White Horses

by Alice Hoffman

  When Roger drove her home the next morning, Teresa got out of the car and didn’t look back. Atlas had been left out all night and when Teresa walked around the yard to the back door, the dog didn’t come to greet her; instead, he sat beneath the eucalyptus tree and stared at her mournfully.

  “Well, come on,” Teresa said to him.

  Atlas didn’t move an inch. Two sunflowers grew in the abandoned garden, they stood there like witnesses, facing east. Teresa sat down on the steps of the back porch and cried. She didn’t want to think about Silver, didn’t want to compare every man to him. She wiped her eyes on the cuff of her satin blouse; she pulled her skirt down to cover her bare knees. Atlas walked over to her slowly; the earth was dusty, the sky was as blue as a bird’s feathers. When the collie sat next to her on the porch and coughed like an old man who had spent a sleepless night, Teresa realized that she had forgotten to ask Roger for the thirty dollars he had promised to pay for a night of dancing, a night full of red stars and seduction, a little time with a woman like her.

  Although Lucy was annoyed when Teresa admitted she hadn’t gotten a cent from Roger, she laughed out loud when she heard that Teresa had left her panty hose in the glove compartment of the car.

  “That’ll cost him more than thirty dollars when his wife gets hold of them,” Lucy crowed. “But just don’t forget what you want,” Lucy reminded Teresa. “Otherwise you’ll make it tough for me—I’ve got to survive, you know. I’ve got to put gas in my car, and pay to have my hair styled. Just remember, what you want is cash.”

  Still, Teresa almost never took money, although she did accept midnight suppers, gin and tonics, bottles of wine, beds in motels where the wallpaper was peeling and the sheets were less than white. Every time she met a new man, Teresa began the evening crazy with hope; each time it was possible that a stranger could make her forget the day at the reservoir, and lately she had begun to think about it all the time. Even when every stranger’s promise grew dim, Teresa was determined: she would prove that there could be a man in her life who wasn’t Silver, she would find him. All autumn, she looked for that proof; she bought new blouses trimmed with ribbon, she wore high leather heels that she had tinted purple at the shoemaker’s, she braided blue beads into her hair and offered herself to anyone who would take her, anyone who had the nerve to sleep beside a woman who could never hide her disappointment, who never even tried. When Bergen telephoned, two or three times a month, Teresa always told him the same thing: she didn’t need money or company. She lied to the detective and told him she had hundreds saved in a bank account; she described the garden to him, an imaginary list of wildflowers and winter onions in place of the coppery weeds and mud puddles. She insisted she was doing just fine.

  Eight months after Dina’s death Teresa still dreaded having dinner alone, the kitchen walls closed in on her and she took to leaving the back door open in the evenings. One October evening, when the air was oddly warm and blackbirds sang in the eucalyptus tree, moved by the false promise of summer, Teresa didn’t have a date for the first time in months on a Friday night. She ate dinner alone, she switched on KCAX and sang along with the radio as she washed the dishes. Atlas was on the back porch: he leaned against the screen door and each time he breathed the metal molding of the door rattled. When Teresa had just about finished washing up, Atlas began to bark. Teresa ignored him; she heard the dog’s claws hit against the wooden steps as he ran into the yard, but she was certain the collie was chasing the neighbor’s cat under the bushes which separated the yards, where Teresa and her friend Maureen had hidden when they were children. The Raleighs no longer lived next door; they had sold their house soon after Maureen was sent away, and Teresa had never found out if her friend had kept her baby, or if the child had been a boy or a girl. Still, Teresa always thought of next door as “Maureen’s,” and that was where she was certain Atlas had run off to.

  In fact, it wasn’t a cat Atlas barked at but a stranger who walked through the yard. If the collie had been younger he might have stood on the back porch and blocked the stranger’s path, but Atlas was nearly ten, he hadn’t the heart to do anything more than stand beneath the eucalyptus tree and yelp until his voice gave out. When Teresa turned from the cabinet where she had stored her washed supper dishes, the stranger was already in the house. Teresa leaned against the sink; the small of her back got soaked with dishwater; she stared up at a man who had gold rings on three of his fingers.

