Passion Play (33 page)

They were alone in a room containing a large swimming pool enclosed on all sides by a ledge of polished tile, and a sauna at the far end. A diaphanous film of steam hung suspended over the water, the play of green lights skimming its surface, revealing the contours of the pool’s floor. Its quiet unbroken, the room might have been in a private home.

“It’s all yours,” Fabian said with a smile as Vanessa released his hand in happy astonishment. “Just what you wanted. Cool water, and lots of it.” He lay down on an ornate bench at the side of the pool.

Vanessa took off her shoes and, lifting her skirt, sat down, on the tile ledge, her legs playfully disturbing the water, her back toward Fabian.

Suddenly, without a word, she pulled off her sweater and tossed it to him. She stood up, removed her skirt and panties, and came toward the bench, dropping them beside him. Her belly passed near his head. He was not yet aroused; his mouth felt dry.

Fabian looked up at her, catching sight of her groin. She opened herself to his exploration, moving one foot ahead of the other, her gaze fixed on him. Aroused, he was silent and motionless.

Vanessa returned to the pool and plunged in, her clean strokes those of a trained swimmer cutting easily through the water, scarcely rippling its calm. After a few laps, she climbed out of the pool, her hair slicked back.

Fabian threw her a towel. She sat down at the pool’s edge, and as she swathed herself, shielding her breasts and hips, he was tempted to go to her but he remained seated.

The door opened, and a tumble of laughter and strong, loud voices spilled into the room as four men and two women, all black, in their mid-thirties, burst in. Glancing at Vanessa and Fabian, they shed their towels; one after another, they dived into the pool. The women, short, with high breasts, their hips broad on stocky thighs, dabbled in the shallows, squatting, gently plying the water; the men, thick and massive through the shoulders and middle, struck off powerfully for the far end of the pool, dashing spurts of foam at one another, clowning for their women.

One of the men surfaced in front of Vanessa, careful not to splash her. He looked up, smiling, and then ducked mischievously, making no secret of his curiosity about what her towel concealed. Vanessa smiled back, and the man swam closer; his fingers brushed her toes.

“Would you like to celebrate our meeting with a bang or a swim, baby?” he asked, his head bobbing at her feet.

“I’m too cold for either one,” Vanessa came back. Her voice was low but not hesitant.

“You don’t look cold to me, beautiful,” he announced exuberantly.

“But you do to me,” Vanessa replied promptly, her smile steady. She was growing bolder. “Cold or not, though, you’re still the longest I’ve ever seen!”

The other men in the pool, hearing the byplay, started to swim closer, their laughter rippling with the waves they made.

“The longest? No kidding?” The man was pleased, then puzzled.

“I said the longest.” Vanessa was bantering with him now, flicking water in his face with her feet. “If you don’t believe me, ask my father.” She pointed to Fabian.

“Your father?” The man jerked back with astonishment, shaking the water out of his eyes. “You brought your dad here?”

“What makes you think my dad didn’t bring
me
here?” Vanessa asked. The men and women in the pool turned to see how Fabian would take this.

“If my pet says it’s the longest,” Fabian drawled from his
bench, “it must be the longest. She’s done enough petting in school to know what’s long.”

The two women, not wanting to be left out, had drifted over from the shallow end.

“Haven’t seen anything yet, honey,” one woman sighed loudly, between giggles. “Now, you leave the young lady alone,” she said to her man, her mock scolding coated with affection; then she turned to look up at Vanessa.

“Honey, by now all my man can do is remember what’s long, not how to make it last long,” she went on, setting off a fresh tide of laughter. Her man began to swim closer, his face pretending outrage. She moved out of his reach with a vigorous splash.

The game had run its course; the black men and women began to climb out of the pool. Picking up their towels, they waved to Fabian and Vanessa and piled out the door.

The room was silent again; the surface of the pool subsiding, the water translucent then opaque with the dappled play of light. Vanessa got up and went over to the bench where Fabian reclined, one hand propping his head. She perched on its edge; she seemed to be waiting for him to speak. She shivered briefly, not looking at him.

“Well, you’ve had your pool,” he said. He reached beside him for another towel and tenderly cloaked her shoulders with it. She slid against him, pressing. He asked, in playful imitation of the black man, “Is there anything else I can do for you, beautiful?”

