Horse Heaven

by Jane Smiley

  “Doesn’t this discussion sound crazy to you?” said Joy. “I have a scientific background, and I always think—”

  “Look around you,” said Plato. “What is crazy?”

  Joy looked. It was true. A Rastaman and a blonde woman in a white coat, wearing Rollerblades and carrying a tray of pineapples cut to look like the World Trade Center, were chatting idly beside the pool. When they skated and glided their separate ways, she saw behind them two sets of identical twins, one male and one female, all dressed alike, pulling identical bags to the second tee. Plato continued, “Let’s go over there. Where do they keep the racehorses?”

  “We don’t have to go over there. The channel is clear as a bell.”

  “The channel?”

  “Well, its not a channel, really. I call it a pervasion.”

  “A what?” said Joy.

  “A temporary ubiquity caused by paying attention. I’ve had to coin my own terms. Pervasion. Ubiquity. Alertion. We asked him that earlier question, so he is in a state of alertion.”

  “Why don’t you just say he’s alert?”

  “Because he isn’t conscious of it. He’s not noticing anything but he’s available. He could even be sleeping. When we go over there, he’s attentive to us, but that’s just physical. My favorite word is ‘unitive.’ When he’s really in a state of alertion and I am really in a state of pervasion and ubiquity is all around us and in us, then I say that we are unitive.”

  “Darling, you’re a genius,” said Plato. Elizabeth smiled with what looked to Joy like the knowledge that, whether or not she was a genius, she was certainly well loved.

  “What do you want to ask him?” said Joy to Plato.

  Just then, the phone on the towel stand rang, the towel manager picked it up, spoke, and then gestured to Joy. When she came back she was gratified to report that, yes, the automatic waterer, which had been jammed, was now unjammed.

  The unflappable Plato Theodorakis, man of the future, looked at her, thoroughly flapped. Elizabeth laughed. Joy said, “This sort of thing happens all the time with that horse.”

  Plato sat back and closed his eyes for a moment, then sat forward. He said, “What does he make of it all?”

  “What all?”

  “Don’t specify. See what he says. Just ask him, what does he make of it all?”

  Elizabeth beamed at Plato, then closed her eyes. After a moment, she said, “Of what all, he says.”

  “It all. Let him identify it.”

  Elizabeth closed her eyes again, then opened them and said, “Manure.”

  “What?”

  “He says, he makes manure of it all. Hay, feed, grass, which he would like there to be more of, many many times a day.”

  “I told you they prefer the immediate,” said Joy.

  “I think he’s joking,” said Elizabeth, without opening her eyes.

  “Okay,” said Plato. “Let’s see. Ask him what he is.”

  “He’s a horse,” said Joy and Elizabeth simultaneously.

  “But what does he think that is? How does he define it? You know, subject peoples are always turning out to reserve some name for themselves that redefines their identity in opposition to the general name for them. The Lakota don’t like to be called ‘Sioux.’ That kind of thing.”

  “He doesn’t object to being called a horse.”

  Plato shook his head. “I mean—”

  “He says it’s better than being called a dog.”

  “Called a dog or being a dog?”

  “Either one.”

  Plato sighed. “He’s toy—Uh, I’m being toyed with.”

  “Maybe,” said Elizabeth. “I can’t tell.”

  “I wish we could see the look on his face,” said Joy. “I’m getting pretty good at reading his expressions.”

  “Are you teasing me?” Plato said to Elizabeth.

  She opened her eyes and smiled enigmatically.

  “Theoreticians are always being teased, you know, because they take things seriously.”

  “I might be teasing you.”

  The two of them dissolved into smiles at the very thought of this.

  Joy said, “Ask him what, of all the things he knows, he knows the best.”

  They looked at her, then Elizabeth closed her eyes again. There was a long pause, then she said, “I get a picture of the ground.”

  “He knows footing,” said Joy.

  “This is interesting,” said Elizabeth. “I get a stream of pictures. At first I couldn’t figure out what they were, but now I see that, even though they look like water flowing or streaming, what they really are is land flowing or streaming—turf, dirt, hills, dips, flat areas, but there’re also close-ups of the ground, green plants and grasses and leaves and other vegetation.”

  “Grazing,” said Joy.

