Mercury

by Margot Livesey

  She was very firm about this point. I said she was providing me with a mount, which meant there was one more horse we could use for lessons. My jumbled logic seemed to satisfy her. We each had an agenda. Then I gave the quick version of my life story. When I mentioned you, she exclaimed that she’d seen you at the stables and assumed you were just another parent. You’d been great with Diane. I said I was glad you were doing a good job with your patients. At home, since your dad died, you’d been MIA.

  Hilary shook her head. “I’m not sure grief has a timetable,” she said. “Just when I think I’ve come to terms with Michael’s death, I find myself spiraling down again, braking at a green light, wearing odd socks.”

  We split the bill and promised we’d do this again soon. Driving home, I thought how long it was since I’d made a new friend, not as a parent, not as a wife, but as myself. I’d forgotten the pleasure of revisiting my past with another person. It wasn’t only Mercury that filled me with hope, but Hilary too. When I told her how I used to work in mutual funds, she said, “Viv, you’re a Renaissance woman.”

  The next day, as we brought the horses up from the paddocks, I told Claudia about the arrangement. She was leading Sorrel and Dow Jones. I had Mrs. Hardy and Nimble.

  “Lucky Hilary,” she said, “finding a free groom. What time is the hay arriving?”

  “You were the one who said we needed more boarders,” I persisted. Three owners had taken their horses to North Carolina last winter and never returned, and we’d had a run of bad luck with our own horses: a mare with colic had to be put down, a gelding was lamed by a split hoof, another gelding kicked in the face, his tear ducts damaged. Five of our twenty-four stalls were empty. And Matheus and Felipe had asked for a raise.

  “Not boarders like Mercury,” said Claudia. “He doesn’t belong in our cozy, second-rate stables.”

  As she spoke, Sorrel and Dow Jones crowded forward, objecting to her description. I did too. “We don’t have to be second-rate,” I said. “He can help us attract better horses, better riders.”

  “I’m not saying we have to be.” She tugged at the reins. “But I like the stables the way they are. I like that anyone can come here and ride. Of course, I’d love to have prize-winning horses, stellar riders, but I’m satisfied with what we do have.”

  And Mercury, I tried to explain, was a way for me to be more satisfied. “He’s been so well trained. I’m hoping to take him out to a few shows.”

  Claudia gave me a quick, sideways glance, but all she said was, “Okay, I’ll stop being a Grinch. I just want you to be happy.”

  I would have said the same. We were both nearly thirty-eight, but Claudia was childless, living with her great-aunt, dating a married man. In her twenties she’d gone out with a series of willowy, Frisbee-playing boys. I’d thought their youth mere coincidence until one night I made a joke about cradle snatching, and she said, “But you know I like younger guys.”

  She was my closest friend, and I had had no idea. When I asked why, she said, “They’re cute, and they don’t think I’m a failure.”

  “You’re not a failure,” I protested.

  She laughed. “Come on, Viv. I love my job, but there’s no ladder to climb, no glass ceiling. I can’t afford to do the things you and your fancy friends do.”

  Suddenly I recalled all the times she’d claimed she wasn’t interested in a play, didn’t feel like going out for tapas, and I’d taken her at her word. I felt dumb as a post. A few months later Helen asked her to run the stables. Then she met Rick; he was taking photographs at a horse show. The good news was, she’d overcome her ageism. The bad news was, he had a wife and three sons, the youngest still in college. His wife used to teach nursery school. Now she raised money for her church and had migraines. It wasn’t a question of if they got divorced, Rick said. Only when.

  Claudia was incandescent, but as the months passed, his divorce seemed permanently on hold. One son was depressed, another got sick, the dog had cancer, his accounting firm was restructuring. Rick was doing his best, she told me, seeing a therapist, but there was always a good reason why it was a bad time to leave.

  The afternoon he came to photograph Mercury for our website, Claudia had a dentist’s appointment. I spent an hour grooming Mercury—washing him with whitening shampoo, oiling his hooves. I had just finished combing his tail when Rick arrived.

