My Year of the Racehorse (5 page)

I lamely attempt to draw out our conversation.

“Um, anyway, I like your lyrics a lot,” I say. “Especially on ‘Speed of Sound.'”

“Dude, it's actually called ‘Spreadsheet of Clowns.'”

“Oops, your lyrics are very personal. At times, they almost read like journal entries.”

“Really?” He pulls back one corner of his mouth; the rest of his face pinches into a scowl.

“Sorry, I didn't mean to offend you. I misspoke. I don't mean to say—”

“It's okay, dude,” he says, waving back the cigarette smoke in his face. “It just reminded me of this time I was backstage at a Katrina benefit concert. Tim Robbins and I were listening to a very young, very confessional singer-songwriter, and I said to him, ‘That's what diaries are for.' And Tim said, ‘That's what locks on diaries are for.'”

My guffawing is strained. “I didn't mean it that way,” I start. “I meant to say it in a way that suggests your lyrics are good—”

“No problem.” He sits up and squints at me. “Are you okay?”

“What do you mean?” I ask him, dabbing my brow with my shirtsleeve.

“You're sweating.”

“Sorry,” I say. “I'm a little hypoglycemic and didn't eat breakfast. I should have brought a granola bar with me.” Should I ask for something to eat? It would be too unprofessional. But what if I pass out? “Do you mind if I have some grapes?”

He finally notices the fruit plate, the cling-wrapped object of my ardour, by his feet. His gaze pitches back to the door through which the publicist exited, before returning to me. “Dig in, man.”

I've always wanted to be someone who could politely turn down free food, but I fail at every test. With a jittery motion, I pull four or five grapes into my hand and cram them in my mouth like popcorn. “So, about that song, can you talk about what inspired it?”

“Sure,” he says. “It's about staying relevant. My first album came out almost twenty years ago, and I feel as though I was late to the party even then. All my favourite music was made before 1972. The White Album, Let It Bleed, Pet Sounds—”

“Anne Murray,” I joke, wiping the grape juice from my chin.

He smiles for the first time, but doesn't seem to get my joke. For all he knows, Anne Murray is the Janis Joplin of Canada—and not just our mulleted Linda Ronstadt. “Yes, yes.”

“So you're saying you're among the last of a dying breed?” I ask.

He curls his hand in front of his face, the way I've seen him do in concert films when he emotes, shaman style, before his mike. “Yeah, like that, except not in such a clichéd way.”

“Agreed. Flaubert had that feeling, too,” I suggest. “A sense of belatedness; that feeling of coming to the party an hour after the orgy's ended.”

“Yeah, man. It's like a congenital, dying-world thing.”

It's in this inopportune moment that I have a private epiphany. For the first time, I realize that my own interests, both professional and personal, have a unifying theme. Like this rock star, I like unpopular things that used to be popular, things that inch along a cultural continuum between staleness and a revival, because I am someone who wants to be adored but also reflexively scorns adored people, who shrinks from fads but reveres institutions, who likes popular things but not the ones you like. This explains my interests in books and rock music. Horse-racing is no longer an outlier interest, another of my dilettante dabbles, but part of a family of aging glories I cherish.

I wag my finger in the air; the desire to share this insight overcomes me.

“You know what your song really is about?” I say. “Horseracing.”

“What the fuck?”

“Yeah, just follow me. I've gotten into it and it's kind of seen its best days in the past.”

“Well, yeah,” he says, dipping his cigarette into an ashtray, “I don't know much about the sport.”

“It's kind of like the rock 'n' roll of sports,” I say. “The most glamorous and most tragic one. Did you see Barbaro breaking down at the Preakness two years ago? It seemed like he would recover, but he died. So, so sad. Like Kurt Cobain's final days.”

The rock star is visibly uncomfortable with a journalist talking about himself. When the publicist arrives with her latte and his smoothie, he looks as though he's been retrieved from an ice floe.

“I hope you got what you needed,” she says, watching the rock star stand up, briskly shake my hand, and retreat into his back room. “If you want some photos, there are some in the press kit I sent you.”

