Horse Heaven

by Jane Smiley

  Well, then, her cousin George was gay as they came, and who could say which of the many other cousins of all degrees were of the same persuasion, and who could say that she was not? No man who had ever tried to date her, and there were a few, though only a few, would be surprised. A couple of them had been handsome fellows, too, well formed and good-humored and even, Mother of God, affectionate, and there had been the odd incident of sexual intercourse here and there, and what she had always thought was that she had taken after her mother in seeing the whole thing as a trap, a ruse played upon a woman by her own RNA, which sought to extend itself into the future no matter what the cost. Her mother, the saint, had three children and no more, and never said a word to Deirdre in all of her childhood about marriage.

  Tiffany’s effect upon her was like the effect of a finger upon a lump of clay. Every word she spoke, every gesture she made, every smile, every touch, every moment of her presence changed Deirdre’s inner shape. She retained her usual expressions and habits on the outside, but inside she was plastic, taking one impress after another. Perhaps alone in this little room, far away from Tiffany and all her communications, she would find some knowledge or resolve that would harden her to Tiffany’s presence and prepare her for Tiffany’s inevitable departure. And if you looked on the bright side of that one, well, you were a fool, weren’t you?

  Deirdre got up and put on her shoes and opened the door into the corridor. It was narrow and fluorescently lit. The engines were less apparent here. Not far down the corridor, a staircase went up to the right. She went to it and mounted. Her back hurt. That was familiar. The staircase came out upon another corridor like hers, and she saw an open door to the left, a door with a high sill, through which she felt a fresh breeze. Beyond the door, of course, was the deck and the sea and the skidding foggy clouds, mere veils rent into rags, revealing both three-quarter moon and stars. There were others on the deck, though it was, by her watch, about 4:00 a.m. Alongside the boat, lit by cabin lights perhaps, the wake was illuminated in edges. She did not think they were far from land. She could see widely separated dots of light in the distance. And now that her eyes had adjusted, she realized that the darkness wasn’t truly dark. Off the stern of the ship, just on the horizon, night was already gone. Of course, that was an attraction of this particular cruise—less and less night until, finally, no night at all. Deirdre turned right and began traipsing stern-ward on the deck, her left hand on the rail. It was not unlike making your way along the outside of the racetrack to the three-quarters pole, where your rider would turn you, bring you to the rail, and stir you up into a work or a gallop. Remember that, she thought. Remember that feeling when you were a tiny girl of being the horse and the rider all together, of trotting on your own two feet, then cantering and prancing, jumping little jumps, reassuring yourself when you got spooky or wild with a little pat on your own rump. Toward the end of the afternoon, when you got tired, you would carefully cool yourself down and put yourself away, not forgetting to comb your mane and give yourself a carrot. Hadn’t her mother been good about that, giving her bits of carrot and apple and even lumps of sugar as treats for the horse in her, telling her that, no matter how her horse misbehaved, he always deserved a treat in the end, because the misbehavior wasn’t meant, it was just a little mistake, and tomorrow would be another day, would it not? It was good advice never to put a horse away when you were mad at him, but always to give him some words of praise and a bit of something and a scratch about the head. You did that, and no matter what had happened, you felt better and were off on a good foot for the next day.

  Deirdre could and did say for herself that the horses had liked her, that they did a good job for her, that, whatever they represented in terms of disappointed hopes and failed expectations, they themselves welcomed her into their company, approached her, greeted her, watched what she was doing. Once upon a time that had been enough, more than enough. You got up, threw on some clothes, ran out to the barn, and, whatever you were feeling, sleepy, anxious about money, achy, fearful, hard, they plucked you right out of that with their pricked ears and big eyes and open nostrils. Of course they were looking for their feed—some would be rattling their feed buckets, or kicking the doors, knowing like clocks that you were late—but only a fool thought a horse was purely a processor of hay and oats. Ah, well, she missed them a bit.

  She came to the stern of the ship and looked down. It was light enough now, and the waters of, what was this, Puget Sound or something like that, were clear enough for the screws of the engines to be visible, turning and churning. Big spruces and evergreens made a dark shadow across the distant hillsides. The moon was faded, and the stars were gone. A grand flotilla of seagulls had taken their place, crying aloft. Mother of God, this oceangoing was a noisy enterprise indeed. She turned and headed forward, westward, still dragging her hand upon the rail. Three passengers, bundled in blankets, lay attentively in deck chairs. Nature-lovers, no doubt, connoisseurs of natural beauty. Her uncle, George’s father, had been such a man. Once wild, he had become a farmer like all the others, he was the one who would stand and watch the sunset, go out and look at the stars of an evening, take the children to see some waves breaking on the shingle, just for a lark. Perhaps he had needed solace for something. He would have been much like George, no doubt. George, still her loyal pal, had been back in Ireland for two months now, and he had written her often to tell her all about working at Coolmore, telling tales upon her, feeling sanguine all around, happier. Happier than what? She had not thought he was unhappy, but there you were. He had needed solace for something and he had got it now.