“Yes, there is—Father,” she said quietly.

“Then tell me, what is it, my child?” He remained playful.

“I’m still a virgin, Fabian,” she whispered. She slipped from his grasp, rising. He stood up to bring her closer; the towel slid from her neck and shoulders, and she trembled, his arm about her waist. She turned finally to look at him, her face lifted to brush his mouth, her lips cold and dry. “I don’t want to be anymore.”

He wondered if she were telling him this so that he would go with her to one of the rooms they had passed, thick with couples in the act of lovemaking. He imagined her in the clasp of another man, a nameless body.

Fabian released Vanessa and stepped back. Instinctively, she reached out and touched his cheek.

“I don’t want it, Fabian,” she said.

“What do you want?” he asked, his voice neutral.

“You,” she whispered, her eyes serene, her arms folding across her breasts. She retreated to the bench and lay down on it.

For a moment, he hovered above her, then eased himself to the ground before her, guarded, afraid to touch her. He wondered if for her, as for him, memory had begun to act as a courier, bearing images of their inviolate exchanges in his VanHome.

“I’m often attracted to young women,” Fabian said warily. “I’m drawn to those who’ll give me a second look, and also to those who won’t. There are girls I want to stir me up, and others I want to stir up. But always, before, when I wanted a woman, the faster she passed through my life, the more exciting I found her. But you—you were never one of them. I’ve always been afraid of losing you. I’m afraid now.”

He stopped, reluctant to name what he felt. Now, when she was willing to resume what he had initiated so long ago, to receive the finality of his mark, to embrace the long arc of his design for her, he saw himself caught in that design.

“The first time I saw you,” he went on, “beyond anything else I felt that whatever might happen between us, I could never have you, that the day might come when you would outgrow your memory of me, and I would become, for you, a pathetic figure from your riding days.”

She gave no sign of registering his intensity. Her eyes remained serene; her arms still enclosed her body.

“I thought of you when I was alone and when I was with others,” he continued, “and the thought always brought with it the same regret—that, as your father, I would have been at least the one who shaped your past, but as a lover, nothing I could ever do, no force of my will breaking in on your life, could ever change it.” In his vehemence, he had drawn closer to her, his shoulder brushing her thigh. “I’ve loved you all along, Vanessa.”

Vanessa did not respond; he laid his head in her lap. She reached up to his face and touched his mouth with her hands. A door slammed, a distant sound. Vanessa removed her hands, bringing one of his to the scar on her lip.

“Then love me now,” she said simply.

They rose. Fabian led Vanessa, who was carrying her clothes, toward the sauna. Opening the door before her, he switched
on the light. A smell of shavings and dry bark spilled over them; the benches, bleached and plain, offered spare comfort.

Vanessa went toward the benches, her towel abandoned, and deliberately put her clothes on the top bench. Then she sat on the one beneath waiting for him.

He began to undress, placing each item of his clothing beside the small mound Vanessa had made on the top bench. To find the freedom that had been his with her before, he willed himself to remember images of afternoons in his VanHome, of Vanessa undressing before him, carefully placing her clothes within reach in case they might be interrupted and she would have to dress quickly. He realized that then, in the conspiracy of his VanHome, it had been he who took her, a mere girl, for his lover, putting at stake the only security he knew, containing his need for her, restraining the impulse to break the seal that bound her to herself. Now it was she who was taking him for her lover, bidding him to come, inviting him to break that seal.

Naked, his body was not yet responsive. He sat down next to her, his shoulder lingering at her back, the scent of her hair mingling with the pungent smell of wood, his mouth on her neck, his lips grazing the soft mound behind her ear, soft as it had been when he had first kissed it. His hands slid over her breasts, and the stir that rose in her quickened him, but his knees did not urge her to part her legs. A disquiet that he might soon cause her pain grew in him. He wondered whether she was also apprehensive.

He slipped a hand between her thighs, skimming her flesh, brushing its folds; his fingers, deeper still, found her moist. Slowly, unresisted, his hand invaded; a force within her, he drew her to his side, her eyes on him, her arms swaddling him. Memory and thought drowned in a touch he could no longer flee, as if the knowledge of who he was lay within her, and only by claiming her could he discover it.

