Passion Play Read online

  In short spurts of trot, canter and gallop, grasping the reins and a whip in his left hand, the mallet in his right hand, Fabian entered upon the ritual of stick-and-ball. He began to drive the ball forward across the lot with a relentless volley of forehand shots; as it bounced and veered off course, he caught it in a steady flow of backhand strokes. Then, describing another pattern in the crisscross intersection of parking lot transmuted into polo field, he reversed his strategy, angling to the left over the horse’s withers and propelling the ball backhand; as the ball rushed back, he followed it and lofted it with a forehand shot.

  The intense running exhausted Big Lick; the mare stumbled and lost its footing. Fabian tied the animal, foaming, to the back of the VanHome. Sensing its turn, Gaited Amble began to prance and sidestep eagerly, ears twitching in nervous expectation. Now Fabian placed an array of empty wine bottles upright at the far end of the lot, scattering several balls in the space between. Mounting the pony, he prodded its sides sharply. From its easy standstill Gaited Amble shot out in full racing mettle, legs stretched, hoofs pounding.

  Fabian kept the mare in tight check, in a sequence of pivot, half-turn, gallop, with the ball always near the horse’s forelegs. Shuttling his eyes between the ball and a bottle, he accelerated for the fury of a strike, wielding an erect mallet, his right arm arched up and back, his elbow and wrist locked. Rising with the spring of his taut knees and feet, thighs clutching Gaited Amble, he thrust his left shoulder forward and, like a great slicing scythe, swung his upraised mallet in a mighty blow at the scampering ball, sending it fifty yards in a graceful jet before it shattered one of the bottles, splintering the afternoon’s silence.

  Suddenly a shower of flying glass fell away in the distance to disclose the figure of a derelict huddling, as if fixed to one of the grimy walls that enclosed the lot.

  Fabian slowed Gaited Amble and rode it toward the wall where the man cowered. The mare whinnied and shied uneasily, reluctant to inch closer to the vagrant. The man, his pants smeared and caked with dirt, was wrapped in a tattered raincoat, one of its sleeves half torn off at a jagged angle.

  “What’s the riding for, captain?” he asked, revealing his missing teeth.

  “To make a living,” said Fabian, prodding his horse closer.

  “In that Big Top?” asked the man, pointing to the VanHome.

  “It’s my home.”

  The man raised one hand—its swollen wrist a feverish, scaly red, ending in fingers that were stumpy and clubbed—to pat the horse, but when Gaited Amble snorted nervously, he withdrew it quickly.

  “Would you have some soup left, captain?” His glance pleaded.

  Fabian backed off Gaited Amble, turning as if to leave. “Come and see me at home,” he said.

  The man followed Fabian and his horse unsteadily across the lot, sweating as he tried to keep up with them. He hesitated at the door of the VanHome as Fabian tied Gaited Amble alongside Big Lick.

  “I don’t visit often,” he said, peering suspiciously through the door. “You won’t kidnap me, captain?”

  “Kidnap you? What for?”

  “To experiment,” he whispered. “To try things on me: drugs, a beating, a torching. Guys do things like that to people like me, you know.”

  “I don’t deliberately hurt people,” said Fabian. “I like them. I play with them.”

  They were now inside the VanHome. The man looked about curiously. “Mind if I see the rest, captain?”

  Clutching his raincoat, deference mingled with caution, he followed Fabian to the galley, where he carefully examined the power generator and the microwave oven, jumped back in alarm as Fabian set in motion the compactor, and smiled with faint puzzlement as Fabian explained to him the self-timing automatic trouser-press. He was fascinated by the bathroom, a Fiberglas module containing a sink, toilet and built-in whirlpool bathtub. He nodded with approval at the medicine chest. Trotting in Fabian’s footsteps, he peeked into rooms stored with polo gear and tack and equipment for the schooling of horses. The saddle and boot racks as well as Fabian’s clothes and riding apparel did not interest him at all, but he was taken aback by the sight of the fully rigged practice horse. Made of wood and set on springs, the fifteen-hands-high horse was enclosed within a vaulting cage of chicken wire; astride its immobile bulk, Fabian would stick-and-ball, his shots recoiling from the wire mesh of the cage.