  “I’m not going to hurt you,” he told Teresa after he had closed the door behind him.

  “You’ve got a lot of nerve,” Teresa said. She brushed stray strands of hair out of her eyes. “The least you could have done was call. I told Lucy not to give out my address—just my number. You really have a lot of nerve.”

  Teresa wasn’t wearing a bit of makeup, her feet were bare, she hadn’t expected company, but when she narrowed her eyes and inspected the stranger’s face she began to wonder if the man in her kitchen might be the one who could drive Silver out of her thoughts. Teresa took his hand.

  “Come upstairs,” she said to the stranger.

  “Wait a minute,” he said, but he was smiling. “You don’t even know my name.”

  “Let me guess,” Teresa said as she led him out of the kitchen, and then upstairs. “Arthur,” she tried. “Lloyd. Robert, but they call you Bobby.”

  “You haven’t guessed right yet,” the stranger told her as she led him into her bedroom.

  If Teresa had ever asked Silver, years before, what he did all night and who he worked for, she would have known the name of the man she took to her bed. If she had ever gone with Silver to the Dragon, late at night when all the stars were in the center of the sky, she might have met the man who now watched her take off her clothes and place them on the back of a wooden chair; she would have known the man she kissed was not really a stranger at all. He was Angel Gregory and he had been planning a visit to the house on Divisadero Street for nearly four years, but he had never, ever, expected to be greeted like this.

  When they made love they were both tentative—Gregory, because he had never expected to be taken up to her bedroom, and Teresa because for the first time she wasn’t thinking of Silver when she held another man. Instead she was thinking of deserts and hope—and she found herself wondering what sort of man she had discovered at her own back door. Each time she responded to Gregory’s touch, Teresa was shocked by the tenderness she felt toward a stranger. And after they had made love, she still felt the urge to hold him, as if, finally, there was a possibility she might not be lonely forever. Gregory stroked Teresa’s neck with his fingertips, they were side by side, there was no reason to speak, and as soon as Gregory did speak he ruined everything, because the first thing he said was Silver’s name.

  “That’s why I’m here,” Gregory admitted. “I’m looking for your brother.”

  Teresa eyed him as if he were a cobra on her pillow.

  “He doesn’t live here any more, so you might as well leave if that’s all you’re here for.”

  “Don’t lie to me,” Gregory warned. “I hate dishonesty. I hate it worse than murder.”

  Teresa blinked. “Let’s not talk about murder,” she told the man in her bed. She wished, now, that she had kept the back door double locked.

  Gregory got up and pulled on his jeans; he stood inches away from the wall that separated them from Silver’s old room; he tossed Teresa’s bathrobe to her, then nodded to the door.

  “I’m starving. I lost thirty pounds in prison, and now no matter what I eat I never gain any weight and I’m always hungry.”

  There wasn’t much in the house, but Teresa cooked him a dinner of green tomatoes and rice; when she walked over to the table carrying the hot frying pan, Gregory shook a finger at her.

  “Don’t throw that thing at me,” he warned. “This is nothing personal. I’ve got nothing against you. I like you,” he admitted. Teresa gazed at him coldly. “You were pretty friendly before,” Gregory said, “when you
didn’t even know who I was.”

  Teresa leaned against the countertop and watched Gregory eat; she had spent a whole week’s salary on the silk robe she wore and the man who had just gotten out of prison hadn’t given it a second glance.

  “Silver lives in San Francisco now,” she said, when Gregory had finished eating and still hadn’t made a move to leave. “You won’t find him here.”

  “You could be lying, trying to protect him. He could walk in the door at any minute.”

