Passion Play by Jerzy Kosinski

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.
    Fabian felt Alexandra’s gaze steady on him. She was still waiting. He knew she was Eugene’s emotional property, another facet of his measureless wealth, but was that sufficient to impose a check on Fabian, to bridle his desire for her? Did her affair with the French film producer not intimate her availability, a sexual field on which many could sport? Finally, did Alexandra herself, intent on ensuring Fabian’s connivance, now choose to invest her body in that silence?
    To decline Alexandra’s challenge, to thwart his instinct toward her, would ratify an indolence or lapse in value. Either would subvert his trust in himself. Without looking at Alexandra, the balance of his mind restored, Fabian abruptly turned off the overhead light in the lounge. A single blue bulb lighted the narrow staircase to the sleeping alcove.
    For reasons of mental economy, Fabian chose to think of certain people as polarized, their unity sundered into compatible or antagonistic hemispheres. There were the symmetries and the asymmetries. In the symmetric, the halves, the face, the body and the soul were harmonious; the symmetric rested in calm, a stranger to compulsion, seldom bent to the extremities of life. In the asymmetric, the halves were at variance, constrained by no uniformity; undulant, the asymmetric gave way to spasmodic eruptions of play. Character defined the symmetric, personality the asymmetric. The symmetric was driven, the asymmetric enacted. To a casual eye, the symmetric was comely, the asymmetric interesting.
    Alexandra had seemed to Fabian a classical symmetric; during their night together, however, in lovemaking that was unrestrained, even obsessive, she divulged that chasm between her external poise and her inward turbulence. Fabian responded with fascination.
    In this freedom to make love to her, in his awareness of that gift of herself as an incarnation of his need, he scanned the waxing of his own excitement, revealed himself naked before her, to signal to her that there was nothing in him that was not hers. She accelerated the mounting spiral of his pleasure with a deliberate rhythm.
    In the haze of morning, he watched her sleeping. He had scheduled stick-and-ball practice for early that day, and when he rose, leaving her in his bed, longing and doubt streaked through him, intermittent, unruly, leaving him numb and uncertain.
    At lunch, he was told that Eugene, who had not been expected back for two or three