Horse Heaven

by Jane Smiley

  But just as he didn’t have a horse to bring for Saratoga racing, he didn’t have an owner to bring for Saratoga buying. His owners these days were as cheap as his horses. The ones who had some class personally, like the herbal-supplement people, happened to be fiscally cautious, and others, who were more eager, just happened not to have any money. He looked at the yearlings anyway, but as the hours wore on, Farley felt his spirits dip lower and lower. It didn’t help that some of his past owners, two or three that he had found especially child- or even toddlerlike during former associations, were here, howling on the arms of Buddy Crawford and others, beating out the old refrain, Kentucky Derby, Triple Crown, Breeders’ Cup, I want I want I want.

  Cellular phones were ringing everywhere, but his was not. Who am I? thought Farley. Where am I? What am I doing here?

  And then he fainted dead away.

  When he came to, Buddy Crawford had his hand on Farley’s forehead, and when Farley looked at him, he said, “Jesus Christ, what the fuck, you bastard, you okay?”

  It was reassuring, in a way.

  Buddy was immediately replaced by an attractive smooth-faced boy of about thirteen who identified himself as a cardiologist with one of those hyphenated hospitals in New York City. Behind him loomed the face of Ralph Halliberton, a trainer at Belmont and Aqueduct whose picture Farley had seen in The Blood-Horse. Ralph said to the boy, “Did he have a heart attack, doc?,” and the boy said something that sounded unaccountably like one of those Mozart flute solos he had heard three nights before, and that was that, he closed his eyes. The only thing he could make out was the voice of Buddy Crawford, rattattattatting above the din, who the fuck what the fuck why the fuck how the fuck when the fuck.

  Time passed. Farley sat up. Someone brought him a chair. He took a few deep breaths and a sniff or two, rubbed his face with his hands. The first things that came back to him were odors—the ever-familiar odors of horses and hay, of men sweating. After that, sounds—people talking, hooves clopping, whinnies and snorts. Smells and sounds, the evidence of life resuming. Farley put his hand behind his neck and gave his head a twist, first one way, then the other, then he smoothed down his beard and heaved a deep sigh. At last, what he was seeing took on significance. The face of the boy cardiologist rose before him like a moon, and the mouth said, “Well, I don’t think you had a heart attack. But let me take a little history.”

  He answered the usual questions. His age and gender were against him, his weight and life-style were for him. His cholesterol was low, his family background was unsuspicious. Still, you never knew. Farley nodded. Buddy’s head bobbed behind that of the doctor, his eyes still full of longing. Farley shook his head and closed his own eyes. Then he said to the boy doctor, “Can I get up? I think I would like to go back to my hotel.”

  “I don’t see why not.” Then, almost shamefacedly, “I’ve got some more horses to look at myself.”

  “You’re an owner?”

  “Well, yeah. I’ve got one or two. No Derby prospects, though. At least, not yet.” He grinned.

  Farley sighed, then said, “Did you save my life?”

  “No. Your life wasn’t in danger.”

  “Well, I’m grateful to you anyway, so I’m going to tell you something I’ve never told anyone before about the horse business.”

  “What’s that?”

  Farley opened his mouth. The boy cardiologist looked at him expectantly, sweetly.

  “I’m sorry,” said Farley. “I can’t remember.”

  He got up from his chair and headed for the parking lot, where he almost bumped into a woman who was standing like a statue at the end of the shedrow. Smoothly blonde, pale of complexion, of no discernible age, dressed in shades of ecru and beige, in sunlit contrast to the dark green of the wooden barn, she caught him as he stumbled toward her. She seemed to set him back on his feet with no effort, though he was tall and she wasn’t. Her grip was solid, deceptively strong, and reassuring. He continued to feel it, on his elbow and his chest, after she had removed her hands. He said, “Thanks! I’m so sorry. I just—”

  Rosalind gave one of her slow smiles and said, in a serene, vibrant voice, “It’s all right, dear.”

  ROSALIND WAS WAITING FOR AL. They did everything together now. She heard and saw everything Al Maybrick did, hour after hour, day after day, night after night. They were never apart; Eileen trotted at Al’s heels as if pasted there. Here he came now, from the men’s room. He looked a little florid today, but that was okay, an improvement. He had looked nearly apoplectic the day before. “I don’t know,” he said when he came up to her. “There’s something going on. You got any of that Immodium stuff?”