  First he photographed Mercury grazing with Sorrel and Sir Pericles, then on a lunge line. At last I rode him. For the final shots Rick suggested a couple of jumps. We hadn’t jumped before, and as we approached the first pole, I felt him hesitate. Then he gathered himself, and we were flying. By the third jump I knew what Mercury was born and trained to do.

  Back in the barn, while I rubbed him down, Rick set up his tripod. “It’s so quiet,” he said. “Don’t you ever get frightened, being here alone?”

  “It’s safer than walking around downtown at night,” I said.

  “That’s what Claudia says. I told her she should get a gun.”

  Had I heard him correctly? I turned to look, and there he was, frowning slightly, gold-rimmed glasses glinting as he adjusted the camera. “I have a pistol at my cabin in New Hampshire,” he went on. “I take it out once a year to oil it, but just knowing it’s there makes me feel safer.”

  “You own a gun?”

  “I know, it surprises me too, but in Franconia no one gives it a second thought. It doesn’t mean I’ve turned into a redneck.”

  Suddenly I couldn’t stop myself from asking, “Are you ever going to leave your wife?”

  It was his turn to be surprised. “The answer is yes. Believe me, I don’t like having to lie. I don’t like Claudia having less than she deserves. I don’t like Nan having less than she deserves.”

  “So what’s stopping you? Thousands of people get divorced every year.” I moved to Mercury’s off side.

  “I don’t know,” he said, and I could hear that he didn’t. “Three months after I met Claudia, I was all set to leave. I’d had a good day at work, and as I drove home I was sure I could find the right words. Our marriage had run its course. We’d both be happier apart. Nan would have the house, money, etcetera. But when I stepped into the kitchen, she was waiting with a bottle of champagne. Her church had gotten planning permission for their extension.”

  “I can see that was a setback,” I said, “but there can’t have been good news every day.”

  He clicked his fingers along the bars of the nearest stall. “All I can say is that looking after Nan has been my job for nearly thirty years. If I die tomorrow, that’ll be my epitaph: ‘He was a good husband.’ Everyone will hate me for leaving her.”

  I asked what his therapist thought, his sons.

  “My sons are devoted to the status quo. My therapist thinks I should shit or get off the pot, but being a polite woman, she says we should try couples counseling.”

  Nearby a horse whinnied. “Claudia loves you,” I said. “She deserves a chance to have what you have: a partner, children. If something doesn’t change”—I was amazed at my boldness—“I’m declaring war.”

  Rick stepped over and placed his right hand on Mercury’s neck. He was swearing an oath on what he knew I held sacred. “I am trying,” he said. “If I can’t, then I promise I’ll break up with Claudia.”

  “Soon,” I said. “Not years from now. Months from now.”

  Mercury, with a fine sense of timing, let fall a stream of droppings. As I fetched a shovel, Rick asked if I’d tell Claudia about our chat. “Will you?” I said, trying to sound as if I didn’t care.

  He wasn’t fooled for a second. “What good would it do? She’d just be mad at you, and she wouldn’t break up with me.”

  When I began to apologize, he started to laugh. “You’re a scary woman, Viv. I’ll send you the photographs by the end of Sunday.” Then he looked up from folding his tripod and said what I’d been hoping Claudia would say ever since Mercury emerged from the trailer: “That’s a horse in a thousand.�
�

  3

  I CAME HOME AND TOLD you I’d just heard something astounding: Rick, the liberal, artistic accountant, owned a gun. You were in the garden, picking tomatoes, the last of the season.

  “Maybe he’s like you,” you said. “He learned to shoot at camp?”

  “But that was a game. Shooting clay pigeons. Rick owns a real gun. If someone broke into his house, he could kill them.”

  You removed a few faded leaves and held out an almost ripe tomato. “Hopefully that won’t happen,” you said. “But you never know about people and guns. Remember Melanie’s father?”

  I did, and I remembered, longingly, your response. It was you who noticed that Trina had come home from Melanie’s with a picture of a girl holding something small and black. You who gently questioned her and learned that the small black object was a gun. Melanie’s dad had one. He kept it in a box.

  “Sure,” Mr. Nichols had said when you phoned. “What’s the problem? I have a permit.”

  “Excuse me,” you said. “No one has a permit to show a gun to six-year-olds.” After you hung up, you had phoned all the parents in Trina’s class.

