Free Passion Play by Jerzy Kosinski Page B

parked his VanHome near the house.
    After dinner at the Polo and Golf Club with several players and their wives, Alexandra suggested that she and Fabian walk across the deer park sloping gently between the club and their house.
    Overhead, wind ruffled the treetops, but on the sandy path, where moonlight hung like smoke, the quiet was broken only by a steady whir of grasshoppers beckoning them from the ground. Aware that for the first time he was alone with Alexandra, Fabian’s thought flowed in strands, shifting with the slightest pulse of the uncertain moment.
    Alexandra broke the stillness. “I have always supported myself.” She spoke, as if to herself, in a cool, detached voice. “And as long as I am not abused by the men I live with, I choose to live with those I do.”
    Fabian was quick to reassure her. “I won’t tell—”
    “I know you won’t,” she broke in, “although even if one day you do, neither of them would mind. They know what they want.”
    “What do they want?” Fabian asked.
    The forest was dry, the air sultry, the clatter of grasshoppers incessant. A lightning bolt, swift and thunderless, carved the sky. As Fabian strained his eyes to fill in the contours of the night,another flash of lightning revealed Alexandra, standing near him.
    “I promise better than any woman in the world,” she said, “and they want to follow through on what I promise.”
    They were close to their house now, about to pass his VanHome. As if she were leaving a mark in ghostly dust, Alexandra drew one finger across its surface.
    “Can I see the inside?” she asked.
    Fabian looked at the mesh of shadows on her face and bare shoulders. “Could it wait for another time?” he asked, confessing the impotence of reason.
    “It could. But should you?”
    He entered the cab of the VanHome and turned on the lights in the lounge. She stepped in behind him.
    “So this is where you hide out?” She looked around the lounge, then peeked up at the alcove.
    “This is where I live and work,” Fabian said.
    Alexandra asked for red wine. Relieved to be able to conceal his anxiety, Fabian went to the wine rack, where he pulled out the last bottle and uncorked it, pouring her a glass. She sipped the wine slowly. Her eyes rested briefly on a boxed collection of Fabian’s polo books, but she did not reach out to touch them. She was amused by the writing chair he had made by setting a polo saddle on a wooden tripod. Lifting the hem of her evening dress, she slid astride the saddle; the movement pushed her dress up, above her thighs. She leaned back, and her mane of copper-colored hair, trembling with a sheen of light, rippled in waves over her neck and shoulders. In her shimmering dress, straddling the chair, the head of the saddle between her exposed thighs, her feet nude in their high-heeled sandals, leather straps binding her ankles, she tantalized.
    With the knowingness that made her so proficient a model, Alexandra splayed her fingers over her ankles, coiling and unraveling her hands, showing the red stain of her nails, molded for exhibition, then interlocking her fingertips with her enamel-glazed toes.
    Fabian watched the complicity of hands and feet, fingers and toes: all elongated, tensile, nervous, they seemed at moments like the fragile plaster features on a religious figurine, in perpetual danger of snapping off.
    She raked her fingers through her hair, cosseting it as if gathering the silence of the room, then glanced into a mirror on the wall: twins, one arrested in glass, one flesh, each chary of the other. The woman in the mirror caught his stare; he could no longer watch, unobserved, the bare shoulders of her twin. Alexandra smiled.
    “At work, they call me the centipede,” she said.
    “Centipede?”
    “Yes. Legs, feet and hands.”
    She shifted to one side of the saddle, her hands on her lap, her legs drifting apart, the dress snaking even higher. She knew he could see the insides of her thighs.
    “What are