She leads me out towards the door, but I stop. “I really have to pee,” I say.

UNLIKE THE PREVIOUS session shadowing a postie, a hard day of journalism doesn't quite wear me out. On days not spent at the track, I've been kept awake by low-level anxiety attacks. I'm fretting, as is my wont, over the wayward course of my life.

These days, I'm no longer afraid of getting old. In fact, I prefer my thirties to my twenties. I wear better clothes and avoid draft beer. I've finished War and Peace and given up on trying to read Proust. The hay fever that ruined my childhood summers now affects me less severely; I don't catch cold nearly as easily; I'm able to rest on planes. My decrepitude has come with abundant blessings.

Now what bothers me is the idea that I'm behind. Friends have gone further in their careers, acquired the objects, relationships, and experiences that denote a rich, un-squandered life. I'm competitive, after all.

I stay up later than I should and after lying in bed for two hours, I get up with the intention of transcribing the interview with the rock star. I get to the part of this interview about horseracing and listen to it twice. I tilt my head back. Pinned on the corkboard above my computer screen is the to-do list I made earlier in December. With the new year arriving, I put together a list of things I wanted to have accomplished by the following year. As a form of stress relief, I compulsively made lists, breaking inapproachable burdens into bite-sized, component tasks. It was this format, favoured by obsessive males around the world, that I used to chart my life goals.

1. BECOME A HOME OWNER

2. FIND TRUE LOVE

3. SETTLE DOWN & START A FAMILY

4. SEE THE WORLD

5. LEARN ANOTHER LANGUAGE

6. START A RETIREMENT PLAN

7. GET A TATTOO

The list, of course, is a joke. As a matter of principle, to-do lists shouldn't take a lifetime to complete. They shouldn't hang above you in reproach, like an eviction notice. To-do lists are made in order to provide the pleasure of crossing them out.

With that in mind, I take down the list and cross out the first item:
1.
BECOME A HOME OWNER
. After all, didn't I substitute that task with a way cooler acquisition? With pen in hand, I alter my first entry:
1.
HOME OWNERSHIP
BOUGHT A RACEHORSE.

It was unlikely that I would legitimately be able to cross off any of the other items on my list in the near future. But what was keeping me from finding other substitutions? Instead of seeing the world or picking up another language, maybe I could learn to play backgammon or master Morse code.

And maybe instead of getting married, I could hook up with someone online. With that in mind, and two glasses of Crown Royal in my belly, I notice that Linda Lee—a source of heartache two years ago—is available for online chat. She's in Toronto now, three hours ahead, so she must have just gotten out of bed. We haven't spoken over those two years, not even a cursory hello when I added her as a Facebook friend. I click onto her profile and look at pictures of her cat, her boyfriend, her road trip through Morocco. I click through all the photos of her, then loop through them again. The most recent photos of her no longer feature the aforementioned boyfriend, though her status is still set as “In a Relationship.”

I argue with myself. If she wanted to talk to me, she could talk to me. I wasn't the one who moved away. I wasn't the one who acted awfully. Well, I sort of acted awfully, but she made things worse. I click onto her name and consider typing “hello,” but what keeps me from chatting with her is a message from another person of interest, Celeste:

CELESTE: Whatcha doing up so late?

KC: Up to no good.

CELESTE: Har-har.

Celeste lives in Kentucky. Last I heard she was married to a mathematician.

KC: You?

CELESTE: I just got back from a run. What's new with you?

KC: I own a racehorse.

CELESTE: Figures... what????

KC: Long story.

CELESTE: We've got tons of racehorses here, you know. I've been living here for a year and haven't seen any of them yet.

KC: I want to check them out.

CELESTE: What's holding you back?

KC: Is that an invite?

CELESTE: Uhhhhhh, why not?

KC: That's a possibility. How's married life treating you?

CELESTE: Well, not so good...

I start eyeing the second item on my list, imagining a line through it.

IF YOU KNEW Harris was a real-estate agent and saw his angular, bespoke visage, the home you would conjure for him in your imagination would be a penthouse suite in an envy-inducing edifice of glass and steel. In your mind, you would furnish it with geometrical leather furniture, framed emulsions of oil splatter mounted on the walls, and a gnocchi maker.