  Now the news about Rick’s firearm barely reached you. Could I start the water for pasta? you asked.

  AT THE TIME THAT I studied Margaret Fuller I had intense ideas about sharing everything with my affinities. And I still feel that way. I want to be truthful, and until last fall, barring my colleague Robert, I mostly was. Then you and Claudia, the two people I was closest to, disapproved of Mercury, and in the face of that disapproval, I began to follow your example: I began to hide things. I hid the amount of time I was spending with him; I hid the scope of my ambitions. You asked only practical questions—who was taking Trina to her violin lesson? Should we have the furnace serviced?—but Claudia was more perceptive. Why did the vet see Mercury every time she came? Why did he have special food and the largest paddock? So when Rick’s photographs appeared in my in-box, it was Hilary I phoned. We arranged to meet at a café near her office.

  I arrived to find her already seated at a corner table with two coffees. “I hope you like lattes,” she said as I opened my laptop. The photographs began to slide across the screen, Mercury growing ever more lustrous as the sun set.

  “He is beautiful,” Hilary said wistfully. She asked who had taken the photographs, and when I said Claudia’s boyfriend, she said, “Oh, I’m glad she has someone.”

  “She does, and she doesn’t.” I described the situation and, lured on by her attentive smile, confided my attack on Rick.

  Her phone buzzed, but she didn’t even glance at it. “You’re such a good friend,” she said. “What would happen if Claudia delivered her own ultimatum?”

  I explained Claudia’s theory that Rick had never recovered from being sent away to boarding school. He was twelve years old, two thousand miles from his home in Nebraska, and allowed one phone call a week. “She says he has to decide for himself,” I said.

  We both paused to watch Mercury approach a jump in one photograph, soar over it in the next. The neat way he folded his hind legs gave him several inches advantage over a sloppier horse.

  “Perhaps,” Hilary suggested, “Rick’s a Good Man.” Then—at first it seemed like a digression—she told me about her abortion. When she got pregnant, soon after she moved to Providence, her mother had phoned with the news that she’d once had a sister. Jessie had been born with Down’s syndrome when Michael was three, and had died soon after her second birthday. “I’m telling you now,” her mother had said, “so you can make sure there aren’t any problems.” But there were.

  On what was already one of the worst days of her life, Hilary had arrived at the clinic to find a group of middle-aged men holding up bloody pictures, shouting “Murderer!” “Whore!”

  “I kept thinking,” she said, gazing at me intently, “that these men went to church on Sunday, and for the rest of the week they looked at porn and hit their wives and molested their kids’ friends. Or their kids. All that mattered was that everyone thought they were good. I hate Good Men.”

  Rick’s not like that, I wanted to say, but I recalled his anxious frown, his fear that everyone would hate him. Before I could speak, Hilary’s phone rang again. She was needed at the office.

  “Thank you for showing me the photos,” she said. “I wish Michael could see them.”

  I was nearly back at the car when I caught sight of Jack across the street. Two minutes earlier, and Hilary would have met him, tapping along with his white cane. I went over to say hello, and he asked after you. You’d been so distant since Edward died. I’d been glad when Hilary said you were doing well by your patients. Now I was glad Jack had noticed your astronaut’s suit. I told him about our whale-watching expedition, and how it had seemed to cheer you up.

  “So maybe Donald just needs to be in the presence of large mammals,” he said.

  “Do you think there’s anything we can do to help?”

  He tapped his cane thoughtfully. “Besides keeping him company, and waiting for him to come back? No. He’s on his own journey. Someday soon he’ll realize how lucky he is to have you and the kids.”

  I offered him a lift, but he shook his head. “It’s my civic duty to remind my fellow citizens that, however bad things are, they still have their eyesight.”

  “You’ll only serve as a reminder,” I said, “when you’re less handsome.”

  THE PHOTOS OF MERCURY were my version of porn. When I was alone, I looked at them all the time. I pinned up half a dozen on the bulletin board. Matheus pronounced him superb; Charlie and the other stable girls were wild about him; Claudia said nothing. At my birthday party she led the singing and teased me about my hair, but the next week we had another quarrel. She tracked me down in the stalls, where I was getting a horse ready for a lesson, to tell me Hilary had phoned to complain about the bills from the vet and the farrier. “She said there’s even a charge for silicone pads.”

