by Jane Smiley
In a moment it was at four.
“Snell is bidding against you,” said George.
“He is?” said Skippy.
“It’s only money,” said Deirdre. “You have plenty.”
It got to five, Skippy’s limit, and, dutifully, he put his hand down and sat on it.
It got to six.
The mare lifted her head, pivoted her ears at some sound. She was a bay. To Deirdre, who had seen thousands of horses in her day, she looked uniquely splendid. Deirdre said, “Bid seven, I’ll go halves with you.”
“What!” exclaimed George. “Love, you’ve not got that kind of money!”
“I’ll find it. Bid!”
Skippy raised his card and said “Seven.” That halted the bidding, and a minute later, they owned the mare.
George said, “Have you not heard of the winner’s curse, Cousin?”
“What’s that?” said Skippy. Deirdre had floored herself too thoroughly to speak.
“That’s an economic principle of auctions. Whoever wins is cursed, because they’ve paid a premium for the fun of winning.”
“God in heaven,” said Deirdre, realizing she would have to do something she had seen others do and sworn she herself would never do. “I’m going to have to mortgage my house for a horse!” She put her head in her hands. Deirdre’s house was her pride—she had bought it after selling her best jumper for a hundred thousand dollars, and when she handed over the check, she had vowed to herself that she would never own another horse. That was ten years ago, and the house had continued to express its difference from a horse by appreciating in value at a steady 12 percent a year. But with her eyes closed, she saw that mare’s face, clear as day, and, knowing it was now hers, she felt a bonafide surge of joy. And now the man with the clipboard came toward them, and Skippy lifted his hand and signed the paper.
11 / THE BARON
DICK WINTERSON was a successful trainer and a busy man. He had a string of million-dollar runners (well, some half- and some quarter-million-dollar runners—the pool of million-dollar runners, though deep, you might say, was also naturally rather small in circumference, and Baffert and Lukas had bought up most of the shoreline). But Dick wasn’t afraid of them. Most of the time. Some years before, Dick hadn’t been afraid of them any of the time. Or of Allan Jerkens or John Kimmel. Name any trainer you like, and that was a trainer that Dick Winterson hadn’t been afraid of. As a rule, Dick liked other trainers. They had something in common, and he was, or had been, an outgoing sort of guy. Probably now, unless, like dogs, they could actually smell it, Wayne, Bob, Allan, and John didn’t as yet know that Dick was afraid of them. He still joked around with them and the others when he saw them. He still stood next to them during morning training and talked horse idiosyncrasies with them. He still drank coffee and ate toast with them in the cafeteria. But after the workouts were over, when the others went into their offices and called owners or did paperwork, Dick went off to his therapist. He was a racing man, of course, and so he envisioned his fear and his therapy in a match race, neck and neck, Sunday Silence and Easy Goer, Affirmed and Alydar, all the great racing couples. Or, God forbid, Foolish Pleasure and Ruffian. The problem was that, even after the second turn, he didn’t know which horse was his fear and which horse was his therapy. Sometimes he tried to gull his therapist with the idea that Thoroughbred training had changed when the quarterhorse guys got into it—they were a harsher, harder-bitten group—but his therapist ignored these realities and said that winning and losing was the source of his distress, not its solution, that quieter, more organic images would be more helpful. Blossoming. Budding. Fruiting. Digging the soil, sprinkling the fertilizer, gently mounding the dirt up around the stalk of the plant, etc. It was dead certain that Wayne Lukas never visualized his life in terms of gardening, Dick thought. He nodded when his therapist suggested this sort of thing to him, but couldn’t, or at least didn’t, take it in. Meanwhile, his fear and his therapy had turned into the stretch, and Dick had the distinct sense that in a matter of moments, so to speak, the race would be over. And now he was having an affair with the wife of one of his owners. That didn’t mean he was more afraid, he told his therapist, only that he was afraid more of the time. His therapist told him that this distinction was meaningless, but Dick actually found it rather comforting. It meant, somehow, that he wasn’t entirely panicked.
