“You don’t understand, do you?” she said.
“These things have a way of working out.”
“I don’t think you know what you’re up against. Stop caring. Just live.”
“All right,” I said, in mock agreement, and we both laughed.
“But it amounts to a weird sort of superstition, Stratton, this faith that things will work out. Sometimes they don’t.”
I had forgotten how a lick of cigarette smoke burns when it gets into your eye. “Sometimes a person gets lucky.”
She looked at me in her bored, intelligent way, considering what I had intended as a fairly idle statement. “You believe in luck,” she said, not asking a question.
“It’s just a word, really.”
She watched smoke rise around her. “If there’s good luck, then there’s bad luck, too.”
A glass or two of bubbly later, I worked my way through the crowd, shaking hands. I complimented the artist. He looked more calm now, and said that he was pleased to meet “one of the famous Fieldses.”
Just as I turned from the artist I met the eyes of Anna Wick.
Anna ran a finger along the sleeve of my jacket. “You were avoiding me,” she said.
She wore one of DeVere’s latest, a dress that matched the Cezanne golds of the painting I had admired. She gave me a glance that could only be described as seductive. I did meet women on occasions like this, attracted by my name, or the reputed scope of the estate. But Anna Wick could hardly be hungry for male companionship. She was blond, full-figured, brilliant, and looked equally good in photographs in both Vogue and the financial section.
“I was dazzled from afar,” I said.
She let my own thoughts capture me for a moment. Then she smiled. “We want to see you tomorrow.”
“It sounds interesting,” I said, trying to keep the thrill from my voice.
“I think you’ll find it fascinating,” she said.
Nona called that night.
“No,” I told her, in response to her question. “No further sign of the cat.”
“Thanks for the frog,” she said. “I’ll keep him here on my nightstand. I think he looks a little like you.”
“That’s terrific. I can make a big one. Call it Self-Portrait as a Frog.”
“I didn’t say exactly like you. Just the look in its eyes.” Someone in the hotel had suffered “severe disorientation after getting robbed on Bourbon Street.”
“You make it sound like good news.”
“It turns out he’s a vice president of Rorer, one of the big drug companies. I think he’ll give a donation to the hospice.”
“You amaze me.” I told her about the opening, about Margaret and her tan and her outlook on life, and about Anna Wick.
They want to see me tomorrow.
“It sounds wonderful, Strater,” she said.
She sounded close. It made her seem, paradoxically, so much farther away. “I’m not completely sure the news is going to be good.”
“Don’t worry. I’m sure something wonderful is going to happen.”
3
The University of California Medical Center in San Francisco is both a place for the study of medicine, and an effective hospital. It consists of tall buildings surrounded by craggy hills and eucalyptus trees. At night there is a view of the Mission District and the bay. The sunlight is usually warm, and the air cool. When there is fog it lowers over the tall buildings, parting around them, flowing with the wind.
The men and women in white coats tend to be youthful, and most walk with a certain spirit. My family had long helped support this hospital, endowing a lecture hall and a long-since torn-down hydrotherapy wing. My father had sat on the board of trustees, and I was often consulted myself on such matters as fundraising for a new “blaster” for kidney stones, and the possibilities of a new parking lot for the staff.
In the corridors of the hospital I am greeted by people I know, and people I do not know. I feel that I am in a university I used to attend, but the truth is that, on this morning especially, I missed Nona.
Nona’s ward was hard to reach. It was up several flights, and down what looked like an impossibly long corridor. The implication was that these patients needed privacy. The truth was that the medical center was satisfied to keep them out of sight. I always felt conspicuous under the gaze of all those young, wise eyes.
But their smiles always delighted me, and despite the fact that I felt robust and adult, powerful and blessed with a varied life I did not deserve, a visit with the children always warmed me, and touched me in a way that no art, and no music, ever could.
Nona had made the place more pleasant than the other wards at the medical center. There were posters on the walls, Donald Duck at the beach, and Curious George on top of a fire truck ladder. I had put a few drawings of my own on the walls, animals either driving cars or operating street-repairing machinery. I am not sure why I chose to depict animals operating heavy machinery, but somehow the subject matter seemed appropriate.
I passed back the patient’s drawings. I praised the giraffes, and received compliments on my own drawing when the child cried out, “I got an eagle!”
Stuart examined the telephone worker I had drawn, a figure atop a telephone pole. “It’s not an animal,” he said.
I agreed that it was not. “Your horses were so good, I couldn’t think of an animal I could draw well enough to go along with them.”
“What’s he doing?”
“He’s one of those people who repair telephones.”
Stuart was thin, and had dark hair, dark eyes. His hair was becoming sparse uniformly around his head, so that it seemed to be vanishing into the air. He did not have the normal amount of strength for a six-year-old, so his expressions took place slowly, and had an extra cast of seriousness as a result. “I want an animal,” he said.
I selected a sheet from the art tablet on his bed stand, pulling the paper slowly, deliberately. I folded the paper, in an effort to remember origami animals from my childhood. The white paper rustled, and, as I creased it and shaped it, took on the general shape of a horse’s head. Held in a certain way, the paper steed even seemed to have spirit.
