Horse Heaven (28 page)

“Well, plenty. The Breeders’ Cup is at Churchill this year. We’ve got to—” And then all his words vaporized again. Dick could see his yap yapping, but
couldn’t hear a thing. He said, “Better not to count on anything, Al—” Yap yap yap. Now he was barking unintelligibly himself.

But he was watching Louisa. Later he decided that this thing that happened was what broke his heart. The first thing was that Louisa cleared her throat. Then she put her palm over her mouth, bent her head back, and closed her eyes, only for a second. Then she ran her hand down her neck, pausing at the base of her throat, continuing until she was pressing on her chest over her heart, as if to still it. All of this took only a second or two, and perhaps she wasn’t aware of him looking at her. At any rate, after that, she took a deep breath and smiled at him, her husband, and said, “Let’s go, then.” There it was, her whole history of not being able to go where he spent his life, in a large, chaotic space where nothing at all could be predicted or even planned, and where he had been perfectly comfortable for many years. How could it be that they had so thoroughly gone their separate ways that they could barely enter each other’s world now? Did he enter hers any more often than she entered his? Perhaps it was years since he had been to the college where she taught, and he hadn’t been to many recitals, either—he found the music she preferred grating and hard to listen to. At home, on their familiar turf, in their living room, kitchen, bedroom, study, dining room, all rooms that she could live in with utter familiarity and apparent normalcy, he was just as she was, apparently normal and apparently happily married. But, he realized, he hadn’t been even as willing to go as far with her as she was to come, again, to Aqueduct. If someone was trapped in a small room, fearful of going out and fearful of staying in, then it was himself, not her. It was a small room that Rosalind Maybrick entered and left at will, as free, Dick thought, as anyone could ever be.

“I’m ready,” said Louisa.

“Good,” said Rosalind, her voice resonating like a bell. And he followed Louisa as she performed the rituals that allowed her to move, longing to take her elbow, but not daring. You never touch an agoraphobic in the middle of an attack.

T
HEY CAME TO
the saddling enclosure. Rosalind looked down at Eileen and told her to sit. Eileen sat right down, boom, the way she always did, as if showing off. The groom and the assistant trainer already had the filly in her slot, though the horses for the sixth race were only just going out. Dick said brightly, “Here she is. You see, Al, she’s got quite a bloom on her.” Rosalind knew what that meant now—that the horse was training hard but in excellent health, well oxygenated and happy, 100 percent, as racing men said. Rosalind picked up Eileen and the four of them entered the saddling enclosure and went
over to the filly. The two men then drew off. Rosalind could hear Al’s persistant whine: “It’s April. We’ve got to put her in some of these fancy races. I’m telling you rumble rumble rumble drone drone drone Breeders’ Cup—”

Though she was younger than Rosalind by five years or so, the wife was one of those women for whom time had passed, and not kindly. Her face was a little puffy and her hair a little contrasty, brunette and gray. Of course, Rosalind knew, she was an artist, a singer, and appearance was of secondary importance to her. Rosalind respected that. Today, though, she radiated something that Rosalind couldn’t quite figure out. Pain of some sort. Well, if Rosalind herself didn’t radiate pain, it was only because her containment facility was in perfect order, on a regular maintenance schedule serviced by Elizabeth Arden, Bliss, Isaac Mizrahi, Jil Sander, and Giorgio Armani.

The thing about the wife, that is, Louisa, was that Dick had been married to her for twenty years, with her longer than that. Rosalind had delicately extracted from him the information that he was not a habitual adulterer, that, though not 100 percent faithful over the years, he had learned whatever it was he knew about love and sex through marriage, not outside of it. Rosalind, herself not previously an adulterer at all, was perhaps not as much a connoisseur of the erotic as she was of Persian carpets, American Chippendale furniture, nineteenth-century American painting, or Chinese porcelain, to name four things she had more experience with than sex and had formerly liked more than sex. But she had plenty of experience in being a satisfied customer, and with Dick, she was most assuredly a satisfied customer. At least for a moment. In that moment just after they were finished making love, she was satisfied to the eyeballs, but then, when he turned away from her, to drink something or to go to the bathroom, or to blow his nose or whatever, the satisfaction always began to dissipate, and continued to do so, so that, by the time he left to go wherever it was that he had to go, usually to the track, or she left to go wherever she was pretending she had to go, she was lost and aching again, though she dared not let him know.

