The Hidden Horses of New York: A Novel

by Natalie Keller Reinert

  “Turn left, walk a block, blue door on your left,” Jenny said to herself, passing the rattling windows of the injection-mold plastics factory, where apparently American manufacturing was still going strong despite presidential reports to the contrary, and sidestepping a shining blue pile of safety glass which had once been a windshield. This didn’t seem like a great neighborhood to leave your car overnight. Or to walk in broad daylight. She hoped, for the tenth time since she’d gotten off the 7 train and started navigating these streets, that Lana’s father wasn’t proposing they put their new office somewhere out here. Sure, plenty of people were moving to Long Island City, obviously, or there wouldn’t be so many new condo towers going in. But Jenny was pretty sure she wasn’t ready to be one of them. Streets this empty, buildings this loud: it was all pretty ominous.

  The humming building next to her suddenly seemed to heave, then sigh, as some unseen machine within either blew a gasket or finished its monstrous cycle with a roar of satisfaction, and Jenny hustled across the next street before it could do anything else alarming, like explode.

  The avenue she found herself on next was a little more people-oriented, with bicycles parked in front of the blue-glass apartment tower across the way and actual humans walking on the sidewalks, talking at their phones and watching their dogs shit in normal New Yorker fashion. She passed a thrift store catering to the homeless next to a cafe serving twenty-dollar fried chicken on paper plates, and then Jenny knew she was back in gentrification country. Green borough cabs joined the black sedans and unmarked delivery vans on the street, presumably full of people who had moved here but found the 7 train as inconvenient and unpleasant as she had. What was it with those narrow old numbered trains, anyway? You were always touching someone else.

  One block, on the left… Jenny crossed another narrow, barren street lined with rattletrap cars and nondescript factory buildings of sunbaked, mid-century beige, and found a bright blue door set into a white-painted wooden frontage. The sign over the door was painted on a boogie board: Blue Ocean Brewery.

  “Okay, if you say so,” she sighed, and pushed the door open.

  She immediately spotted Aidan and Lana, leaning on a polished bar which glistened under unexpected sunlight. The rays of yellow light fell from small, square windows lining the high ceilings of the room, which was really just a big square with benches against the walls, and the bar along the right-hand side. Bland rock music was playing, some sixties band her father liked. The bartender, a slim, tattooed young man with barbells in his ears and greasy hair tucked up into a bun, waved to her. “Jenny!” he shouted happily, and the small collection of bar patrons, most of whom resembled the bartender in some way, cried back: “Jenny!”

  Jenny had to fight the immediate urge to run out of the bar and back into the Long Island City afternoon, where she could at least be anonymous again, even if she’d still be fairly lost. Hell, if she walked up the river long enough she’d come to the Queensborough Bridge and then she’d at least have a way back to Manhattan. One of the great joys of city life, the thing that had most appealed to her when she’d first come with her father and thought I should live here, was the total disregard people gave one another. There was no eye contact between strangers here, there were no acknowledgements of strange behavior, there was only this sort of universal understanding that the best way to get by when you were surrounded by millions of other people was just to let everyone else be, and do your own thing. And so Jenny, shy to the core, had walked the teeming streets and finally felt free of the judgmental looks and whispered gossip that, real or imagined, plagued her everyday life back in Ocala. No one looked at her here. No one cared.

  So now, of these strangers gazing at her, yelling her name in some sort of prearranged vaudevillian stunt? This was a fucking nightmare.

  “Jenny, Jenny, I’m sorry.” Aidan was half-laughing, half-frowning as he slid off his bar stool and ran to the door, catching her by her arm. His fingers creased the gray polyester of her summer blazer. She was dressed for a business lunch meeting, with a white blouse and a pair of dark blue culottes in deference to the June heat. He was wearing a Brooklyn Bowl t-shirt and faded skinny jeans. She added over-dressed to her list of things to feel embarrassed about. “We were just talking about you and I guess everyone wanted to make you feel welcome. I should have told them you’d hate that.”

  “Jenny hates that?” the bartender asked, looking forlorn. “Guys, everyone look away from Jenny.” Heads swung away in elaborate obedience. Jenny felt her cheeks grow even hotter.

