I had thought that, with luck, I’d get her to take in an afternoon movie with me later in the week. Maybe two or three weeks down the line, we’d get intimate. But now this.
And then, as abruptly as it had started, it ended. She stood up. I was in a heap on the floor, probably looking like a dumb, stunned mess.
She smiled slightly and said, “I’m confused.”
“Ah,” I said.
She smoothed her shirt, ran one of her strange hands through her hair, then went over to the door.
“I’ll be back,” she said, then walked out of my shop.
I sincerely doubted I’d ever see her again. I frowned at John Black’s holy card. Then shrugged. Then laughed to myself and went back to shaving down the Kawai’s hammers.
The next day, Lucinda was back. She was wearing strange little boots that had mud all over them. I guess I was staring at these.
“Paddock boots,” she explained. “I came right from the track. Somebody ripped off my locker, too; my change of clothes was gone. And twenty-seven bucks I won on this long shot that Bridgemohan rode last week,” she said.
“Oh?” I said.
“Bridgemohan tried to pick me up once,” she said, frowning at the memory of it. “But I don’t like bulimic men.” She said it emphatically. I didn’t know what the hell she was talking about.
“You know they’ve all got to vomit, right?”
“What?”
“The jocks. To keep the weight off. Gotta puke and sweat and take Ex-Lax.”
“Oh.”
“Females got it easier. We’re smaller, but the reason you don’t see many female jocks is usually a small woman doesn’t have as much upper-body strength as a small man. You know how much strength it takes to hold a thousand-odd pounds of Thoroughbred back when he wants to go?”
I shook my head.
“Yeah. Well. Me, I’m five five, and I’ve got big shoulders. I have upper-body strength, but I can’t get my weight under one-twenty without getting sick and weak.” She shrugged. She looked at me then, finally seeming to actually see me. She leered a little. Then stopped.
“ Can I play? You mind?” she asked, and before I could tell her she could do anything she damn well pleased, she marched over to John’s piano.
There were thousands of things I wanted to ask her, but I was slightly afraid of her. I had the impression that she was the kind of woman to come and go as she pleased. No fanfare, no pronouncements or commitments.
She sat down at John Black’s piano. She played.
At some point, she stopped playing and I looked up. She was standing, staring at John Black’s holy card again. I felt like ripping it off the wall.
She came over to me. I put down the damper I’d been fussing with. I rested my hands on my knees and stared at her. She was very beautiful at that moment.
She put her hands on my shoulders, kissed me lightly. Pulled back. I thought she was going to turn around and walk out the door again. Instead, she took her shirt off. She had well-made, tiny breasts. She was thin, but her arms were muscular. I put my hand at the small of her back. I felt a strange swelling in her skin.
“Scar,” she said, turning around to show me a long pink scar that started between her shoulder blades and ran all the way down her spine, disappearing into her pants.
“What’s that from?” I asked her back.
“Fell off,” she said.
“Fell off?”
“A horse. Ballistic. Grandson of Native Dancer.”
I was getting attached to the way she’d spout out horse talk, even though it must have been obvious that I had no idea who or what she was talking about.
“Oh,” I said.
“Ballistic spooked at some geese on the track during a workout. I got thrown off, then stepped on by the horse running behind us. Broke my back. I was laid up a long time. That’s why I have to have a piano.”
“What?”
“I couldn’t do much. I listened to music again. I hadn’t in a long time. Now I’m obsessed again.”
“Oh,” I said, increasingly confused. I didn’t know what the hell to do. About anything. Least of all this crazy creature, half-naked in my shop.
“You studied music as a child,” I said.
“Yes. But I stopped when my brother got locked up.”
“Oh?” By now, I knew she would tell me the whole story. I also knew it would be quite a story. Nothing to do with Lucinda was boring.
“The prison he was in, they had this program where the convicts took care of broken-down racehorses. You know they get auctioned off for meat, right? Horse could win a shitload of stakes races, make someone half a million dollars, but then, minute it breaks down, off to the meat wagon. Literally. So they started this thing. In Kentucky. Inmates taking care of fucked-up racehorses. My brother was incarcerated there. He had two horses he took care of. I went to visit him often. One day, I was probably fifteen, he put me up on one his charges. A little chestnut mare that was sound enough to ride. I never wanted to get off. I’m like that. I get obsessed with things.
“Two days later, I went over to Churchill Downs and just walked around the backstretch until I found this trainer that gave me a job walking hots. That’s where you walk the horse around to cool it down after a workout. The trainer I walked hots for, he put me up on a horse within a couple of months. I knew I’d fuck up my hands. Working with horses, you’re bound to. I didn’t care, though. It was like all those stories you hear, how some overzealous parent makes the kid play piano six hours a day. I’d been doing that so long that all the joy was gone. When I got on a horse, the joy was back. So I didn’t care about my hands.”
She studied these hands now. She seemed totally oblivious to the fact that she was still half-naked.
“I never broke ’em,” she continued, “just my back. Nine months I couldn’t get on a horse. I thought I would die. I listened to Bach.”