I examined my handiwork. I was pleased. I could make the horse arch its neck, working the paper like a finger puppet.
I perfected the folded paper, then stretched forth my hand and offered it to Stuart.
He gazed at it, and did not move.
“What is it?” he said.
Then he took it, and sat up.
The cab ride to DeVere’s Montgomery Street office was uncomplicated, except for the work being done on Clay Street, a sandy peak of earth surrounded by men in yellow hardhats. A jackhammer ripped the asphalt, punching holes in the gray pavement.
Anna Wick met me in DeVere’s waiting room. She smiled, cutting through me with her eyes, measuring me, and I heard myself murmuring idle courtesies.
“Mr. DeVere has so much looked forward to meeting with you,” she said. “I think I could say that he admires your work.”
So the news must be good, I thought.
But while the Anna Wick of the night before had been seductive, this was a different manner entirely, still sexually aware, but much more businesslike after the first glance or two.
We engaged in some professional gossip, complained about one of the newer hotels in town, and about the poor quality of the air conditioning in so many of the buildings (too many “particulates in the air,” we both agreed). Then she excused herself to make a phone call, and the nature of my visit began to become clear.
No one made me wait like this. In any other office in San Francisco I would have been ushered in at once. But not in this office. DeVere was in no hurry.
I teased myself with what was left of my hope: good news.
Surely there was good news.
I crossed my legs, and looked, I knew, perfectly at ease.
But I was not. Surely now, I allowed myself to think. Surely now I will
hear what I have waited to hear for so long.
His door opened, and he was there, a folder in his hand. DeVere pretended not to see me for a moment, pausing at his secretary’s desk. Then he handed her the red plastic folder, and he turned to me with his fine smile.
I stood and we grasped hands, and I knew. He didn’t have to say a word. I could tell.
This can’t be, hissed a voice in me. He surely didn’t bring me all the way to the Financial District to insult me like this. But it was in his eyes, his smile. He opened the door for me, one of those large teak slabs I associate with boardrooms. This oversize chamber was his office, or one of his offices. He had chambers like this in Milan and in Tokyo. Everything about it was too grand, including the view of the Bay Bridge and the slow progress of a tanker toward the Port of Oakland.
He offered coffee, tea, “or something a little more warming.”
I was careful to show no sign of emotion. I declined, thanking him.
“I think it’s cruel to let a person wait.” He let me think over these words for a moment. “I wanted to tell you personally.”
He settled behind his desk, and I did not help him by asking.
DeVere was craggy, long-limbed. He made his living telling people what to wear, how to decorate their homes—how to live. Outside, I recalled, on the way to the airport, his face gazed down from a billboard, the sign emblazoned with his name. That’s all it took: just his name on a label.
“You’re looking well,” said DeVere.
I imagined that I probably did look good to him, for someone dressed in non-DeVere clothing. I thanked him, and returned the compliment.
“Don’t be angry with me, Stratton. I want you to understand.”
I waited.
“I admire your work. Your designs are always tasteful. Elegant. Impressive—as works of art.”
I waited, knowing almost to the word what was coming. But I could not disguise from myself my bitterness. This was the most important landscape design project in eighty years. Golden Gate Park was being redesigned, and competition for the prize included the best talent from fifteen different countries. This was the project of a lifetime. I had dropped by the Palace of Fine Arts several days ago, to see the work on exhibit. My work, under even the most harsh eye, would seem the most humane, the most plausible—the most beautiful.
“I have always felt that you were wasting your time trying to make a name as a designer,” said DeVere.
I did not speak.
“Despite my heavy criticism of the ethereal quality of your work—its overprettiness—your plans came in second.”
He was not telling me this to allay my frustration. He was saying it in a way that told me that he personally had campaigned against me.
His father had been an artichoke grower in Castroville, not an impoverished man, but a man who made money sitting in a pickup watching the bland seasons of the Monterey coast, and supervising as workers harvested the edible thistles. It was well known that DeVere never discussed his family.
“Naturally, the decision is entirely out of my hands,” I said, my voice even, certain that if someone had observed me he would have had no clue regarding my real feelings. “If you thought my ideas were implausible …”
“If you think you can go to the jury and persuade them, forget about it. Blake agrees with me.”
This information hit hard. DeVere must have read my feelings, because he added, “Blake had to admit that once again your work simply did not seem practical.”
I had always been able to count on Blake. I could not keep a certain stiffness out of my voice. “I have always appreciated his opinion.”
“Your kind, Stratton, your type of person …” He let his voice trail off. “You have no business trying to make your way in a career like this.”
“I should content myself with activities that don’t matter to anyone.”
He smiled. His long-dead father had bequeathed to him the wrinkles and creases of a range rider. “You should enjoy a gentleman’s pursuits. And leave the creation of the real world to others.”
“People like yourself.”
He acknowledged my words with a half nod, toying with his reading glasses. “I know how the world works.”
I let a moment, and his remark, pass. “Peterson won, didn’t he?”
Again, DeVere gave me that famous smile, the manly grin that sold everything from leather jackets to fountain pens. “Peterson’s plans are plausible.”
