Passion Play by Jerzy Kosinski Page B

him to the brink of orgasm, her hand refused to allow him to yield to it: consenting to submit to passion, he was denied the thrust of the gift.
    Now he stared across the hunt table at her hands, their slender, carved fingers linked in her lap. He thought of those hands, in the night: how they had summoned the muscles of his body to their collusion, kneading him at will, exploring him with boldness, the cool enamel of her nails tracing the taut membranes of his depth, ignoring his resistance, unlocking him to her plundering mouth, inciting him to submit to her tongue.
    In her eagerness to have him open to her, her refusal to permit him to retain some region of his body as inviolate, the license she extended to her mouth and tongue to venture where her hand and fingers had gone before, there was an unmasked avidity of possession. But he also sensed her conviction that what she was doing, although offered to him as pleasure, was exacted as proof that—in whatever manner she invoked—he would be hers.
    She was able, finally, to abolish his last thin awareness of her will. He no longer cared what impulses she submitted to in her commitment to his need: whether they were stages in a drama, ordered by her and enacted by him, that would permit the revelation of his own nature, his pleasure at the discovery a tribute to her zeal; or whether, provoked by her, he was the one who would disclose what lay hidden in her, what she could not otherwise release, the pleasure she sought most.
    The pensiveness of her voice returned to him now, musing: “I’ve always been turned on by a man’s rear, Fabian. Always. Doing it to a man’s rear, with my fingers, my hand, my mouth, my tongue, that’s the only sex that sends me up. But Eugene hates it. One time he got really upset. He screamed at me that it was a sick and savage thing; no other woman had ever done such a sick and savage thing, trying to make a fag out of him.”
    As she spoke, Fabian reflected that her lawlessness in seizing her pleasure, bending him to her will, that very lack of constraint might have arisen from a vanity and terror at abandoning herself to the play of sex, to the risk that she might, in the presence of her lover, lose the carriage and control that her profession imposed. Knowing that, with his orgasm, her power over her lover waned, she would violate any taboo to prolong his craving, break any bond, penetrate any boundary.
    Eugene let go of Alexandra and leaned forward across thetable, his finger pointing at Fabian, his voice thick with menace. “Alexandra says you tried to force her to do a sick and savage thing, but she pushed you away and ran out.”
    “Alexandra is lying,” Fabian said.
    “You’re the one who’s lying!” Eugene shouted. “You’re the liar.”
    In their time together, Fabian had seen Eugene defeated, his pride wounded. He had seen him in physical pain, seen him knocked unconscious. He had witnessed his control and easy bearing among simple horse breeders or trainers who had no idea of his position, had observed his tactful restraint among foreign polo players, some of them abusive, to whom the Stanhope name meant nothing. He had felt Eugene’s commanding presence in his offices, the fount of his corporate power. Yet nothing he thought he knew of his friend could have prepared Fabian for the flood of rage that now confronted him. Under that abuse, face to face with the contortions of fury, Fabian understood what a poor judge of character he had been.
    “Alexandra is lying,” he said. “Last night I took her straight home.”
    In the telling, Fabian regretted his own lie. Desperate only in his attempt to thwart Alexandra’s assault on the bond between him and Eugene, his mind denied her entry to his VanHome. The words betrayed his despair, and he realized it was futile to retract his lie.
    “You’re a liar,” Eugene said. “The minute she saw you, Alexandra warned me to stay away from you. She said you wouldn’t lift a