His establishment, he knew, the exercise girls and the grooms and his two assistants and his office manager and the feed man, were all operating on momentum at this point. He had set them going years before and they all knew their jobs. They kept their heads, took care of the horses, and rolled along. He was still winning races—his win percentage in the fall was 18 percent, as high as it had ever been. But none of the wins, not even the big-stakes wins, where he got his picture into the New York Times and the Daily Racing Form, proved anything to him except that life was fluky. He could send a horse out a one-to-five favorite, have the horse come roaring in by ten lengths of daylight, and still not be convinced. Convinced of what? Dick didn’t know. His brother, who taught French in a high school in Queens, said he was having an existential crisis. Dick didn’t really know what that was, but it sounded like a bad thing to have at Gulfstream, where everything was lovely, and an even worse thing to take back to Belmont Park with him. Belmont Park was big—a track of such vastness that it gave you the willies to begin with. Belmont Park was like an ever-expanding universe, a vacuum forming at your feet—Dick shook his head, scattering the images.
What he had to do was decide whether to take Luciano back to New York with him.
Luciano was his horse masseur, and the only balm to his troubled soul. Every day, after his therapy (over the years he had won so much money that he could afford daily therapy), he came back to the track and watched Luciano massage the horses. Luciano was only half Italian—he was actually tall and Irish-looking, with reddish hair and blue eyes. Though he was just over six feet tall, he could palm a basketball. When the horses heard his voice in the aisle, they pressed against their stall guards to get at him. They loved him far more than they loved their grooms, and though Luciano only did horses and never people, Dick felt entirely certain that Luciano would be able to resolve his condition better than his therapist, one session, full-body, just squeezing and pushing the fear out. But he didn’t ask; he only watched Luciano do the horses and chatted with him.
Though they had never spoken of it, Dick knew that Luciano knew that Dick was in trouble. Luciano, therefore, offered a lot of well-meaning advice, which was sometimes of an Italian nature and sometimes of an Irish nature. Today, when Dick saw Luciano pass his office door (he was pretending to be scanning the condition book in a rational manner, but about two weeks before, he had started picking races by tosses of the coin; this had not affected his win percentage), he got up and came around his desk, then looked out the door. Luciano was ducking under the stall guard of a four-year-old named Rah Rah, who had won about half a million so far. Dick flipped his last coin, received from that the information that the filly Laurita should run in the Shirley Temple Handicap, a hundred thousand dollars added, and he walked out into the aisle. He could see Rah Rah’s head, haltered, his shank hanging over the stall guard, and he could hear Luciano mumbling. He strolled over and said “Hi.”
“Hey, Dick,” said Luciano. “How’s it going?”
“Okay. Had a win and a place yesterday, out of two races. The owners were thrilled.”
“Great,” said Luciano.
Dick, his own hands in his pockets, watched as Luciano pressed his fingers into the colt’s neck, making small circles, sometimes pausing to manipulate little knots, other times stroking, other times running his thumbs part of the length of the muscle. Rah Rah stood calmly. Dick stepped toward him, and touched the animal’s nose, knowing what would come next, and it did. Rah Rah lifted his nose and began working on Dick, on his neck right where it came into his shoulders. With his mobile upper lip, he pushed and dug at the
skin of Dick’s neck inside his shirt collar, sometimes moving down his shoulder, sometimes moving up his neck and sometimes working on the line of Dick’s jaw. Dick let him do this, although he knew he was in danger of being nipped—during mutual grooming, horses often nipped one another, and because of their manes and coats, they liked it. Unprotected, Dick liked it less, but he recognized it as a gesture of equine attachment, and no horse had ever drawn blood.
“Now, listen,” said Luciano.
“I’m listening,” said Dick.
“How does your wife fit in here?”
Dick flinched, but hid it. He said, “She doesn’t.”
“Where did you say she works, again?”
“She teaches vocal technique at a college in New York.”
“Like singing?”
“Yes, singing. She hates the track. And she hates Florida.”