In reality, he bought the fifty-year-old North Shore home he grew up in, a four-bedroom rancher set deep behind a phalanx of alder trees. (Purchasing the home allowed his parents to move into a condo tower that has its own on-call dog-groomer.) To his wife's dismay, he insists on keeping much of the furniture that came with the house, like the butterscotch-coloured corduroy couch in the living room, the kitschy landscape painting his parents bought in a Havana street market, and the upright piano where he's maintained his younger sister's figure-skating trophies next to baby pictures of his own children, Jack and Liam. I don't know whether this is because Harris is thrifty or sentimental; I've seen him both ways. Angie did succeed in getting him to buy a new bed for their master suite.

“I printed out a copy of my manuscript,” Harris tells me as we hover by his grill. It's May, a few days before I leave for Kentucky.

“Oh good,” I say, watching him plant his meat thermometer into a bison burger with a nutmeg-Swiss core that I imagine pulsing with goo like a beating heart.

He taps down each patty with his flipper, the scent of nutmeg making me think of Christmas, and closes the grill. “I'm sure you get manuscripts all the time.”

“Well, I don't get them none of the time.”

“I want you to be honest.”

“You can't handle the truth.”

I deserve the fake laugh I get. “Mind if I email you the story as a Word doc so you can use track changes to make notes? I can't read your handwriting.”

It's not quite warm enough for outdoor cooking, but Harris bought the grill last week and paid extra so it would be connected to his gas line in time for the weekend. Angie sneaks onto the deck with two more beers in one hand. She has dark hair that she wears in a stylishly updated Beatles mop, the stringy, braided musculature that comes from running, and brown eyes that remind me of, well, a racehorse. Never having had the taste for beer, she's made herself a Negroni in a short glass. The boys are inside watching Ratatouille.

“So,” Angie says, handing us each a Grolsch, “tell me about your trip to Kentucky. I've been promised gossip.”

“Yeah, I'm visiting the Kentucky Horse Park, where all the retired thoroughbreds live, and Churchill Downs,” I tell her. “I'm also seeing a friend.”

“Harris says you're looking up an old girlfriend.”

I cringe. “She was never my girlfriend,” I yelp, hating myself for the falsetto I lapse into when flustered. I'm always talking this way.

“But you wanted her to be, right?” Harris says, opening up the grill and plating the burgers. Normally, he wouldn't tease me about this, but maybe he's sore about my grim reaction to his manuscript. “You had it bad for her, right? She was dating someone else. And then she married another guy, but the minute you find out they split up, you book your ticket. Do I have my timeline correct?”

“Yes, yes,” I say weakly, “but you're taking facts out of context.”

Angie watches Harris disappear into the dining room, the burgers sitting proudly on his serving platter like Olympic medals. She passes her eyes over me, with a mixture of pity and amusement, as though I were a lapdog chasing his own tail. Maybe I only believe she's looking at me that way, but I don't believe I'm only believing it.

As expected, dinner, with yam fries, a spring salad, and a peach and blueberry cobbler, is so good I swear to hate my next three meals out of loyalty. Harris's older kid, Liam, likes to eat his burger with a knife and fork, and with mint jelly smeared all over the patty. Jack, who has Angie's darker colouring and wears wire-frame glasses, doesn't say much at all.

After dessert, Angie puts the kids to bed. Harris and I cross the backyard to his “workshop”—the tool shed that his father had converted into a space to smoke his pipe and look at girlie magazines. Now Harris uses it to smoke weed and keyboard his fiction. He has furnished the workshop with the stuff from his old room that had to be shuttled out of the house: the RoboCop 2 and Guns N' Roses posters, the Haight Street sign he stole on a high-school graduation road trip, and a taped-up beanbag chair.

“I think Liam is weird,” he says to me with crinkly, stoner eyes. Because I don't smoke weed, he pours me a mug of Jameson's, from the bottle he keeps in his desk drawer. “I look at him and think, ‘Did all the weed-smoking degrade my sperm when we conceived him?' By the time we made Jack, I'd stopped my wake-and-bake routine.”

