Horse Heaven

by Jane Smiley

  And there he was, the great Epic Steam, his intuition having failed him, standing in the corner of the pasture by the gate, his head down. The mares were grazing peacefully, having seen the threat and dealt with it. The feed girl didn’t know whether to call Ellen first or to try to get the horse out first—he was a dangerous animal, she knew. But then she went up to the gate, and he looked so forlorn that she took one of the halters hanging there and went inside. He put his head in the halter, and, with the mares looking on with interest, she led him, limping, out of the gate and down the path, back to his own peaceful spot on the other side of the woods. She spoke to him kindly and pityingly, and he didn’t mind it.

  WILLAM VANCE DECIDED to give up on finding Justa Bob. The Jockey Club gave out information only on who had owned a horse for his last start, and that was William himself. The new owner hadn’t started him again in six months. That was a bad sign—all William could think that that meant was that the evidence of lameness that he remembered was pretty bad—a bowed tendon most likely. What he imagined was that the new owner had him at a farm somewhere, rehabbing him. If it had been six months, then the horse could come back anytime, so he could turn up, but the national racing magazines only gave the results of stakes races, and Justa Bob was a claimer. William began to lose hope, to pay less attention to the whole deal, but his conscience still ached every time he walked into his office and saw those eight photofinish win pics, sometimes with Justa Bob on the outside, sometimes with Justa Bob on the inside, always with his head down and stretched, his nostril flared. Short of going down there and asking around, he had done his best, he thought. Probably he should just put it out of his mind.

  AUDREY OPENED THE DOOR of her closet, took out her suitcase, and laid it on the floor of her room. Then she went over to the dresser and reached into the top drawer, took out a pair of pink underpants, and unrolled them. Inside them was the key to her suitcase. She unlocked the suitcase. Out of that she took a ratty teddy bear, Arnold. His back seam was open. She stuck two of her fingers into the bear’s stuffing and felt the edges of the money, a nice wad, the three thousand dollars she had won hitting a twenty-to-one long shot that Deirdre had told her had no breeding, no record, no speed, and no hope when they’d gone to Pimlico for the last day of the meet. On the other hand, he was gray, so she bet him anyway, and now she had enough money to buy a horse, and, more than that, her mother’s permission. She pushed the money back into the teddy bear, locked the teddy bear in the suitcase, hid the suitcase in the closet and the key in her underwear. She was thirteen and going into ninth grade, old enough to put her money in the bank, as her mother had pointed out, but having the money in her room felt like having the horse, whoever he or she was, very close at hand.

  A car horn beeped, and Audrey looked out the window of her bedroom. It was Deirdre’s sedan. Audrey grabbed her helmet off the bed and ran for the front door, not forgetting to shout good-bye to her mother as she slammed out. As soon as she was in the car, Deirdre began. “Now, Audrey,” she said, “I have been shamed into taking you on this jaunt on the score that I have nothing better to do, which is not exactly true, but true enough. My own purpose is to make sure that you don’t get on anything your own grandmother couldn’t ride and to talk you out of every animal either on the grounds of conformation or on the grounds of temperament.”

  “Thank you.” Audrey was serene in the assurance that they would find something at either the first or the second barn.

  “Have you ever haggled for anything, darlin?”

  “You mean, tried to talk the price down?”

  “I do indeed.”

  “No.”

  “Well, I hate to lay this curse upon you, Audrey, but you are a natural horsewoman, who can read the Form, place a bet, pull a shoe, and jump a triple combination. If that is your fate, then you’re bound to be broke unless you can buy them cheap and sell them dear.”

  “I don’t want to sell him. I want to buy him.”

  “Your horse is not your boyfriend, Audrey. If you want to learn what they have to teach you, then you must let them come and go, and always make a profit out of the back end.”