Now the filly was saddled and they followed the groom, the horse, Dick, and Al out to the walking ring. The jockey had appeared and was walking along between the two men, cocky as could be, chatting them up. Rosalind could hear herself talking to Louisa—You just decided to come out suddenly, you don’t come out very often, then, racing isn’t my cup of tea, either, really—but she wasn’t actually looking at her until they came into the stands above the paddock and she heard Louisa inhale sharply and cry out. In front of her, Dick stiffened like he’d been shot, and Rosalind felt herself emerge from her shell of self-involvement and take notice. She said, “Are you all right?” She put Eileen down again.

A terribly anguished look passed over Louisa’s face and she took Rosalind’s hand. She said, “Just hold my hand until they open the gate and let the horses out.” Rosalind made up a reassuring smile, and they stood there while the horses moved out onto the track and began walking around to the gate. Eileen on her leash trotted right behind them, her head about ankle high in the crowd, but nevertheless, as always, undaunted. Louisa let go Rosalind’s hand when they mounted to their box, and then Dick paused long enough for the two of them to catch up to him, still talking to Al. Al, of course, was still babbling about his rights and privileges as a racehorse owner. Rosalind passed Louisa to Dick and he gave her a little smile, grateful, unlike any other smile they had shared. Rosalind expected to see him put his arm around his wife and draw her against him, but he didn’t. He let her pass in front of him, then he followed her up the steps and over to the box. She sat down and seemed to coil up, her hands in her lap and her feet under the seat. Dick sat on one side of her, and Rosalind on the other, with Eileen in her lap. Eileen got up, put her forefeet on the railing, and pricked her ears as if ready for the race. Al sat on the other side of Dick. He said, “About time this filly got back out here. It’s been two months since her last race.”

Dick said, “She’s ready today. And, Al, if you want to go to the Breeders’ Cup, you’ve got to let her save something for later.” He sounded enthusiastic, but as the horses approached the gate, Rosalind knew from conversations they’d had that he was worried. He hated the starting gate. One thing for sure, since the onset of her illness, which was how she thought of their affair, she had learned a good deal more about horse racing than she had ever known before. Too much, probably. Anyway, now she knew enough to worry, whereas in her former life she had skimmed in blissful ignorance above the whole socially unredeemed enterprise.

Dick put his glasses to his eyes, as did Al, and Laurita went into the gate second. She was in the seventh position from the post, a good position in this race. The last horse to go in resisted, and Dick coughed, a sign of distress. Did Al recognize this? Did Louisa recognize this? Perhaps only Rosalind knew enough about what was going on with Dick to recognize that cough. Then the horses were in, the bell rang, and they were out again, streaming over the green grass in a bunch. Rosalind, who had no binoculars, couldn’t make out which one was Laurita, but that was okay. She let Al and Dick take care of winning. She herself only took care of safety. She closed her eyes, gripped Eileen around the shoulders, and exerted her powers. Her hearing was good. She could hear eight horses, sixty-four legs, everyone safe and sound. This was a newish thing for her, knowing that the horses were safe by the separate and even beats that all of their hooves made in the track surface. She might have been astonished
by it, but she had seen
Rain Man
, and she knew that the power to make order out of chaos was a fairly common one among the mentally unusual, which she now was. She could hear the horses round the second turn. If you closed your eyes, a race seemed to go much faster than it did if you watched it, which she considered a blessing.

And then Louisa rose out of her seat like a missile through the still surface of the ocean and ran. And Dick rose out of his seat and went after her as if on a string. And Eileen gave a single bark. Al said, “What’s up with them? The race isn’t even over.”

Rosalind remembered to turn her eyes to the homestretch, where, sure enough, Laurita was flattening out to hold off the bid of another filly, who had attained her shoulder but could attain nothing more and, at the wire, dropped back to Laurita’s hip. They jumped up, cheering, and Rosalind exclaimed, “That filly works hard for you, Al.”