“Isn't it a natural reaction to think your child odd?” I say, sitting uneasily in his beanbag chair. I balance my mug of whisky on Harris's four-hundred-page manuscript. “I'm positive your dad thought that about you.”

“I'm getting a vasectomy.”

“That's an extreme reaction.”

“Angie wants me to get one.”

“She does?”

Harris nods madly. “Two is our max,” he says. “I mean, we originally only wanted one kid. Angie's an only child; she says she loved getting all the attention.”

“But then you had another one.”

He shrugged. “Considering how weird Liam turned out to be, it worked out okay.”

If Harris lived in a glass high-rise, I'd envy his life less than I do. Of all of his enviable qualities, it's the effortlessness he projects I'd steal from him first. I've seen him on hot summer afternoons, and he barely sweats; he only sweats a little, on purpose, to make other people feel less self-conscious. Without being phony or slick, he acts as though he were born dry-cleaned. His own father shares this quality, and I'm sure it's what allows them both to move million-dollar bungalows.

Only a decade ago, we were at a roughly equivalent place and now he possesses a comfortably imperfect life—one that isn't exactly what I want, but not far from it. In the meantime, I've spent that time struggling to write books, hustling for freelance assignments, stammering through classes. Strain and striving clog up every itchy pore of my being. And yet I've chosen to put myself on a plane to seek out an unrequited love, an acquaintance I lost touch with for good reason.

I HAVEN'T SEEN Celeste in nine years. The circumstances of our first meeting, at an Archers of Loaf concert in a long-demolished indie-rock club called the Starfish Room in 1997, now have the unmistakable tang of a more awkwardly dressed era. (Later that year, she would be the first person I ever sent an email to.) It was outside the Starfish Room that she introduced herself, wearing a faded college-football jersey and a second-hand leather jacket.

“What's your story?” I asked her, in an oven-mitted attempt at banter. Keep in mind I was only twenty-two.

“My story is trouble,” she told me, after shaking my hand.

Right away, after she gave me her phone number, that moment was cast in the burnished light of eventfulness. I felt like the bookish, sensitive narrator in the kind of novel I used to love reading—and now try to avoid writing. Over the next couple of years, with occasional lapses into common sense, I filled my days and nights with a suckering ardour for her.

When I knew her, she had a boyfriend with a ponytail who tortured her with the iron-fisted ambivalence necessary to engulf her heart. For a while, his absences and the shortcomings of that relationship were offloaded to me—her neutered helpmate, movie companion, and airport-limo driver. I dedicated flaccid poetry to her, bought her magazine subscriptions, proofread her essays. She got me an ice-cream cake on my twenty-third birthday. At times, she was blunt about her lack of interest in me. But, in moments of distress, she related her platonic feelings more ambiguously, with a sentimental gloss and open-endedness that I was free to distort into a kind of suppressed reciprocation.

One evening around Christmas, 1998, after I'd come back from a term away, she was excited enough about my return to remark that a lighted ornament on a tree reminded her of an orgasm. Later that night, we even shared a kiss in my car at an intersection. It's a moment that has become almost threadbare from recollection. For years after the fact, I regretted pulling away from her when that light changed. Why didn't I just let the cars behind me pull around and breeze by? Maybe we'd still be kissing now.

Is nine years, the brunt of my adult years, a safe enough time apart? Actually, it's not worth finding out. I realize this even before my three flights to Charleston, West Virginia—the last tiny plane I board is basically a mini-van with wings—where I rent a car at the airport to cross states into Kentucky. Celeste has warned me that her townhouse is part of a subdivision that's so new it doesn't appear on any maps. When I get to that development, my GPS only takes me to the nearest major intersection before the animated display shows only empty space. As far as my device is concerned, I'm off-roading in the Sahara. In a panic, I pick up my phone.

“I knew you would call me,” she says. “Where are you?”

“Nearby, but I'll need to be talked through this.”

“Do you see the supermarket?”

I turn to see a strip mall in my rear-view mirror. “Yes.”

