Borrowed Horses (22 page)

“Foxy is not ‘any other horse.’”

He smiled and took the carrots from my box and snapped one in half to offer her on his flat palm. She jerked back in the ties as if he’d struck her, rolling her eyes and pinning her ears at the treat.

Eddie dropped his hand and walked to her side, his eye on hers. He walked her up a few steps and let her stand. Slowly, he raised the carrot in his left hand, stroking her neck with his right. He touched the carrot against her jowl and moved it toward her nostril where she could smell it. Her eye whitened again and she jerked away. “Hmph.” (Eddie’s short snort.) “She doesn’t know what it is.”

I shook my head. “A horse that doesn’t know what a carrot is. Just ‘like any other horse,’ huh?”

Eddie ignored me. “We’ll put this one in her grain tonight and let her figure it out. She didn’t know what apples or sugar cubes were either, but I hadn’t tried carrots yet.”

I lead Zephyr out. Exhausted, she walked quietly enough now, though her ear and eye stayed trained on me until we reached her paddock. Foxy was running the fence-line, screaming, and Zephyr looked at him with what could only be seen as disdain. I led her in and got him out as she grazed her way toward the back. I mounted Foxy and rode him bareback over the soft loam of the hills, guiding him with nothing but his halter and shifts of my weight. The twilight deepened around us as we returned to the barn. It would become our routine, the post-Zephyr unwinding.

Forge

T
imothy had left a message on my machine. Punk chemist indeed; I appreciated the way he challenged a fence.

When I called back, he answered on the second ring. He said, “I’d called to see if you wanted some dinner, but when I didn’t hear from you, I figured I’d better just go ahead and eat.”

“I was at the barn late tonight. A lesson.” It was eight o’clock and I had no food that I wanted to eat. Someone said hunger is the best sauce, and maybe it is, but no sauce can save the limp peppers of a frozen rice bowl.

“How was it?” Timothy asked.

“What?”

“The lesson.” There was a smile in his voice.

Where to begin? “I’ll tell you over dessert, if you’re still interested, but I’ve got to eat something.”

Timothy laughed. A gentle, intimate laugh. A laugh as warm as the receiver pressed against my ear. My smallest bones reverberated, waking the tiny forge in my ear: hammer, anvil, stirrup.

“Where to?” he asked.

“Shit, I’d even eat McDonald’s at this point,” I said, but quickly feared he’d take me at my word. “No, strike that. I’m not that desperate yet.”

“Gyro and baklava?”

“
Yes
.” The man had taste.

“I’ll be by in ten minutes,” he said, and hung up before I had time to ask for fifteen. My skin was dry and powdery with barn dust and my nose was lined with a hard black crust of dirt-hardened mucus, but he’d left no time for a shower. I washed silt and sweat from my neck, face, and arms. Rivulets of grime coursed down the drain. I’d just had time to pull on jeans and shove a ball cap over my head when he knocked.

The crow-feather hair that flopped over his eyes picked up a hint of starshine. He said, “You changed already?”

“You sound disappointed. I’m sure I still smell like horse shit. Surely, that’s worth something.”

He laughed again, that lovely sound. “Let’s get you fed,” he said.

I thought back on our dinner the next day at work. There, amidst my humming machines, I thought of the way he leaned on his hands and watched me eat, waiting to eat his baklava until I’d finished my gyro. His imagined presence, the remembered conversation, the taste of seasoned lamb, feta, and cucumbers warmed the sterility of Room One.

I had told him about Zephyr and showed him the bruise on my arm, the broad red where she’d first gotten hold of me, the thin blue line where her teeth had pinched before I’d yanked my arm clear. He had laughed, the glint again in his eye. “Tell me again why you like this sport?”

I had smiled the question off, then was startled to realize he was waiting for a reply. The flip answer was at my lips, but I didn’t want to push Timothy away with insincerity. I paused before answering, “It makes me feel real.”

“Real?”

“In touch,” I tried. “In my body.” I shook my head. “I can’t explain it.” I looked away from him, pretending to study the invented hieroglyphs that decorated the walls of Mikey’s.

Timothy didn’t drop it there. He was really trying to understand, but how does one explain obsession? How does one explain faith? He asked, “Real or corporeal?”

I met his gaze. “Is there a difference?”

Now, Timothy paused and reflected. “The difference, I think, is passion.”

The hieroglyphs were painted in browns and blacks, as were the pseudo-Egyptians marching around the room. I’d always found them comfortingly amateurish—the proportions off, even for primitive figures. There was no message in their movements, nothing offered in their empty hands. “Real, then, because that’s the passion part, right? That’s the part that’s more than just physical.”

“Like the difference between sex and love,” he said. His voice had been smirking, but I couldn’t read the smile on his face.

He was baiting me. There could be no unthinking conversation between us. I let baklava honey rest on my tongue, and raised my guard.

“Tell me about your boyfriend,” Timothy said.

“Not tonight.”

Again, he regarded me, at once calm and thoughtful. The challenge in his gaze latent, but there.

Sitting in the dark of Room One, this was what haunted me. Instead of building truths between us, I had been constructing more walls. Joan of Arc: castles and keeps. I had made a fortress of myself. For what?

There weren’t many patients that day. Some stomachs early in the day to prep for surgery, an appendix, three knees. Herman Kraus was in the ER again with another possible heart attack—the fourth chest x-ray I’d given him this year. He got crankier every time. Having four x-rays apparently entitled him to tell me how to do my job; he instructed me how to line up the portable unit and complained about everything: the weight of the apron as I swung it on (
Christ, Joannie—are you trying to sterilize me? Damned if that wasn’t dead on the nuts
.), of the nurses’ slowness (
Did they forget to brew the coffee today, ladies?
), of the lack of attention with which he was served (
Hello? Ladies?
), as we all buzzed around him and attended to his comfort. Outside ER, I knew Kraus to be a nice guy—a retired insurance man. I’d often passed him in the afternoons as he walked his Bichon Frise, the small white poof of a dog that was his only family. Pain brought out the ugly in some people.