  “It’s all flowing toward him, like a river.”

  “Or he’s moving across it.”

  “But it isn’t only visual,” said Elizabeth. “It gives me another feeling, a feeling in my body, an undulating surface that my body is conforming to.”

  “Why not?” said Joy. “Think about it. They keep all four feet on the ground at all times, and have their noses to the ground most of the time, too.” She knew she sounded blasé, but really what Elizabeth was saying gave her the oddest, most exciting sensation, the heretofore still and steady earth moving toward and enveloping her. “Think what it feels like to go thirty miles an hour with your nose first. Talk about alertion!” She laughed.

  “What else does he know?” said Plato.

  “He knows Joy,” said Elizabeth.

  “What kind of joy?” said Plato.

  “Our Joy. Joy right here. But he gives me an interesting picture of her. It’s like a fish-eye-camera picture. She’s in the center, large and dressed in white, and she’s surrounded by other horses and people, smaller and dimmer. I think this is a picture of love.”

  “Ask him,” said Plato, “if he knows what love is.”

  There was a moment of silence. Joy’s heart was pounding.

  “He says of course he does.”

  “Horses are very affiliative animals,” said Joy, but actually she could hardly speak.

  “Well, what is it?” said Plato.

  Elizabeth was silent for a long time, with her eyes closed and a perplexed look on her face, but finally she said, “Well, I guess the best way to describe what he’s showing me is to say love is pervasion.” Then she said, “But he says that it’s particularly pervasive when Joy is around.”

  Ah, Joy thought. I am such a fool. I have walked step by step away from strict functional definitions, scientific methods, biology, physiology, chemistry, biomechanics, and order and here I am in a new world where I don’t know how to exist or who I am, and it’s not like any future I ever imagined.

  Plato said, “I wish we could get some social theory out of this horse. Some economics. Some, I don’t know, some Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft. No more Weltanschauung.”

  “Maybe later,” said Elizabeth. “He’s tired, and he doesn’t really understand what you’re getting at anyway.”

  Joy leaned back in her chaise longue and looked at the pergola above her. Yes, she thought, she could hold all these things in her mind at the same time—the ground undulating toward her, the horse’s love surrounding her like a beautiful glass globe, her own sight of Mr. T.’s graceful lines and intelligent face at just that moment when he would notice and turn toward her, and if she held these things suspended together in her mind, they worked as a spell against drudgery and loneliness, glare and fatigue, envy, even, of Elizabeth and Plato kissing right beside her. She sighed happily. On the green hillside across from her, sprays of irrigation water rose on the bright air, as expensive and glittering as diamonds.

  35 / TWO PUNCH

  YOU KNOW,” said Louisa, “how many things you want for years and years, and then you get them, and it’s just the same old thing, no different? Almost everything, really. But I spent all of those
years asking for a Tuesday-Thursday teaching schedule, and finally I got it for the summer, and it’s just the way I thought it was going to be.”

  “How’s that?” said Dick.

  “Heaven on earth,” said Louisa, smiling across the table at him. It was eight-thirty on a Monday morning, and in front of him he had a fried egg, two pieces of raisin-brioche French toast, a patty of sausage, and a glass of cranberry juice. The same thing was in front of her. They were eating breakfast. Together. With the sun well up in the sky. Even more amazing, they had a plan for the day, to drive upstate and have a late lunch in Woodstock. Perhaps, when they got home, they would go to a movie. It was just like a date. It was maybe the first time in several years that they hadn’t gone out together either in order for one of them to demonstrate that he or she was interested in the other one’s life, or else to fulfill some necessary function having to do with the basic human needs of eating, sleeping, clothing, or habitation. Louisa’s agoraphobia had been quiet for a couple of months now. Dick thought this outing was probably both a celebration of that and a test of it. He was therefore rather ambivalent about it.

  About that and everything else. He was running a horse these days, a two-year-old that the owners had bought at a training sale in the spring. “What shall we name her?” they had said, perhaps idly. “Ambivalence,” he said, a joke. But it was an appropriate name, given that her sire was Two Punch, so that was how they had registered her. Sometimes she ran, sometimes she didn’t. Well, of course, most of them were like that, but because her name was Ambivalence, she had to be like that. It was a good name, but of course he was ambivalent about it.