  So Gregory stayed; soon Teresa grew braver with him—she let Atlas inside, then made a pot of coffee, and sat across from Gregory at the table.

  “Am I the first woman you’ve been with since you got out?” she asked.

  “What if you are?” Gregory teased. “Does that mean we’re engaged?”

  “What’s prison like?” Teresa asked then.

  “You don’t want to know about it,” Gregory said. He rolled up his sleeve. “This is the only good thing I got in Vacaville.”

  Teresa bent over and touched his arm; there was the tattoo of a red dog, his head thrown back as if he howled, all four paws close together, ready to leap.

  “This here is nothing like your dog.” Gregory nodded to the old collie, asleep on the linoleum, his nose buried between his paws. “This dog’s a hunter.” Gregory smiled. “Like me. I’m going to follow Silver until I find him, and once I do I’m not going to let go.”

  The closeness Teresa had felt before, when they were lovers, was returning, and Gregory seemed less and less like a stranger all the time. When he spoke about Silver, Teresa felt as if he were using words that were her own, and when it was nearly midnight and Gregory got up to put his dinner plate in the sink Teresa realized that she didn’t want him to leave.

  “I’ve waited so long for Silver,” Gregory told Teresa, “I can wait a little longer. I could try to get you to give me his phone number and address, but I don’t want to put you in the middle. I’m not going to force you to make a choice.”

  “What makes you think there’s a choice?” Teresa said. “He’s my brother.”

  “So what?” Gregory said. “That doesn’t stop you from knowing what he’s like.”

  When Teresa walked Angel Gregory outside there was no moon, and the air was warm; it was a night of Indian summer, and for the first time in year Teresa felt as if she had a friend.

  “He sent you to prison,” she guessed, and Gregory nodded his head yes.

  “My mistake was to think that Silver was only a kid. He had me busted, then he set himself up in business.”

  Out on the front porch Teresa felt totally at ease with Gregory—there was a lovely caution in the dark; no blinding sunlight, no hawks above them in the sky. Teresa took Gregory’s hand in her own and opened his fist so that she could look at his palm, but it was too dark to see his love line, too dark to see the life line in his skin.

  “I always thought he was going to come back for me someday, but he hasn’t,” Teresa whispered, and the words came out before she could stop them.

  “It’s a shame you can’t give him up,” Gregory said, understanding that Silver was in Teresa’s blood just as he was in Gregory’s. “It’s a shame I can’t either,” he admitted. “So I’m not going to ask you to be in the middle. Call him,” Gregory told Teresa before he left that night. “Let him know that I’m looking for him. I understand that you have to, just like you understand that sooner or later I’ll find him.”

  Before he was out of the yard and into the old blue Ford Falcon he had bought earlier in the week, Teresa started missing him; she missed standing in the dark with someone who also thought about Silver all the time. Together, they had managed to conjure up Silver so true to life they could hear his breathing; alone, there were suddenly a hundred other sounds echoing around her—crickets on the lawn, the screen door rattling, sunflower seeds falling onto the ground, one by one. She went back inside, then up to her room; she had decided that she wouldn’t call Silver, even though Gregory had told her to. A call to Silver felt like a betrayal of a man who had left her with a desire for something she couldn’t quite name, the need for company, for a friend she wasn’t afraid to tell all her secrets to. But all that night Teresa couldn’t sleep. She turned on the radio and called Atlas onto the bed where he dozed on the quilt by her feet. She chased sleep like a hunter, she felt as if she were burning up, she imagined that the cool October night was as hot as Egypt. Sometime near dawn, she could no longer fight her loyalties. She slipped on her bathrobe and went downstairs, and without giving herself one more moment of hesitation she called Silver. As the phone rang, Teresa imagined her brother walking down a hallway, still winding down from a night spent out in the streets, in countless bars, in Cadillacs and alleyways. When he finally did pick up the phone, Teresa was hypnotized by the sound of his voice; she couldn’t speak until Silver had repeated himself several times, demanding to know who was there, ready to hang up.

