“I’m not sure how.”
“Maybe it won’t be for our site. Maybe it will be for something else. But you’ll write about this, all right.”
Aidan’s prediction was probably true, Jenny realized, slipping her phone back into her pocket as Becca led the Clyde out to the courtyard. The gelding’s huge hooves rang on the cobbles with steel shoes the size of dinner plates. Jenny wiggled her toes nervously. She was wearing skinny jeans and a light button-down blouse, semi-appropriate riding attire, but her shoes, a pair of thin-soled leather oxfords she’d gotten at a vintage store, didn’t seem to offer enough protection to go anywhere near that beast… let alone get in the saddle.
The width was the really surprising part.
Being mounted in Central Park wasn’t actually as strange as Jenny had expected. Seeing the world from horseback was as natural for her as from ground-level—perhaps more so. The horses walked up the center of a paved park lane, towards the tourist-soaked, flower-bedecked South Drive, where the statue of Shakespeare gazed benevolently towards the skyscrapers of Fifty-ninth Street. Their heads were lazy, their ears were waggling, and their steps were sure and patient. These were draft horses who they had been trained in the ways of smoke bombs and traffic stops and firecrackers, and the world would have to work pretty hard to make them lift their heads and take note. The Clydesdale beneath Jenny walked with a swagger, and she felt like she was riding a ship rolling on a heavy sea, her hips and waist bobbing and swinging in rhythm with his expressive stride.
“Tighten your abs a little,” Becca suggested amiably. “Paulie has you wiggling all over the place.”
Jenny tried to follow her instructions, although she wasn’t sure she had any abs to tighten. A school year always left her feeling like mush, and without a summer break at home to put her muscles back to work, she was pretty sure one wrong move from Paulie would have her tumbling to the ground. She felt like a sack of potatoes in the saddle.
“I’m out of practice,” she confessed. “I haven’t been riding since Christmas break.”
“No, no, you look fine,” Becca assured her. “Look, let’s ride up the Mall! Ellen never wants to but it’s so fun.”
Under the twining boughs of massive elms, the air was cooler and fragrant with the crushed stems of lush emerald lawns. The formal promenade was fenced with stern iron fencing, but on perfect summer days like this, no barrier could keep out a New Yorker with a picnic blanket and a bottle of rose. Jenny watched a man with a Jack Russell terrier tucked under one arm, and a bag from Whole Foods Market over the other, scaling the iron railings next to a sign which read Keep Off Grass.
“We’re supposed to yell at them, but look how many of them there are.” Becca grinned and shook her head. “Sometimes you have to pick your battles. I mean, it’s a park! I say, let them enjoy it.”
Jenny got the impression that Becca had not put on a badge because of any fierce devotion to enforcing the laws of city and state.
Tourists stopped and gaped at them; the man who made the giant bubbles with rope and a bucket of soapy water scowled at them as his audience turned around to watch them ride away, their interest in watermelon-sized soap bubbles momentarily vanishing. There was always at least one person standing merrily in their path, ten or twelve strides away, playing a game of chicken with the drafts’ mighty hooves and colossal chests as they made a perfectly-framed video to post to Instagram once the horses had passed. The bravest lasted until the horses were just three strides away, but most skedaddled before things got that serious. Becca’s fingers were light and casual on the reins, her left hand resting on the pommel of the patrol saddle, and Jenny tried to imitate her even when the amateur videographers made her so nervous that her toes curled up in her boots. You’d never stand in front of a racehorse like that, she thought. This is a whole different world.
They passed the bandstand and walked across the broad paved terrace in front of the stairs down to Bethesda Fountain, where Jenny had been taken on a carriage ride just last week. Paulie lifted his head to watch a carriage horse, not Cherry, walk sedately over the bridge. The tourists in the carriage were leaning to the right, holding up their phones to capture the triumphant angel standing high above the fountain’s pool.