“Is she a good singer? These owners might like to, you know, talk with a good singer like that.”
“She’s a good singer, but she sings songs that don’t have any real melodies. You know, Charles Ives. Anton Webern. Alban Berg. Sometimes she sings some Schubert.”
“I’ve heard of him,” said Luciano.
“I’ve found that, if you listen to those Schubert songs about fifty times, they get pretty.”
“But she doesn’t like the track?”
“Never has. She’s a little afflicted with agoraphobia. The track is no place for an agoraphobic.”
“What’s that?”
“The word means ‘fear of the marketplace.’ Fear of busy places.”
“Oh. So she wouldn’t like to sit up in the boxes and talk to the owners about concerts and things? Ballet? Opera? Owners like to seem to have class.”
“Some owners do have class, Luciano.”
“That lady who owns that filly who jumped the other horse.”
Dick stepped to the right, and Rah Rah began on the left side of his neck. Luciano had, meanwhile, moved back to Rah Rah’s withers. “Laurita.”
“Yeah. Mrs. Maybrick.”
“Yes. She does have class.”
They were silent for a moment. Luciano had gotten to Rah Rah’s back, and was really digging in. Rah Rah now forgot about Dick, and lowered his nose nearly to the floor, at the same time turning his head to the side and extending his upper lip. He gave a couple of grunts, huh huh.
“He likes it!” chortled Luciano.
“They all like it,” said Dick.
“So maybe she would like to meet your wife?”
Dick stared at Luciano, wondering if some mindreading was going on, then opted to say, “But Louisa doesn’t like the track.”
“How did you meet her, then?”
“We were in a band. Sort of. We hung around the band, and sometimes we played with them. I played guitar and she sang.”
Luciano ran his hands sweetly over Rah Rah’s haunches, and then began the small circles in the large muscles there. Rah Rah leaned into the pressure. Luciano said, “You were a musician?”
“Musicianlike. I was pretending to my father that I wasn’t going to train horses, but it didn’t last.”
“Well,” said Luciano, “I can see that. Training horses is a full-time job, as far as I can see. You’re out here before dawn, you stay all day, you go to the races, you put the horses to bed. If your wife never comes to the track, when do you see her?”
“My therapist and I have been talking about that.”
“Probably a good idea,” said Luciano. He shook out his hands and came around the horse, beginning at the neck on the right side. He had been working maybe twenty minutes. He charged fifty dollars a session. Each horse who was on a training-and-racing schedule got one session a week. Dick had absorbed the cost himself, effectively lowering his training fees by fifty dollars a week per horse. On the other hand, his winnings had risen, sometimes and sometimes not making up the lost fees. The difference, the vig, you might say, was the amount of time he didn’t have to spend explaining to the owners how much the horses liked it, how it wasn’t mumbo-jumbo, how his barn was happier as a result, how he was happier as a result of their being happier, of watching them, every day, be made happier. Living at the track was a hard life for a horse—no grass, no turnout, no buddies to nuzzle. Fortunately, Thoroughbreds were pure workhorses. No plowhorse ever concentrated on doing his (or her) job the way the average Thoroughbred liked to do, but it still gave Dick a pang, the way they lived. But what was a pang to him, these days? A pang was a moment, every moment was a pang.
Luciano said, “So you seem a little down.”
“Do I?”
“Change always brings stress.”
“Does it?”
“You just don’t know where you’re going to be in six months.”
“In six months I’ll be at Saratoga.” Heaven, thought Dick. I hope I’m in the mood.
“You think so now, but, hey, in six months you could be dead.” He shrugged a specifically Italian shrug.
“Thanks, Luciano.”
“Who says that’s bad?”
“True enough.”
The masseur eased toward the withers and the horse stretched his head and then rested it on Dick’s shoulder. Luciano continued in a philosophical vein. “See, every moment, you pretty much know where you are, who you are. That’s life. Even if you make the mistake, which I try never to make, of examining your life, you still are more or less the same from moment to moment. That’s reassuring. But then all those moments add up, and pretty soon you’re somewhere, as someone, that you never expected to be and, even worse, that you could never have understood if you had ever known you would be that person. Understand what I mean?”