  Rosalind opened her bag and handed him a packet of tablets. Eileen, right behind Al, cocked her head upward and snapped Rosalind a glance, then flopped down on her belly, all four legs stretched out. Rosalind said, “That A.P. Indy colt we saw in the catalogue should be right in this barn.”

  “Huh,” said Al.

  They turned together. Rosalind put her hand through Al’s arm and they walked like that down the barn, their progress counted out by the passing stall doors. Eileen trotted behind them, whirring along as if on skates. “What’s that hip number?” said Al.

  “A hundred and four,” said Rosalind.

  “Say,” said Al, “I heard a story about Nureyev. Seems this guy in Texas got himself a zebra from somewhere, some kind of special zebra, and he had his heart set on breeding her to Nureyev.”

  “Oh, Al,” said Rosalind.

  “This guy swore to God. Anyway, Nureyev breeds at night, you know, so, when the Texan offered them a million bucks’ stud fee, they were tempted. He’s not all that fertile anymore, they say.”

  Step step step. It was interesting to Rosalind to place herself inside Al’s personal space. It felt like being inside his body, especially since he himself focused so intently on his body. He had pills, tablets, lotions, ointments, lozenges, drops. Rosalind carried all of them in her purse, along with his crushable hat. She might have thought this would be unpleasant, but it wasn’t. Al was so focused on his body that she could look past it perfectly well. Perhaps he had personal qualities still. Others reacted to him as if he did, but Rosalind didn’t experience them any longer. Perhaps she experienced nothing in the normal sense anymore. No past, no future. Perhaps if she should experience things in the normal sense, she would be afraid of what was happening. But she wasn’t. She was curious. She was fascinated.

  “So the studfarm agreed to accept the zebra, and they brought her there after midnight, and they took her in. Well, Nureyev pawed and squealed and, you know, showed a bit of an interest, but he seemed a little scared of her, so they let it go. Next night, they brought her in, brought him in, same thing. So the stallion manager went up to the horse, most expensive horse in the Blue-grass, they say, maybe in the world, and he tried to calm him. Took him over to the zebra and let him sniff her and all. She was receptive. But, still, he wouldn’t mount, and they didn’t want to get a lot of guys out there, you can understand that, with the Jockey Club and all, so they let it go another night.”

  Step step step. The barns at Saratoga seemed very long this year. Eternal. That was okay, too. Every experience of endlessness gave you time to review all that flux you had given up. Most dramatically, you had given up the flux of presence and absence. Where was Dick? Was he here yet? Was that his step? No? How soon? Now? What was he doing if he wasn’t here? Was he late? How late was he? Here he came. Here he was. Did he look the same? What was he going to do now? What did that mean? Was it what she wanted him to do? How could she know what she really wanted him to do? In the room. In her arms. In her. And then not in her. And then not in her arms. And then not in the room. And then not in the vicinity. And then, it felt like, not in existence, as if love itself had died away. Try as she might to tell herself that he was only a man, working, earning a living, conditioning horses, and subject to his own perplexities and anxieties, whenever he left there was an utte
r goneness about it that emptied her out for a day or two, until, bit by bit, she put herself back together, retrieved from some distant region of her mind an intention, then a plan. Would she see him tomorrow, the next day, next week, in two weeks? But, after all, plans were the worst. They drained you of every bit of present life, until all you were was a containment building, and the ghost of yourself was lost on the vapors of the future, waiting to exist. Enough of that. Better to give up all personal qualities, all hopes, all plans, all dreams. Better to exist in a permanent startle, moments lighting up like sparks and flashing out, goodbye, good-bye, good-bye.

  “The next night, they brought the zebra mare into Nureyev’s breeding shed again. She was winking and all that. Couldn’t have been more ready. The vet palpated her and she had a follicle the size of a kumquat. Perfect. But, still, Nureyev couldn’t, or wouldn’t, do it. So the stallion manager takes Nureyev aside and he whispers in his ear, ‘This is a million bucks, boy. It’s the end of the season. This is eight mares you don’t have to do. One time, no guarantee. That’s in the contract. No guarantee season.’ So Nureyev does that stallion thing, where they wrinkle up their nose, and he nods his head up and down. She’s ready. He knows it.”

