The Glory Game (44 page)

The double bed had a heavy carved headboard and foot rails. There was a nightstand and lamp beside it. A straight-backed chair sat in the corner, and a tall chest of drawers stood against an otherwise bare wall. Fresh logs and kindling were arranged in the brick fireplace, waiting for a match. The stark, ivory-plastered walls were outlined by heavy, stained molding
and wood trim. The braided rug on the floor next to the bed was the only real patch of color in the room.

She pushed away from the door and walked over to the bed, where she sat down and tagged off her riding boots. In her mind, she kept seeing Raul lifting Trisha down from her horse after they'd all ridden into the stableyard. Trisha had asked for his help in dismounting, which made it all the more frustrating.

With her boots off, Luz stripped out of her clothes and left them piled on the chair seat, then entered the connecting bathroom she shared with Trisha. The noisy water pipes reminded her of this morning's incident when Trisha had been so provocative, telling Raul about the shower. Luz didn't remain under the hot spray for long, not caring for the knocking, banging song of the water pipes.

After wrapping the long towel around her like a sarong, Luz opened the connecting door to her room. Her glance fell on the empty chair seat where she'd left her riding clothes. A noise came from the closet area. When Luz turned toward the sound, the housemaid, Anna, who bore a striking resemblance to Brunhild, stepped out. Her hand went to her chest in a gesture of shocked surprise when she saw Luz standing there.

“I put clothes,” she explained in her halting English, thickly Spanish in accent. “Okay?”

“Sí. Gracias.”
Luz came the rest of the way into the room and shut the door.

“Por favor.”
Anna appeared to struggle for the English words and stalked over to the nightstand where a glass filled with ice and a pale brown liquid sat on a tray.
“Mat
é. Tea.” With her hand she gestured toward Luz, indicating it was for her.

“Gracias,”
she said again.

“De nada.”
Her curtsying bob appeared out of character. The big-boned, big-bosomed woman backed to the hall door, then turned and left.

Luz walked over to the nightstand and took a drink of the iced
maté
, a native herbal tea laced with lemon. She had tasted it the previous afternoon when Hector had provided refreshments for them after they arrived. Then she crossed to the closet and traded her towel for a robe.

A door opened and closed in the outer hallway. When she heard someone moving about in Trisha's room, Luz hesitated,
then walked to the door of the connecting bath and went through to the opposite door.

“Trisha?” She knocked twice, aware it might be Anna instead of her daughter.

“Yes. Come in,” Trisha called in answer. “You're just in time to help me get these boots off,” she said as Luz walked into the room.

Luz hesitated, then walked over to the chair where Trisha sat and tugged off first one high boot, then the other. Stepping back, she brushed the dirt from her hands.

“Thanks.” Trisha peeled the sweater over her head and tossed it aside. “I smell like horse,” she said, sniffing at her hand. “That shower is going to feel good. I hope you didn't use all the hot water.”

“Trisha, I want to talk to you,” Luz began.

“About what?” Trisha unsnapped her pants and zipped down the fly.

“About the shower, for one thing,” she snapped, irritated by her daughter's indifference to her presence.

“It's noisy, isn't it?” She laughed and sat down in the chair to kick off her jeans.

“Trisha, I'm serious.”

“About the shower?” She looked at her skeptically, and Luz wondered if she was deliberately being obtuse, or whether she was simply making a mess of this discussion.

“No. Not about the shower. About the way you're behaving around Raul. You're making a fool of yourself, Trish.” She saw the hard, stubborn light flash in Trisha's eyes and knew she was taking the wrong tack. She had not intended to start out by accusing. She had wanted to explain—to reason.

“Is that right?” Trisha challenged.

“Yes.” Luz attempted to get control of her anger. “I don't think you realize how obvious you look and sound. I find it embarrassing.”

“I don't know why you should.”

“It's one thing to ask a man to help you off a horse you're perfectly capable of dismounting, but it's quite another to talk about taking a shower. You deliberately invited him to imagine what you look like stark naked in a shower. I'm sure you think it's cute and provocative to arouse a man's interest like that, but I find it coarse and tasteless.”

