Horse Heaven

by Jane Smiley

  “All weekend?”

  “All weekend.”

  “Okay. I—” But she had already hung up.

  ———

  “I’VE GOT A JOB,” said Deirdre. “And I like it.”

  “I’m not trying to interfere with that. I just need you to tell me something,” said Tiffany.

  “Ask me over the phone.”

  “You have to come out and see.”

  “See what?”

  “Just come out.”

  “I’m in quarantine. I can’t look at any horses except with Audrey.”

  “Audrey will be there.”

  “Send me a videotape.”

  “I, Tiffany, want to see you. I haven’t seen you in three weeks.”

  Deirdre laughed. She said, “How are your horses runnin’, darlin’?”

  “I still don’t have a stakes winner, but Somnambulist ran third in the Kelso Handicap. How’s your job?”

  “You know, Tiff, I don’t see how you can go wrong in Washington real estate if you have the right attitude. What you do is, you take your dullest clients to your strangest houses, and you say, ‘I don’t really think this is right for you, possibly a little, I don’t know, uncomfortable, but I thought you would like to see it, because so-and-so lived here,’ and pretty soon they want to show themselves that they’re just as cool as so-and-so, and anyway it’s different from what they had back home, and why else go to Washington in the first place?”

  “It was nice of Mary Lynn to give you that house to list.”

  “She set up this whole real-estate thing. I always said the best thing you could do was put yourself right into her hands. She told me how to sell it, too—she calls it Maison Billing Gates, for all the hours Skippy’s law firm billed to Microsoft.”

  “Please come out.”

  “There is a listing out that way I would like to see.”

  “Thank you. Tomorrow.”

  “Call me tomorrow and I’ll tell you.”

  After hanging up, Tiffany turned to Ellen. “Sometime tomorrow.”

  Ellen nodded. She said, “We’ll keep him in until just before she gets here.”

  DICK WAS WATCHING Luciano massage a two-year-old filly. Luciano was working on her gluteals now, and the filly was grunting very softly. After a moment, she sighed. Then Dick sighed. Luciano said, “Ah, well, you know, that’s horses.”

  “That’s not horses as we know them. No American horse has ever won the Arc before. I didn’t see it.”

  “Did he have it?”

  “I don’t know, I didn’t see it.”

  “Blinded by the Derby.”

  “That’s right. I wouldn’t have thought of the Arc in a million years.”

  “Well, there you go. You couldn’t have trained the horse, because the horse was going to win the Arc, and you weren’t going to get him there, so he had to find himself another trainer.”

  “I bet Rosalind got the trainer to send him there. No California trainer would think that up on his own.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  “I believe it, though.”

  “What if Rosalind had said to you, ‘This horse is going to the Arc’?”

  “I would have ignored her.”

  “You loved her.”

  “Yes, I did. Probably that’s why I would have ignored her. I told her everything she knew about horses, and whenever she said anything about them, I didn’t listen because I’d heard it all before.” Dick sighed again. The filly sighed again. Luciano was gently pulling her tail, first left, then right, then down and back. “I met my ex-wife’s new boyfriend. He’s a sound engineer. They were very affectionate together.”

  “You got a girlfriend?”

  “Nah.”

  Luciano came around the filly and started at her head again, this time on the right side. After a few moments, he said, “You want to go have something to eat? It’s about that time. I found this place where they make a great paglia e fieno. You know what that is?”

  “No.”

  “Your ex-wife’s got a boyfriend, your ex-owner’s horse won the biggest race maybe in the world, you don’t have a girlfriend and you also don’t know what paglia e fieno is? May I have your attention? May I tell you a few things? May I give you a little bit of help here?”

  “I wish you would, Luciano.”

  “Okay, then,” said Luciano. “The first thing you have to know is that paglia e fieno means ‘straw and hay,’ but what that’s referring to is the pasta, okay?”

  “Yeah,” said Dick.

