Passion Play (31 page)

“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 She was a factory worker, plain, ordinary, withdrawn.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 building. 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 cheap—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.

Then, the two of them in towels, Fabian would guide her through the club. From the first, she would witness sexual play at its most unhampered and extravagant: men and women, singly, paired or in groups, investing their intimacies with the ease they would bring to social gatherings in their own living rooms.

Soon the woman would be lulled by the climate of mundane assumption, her need for privacy ratified by the sense of enclosure. She would risk permitting herself the exploration of touch with a stranger, often a woman, who seemed less threatening than a man. Sometimes her discovery of her own nature would proceed in the anonymity of a nest of bodies, female and male, sequestered in one of the club’s more isolated rooms. Fabian might watch these stages in her revelation, or she might signal that she wished him to leave and wait for her, reserving to herself the scenario of her abandonment.

Then, the fluent persuasion of circumstance having enforced its own code, the woman made herself accessible to Fabian, her response natural now, an expectation fulfilled, an inevitable compliance with the mood of the time and the place. What the two of them shared was a covert knowledge of each other seldom if ever conceded to a possessive lover or the complacent partner in marriage, the knowledge of sensation alone, conveyed by sexual acts perhaps never to be repeated, never even alluded to outside that sexual arena.

Music still throbbed as Fabian guided Vanessa down a long channel of stairs, the passage narrowing, the darkness deepening, to yet another floor of
DREAM EXCHANG.

“Would you ever want the two of us to make love among other people here, strangers?” Vanessa asked abruptly. “To share me with other women?” She hesitated. “Other men?”

“Only if you and I would want to share and be shared. Would you?” he asked gently.