Horse Heaven

by Jane Smiley

  And yet there he was, Mr. T., nineteen years old now, standing in his stall, looking at him. Farley knew that it was hard enough, when your human children were eighteen or twenty, able to read, write, balance a checkbook, drive a car, and listen to reams of advice, to send them off to do what they wanted to do, which was to go off—and his own kids had been a little adventurous, one in Australia, one in Jamaica, the other two well-traveled. How much harder was it to walk a horse up the steep ramp of a horse van and watch him head into the unknown—unknown to you, but, more profoundly, unknown to him? There was no preparing a horse to go, no describing to him what he would do, what the people would be like. There was no reassuring him that there would be plenty of hay and oats or grass. Sometimes you didn’t know that there would be. You could not prepare him to communicate to his new associates that he had certain preferences and desires and needs, and that if those were accommodated he would be a good, cooperative horse. Sometimes horses went away from you happy and calm and came back full of vices and fears, hard to handle and nearly broken down. Sometimes horses that you had trained as two-year-olds went to someone else, and you were right there in the grandstand watching when the horse shattered his foreleg as a four-year-old, and you knew that wouldn’t have happened if you were still training the horse, knew it even though it was not true and you were wrong to think so. Farley went over and put his arm around Mr. T.’s nose, stroked the horse on the cheek and forehead. The horse had been on his own for nineteen years now, finding himself here and there, and even though he was picky about his food and cranky at times and nervous about certain things, here he was, fit and shining and healthy, able to get along and even thrive in a world that had not been made with him in mind. No one had planned this life for the horse—most likely his breeder had planned for him to be another Nearco, a successful racing stallion with a lifetime sinecure at a studfarm in France or Germany. But here he was, he who had been around the block and had lived, according to Elizabeth, to tell about it. If you wanted to, you could look right at Mr. T. and see trust written all over him, whether you believed in his betting system or not. And so Farley laid his cheek for a moment against the cheek of the horse, and said, “Okay.”

  BACK IN BED and unable to go to sleep, Joy tried to remember the longing that had brought her here. She could summon up the images she had obsessed over, the quiet, the stillness, the piles of stuff that never moved, the darkness. But those images had been memories of her place at the ranch. Hadn’t she known that, wherever she went, that was not what she was going to find? Wasn’t she that sane, sane enough to know the difference between memory and desire? What she could not summon up was the feeling itself. It must have been very strong, but now that she was here, by herself, lying alone on a bed in a room, she felt neither the feeling nor the satisfaction of the feeling. Instead, she felt lots of other feelings, none of them paramount. First, of course, there was what you might call the unease of disobedience. She had certainly done wrong to abandon her responsibilities without a word, to cause the man whom she loved and who loved her fear and worry. Now that she was no longer overwhelmed with longing, there didn’t seem to be a whole lot of justification for doing that, or for walking away from Limitless, whom she had made, selfishly but steadily, entirely her own over the last four months. And she longed for them, too, now that she had separated herself from them. Was this her besetting sin, that, when she had the thing she wanted, she could not appreciate it, or even feel it? Last night, it had been easy. She had been asleep, luxuriously asleep, and perfectly happy, for sixteen hours. No dreams, no wakings, no life at all, just a boatload of sleep drifting down the dark river. As in the past, though, her body’s disappointing inability to sustain that had left her right here, wide awake and regretful.

  She got up and went into the bathroom, where she looked at the bathtub for a moment, thinking she might take another bath, but her fingertips were still pruny from the last bath. Instead, she brushed her teeth, then flossed, then sat down on the toilet seat and clipped her toenails. When in doubt, groom.

  The fact was, though she was always calling herself depressed, and her condition depression, she didn’t truly know what depression felt like. Sometimes it felt like longing, sometimes it felt like grief, sometimes it felt like fatigue, sometimes it felt like confusion, sometimes it felt like stupidity. When she had been on the Prozac, it had felt like all of those things but made less important, as if there were a buzz of interference on the line between those feelings and her. What if, she thought, instead of saying that she was depressed, she said that she was tired or confused? Wouldn’t she then take a nap or seek clarification? How about discouraged? How about self-hating? How about afraid? How about separated from what was going on in the world and lost in herself? What would be the antidote to that? Some instructions to follow? On the one hand, it was easier just to say she was depressed. On the other hand, all the remedies they had for depression seemed not to make much difference. The depression was nearby or a little farther away. Maybe a more specific approach, though time-consuming and perhaps overdetailed, would actually work.

  At the moment, her depression felt like pure adolescence. Here I am, looking in the mirror, she thought. I look lifeless and unpleasant. My skin is pasty and my eyes are dull and my hair is dirty and I have no appeal. Moreover, I have no desire to please. Relieving my beloved’s worry is as easy as calling on the phone, and yet I don’t want to. I don’t want to express that minimal fleck of love when, over the past six months, I have expressed love with every look and gesture, hour after hour, day after day, week after week, so that I thought the expression of love was an unbreakable habit.

