Passion Play by Jerzy Kosinski Page A

days, had returned and wished to see him in the old house.
    He went directly to the drawing room. Eugene and Alexandra were waiting for him. Eugene, formal in a gray business suit and white shirt, sat in a heavy leather armchair guarded by the sweep of an ornate hunt table. Alexandra was perched on the thick arm of his chair, one of her legs swaying slightly. Her breasts showed through the sheer halter of her jumpsuit. Fabian started to hold out his hand, but something in Eugene’s expression arrested him midway. He looked at Alexandra, and she turned her head. He pulled a chair up to the hunt table and sat down.
    Eugene scrutinized him. “I thought you were my friend,” he said, measuring the words.
    “I
am
your friend,” Fabian replied quietly.
    Eugene circled Alexandra with his arm and brought her closer. She let her weight rest on him. Both of them looked at Fabian as if he were a schoolboy called to account.
    “Alexandra tells me that, last night, under the pretext of showing her your trailer, you tried to force her to make love to you,” Eugene said.
    Fabian felt out of his element, alien and solitary. “Alexandra is lying,” he said. His eyes turned to Alexandra. She sat calm and indifferent, regarding him with an expression that remained long after the emotion that formed it seemed to have dissolved.
    “Alexandra admitted that the wine you forced on her made her a bit drunk.” Eugene paused. He looked up at Alexandra, and she nodded as if to prompt him in what he was about to say. He turned back to Fabian.
    “She also told me,” he went on in a harsh voice, “that, even though she remained fully dressed, she spent a few minutes next to you, on top of your bed, before she felt safe enough to run out on you.” He paused again. Alexandra pressed his shoulder and, as if ashamed of herself, lowered her head.
    “I know everything there is to know, Fabian, and I know it from Alexandra,” Eugene said. “Alexandra and I have no secrets from each other—that’s the secret of our love. Did you think you could destroy that with one bottle of wine?”
    Fabian looked at Alexandra, a soft glow on her cheeks, her lips parted. She wore a look of an obedient daughter submitting to the wisdom of Eugene, her all-knowing father.
    Fabian’s memory had not yet edited out her presence when she lay next to him. As he watched her now, the memory of what had happened between them brought her words back to him: “I’ve been stuck, Fabian. Stuck waiting on men and what they want, always what they want, their weary flesh in search of an easy hole. All that sweating, their clumsy kisses and useless embraces, and moaning and humping—that constant in-and-out missionary commuting. They leak into me, then off to sleep they go, and then on to the office.”
    He had glided closer to her, one hand under her waist, rising, the other lingering on her neck, her shoulders, hesitant to descend onto her breasts, to know again the sensation of their firmness, their sculpted shapes. He kissed her on the mouth, and it came back to him, pressing, a response vigilant and insistent. She watched him, commanding his gaze, not allowing him to lose or deny the expression in his eyes, or for a moment, even in thought, to withdraw to another world, one that might be entirely his own—or one that he might share, in recollection or fantasy, with another woman.
    He thought of her legs upon his chest, her calves girdled round his ribs. Her skin lapped him with a smoothness that Fabian imagined to gleam in the darkness. She sought him with her feet, her narrow ankles, her soles supple against his cheeks. He was conscious of the high arch of her instep, the roundness of the heel grazing his jaw, her toes, lithe and fragile, prodding his lips, splitting the furrow of his mouth, prying open the clenched gate of his teeth, plying his tongue. Her hand deep within him, her foot mastering his mouth, he labored as if to summon life, but each time she brought