Passion Play (25 page)

Fabian wondered what means he would have to use to seduce Stella. The slightest details of her manner, her demeanor, the texture of her daily life possessed him. He watched for any sign of weakness, a rent in the fabric. He found none. Her ability to reconcile her love of Ebony’s Ebony with the knowledge of the pain her training caused the animal only deepened her mystery for him.

He came to suspect that for Stella the simple act of sexual taking, the ruptured tissue, would mean less than her memory of the expectation of it. Before he could take her, she would have to imagine herself as his willing partner, she would have to prepare the path of her surrender to him. Once she had done this, she would be his whenever he wanted her.

And so, at a future time, if he wished to, he could return to her, the lover unannounced, and take her, a girl no longer, now a woman, perhaps engaged, perhaps married, perhaps bearing or having borne the children of another man. On that day, Fabian hoped to be paid in coinage that memory alone had minted, and only for him.

One morning at the stable, while Stella was fastening even more cumbersome chains to the horse’s forelegs, Fabian, on an impulse, leaned over to assist her. His head, bending in the apparition of an embrace, brushed her hair.

At that moment, an old black man, one of the stable’s hired hands, abruptly turned the corner of a stall and came upon them. The stable door slammed shut too late to announce his arrival. Startled, Fabian moved quickly away from Stella, disturbed at the invasion of their intimacy, reluctant to have his abortive embrace observed.

Wordless, unsmiling, the black man looked first at Fabian, then at Stella; his eyes rested on her a moment longer. Stella returned the black man’s stare, the balance between them poised, their gaze an equation. Fabian, at Stella’s side, felt a swift rush of instinct, like a horse vividly alert to a new reality. The space between Stella and the black man vibrated with her fright, glints of which showed in her eyes. The black man snapped the tension as abruptly as he had created it. Dropping his glance, pretending that he wanted something he could not find in the stable, he wandered about, then left. As the door closed behind him, Stella, her terror banished, turned calmly again to Ebony’s Ebony and the weights. But she did not look at Fabian.

Later that day, lying in the alcove of his VanHome, Fabian played over and over in his mind the scene of Stella and the black man. It brought into focus several odd aspects of Stella’s conduct. He remembered her discomfort before a group of black boys who watched from behind the stable fence when she rode Ebony’s Ebony, her expression of love for the South and her hate of the ghetto-ridden North, her exaggerated air of the Southern belle. And there was her reluctance to discuss her parents, her cryptic remark that they were too involved with their respective second families to visit her at school.

The next day, after Stella had finished at the stable and was
about to board the school’s minibus, to go back to her dormitory, Fabian offered to drive her there. She smiled but said she could not go with him.

“Why not?” he asked, stepping down from the door of his VanHome.

“I told you,” she said, demurely polite. “You’re just not my type. Not yet, anyhow.” She turned away.

Fabian caught her arm. “Not your type?” he said. “Is it,” he hesitated, “is it because I’m white?”

An invisible hand arrested her at half-turn. Suddenly a figure in a pantomime, she wheeled to face him. A dusky flush mounted her neck, stained her face. Against her suddenly swarthy skin, her eyes stood out in ghostly relief.

“I don’t understand,” she stammered, her gaze fixing him. “Why would I mind your being white?”

“You know why,” Fabian said. He was convinced that he had arrived at the truth.

She swallowed rapidly, her throat pulsing. Adamant still, she held him off, a note of menace in her voice. “I don’t know why.”

“You do,” Fabian said. “You do because even though everyone takes you for white, under that snowy skin, all that blonde, blonde hair, you’re black, ebony black, just as black as Ebony’s Ebony, that mare you love so much. Some people might call you a white Negress; other places, you’d be a beautiful albino. But you’re a full-blooded black, Stella, as black as those parents of yours nobody’s ever seen, as black as I imagine the rest of your whole family is, as black as that old man down in the stable. He knows it, and I know it.”

She glanced around, panic in her movement and eyes at the danger of someone overhearing. Her teeth locked; for a moment she was beyond speech. Then she whispered, “Nobody knows it. Nobody. That old man just looks at me as if he knew something. He knows nothing. Nobody knows. Nobody.”