  Step step step. And on the surface, apart from the empty center of her that she felt but didn’t understand, purchases, dinner parties, horse races, clothing and hairdresser’s appointments, Al’s body, Dick not around to run into for some reason, everything okay, everything far away.

  “But then he looks at the stallion manager, Nureyev does, and he leans closer, and he says to the guy, ‘What I don’t understand is, if she’s so ready, why doesn’t she take off her pajamas?’ Here’s the stall number,” said Al. “This must be the horse.”

  Rosalind remembered to laugh.

  IT WAS LATE. The bay filly out of Belle Starr was waiting to enter the pavilion and step up on the golden stage where her value, in tens or hundreds of thousands, even in millions, would register on the display above her head as the bids flew around the amphitheater. For now she was known as hip number twenty-six. She moved deliberately, but with a swinging, ample stride. Her head turned easily from side to side as she took everything in. The filly’s handler paused with her outside the sales pavilion. She stood quietly, her lead-shank loose. Her handler gave her a couple of pats, then ran his hand down her neck. She was so clean for this sale that her coat was almost too fine for his callused palm to feel, but he nevertheless appreciated, as he had in the past, the wide expanse of a healthy horse’s smooth silkiness. Really, when you thought about it, no dog’s ear, no woman’s belly, no child’s cheek, no cat’s electric back offered such an inexhaustible field for a man’s palm. A moment later, the handler walked her in and stood her on the little stage. A hand went up, and then another. When the auctioneer called out, the filly’s ears swiveled.

  Al was sitting next to Rosalind. He rather liked this filly, and he thought of bidding. He glanced at Rosalind for a sign, any sign, that she liked the filly, too. Rosalind’s consumer instincts were infallible. But in fact Al got no sign of anything, even that Rosalind was there. He knew that if he poked her and asked her for something she would hand it over with a smile; that was why he asked her all the time for so many things. But when she wasn’t handing something over, the lights were out and the family wasn’t at home, that Al could see. He sighed and glanced around the pavilion. He thought for a moment about one time they’d had together, seven or eight years before. They’d been driving up in the Catskills by themselves. They’d been way back in the hills and had gotten a flat tire. No cellular then. As the man, Al had gotten out and started changing the tire. But Al was all thumbs with this stuff. His dad had told him that he’d better make something of himself, because if he was going to have to handle tools he wasn’t going to get far. So he was fiddling with the tire and the tools in the trunk and all, and cursing and getting mad, and Rosalind floated out of the car in her cream-colored suit and said, “Go sit down, honey.” The fact was, she was from Appleton, Wisconsin. It wasn’t like he didn’t think she could change a tire. But the tools kind of jumped into her hands, the tire kind of jumped onto the axle. Could he have seen that on film? Al didn’t know. Maybe she was just handy. But she changed that tire in about ten minutes, never got a dot on her suit or her shoes, wiped off her hands on a Kleenex, and off they went. When the lights were out and family wasn’t home it was the exact opposite of the sense that tire had given him, of everything being safe and basically okay, in spite of his mistakes and tantrums. Someone else bought the filly, and Al sat quietly.

  ONE SECTION OVER and a few seats back, Farley watched the filly leave the sales pavilion and turned to looked at that blond head again, as well as the grizzled, balding head beside it. They were a strange pair, the cool, ageless blonde and the fidgety attention-seeker. Somebody’s owners, but with the self-confidence or the knowledge to come to the sale by themselves. Farley sighed. If he had had that heart attack he thought he was having today, someone, or, better still, a whole line of people, would be telling him what to do next. Having not had that heart attack, he still had to figure it out himself.

  BEHIND HIM, but with his eye right on him most of the time, sat Buddy Crawford. His owners had bought everything he had advised them to buy, and every time Farley Jones nodded, shook his head, or even twitched, Buddy doubted himself. His reaction was to buy even more. Right next to him sat Andrea Melanie, her hands twitching. She said, “Oh, Buddy, listen to this. When I went off to college, you know, to Bennington, my mom took me right down to Gump’s and she said to the salesladies, ‘Bring everything out, all the fives and sixes,’ and you know what, we bought everything that looked the least bit decent. That was the most fun I ever had in my whole life next to this.”