“I was just out with a carriage driver last week,” Jenny offered, feeling like she hadn’t said much on their ride. She wasn’t sure if conversation was part of the test, but she had gotten the impression Becca liked to talk, and she definitely wanted Becca to like her. Without really meaning to, she was finding herself becoming deeply invested in becoming a part of this strange little tribe of city horsemen. Caitlin, Janice, Sergeant Wilkes, the mystery policeman on the little chestnut horse, Becca—they all had something figured out that she had not realized before: this was still a city of horses, if you knew where to find them. And once you realized that, horses seemed to be everywhere. “She took me along here and up to Cherry Hill.”
“I love it up there. Hey! Let’s turn left here, we’ll walk up to Cherry Hill, then we’ll trot down that road next to Sheep Meadow on our way back. I have to see you trot for like, ten strides or whatever, to prove you know how to do a posting trot without ripping your horse’s mouth off.” Becca pantomimed lifting her reins high in the air jerkily, as if she was using the horse’s mouth as leverage to get her out of the saddle. “You’d be surprised how many people tell us they can ride and then pull that stunt. Ellen tells them to take lessons for two years and then call to get on our waiting list.”
“Is there a waiting list?” Jenny was suddenly afraid this was a dream that was still three or four years away. With so many good things in New York, there were usually a few thousand more people who wanted to do them than there were actual slots. Hence the all-day waits for Shakespeare in the Park, and concerts which sold out before a web browser could render the ticketing page.
“Not for knowledgeable riders,” Becca said with a sidelong smile. “Ellen says there’s no rule that waitlists are strictly chronological. She also says Manhattan is her command and she’ll do whatever she wants with it.”
On Cherry Hill, the horses pulled towards the fountain, but Becca insisted they had to be the good ones who followed the rules. “Plus, who knows what people do in that water. Would you drink free water just sitting out in New York? They can get a drink back in the barn.” She walked her horse over to the far edge of the circle, where they had a commanding view of the Lake and the wooded hump of the Ramble rising behind it. To their left, the twin towers of San Remo and the French gables of the Dakota rose above the green trees lining Central Park West. The sidewalks and roads of the park were busy with New Yorkers in various stages of their day’s to-do list: walking the setters, running the weekly 5K, cycling like it was the last stage of the Tour de France. Tourists lined up for hot dogs and pretzels at carts shaded by striped green-and-white umbrellas, emblazoned with the sycamore leaf insignia of the parks department. There was a smell of salt and fat and mustard on the breeze. Jenny’s stomach rumbled. If they ever let her go on with her day, she’d have to find lunch before she went into the office. She wondered if Aidan had eaten lunch yet. It was past one o’clock, so probably. Damn…
“Let’s turn back,” Becca was saying, picking up her reins. “Hopefully the roller skaters aren’t taking up the entire road.”
Jenny moved her hands to turn Paulie as well, although the Clydesdale was cheerfully following his stablemate and didn’t really need her guidance. She was just smiling at the horse’s self-assurance when movement to her right caught her eye. She looked quickly and her gaze locked on Aidan’s.
He grinned and waved with his free hand; his other one was holding his camera at eye-level. “Hi,” he said sheepishly. “You look really good up there. I know you don’t want me to shoot you for the site, but I figured you’d want some pics of your first ride in Central Park. I’ve got some good ones.”
Jenny bit her lip, but she couldn’t hold back her smile. Damn him, damn his thoughtfulness, damn his affec
tionate gestures that kept her forever hoping there might be something more between them. Even when she knew he was just her friend. “I look ridiculous up here,” she scoffed, because it was easier to be self-deprecating than deal with her own hopeless love. “I’m wearing jeans and shiny oxfords, for heaven’s sake. That’s what you think I want captured for posterity?”
Aidan’s grin didn’t falter. “Trust me,” he said. “You’re going to want these.”
“Did you get any of me?” Becca called. She held her arms over her head in a triumphant gymnast pose. “Take one now, take one now!”
“Your boyfriend is cute,” Becca confided as they trotted across a sparse lawn, rising and falling in the saddle with the draft horses’ big movement. “I can’t wait to see those pictures.”