  The worst part was to go on being yourself. Everything you had learned, all those conclusions you had drawn, crusted you over. You had thought it was so good to learn each lesson—each lesson prepared you for something, it seemed, or else how could you bear the pain of the lessons—but in the end, all the bits and pieces added up to no sensible curriculum, and what you had made of it all was contradictory and confusing. You saw horses like that all the time. A horse was trained by a rider with a heavy hand, and the horse concluded that it could not stretch into the bit, and therefore its neck curled over, it stepped short behind, it refused to jump, the rider whacked it with a stick, the horse got caught between two promises of pain. And all the time you were noticing this in your friend’s horse, she was noticing that, every time your horse spooked and you tensed, you were teaching your horse that there was something to spook at, and he was getting spookier and spookier. The very thing that you were, or your friend was, was the very thing that your horse learned to misbehave from, despite your intentions, your wishes, or your willpower.

  Better, even though you were forty-three, to throw in the towel, to admit that all the looking on the high, bright side, all the efforts to benefit from your experience, had resulted in only this—you were all the more confirmed in being yourself and all the more tired of it.

  But, still, her mother had cut up bits of apple and carrot, and put them into her hands, and sung, “The pony goes to his little stall, the cart gets put away, we’ve had a lovely ride around the verge of Corwyn Bay. Now I lay me down to sleep, the hounds all curled around. The moon hangs o’er the grassy lane, and the fox has gone to ground.”

  IN MARYLAND, Tiffany and Ellen were standing in the center of Ellen’s largest riding arena as Audrey trotted around them on Ellen’s equitation pony, Moses. It was early, so they were the only ones around besides Ellen’s two grooms, who had just started cleaning stalls. Tiffany said, “She was reluctant to load.” The two women looked at each other and laughed.

  “Did you have to use a whip?”

  “Only to get her to buy the clothes.”

  “That must have been something.”

  “Girl, I showed the patience of Job, as my mama would say.”

  Ellen shook her head.

  “I want to gossip about her. I think maybe it’s safe now that she’s four thousand miles or something like that away,” muttered T
iffany.

  “She always finds out. Especially if you meant well.”

  Tiffany shook her head. The pony traveled in a limber circle once, twice, three times. Ellen said, “Okay, Audrey. I’ll set up a cross-pole.”

  “A cross-pole!” exclaimed Audrey.

  “Even Michael Matz starts the day with a cross-pole!” Then, “Aren’t you going up to New York today to watch your horse run?”

  “As soon as I leave here. I just wanted to—”

  Audrey and her pony trotted over the cross-rail, then stopped, turned, and went back the other way.

  Tiffany said, “Does she like me? I think she does, but then she won’t talk to me for four days or something, and I don’t know. I worked hard for her.”

  “After she came out of the hospital with her back, she didn’t talk to me for a year and a half. I went to see her in the hospital every day. I took her things, I cleaned her house, I took care of the horses. As soon as she possibly could, she stopped speaking to me.”

  “How did that make you feel?”

  “I missed her, but, you know, I kind of expected it. She wasn’t ungrateful. She thanked me, and she meant it. But there’re some people, you know, they always think about things in terms of deserving them or not, and the more you give them, the less they feel they can take, because they’ve used up what they deserve. Unless they can give you something back, they don’t deserve anything more, and so they shut you off.”

  Audrey trotted back and forth over the cross-rail again, then Ellen walked over to the standards and dropped one end of a red-and-white pole to the ground and lifted the end of a blue pole onto a jump cup, making a small vertical jump. She called out, “Now take this at the trot, also!”

  Seeing the jump being raised from its minimal cross-pole height, the pony livened up considerably, pricking his ears and lifting his tail. He trotted smartly to the base of the fence and hopped over it. Audrey pushed her heels down and put her hands in the pony’s mane. A couple of steps after the fence, she brought him to a halt and turned him around, and Ellen said, “Okay, do it again.” Then, “Believe me, Tiff, she likes you. No doubt she loves you.”

  “Did she say that?”

  “To me? What do you think? She’d take a kick in the head over admitting something like that. Go back and forth over it, Audrey, until you and the pony are really comfortable.”

  Tiffany, watching, could see Audrey relax and concentrate. What a thing this was, she suddenly thought, to finish with her two charges at the track, then to come here and watch this, then to get into her car and drive to Belmont and watch her filly run in a race that she well might win. How strange it was that you had said yes and why not and I’ll try that, and you got someplace where there were horses behind you and horses in front of you and horses all around you. She said, “But if she likes me—I mean, when I like someone, I can’t get enough of them. Or something. It’s like with the horses. I had one, and then I wanted another one, and now it’s just about all horses all of the time. But it seems like, when she likes something, she right away starts going off about it and backing away from it.”

