The Horses of the Night (2 page)

I had never felt about her the way I felt about Nona. Still, it was good to see her. “I thought you were in Washington.”

Margaret did not speak for a moment, giving me an extra moment or two to gauge her mood. “I am.”

She had lost weight and was deeply tanned, a combination that made her look at once healthily attractive and gaunt. She had always been slow to stir in the morning, more interested in champagne than sunshine. She was dressed in something you couldn't find in the City, unless you knew a designer like DeVere personally, a confection of coffee-black crepe de chine.

When I simply smiled, she added, “Here or there. What's the difference?”

At one time I had found her dead-core irony, her boredom with all of it, attractive. “You're suffering a little lingering jealousy,” I said.

“Probably.”

“Nona and I are close.”

“When you're together.”

Despite a certain hard feeling in me, I smiled. “Politics seems to be good for you.”

She closed her eyes slowly, and slowly opened them. “I love politics.” Her look, combined with her tone, meant that she felt nothing but boredom.

“But you manage.”

“I do all right.” A cigarette appeared from her handbag, and I was relieved to see at least this trace of the old, more youthful Margaret.

“She's not your type,” she said. She blew smoke, and it took its place around us.

“Describe my ‘type,'” I said.

“How's your brother?” she asked.

“He had some sort of accident awhile ago. Nothing serious. It was up on Devil's Slide, on the Peninsula. Tore the bottom out of one of his vintage roadsters, I can't recall which.”

“But he survived intact?”

“As far as I know.”

She let her eyes linger on mine. “Anna Wick wants to talk to you.”

I could see Anna through the tangle of people, in conversation. She did not glance my way.

Anna was DeVere's personal assistant. I felt a tickle of hope.
Good news
, I let myself think.

I could taste it: success.

Margaret's hand was on my arm. “You still want a career, don't you?”

I wanted to say something self-mocking, ironic. Instead I said, “Of course I do.”

She drew on her cigarette. “Let the others care. The people who still believe in things. Let them try to make some kind of sense out of the world. They can't. You know it. I know it.”

“You think Nona and I are mismatched.”

“I think you're a decent man,” she said. She said this as though uttering a complaint. “I think your psychiatrist friend is a woman with a mission.” She glanced across the room, in Anna Wick's direction. “Take care of yourself, Stratton.”

“You're giving me some sort of warning.” I kept my tone light, but I had enough respect for Margaret to take her seriously. “As though I were in danger.”

“You're looking better than ever.”

“I swim.”

She closed her eyes, a kind of quiet laugh. “I remember your midnight swims. It's a miracle you haven't drowned.”

“Nona says I'll die of hypothermia. Apparently the hypothalamus controls body temperature. She tells me I'm overworking mine.”

She gave me a weary smile. “I saw your designs. The ones for the new Golden Gate Park. Everyone admires them.”

My pulse quickened. “What did
you
think?”

She flicked ash from her cigarette. “You have talent. A lot of talent. And you still want to remake the world.”

I thanked her, and she used the cigarette again, flicking ash, showing her impatience with even heartfelt courtesy.

“You won't get the award,” she said.

I could not ask: Did she know something?

“DeVere's the one who really decides, and you know how he feels.”

My words sounded lame in my own ears. “Blake has some influence. He's chairing the jury.”

She parted her lips, another silent laugh. “The gentleman's gentleman. San Francisco's chief of protocol. The kindest man in Northern California.”

Blake Howard was all of those things, and a friend of my family. I could not understand her tone.

She read my eyes and drew on her cigarette. “I'm sorry, Stratton. I forgot how strong your feelings are. Most people I know stopped having serious conversations years ago.”

Then she took my arm and led me over to a painting that reminded me of Cezanne, if Cezanne had painted huge, oversize canvases. The gold, the citrus-bronze, was pleasing to the eye. I was not in a position to buy art, or I would have chosen this piece.

“You don't understand, do you?” she said.

