Horse Heaven (43 page)

“The next night, they brought the zebra mare into Nureyev’s breeding shed again. She was winking and all that. Couldn’t have been more ready. The vet palpated her and she had a follicle the size of a kumquat. Perfect. But, still, Nureyev couldn’t, or wouldn’t, do it. So the stallion manager takes Nureyev aside and he whispers in his ear, ‘This is a million bucks, boy. It’s the end of the season. This is eight mares you don’t have to do. One time, no guarantee. That’s in the contract. No guarantee season.’ So Nureyev does that stallion thing, where they wrinkle up their nose, and he nods his head up and down. She’s ready. He knows it.”

Step step step. And on the surface, apart from the empty center of her that
she felt but didn’t understand, purchases, dinner parties, horse races, clothing and hairdresser’s appointments, Al’s body, Dick not around to run into for some reason, everything okay, everything far away.

“But then he looks at the stallion manager, Nureyev does, and he leans closer, and he says to the guy, ‘What I don’t understand is, if she’s so ready, why doesn’t she take off her pajamas?’ Here’s the stall number,” said Al. “This must be the horse.”

Rosalind remembered to laugh.

I
T WAS LATE
. The bay filly out of Belle Starr was waiting to enter the pavilion and step up on the golden stage where her value, in tens or hundreds of thousands, even in millions, would register on the display above her head as the bids flew around the amphitheater. For now she was known as hip number twenty-six. She moved deliberately, but with a swinging, ample stride. Her head turned easily from side to side as she took everything in. The filly’s handler paused with her outside the sales pavilion. She stood quietly, her lead-shank loose. Her handler gave her a couple of pats, then ran his hand down her neck. She was so clean for this sale that her coat was almost too fine for his callused palm to feel, but he nevertheless appreciated, as he had in the past, the wide expanse of a healthy horse’s smooth silkiness. Really, when you thought about it, no dog’s ear, no woman’s belly, no child’s cheek, no cat’s electric back offered such an inexhaustible field for a man’s palm. A moment later, the handler walked her in and stood her on the little stage. A hand went up, and then another. When the auctioneer called out, the filly’s ears swiveled.

Al was sitting next to Rosalind. He rather liked this filly, and he thought of bidding. He glanced at Rosalind for a sign, any sign, that she liked the filly, too. Rosalind’s consumer instincts were infallible. But in fact Al got no sign of anything, even that Rosalind was there. He knew that if he poked her and asked her for something she would hand it over with a smile; that was why he asked her all the time for so many things. But when she wasn’t handing something over, the lights were out and the family wasn’t at home, that Al could see. He sighed and glanced around the pavilion. He thought for a moment about one time they’d had together, seven or eight years before. They’d been driving up in the Catskills by themselves. They’d been way back in the hills and had gotten a flat tire. No cellular then. As the man, Al had gotten out and started changing the tire. But Al was all thumbs with this stuff. His dad had told him that he’d better make something of himself, because if he was going to have to handle tools he wasn’t going to get far. So he was fiddling with the tire and the tools in the trunk and all, and cursing and getting mad, and Rosalind floated
out of the car in her cream-colored suit and said, “Go sit down, honey.” The fact was, she was from Appleton, Wisconsin. It wasn’t like he didn’t think she could change a tire. But the tools kind of jumped into her hands, the tire kind of jumped onto the axle. Could he have seen that on film? Al didn’t know. Maybe she was just handy. But she changed that tire in about ten minutes, never got a dot on her suit or her shoes, wiped off her hands on a Kleenex, and off they went. When the lights were out and family wasn’t home it was the exact opposite of the sense that tire had given him, of everything being safe and basically okay, in spite of his mistakes and tantrums. Someone else bought the filly, and Al sat quietly.

O
NE SECTION OVER
and a few seats back, Farley watched the filly leave the sales pavilion and turned to looked at that blond head again, as well as the grizzled, balding head beside it. They were a strange pair, the cool, ageless blonde and the fidgety attention-seeker. Somebody’s owners, but with the self-confidence or the knowledge to come to the sale by themselves. Farley sighed. If he had had that heart attack he thought he was having today, someone, or, better still, a whole line of people, would be telling him what to do next. Having not had that heart attack, he still had to figure it out himself.

