Horse Heaven

by Jane Smiley

  He saw that the horse had drawn the number-four spot, the race was five furlongs, and the handicapper said of him, “No breeding, no form, no chance. Two good works do not make a racehorse.” Usually when the handicappers got dismissive of his horses like that, Al had a little reflex of defensiveness, especially with a homebred, but sometimes when some guy got down on you, you had to just say, Yeah, you’re right, and leave it at that.

  So he went up to his box. The horses hadn’t come out for the first race—he was way early. No one he knew, none of the other owners, seemed to be around, either, so he just sat down and stretched out his legs. The shade was cool, so he closed his eyes and tried to enjoy it. Actually, riding the train had put him in kind of a funny mood. It was nice that no one on the train knew who he was, or cared. It was nice to buy your ticket and say thank you and not have the ticket agent treat you like anything special. It was nice to go up to the counter at the station and wait in line for a bagel and have the guy say, “What about you, buddy? You want something, or are you just taking up space?” It was nice to have the conductor take your ticket without looking into your face, and stick the stub in the back of your seat. It was even nice to sit right up next to your seatmate, a black guy carrying a cake on his lap, and wonder where the guy was going. It was nice not to have to be Alexander P. Maybrick all the time, or Al M., or even just “honey.” It was nice to be unnamed.

  Sometimes these days, Al woke up in a panic. That was maybe the only result of his knowledge that Rosalind had had a thing with the horse-trainer. All he knew about the thing was that there had been a thing and now there wasn’t a thing any longer, because the way he knew about the thing was that he was rummaging under the bed for his watch a couple of nights after they got back from the sale, and he had come upon a note from the horse-trainer dated only a couple of months ago saying, “I don’t know what I am doing now and I didn’t know what I was doing then, but I did love you and probably still do. I’m sorry.” It was not actually addressed to Rosalind, but it certainly wasn’t addressed to Al, so, if you had four and took away two, you had to get two. All he had thought at the time, oddly enough, was, So that’s her problem. Two days later, though, he had awakened in a panic. He had been snuggled up to Rosalind, with the damned dog’s hairy body between them, and he had lain there, just putting his arm around her a little more tightly. The thing was, when he had his eyes closed, it seemed like she was all the way across the room, even though when he opened his eyes he saw that she was an inch in front of his nose. Then he realized that it didn’t matter where she was. He had always relied upon her to keep him safe, but now he saw who she was, a territory unexplored and unknown. She could not keep him safe. It wasn’t a matter of willingness. Shoulda, coulda, woulda, they were all the same. That was why he didn’t care much about the thing with the horse-trainer. The mistake had been his own, in more ways than one. If there was no safety in Rosalind, there was even less safety in his money and investments and assets and sponsor and colleagues—of course he ran down the whole list, that only took a second. He had felt his panic intensify. And then he had gotten up and gone to work and his meeting and tried not to think about the thing she’d had with the horse-trainer. But the panic had happened since, twice.

  How did you balance these two experiences? On the one hand, surrounded by your stuff and your name, snuggled up against your wife, who had chosen not to leave you, and you felt a panic; on the other hand, alone on the train, alone in the stands at Saratoga, and okay, really, just a guy. If the other owners weren’t around, you didn’t even have to be an owner and all that implied, you could be just a guy.

  The horses for the first race came out and Al hadn’t even placed a bet. But he was glad to see them. This what they called introspection was taxing. At his AA meeting, there were women, and even guys, who engaged in this sort of thing all the time. Normally, Al felt a good deal of contempt for them, but now he saw that they maybe deserved a little more respect.

  EVEN THOUGH Al had all these plans about going out to the saddling paddock and all that normal stuff, when the second race came around, he just kept sitting there, as if the horse in the race belonged to someone else. He didn’t even get up to place a bet. Some other owners came in that he slightly knew, and all he did was wave to them. Woulda coulda shoulda, none of it mattered. He just sat there. The horses came out, jogged and cantered around to the gate, wherever it was placed, the bell clanged, the gate opened, the horses ran around the track, the track cleared, and then it happened again. How strange, Al thought.

  Now the horses came out for the third race. His horse, bay and otherwise not distinctively marked, paraded to the post with only a number to identify him. Al’s silks looked good on the jockey, but so did everyone’s. When you looked at it objectively, it was all the silks together that made the picture, the bright kaleidoscope that the horses made of the jockeys as they wove themselves a race. It wasn’t much of a race, just five-eighths of a mile. Al sat forward and looked around, as much to shift his position as anything else, and then he saw that guy, Luciano, the horse masseur, coming toward him. That was a strange thing he had done, go out to dinner with the guy at some inexpensive Italian place in the City. Of course, now that he thought of it, Luciano would have known about the affair. No doubt, that was why he had taken him out to dinner. The very moment he was remembering this, Al saw that Luciano was looking at him and waving. And then here he came. Al turned his head away, hoping that the guy would pass on by, but he stopped and said, “Hey! Mr. Maybrick! You know, Dick doesn’t even know you’re here.”

  “I’m not.”

  “Yeah, I won’t tell him. Well—”

  Al relented. “Well, so sit down.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah. Sit down. But don’t talk to me about the horse.”

