by Karen Pullen
“Andari promised. He crossed his heart I’d be perfect.” She stole another glance in the mirror and burst into wracking sobs.
I put my arms around her and she leaned against me, her right side hidden against my chest. I stroked her silky hair. I wondered if Andari knew crossing his heart meant telling the truth.
“I want to die. Kill me, Ben. Put me out of my misery.”
I stared straight in her swollen, lopsided face. “I will always think you’re beautiful.” Though my heart broke for her, I meant every word.
* * * *
David showed up at the house. Magdalene refused to see him, but he pushed by me and scaled the stairs to the second floor. I hurried after him, afraid of what would happen. He barged into her dark room where she’d brooded in bed for days, refusing food.
“Magdalene, are you all right?” he asked. He turned on the bedside light.
“No,” she cried, covering her face with the sheet. “Get out. Get out!”
All pretense tumbled when he said, “Darling, it’s me, David.”
“I know who it is. Get. Out.”
“Let me see.”
Unable to move, I stood to the side like a totem and watched them. A short, pudgy totem. Neither paid me any mind or realized what he’d just said. Darling. Magdalene used the word all the time, but David didn’t. Until a few seconds ago.
Then David tugged the sheet away from her face.
She groaned and propped herself on her elbows. “Happy now?”
He gasped and stepped back as if she’d contracted a contagious disease. “My God,” was all he said as he fled the bedroom.
Magdalene released a guttural cry unlike any sound I’d ever heard. A sharp pain pierced my gut. How could he do that? He’d made love to her. For a moment I chastised myself as a failed father. Had I raised him to be not only deceitful but a coward?
I hurried to her side and pulled her into a deep embrace, calming her sobs. “The callous little shit,” I said. She looked up.
Darling.
I could see her brain at work, debating whether I knew about her affair. I was all she had now. She couldn’t lose me.
“I―I’d never have expected his reaction,” she said. “Never. Please, Ben, I know he’s your son and you love him, but don’t allow him to enter my room again.”
A dark corner of my brain celebrated. “You can be sure I won’t, darling.” She looked at me quizzically but again let the moment pass.
* * * *
The next month was as miserable as I’d been since my first wife died. Magdalene was inconsolable. She wouldn’t see anyone. She cursed Andari and cried. I consoled. We made love, delicately, caressing. The affection helped her recover. She knew I still loved her.
The swelling went down, but nerve damage remained. She couldn’t feel the right side of her face, and every doctor we visited said nothing could be done. Magdalene stayed in her darkened room, allowing only me and Carmela to enter.
* * * *
David barged into my office at the studio, fire in his eyes. We hadn’t spoken since the day in Magdalene’s bedroom. He tossed a memo onto my desk. “You’ve replaced me as assistant director? How could you?”
“Quite easily. I don’t want you on the set as assistant asswipe. You’ve hung onto my coattails long enough. I could forgive anything but your affair with Magdalene.”
His body went rigid, and he sputtered, “You…you know? She t-told you?”
“No, she didn’t, but you just did. Thank you for confirming my suspicions.”
“She―she came onto me, Dad. I’m only human. She’s―she was beautiful and desirable. I―”
“Get out of my office, David,” I said in a calm voice. “Find a job. I’ll give you a recommendation, but we’re finished. That you would have an affair with my wife, a woman you knew I loved more than life itself, makes you the lowest of the low. Time for you to go your own way.”
“But―”
“Goodbye. I’m glad your mother isn’t around to see what an untrustworthy, devious prick you turned out to be.” He looked at me as if I stabbed him in the heart, which I probably had, but no more than he’d stabbed me. “Get out.”
He stormed out of the office.
I swallowed the lump in my throat and carried on with my business.
* * * *
Dr. Andari had pulled a disappearing act the day after Magdalene’s surgery. He wiped out his and the clinic’s accounts. The authorities had tracked him to an overseas flight to Abu Dhabi, then he vanished into thin air. His ex-wife’s private detectives and mine came up empty-handed. Magdalene wanted revenge. I couldn’t blame her. I had no idea where he went…until he called.
“Ben.”