B
EHIND HIM
, but with his eye right on him most of the time, sat Buddy Crawford. His owners had bought everything he had advised them to buy, and every time Farley Jones nodded, shook his head, or even twitched, Buddy doubted himself. His reaction was to buy even more. Right next to him sat Andrea Melanie, her hands twitching. She said, “Oh, Buddy, listen to this. When I went off to college, you know, to Bennington, my mom took me right down to Gump’s and she said to the salesladies, ‘Bring everything out, all the fives and sixes,’ and you know what, we bought everything that looked the least bit decent. That was the most fun I ever had in my whole life next to this.”

“Well,” said Buddy, truthful as always, “horse racing is for fun. You’ve got to think of it that way.”

“Oh, Buddy,” said Andrea Melanie, “I do so admire you. You always call a spade a spade. No wonder everyone says you’re a saint.”

Wouldn’t it be nice, thought Buddy, to be sitting there so quiet and self-possessed, like Farley Jones? When he went back to southern California and to wishing he were dead, that would be the reason.

———

W
HEN THE HANDLER
led the filly out of the pavilion, he looked up into the late dusk under the giant trees. A fragrant breeze billowed gently around horses and humans, fragmenting words, whinnies, and smells, dispersing human intentions with the rattle and brush of leaves and branches. Here, then, was the heaven of Saratoga—all budgets and business plans, all ambitions and self-serving dreams broken up and cooled under the ancient trees by the yet more ancient wind, “I want” turning to “Ah, feel that!,” “I’ve got to have” turning to “What an evening!,” discontent with the past, fear of the future turning into a long, satisfied sigh already a hundred years old, but still fresh, still an astonishing surprise.

T
WO WEEKS
after the sale, Al found himself going back up to Saratoga alone to watch this dud that they had named Limitless, for some reason, make his third start. Al didn’t have a lot of interest in the horses anymore—they hadn’t bought a thing at the sale—but he didn’t have anything better to do, so he was walking past Grand Central and it was kind of fun getting off the train and taking a cab to the grandstand entrance and not having the valet parking. Saratoga did always make you feel good in some way.

Laurita wasn’t scheduled to run, as far as Al knew, but, then, he had not been in close contact with Dick Winterson for ten days, since he had discovered that Rosalind had had a thing with him. The extent of the thing he hadn’t gotten into. Love, sex, one night, one week, when it began, when it ended, what it meant to them, whatever. There were things that happened around you that you were wise to know one thing about but not everything about, which is what he had tried to tell some of the Republican congressmen he knew about this Clinton thing. What he had said to D’Amato himself when he last saw him was: If people like me lose interest in the guy’s dick before you do, then you’re the one who looks like a schmuck, not him. And then he put his hand on Al’s shoulder and he looked him in the eye, and he said, “Al, I am losing interest in the guy’s dick. I just am. Take that as a sign and pay attention,” and Al had said he would, but there was no sign of it. Still, the whole Clinton thing made you feel slightly different about anything you yourself might have done over the years, and even about anything your wife might have done with your horse-trainer, and why him, he’d like to know. It kind of took you out of that
I’m-gonna-kill-her frame of mind and put you into a these-things-happen-all-the-time frame of mind (which was more or less your own frame of mind when you were doing over the years what you had done over the years).

So he picked up his program and his
Form
and saw that the horse was in the third race, a maiden special weight, eighteen thousand dollars, all of which Dick had told his secretary the day before but he had forgotten, not having planned to come up here. And Dick wasn’t expecting him, either. And Dick maybe did not know that he, Al, knew about the thing he had had with Rosalind. There was a little thrill in that, wasn’t there?