“Let’s go,” Fabian said. “I’ll walk you to the bus.”

Stella looked at him, her lips tremulous. Her eyes brimmed with tears. “I don’t want to be alone,” she said. “Can I stay with you for a while?” The tears spilled over, streaking her cheeks.

“You can. But whether you stay or you don’t, what I know will
stay with me. Only with me,” he said, putting an arm around her.

Inside his VanHome her sobs relented, but Fabian was still aware of her punished eyes streaked with tears. In the few moments that had elapsed since Stella’s acknowledgment, she had changed. Her aloof manner, the languid rise and fall of her speech, her gracious condescension had withered, dissolved. A wound had opened in their place; fear had yielded to sorrow, the newer vulnerability of her being.

“How did you find out?” she asked. Her question was a conspiracy. Slowly, uncertain, a wary child, she took his hand and clutched it in her lap. “Who told you?”

Fabian could feel the heat of her body through her skirt. “No one told me. I just sensed your fear. You were holding something back. Then I saw your face, what happened to you when that old black man looked at you.”

“But I’m white.” There was weariness in her voice. “My parents, all my kin are black. With my white skin, my hair and my eyes, there was no place for me in their world. I had to leave them, go somewhere where nobody could know who I was. No white person has ever guessed the truth before. How did you?”

“Maybe because as a child I too lived among people to whom I was an outcast,” Fabian said. “And here I am, foreign born, still an outsider.”

Stella continued to cling tightly to his hand. The flush had gone from her eyes; she looked down. “But until now, you didn’t know I was black. Yet you were after me.”

“I was drawn to you,” Fabian said. “Now I want to know you even more.”

Releasing his hand from her grip, he reached for her with both arms, his hands cradling her ribs, his thumbs deeply invading her breasts. Again a dusky blush suffused her face, spreading into her neck and shoulders. He released his grip on her and pulled her hair back from her face with one hand, exposing her forehead and ears, while gliding the rough skin of his other hand, in a mock threat, along her cheeks, then down, brushing her nipple more harshly than he intended. She recoiled, suddenly tense with alarm.

“Ever since my parents sent me away to live as white,” she whispered, “I don’t know who I am.”

“Do you want to know?” Fabian asked.

“I do.” Stella was silent, her arms locked across her breasts.

He dropped his hands to her hips and brought her closer. She swayed against his chest, chastened, broken and obedient, clinging to him. There was fear in the silent touch with which she brushed his lips. “I want to go through it with you,” she whispered. “I am myself. Finally myself.” She glanced about at the VanHome’s interior, suddenly conscious of where she was and what enveloped her.

Fabian’s VanHome now became the sanctuary for the rites of their intimacy. Stella entered an uncharted world of knowing and being known; with every step, with every movement, she retained the freedom to leave and return, to voyage at her will to an unmarked solitary goal or back to the point she had abandoned. Stella’s freedom was the ground of Fabian’s acts: without it, she would be but the captive of his will; with it, she was the captive of her own need. Silence was their sound, an echoless chamber. Gesture, touch, pressure, stroke composed their only language, a vocabulary of such variety and plenitude that it restored the dominion of a power usurped by speech. In their hours together, sensation was unsullied by thought, thought impervious to feeling.

In movement—an eye, his head, a hand, a foot—in gestures as simple as the flicking of a light switch, now on, now off, with the steady pressure of any part of his body, he would have her strip off an article of her dress.

Dressed or naked, or wearing only his riding boots, his spurs a steady threat to her skin, he would follow a sequence as incidental as each item of clothing itself. He might begin with a shoe or with her blouse; he would leave her clothed or in a state of partial undress. Sometimes he would start with her naked and then have her dress herself again; perhaps he would signal to her that she should stand or kneel or lie down—on the
staircase, in the lounge, the alcove, the bathroom, the tack room, over the wooden horse, even next to his pony. He would keep her neither bent nor straight, here supple, there braced, perhaps seated, lying, her suspension between those states only another state, to last as long as he would not alter it.