  Jenny allowed Aidan to sweep her over to the bar and the stool he’d been protecting with his camera bag. Lana, on the other side of it, leaned over and gave her a hug. Her platinum-blonde hair swung over Jenny’s shoulders, scented with expensive lavender shampoo. “You poor thing,” Lana gushed, the dramatic way she always spoke. “Harry! An IPA for my friend. That really fruity one you gave me earlier. You have frightened her, so it should be on the house.”

  “Not so loud,” Harry said, looking over his shoulder in a pantomime of fear. “My boss will find out.”

  Lana laughed and patted his hand as he set a brimming pint glass in front of Jenny. “This will make it all better, my love,” she told Jenny expansively. “Now, do not forgive Aidan. It was his idea.”

  Aidan swiveled his eyes away. “Thanks, Lana,” he mumbled into his beer.

  She just laughed again, her eyes sparkling with mischief. Jenny often thought of Lana as a friendly demon, who swept into parties making friends left and right with her lush good looks and lavish spending, then handed out mayhem along with champagne cocktails, before making everyone kiss and make up at the end of the night. Her malice was purely self-serving and its effects were rarely long-lasting. Lana just liked to see some good drama played out to make her day worth living, and everyone around her knew it and gave it to her.

  Jenny took a long, deep pull of the beer, knowing it would settle her nerves and her stomach, which had started fluttering even before she’d opened the bright blue door. Lana’s father had invited them here, after all, and he was the one who was bankrolling their website—theoretically. Graduation had been two weeks ago, and ever since then, she and Aidan and Lana had been meeting in cafes to drink expensive coffee and go over their plans again and again… but Mr. Farnsworth had been silent on the matter.

  “He’s in London,” Lana said when first pressed, and a few days later: “He’s in Hong Kong.” Last Friday, as she prepared for a weekend at the family farm in Connecticut, Lana told them that her father was just finalizing the details with his accountant. “He’ll be in touch on Monday,” she’d assured them. On Wednesday, she’d sent them all a text: LIC on Wednesday at 1 - directions to come.

  Fortified with alcohol, Jenny turned to Lana. “Where is he?”

  Lana turned purple doe-eyes on Jenny. The effect made her blink, loosening her resolve—which was exactly why Lana was always wearing bizarre contact lens colors, Jenny thought irritably. “He’s coming,” Lana said. “He had a late meeting at the Citibank Building.”

  “The one in Manhattan or the one here?” Jenny asked, a rather welcome suspicion rising in her thoughts.

  “The one here,” Lana confirmed.

  That was it, then. Jenny’s shoulders slumped with relief. They weren’t moving to Long Island City. Although, she thought, taking a look around the brewery’s casually beach-themed space with newly appreciative eyes, this wasn’t such a bad hangout.

  Sunlight shifted across the room as the door opened. The three of them turned as one and saw Lana’s father in the doorway, his suit jacket over his arm, his tie unknotted.

  “Jimmy!” the bar patrons shouted.

  “You know him?” Lana asked Harry incredulously. “You know this suit?”

  “Jimmy is a surfer at heart,” Harry said comfortably. “Like all of us.”

  The other bar patrons hear-hear’d in appreciation.

  “I just have a lot of meetings nearby,” Mr. Fa
rnsworth confided, slipping onto the stool next to Lana, “and I hate drinking with those stuffy bank people.”

  “I was afraid you were thinking we should set up shop over here,” Jenny said, feeling more chipper now.

  “You don’t like it?” Mr. Farnsworth accepted a beer from Harry with a nod of thanks. “Long Island City is where everything’s happening in five years. Two, even. I own blocks and blocks of this place.”

  Harry lifted his eyebrows.

  “Anyway,” Mr. Farnsworth went on, winking at Jenny, “I’m saving all these old factories for bigger fish down the road. You guys can go where you want, as long as you stay in budget. Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, doesn’t matter to me.”

  “Manhattan,” Lana said quickly. “Someplace close to the F train.”