The horse’s form was bad. In his first race, in a field of eight, he had run seventh by fourteen lengths. The line on him was “Showed no commitment.” In his second race, in a field of nine, he had run seventh again. The line was “Went wide on turn.” But all you had to do was look at his fractions and see that he had never gotten into either race. Dick hadn’t figured the horse out yet. That was clear from the
Form
. Suppose he talked to Dick about the horse. But between them, the horse, the trainer, the wife, and he himself, the owner, had gotten into one of those swampy interpersonal areas that Al especially didn’t like, where no one knew what to do, everyone was sorry, and no one was saying much. And what they were saying was all a cover-up. In his former life as a two-fisted drinker, Al would have produced some of what his sponsor called “bottle wisdom”—“Shit or get off the pot,” “What the fuck is going on here?,” maybe “Who the hell do you think you’re dealing with?” Now he was required to be more patient, and, to be perfectly frank, there was a lot about patience that felt just like not caring much at all. But that was a state you could take a little rest in, not a state you could live in. It was too boring, and, most of the time, he hated being bored most of all.

He saw that the horse had drawn the number-four spot, the race was five furlongs, and the handicapper said of him, “No breeding, no form, no chance. Two good works do not make a racehorse.” Usually when the handicappers got dismissive of his horses like that, Al had a little reflex of defensiveness, especially with a homebred, but sometimes when some guy got down on you, you had to just say, Yeah, you’re right, and leave it at that.

So he went up to his box. The horses hadn’t come out for the first race—he was way early. No one he knew, none of the other owners, seemed to be around, either, so he just sat down and stretched out his legs. The shade was cool, so he closed his eyes and tried to enjoy it. Actually, riding the train had put him in kind of a funny mood. It was nice that no one on the train knew who he was, or cared. It was nice to buy your ticket and say thank you and not have the ticket agent treat you like anything special. It was nice to go up to the counter at the station and wait in line for a bagel and have the guy say, “What
about you, buddy? You want something, or are you just taking up space?” It was nice to have the conductor take your ticket without looking into your face, and stick the stub in the back of your seat. It was even nice to sit right up next to your seatmate, a black guy carrying a cake on his lap, and wonder where the guy was going. It was nice not to have to be Alexander P. Maybrick all the time, or Al M., or even just “honey.” It was nice to be unnamed.

Sometimes these days, Al woke up in a panic. That was maybe the only result of his knowledge that Rosalind had had a thing with the horse-trainer. All he knew about the thing was that there had been a thing and now there wasn’t a thing any longer, because the way he knew about the thing was that he was rummaging under the bed for his watch a couple of nights after they got back from the sale, and he had come upon a note from the horse-trainer dated only a couple of months ago saying, “I don’t know what I am doing now and I didn’t know what I was doing then, but I did love you and probably still do. I’m sorry.” It was not actually addressed to Rosalind, but it certainly wasn’t addressed to Al, so, if you had four and took away two, you had to get two. All he had thought at the time, oddly enough, was, So that’s her problem. Two days later, though, he had awakened in a panic. He had been snuggled up to Rosalind, with the damned dog’s hairy body between them, and he had lain there, just putting his arm around her a little more tightly. The thing was, when he had his eyes closed, it seemed like she was all the way across the room, even though when he opened his eyes he saw that she was an inch in front of his nose. Then he realized that it didn’t matter where she was. He had always relied upon her to keep him safe, but now he saw who she was, a territory unexplored and unknown. She could not keep him safe. It wasn’t a matter of willingness. Shoulda, coulda, woulda, they were all the same. That was why he didn’t care much about the thing with the horse-trainer. The mistake had been his own, in more ways than one. If there was no safety in Rosalind, there was even less safety in his money and investments and assets and sponsor and colleagues—of course he ran down the whole list, that only took a second. He had felt his panic intensify. And then he had gotten up and gone to work and his meeting and tried not to think about the thing she’d had with the horse-trainer. But the panic had happened since, twice.

How did you balance these two experiences? On the one hand, surrounded by your stuff and your name, snuggled up against your wife, who had chosen not to leave you, and you felt a panic; on the other hand, alone on the train, alone in the stands at Saratoga, and okay, really, just a guy. If the other owners weren’t around, you didn’t even have to be an owner and all that implied, you could be just a guy.

The horses for the first race came out and Al hadn’t even placed a bet. But he was glad to see them. This what they called introspection was taxing. At his AA meeting, there were women, and even guys, who engaged in this sort of thing all the time. Normally, Al felt a good deal of contempt for them, but now he saw that they maybe deserved a little more respect.