  “Okay,” said Audrey, a little deflated. She saw that they were almost to the turn of Marshville Road. That was where the first two prospects were. She put on her helmet. They turned down the gravel road, and Audrey thought, This is it. We are almost there. I am going to see him very soon. She saw that every fencepost and telephone pole and flying bird was very significant. They went over a hill and there was the barn, red and white, and he was in there, probably already standing in the crossties. She bounced up and down in her seat. They turned into the parking lot and pulled up to a sign that said “Riders Park Here.” Here he had been living. These were familiar scenes to him. Every day, he would walk out of the barn and across this very parking lot to the jumping ring. He was thirteen years old (both of the geldings they were planning to see here were thirteen years old).

  But in fact he wasn’t here. The horses shown to her were heavy and dull, just horses. One was brown and one was chestnut. She tried to be enthusiastic about the chestnut, but when she got on him, his gaits were choppy and hard to ride. The brown didn’t even jog sound, and Deirdre said to the owner, “This one needs a vet, darlin. He’s got heat in his foot and a digital pulse,” and that was that.

  That was that all day. They looked at ten, she rode six. In addition to the one with choppy gaits, there was one with only one eye, one who couldn’t switch leads behind at the canter, one who bucked and spun when he passed other horses in the arena, one with an ugly head, and one who was very big and jerked her right out of the saddle about every three minutes.

  As they drove away from the last barn, Audrey said to Deirdre, “You guys made a plan to teach me a lesson.”

  “Did we, now?”

  “Yes. You took me out to see all these horses because you knew I wouldn’t want to buy any one of them.”

  “I suspected, yes. But, Audrey, these are horses in your price range. The unfortunate circumstance here is that you don’t ride in your own price range.”

  “That one was okay. He just had an ugly head. He had nice gaits and he jumped well.”

  “Yes, he did. But, you know, you want to be glad to see that face every morning, not be saying, ‘He’s fine enough but he’s got a head like a coffin without handles.’ Believe it or not, someone is going to come along who thinks that’s a pretty head, or a handsome head, or a head with character. That’s the one who should own that fellow.”

  “I need to win some more money.”

  “That’s when you don’t win it, when you need to. You keep that cash in your sock or wherever you’ve got it, and your horse will turn up.”

  “How about a horse off the track?”

  “We’ll see.”

  That night, Audrey wrote a letter to Miss Joy Gorham, at the Tompkins Ranch. It read,

  Dear Joy Gorham,

  You don’t remember me, but one time I wrote to you, and you rescued a horse that I had taken care of in Texas. His name was *Terza Rima, and you wrote me back about him. I hope he is still healthy and happy. Since that time, I have learned to ride and also learned to bet, and I now have some money to buy a horse. Since you live on a big studfarm and racing farm, I wonder if there is anything there that might be appropriate for me. I am a good enough rider so that I teach lessons at my barn. I show hunters, three feet and three-six. I won seven blue ribbons in equitation this year. I am about five foot four and I weigh about 115 pounds. I have three thousand dollars to spend. I would give a horse a very nice home.

  Yours truly,

  Audrey Schmidt

  1245 Hopewell Drive

  Morristown, Maryland

  She enclosed a picture of herself on Moses, taking a very flowery three-foot-six oxer at an A show. That pony was for sale. Ellen expected to get forty thousand dollars for him. She sealed the envelope, gave it a little kiss, and put it in the mailbox. Then she did what her mother
was always telling her to do, she tried to forget about it.

