Horse Heaven (60 page)

“Hanging on the wall of William Vance’s office are six photofinish win pictures. Horsemen think that might be some kind of record. And William hasn’t been averse to betting on his own horse. ‘Let’s just say,’ he says, ‘I’ve set aside some money toward my son’s medical-school tuition.’ Does he have an explanation for the horse’s performance? ‘You know, when he was down at my dad’s in Missouri for all those months, he stood every day in a spring-fed pond. That’ll cure what ails you.’

“But that’s not why he’s smiling. He says, ‘This is a nice horse. He’s easy to get along with and a pleasure around the barn. I always wonder,’ adds Vance, ‘whether he has a sense of humor.’ ”

William takes the article to Kinko’s himself and has it laminated to a piece of particle board right above Justa Bob’s seventh win picture. After that, when people want to talk about the whole deal, he gives that to them to read.

I
T WAS INTERESTING
to Rosalind to note that in all of her travels, even in all of her china-buying, she had somehow never been to Ireland, where she found herself in the new year. Everyone either came from Ireland or went there, especially everyone in the horse world. Al, in fact, had been to the Curragh, and Coolmore Stud, and the yearling sales several times, but Rosalind had never had occasion to come until now, when she was supposed to be looking at paintings but could not because the painter, having missed his flight from Ankara, would not be back at least until tomorrow and maybe the next day, by which time Rosalind herself would be in Spain on her way to Delhi. And so she was in Dublin, with a free day. Since Irishness pervaded the world, and it seemed that most people spent at least part of their education and a bit of each day having feelings about things going on in Ireland—much more so, say, than things going on in France—it was all the more surprising to Rosalind that she had no friends here and was herself unknown to anyone, so she didn’t have a soul to call, and as wealthy and well connected as she was everywhere else, here in Ireland she was a nobody.

How her heart soared at the thought.

No light blinked on the telephone in her hotel room.

No faxes or messages were waiting for her, since she had spoken to the artist himself upon her arrival the day before.

No one knew that today, this very day, she was turning fifty years old. No one had arranged a birthday party for her. She had no self-preservation or self-consolation appointments at any salons or spas. None of her friends had made lunch reservations at Cité Grill or Lutèce for the sake of common lamentation at the passage of time.

Instead, January 3, 1999, was an utter unknown for her. Even Al might not call, since he was in Siberia looking into building some sort of steel-rolling mill. The worldwide cellular-telephone system only intermittently connected
with Siberia, and Rosalind had told him not to worry about it. They had hardly seen each other at all since the Breeders’ Cup.

As she came down the wide, beautifully burnished dark oak staircase into the lobby of the hotel and turned left to go into the dining room for breakfast, Rosalind looked at her watch. In fact, it was only just after 1:00 a.m. in Appleton, her natal city. She was still unborn, though the labor that had resulted in her was well progressed.

The hotel dining room was a pleasant combination of seedy and beautiful, a place where nothing was new but everything was well taken care of. She sat down at her brilliantly white and sparkling table, former seven-pound, two-ounce female baby with only the lightest down of hair on her head. Fifty years on. Hard to believe.

Just then, one of those handsome, blue-eyed men appeared with a basket of something warm, and set it on the table. He said, “There you are, then, dear. Its nice currant scones this morning, and the butters right there. Coffee or tea this morning?”