  In the galley, as the man slurped the soup Fabian had heated and served him, his eyes kept darting to the row of bottles at the bar. When he finished, he asked for a drink, and Fabian fixed it for him. They moved into the lounge.

  “Some home to have,” the man exclaimed. “Some have no home,” he mused, looking around. “In a pawnshop, any gizmo like this could keep my kind for a whole year,” he muttered, his eyes fixed on the TV console. “It’s a nice home, captain,” he said finally. “Really nice. How do you keep it?”

  “I fight for it,” said Fabian.

  “You fight for it?”

  Fabian nodded.

  The man moved closer. “Dangerous? Can you be killed?”

  Fabian nodded again.

  “Why do you fight like that?”

  “Because of you,” said Fabian, pouring him another drink.

  The man reached for it eagerly, his hand trembling. “Because of me? How come, captain?” A sudden glint in his eyes showed that he sniffed some reward.

  “I fight for this home so I won’t become what you are,” said Fabian.

  The man lowered his head. Without a word, as if absorbed in solitary thought, he slowly sipped his drink.

  Fabian had a fear of inordinate skill. He felt awed—and troubled—by his aim, the elusive interplay of muscle, vision, brain, the rippling fusion of reflexes, the constellation and apparatus of impulse, knowledge, will that invested him, mounted on a horse at swiftest gallop, with the power to hit a polo ball, lying seven feet from his shoulder, with a precision that would reach a target no larger than a player’s helmet and forty yards or more away, and to maintain that precision for at least sixty strikes out of a hundred. He knew that such skill carried with it a state of uncertainty, a mood of apprehension: the possibility of failure. The man who attained a pitch of skill in sport or trade, in some profession or in his intimate relations with other men and women, had undoubtedly found the most direct path to his goal. Yet, confusing progress toward that goal with progress through life, he believed that he had simplified the maze of life. He would, however, soon lose himself in one of the traps which composed that maze, many of them unavoidable, even inevitable, and so become the prey of his own facility, a parody of prowess and of technique.

  Fabian had discovered his aim as a boy, playing a peasant game, astride a farm horse at full gallop: with a rake handle, he had sent a ball the size of an apple, twenty yards across a meadow, hitting a target no larger than a pumpkin. It had been his first strike; he hit the target a second time, then a third, finally a fourth. Since that time, his aim had not failed him: it was not he who had shaped his faultless stroke, but the faultless stroke that had shaped him. To that wisdom of his body he submitted himself implicitly. He wondered often if an advance agent of conscious choice had determined so early his choice of polo as the landscape of his potency.

  Fabian imagined the components of each strike: the plane of the field and the level of his shoulder, the pliancy of his mallet shaft and the hardwood of its head, the resistance of grass and air to the trajectory of the ball, his body’s shifts and changes, his pony’s speed; in this plenitude of variables and circumstances, he saw his counters to chance. Whether he was alone or in collision with other players, whether he swung at the ball from the horse’s side or under its neck or tail, the ball Fabian hit sped to its target.

  Polo was a team game, the roles of its four players clearly delineated: always forward, number one set up the shots; number two was a driving force of attack; number three, the pivot man, often captain of his team, linked attack with defense; number four stood guard at th
e team’s back. No one of those roles fully consumed Fabian’s ability to strike and to score—and to do this unaided. Most players were content to outmaneuver their opponents in reaching the ball, wrestling it from them, driving it in the direction of the goal posts. The confrontation of opposing teams, each attempting to score a higher number of goals, was the core of polo, but for Fabian the game was essentially a one-on-one contest between two players fighting for possession of the ball during any moment of the game. From the outset of his career, his disregard of the other three players on his team—many of them standing in the foremost international ranks—antagonized and humiliated them.