“These things have a way of working out.”

“I don't think you know what you're up against. Stop caring. Just live.”

“All right,” I said, in mock agreement, and we both laughed.

“But it amounts to a weird sort of superstition, Stratton, this faith that things will work out. Sometimes they don't.”

I had forgotten how a lick of cigarette smoke burns when it gets into your eye. “Sometimes a person gets lucky.”

She looked at me in her bored, intelligent way, considering what I had intended as a fairly idle statement. “You believe in luck,” she said, not asking a question.

“It's just a word, really.”

She watched smoke rise around her. “If there's good luck, then there's bad luck, too.”

A glass or two of bubbly later, I worked my way through the crowd, shaking hands. I complimented the artist. He looked more calm now, and said that he was pleased to meet “one of the famous Fieldses.”

Just as I turned from the artist I met the eyes of Anna Wick.

Anna ran a finger along the sleeve of my jacket. “You were avoiding me,” she said.

She wore one of DeVere's latest, a dress that matched the Cezanne golds of the painting I had admired. She gave me a glance that could only be described as seductive. I did meet women on occasions like this, attracted by my name, or the reputed scope of the estate. But Anna Wick could hardly be hungry for male companionship. She was blond, full-figured, brilliant, and looked equally good in photographs in both
Vogue
and the financial section.

“I was dazzled from afar,” I said.

She let my own thoughts capture me for a moment. Then she smiled. “We want to see you tomorrow.”

“It sounds interesting,” I said, trying to keep the thrill from my voice.

“I think you'll find it fascinating,” she said.

Nona called that night.

“No,” I told her, in response to her question. “No further sign of the cat.”

“Thanks for the frog,” she said. “I'll keep him here on my nightstand. I think he looks a little like you.”

“That's terrific. I can make a big one. Call it
Self-Portrait as a Frog
.”

“I didn't say
exactly
like you. Just the look in its eyes.” Someone in the hotel had suffered “severe disorientation after getting robbed on Bourbon Street.”

“You make it sound like good news.”

“It turns out he's a vice president of Rorer, one of the big drug companies. I think he'll give a donation to the hospice.”

“You amaze me.” I told her about the opening, about Margaret and her tan and her outlook on life, and about Anna Wick.

They want to see me tomorrow
.

“It sounds wonderful, Strater,” she said.

She sounded close. It made her seem, paradoxically, so much farther away. “I'm not completely sure the news is going to be good.”

“Don't worry. I'm sure something wonderful is going to happen.”

3

The University of California Medical Center in San Francisco is both a place for the study of medicine, and an effective hospital. It consists of tall buildings surrounded by craggy hills and eucalyptus trees. At night there is a view of the Mission District and the bay. The sunlight is usually warm, and the air cool. When there is fog it lowers over the tall buildings, parting around them, flowing with the wind.

The men and women in white coats tend to be youthful, and most walk with a certain spirit. My family had long helped support this hospital, endowing a lecture hall and a long-since torn-down hydrotherapy wing. My father had sat on the board of trustees, and I was often consulted myself on such matters as fundraising for a new “blaster” for kidney stones, and the possibilities of a new parking lot for the staff.

In the corridors of the hospital I am greeted by people I know, and people I do not know. I feel that I am in a university I used to attend, but the truth is that, on this morning especially, I missed Nona.

Nona's ward was hard to reach. It was up several flights, and down what looked like an impossibly long corridor. The implication was that these patients needed privacy. The truth was that the medical center was satisfied to keep them out of sight. I always felt conspicuous under the gaze of all those young, wise eyes.

But their smiles always delighted me, and despite the fact that I felt robust and adult, powerful and blessed with a varied life I did not deserve, a visit with the children always warmed me, and touched me in a way that no art, and no music, ever could.