“You do?”

“Yes, I do!” she declared angrily.

Clad only in bra and panties, Trisha stood in front of her and rested her hands on her hips. “What makes you think Raul hasn't already seen me naked, Luz?”

Shock drained the blood from her face. “You're lying.” But that cocky look in Trisha's eyes made her doubt that.

“Am I? Why don't you go ask Raul?” she invited.

Luz backed away from her, then turned sharply and retreated to her bedroom. The minute she stopped, the trembling started. She couldn't believe it. Somehow she had been so certain that this was all one-sided. But she always knew when Trisha was lying. And that hadn't been a lie.

She closed her eyes, and her head swam with images of Trisha and Raul lying naked together. She recoiled from those mind pictures. She didn't want to visualize them together. She didn't want it to be true.

She started laughing and crying at the same time. After all this time, she had still been subconsciously entertaining hopes that someday he might hold her. That face was still part of her secret fantasies.

It was so terribly ironic—so hilariously sad. The first man to arouse her interest after the divorce was involved with her daughter.

It hurt. It hurt almost as much as losing Drew. There wasn't any new beginning, just a repetition of the past. Luz walked blindly to the bed and sank onto the quilt-covered mattress. She rocked back and forth, silently crying. She could never accept this situation between Trisha and Raul. The jealousy would always be there, making it hell. She didn't know what to do. Her life was so confused. If this was what it was like to grow old, she'd rather be dead.

T
he sun warmed the half of her face not shaded by the brim of her lacquered straw hat as Luz stood on the sidelines and watched the action on the polo field. With the afternoon temperature soaring to springtime heights, she had removed her ivory-and-gold sweater and let it hang down her back, tying the sleeves in front. She was conscious of its heavy weight pulling on her shoulders, but it wasn't the cause of her leaden spirits.

A horse and rider broke away from the player they were guarding and charged the oncoming ball. It was Rob who was playing the Number Four position as defensive back for the white-shirted team. He'd had the inside position on the opposing forward, perfectly placed to turn back any pass to a red-shirted rider. Instead he had turned to meet the ball, leaving the player free and the goal exposed. It was an incautious move that Luz viewed with dismay. He had only one chance at the ball, and if he missed … but he didn't. He made a splendid neck shot, driving the ball upfield toward the center.

The bold save was taken from him as the ball landed directly in front of an opposing player. He lofted it toward the goal, where his free-running forward had an easy knock-in for the score. Rob was too far out of position to prevent it.

“Rob, why did you do that?” Luz murmured critically, regarding his deflated posture in the saddle as rightfully deserved.

“It is always this way, Señora Luz.” Hector Guerrero stood a few feet from her, most of his weight centered on one crutch. A stopwatch was in his other hand, and a whistle hung at the end of the cord tied around his neck. He was acting as the
timekeeper, scorer, and the third man, the referee on the sidelines who casts the deciding opinion when the two umpires on the field disagree on a foul or the point at which it occurred. “When new riders play the first game here, they always try to prove how good they are. Raul says he has eight men on the field playing solo polo. That is why he always has them play a game before the training starts so they can show off for him and he can see all the things they do wrong. When one tries too hard, one often looks foolish.”

“That's true.” She smiled wanly at his consoling remarks.

Yesterday, Saturday, had been the arrival day for the rest of the students participating in the polo program. “Students” was a misleading word, since most of them were in their early to late twenties and two were over thirty. The class was international in scope, composed of four Argentines, a Mexican, a German, two Americans, the son of an Arab sheik, and a Texan. The polyglot conversation at dinner last night had been confusing for nearly everyone. Fortunately English was the language in which they could all make themselves understood—eventually.