“Rafiq. Where are you?”
“I’d rather not say, but there is no extradition treaty with the United States. I’m in a beautiful place. Blue waters, good food, compliant women.” He paused for a long moment. “How is she?”
“Distraught but adjusting.”
“Such a beauty, but like my wife, a superficial, self-absorbed adulteress.”
“You received everything on time?”
“The transfer went through to my Swiss account. Thank you.”
“No, Rafiq. Thank you.” I hung up, feeling content. The limo waited to take me home.
“Dinner in Mrs. Steiner’s sitting room, Carmela,” I said when I arrived.
“Yes, Mr. Steiner. Drinks first?”
“Open a bottle of Cristal, and make the caviar plate she likes.”
“Of course.”
I climbed the stairs and entered the sitting room that adjoined Magdalene’s bedroom. The one we now shared. The suite had been remodeled to her wishes.
No mirrors.
She sat at the computer, writing her memoir. The world believed Magdalene retired from films. Rumors persisted that she’d been ill, but no one really knew.
“Darling,” she drawled. “How’s the film going? How’s Savannah Charles in the part?”
I admired her for being able to speak of the film, of the young star I signed for the part of Mata Hari right before Magdalene’s surgery. “Not as good as you would have been, but she’s coming along. She ages well in the role.”
“Maybe I was too old to play the young Mata Hari. Aging an actress is easier than making her look younger.”
I shed my jacket and tie. “Carmela’s bringing up a bottle of Cristal and some caviar. Then we’ll have a quiet dinner and watch a movie.”
“Sounds wonderful.”
“How’s the writing going?”
“I’m enjoying the challenge. I even have an idea for a screenplay. Maybe we can work on the treatment together.”
“Of course.” I rubbed her shoulders. “You look beautiful tonight.”
“Oh, stop. You know that’s not true.”
“I told you once you’d always be beautiful to me.”
She stood, planted her wet, half-drooping lips on mine, and kissed me hard. A tear slipped from her good eye. “Thank you, darling.”
“You’re mine,” I said, taking her hand. “Forever.”
BIG GIRLS NOW, by Judith Stanton
“Inge, Inge!” Tatum McRae cries.
Yesterday her parents flew down to their estate in the Virgin Islands in their private plane. Today, Tatum’s nanny called in sick. I’m the back-up expert riding instructor at McRae Equestrian Center in Southern Pines but today Tatum needs me.
“Look,” she says. “I cut my hand.”
She crimps her mouth against a cry of pain and shows me her wound, a nasty gouge between her left forefinger and thumb. Blood trickles across her palm and down her skinny wrist. I inspect her wound with care and admiration.
“Oooh, good work!” I say.
She gives a brave, proud grin. There are no girly-girls at the McRae Center, paradise for horse lovers of all ages. We’re tough.
“What happened, honey?” I take her good hand and lead her into the tack room at the Center. It�
�s furnished, like every utility room in the barns and apartments and house, with a Pony-Club-approved first-aid kit. With horses, scary bad things can happen any day—a kick, a fall, a broken ankle, a concussion. Paralysis. Death. I take the kit from the cabinet beside the stainless steel utility sink.
“Why didn’t Nigel fix it?” My husband’s the celebrated trainer at the Center, a premier training facility for three-day eventers in Southern Pines, North Carolina. I get the students he doesn’t want, the young and the inept, though I’m a better teacher. He’s just got more wins. And balls.
I wipe off drying blood with a Betadine solution the color of iced tea. Sweet tea, they call it here.
“He said—show you—you know—how to fix it.”
She hiccups between words, curbing tears.
“Of course I can fix it, sweet pea. But what happened?” I gently press a square antiseptic gauze pad on the wound.
“I was grooming Molly for our lesson.” Molly is Tatum’s first big pony, a fancy Connemara, show name, Macaroon. “Nigel says my bridle’s dirty—time I learn to clean it by myself.”
Bloody bully, lording it over the boss’s daughter while her parents Chip and Sloan celebrate their anniversary in luxury.
“You’re getting better, honey bunny.”