“I suppose that’s the story of my marriage, actually. Hers, too.”
“Whose?” said Luciano.
“My wife’s,” said Dick.
“Yeah,” said Luciano. “Everyone’s the same. I take comfort in that. Of course, horses are all different. Now, take my dad.”
“Your dad?”
“My dad was a baron.”
“He was?”
“Sure,” said Luciano. “He knew everything about being a baron, too.”
“What is there to know?”
“Well, if you are an Italian baron, there’s wine, there’s women of various kinds, there’s food, there’s property considerations, there’s debt, there’s relatives all over the place. He knew all that stuff. But the war came along. The war, my dad always said, was not run by barons for barons, and so barons did not fit the war and the war did not fit the barons.”
Dick laughed.
“Well,” said Luciano, perfectly serious, “that happens. My dad happened to be here in Florida at the time of the war, and he stayed here. Nothing he knew really applied here, I mean, all his information was wrong, because it was Italian information, but he didn’t know that, and so he did what he was in the habit of doing, and by the end of the war, he had a restaurant here that served good wines, he had a wife, a mistress, a couple of nice pieces of property, and some debt, too. So the war ended, and he went back to Italy, thinking everything would just resume where it had left off, but of course Italy was much different. The thing was, my dad was much different, too. Now he knew all about being a baron in Florida, but not much about being a baron in Italy anymore. Here’s what I think. I think the two of them, Italy and my dad, were exactly equal in their difference from what they had been, and if he had made up his mind to really be there, he and Italy would have converged again, but he didn’t know that. He just thought he hated Italy now, but he hated Florida, too, and he wasn’t much pleased with either his wife or his mistress. So there was his mistake. He thought the problem was in them, but there was no problem.”
Dick was beginning to lose Luciano’s train of thought.
“There is no problem. When I think there’s a problem, I come over here, and I put my hands on the horses, and then I go have a little plate of gnocchi with some gorgonzola sauce, and there’s no problem. If I k
eep thinking there’s a problem, well, then, I have a little glass of wine.”
Now he came to Rah Rah’s back again, and the horse did the same thing as before—he stretched his head down, closed his eyes, and grunted, only this time his knees started to buckle. Luciano said, “Has he been back-sore?”
“A little frisky when someone first gets on him. Your dad must have stayed in Italy, if you grew up in Rome.”
“He did, but he spent the whole time complaining and wishing he was in Florida, so when I got over here I was supposed to go to California, but I ended up right here!” He laughed.
It was true. Luciano, perhaps because he was half Italian, was much wiser and more comforting than his therapist. Dick said, “Say, Luciano, you want to go back to New York with me? Live up there for the summer season?”
“Hey, I don’t know. I mean, I know it around here. I can’t say. It’s expensive up there. You know, I’ve lived here all my adult life. Sometimes I can’t believe that.”
“That’s a reason to go, then.”
“We’ll see.”
“I’ll have work for you every day, as much as you want.”
“Huh,” said Luciano, leaving it up in the air. And Dick’s assistant, Andy, appeared at his elbow. He said, “Is your cellular turned off? You have six messages from Al Maybrick about the Laurita filly.”
Dick sighed, pulled out his cellular, and turned it on. It rang at once. “Hey hey hey,” said Dick, his cheerful greeting. This was the way he greeted the man he had cuckolded now, much more enthusiastically than he had when his irritability with Al had been simple and pure.
“This is Al Maybrick, Dick. I’ve been trying to get a hold of you. I’m a b—”
“Hi, Al. Yes, I’m going to enter Laurita in the handicap. You coming down for it?”
“I don’t know. It’s a big jump in class for her—”
“I thought you were eager for that.”
“I was, but when I talked about it in my group, they said my eagerness was because of my grandiosity, and that I should listen to you more carefully because you are the expert, and not so subject to fantasies and all that.”