  “Mercury was a little off,” I said. “I needed the vet to do a full lameness exam. And he was due for new shoes. The farrier suggested the pads.” With another horse I would have waited a day or two to see if he recovered before paying for a vet’s visit; as for the pads, they helped to absorb the shock of jumping. Of course Claudia knew all this. What she didn’t know was how much I was riding him. Already he recognized my car. When I arrived in the morning, he was waiting at the paddock gate.

  “But why didn’t you consult Hilary?” she said. “At least let her know about the shoes? And Matheus says you’re giving him special food.”

  “Just vitamins and alfalfa hay. I buy them myself.”

  The mare I was saddling tried to nip me. She sensed my anger, and so did Claudia. “Viv, it’s not the food or the farrier that’s the problem. It’s you. You’re acting as if Mercury is the only horse at Windy Hill. He’s not, and he’s not your horse.”

  Twice in elementary school I was sent home for hitting other children. Maybe that’s why I was so worried about Marcus. For a few seconds I could have thrown my helmet at Claudia, or shoved her to the ground. Then my vision cleared. I was tightening a girth, talking to my oldest friend. I said I was sorry; I didn’t want to lame an expensive horse; I’d let the farrier’s zeal carry me away.

  She nodded doubtfully. “You’re so different.” She sighed. “It worries me.”

  “I’m not different,” I said. “I’m myself again. Now I know why I didn’t die in the subway.”

  I smiled, hoping to win her over, and she returned my gaze, not smiling. She’d been there when Nutmeg broke my finger, when the Challenger disintegrated and we stood in the school playground, staring up at the sky, when I won first place in the Medway show, when my parents separated, when I met you: all those hours of riding and daydreaming and planning to change our lives.

  “Okay,” she said at last. “But be careful. Remember what happened with Nutmeg.”

  “I was twenty then. Just a kid.”

  That afternoon, as I tau
ght my lessons, what I kept thinking about was not Claudia’s warning but Hilary’s betrayal. She and I talked or texted several times a week, and at my party she had joined in like an old friend. Now she had gone behind my back to Claudia.

  After supper I went to the study and dialed her number.

  “Viv, I was just wondering which to do first: sew on a button, or go over Diane’s homework?”

  “The button. Listen, Claudia spoke to me about the bills. I’m sorry I didn’t ask you first.” I explained that Mercury would need to see the farrier every five weeks but, barring emergencies, there wouldn’t be any more major expenses. The vet had given him a clean bill of health. As I spoke, I drew the outline of a large M on the notepad you kept on the desk.

  “Did I screw things up, phoning Claudia?” Hilary said. “I think of her as the money person, and you as the one who knows horses.”

  I felt a rush of gratitude; she had seen past my apology. “Actually,” I said, “I’m the money person.”

  “Oh, Viv, I did screw things up. Of course after a decade in business you’d deal with the bills. I’m sorry. You’re my friend, and I didn’t want to bug you, so I went to Claudia. I’ll know better in future. Listen, I wanted to ask you about Jack Brennan.”

  “Jack Brennan?”

  “Yes. We’ve been hanging out since your party. He seems really nice.”

  I could hear her smiling. I said he was great, one of your closest friends, and got off the phone. Hilary and Jack? Jack and Hilary? Alone in the study, I felt my cheeks grow warm. The thought of them together seemed to break some unwritten rule. I told myself it wouldn’t last. There was no reason to tell you.

  4

  ONE DAY SOON AFTER we moved here, Marcus rode his tricycle straight into Main Street. In the instant that he shot out into the lanes of cars, I was running after him, shouting, “Stop! Stop!” My love for him was like a skyscraper, dwarfing the danger. All that mattered was his safety. I had the same single, towering emotion when the police called at Thanksgiving to say the alarm had gone off at Windy Hill. You know what happened that night at the stables. What you don’t know is how it made me feel. When the police escorted me to the corner of Milton Street, I saw our house, dark except for the kitchen lights.