She fell silent now. I folded her into my arms. I put her down on the floor on top of the blanket that the Chickering’s keyboard had been on. She was wearing red cotton panties that were a little too big for her.
“My lucky panties,” she whispered into my ear.
“Oh,” I said.
“For riding I mean. Everyone’s incredibly superstitious on the backstretch. I try not to be. But I have to wear these.”
I covered her mouth with my hand. Ran my other hand under the elastic of the lucky panties. I pushed the crotch of them to the side as I entered her. She seemed to like this.
Within a few days, she had moved in with me. For the last five years, I’ve lived in the back room of my shop. There’s a toilet, a shower stall, and a sink. I have a hot plate and a very comfortable futon that I keep under a Knabe concert grand. Lucinda loves this.
Most mornings, Lucinda gets up before three to head off to the track. Sometimes, I feel her kiss me good-bye.
She’s always full of stories. About the track. About her brother,who’s still incarcerated but now looking after Kentucky Derby–winner Monarchos’s full brother.
She never makes any pronouncements about love or a lack of it. She plays the pianos. Mostly John’s piano.
One afternoon, she fails to appear.
Two days go by without any word from her. I don’t have a phone number for her. All I know is that she shares a small house in Queens with two other racetrack people. I consider calling over to Aqueduct, but, as ridiculous as it sounds, I don’t know her last name.
She’s left some belongings here in a pile to the right of the Knabe concert grand we slept under. There’s a pair of crusty paddock boots. Some books. A lipstick she never wore. And I realized that she had stolen something. John Black’s holy card. Took it right off my wall.
Three weeks after she’s disappeared, I get a phone call: “I’d like to speak to Albert Rauch,” a nasal voice says.
“That’s me.”
“You know a Lucinda Shoemaker?” the voice wants to know.
“Yes, I do, yes, w
hat is it?” I say.
“I’m afraid there’s been an accident.”
My heart weighs too much.
“Is she dead?”
“Oh, no. No. She lost consciousness, though, so we have to keep her overnight. And she has some fractures.”
“Hands?”
“I’m sorry?”
“Did she break her hands?”
“No. Both legs.”
“Oh.” I sighed. “That’s good.”
The nurse, no doubt, thought me sick.
I wrote down the hospital’s address. Closed the shop. Drove out to the nether regions of Queens.
I didn’t know why she’d had them call me. She must have had friends at the track. I hadn’t even been aware of giving her my phone number.
Her legs were in traction. Her head had been shaved and was partially bandaged.
“It didn’t work,” she said by way of greeting.
“What?”
“I thought John would give me my nerve back.”
“What?”
“This,” she said, reaching for her bedside table, where, I now saw, she had John Black’s holy card. “I thought if I rode with this in my helmet, it would give me my nerve back.”
“Oh?” is all I said.
“I hope it’s okay I had them call you,” she said then. She was so tiny and pale-looking, the bandage on her head almost bigger than the head itself.
“Sure. I can’t say I understand it, but I’m glad to find you alive.” There was more I could have said. Like that over the last couple of weeks I had cut myself, gotten felt glue stuck in my hair, tripped, banged my head into the ceiling, and been bitten by a previously friendly dog. All because I’d been distracted by the absence of Lucinda.
“Maybe I should go now,” I said.
I found myself rising from the plastic hospital chair I’d pulled up to her bedside.
“Go?” She looked aghast.
“I’m not sure what purpose I serve.”
“Albert, please,” she said.
This was all she had to say.
She was released from the hospital two days later, and I brought her back to the shop. We never talked about what made her leave in the first place. But now, there was no getting rid of her. For one thing, she couldn’t walk. For another, I would have been hard-pressed to drag her away from John Black’s piano. Though his holy card had apparently failed to keep her safe from harm, his piano was certainly doing something for her. She would carefully arrange her plaster-encased legs and play for hours. And her playing improved monstrously. She’d been a good—albeit out of shape—pianist to begin with, but now she was pulling savagely beautiful things from the clunky old Model M.
One night, about a week after the accident, as we lay half-asleep on our futon beneath the Knabe, I felt her hand on my chest.
“Albert?” she said tentatively.
“Yeah?” I opened one eye. I didn’t really like the sound of that Albert.
“I will never get my nerve back, and that probably doesn’t bode well for our future.”
I sighed. I could live without the incomprehensible statements that she was partial to.
“What are you talking about?”
“I told you I thought having John Black’s holy card in my crash helmet might help. With my nerve. Which I lost after the injury on Ballistic. I knew I lost it, but I tried to pretend I hadn’t. I had a bad feeling it would catch up to me, and it did. Now this,” she said, motioning to her casts.
“And how is it this doesn’t bode well for us?” I asked.
I hadn’t really realized there was an “us” to begin with. “Us” implied keeping each other informed of whereabouts and feelings. Lucinda had not mastered anything resembling this.
“I can’t ride anymore. Maybe for pleasure eventually. But not as a living.”
“I understand that and I’m sorry,” I said, cupping her chin in my hands, “it doesn’t mean anything has to go wrong between you and I.”