“Pull off on the street behind it.”

I make a U-turn and then another turn down a street full of empty lots. “Okay.”

“Do you see a sign for a hideous housing complex?” she asks.

“Calumet Estates,” I recite, “Two-bedroom bluegrass palaces from $225,000?”

She sighs. “Don't need to rub it in.”

The billboard directs me down a hill, where I turn into a roundabout that leads into clusters of brick row houses with beige detailing and flags hanging from poles like rooster wattles. They are near identical.

“Confused yet?” she asks. “Turn into the last cul-de-sac.”

The phone is still stamped on the side of my face when I catch sight of her outside. She's wearing a white cotton golf shirt and jeans, and no makeup besides a little lip gloss. I have one hand on my bag so I hug her with only my free arm.

She leads me down an alley lined with air conditioners to her back unit where I dump my bag next to the futon I'll be sleeping on. Her place is sparsely furnished in a manner befitting an academic nomad. For the last seven years, she has followed her estranged husband, a mathematician, across the Western world as he completed his Ph.D. and post-docs. They set up camp in this Kentucky town, where she found a job in student admissions. At the end of the year, he resigned his position for a better job in Frankfurt and told her he no longer wanted to be married.

“I'm here until I figure out where I go next,” she explains, fingering the wedding ring on her hand. “Do I make for a gay divorcee? Or do you think I look hideous?”

“Not at all.” She's still tomboyish, with a high forehead and her Jean Seberg–style bob. She doesn't look too different from the girl I kissed once, unforgettably, over a decade ago.

Celeste smiles. I tell myself that I am here for completely selfless reasons—to prop up the spirits of an old friend going through a hard time. I bury any intentions I have to rewrite the past. I am here instead to prove how different I am from then. I am no longer a passenger to my desires, but the pilot—failing that, maybe the flight attendant.

“You look hungry,” she says, her grey eyes like pinpricks.

Although I grabbed a chicken burger at the airport, I nod dumbly. She gives me two restaurant options: the colourful wine bar with so-so food or the French bistro that has better food but is overpriced.

I pick the second place. “I'm on vacation,” I explain.

She shakes her head, regretting the fact that I was given any choice. “It's too expensive. We'll go to the first place.”

The restaurant is not even half full when we arrive. While sidestepping any awkward incidents from the past, we catch up on our lives since we last saw each other: the bad apartments, the meaningful and far-flung excursions, the people who've passed through our lives like cheap wine at a house party.

As we speak, I realize that the essence of her allure is a combination of her slim-hipped girlishness and her candour, the immediate intimacy she can create with a jibe or a giggly expression of disdain, which often edges into callousness.

If anything, I fell in love with her voice, which is still squeaky and still trips over hard consonants—like she's got an invisible toothbrush in her mouth. Even now, her favourite word is “heinous.” For years after we lost contact, I kept arguing with her in my head, getting in the final word at last. At dinner tonight, listening to her talk, I feel as though I've caught a long-forgotten favourite on the oldies station.

“I went to riding school when I was twelve and fantasized about being sent to boarding school,” she says as our plates are removed. “Why are you so interested in horses?”

“It's an excuse to see you,” I say. Then: “I'm joking.”

“You were always good for flattery.”

“And yet it never worked.”

To italicize this remark, I bang my fist on the table, but it doesn't come off quite as playfully as I intend it to. Celeste, in fact, shudders.

“Maybe it didn't work the way you wanted it to,” she says, loosening her grip on her wine stem, “but it left an impression on me.”

The truth is, I do know she cared about me, but then there was the part of her that stoked my ardour for cheap thrills. And when I became too demanding, she would shut me out for months, even years, before picking up the reins of our fraught friendship when she found herself ear-high in neglect.

It seems like this might be one of those moments.

After her third glass of Malbec, Celeste leans across the table and drops her voice. “I think Jacob has a new lover,” Celeste says, referring to her erstwhile spouse. “She's a former colleague who he would go on and on about. He would use words like ‘bubbly' and ‘energetic' to describe her. The truth is, Jacob always felt I was a lazy lover.”