  Jenny thought of Lana’s expansive apartment near Second Avenue and knew that was the primary reason. Lana wouldn’t be giving that place up without a struggle. It had a full kitchen, a living room with two windows overlooking a little park, and a closet in the bedroom—an actual closet. Lana considered herself set for life. Jenny, on the other hand, was waiting for the office announcement before she decided where to go next. At the moment, she still lived near Astor Place, in the same tiny one-bedroom apartment she’d been sharing with another student for the past three years. But that lease would end in August, and she had been studying the rental listings in neighborhoods she’d felt she might actually be able to afford on her own. After three years with a roommate in a space hardly larger than the average racehorse’s box stall, Jenny was desperate for her own place… however expensive that might be in New York City.

  “The A train goes to Aqueduct,” Jenny said. “Something near that line might be worth thinking about, since Aidan and I will going out there a lot in the winter.” She looked to Aidan for back-up. The A train also ran to a lot of places which cost much less than the Lower East Side landlords were charging these days.

  Aidan just shrugged. He didn’t like making decisions, and he lived in a studio hardly wider than his IKEA loveseat, which seemed to fulfill all of his needs, even if the tiny fridge’s freezer compartment was so small that he could only buy ice cream larger than a pint when he could leave it on the fire escape overnight.

  “Aidan!” Jenny sighed. “He agrees with me,” she told Lana and Mr. Farnsworth.

  Lana grinned mischievously at her father. “Aidan always agrees with Jenny.”

  “I’ve noticed,” Mr. Farnsworth said. “On those weekends when you three take over my house.”

  Jenny leaned over her beer and let her dark hair fall forward to cover her blush. “Have we considered,” she went on from the safety of her homemade tent, “if we would be best off locating somewhere out near the tracks?”

  There was a moment of silence. The bar clatter went on around them. Jenny looked up and found three pairs of eyes focused on her with expressions ranging from astonishment to concern. Harry, mercifully, had gone about his business.

  “Near the race tracks?” Lana asked carefully.

  “Well, yeah,” Jenny said, annoyed by their reaction. “We’re a racing site. The whole piece I was putting together, Notes from the Backside, that’s something I have to physically go out and report on, from Aqueduct and Belmont, every single week. Plus, Aidan’s photography will be based there, right? We should make sure it’s easy to get there.”

  Lana bit her lip and let her eyes roll just a little as she went back to her drink. Mr. Farnsworth wasn’t so discreet. He looked at Jenny like she had three heads. “You’re not going to work in Ozone Park,” he said dismissively. “What are you thinking? Have you walked around in those neighborhoods, or just gone straight to the track?”

  Jenny wished she hadn’t said anything at all. “I haven’t,” she admitted. “I just get off the train at Aqueduct or whatever. But look, I know they’re not exactly the nicest places in New York City. But lots of places aren’t. This neighborhood sure isn’t, but everyone talks about LIC like it’s the best place ever.”

  Harry, passing by to check on their drink status, gave her a pat on the head. “It is, sister,” he said pleasantly, and wandered off again.

  “Jenny,” Aidan said tentatively, in the soft voice he used when he didn’t want to upset her, “there’s nowhere out by the tracks we’d want to commute to everyday. Transit sucks, and I don’t even know if we’d find an office that would suit us. It’s just not that kind of area.”

  “But that’s where our people are,” Jenny said stubbornly. She wasn’t quite sure what her argument was—if she hadn’t wanted to commute to Long Island City, she sure as hell wouldn’t want to commute all the way to Ozone Park. But something was not sitting quite right in their attitude towards the neighborhood. They were meant to be sharing the real stories of people and horses on the backside. Well, a lot of them lived out there near the track.

  “Not our people,” Lana interjected. “The people we are going to write about.”

  Aidan looked uncomfortable. Jenny glared at Lana. “Well, I’m racetrack people,” she said. “That was the point, Lana. Bridging the gap between the racetrack and the rest of the world, equestrian or otherwise.”

  “And that’s what we’re going to do,” Mr. Farnsworth said, “but we’re going to do it from this side of the gap. The Manhattan side. Because that’s where we all live.”