The saddle leather squeaked as Jenny rose with each stride. She had never ridden in a patrol saddle, and its deep seat and long flap made it feel like the opposite of a light, flat exercise saddle. She was struggling to make her riding look effortless, a strange feeling for her in a sea of strangeness: the city rising around her, the jingling of the bridle, the huge steps of the Clydesdale beneath her. Saying the words: “He’s not my boyfriend, just a really good friend,” was the most normal moment of her day thus far.
They still stung.
Chapter Seventeen
When Mister won the Casanova Stakes going away, Aidan and Lana threw Jenny an impromptu party in the office, with a cake delivery from a frou-frou bakery down the block accompanied by a cheap bottle of bubbly. They hoisted their coffee mugs of sparkling wine into the air and toasted her breeding prowess: “To Jenny, expert horse madam!”
“Thank you,” Jenny said. “Although since he was our family’s stallion, I must remind you no money was exchanged for this sex act.”
“On the house,” Lana observed, slicing the cake into recklessly large chunks. “Even better.”
Aidan scurried away soon after, excusing himself with something about Lily’s art gallery opening a show of erotically-themed blown-glass bongs that evening, and Lana smiled weakly at Jenny from across the table where they’d been plowing their way through the layers of lemon-blueberry cake. “Now we need to go find some real food. I’m too old to live on sugar and alcohol.”
Jenny smothered her private sadness, a feeling which rose up every time Aidan left the office without her, with another spoonful of buttercream icing. She knew Lana was going to take her to dinner just to take her mind off him. There was nothing stopping Lana from living on sugar and alcohol—those were her two primary food groups, followed closely by sushi and salads. This was about Jenny, and the things Lana could see in Jenny’s face when Aidan mentioned Lily, when Aidan left her behind, when Aidan was near and when Aidan was far away.
It turned out working side-by-side with him was a thousand times more intimate than just being a schoolmate. It turned out she’d been wrong and she couldn’t handle the nearness without the closeness. It turned out that chumminess was the worst sort of rejection she could imagine.
Jenny felt like she was on the verge of an out-and-out depression, one she didn’t have time for, one she didn’t know a cure for. Back in Ocala, she’d gotten over boys by getting on a horse. But Aidan wasn’t just a boy, and Jenny didn’t have a horse.
She’d turned down Caitlin’s suggestion to get on one of her Belmont string, and now that Caitlin had started packing up the shed-row for their summer move to Saratoga, there were no more invitations. Jenny still didn’t trust herself to get on a racehorse, feel the thrill of a gallop around the track—even if she had thought for a moment she was fit enough to do it without getting run away with. There was still the hope of the Central Park patrols, but she hadn’t heard from them since her test ride with Becca. The article on Rabbit had gone live on the website with excellent feedback, but no peep from Sergeant Wilkes or anyone else in the patrol.
Licking icing from her fork, Jenny sighed and picked up her phone. Maybe there would be good news in her email. She flicked open her personal inbox—and her heart leapt. Finally!
She skimmed the message from the mounted patrol and stifled a squeal when she saw the date at the bottom. She was in—she was scheduled—she was going on her first ride next Saturday morning! That was just a little over a week away!
Aidan disappeared from her mind with a little poof—well, maybe not permanently, maybe not completely, but close enough. If she could write about happy racehorses for a living, and ride in Central Park for fun, Jenny thought she might have cracked the code for living happily in New York City.
Lana came back into the room with her laptop in its expensive leather bag.
“I could eat,” Jenny told her happily, even though she’d just spent the past two hours working through a solid six square inches of cake. “What do you feel like?”
Lana eyed her suspiciously. “Ugh, I don’t even know. We aren’t going to find a table between here and Madison Square. Saturday night is the pits in Midtown. Tourists everywhere.”
“We could stop at a deli and grab a sandwich, take it to the park.”
“The High Line,” Lana suggested. “We always go to Central Park. I’m not in the mood.”
“Wide-open spaces not your thing today?”
“Haha, that’s it exactly! I want some skyscrapers and straight lines.” Lana whisked the remains of the cake away to the fridge, wedging it onto a shelf next to bottles of coffee creamer and a forgotten half of a gyro wrapped in foil. She grimaced at the leftovers. “A gyro sounds amazing, actually. A new, hot gyro.”