A fluttering of white near the picket lines caught her eye, and Luz turned her head slightly to identify the source. Trisha had wandered in that direction some time ago, although she wasn't in sight now. The flash of white had come from the two Arabs, garbed in their native flowing caftans and ha'iks, who had accompanied Hanif, the sheik's son. Luz wasn't sure whether they served as his bodyguards, valets, or what, but one of them was always present wherever the Oxford-educated Hanif was. Scanning the picket line, she finally noticed Trisha sitting on the ground talking to the red-shirted Texan Duke Sovine.

A horse and rider crossed her line of vision, then cantered toward the sideline. Luz recognized Raul and felt the wary tautness take hold of her. But he didn't look her way, directing his attention at Hector as he reined his horse in with a barely perceptible check on the bit.

It was difficult not to admire the continuous flow of invisible communication between the hard-breathing horse and the man on its back. Raul said something in Spanish to Hector, who looked at the stopwatch, then responded. Without a break in the animal's stride, he turned the horse in a tight arc and rode
to the center of the field, where the players were gathering. In this game, Raul was an umpire, not a player.

“Only three minutes left,” Hector said to Luz. “It will be over soon.” She nodded to acknowledge she'd heard him, but continued to watch Raul, her errant thoughts visualizing those wide shoulders and tapered back without a shirt—as Trisha must have seen them. “He rides as one with the horse, no?”

Startled, Luz glanced at Hector and realized he'd noticed her watching Raul. Quickly, she looked back at the field, struggling against the sudden self-consciousness. “Yes, he does.”

“Do you know the legends of our gauchos? It is said they were half man and half horse. Your cowboys, they caught the cows with
la reata
. The gaucho, he rode his horse at a full gallop after a wild cow, then cut the hamstring with the blade of his lance. The quickness of the hand and the eye and the horse, all one, it is like polo, no?”

“Yes.
El señor de nada,”
Luz remembered—too well perhaps. After seeing the pampas, it would seem that he was a mounted lord who ruled nothing, and therefore possessed only the arrogance of a lord.

“You have heard the stories.” Hector smiled at the discovery.

“Not really. That was just something I picked up somewhere.”

The ball was thrown in by Raul, and the last minutes of play were resumed. Thankfully, Rob made no more blatant errors in judgment that Luz observed, but neither did he have the consolation that someone else did during those final minutes, and so his remained the freshest. When the game ended, he separated from the other players and rode off the field by himself.

“No se olvide
—do not forget,” Hector said to Luz as she started to move away, intent on joining Rob. “We have the big feast in one hour. Then you will taste the
asado.”

“I'm looking forward to it.” She was aware of all the preparations for this festive Argentine-style barbecue that had kept the household staff busy all morning. The smell of smoke from the open fires was in the air, and its gray trail was visible above the treetops surrounding the back lawn. But there were simply too many other things on her mind for Luz to take more than a passing interest in it all.

After leaving Hector, she crossed the dirt road that separated
the polo field and the stables, angling to intercept Rob while allowing him time for self-castigation. When she met up with him in front of the stables, he dismounted and handed the reins of his horse to a waiting groom. He turned toward Luz, but didn't look at her as he pounded the mallet head on the ground a couple of times, his helmet and riding crop in his other hand. The disgusted expression on his face showed, as plainly as his action, his anger at himself. She didn't need to say anything.

“I thought I could do it,” he muttered, keeping his voice down so that the other returning players couldn't hear him. “I knew I could make that shot. If Juan had been in a position to pick it up, we could have had an easy score.”

“You were the defensive back. You have to remember the duties of your position. Your priority is to protect the goal, to stop your opponent from scoring, not to set up a score for your side. You left your man uncovered, with none of your other three teammates between him and the goal. You took a risk, and backs aren't supposed to gamble.”

“Yeah.” His glance flicked to the right of her, traveling upward. “I made one hell of an error, didn't I?”

Realizing he was talking to someone else, Luz turned. There had been so much activity around her, riders dismounting, grooms leading horses, and players walking by, she hadn't paid any attention when a horse and rider stopped nearby. As she met Raul's steady gaze, it was evident that he had overheard her lecture on position responsibilities. He towered beside her on horseback, tall and imposing.