I was born in Sweden, learned English in the cradle, British English, so my last two years in the United States I have struggled to learn to talk like I belonged. I loved the day I learned that honey bunny and pumpkin are endearments. Sweet pea is my favorite.
Tatum sniffles, obviously embarrassed. “Take your bridle apart, he says. Clean it good before you put it back together.” Another sniffle, but she goes on. “I do it for Molly. Time I learn. Big girl now.”
I admire her struggle to be clear, stay strong.
“You are a big girl,” I say soothingly, thinking. Good thing Tatum isn’t a big girl, or Nigel, my horny husband—a hound dog, as Sloan McRae once slipped and called her husband Chip—would have his hands all over hers, showing her exactly how to clean that bridle and put it back together, end straps snugly secured in their tight keepers. Or at lessons when she gets a little older he’d run his hands up the inside of her thigh to show her exactly where and how flat it should be against the saddle. It’s legal, lots of trainers do it. Position in the saddle is a hard concept to grasp. I always suspected Nigel, skanky bastard, went too far but couldn’t prove it.
No more. The hair in the little Zip-Loc bag scrunched in my breeches’ pocket is my best evidence ever.
He’s got something going on with someone, a brunette whose hair is shoulder length, not my hair, not our kids’ hair either. They inherited my Swedish blond locks to their roots. (How I got from Sweden to England to here is another story, but he was older, dazzling with his success, and I was poor and desperate. “Horses” says it all.)
I take the gauze away and hold up Tatum’s hand. “See, bunny, better already.” I make a butterfly bandage and fit it over the delicate webbing. “Could happen to the best of us.”
“Even you?”
“Especially me. You want to skip our four o’clock?”
Lesson, that is. Because she’s way too young for Nigel to bother with. Only after my students show talent—or hit puberty—does he graduate them to his exacting, ever-loving care.
I mean, that’s how I see it. Two years is about his limit before some helicopter mom starts to suspect exactly what his wandering hands are doing. Then our latest stable “lets him go” and so me too, and so our kids, Scott, sixteen and keen to leave, and Jennifer, twelve, talented, and oblivious to anything but her next ride on a horse or pony we couldn’t afford any other way. If Nigel wasn’t such a brilliant coach and trainer—and handsome charmer with a British accent—he’d be in jail for taking indecent liberties with a minor. I’d be tainted by his crime, unemployable in other barns, a Wal-Mart checker, raising two kids in a trailer park.
Tatum studies her new bandage, chin quivering with disappointment. “But I can’t hold the reins, or saddle Molly.”
“I’ll take care of Molly, and you can wear gloves. No, better, let’s do gymnastics, no reins.”
“You think Molly’ll like that?” Her sad green eyes go round with hope.
“She gets bored standing around. She’ll love it, honey bunch.”
* * * *
Molly doesn’t love it. Today Tatum’s little babysitter of a mare is, well, marish. Thin-skinned to the touch of a hand, a comb, a brush, her tack. Skittery in the flux of horses, grooms, and riders around the barn, and fidgety in lulls.
Maybe she’s in season to be bred and estrus is hitting her hard this go-round, like horsy PMS. It never hit her like this before. She sidles across the yard, shies at a familiar brown lab lolling under the pines, whinnies desperately to stablemates in distant paddocks.
Worse, the arena’s full. We have to wait.
Nigel’s finishing lessons with two of the three brunettes on my suspect list. My little Zip-Loc bag is burning in my hip pocket.
The long single strand of hair I retrieved from the teeth of the zipper of his riding breeches is a rich dark brown, somewhere between the walnut and nutmeg Lady Clairol demi-permanent dye Tatum’s mother secretly uses to hide a sprinkling of gray hairs, too proud to trust her hairdresser not to tell.
I measured it so I’ll know exactly who I’m looking for—a woman whose hair is at least ten and three-quarter inches long.
From across the arena, Nigel sees me with Tatum and Molly, and touches a finger to the brim of his baseball cap, labeled Land-Rover Burghley Three-Day. He finished in the top five that year, the year we married, Scottie on the way.
Nigel’s friendly gesture is part of his public image, happily married man, devoted father.