“—Breeders’ Cup. But where did those two go? I can’t go into the winner’s circle alone.”

“Al, I think there’s something wrong.”

“What’s wrong? How could anything be wrong? We just won a big stakes.”

“Adrenaline doesn’t cure everything, Al.”

“What does that mean?”

But then he was gone himself, leaving her to make a more dignified progress to the track. A few moments later, she saw him out there. He shook the groom’s hand, then the jockey’s hand. Then he gave the filly a clumsy hug. She made her deliberate way to the filly. Dick was nowhere to be seen, which was rather awkward, though no more awkward than other social situations Rosalind had dealt with in the past. What she hated was that she had not prepared herself for his absence, which she had to do in order to accommodate herself to it. Whatever was happening to Louisa, she thought, could be no more agonizing than what was happening to her (her self vanishing into darkness, irretrievable, deadly), she was just more in the habit of closing down the containment facility to prevent a total meltdown. But the alarms were ringing so loudly while they were standing for the picture that she thought surely every ear in the stands could hear them. And Al said, “What’s the matter with you? What’s the matter with everyone? I don’t get it.”

L
OUISA
M
ALONE
-W
INTERSON
was perfectly capable of understanding what was happening to her—it had been happening for ten years now, and she had had plenty of therapy. She was even perfectly capable of deploring it,
excusing it, and forgiving it, but she was not capable of stopping it. She had always imagined a full-blown agoraphobia attack as the experience of knocking at an address she thought she knew, expecting the door to open, and a friend to smile at her and invite her into the house, but instead finding herself sucked into a wind tunnel, slick, featureless, buffetting, with only a slender thread of knowledge to hold on to—progress through the wind tunnel was inevitable, the attack would end, the door at the other side would open when she got there. This thread of knowledge was more comforting when she was not having an attack, but she had learned to hang on to it even when she was. It was also probable, she knew, that she would not get hurt, though falling down, running into the path of a moving vehicle, and even running into a wall were remote possibilities. Ah, well, there was a room in her mind that was separate from this, from which she observed her behavior through a small, protected window.

She ran through the betting hall and out onto the concourse in front of the track. She found herself where the ramp swooped up to the subway stop, not a good place to be—in fact, the very worst place to be, because the roof of the concourse seemed to run toward her or away from her, as if she were in the center of a funnel, and the grandstand loomed behind her, too tall for her to dare to look at. Now Dick was with her, toppling toward her, and he grabbed her, even though she recoiled. He grabbed her by the elbow and began pulling her back inside, through the pass gate and the vestibule, and into the hallway below the escalators, and from the small safe little room in her mind, she ordered herself not to fight him, but to go along with him. He had always taken her somewhere safe before, and so she ought to have had faith in him, but the reluctance to be touched was so powerful that it came into her mind to bite him or kick him, a horsey thing to do, he liked horses so much. He said, “Darling, close your eyes. Close your eyes.” He took her over to the wall behind the escalators.

She had done this in the past, long before, and she tried to remember how to do it. But her eyelids were pasted open in horror and fear. She had no control over them. Finally, he did what he had to do, which was to put his hand in front of her eyes and block out everything she was seeing. Then he sat down on the bench against the wall and pulled her down with him, still keeping his arm around her and his hand over her eyes. It was brutal and made her want to run away. But that was the thing about agoraphobia. In the middle of an attack, there was no going and no staying. The impossibility of either course of action put her into a dilemma that could not be solved in this physical universe, so she started screaming. She knew she was screaming; it was pretty obvious,
and it echoed around the glassed-in space, but she couldn’t stop. And then Dick said, “Louisa, you will damage your voice. Please don’t do that to yourself, darling.”

“Let go of me.”

He let go of her. Immediately, the urge to run lifted off. His hand was no longer over her eyes, and so she put her own hands over her eyes. A bit after that, she was able to take a deep breath. Then she realized what had been happening, and the relief of finding the door at the end of the wind tunnel turned into humiliation and remorse, so she burst into tears. He did not put his arms around her. She had trained him not to. But he sat beside her on the bench while she cried.