  Whenever he played on a team, to preserve a sense of the team’s unity, Fabian was forced gradually to restrain his attempts at scoring goals on his own; he scored them only when team expectations justified it. His self-imposed impotence thwarted him. Whenever an opponent infringed upon Fabian’s legitimate right to strike the ball, when fouls were committed against him, Fabian seemed to repay the breach by striking the ball, hitting the guilty player’s shoulders or thighs, or the shoulders or flanks of his pony.

  In polo, a sport of solitary valor and collective assault, with the ball in motion through the air most of the time, Fabian’s retaliations against players had been called accidental, unfortunate consequences of the loss of precision any player might encounter in the rush of the game. But in time, some players began to discern a disquieting equation between Fabian’s strokes and the men and ponies that were the targets of his shots. Somewhere, someone voiced a concern; elsewhere, another seconded it. Unaware, Fabian was watched now by the referee, his shots monitored by members of his own team, as well as by his opponents. Penalties were imposed on the team that sheltered him, for the personal penalties he levied against certain riders and their mounts. He had become a menace to the collective soul of the game.

  Polo players often shift team allegiances. Those whom Fabian punished one day were on his team the next day. Many refused to play with him, and soon Fabian dropped relentlessly from one team after another, slipped gradually into the notoriety of isolation, a maverick. For a while he was polo coach at one of the Ivy League colleges, but it was not long before some of the school’s older alumni, considerable polo players themselves at one time and now on the board of trustees at their alma mater, denounced his presence in their collegiate athletics, citing what they called his inability to play in concert with polo teams of Europe, England or the Americas.

  As a student, Fabian had thought that his distrust of team play was simply the fear of being trampled to death by a massed tonnage of horses and men, each player, no less than his pony, driven by momentum that, like the goal scored, did not spring from the solitary force of his own will to live, from his unique instinct to survive, but stemmed, rather, from a collective strategy in which an individual destiny mattered little.

  Later in life, he decided that the spirit of the collective and the team bore for him another implication less ominous but equally disturbing: collective responsibility diluted one’s faults, but it also diminished one’s achievements, took away from them stature and consequence. One could no longer distinguish what was due to oneself and what to one’s team; the boundaries of success and failure, victory and defeat were blurred in a tangle of humility and pride. Even further, the collective mood was insidious: after an impressive score, applause for the group left players heady with a sense of invincibility; then a player, racing his pony too fast at a turn or jostling an opponent too impetuously, would find his mount suddenly losing its balance and falling, burying him under it, just at the moment he was most confident of his prowess. The loss of a player in a crippling accident often devastated the team’s morale, impairing each player’s sense of security, leaving him prone to accident and easy panic.

  Fabian’s polo—polo as Fabian played it—was the ground of his being in the world, the only uniqueness at his command. Shunned by most teams, he resigned himself to traveling around the country in search of work as a polo referee or as a player in one-on-one polo games with wealthy opponents. Since these engagements were infrequent, he explored almost desperately the avenues of other talents, but found none.

  At times he worked as a riding instructor or lecturer, but, as he acknowledged with chagrin, by many of the formal standards of horsemanship, he was not thought to be a faultless rider. According to these standards, the goal of horseback riding was to achieve that utmost security of a good seat, the calves, thighs, knees, hands, voice deployed gently by the rider to communicate his will to the horse without submitting it to unwarranted checks or restraints or violating its natural instinct toward self-preservation, its harmony of balance and sudden reflex.

  Polo, however, was a game of surging takeoffs, of abrupt halts and sudden veers and pivots. It demanded a rapid displacement of the weight of a horse and its rider; it called for the strategy of reins insistently pulling on a horse’s mouth and bearing on its neck, the ceaseless prod of the spurs and the nip of the whip, the smiting heat and clash of one horse evading collision, colliding, seeking collision with another. Years of playing polo, practicing for it, riding ponies bred and schooled exclusively for that game had evolved in Fabian habits contrary to the safety, decorum and propriety of dressage, a hunt or a jump. Practicing at a stable, arena or paddock, he would often exhibit a demeanor in his horsemanship that disturbed, sometimes even shocked, other instructors, whether beginning or advanced. Worse yet, the incorrigibility of his mistakes, and their vehemence, frequently tended to unnerve even the most pliant and submissive mounts.