He would bring his hand to her face time and again, pausing to offer the moment of aversion, of election, and when she did not seize it, again use that hand, then stop, then continue using it, perhaps on one side only or alternating side to side, until her submission would overwhelm her. He would stop then and bring her back to the present by grasping her hair, letting her head drop low between her knees. When she looked up at him, her head at his arm’s length, he read in her gaze that she had reclaimed awareness of her self.

He might give notice that he was uncertain whether to stay with the surfaces of her, watching the scoring of his hands, his teeth, his feet, on the landscape of her body, the mutations imposed by the strategies of his hip, a knee, sometimes a shoulder. When her movement or expression declined to reveal what inhabited her most inward self, he would elect to thrust within her, in quest of that withheld annunciation. He might guide her, his knee or spur the goad, to a corner, steadying and bracing her against a pole or a shelf, the burden of him heavy on her until, pressed to the last border, she would go limp, undone, in readiness for the moment when she would regain awareness by herself or he would choose to breathe it into her; it might pass that, at her first deep heave of renewal, that first lolling nod, he would continue with her as he had begun.

He might employ her face, clasped between her thighs, his knees a weight upon her hair, as yet another neutral pad of flesh, another buttock or hip, without reflex of its own; or he might squat downward along her body finally quiescent, her head mobile, her face watchful.

Sometimes, under his grip, a realm of her body would take on a darkening hue, bluish, then a sullen red. He saw in these the emblems of the fusion of their entities, as he did in another response to his touch: that moment, flowing in slow motion, when blood would seep through the skin that had split open at his stroke, the touch of his spur, and, hesitant, would trickle earthward
through the folds of her flesh. In such stigmata he read her response to him.

He might have her with her eyes closed, as if in darkness, or staring at him or at the wall, through the window or at the clustered thickets steeped in the murky fog of a summer evening. Perhaps he would permit her to know that she was the object of his gaze; or, contemplating her without her knowledge or the complicity of her eyes, as trapped by her blindness as she by his stare, he would give himself to be tasted, or he would taste her, or he would have her taste herself at his mouth.

Sometimes, when he was with her, when she expected to be taken to the alcove or to leave it, perhaps even in the act of having her there, he would rise and motion for her to follow him. In silence, he would lead her to the stall with the horse in it. There, simply, wordlessly, he would gesture toward a pile of magazines, glossy, profuse in their graphic visual and verbal celebration of the erotic pleasures of the saddle and the mount, their pages curling in the humidity given off by the hay and the horses.

She would move toward the magazines, hesitant, as if once she went, there were no retreat. She would pause before them, then select one at random, a ticket to a lottery she had elected to play. Resting against the shelves, she would start to turn the pages, rapidly at first, as if eager to know in advance what were the stakes in her lottery, then slowly, deliberately returning to the page that had first compelled her. Undistracted, her eyes intent on a drawing or a photograph, she would examine it as if detained by what she recognized as her own or captivated by what she had never yet seen or imagined. She would linger over a fragment of text, then turn the damp page, then return to it, as if to verify that she remembered all that had streamed before her eyes.

He waited for her, the chambered silence of the stall breached only by the noises of the horse, its warm, gusting breath, one hoof pawing impatiently, overstepping the other, a sudden bristling as it tugged at the rope that bound its collar to a ring fixed in the wall.

She would lay the magazine aside, her eyes averted, her posture a signal that she was now accessible, no movement too ungainly, no region too confining to restrict her freedom to offer herself.

There were now the three of them, a stall their bed. The animal that had come between the man and the woman no longer excluded, the bareness of their bodies making each of them aware that the animal was always naked, muzzle and flanks, haunches and loins, the heat of its parts without disguise, always present to smell and sight and touch.

Stella would lean against the metal hayrack, its rails imprinting her thighs, her arms limp, her hands dangling on the rack, her fingers uncoiled, a sign that she would not clasp it if asked to step away.

He would then reach for her and, guiding her gently by her hair, as if deferring the touch of her skin, move her next to the animal. The surfaces met: one white, dry, smooth and cool, the other dark, hairy, moist with heat. The woman’s hair would ripple over her shoulders, drift onto the neck of the horse, blend with its mane.