“I’ve always admired his work,” I said, truthfully. And saw just a trace of disappointment in DeVere’s eyes. He had hoped for an outburst, although he should have known better. “He’s a good choice.”
“A gentleman knows how to lose gracefully,” said DeVere, perhaps intending to mock me.
“My father felt that you would go far,” I said.
“Further proof of his good judgment.”
“And I have been amazed at your success. Everything you turn to manages to transform itself—”
“To gold.” He ran his hands over his gray-streaked dark hair. He stood, but stayed behind the desk, as at a battle station. He flicked a switch and asked his secretary to send in Mr. Peterson.
Peterson was a man I saw only occasionally, at a reception, an art opening, or sketching the same sort of building I enjoyed, one of the pre-Earthquake Victorians off Van Ness. He was a lean, athletic man, more comfortable in jeans than the slacks and tie he now wore. The tie was a DeVere, earthy splashes of grays and browns.
He had been told already. “I’m sorry,” Peterson said, through the blush of victory, and his plain distaste for DeVere. He was one of those unnaturally youthful men, anywhere from thirty to forty, with a young man’s self-assurance, and a tennis player’s build. Looking into each other’s eyes, we understood something, unified by our dislike for the third man in the room.
There was something else in his eyes, a wariness, an unease. I assumed that he found this meeting awkward, even unethical. It was obvious that no jury had reached this decision. The decision was DeVere’s.
I was managing my famous poise even now, my good manners, and my well-known lack of hard feelings, carrying me to the door. When I looked back at DeVere I looked at the son of a man who knew irrigation and frostburn. This hard man in his elegant, self-designed suit, resented me, and saw me as an embodiment of all that he himself could never possess.
Local legend explained that DeVere had friends in organized crime. A fashion critic for CNN had vanished after criticizing one of his spring lines as “a cross between the Easter Bunny and the Great Pumpkin.” There were rumors of beatings, of iron-fisted retaliation against labor unions.
Well, at least I have important enemies, I told myself. None of those wimpy, powerless enemies for Stratton Fields.
I hurried down the hall, barely noticing the paintings on the wall, DeVere’s trademark charcoal grays, adobe browns.
Anna Wick was in the downstairs lobby, fussing with a cordovan briefcase. “I was so sorry when Mr. DeVere told me last weekend,” she said. “You’ve worked so hard, so many years.” Her smile displayed her white teeth. She was good looking as a fine car can be, assembled by expensive craftsmen.
I could not utter a word.
“I say hello to your brother now and then at the race track. I’m pretty sure I’ll see him at Santa Anita this weekend. You and your brother are remarkable people. Mr. DeVere wants to humiliate you.” She said the last phrase as though delivering pleasant tidings.
I understood. She was not being cruel. She was one of those people who like to see the distress of others in order to learn something. She was curious. She had heard so much about me, about my family. How was I going to react?
I gave her a smile, and something changed in her eyes, in her manner. She parted her lips and was about to say something.
Outside, the bustle of the Financial District surrounded me, briefcases and dark suits in a hurry. I found myself searching for a phone before I caught myself. Nona was o
ut of town, at a convention, trying to raise money for a new ward for her patients.
I could not help leaning against a wall for a moment, pedestrians whisking past me.
I had never had a chance.
I had means at my disposal. I could have an attorney look into the competition, or raise a question or two when I next saw the mayor. But as capable as I was, DeVere was more powerful—his name was sunlight. My name was illustrious, even aristocratic. But it lacked power. It was a name from another era, an era of quiet voices and candlelight.
As I hurried up Montgomery Street my feelings shifted from frustration to anger. I could almost forgive DeVere. The man was more a creature of ambition than a human being. But Peterson. He could have declined the award on the spot. The man knew my plans were better. And Blake. How could I ever forgive Blake?
That afternoon I called to see how my mother was. Another restless night, the nurse said. She tried to stab an orderly with a little piece of plastic cup, “one of our water glasses she had sharpened especially.”
4
Barry Montague, my personal physician and sometime tennis partner, took my arm as I entered the Montgomery Street bar. “Congratulations, Stratton,” he said.
“Thanks, Barry. For what?”
“Your plans. Your entry for the Golden Gate Park competition. Everyone’s talking about it. They have to give you the prize.”
I was about to tell Barry the truth, but he had such an open, sincere smile that I couldn’t bring myself to crush his enthusiasm. “I’m glad you liked my work,” I said.
“Liked it. Mr. Modest. The worst sort of conceit. We ought to take up tennis again. I’m getting a little out of shape.”
I looked at Barry closely, and I realized that he looked tired. He had gained weight, and his eyes were hidden in shadows that had never been there before. His voice was hoarse, and he smiled as though in apology for his appearance. “I’ve been putting off having a medical checkup of my own,” he said. “There’ve been a record number of murders in the Bay Area this year. And you know what that means.”
I had visited the emergency room with state senators to urge them to increase spending. I had seen blood on the green linoleum, the scarlet smearing, leaving the imprint of footsteps. No matter how soon someone mopped it up, the sight of it always stayed, the memory of it and the insight: What keeps us alive is so much red ink.
The Horses of the Night Page 2