  “Does that bother you?”

  “Not really, no. I just don’t understand it. I mean, nothing about her bothers me. She’s funny, and all that stuff she puts on, you can see right through it, and the last thing she would ever do is hurt somebody.”

  “You know what?”

  “What?”

  “People love her. Horses love her. She always always always has your best interests at heart, and she puts herself out to make sure you know what your best interests are, even if they conflict with hers. When she had the jumpers, I remember, people would come around and want to buy horses, and she would say, ‘Now, darlin’, you won’t be wantin’ this lad. He’s got osselets and he won’t last ya a year!’ And then she would wonder why she had all these horses standing in the barn. When she got to the track, she did better, because at least she would get her horses claimed, and that paid a lot of the bills at first. You know something?”

  “What’s that?”

  “Just a second.” Ellen went to the jump and raised it a notch, so that now it was about two feet high. “Okay, dear,” she said to Audrey. “At the trot, please.” She came back to Tiffany and said, “In all the years I’ve known Deirdre, I have never one time been angry with her. I can’t say that about anyone else.”

  “I’ve never been mad at her, either. And I never saw George get mad, really, though he pretended a couple of times.”

  “There you go. But she’s a conundrum.”

  “What’s that?”

  “A riddle.”

  “What did you call that?”

  “A conundrum.”

  “I like that. Conundrum. That would be a good name for a horse, you know. A filly by Secret Hello. You know, what I really need is to get myself a nice broodmare, say twenty-five thousand dollars or so, and breed myself a commercial weanling. If you sell them as weanlings, it’s almost pure profit, Bill says. Conundrum.”

  “You are obsessed.”

  “Look who’s talking.”

  “I’m ready!” exclaimed Audrey. “Can I do a course? With that triple combination? Not too low!”

  “Who’s obsessed?” said Tiffany, nodding toward Audrey and the pony.

  “We have set a very bad example for Audrey,” said Ellen. But she was grinning.

  IT WAS DAYLIGHT NOW. The gray dawn was blueing up toward a bright, breezy morning, and Deirdre was of two minds. The sunlight had an irrepressible good effect upon her, just the sort of biological knee-jerk reaction that was so burdensome to the free play of the intellect, and so she was tempted to go back to her stall and lie down next to her books. And she was tempted to have something to eat. The cruise line advertised twenty-four-hour-a-day victuals, and perhaps it was time to put them to the test. The ship was still heading west. She was no longer alone in her perambulation of the deck, however, for several early-morning joggers were doing their laps. One of the ship’s personnel was about to hoist the flag over the stern.

  Before he left, George had taken her out to dinner and fed her all of her favorite dishes—some very nice crab cakes, a salad of baby greens with a balsamic vinaigrette, a veal piccata nestled on the plate with braised fennel and leeks, and a felicitous lemon-ginger mousse. For her part, she had given him something, a black-and-white photograph she had found in an art gallery, of six male athletes, naked, from behind, a baseball player, a marathon runner, a basketball player, a jockey, a soccer player, and a pole vaulter. Though the collage was seamless, all the figures had been blown up or reduced so that they were equal in height to the marathon runner, who was six feet tall. All were nicely burnished, too. “I consider this a purely educational graphic, George,” she had said, “and I expect you to hang it in the kitchen.”

  “Who do you think that is?” he said, pointing to the jockey.

  “Could be anyone perfect,” she had replied. “Your eye does go to that one, does it not?”

  “They’re the first to tell you they’re the most fit.”

  “It does look that way from this photo, doesn’t it?”

  They had gone on about the picture for at least a half-hour, then he had taken her in hand. He said, “You’ve done everything for me, Cousin.”

  “You’ve earned your pay, George. You’ve done your work and kept your sunny disposition and never incurred the wrath of the officials or the owners.”

  “You must accept my gratitude, anyway.”

  She had sniffed, then said, “Well, I do. And you must accept mine, for giving me a laugh now and then. I’m going to miss you.”

  “Yes, you are, so I am going to do you the favor of telling you all over again that you are a prideful woman. You don’t think much about the seven deadly sins, no one in this country does, but even so, they’re still about.”

  “You can accuse me of gluttony, George.” She had taken another bite of her mousse. Lust she kept to herself. “But if you ask me, li
fe is the deadliest sin, as it always ends in death no matter whether you sleep in every morning or not. Personally, I think insomnia is—”

  He went on, “The priest at my church calls them ‘the seven deadliest self-imposed punishments.’ ”

  “That’s very California of him. No wonder you’re going back to Ireland.”

  “You’ve imposed a considerable burden of pride upon yourself, Cousin.”

  “Have I?”

  “Pride is the hardest burden to bear, the number-one sin, the one that separates you from God.”

  “I knew that name was going to come up.”

  “God loves you, sweetheart.”

  “Ah, George—”

  “All these years, I’ve given in to your pride and not talked to you about God at all, but now’s the time.”