in his face. With probing fingertips, he worried the beady transparent eruptions around his
nose and in the wrinkles of his forehead. Minuscule globules of fat, faintly visible threads of sallow grease jetted out from their wells, spiraling, reluctant to leave. He rolled the waxy substance between thumb and forefinger until it turned pasty. Then, with precision, he plucked the random gray hairs from his scalp. Some refused to submit; the broken top discarded, the lower half curled defiantly backward as though to root itself doubly in his scalp.

In the midst of an eyebrow, he noticed one hair longer, thicker, darker than the other hairs. Fabian hesitated before pulling it out. The defiant hair might have grown from a particular cell that had rebelled against the pervading rhythm of his body. If the hair were plucked, would the aberrant cell revolt, and a cancer metastasize? He pulled the hair out; for a moment the eyebrow itched as if the cell, annoyed by his intervention, communicated its resentment at violation.

He repeated it with the hair that had chanced to grow on his chest. When he pulled it out or shaved it off, he wondered whether the growth of a single hair was an occurrence as unique as the onset of a cancer—or of a thought, of emotion? With all its formidable array of impersonal power and technology, science was able to explain only occurrences that formed a whole class, the genesis of whose origins and behavior—universal, uniform—could be determined and predicted in advance. But science could not explain, or explain away, the unique. What if the single hair he had pulled out was just such a one-time occurrence?

Frame by frame, the documentary of aging unreeled in his imagination: the bad faith of the balding patch, the descent of graying hair, the betrayal of the lashless eye, the juiceless eyeball, the waxless ear, the dry, freckling skin; the snares of pus in sputum, of bile in urine, of mucus in feces; the reflection that debauched the spirit.

Even though he combed his hair to mask the bald planes that flanked both sides of the widow’s peak at his forehead, the receding hair diminished the impact of his face and emphasized the shape of his skull. In each hair lost, in the unannounced arrival of each wrinkle or swollen pore, in sagging flesh, he saw nature cut close to the bone.

Fabian puzzled over whether he resented going bald because
it was so obvious an announcement of the process of aging within. As his looks had never done much for him one way or another, he believed that the fewer people he attracted, the deeper the hold he had on those he did attract. What if now, because of time and loss, he might attract none? He continued his scrutiny of decay. In the mirror, he caught a glimpse of lusterless teeth, now yellow or shot with blue-black mottling, a few tarnished silver fillings against a flare of gold. His gums were pale; like old chewing gum, they had lost elasticity, hardened, receding to bare more and more of each tooth’s eroding root. Struck with the precariousness of his mouth, he pressed the lower front teeth with his thumb; no longer firm, they shifted slightly, almost imperceptibly. One day, without warning, when he collided at polo with another rider or was unseated by him, they might simply fall out. He kept a log of the steady remolding of his face, particularly when fatigue set in, the folds in the eyelids thickening, the overpliant chin sagging with flesh.