  WHAT WITH THE TRIP to Kauai and going through the galleys of the first volume of her three-volume Spiritual Housework: An Astrolabe for the Next Millennium, and overseeing her investment experiment, which meant being in constant communication with Mr. T. (so far, the return on her investment in the commodities market was running at about 23 percent annually, while the return on her investment in the Hollywood Park market was running at about 22 percent), Elizabeth was rather overextended. Even so, she had time to notice that someone was falling in love with her, and that someone was Mr. Kyle Tompkins, owner of Tompkins Racing and everything else in the entire world. One of the things that Elizabeth had discussed at length in her work was the future of monogamy. Monogamy, she pointed out, had a very checkered past, and at the beginning of the present millennium was purely a property arrangement. Whatever one’s theory of male sexuality, she went on to say, it only seemed to fit intermittently and with unease into monogamous marriage. When women were not tied down by pregnancy and child-rearing, there was much evidence to support the notion that they were not monogamous, either. Her own experience, which she related in detail, demonstrated that developing one’s sexuality took discipline, focus, money, and time, and should not be considered the recourse of mere idleness. Thus it was that she had an entire theoretical framework in which to fit the fact that Kyle Tompkins was married, and not only married, but California married, which meant that impulsive or passionate actions on his part would have many tedious legal ramifications and could dislocate a significant number of innocent members of the working class, shifting the wealth that was now filtering down to them in an orderly fashion into the coffers of the parasitic legal class, who were, even in quiet times, always circling the Tompkins fortune like moths about a lightbulb.

  Which was not to say that Elizabeth was unaware of the fact that Kyle Tompkins’ wife was forty-two years old, whereas she, Elizabeth Zada, was sixty-two years old, that Mrs. Tompkins was and had been all her life a beauty, whereas she, Elizabeth Zada, had graduated from a plain childhood to a gawky adolescence and thence, to the outspoken relief of her mother, to the best wifehood that she had been able to manage at the time, to Nathan-may-he-rest-in-peace-in-spite-of-all-those-animals-he-murdered-as-a-furrier Zada, no prize himself. Her passion with Plato was a project joyously conceived and carried out with relish, but the fact was that never had she aroused actual longing in any man until now, and it had a potent effect upon her. When she opened her e-mail every day to the compositions of Kyle Tompkins, it was with anticipation rather than disapproval. Nor had she as yet shown them to Plato, though he would have plenty to say about them, for he was always eager to exploit his interpretive skills.

  Plato was ready for marriage and fatherhood. Elizabeth had been telling him this for several months now. He was thirty-three and secure in his vocation. Though his tendency to theorize at length might not be every woman’s cup of tea, he had plenty of money, plenty of self-knowledge, lively convictions, habits of kindness and patience. If he was not as well prepared for domestic life as any man in America, Elizabeth couldn’t imagine who was, and Plato was inclined to agree. They had done well together, but a change was in the wind, and Elizabeth was preparing to add a chapter to volume two (Twin Suns: Relationships in the New World) called “So Let Us Melt Us: How to Choose to Flow Apart.”

  Kyle Tompkins was a man her own age. He had actual memories of Elvis. He had seen Rebel Without a Cause in the theater. He wrote, “I want you.” It made her feet cramp to read it. He knew enough to woo her with desire rather than money, looks, intelligence, accomplishments, or promises of good times. She did not delete it, but clicked “keep as new.” And every time she looked at it, it did seem new. At last she went out of her Internet server, put down her mouse, and got up from the desk.

  In his office, Plato had his jeans off, his head back against his chair, and his hand in his shorts. She said, “Hi, honey. May I talk to you for a second?”

  “Of course.”

  She went over to him and knelt beside his chair, and put her own hand into his shorts, covering his. He had a nice erection, but he was only casually stroking it. She kissed his paunch. He put his other hand on her hair. He said, “What’s up?”

  “Is our critique of monogamy a felt thing or a theoretical thing, do you think?”

  “I think the best way to look at that is to observe how many rules there are that maintain monogamy. The more rules there are, then the more the institution enforced is a social convenience rather than a natural impulse. Look at capitalism, for example. Capitalism is based on the natural impulse of greedy self-interest. It functions robustly without rules—all the rules exist to limit and contain its functioning. But without rules, habits, and customs, monogamy doesn’t function at all.”

  “But how do we feel about it?”