  Well, yes, she could trace the onset of her depression to moving in with Farley. That was another thing she had longed for, to be in his steady, kind presence all night long. What she hadn’t reckoned with was the fact that she didn’t sleep much when she was with him. They liked to sleep entwined, and so she was aware of his presence all night long, aware of her love for him, aware that any moment he could turn over and embrace her and kiss her and give her that gift of his own desire and pleasure, aware that she could do the same. She woke up and looked at his face, woke up and kissed his arm, his chest, his shoulder, his cheek, whatever part of him was nearest. However light her kiss, however designed not to waken him, he responded with a touch or an appreciative squeeze. As a result, she had been in sleep deficit for weeks, and here it came, fatigue, a lowering of spirits, a sense that she could not do what she craved to do, which was simply to sleep entwined. But, then, the last time she moved in with someone, with Dean, at the university, depression had set in there, too, almost immediately. Then she’d thought that her depression was owing to Dean’s frantic quality. He had no peace in him, day or night. Even sitting in front of the TV, he rustled and twisted and creaked and talked and sought reassurance and made plans. There had been so little that was lovable about Dean that she had stuck with him for years, getting more and more depressed. But now she saw that there was always a story about the depression, but the underlying fact was that she couldn’t be with anyone, not even quiet itself, kindness itself, love itself. What it was that she seemed to aspire to was very small. A single room with a small bathroom, and in a dark little corner of that, a bathtub with a heavy dark curtain to block out the light.

  OVER IN ARCADIA, Farley wasn’t getting much sleep, either. It was hard enough at the track, where there was plenty going on, to maintain a level of sanity that was partly willpower and partly business, but here, in his condo, in his bed, between the sheets that still carried her scent, it was a challenge. He was a guy with procedures, a guy with rules, a smart guy. Everyone said that about him. The first rule was “Keep cool” and the second rule was “Pay attention” and the third rule was “Think before you act.” Of course, the foundation mare had misinterpreted these rules, and frequently offered her critique of them. According to her, his first rule was “Retreat,” his second rule was “Watch instead of act,” and h
is third rule was “No spontaneity at any time.” That he should have ended up at the racetrack was a continuing source of amazement to her, since he was a natural for, let’s say, accounting or teaching biology at a very quiet convent school in a rural location. Of course, since the end of their marriage, she had apologized for her more colorful characterizations of him, but, then, she hadn’t taken them back, she had just shifted her relationship to them.

  He was certainly not following his first rule, since he was sweating profusely and had a steamroller headache. And when he got up to pace around the room, setting Joy’s things in order, he stumbled over everything, and when he came out of the bathroom, he actually ran into the door in the dark and bruised his forehead. And as for thinking before acting, he couldn’t think at all, so it was a good thing it was the middle of the night and no action was required.

  Of course, there were several actions he could take. He could get in his Yukon and drive frantically around, looking for her the way you would look for a lost dog. He could go to the police, which seemed all the more attractive now that its being the middle of the night gave everything the quality of drama and panic. He could call or, better, drive to every emergency room in southern California and look into the face of every female patient. If he could not find Joy, then at least he could begin eliminating each one of the three or four million women in southern California who were not Joy. Or he could bellow like a wounded bull. Or he could pound his head against the wall, put his fist into the wall, go into the kitchen and pick up a frying pan and beat some dishes to death with it. The very thoughts made him pant and sweat all the more. He went back into the bathroom and turned on the shower.

  Ah, he was so much better at this other thing, this removed, detached, floaty thing, where the horses worked and ran and won or did not win, where the owners came and went, and you viewed them with amusement, where you were detached and funny and enigmatic and steady and agreeable. At not expecting the worst or the best, but just going along. He was so good at being good with her—responsible and thoughtful and reassuring and witty—and now she was gone anyway, in spite of all his efforts, and it was very much like that time he had collapsed at Saratoga, just keeled over, and Rosalind Maybrick had set him right again, just by touching him. That, he thought, was who he should call, but he had no idea where she was. Somewhere in Europe, not really reachable, and so he, who always took care of himself, had to take care of himself again, and it was unfair, all of this taking care of himself, taking care of horses, taking care of Joy, taking care of his staff and his children and his owners and the foundation mare’s monetary needs. The sweat was pouring off him and his head was exploding, so he got into the shower and it pounded down upon him, into his hair and beard and eyes and mouth, over his shoulders and belly and down through his body hair and over his penis and testicles and down his legs, first hot, then warm, then cold, then very cold, until his skin was throbbing, and he got out exhausted, toweled off, went back into the bedroom, and changed his sheets. While he was doing this, he felt better. He stretched the corners of the contour sheet over the corners of the mattress, laid the top sheet neatly down, pushed the pillows into their crisp cases, and then lay down naked, cool, and dry. And then he reached over and picked up the sheets he had taken off and dropped on the floor, the ones impregnated with her scent and his scent, and he put them over his face and wept.