  The deal was, he had lost his sense of how best to train this horse, and she was contaminating the rest of them. With a two-year-old, you brought along the body, but you also had to bring along the mind. It took a long time for some of them to figure it out. Frequent works and steady racing focused them and showed them what to do, especially fillies. But frequent works and steady racing were hard on them. And Ambivalence had an ambivalent pedigree. Stage Door Johnny was in there, but so was Storm Bird. Her dosage was heavy on the sprinting side, light in the middle, and heavy on the staying side, unusual for an American horse. Was she a sprinter? Was she a stayer? Of course, he was ambivalent about dosage, too. The result was that he would decide to train her one way—work every five days, rain or shine—and then he would decide to work her another way—long slow gallops, works only when she seemed to need sharpening up. The result was, either he had no idea who she was, or she had no idea who she was. One or the other.

  “Dick?” said Louisa.

  “Sweetie.” But the fact that she had broken in on his reverie brought up a very sudden and sharp annoyance.

  “Are you with me here?”

  “Kind of.” That she sensed his annoyance (he could tell this by the tone of her voice) annoyed him even further. Maybe, he thought, the very fact that you did not expect a fight today of all days ensured that there would be one.

  “Can you be really with me? Because, if you can’t, I don’t see why we bother.”

  “Bother with what?”

  She cleared her throat, leaving him to guess, or, rather, to know. Bother with each other was what she was getting at, though she allowed him to think she was just talking about their plans for the day.

  “I’m sorry, sweetie,” he said, a good try. But now her face was clouded. Their day would not be perfect. He realized as he thought this that that was what he had been planning—a perfect day as a springboard into a new and less ambivalent life together. If you could have a day, or even an hour, or even a moment of pure love for your spouse, he suspected, that would be enough to fix everything, but the moments kept getting away from him, tainted by ambivalence and inattention. Of course, he suddenly realized, ambivalence was inattention masquerading as indecision. Ah, it was a tangle. The cloud in Louisa’s face gave way to something harder—conviction, it looked like—and, sure enough, she pushed away her plate. She said, “Do you ever think about anything besides horses?”

  “Of course, I—” But the residue of his now largely dissipated annoyance was still there, and she could hear it, and that was enough.

  “Really?” Her chin jutted forth. “Don’t say ‘of course.’ Think first.”

  Because he thought about Rosalind Maybrick most of the time, he said, “Horses are on my mind much of the time, but—”

  “But?”

  “But I often dream about other things.”

  “Like what?”

  “Being naked in a restaurant. Not having done my homework.”

  “With enjoyment?”

  “What?”

  “Do you dream about being naked in a restaurant with enjoyment?” She sounded angry.

  Which brought his annoyance back as resentment. “Yes. I do enjoy it. I am not embarrassed at all and women are getting up from their tables and coming over to me and looking at me with intense desire.”

  She sat back suddenly in her chair and stared at him. Of course he had never had a dream like this in his life. This was a lie designed to hurt her feelings.

  She said, “I thought this was going to be a nice day.”

  “I did, too.”

  “Then why do you want to wreck it?”

  He almost said one thing, something about how he didn’t want to wreck it, but then he said, “Because a nice day would be fake for us.”

  “What?”

  “I cant stand a nice day. That’s exactly the thing I can’t stand the most, a nice day. We have to have either a perfect day or a disastrous day.”

  “Why?”

  “Because, if we don’t have something black or white together soon, we won’t know why in the world we are together.”

  “I love you.” But the look of conviction had passed, too. Now her face had a look of fear.

  “Do you?”

  “Yes. Don’t you love me?”

  “I don’t know, Louisa. I don’t know what love is anymore. If I ever did.” He saw that he had embarked upon honesty at last. He sighed.

  “Don’t say that.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because it makes me feel dizzy.”

  “Dizzy like you’re having an attack?”

  “I don’t know. No. Dizzy like I’ve lost track of everything. Dick, we’ve been together for twenty-five years.”

  “I know that.”

  “Do you love me anymore?”