Just before the end of my shift, Dr. Rivers walked into the lab. For once, he hadn’t slicked back his hair. Its relaxed wave framed his forehead, styled as if for an L.L. Bean catalog, with none of the ease or naturalness that I’d seen on the morning of the bike ride.

“Joan, I was looking for you.”

“You found me.”

“Ha, yes.” He ran his hand through his hair, then fiddled with his name tag, straightening it although it was already straight. “Nothing pressing. I’m having a small get-together tomorrow night. Bread, cheese, a little wine, that sort of thing. I, um. I thought you might want to stop by.”

He straightened the expensive pens in his coat. “Sounds nice,” I lied, wishing for a ready excuse.

“Great.” He took out his prescription pad and scribbled his address and phone number on the back. His hand shook as he wrote. I wondered if all the gel and stiffness was just an attempt at self-protection, a layer of veneer to protect himself from the pervasive miasma of sadness that floated around the hospital, mingling with the scent of disinfectant. It didn’t make him any easier to take.

“What time?” I said.

“Eight-ish?” He held out the small square of paper.

“O.K.” I looked at the slip. “Good lord. Don’t you doctors ever break stereotype? Is this a four or a nine?”

He moved to look over my shoulder and held my hand within his warm hand, turning the scrawled writing toward him. I couldn’t remember him ever touching me before, even casually. His fingers were soft, long, straight, and slightly feminine, tipped with clean, manicured nails—perfect for surgery or playing piano.

“Four,” he said. “And no, we don’t ever break stereotype. Bad penmanship is part of the Hippocratic Oath. In the footnotes.” Without cracking a smile or waiting for a laugh, he removed his hand from mine and walked out of the room.

In the morning, I ran. If there is evidence of the existence of God, it is the human foot. My vertical tower of not quite six feet of moving flesh and bone should not be able to balance on that meager foundation. When we run, an area the size of a dog’s paw contacts the earth. It defies physics and exists well beyond our own rational thought or intentionality. In a million thoughtless adjustments of muscles, the spreading and unspreading of toes, shifts in weight, we not only stand and walk but run. No merely human inventor could manufacture so finely tuned an engine.

In high school, I’d once argued with Mouse’s jerk boyfriend about whether horses or motorcycles were a better all-terrain vehicle. He’d said that motorcycles don’t buck off their riders. “Sure they did,” I’d replied, “but when motorcycles put you in a ditch, they don’t head back to the barn to let people know you’re hurt.” Horses jumped walls that stopped a bike, and they did not poison the world with toxic fumes or deafen their riders with their noise. The engine of the horse was more sublime.

But thinking of the human foot, I realized that neither horses nor motorbikes were as versatile, as adept, as capable as an unaided human. Neither could climb a tree, or scale chain link, or rappel down a sheer face of rock. With time and stamina enough, I could traverse just about anything.

I reminded myself of all this that morning, trying to convince myself that getting through Dr. Rivers’ cocktail party would be no big deal. At the moment, I’d rather prepare for an Everest climb than find clean and presentable clothing to wear. My arms, covered with Zephyr’s bruises, would have to be covered.

I was terrible at these things. The first cocktail party I’d been to in Jersey, the barn’s Christmas party, was a lesson in East Coast formality. I’d gone in jeans and a nice sweater and arrived to find myself amidst the sequined and silked; a duckling amidst swans. I felt destined to make a similar gaff tonight.

I arrived a half hour late, but only three couples were there so far: an OB/GYN and her husband, an older couple I recognized from photographs of the hospital’s board, and a small tan man and his wife who introduced themselves, immediately, as being from Nepal. They did this repeatedly through the evening, each time one of them met a new person.
Hello, I’m Janak and this is my wife Melina; we’re from Nepal
. I came to think of this as their function at the party: to be the couple from Nepal. To be glamorous. To be exotic. To show how kind Dr. Rivers was to have invited them. What an open-hearted man he must be, their presence said. He’d met them on the Wheatland Express, the bus linking Moscow, Idaho, with Pullman, Washington. They’d “hit it off,” he said.

And what demographic was I representing tonight?

I balanced a heavy crystal goblet in my hand and tried to think of anything to say that would make me appear intelligent and funny, but the familiar tension had settled into my shoulders. Eddie would tell me to
relax, relax
. How I wished he was here—how I wished anyone was here whom I could talk to. I asked the couple from Nepal how they liked it here, realizing as soon as I’d said it that the question left them no choice but to say they liked it a lot. “You don’t have to,” I said, trying to break from the conversation’s script into something more natural. “I don’t always like it here.” The couple looked at me oddly, and I suddenly felt myself a spoiled American, complaining about an idyllic land where I held crystal goblets and ate proffered Stilton and grapes. They edged away from me.

The house was beautiful. Along one wall, paintings hung, spotlit by recessed lighting. They were real paintings—not prints, but oil on canvas. I tried to picture the artists who created these modernistic pieces, full of color and movement, but I couldn’t see any suggestion of the creators in the created. Along another wall, stained glass windows, apparently recovered from demolished churches, hung on invisible wires. Overstuffed sofas, overstuffed chairs, overstuffed ottomans were placed to allow conversation, their patterned cushions coordinated with the intricately patterned rugs that lay at angles on the gleaming cherry wood floors.