  ———

  Dear Gustave,

  Please forgive me for not writing this letter in French, but your English is far better than my French ever was. This is a letter of reference for the American jockey Roberto Acevedo, who, as you know, rode our horse Limitless to the win in the Arc. Roberto has informed me that romantic considerations have led him to decide to settle in France. I am writing to the trainers and horse agents I know to introduce him. He is an exceptional rider, from an exceptional family of riders. He is rather taller than is usual for an American rider, and maybe a kilo or two heavier, but he has a wonderful sense of pace and as good a pair of hands as I’ve seen. He is especially good with sensitive horses, like our Arc horse. I hope you will give him a try. He can be reached in care of Mile. Dominique Lalande-Ferrier, 14 Rue Donegal, in Paris (tel. 98-73-46-50). I have also suggested that he call on you personally, and I think he will do so. Roberto and Mile. Lalande-Ferrier have indicated that her position at the Sorbonne will not prevent their relocating to Chantilly.

  Yours truly,

  Farley Jones

  When Elizabeth picked up the phone, she thought the party on the other end of the line was going to be the interviewer from The Independent, whose call she had been told to expect by her English publisher. Instead, it was Joy. She sounded blue. She said, “Can you read Mr. T. from here?”

  “You mean in France?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Sequentiality and locationality make no difference in this context.”

  “What’s he doing?”

  “Ask him yourself.”

  “I don’t know how.”

  “Yes, you do. Close your eyes if you have to. Just bring him into your mind.”

  “You mean remember him?”

  “Start that way.”

  “Then what?”

  “Well, start now and see.”

  “Do it with me.”

  “That wouldn’t do any good. It’s not like lifting a box, where we both take an end. It’s more like looking into each other’s faces. We’re both there, but we aren’t seeing the same thing. Just bring him into your mind.”

  Joy was silent for a moment, then said, “Oh.”

  “What?”

  “Well, when he came into my mind I wasn’t looking at him. I was looking from him. The first thing I saw was lots of green close up, but also the horizon curving around that, and other horses between the close-up green and the horizon, but they weren’t very distinct to look at. I felt them, though. It was like some were resonating with me and some weren’t.”

  “That seems familiar,” said Elizabeth.

  “Is that what you see?”

  “Something like it.”

  “I don’t know whether to believe this.”

  “You’ve always said that, then you’ve always acted as if you believed it, and what’s been the result?”

  “The best relationship I’ve ever had with a horse.”

  “Why question it, then?”

  “Because maybe I’m making it up.”

  “What if you were?”

  “Then I would just be deluding myself.”

  “By what standard? Doesn’t it make you happy to bring him into your mind?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, if you ask me, the happiness that you feel when you bring him into your mind is your own self expressing love. That’s your only evidence that love exists. When Farley embraces you, your mind recognizes love in
his embrace. It isn’t there unless your mind recognizes it. So, even when you think you are feeling Farley’s love for you, what you are really feeling is, once again, your own mind expressing love, but defining it as coming from him to you. You could drop that definition, though—all those definitions that have to do with location and time—Mr. T. was here and now he’s there, for example. Farley is apart from you, for example. One day we lift the box. We are weak and the box is heavy, and it’s hard to lift. Two weeks later, we’ve gotten stronger, and the box is light. We don’t ever feel the actual weight of the box. We only feel the ease or difficulty of the lifting. One day we feel unloved and alone. A week later, we feel loved. The difference is that we’ve remembered how to feel love, not that our circumstances have changed.”

  “I never told you about the time I ran away, when you were in Hawaii.”

  “You ran away?”

  “It was exactly like that. I forgot how to feel his presence and love.”

  “The easiest thing for me when that happens,” said Elizabeth, “is to do what we just did. Bring him into your mind and say, ‘I love you.’ ”

  “Okay, I understand that,” said Joy.

  “And?”

  “Relaxing, isn’t it?” prompted Elizabeth.

  “Well,” said Joy. “Yes. Yes.” She sighed again.

  “Oops,” said Elizabeth. “There’s call waiting.”