The High Line was crowded, but that was expected; the park was always packed these days, whatever the weather. It had been added to tourist checklists alongside the Statue of Liberty and Times Square, and so out-of-towners dutifully shuffled along its elevated tracks, through the twisting, gyrating condos built around it, looking into people’s living rooms and gaping at the wealth on display.
Lana had stopped in a liquor store and picked up a small bottle of rum while Jenny was waiting for their gyros from a nearby cart, and once their Cokes had been sufficiently depleted, she added the rum with a flourish, first taking care to make sure there were no uniformed observers. “This is the kind of thing you have to watch out for you when you’re a park cop,” she said with a grin, handing over Jenny’s doctored bottle of Coke. “Miscreants like us, drinking the devil’s sarsaparilla in a public park.”
Jenny tried to imagine herself enforcing laws from atop a big draft horse. “Am I mean enough to stop anyone from doing anything, let alone a New Yorker?”
“Definitely not. You’re just back-up. The extra cowboy, the one who holds the horses during the shoot-out.”
“I can do that.”
They watched the sunlight fading into pinks and yellows through the fangs of modern architecture, and then the reverse effect as the city’s lights came on and began shining heavenwards, lighting the sky from the ground up. A cool breeze began to blow across the Hudson River, pulling at elaborate twists of hair and raising goosebumps on bare arms. Jenny shrugged on a drab gray cardigan she’d had in the bottom of her tote bag. Lana eyed it with dismay. “Were you going for a sad grandma look when you bought that? Or did someone break into your apartment and put it in your dresser?”
“I just keep it on me for the subway,” Jenny said defensively. “It gets cold on long rides. I’m not dressing up for the mariachi band on the D train, Lana.”
Lana shrugged. She was a person who would dress up for the D train. Lana was always prepared to dress up, for any occasion. “So Jenny, what’s going to happen with you and Aidan?”
She was also a person who was prepared to dress up any occasion with some serious conversation bombs.
Jenny took a long swig from her rum and Coke. “Nothing’s going to happen. He’s pretty serious about Lily.”
Lana laughed. “He’s not serious about Lily. He’s just running around the city trying to keep up with her. That girl is about to dump him. Aren’t you paying attent
ion?”
They were standing near a translucent panel that overlooked the cross-street below. A few rows of seating had been built so that people could sit and stare pensively at traffic. Jenny sat down and kicked off her sandals. The High Line was slowly emptying out as tourists were wandering off to find dinner, or to gawk at the garish lights of Times Square. Their surroundings were starting to feel like a city where people lived again, and less like a theme park.
“What makes you say that?” Jenny asked softly, her heart racing.
“It’s obvious to anyone who’s ever dumped a guy before.” Lana thumped down next to her and kicked off her shoes as well. She leaned back, ignoring the street in favor of the starless sky overhead. “But I guess you haven’t. So let me assure you: Lily and Aidan are almost over, and Aidan’s frantically trying to stop it, but it’s going to end and then he’s going to get over her and then… what? You step in? Just for the record, I don’t think it’s a good idea. But I know you’re not going to get over him anytime soon.”
Jenny blinked. “Wait—you don’t think it’s a good idea? Why not?”
“Because if you eventually break up, what’s going to happen to our team? And speaking as an editor, your writing is always better after he’s had that girl around the office. The tension really ratchets up your stories. You should see the shares on those pieces. Analytically speaking, I can chart your entire emotional spectrum. You’re lucky I don’t manipulate you to increase ad revenue.”
Jenny had to laugh despite herself. Lana’s blunt business talk always amazed her. If there was a true New Yorker in their little group, it was this baby-faced Connecticut horse-girl, for sure. But her amusement faded as she considered what Lana had said. She was going to be facing an impossible choice, very soon. If Aidan really was single in the near future, she would have to decide if she could be honest with him about her feelings, and that really would rip up the website—if things didn’t go her way.
The Hidden Horses of New York: A Novel Page 17