  To write about horses and horsemanship became, for Fabian, one way to make a living, but he seemed to lack something of the zeal and verve of others who worked that territory. In twenty years, he had published only a meager handful of books, each of them including a few sections on polo. But polo was still an exotic sport, evoking in the popular imagination phantoms of Britain and India at the Victorian high noon of empire, gentry and military alike chasing the ball and one another across the trim and decorous turf of a country estate. And most riding instructors and people who had a special feeling for horses showed little interest in polo or sympathy with it, in angry dissent from what they took to be its violence against animal and rider alike.

  Friends advised him to enter the world of state and national horse shows, not in the role of judge, which he frequently accepted, but as a competing entrant. They pointed out that the horse show had progressed from the local pleasure of the entry of the family back-garden horse to the big business of keen international competition, the winning horses commanding staggering prizes, their value increasing with every championship they won. His friends tried to persuade him that his prestige as a polo player, coupled with the distinction he now commanded as a writer on equestrian art, would compensate for his defects in horsemanship and would persuade some of the better-known stables and individual owners or breeders to hire him and exploit his minor celebrity to win attention for their horses at major shows and events.

  But competition of this order was foreign to Fabian. In one-on-one meets, he fought another man for supremacy in the short span of their play, submitting to rules that both contestants obeyed, without an umpire, away from the fickleness of a public that might choose favorites. Horse shows rated men and animals according to an order of excellence and accomplishment that did not interest Fabian. The essence of competition, for him, lay not in the challenge offered by others but always in the challenge posed by oneself.

  Fabian lay in wait for fall in Massachusetts or Vermont, sometimes along the shallows, pleasant dunes and stretches of the coast, but mostly in the northern reaches of the East, where summer put up its fiercest resistance, until the last, to break with life.

  There the leaves defiantly clung to the trees, and the mantling shrubbery, misted by the mild noon of autumn, bristled at the frosting chill of night.

  Fabian’s thirst for this spectacle, for its prick and stir, the immolation of odor and hectic bloo
m that only autumn offered, would come as suddenly as any other, ignited by a whiff of bark or mealy oats, the supple aroma of leather or hide, the musk of roots trailing a wind along the highway. He took it as a longing for something apart from thought, different from memory, beyond them, something to which one could stake no claim of one’s own, a realm outside the deed of charter or possession.

  When, in that season, Fabian would find his road approaching some grand estate, a frontier of thickly wooded land dense about it, acre on virgin acre, he would drive off the highway into a clearing nearby and park his VanHome, the signs PERISHABLE clearly fixed to its sides. Avidly, like a boy on the scent of play, he would saddle his ponies quickly and, in a white polo helmet and padded knee guards that protected him from branches and underbrush, he would cut into the wood, astride one horse, the other, also saddled, on a lead rein, the ponies snorting, jostling in the promise of the run, plunging through the wiry brambles, thrusting forward, great plows scything the earth, tearing the ligaments and arteries of the stubborn thistles, the prickly shrubs, leaves in their clustering.

  Picking his way through the thicket, he would wade through layers of leaves, stalks, roots and stumps heaped in profusion, their dry, crackling billows making a sea music, soughing, the tidal lap rising about his ears, muting even the drum of the horses’ hoofs. The woods folded before him in silence: pine and fir, oak and beech sentinels of his transit.

  Perched on shoots of burdock, humiliated by the brawl of color that framed them, a flock of blackbirds, motionless, would watch Fabian’s caravan sailing along channels and freshets of hazel and hornbeam, blackberry and sumac. Like a skiff bringing up the rear, a solitary leaf, its fretted veins a lair for the sun, would scud in his wake, gliding through the dappled air. At a pond, its surface brackish, mantled with mottled leaves, random patches of turbid fluid between brownish clumps reflected the yellow leaves of an overhanging tree.