“Tea, please,” said Rosalind, lifting the napkin on the basket. Five or six square buns were tumbled in their nest. She picked one up. Both its flat bottom and its domed top were deep, crispy golden. The butter that they had been brushed with came off on her fingertips, which she licked. Then she bit off a corner of the scone. It was warm and savory. The buttery shell of the crust, the heavy, soft, crumbly interior. It was just sweet enough to remind you that the marmalade on the table beside the pale, creamy butter would go perfectly if you could pause long enough to smooth it on. Rosalind closed her eyes. The fragrance was delicious, too—biscuity and fruity and buttery. Her grandmother had been a great baker of biscuits—big tins of biscuits coming out of the oven every morning for her grandfather and her father’s brothers who worked the farm, who were just coming in the door from the first milking as Rosalind came down the back stairs from the sleeping porch. She would have been, what, five, maybe six, and it would have been summer, because that’s when they went out to the farm. Her father’s brothers were big men, three of them, heavy in the belly and the shoulders, all waiting to get married in those days, and so bulking large around the farm. As they came back to her, she saw all of their rounded, heavy accoutrements, too—black Buicks, black-and-white cows, tractors, bales of hay, everything big and dangerous, everything that she was supposed to stay away from and be careful of. The farm was supposed to be fun—that’s how her mother and father presented their annual trips to herself and her sisters—but the fields were full of cowpies, the blackberries had thorns, the pond was slimy, they weren’t allowed to climb the trees,
and her grandfather was short-tempered with all of his sons, who, she realized now, should have been long gone by that time. She bit into the scone again, and felt a stab of anxiety at how they would all come in, tromping, stepping out of their boots, already arguing among themselves by breakfast. They ate heartily and with a lot of banging of silverware and glassware, with yelling and growling. None of it was ever directed at her or her sisters, of course. They were treated like special company, delicate and easily damaged, but among themselves, anything went—table-pounding was routine. She and her sisters would look at each other under their bangs and lose their appetites, and so they would be required to sit there all the longer, until they finished what they had taken onto their plates—no waste was the rule around the farm. Eventually, after the men went back out to work, they would choke it down. Rosalind bit off another piece of the scone.

She opened her eyes, and her tea was in front of her, and in addition to that, a woman was sitting at the table with her, a slender young woman of about thirty with dark hair, in a black suit with a white, high collar. She was smiling. She said, “Hullo, do you mind if I sit? There’s absolutely not another spot in the place, and I have to wait for this woman I’m interviewing. She’s a great poet, and very particular and all that, and her publicist told me I mustn’t be late on any account, and so I’m twenty minutes early, can you believe that? But all the tables are taken, and the maitre d’ won’t let me wait inside the restaurant at all, so I told him I was with you, because you looked so lovely here, like a beach in the Caribbean, if you know what I mean.”

Rosalind laughed aloud, and said, “That’s the nicest compliment I’ve had in years.”

“Ah, so you’re American, then. I thought so. You were enjoying your scone quite a bit.”

“Was I? Would you like one?”

“Oh, yes. With a bit of this marmalade, it would be divine.”

“I was remembering my grandfather’s farm. My grandmother made what we call biscuits. They’re very like scones. But it wasn’t a happy memory. Sort of frightening, really.”

“And so you hate breakfast? That’s what happens. You find yourself hating something simple, like breakfast, and then you pay thousands of pounds to have it traced to how your parents once leapt across the table at one another with their forks raised. That’s what happened to me, except that it didn’t.”

“What didn’t?”

“That fork incident. No one, none of my brothers and sisters, none of the aunts or uncles, ever remembered my parents trying to gouge each other with
forks, and really, that sort of thing isn’t in them. So, after talking about this fork-gouging incident with my psychoanalyst for weeks, I found out it didn’t happen, so she said, ‘Well, lets pretend that it did.’ So we did that. I must say there was great weeping and gnashing of teeth that day! And then she said, ‘Now lets remember that it didn’t, and so you can eat breakfast anytime you want,’ and so I said good-bye to that fork-gouging thing, and I must say that was a relief to everyone in the family. Yes, the thousands of pounds to the psychoanalyst happened, but not the forks. But, you know, after that, we saw that you could entertain any thought as a memory, and then get rid of it, and it worked perfectly well. I thought it was quite a breakthrough myself, not being attached to any idea that these things you remembered had ever actually happened. Lovely. And all of that stuff that really happened, well, you could get rid of it, too, because you can’t remember, so it’s just a story.”

Rosalind laughed.

The young woman said, “I do believe that I’ve had the only successful psychoanalysis in the history of the world. Ah. There she is!”

Across the room, a woman with great upswept gray-blond hair whooshed into the restaurant. She was wearing a purple garment and in every way taking advantage of her artistic status. Rosalind said, “I met her at a party once. Have a good interview.”

“She’ll say anything, you know. That’s the brilliant benefit of interviewing her. You turn her on, write it down, give it a little continuity, and you’re finished. Thank you for the scone.”