  He looked at her, then said, “I think we understand the relationship between freedom and jealousy, in that, if we view love and affection as a zero-sum endeavor, then what someone else has of one of us, that is what the other of us has lost. On the other hand, if we view love and affection as a self-creating and renewing endeavor, not bound by concepts of scarcity, then any love that accrues to either one of us accrues to both.”

  “In what sense are we using the word ‘love’?”

  “I think we agree that love is not a feeling in the same way that, say, sadness, gladness, desire, anger, and fear are, but, rather, a condition of existence that each individual has greater or lesser tolerance for, depending upon what he associates from his past with feelings of attachment. We’ve seen ourselves that past associations can be removed from the concept of love, thus raising our tolerance for its condition much higher than we think possible.”

  “Mr. Tompkins wants me.”

  “You sound surprised.”

  “I am, a little.”

  “Well, look at it this way. Mr. Tompkins is accustomed to indulging in a taste for the unusual. You are certainly the most unusual woman in his circle right now. It’s not surprising that he should locate you as the next venue for a habitual pattern of behavior. Or, dear, you can look at it this way. You are a fine piece of ass, and it shows, and any guy who can see it is a wise man.”

  She put her arms around him and nestled her face into his neck. He said, “When we find ourselves entering into a transitional period, the support of intimate friends is an invaluable consolation, because it encourages us to create new neural pathways and new patterns of pleasure-redundancy.”

  She said, “I know that, honey, but thanks for reminding me.” They looked square at each other, both knowing from their training that this was a preliminary biological and cultural signal that some form of sexual activity was acceptable to both of them. Elizabeth licked her lips, another signal. Plato’s hand moved inside his shorts, and Elizabeth saw it. She inhaled sharply, and then they both moaned, closed their eyes, and slowly cocked their hips. They were well trained. Desire leapt up instantly, hot and full. Elizabeth closed her eyes, and Plato leaned forward and kissed her lightly but lingeringly on the lips, nothing hungry or sudden, but slow and then slower, inducing a state of both mental and physical concentration. Elizabeth put her hand over his. His erection, now firm, long, and thick, had its usual Skinnerian effect upon her. Having never suffered anguish in her relationship with Plato, having never known anything from him but kindness and care, she had no past references to restrict her response to his manifest desire. (She had written about this in her book. “The penis,” she wrote, “should not be asked to lift the burden of repeated un-kindnesses from the relationship. Grievances dealt out and endured are the surest route to impotence.”) She felt her nipples rise. “Mmmm,” said Plato.

  “Ahh,” said Elizabeth. She stretched out on the Oriental carpet.

  DOWN IN TEXAS, Angel Smith’s grandson asked him if there was a horse he could ride. Angel got out Justa Bob, put an old bridle on him with a long shanked bit, and threw the bo
y up. He walked him around and around the arena, kicking him in the sides when he wanted to stop and practicing various moves. Pretty soon, he was turning around in circles as they walked, riding backward, lying down on the horse’s croup. He must have had him out for three hours, which was a good thing, because the horse had been developing a stress-related impaction colic, and the movement relieved both the stress and the impaction. Angel told the boy if he would come out every day and ride the horse he could be his. The boy said that he would, but vowed to himself that trotting, a jolting gait hard to sit and easy to fall off of, was out of the question.

  IN MARYLAND, Epic Steam, or Sudden Intuition, had decided to allow Ellen to hose and doctor the gashes and bruises the mares had given him. He even let the vet drain the hematoma on his chest. He stood quietly, his head down, without a shank over his nose or a tranquilizer in his system. Ellen said, “When he feels better, he’s going to go back to being a bad boy, but I don’t mind giving him a taste of kindness while we can.”

  IN CHICAGO, William Vance’s son, who normally had no interest in horses at all, said, “I’ll help you.”

  IN CALIFORNIA, Audrey Schmidt’s letter was put in Mr. Tompkins’ box, because Joy’s forwarding-address card at the post office had expired.