  “Well,” said Buddy, truthful as always, “horse racing is for fun. You’ve got to think of it that way.”

  “Oh, Buddy,” said Andrea Melanie, “I do so admire you. You always call a spade a spade. No wonder everyone says you’re a saint.”

  Wouldn’t it be nice, thought Buddy, to be sitting there so quiet and self-possessed, like Farley Jones? When he went back to southern California and to wishing he were dead, that would be the reason.

  ———

  WHEN THE HANDLER led the filly out of the pavilion, he looked up into the late dusk under the giant trees. A fragrant breeze billowed gently around horses and humans, fragmenting words, whinnies, and smells, dispersing human intentions with the rattle and brush of leaves and branches. Here, then, was the heaven of Saratoga—all budgets and business plans, all ambitions and self-serving dreams broken up and cooled under the ancient trees by the yet more ancient wind, “I want” turning to “Ah, feel that!,” “I’ve got to have” turning to “What an evening!,” discontent with the past, fear of the future turning into a long, satisfied sigh already a hundred years old, but still fresh, still an astonishing surprise.

  38 A DUD

  TWO WEEKS after the sale, Al found himself going back up to Saratoga alone to watch this dud that they had named Limitless, for some reason, make his third start. Al didn’t have a lot of interest in the horses anymore—they hadn’t bought a thing at the sale—but he didn’t have anything better to do, so he was walking past Grand Central and it was kind of fun getting off the train and taking a cab to the grandstand entrance and not having the valet parking. Saratoga did always make you feel good in some way.

  Laurita wasn’t scheduled to run, as far as Al knew, but, then, he had not been in close contact with Dick Winterson for ten days, since he had discovered that Rosalind had had a thing with him. The extent of the thing he hadn’t gotten into. Love, sex, one night, one week, when it began, when it ended, what it meant to them, whatever. There were things that happened around you that you were wise to know one thing about but not everything about, which is what he had tried to tell some of the Republican congressmen he knew about this Clinton thing. What he had said to D’Amato himself when he last saw him was: If people
like me lose interest in the guy’s dick before you do, then you’re the one who looks like a schmuck, not him. And then he put his hand on Al’s shoulder and he looked him in the eye, and he said, “Al, I am losing interest in the guy’s dick. I just am. Take that as a sign and pay attention,” and Al had said he would, but there was no sign of it. Still, the whole Clinton thing made you feel slightly different about anything you yourself might have done over the years, and even about anything your wife might have done with your horse-trainer, and why him, he’d like to know. It kind of took you out of that I’m-gonna-kill-her frame of mind and put you into a these-things-happen-all-the-time frame of mind (which was more or less your own frame of mind when you were doing over the years what you had done over the years).

  So he picked up his program and his Form and saw that the horse was in the third race, a maiden special weight, eighteen thousand dollars, all of which Dick had told his secretary the day before but he had forgotten, not having planned to come up here. And Dick wasn’t expecting him, either. And Dick maybe did not know that he, Al, knew about the thing he had had with Rosalind. There was a little thrill in that, wasn’t there?

  The horse’s form was bad. In his first race, in a field of eight, he had run seventh by fourteen lengths. The line on him was “Showed no commitment.” In his second race, in a field of nine, he had run seventh again. The line was “Went wide on turn.” But all you had to do was look at his fractions and see that he had never gotten into either race. Dick hadn’t figured the horse out yet. That was clear from the Form. Suppose he talked to Dick about the horse. But between them, the horse, the trainer, the wife, and he himself, the owner, had gotten into one of those swampy interpersonal areas that Al especially didn’t like, where no one knew what to do, everyone was sorry, and no one was saying much. And what they were saying was all a cover-up. In his former life as a two-fisted drinker, Al would have produced some of what his sponsor called “bottle wisdom”—“Shit or get off the pot,” “What the fuck is going on here?,” maybe “Who the hell do you think you’re dealing with?” Now he was required to be more patient, and, to be perfectly frank, there was a lot about patience that felt just like not caring much at all. But that was a state you could take a little rest in, not a state you could live in. It was too boring, and, most of the time, he hated being bored most of all.