  “How much did they give you?”

  “A million pounds.”

  “What are you going to do with it?”

  “Start a boutique publishing house in England, specializing in futurology. Plato is going to be the editor-in-chief. I want to try my system against the bookies there. We’ve had enough of Fresno. Got to go.”

  ———

  Dear Audrey,

  Some weeks ago you wrote a letter to a former employee of mine, Joy Gorham, and because her forwarding address had expired at the post office, and my secretary knew I would be seeing her, the letter was put with my mail. I never saw it, and so I did not deliver it to her, and then, when I was opening some mail, I opened it by mistake. However, I am glad I did, because before I realized it was for Joy I read it, and saw that you are in the market for a horse. I believe I have just the horse for you, and it is a horse that Joy spent a lot of time with, caring for and training. Her name is Froney’s Sis, and she is a gray Thoroughbred filly, three years old, about fifteen hands two inches tall, pretty and sound. She went to the track, had one win, and then came home because racing did not suit her. Since then, a couple of the cowboys around here have worked with her, and she is very well broke to do just about anything around the ranch, but both of them feel that they are a little big for her, and that she would make a good youngster’s horse. She is, they say, quite affectionate. Sort of a one-girl horse. We have, among other things, a vanning company, and there is a van leaving for the East Coast in a couple of days. I am going to put this horse on the van for you. The van will be in Maryland, Virginia, and Pennsylvania for four days after they drop the horse with you. If you do not care for the horse, just give the boys a call, and they will bring her home again.

  Also, the horse you inquired after, *Terza Rima, has been retired to France, to the studfarm Haras Chamossaire, near Deauville. You may e-mail them if you would like news of him, at Vatout.Firdaussi.Chamossaire@aol.com.

  Thank you very much for your letter,

  Yours truly,

  Kyle Tompkins,

  Tompkins Perfection Enterprises International

  Mr. Tompkins sat back and read over the letter he had written, then turned to the page beside it and crossed off number five. Two to go. He began another one,

  Dear Senator Boxer,

  It may be that I got on your fund-raising list by mistake, since I have always been a donor to Republican causes. Nevertheless, due to unforeseen circumstances, your name has come up, and although I have many reservations about your views and your performance in Washington, I am sending your PAC a check for fifty thousand dollars. Thank you very much for this unusual opportunity.

  Then, as hard as it was, he signed his name and wrote the check.

  IT WAS ALL VERY EASY for Deirdre to say that she just had to be honest with herself, that she did not want to see Tiffany, and best admit it, but as soon as she was honest with herself and admitted it, well, then, Mother of God, she wanted to see Tiffany more than anything. The thing that she did want to see about Tiffany was her beauty and her friendliness and her enjoyment of life. What she didn’t want to see about Tiffany was her own conflicts about that very beauty, friendliness, and enjoyment of life. And so, to be honest, she wanted to see Tiffany more than anything else in the world, and so, to be honest, she didn’t want to see her at all, ever again. Selling real estate was ever so much easier. She was a contrary person, she fit sideways into a contrary market, and she didn’t feel nearly the qualms of conscience consigning an innocent, well-meaning domicile into the hands of knavish owners as she had selling horses.

  She turned into Ellen’s access road, and glanced into the big front paddock just in time to see a large black horse canter toward the paddock fence in a leisurely manner, fold his legs, and come down on the other side. Then he turned and headed directly for her car, only sliding to a halt as she herself skidded to a halt. Horse and car were now nose to nose. Deirdre sat back and adjusted her seat belt. It had happened so fast that she hadn’t had time to react, but now she did. Her heart was pounding, though whether from the sight of the horse jumping or the possibility of hitting him she did not know. The horse, however, did not look startled. He put his nose down to the hood of the car, then turned himself about and trotted away from her, tail up like a flag, head swiveling this way and that. Deirdre laughed. The thing that she was laughing at was that the fence in this front paddock was five feet high. She had built it herself. She was enough of a horsewoman to know even without having paid close attention that the horse had jumped it effortlessly from an easy canter. She followed him as he turned and headed toward the barn. She saw Ellen come out to receive him, followed by Audrey. Ellen sent Audrey back in. Then Deirdre saw that he had a halter on, and that dangling from the halter was an eight-inch length of rope, which Ellen caught and held on to, though the horse tried to pull away from her. Difficult beast, she thought.