I nod back, then zero in on his two current students, both advanced. He’s aiming to qualify them for the Pan Am Games next year. They’re jumping four-foot, three-inch high stadium jumps so both are wearing helmets, not good for my investigation.
Beside me Molly paws. “We’ll be fine,” I reassure Tatum. “Soon as they leave we’ll warm up.”
Tatum casts her eyes down. “Will you start her?”
Not my mare’s not right, not I’m scared to do this.
Just help, this once.
“Of course, pumpkin.”
The brunettes dismount, loosen their horses’ girths, then take off their helmets, and I’m stumped. Kelsey, twenty-something, known to party hard, has the exact right color hair but it’s cropped short. That’s odd as most girls keep their hair long enough to knot it into a bun for dressage tests. She couldn’t have been Nigel’s fling a couple of days ago.
Stunningly beautiful, Charlotte stands beside her gorgeous Irish sport horse gelding, Da Vinci, Vinnie, formerly owned and ridden by a New Zealand Olympian. Serious money. Her father invented a sprocket for a gizmo that makes rocket launchers work and owns the company that makes it.
Vinnie can jump the moon and make it look easy as a foot-high cavaletti.
Charlotte strokes his forehead, blows in his nose, and he exhales a horsy sigh.
I’d be jealous, but I love a woman who loves her horse and…and… This close I see her long brown hair is fine and frizzy.
Cross off suspect number two.
“Inge.” It’s Tatum. “Molly’s weird.”
The mare’s still not herself, flicking her tail, gnawing her Happy Bit.
She’ll be okay, I tell myself. Even the best horses have bad days.
“I’ll hop on,” I say. “Trot circles. Serpentines. She’ll settle down.”
Maybe I will too.
* * * *
After a jarring trot around the arena, I dismount.
“Bring the longe line and the cavesson,” I tell Tatum. “Maybe Molly’s lame. Something I can’t feel. Let’s take a look, see what we can see.”
Tatum’s back in minutes. I take off Molly’s bridle, put on the longing cavesson, and send Molly trotting out on a twenty-meter circle around
us in the middle.
“Doesn’t look lame to me,” Tatum says. For a child, she has an amazing eye.
I don’t see lameness either.
I see a mare snorting and tossing her dainty head, switching her luxuriously long thick tail, and kicking out. Whatever’s on her mind, it would be dangerous, even cruel, to put a child on her back.
“Honey, let’s hand-walk her, then put her up. I’ll call the vet to check her in the morning.”
Tatum has hit the limits of her brave girl act, and her lower lip pokes out.
I go for best news cheer. “You can have a lesson on Archer, okay?” Her mother’s retired foxhunter, thirty years old, salt of the earth.
For an instant, Tatum looks disappointed, then smiles. “Mama loves Archer. I do too.”
“He’ll give you a solid workout, and he needs the exercise.”
And she’ll be safe on him. On a day when nothing feels safe for me.
* * * *
Archer comes through for Tatum, and she’s elated to ride a big horse. A groom helps Tatum cool Archer down and put him in his stall. Nigel’s still with students, but I have one more brunette bitch to rule out. Downstairs I look for Giada, a boarder, Nigel’s best student. Her family’s Italian—I keep thinking Corleone—but it’s Galifa-something—and their money comes from God knows what. Drugs, imported prosciutto, rare aged balsamic vinegar? Giada’s the most experienced rider in the barn after Nigel and me. She competes all over Europe, even Dubai, and probably sleeps with sheiks for kicks. Her dark brown hair is a good ten inches long.
I hope I nail her. I turn on the bright fluorescents. The boarders’ horses who don’t get night turnout are snuffling their hay. I can’t find Giada, then there she is in the shadows of Heidi’s dimly lit stall.
“Inge, thank God,” she says earnestly.
“What’s the matter?” I ask, concerned in spite of my suspicions.
“Heidi’s beside herself. Nothing wrong I can find—pulse, heart rate, gut sounds, all normal, but she’s not herself.”
Neither is Giada, unflappable when jumping solid obstacles bigger than my used Honda FIT, now twisting diamond rings around her fingers.