  “I don’t know what love is. I don’t. I don’t know what anything is. I walk around and look at all these guys at the track who know what everything is, even if they’re wrong and they never win and they break horses down every week and they can’t pay their bills, but they know it all. They just know it all, and they’re willing to tell you all the stuff they know every minute of the day, but I can’t say that I know a God-damned thing.” She wasn’t listening. If he couldn’t tell her that he loved her, then she couldn’t listen. It was as simple as that. So he tried honesty again: “I had an affair.”

  “Who with?”

  “Rosalind Maybrick.”

  “Were you having it when I came out to watch that race?”

  “Yes.”

  “I thought so. Did you love her?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did she love you?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I like that, that you know what love is with her, and you know that you love her, but you don’t with me.”

  “I was ambivalent about her, too.”

  “I hate that.”

  “What?”

  “Just get the fuck out.”

  “Out of?”

  “Out of this apartment. This is my apartment. This is my furniture. These are my dishes and my napkins and my chairs and my—”

  Her face was blazing. He saw that she was being as bad as she could be, to say “my, my, my.” She had been kind and generous all their life together. She closed her eyes and thought of another way to be bad. She said, “You have
no sense of rhythm. When you were playing with the band, your tempo was always uneven.” She smiled nastily. “Everyone talked about it behind your back.”

  It almost made him know he loved her, that these were the worst punishments she could think of. He sighed again and stood up from the table. He thought he would go pack, but he would do it slowly, in a way that would goad her and cause their marriage to devolve as far as possible in one day. That, he thought, was their only hope. He turned away from the table and headed for the bedroom. Behind him, she burst into noisy tears. He found that incredibly irritating, but recognized that this was an excellent start, about which he wasn’t in the least ambivalent.

  36 LONG SHOT

  FLORENCE SCHMIDT’S therapist, paid for by her husband’s death benefits from the Army, was Marguerite, a sympathetic and lovely woman who was always perfectly groomed and beautifully dressed, but who didn’t have that air of impermeability that most of that sort of woman had in Florence’s estimation. Marguerite did not push Florence, because, as she said from time to time, she was waiting for Florence to push herself, and, as the fact that she had raised seven children showed, she was a woman of endless patience. Since Army death benefits were endless, too, they could wait all this lifetime and into the next, said the lovely therapist with a smile. There was no hurry. Florence told her friends that she went for the therapy, but really she went for the beauty tips. These tips had nothing to with attracting another man, everything to do with trying to discover her own identity; that’s why, Florence thought, she didn’t scrutinize women on the street, only Marguerite. While they would be sitting, sometimes talking, sometimes quiet, Florence would note what her therapist was wearing and how she had done her hair and what her natural physical advantages were and how she was making the most of them. For example, the woman had dark-brown eyes, but she was a blonde, an unusual combination. After several weeks of therapy, Florence deduced that she dyed her hair, and went home and looked in the mirror. It was true that her dark hair streaked with gray was too contrasty, and so she went to a beauty salon and the therapist there, Martine her name was, gave her a color weave. If she had expected Marguerite to comment, she would have been disappointed, but she didn’t expect that. She knew Marguerite wanted her to announce her color weave and solicit comment, but she wasn’t ready to. For a while, the color weave looked to Florence like an optical illusion, and then she got used to it. The next thing she observed in Marguerite was that her stockings were certainly not L’eggs. So she went to the lingerie store and did a little survey. The ones that looked like Marguerite’s were silk, and cost fifteen dollars a pair. She bought two pair, and allowed Natalie, the sales consultant, to slip into a bag two pair of cream-colored thong underpants and a pair of peach-colored silk pajama bottoms. After that, she spent about four weeks, and four hundred dollars of military allocations, observing Marguerite’s shoes. Marguerite wore different shoes every day; that would be four different examples of European leathercraft at, on average, $175 a pop. The next time Florence went to Macy’s, she walked into the shoe department as Marguerite and allowed Denise to sell her one pair of black Arche flats, zippers up the back, and one pair of tan, woven slingbacks. The next time she went for an appointment, she wore the tan shoes with the stockings and the underwear. Marguerite hazarded the comment that Florence seemed to be more self-actualized than usual. But even so, the waiting went on. Florence was a follower. Had always been a follower. She knew perfectly well that she couldn’t have bought those things without Marguerite, Martine, Natalie, and Denise.