  A half-hour later, Deirdre, Ellen, Tiffany, and the horse were in the arena. Audrey had strict instructions to stay out of the way. The horse’s name was Sudden Intuition, or Toots. Ellen was riding him, Deirdre was standing in the middle of the arena, and Tiffany was sitting with her feet up in a plastic chair. The horse was huge and strong—seventeen hands and twelve hundred pounds or more, and still a three-year-old. You might worry for his future soundness, but he had ten inches of bone—his legs were like telephone poles and perfectly correct. He was, no doubt about it, a prize.

  Of course, he ground his teeth, jerked his head around, wrung his tail, got behind the leg, did not care to participate or cooperate, a story as old as man and horse. Ellen was a good rider, and strong. She got him on the bit—which wasn’t hard for him, since he was built well—and she moved him into a big, expansive trot. No problem. He went five or six paces like a metronome. Then he used his big strong old neck and jerked her forward, and no power of human arms or back was going to hold him. And she already had a fairly severe bit on him—anything harsher would eventually inure him to pain and make him worse. Only when he was jumping did the horse behave. Then he galloped forward over the jumps, and responded almost entirely to balance and seat. Deirdre said, “What are you planning to do with him?”

  “Make a jumper out of him.”

  “He’s good at it, but you don’t have much control. You’ll be tempted to take him to A shows and all that.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because the courses are getting more technical all the time. There isn’t so much room for just a big jumper. He’s got to make a tight turn over a spooky vertical on flat cups to a giant Swedish oxer, then tu
rn again to a big triple combination. He’s not adjustable like that.”

  “But—”

  “Never will be. He’s a brute. It’s global with him. You’ve got to watch out for him in the stall, he’s not friendly or eager to please. The things he likes to do he likes to do for himself.”

  “He’s so young—”

  “He’s had a whole career, darlin’, and he busted out of it. I see the whole thing. He’s a gelding now, and he’s still opinonated. He must’ve been a force of primal fear when he was a stud colt. You know, Gunther Gabel-Williams said he would rather face a roomful of tigers than an angry stallion, and I always thought he was the one who should know.”

  “What can he do, then?”

  “Go for a ’chaser, that’s what I think. You just point him down the course and let him run till he’s tired, two or three miles later. I see him at Cheltenham myself, eating up that valley with those big feet.”

  “Do you think so?”

  “It’s a dying sport, love.”

  “Every horse sport is a dying sport, except there are more horses in the world being ridden for pleasure than ever in the history of mankind. Who’s going to train him?”

  “Jonathan Sheppard’s good. Someone like that.”

  “You,” Ellen said.

  “Me? I never trained a ’chaser.”

  “Don’t you want to?”

  “No, of course not. No more of that.”

  And then Ellen turned the horse in a circle, put him into a gallop, and jumped all the fences along the side of the arena, jumped out of the arena, crossed the road in one stride, jumping into the pasture, galloped, or rather swept, across it, jumped the far fence, turned, galloped down the road, and disappeared. Deirdre turned to Tiffany and said, “What in the name of all the saints is she doing?”

  “Showing off, I guess. She’s never jumped him like that before.”

  “She used to have one grain of sense, doncha know. She’s lost it now, though.”

  “I’m glad you came out, Deirdre.”

  “Are you? I’m sure it’s horses all the time with you now, darlin’.”

  “Can’t stop, can’t turn around, can’t go backward, can’t think about anything else.” They looked at each other, and Deirdre saw that Tiffany was deadly serious. Her life was full, no room for anything else. Deirdre sighed, then realized that it was a sigh of relief. She said, “Och, what a shame.”