Nona had made the place more pleasant than the other wards at the medical center. There were posters on the walls, Donald Duck at the beach, and Curious George on top of a fire truck ladder. I had put a few drawings of my own on the walls, animals either driving cars or operating street-repairing machinery. I am not sure why I chose to depict animals operating heavy machinery, but somehow the subject matter seemed appropriate.

I passed back the patient's drawings. I praised the giraffes, and received compliments on my own drawing when the child cried out, “I got an eagle!”

Stuart examined the telephone worker I had drawn, a figure atop a telephone pole. “It's not an animal,” he said.

I agreed that it was not. “Your horses were so good, I couldn't think of an animal I could draw well enough to go along with them.”

“What's he doing?”

“He's one of those people who repair telephones.”

Stuart was thin, and had dark hair, dark eyes. His hair was becoming sparse uniformly around his head, so that it seemed to be vanishing into the air. He did not have the normal amount of strength for a six-year-old, so his expressions took place slowly, and had an extra cast of seriousness as a result. “I want an animal,” he said.

I selected a sheet from the art tablet on his bed stand, pulling the paper slowly, deliberately. I folded the paper, in an effort to remember origami animals from my childhood. The white paper rustled, and, as I creased it and shaped it, took on the general shape of a horse's head. Held in a certain way, the paper steed even seemed to have spirit.

I examined my handiwork. I was pleased. I could make the horse arch its neck, working the paper like a finger puppet.

I perfected the folded paper, then stretched forth my hand and offered it to Stuart.

He gazed at it, and did not move.

“What is it?” he said.

Then he took it, and sat up.

The cab ride to DeVere's Montgomery Street office was uncomplicated, except for the work being done on Clay Street, a sandy peak of earth surrounded by men in yellow hardhats. A jackhammer ripped the asphalt, punching holes in the gray pavement.

Anna Wick met me in DeVere's waiting room. She smiled, cutting through me with her eyes, measuring me, and I heard myself murmuring idle courtesies.

“Mr. DeVere has so much looked forward to meeting with you,” she said. “I think I could say that he admires your work.”

So the news
must
be good, I thought.

But while the Anna Wick of the night before had been seductive, this was a different manner entirely, still sexually aware, but much more businesslike after the first glance or two.

We engaged in some professional gossip, complained about one of the newer hotels in town, and about the poor quality of the air conditioning in so many of the buildings (too many “particulates in the air,” we both agreed). Then she excused herself to make a phone call, and the nature of my visit began to become clear.

No one made me wait like this. In any other office in San Francisco I would have been ushered in at once. But not in this office. DeVere was in no hurry.

I teased myself with what was left of my hope: good news.

Surely there was good news.

I crossed my legs, and looked, I knew, perfectly at ease.

But I was not. Surely now, I allowed myself to think. Surely now I will hear what I have waited to hear for so long.

His door opened, and he was there, a folder in his hand. DeVere pretended not to see me for a moment, pausing at his secretary's desk. Then he handed her the red plastic folder, and he turned to me with his fine smile.

I stood and we grasped hands, and I knew. He didn't have to say a word. I could tell.

This can't be
, hissed a voice in me. He surely didn't bring me all the way to the Financial District to insult me like this. But it was in his eyes, his smile. He opened the door for me, one of those large teak slabs I associate with boardrooms. This oversize chamber was his office, or one of his offices. He had chambers like this in Milan and in Tokyo. Everything about it was too grand, including the view of the Bay Bridge and the slow progress of a tanker toward the Port of Oakland.

He offered coffee, tea, “or something a little more warming.”

I was careful to show no sign of emotion. I declined, thanking him.

“I think it's cruel to let a person wait.” He let me think over these words for a moment. “I wanted to tell you personally.”

He settled behind his desk, and I did not help him by asking.

DeVere was craggy, long-limbed. He made his living telling people what to wear, how to decorate their homes—how to live. Outside, I recalled, on the way to the airport, his face gazed down from a billboard, the sign emblazoned with his name. That's all it took: just his name on a label.