“Thank you for the tip.” But the young woman had already turned her attention to the poet, and Rosalind was alone again. She finished her tea and ate another scone. Really, that was enough. It left her feeling light and eager for the day. The day. Her fiftieth birthday! She looked at her watch. Still not born yet. But soon.

Maybe it was these thoughts that prevented her from understanding a word the concierge said when she asked him about taxis. When he was done talking, and smiling at her again, as helpful as could be, she realized that she had not been listening at all. He might as well not have been talking. She was sufficiently embarrassed that she said, “Thank you. That’s very helpful.” And she went out of the hotel. There was a park across the street and whizzing traffic passing right in front of her, so she turned right and began walking down the street, an unknown street in an unknown country on a sunny day in some direction she hadn’t bothered to ascertain. She felt happier than she had in years.

She came to the light and crossed, for the traffic seemed actually to stop.
In any case, she had no sense of danger. Quite the contrary. There was a rightness about every step she took. She turned again and crossed again, and came into a busy walking street paved with bricks. It was lined with all sorts of shops. Ah.

Shoppers, especially wealthy woman shoppers, got very little respect, but it was clear to Rosalind that shopping made the world go round. She and Al, for example, appeared to be at distant ends of a particular continuum. He erected factories for the manufacture of giant heavy metal objects. He employed strong sweaty men, and went to places like Eastern Europe and Siberia, because those were the last bastions of strong sweaty manhood. The only giant heavy metal object Rosalind ever touched was her Mercedes. Carryable and beautiful things made up her world, and knowing where they were meant to be situated and getting them there was her art. But, in fact, usually she had lost interest in the object itself as soon as she bought it. What others thought was the product, beautiful rooms, was only the by-product. The product was the flow itself. She paused and looked down the street before her, knowing that at the end of a couple of blocks she would have modified in a significant way the flow of objects around the world. What was now resting, in windows and on counters, would soon take flight, borne, like all objects, upon the current of money. The current of money had a little vortex right in her house with Al, right in their bank account. So much came in and so much went out that their bank account generated a little Gulf Stream, a warming current of consumption that eddied around the world. Nor was she a purely economic woman, however. Doing her bit for capitalism was only serendipitous. The real payoff, for her, was rediscovering, every moment of every shopping experience, what a good appreciator she was. That was her real privilege. Of course, you could certainly appreciate uniformly manufactured large heavy metal objects. They were useful and often gracefully formed. But a born appreciator needed variety and singularity to really develop her talents.

Rosalind crossed the street again and perused a window full of finely made wooden boxes and cabinets. Next to that window was a window full of Belleek china and Waterford crystal. She saw that there were three styles that she hadn’t seen before; a set of water goblets, opaque, with a clear feathery design, was the most charming. Next to them were shoes. Shoes were interesting, having both a functional side and an artistic side, and both sides being linked to price only in a slippery, undefined way. She went back to the box shop and entered.

For Rosalind, mercantile relationships were always happy ones, and the more expensive the shop, the happier she and the proprietors were to see one another, because as soon as she walked in the door they knew she was the
person they had been waiting for. In this shop, for example, three people were standing behind the counter. They looked up, they saw Rosalind, they smiled, and the man came out from behind the glass case. He, Rosalind thought, would be the manager, or even the owner. His smile was not even mercenary. He was truly happy to see her; that’s how she knew what a great shopper she was. She said, “You have some lovely things in here.”

“Thank you, darlin’,” he said.

“Are they handmade?”

He grasped her left arm above the elbow, the friendliest of gestures, and said, “Watch the carpet here, luv, it’s a little uneven. Here we go.” He had gotten her into a little nook toward the back of the shop, a nook full of chests. They rose in front of her, tall, narrow, silky amber-colored, knobbed in what looked like garnet-colored stones. He said, “Now, look at these, dear. Padraig Mahoney makes these out in Galway. He makes one a year. I’ve got four here, that’s four years’ work. This is 1993. This is 1994. This is 1996. And this is 1997. I sold 1995 last year and 1992 three years ago, and I’ve made arrangements to get 1998 here, but I haven’t got it yet.”