  “Okay.”

  The horse and his gray pony went around to the starting gate. Luciano stretched out his long legs and put them up on the seat next to him. “So,” he said, “how about this Clinton thing? Talk about a scandal! I watch it every day. My feeling is, what’s Hillary got to say about it? No one dares to ask her.”

  “Maybe she doesn’t know what to say.”

  “Oh, she knows what to say.”

  “What?” Al looked at Luciano, genuinely curious.

  “Ay yay yay, what the fuck are you doing?”

  And then they put their heads back and laughed big laughs. The horses were almost to the starting gate. Al had lost track of which one Limitless was.

  Luciano went on. “Did you see that movie they had, about John Travolta as him?”

  “No. I don’t go to the movies much.”

  “Why not? I think the movies are great. Some weeks I go to a movie every night.”

  “Are there that many good movies?”

  “Nah, but I don’t care about good. Good is for risotto, great is for gnocchi, you know? Something that takes real genius. Movies just come and go, like everything else. I laughed all through that movie. If Hillary were really Emma Thompson, then we would all be better off; you know, she had the same problem.”

  “Who?”

  “Emma Thompson. With that guy.”

  “What guy?”

  “Kenneth Branagh. He was running around on her. Now he’s playing Woody Allen, I hear, in a Woody Allen movie about a guy who’s always running around on his girlfriends. I heard that from one of Dick’s owners, who has a production company in the city. Movie people love the racetrack, you know.”

  “I heard that. Say, do you think that adultery is universal?”

  Luciano looked at him, which confirmed for Al that he’d known all along about the thing Rosalind had had with the horse-trainer. But somehow it wasn’t mortifying, the way you’d think it would be. There was something comforting in it. Luciano sucked his teeth meditatively, then said, “It’s one or the other. You know, in Italy it’s universal. But over here? Well, if you do it, it’s universal, and if you don’t, it doesn’t exist. I’ve got t
his girlfriend.”

  “What does she do?”

  “She rides for another trainer. We came up from Florida together. I’ll tell you what happened with her, want to hear?”

  “Sure.”

  “Well, myself, I always ran around on my other girlfriends. I thought that, as an Italian, that was the least I could do, you know. I mean, I didn’t think that, but I really did, the way, if you’re a man, you tend to think with your dick and your past and who your father was, rather than with your brain. Anyway, when the two of us got together, the sex was really good some of the time, and not so good some of the time, so I was thinking about finding myself another girlfriend, because, you know, I’ve decided I’ll never get married. But then, one night, we were out at the movies. We weren’t living together at the time, so I had to get home so I could get up and come out to the track—her, too. Anyway, we were talking about this and that, about the movie and about each other and about our relationship, which I’m telling you is something I hate to talk about in the normal course of events, but, anyway, we were at her house, and I was about to leave, and I went to kiss her good night there in the kitchen, with all the window shades up and everything, and the first kiss, she just turned to jelly and I got hard as a rock, and big, too, like my dick was climbing to my navel, if you’ll pardon my saying so, but it’s part of the story. Anyway, we kissed for a few minutes, but I had to get home, so we didn’t go into the bedroom or anything, and after that, I thought, What a lost opportunity for a great fuck, you know?”

  “Yeah,” said Al. The horses were approaching the starting gate, and Al saw on the TV with which the management had kindly supplied his box that the first of them went in.

  “But I’m really glad we didn’t fuck that night, because I learned something that I’ve never forgotten. We got ready for each other like that, by talking and being together, not by doing anything. You always think, Well, I’ve got to work this gal up to something, by touching her in this spot or that spot or kissing her for so long, or like this, or something, and sometimes, you think, I’ve got to work myself up to that somehow, too, and if she doesn’t touch me here or rub me there, we aren’t going to make it. But that night, we already were right together. And since then, I’ve noticed that every time—when we’re there mentally, we’re there physically. If we aren’t there mentally, we aren’t going to get ourselves there physically, no matter what we do. Better just go out for some tortellini or a movie. So now we learned that, and I don’t run around anymore. That’s what happened to me. Best fuck I ever didn’t have.”

  The gate opened and the horses broke. The race lasted about a minute. When the horses crossed the finish line, Limitless was fifth, having beaten four horses, about six lengths behind the winner.

  Al said, “Go on.”

  Luciano said, “You want to know what I think? Here’s what I think. You grow up running away from the girls you know, trying to find some girl that you don’t know enough to make her into whatever you want, but you keep getting to know her, because that’s what girls want. You’re making it all the time, and every time you make it, it feels like less and less. Then, if you’re lucky, you make it with someone you want to get to know, and then you never want to make it with someone you don’t really know again.”

  “What do you know about her?”

  “I don’t know. I can’t say. Everything I know about her is what I know about her.” Al looked at him. Luciano was smiling happily at all the things he knew about this girl, whoever she was. Al said, “That’s what they want, women. They want to talk all the time before having sex.”