  IT WAS ONLY about eight o’clock Eastern Daylight Time when Joy’s mother answered the phone and noted that it was Joy on the other end of the line, sounding very morose. She was not surprised that Joy was up by five; Joy had been getting up by five since she was born, which was part of the problem between them which Joy’s mother no longer blamed herself for, because she no longer believed it was possible to bring a child into this world and prevent it from experiencing legitimate suffering or its surrogate, neurosis, or both. She was rather surprised, though, when Joy said, “Why am I like this?,” because Joy had never asked her that question before, and her mother’s repeated offers to answer that question unasked had been spurned, which Joy’s mother no longer blamed Joy for, because she no longer believed it was possible to tell anyone anything, especially something that they needed to know.

  Nevertheless, she was prepared for this question, having rehearsed and refined the answer countless times over the years. She said, “Because you want to be.”

  “I want to be tired and confused and isolated and anxious and full of self-blame and disoriented and unkind and resistant and joyless?”

  “In comparison to something else, yes.”

  “In comparison to what?”

  “I don’t know what else there is, dear.”

  “A great guy, a great horse, a good job.”

  “The man could leave you.”

  “He won’t.”

  “You could leave him.”

  “I won’t. I mean, I have, but I wouldn’t.”

  Joy’s mother decided not to touch that one. She said, “Why not?”

  “Because there’s nothing not right between us. What’s not right is in me.”

  “In comparison to what?”

  “In comparison to him. In comparison to you. In comparison to what’s normal. Why am I like this?”

  What a tempting question that was. Had not Joy’s mother and her sister and her best friend gone over this chapter by chapter, verse by verse, more times than she could count? Did she not have all the theories at her fingertips, nature, nurture, brain chemistry, lack of willpower, tragic view of life, mutation, bad luck, unwitnessed trauma, surge of hormones in the womb, environmental influence, unremarked-upon head injury, curse? But she said, “The question isn’t ‘Why?,’ Joy, it’s ‘What now?’ ” And then she decided to try a different tack that didn’t often work with Joy. She said, “What do you want to do, dear?”

  “I don’t know. I only know what I long for.”

  “What do you long for?”

  “Right now I am longing for Farley and the horses and the track.”

  “What were you longing for?”

  “A little dark room, peace and quiet.”

  Joy’s mother licked her lips and consulted her own experience. It wasn’t like she wasn’t an expert on introspection, retrospection, regret, and second thoughts. She took a deep breath and did something scary, still scary—she spoke honestly to her only daughter. She said, “You mean a coffin, right? You mean a tiny space where you can lie down and close the lid over yourself and never see or hear or think again, where you can stop breathing and stop wondering and stop being afraid and stop feeling your heart beat and blood coursing through your veins and things changing every minute, every second? You mean that, right? You were longing for that.”

  There was a long silence on the other end of the line, and then Joy said, “Yes.”

  “Do you think you will be happy with that when you get it?”

  Joy said, “No.”

  And her mother said, “Then it’s time for you to figure out how not to get it, because it seems to me that you can only ask for it so many times before your request is granted.”

  “Will you call him up and tell him I’m okay?”

  “What’s his number?”

  ———

  FARLEY, having gotten up at last, was still at home when his cellular rang. It was Joy’s mother, her voice flat, giving away only one thing, “She’s okay. She called me.”

  “Where is she?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Is she coming back?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What’s she doing?”

  “I don’t know. Stop asking questions.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you keep raising the threshold. I bet that before I called you were saying to yourself, ‘As long as she’s safe, that’s all that matters.’ ”

  “I did say that, actually.”

  “Well, there you are. Don’t ask for any more right now.”

  Farley, who was used to thinking o
f Joy’s mother as kind of a ditz, stood corrected.

  WHEN HE GOT TO THE TRACK, tired as he was, he sorted things out at once, and the day went along quickly enough. He had horses in two races, a maiden special weight for three-year-old fillies and an allowance race for colts and geldings. That was Bernard Baruch. Lorenzo de Medici was running in Kentucky, and Ivan Boesky was in foal to Wild Again. The brothers had two other fillies with him now, Carl Icahn and Billy Sol Estes, a pair of two-year-olds by Seeking the Gold, but the brothers didn’t come out if it wasn’t a stakes race. Billy Sol Estes had considerable promise. By the time Bernard Baruch, who won his race, had finished up in the test barn, it was late, and when he got back to his office, Elizabeth had left a message on the machine for Joy, that they had been bumped from their flight in Lihue and could not make the race. After he had checked the horses one last time and left instructions with the night man, he went back into the office for his briefcase, and there was a call from the Maryland people, to say that they were staying home because the baby was sick. Then he went home and fell into bed, only to wake up at 4:00 a.m. to a call from Al Maybrick, at Narita Airport. “Listen,” said Al, as if Farley had any other choice. “I got to go right now to Murmansk, and skip Rio altogether. I don’t care about that, but I haven’t seen Rozzy in weeks. You tell her I’ll meet her in Stockholm a week from tomorrow, okay?”

  “Okay,” said Farley.

  “That horse gonna win that race?”

  “I understand there is a tip that he is. He looks very fit, Al.”

  “Whose tip?”