  “It’s me,” Teresa whispered, finally.

  “You,” Silver said. He sat down on a wooden chair near the phone and closed his eyes. One of his customers, Rudy, a regular who bought cocaine from Silver and then resold it in Oakland, had arranged a date for Silver with one of his cousins, a woman who had made love to Silver any way he asked for it. All he had to do was promise her a thimbleful of cocaine, and she fixed him with her odd-shaped eyes, set much too far apart, and called him her handsomest boyfriend. But Rudy’s cousin had reminded him of Teresa—it was her long, dark hair, her white cotton dress, and Silver had left her in the middle of the night. He wasn’t thinking of Lee when he left Rudy’s cousin, he wasn’t afraid that his wife would discover the scent of another woman’s perfume, he was afraid of what had happened a long time ago in Santa Rosa, he was afraid of how often he found himself thinking about that time. When Teresa telephoned only a few hours after he had made love to Rudy’s cousin, Silver wondered if Teresa was clairvoyant—it was as though she knew when he was thinking about her. Distance just couldn’t separate them, or ease the guilt Silver felt whenever he heard her voice.

  “Someone’s been looking for you,” Teresa told her brother. She could practically feel his pulse quicken; she thought she heard him light a cigarette and inhale. “Angel Gregory,” Teresa said. “He’s out of jail.”

  “Lock the door,” Silver said immediately.

  “He’s already been and gone,” Teresa said.

  “Lock the door and stay right where you are,” Silver said. He reached for his boots, he cursed himself for having ever left Teresa alone when he had promised her that was something he’d never do.

  “Don’t worry about me,” Teresa said. “Gregory’s looking for you, he won’t come back here.”

  “I’m driving up to get you,” Silver said. “I’m leaving right now.”

  Now that she had called Silver she was a little afraid of what she’d begun, she thought about Gregory’s advice to give Silver up, and she wondered how long she could stay away from him if she went back with him to San Francisco.

  “Please,” Teresa whispered. She would have never thought she might try to stop him driving up for her. “Don’t start anything. Don’t come here.”

  Silver didn’t listen to her; he reached for his jacket, he had his car keys in his left hand. “Wait for me,” he told her.

  When he hung up, Teresa stared at the phone receiver. She should have been happy, she always imagined that she would be on the day when he came back to Santa Rosa for her, but instead she felt dizzy, she could barely see, everything in the house seemed trapped between layers of gauze. She began to wander through all of the rooms she had avoided since Dina’s death. In the living room long strands of dust hung down from the ceilings, and in Silver’s bedroom the twin beds were still pushed together from the time he and Lee had been in the house. Teresa found it was harder to go into Dina’s room; she stood in the hallway, finally she pushed open the door. She had expected cobwebs, a thick film on every bit of furniture, but when Teresa went
to the window and pulled up the shade the room was oddly clean. A cream-colored shawl had been left on the back of a wooden chair, the wallpaper looked like silk which had been tinted in a kettle full of chinaberries, and when Teresa went to sit on the bed she noticed that there was still the indentation of a woman’s body in the mattress, the scent of dark coffee spiraled up from the feather pillows. Teresa thought she would rest, just for a moment; she had spent a sleepless night and the bed seemed so warm, heat rose up through the sheets, it embraced her, circled her ankles and her wrists with coils of exhaustion. Teresa fell into a deep sleep without wanting to, without trying to, without any dreams. Outside, in the hallway, Atlas paced back and forth; he peered into Dina’s room, but wouldn’t go inside. In the garden, the blackbirds kicked up dust all around the rows where asparagus had once grown, and as Teresa slept the sun came up, and the bare wisteria over the back porch shone with its own blue light, and it seemed as if everything inside that house on Divisadero Street stood absolutely still; the only evidence of life was a heartbeat, an old dog, and one white bed of dreamless consolation.