  “Oh, yeah. I don’t mean that kind of talk, you know, so-and-so hurt my feelings and I’ve had such a bad day and, honey, what’s wrong with me. That’s not the kind of talk that gets you there. She knows that. It’s more like: Here is what I saw, here is what I felt, here is what I did, isn’t that interesting, how about you, honey? That kind of talk.”

  Al could recognize the difference. He said, “My wife hardly talks at all.”

  “Well,” said Luciano. “Ask her what she saw today, what she felt today, and what she did today. Maybe she’ll tell you.”

  The horses had disappeared and the track was empty. Luciano leaned forward as if he were about to get up and go. Al felt a pang. He said, “So now talk about the horse.”

  “Oh, the horse! My God!”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Dick doesn’t know what the fuck to do with that horse. The horse doesn’t know what the fuck to do with himself. He weaves, he paws, he presses against his stall guard with his chest, he grabs your clothes when you walk by. My advice is, send him back to the training farm. He’s not ready for track life.”

  “Have you said that to Dick?”

  “Yeah, but I’m not the owner. You say it to Dick. You’re the owner.”

  “I am the owner, that’s right.”

  Luciano stood up. “Well, nice to talk to you, Mr. Maybrick.”

  Al left with everyone else after the race. He hadn’t placed a bet and he hadn’t talked to anyone other than Luciano, and he was ready to go back to the City. That’s what he was thinking about, but when he put his foot down on the escalator that took you under the red-and-white awning and down into the courtyard, he knew he was going to see Dick Winterson, and sure enough, a minute or two later, out by the walking ring, he did see him, and the horse-trainer saw Al, too. And because he had come out and watched the race and hadn’t said anything to his trainer, the trainer now knew that he, Al, knew that the trainer had had an affair with his wife. And that they had a dud of a horse between them, too.

  Nevertheless, Al went up to the guy, and that was an education, too, because once you knew a guy had slept with your wife, one time or many times, who knew, who wanted to know, then you looked at him differently from before. You saw that he was a nice-looking guy, of a certain type. Younger than you by twenty years, maybe, his hair still dark and thick on his head, his belly still contained, his shoulders still where shoulders ought to be. You saw that the guy wasn’t young, of course, but there was a subtle shift that he hadn’t made. His body was still his friend, rather than some big dog farting and shitting and pissing all over the house, barking, whining, gobbling his food, yanking at the leash, itching, aching, all of it. He was kind of pretty, too, not like any movie star, but pretty for a regular man. You could see how there was a contrast between the two of you. Al had never been pretty. He hadn’t even been cute as a baby. The best thing anyone had ever said about his looks was “dynamic.”

  So Al went up to him and they shook hands, and the guy said, “I missed you before the race. I didn’t know you were coming up, Al.”

  “I wasn’t going to, but I got the notion. The horse is a dud. Not like that Laurita filly.”

  “She’s a good filly. She’s a little tired, is all. That happens in August.”

  “As long as it doesn’t happen in November.” He almost said “Breeders’ Cup,” but he didn’t have the heart. It could be that the two of them had talked about him, that he had seemed like a fool to them about this Breeders’ Cup thing, for example.

  “You know, Al, I don’t think the horse is a dud. I just think I haven’t found the key to him yet. He’s got energy to burn, but he doesn’t know how to direct it.”

  Here was where the guy was daring him to find another trainer, Al thought. He said, “Keep talking.”

  “Well, he’s very sensitive. Now, most horses who are very sensitive get mad or get scared when you cross a certain line with them. This guy doesn’t get mad; he doesn’t have an angry bone in his body. And he doesn’t get scared, either. He gets perplexed. I would almost rather he got mad, you know, because you can direct that. But it’s like I’ve got to figure out a way to make things clear to him. He’s a little immature.”

  “Send him back to the training farm. They liked him, as I remember.”

  “They did like him. But I’d like to solve this riddle myself.”

  �
��What’s the point of that?” Well, yes, he said that a little aggressively.

  The guy gave him a glance and said, “Well—”

  Then the old Al interrupted him. He said, “If you don’t know what to do in your gut, then you can’t figure it out.”

  “Yes, but—”

  “Now, listen. I’ve got all these businesses, right?”

  “Well, of course—”

  “I’ll tell you when I buy them. I buy them when the guys who are running them start trying lots of new things all at once. When they do that, that means they’re forgetting how to make things work. The business hasn’t fallen apart, and the guys are pretty excited about all the new things they’re trying, because they don’t know that trying lots of new things is the first desperate step.”

  “I’m not trying new things—”

  Al lowered his voice and softened it, too. He said, “Dick, you’re a good trainer, and I don’t want to move the horse to another trainer. If you like him, I’ll believe that he’s got some talent—”

  “I think he’s the sort of horse who can get a distance—”

  “Fine. Let’s say he doesn’t like two-year-old racing and needs to wait it out at the training farm.”

  “Al—”

  “Dick.” You could see it in his face, the struggle. Instead of saying anything, Al just stood there and watched it. Clear as day, the guy’s face said, “Don’t I get to have this one little thing? Not even this? This unimportant attempt?” Then the guy sighed and shook his head. The answer was no. He said, “Okay, Al. You’re the boss. I’ll send him back to the farm and tell them to turn him out for a few months.”