“You and I was the sire of You. Great filly,” Lucinda said.
“What?”
“You. Gangly bay filly. Went off as the favorite in the Breeders’ Cup juvenile fillies but didn’t get the job done. Had a great career, anyway. She was by a stallion named You and I.”
“Lucinda,” I said, taking my hands away from her face, “I’m sick of this.”
“Of what?”
“Of cryptic fucking horse talk whenever you have something serious on your mind.”
“Oh,” she said. Then: “I’m probably going to leave New York.”
“No,” I said.
“No?” she asked, letting one of her small battered hands travel down the front of my pajama pants.
“No,” I said. Then, I let her savage me. Because that was what it felt like. Savaging. Which was another damned horse-racing term. Unruly stud colts were sometimes known to savage their handlers by grabbing them with their teeth, throwing them down, and sometimes stomping on them.
I let Lucinda savage me. And there wasn’t any more discussion about her leaving New York.
Our bodies did the talking for several weeks.
I started falling behind on work. We would make love, and then she would immediately hobble over to John Black’s piano, arrange her plaster-encased legs, and play.
I would lie under the piano and listen.
Weeks passed.
Her casts came off in early May.
Her already slender legs were now lumpy and malnourishedlooking. Her hair was growing back in frantic spikes. I found this deeply sexy.
On the first Saturday in May, we watched the Kentucky Derby on my tiny, black-and-white TV. Lucinda was certain that a horse named Jack Valentine—a long shot—would win. As we watched him romp across the finish line more than sixth lengths ahead of the pack, Lucinda told me that she’d had money on him. I was surprised, since she had previously told me she’d only bet on horses she’d ridden—and she’d never been given a horse of the caliber of Jack Valentine. I didn’t think much about it, though. After we’d watched the race, we made love for the third time that day. Eventually, she drifted off to sleep. I kissed her sleeping face, then went back into the front of my shop to investigate some separation in a Mason & Hamlin’s pinblock. A few minutes later, Lucinda emerged from the back room, fully dressed. She came and draped her arms around me.
“I’m going out for a little bit. Do you need anything?”
“Where you going?”
“Just out. Get some air.”
“Oh,” I said. “I don’t need anything. Thanks.”
I watched her walk out, pulling the door closed behind her.
I had a bad feeling.
I worked.
When Lucinda came back two hours later, I felt like crawling inside one of my pianos and going to sleep.
Instead, I put down my tools and looked at her, sensing that something big was coming. No doubt she would first launch into a horse story. Maybe her disappointment over Point Given’s not running as a four-year-old. Perhaps a discourse on the history of racing. A mention of Seabiscuit or Ruffian or Cigar. Maybe she’d even root through her pile of stuff and produce her tattered photo of Secretariat, winning the Belmont Stakes by twenty-one lengths. She’d pulled that one out several times already, when something was particularly troubling to her.
She came over and kissed me on the cheek. She was very pale. She reached into her Churchill Downs tote bag and produced a big envelope.
“I have this,” she said, opening the envelope, “twelve thousand dollars,” she added, fanning endless bills out on the lid of a Yamaha baby grand.
“For John Black’s piano,” she explained.
“But it’s already yours,” I protested.
“Now it is, yes,” she said, pushing some of the bills toward me.
I was furious. I contained it.
“Are you going somewhere?” I asked.
“I am, Albert. I am.”
“May I ask where?”
/>
“Back to Kentucky.”
“Where on earth did you get twelve thousand dollars?”
“Jack Valentine. He went off at 13-1. I bet him to win, and I used him in an exacta with Hellcat Helen, the filly that ran second. She went off at 55-1.”
“Lucinda, this isn’t right.”
“What isn’t?”
“You just walked in one day, and now you’re going to walk out?”
“I’m sorry.”
“I would have liked to have had some input into all this.”
“Of course. I don’t know how to conduct myself in love.”
“You love me?”
“Possibly.”
“But you’re going to give me twelve thousand dollars and leave.”
“Yes. I warned you, didn’t I?”
“Warned me?”
“That I’d lost my nerve. I can’t ride anymore.”
“So? You don’t have to ride. Live here. Play the piano.”
“No. I can’t stay here.”
“Why?”
“I can’t explain it. I have to go back where I came from. With John Black’s piano.”
She went to sit at the piano. Lovingly dusted her fingers over the keys, not making any sound, just saying hello to it, and to John.
Over the next few days, we didn’t say much to each other. We were painfully polite and solicitous. We made love innumerable times. Horrible, final love. I felt like my chest cavity was on fire.
Sometimes, when Lucinda was playing or sleeping, I would stare at her, trying to memorize every millimeter of her. It’s possible that I could have coerced her into staying, but, had I done this, it would have hung between us forever. I preferred heartbreak to guilt.
The day came. She’d hired a truck and three men to hoist John’s Steinway out of my shop and to drive it to Kentucky. I sat at my work table, pretending to fiddle with the innards of a lovely Chickering upright that I’d just gotten. Lucinda was nervously overseeing the moving of her piano.
The Dictionary of Failed Relationships Page 18