He bent her gently to the wooden plank, her head back, her legs spread, one angled to rest a foot on the floor, one snaring his hip as he lowered himself, his hand braced to ease his weight on her, the other hand guiding the crest of his flesh along her crease, still reluctant to sink into flesh that had abandoned
resistance, the tautness in his groin rising. She arched both legs girdling his hips, and impaled herself on him, and he yielded, his flesh sinking into her, wedging her flesh until it found its obstacle, a limit of tension which seemed at one with his own urgency. He sensed the straining of her neck; her eyes, hooded, defied his scrutiny. He bore down, her nails knifing his skin, until he pierced her, breaking through to the spasm of her brief, harsh cry, the signal that he was free now to enter her deeper, to gather himself in her, swift in his motion, to reach her where she had never been reached before. Her face was distorted in a grimace, at once that of a young girl on the brink of tears and that of a woman in labor. Her hand commanding his hips, she began to thrust at Fabian, her body springing back as the tip of his flesh met her womb.

Above the sound of their breathing, Fabian heard the rasping of her teeth, a wailing from her closed mouth, its lower lip tightly bound against the other, as if to cover the scar. His hands were under her buttocks, lifting her, his flesh breaching her still further, each stroke a summons to her womb. Pushing her shoulders sideways, she curved her belly to him, her hands above her head, fingers clawing the wood as if to scrawl on it, her body sundered, waiting for him to keel into her, offering herself to a deeper quest.

He felt a warm trickle on his thigh, and he knew it to be her blood. Yet he did not lift his eyes from her face. Fusion with a body that had become his, a port of incessant entry and departure, left him uncertain whether with each step he was binding her closer to himself or setting her adrift, to shores and reaches of her own.

Moving within her, he recalled the Vanessa he had first known: a slender girl on a horse next to him, his eyes trapped by her thighs, the shape of her breasts, the flex of a knee, the space that, with every movement of the horse, opened between her and the saddle. He looked at her now, his vision clouded by the thought of her, of time yet to come, the inert burden of life without her, a space brackish with the tedium of himself as a mere consequence of that life and no longer the sire of it. In the
blood that dabbled his thighs, he knew he had drawn forth proof that something uniquely hers marked him indelibly, pronounced him as the first lover to touch her womb.

Vanessa seemed remote, her face contorted, the rasp of her teeth more audible, her hands clenched. As if by instinct, whether to be free of her or of himself, he could not tell, he lifted his body in a vague threat of partition and his hand moved down, fingers prodding, searching for her flesh, capturing it. She moaned at his touch, and, withdrawing his hand, he pushed back into her. Her womb contracted, her hips and belly falling back. Erupting, her body pounded against the wood, her face shielded by her arms, her mouth agape, torn apart by the moan, the scar of her lip protruding, reluctant to remain hidden any longer, the stiffened nipples of her breasts strong with desire on the palms of his hands, her legs, bloody, unlocking from around his hips.

He framed her head with his arms, his thighs cleaving hers, his chest over her, the shuddering calves of her legs now over his shoulders, her feet above his head. He watched the tide of blood his every thrust spilled. In a sudden urge to share it with her, he withdrew his flesh, a column of blood, and stroked her face with it, each stroke leaving a track of red; he repeated this, bearing into her and pulling out again, returning to her prodigal with blood, brazing her forehead, marking her cheeks, brimming her mouth, obliterating her scar. Then, his face to hers, he licked the blood from her forehead, her cheeks and neck, his tongue gathering it to her mouth. Caressing her lips, cajoling, he kissed her, kisses she returned, tasting the gift of blood he brought to her from her own depth. As she plunged beneath him, her eyes staring, her mouth trapping a scream, he moved into her again, a reeling of ebb and flow pulling her apart, buckling her in quivers of desire.

The landscape of her, riven, swells and fissures overwhelmed him. His thirst unappeasable, he bent his mouth to her mound, his tongue where his flesh had been, a pilot in the wake of her blood, tasting her flow, receiving it, tasting her again, his tongue fluttering, the last pulse of his energy spending itself to absorb her every drop, greedy for all that had once been hers.