  Outside, one contentious hour and a second beer later, the sun had been cloaked by a thin layer of clouds and the blue sky had been transformed into a sickly yellow. Jenny shivered a little at the stiff breeze blowing in from the East River, and pulled at the sleeves of her thin blazer. Aidan pulled her close with one arm. “You cold, kiddo?” he asked affectionately.

  Too affectionately, Jenny thought, still rankling from the set-down the trio had given her in the bar. If he wanted to hug her and be her hero, he should stop dating girls wearing big bows and Sailor Moon t-shirts, and start dating her instead.

  But she’d been saying this to herself for three years, ever since sophomore English, when they’d been paired up to study Middlemarch and immediately bonded over a shared love of horse racing. For Aidan, then an aspiring photographer, fast horses were something that had gotten him out of his very modest apartment in New Jersey, where his mother worked two jobs to support her family. He and Jenny had started going to Aqueduct together on winter afternoons, and as he learned more about what went into the sport, both horse and human, his photos grew more insightful, more daring, more unique. He liked to say he’d gotten his keen eye for an equine photo from all of the knowledge Jenny had given him.

  Jenny shook him off. “I’m fine. I’m going home.” She looked up and down the avenue, hoping to spot a bus stop that might take her back to the train station.

  But Mr. Farnsworth and Lana were next out of the bar, laughing over something companionably. “I’ve got a car coming,” Mr. Farnsworth said, waving his phone at them. “I’ll give you all a ride back to Manhattan.”

  “We can go to the sushi place by me,” Lana said authoritatively. “I’m starving. Beer just makes me hungry.” She patted her trim hips and smiled at Jenny.

  “I can’t do dinner with you guys,” Aidan said. “I’m meeting Lily at seven.”

  “You can watch us eat,” Lana said. “We’ve got to look over these listings Dad emailed me.” She waved her phone, a perfect imitation of her father. “There’s no time to waste. Dad wants us off the ground ASAP. Right, Daddy?” She grinned at him.

  Mr. Farnsworth was already absorbed in his phone again. “That’s right, sweetie.”

  Jenny sighed. She had her own listings to look at; she’d meant to go home and look at apartments for rent until her heart couldn’t take it anymore and she gave up. But that was a nightly ritual she could probably skip for once. Eventually she’d either find the right apartment or end up on the street; either possibility seemed equally likely at this point.

  “There’s the car,” Mr. Farnsworth announced.

  They all piled into the
black SUV from the car service. Jenny found herself pinned against a window, Aidan’s thigh pressed tightly against hers. She gritted her teeth against the tingling his touch aroused in her skin, and turned her head away, watching the changing city go past, the low-slung factories and the brick apartment houses and the sleek new towers pressed close together along the dirty sidewalks. Every time the truck hit a bump, her forehead would rap against the window.

  “Hey,” Aidan said after the second thump. “Wiggle closer to me. Save your brain cells.”

  Jenny reluctantly loosened her grip on the door handle and let herself sink deeper into the seat cushions—and press even closer to Aidan. She felt heat rise up in her and closed her eyes against the sensation, barely masking a suspicious prickling beneath her eyelids—why didn’t he feel it, too? Why was she the only one affected by his nearness, his warmth, the simple rightness of his body close to hers?

  Jenny opened her eyes again slowly and slid them to the right, across the crowded backseat—and saw Lana watching her with those knowing eyes. Jenny met her gaze defiantly: what about it? But inside her feelings snarled at one another like snapping dogs in an alley—if Lana could see it so easily, how could Aidan be so blind? If he couldn’t see the way she felt, was he even worth all this emotion?

  As the SUV climbed over the Queensborough Bridge, its rusting white struts revealing a cross-hatching of Manhattan, Jenny gave in and let her head slip against Aidan’s obliging shoulder. She was beginning to realize that agreeing to build this website with them was quite probably a massive mistake. Working with Aidan every day, while he paraded his string of baby-doll girlfriends through the city: what had she been thinking? It had been hard enough when they were killing themselves to get through the final year of school. It was going to be absolutely brutal when they were working together around the clock, building something out of nothing.