Horse Heaven (17 page)

Rosalind could see herself as clearly as she could see Al. Love had broken her into parts. There was the psychotherapeutic part, all about her father and mother and sisters. Her mother attentive and perfect, her father taciturn, the two of them fighting (frequently? infrequently?). There was the social-class part, all about moving from middle-class Appleton to upper-class Manhattan. She knew she was a newcomer, and even if those around her didn’t expect her to act with perfect propriety, and, in fact, saw the perfect propriety as Appletonian, and the perfect propriety that she took refuge in was the very thing that
prevented her from having any relief, giving that up was too great a cost for getting relief, rather like being disemboweled, she thought. There was the temperament part. Stubborn she was, stubborn she had been, stubborn she had been labeled. These qualities were said to be inbred. There was the feminine part. She knew Dick didn’t love her as much as she loved him, if he loved her at all. Any woman in such an undignified situation had only her dignity to protect her. Then there was the part about being an arrogant fool, which she had been when she thought that day on the plane that there was some little thing she needed, and then she had reached out and taken it, and it had been more than she could handle, and so she had made her bed, and now it was just that she had to lie in it. Then there was the part about being vulnerable for the first time in her life. The fact was, she was rather a nicer person these days than she had ever been. People smiled at her in a genuine way. She herself was warmer. She got touched more often, addressed with endearments more often, complimented more often on things other than clothes. She got thanked and thanked others more sincerely. Several of her friends told her she had unbent; a couple of the ruder ones told her they liked her more and that others liked her more, too. Then there was the part about the great sex. The sex was great. She was transported, Dick was full of compliments. She recognized compliments as compensation for lack of love, and their recent increase in number as a way for Dick to try to persuade himself that there was something in this for him after all, but Al wasn’t much of a complimenter, so the compliments were delicious to her.

Well, she saw Dick, too, dissected and labeled. His job terrified him. Once in a while, when they spent a night together, he was as likely to wake up with a nightmare as not—horses breaking down, horses trapped in the starting gate, horses on top of jockeys and the jockeys screaming underneath the bulk, incapable of being found. Once he woke up in the morning, a real morning, the morning of his day off, so after sunrise, and told her that he dreamt that every horse in the barn had been X-rayed and found to have four broken legs, even though they were all standing peacefully in their stalls. The track officials had come around and insisted they be euthanized on the spot, and he had awakened just as he had agreed to do this. He had awakened with a cry, and said to her, “Now I’m sure they all have stress fractures.” He felt isolated from his wife, and unable to help her. He had no friends that Rosalind would recognize as friends, except her. And he talked to her only, it seemed, under duress, when he couldn’t hold it in any longer. He was some twenty years younger than Al, and so he didn’t seem so locked against himself, but he did seem impossible to save. She had discovered the limit of her powers with him—at most she could
distract him from a little anxiety from time to time. At the worst, her presence gave him anxiety, and she became who neither of them could bear for her to become, a source of discomfort for him and a reason to get away.

What she learned about love was that it was impossible. What she learned about life was that it took more strength to survive the more you knew. What she learned about horses was that anything could happen, even after you cared. Before she had cared, she found this rather interesting. Now she found it frightening, and there was no remedy for it.

All of these thoughts crossed her mind in an instant when Dick entered her with a groan and she felt the usual surprise of his foreskin slipping back and all inside her turning to warm taffy. All of these thoughts intervened between his groan and her cry a moment later. Then all of these thoughts let her go, and she lost herself once again in the blackness of this illness, this love, this torment, this presence, this terror, this detonation. Oh my God, she said, Oh my God. Oh, my God.

Eileen came out from under the bed and stood alert, staring at Rosalind and vibrating her little stump of a tail back and forth. The cries on the bed increased, an awkward harmony to Eileen’s ears. And then they stopped. Eileen turned and went over to the radiator and lifted her leg. She was a female. On the other hand, she was a female Jack Russell. So she lifted her leg.

Dick did what he often did when he was pretty sure Rosalind had fallen asleep. He turned his head and quietly looked at her. Maybe the thing was that she was the first blonde he had ever slept with. She had beautiful hair, thick, streaked honey and champagne, straight. Usually she wore it up. When it dropped, which always seemed like something that it did of itself rather than something she or he did to it, it fell down her back in a thick curtain. Her skin was of the same smoothness and paleness as her hair, and her eyes were pure blue. She generally wore pale colors, too, tawny buffs and beiges and taupes, down to her lace underwear. She did not show wear and tear of any sort. Had he not known how old she was (five years older than he was), he would never have been able to guess. Over the last weeks, perhaps because of this all-over blondeness and smoothness, he had found her an extremely restful person to be with. Everything she did, every gesture she made was measured, not, he thought, as a result of cerebration, but as a natural physical deliberateness. Even her smile was slow, even her sexual response was slow. Her sexual response had fascinated him in its contrast to Louisa’s. All their life together, it had seemed that Louisa needed holding back. Making love to her was an act of splendid self-restraint—their charm was “not yet; not yet, not yet.” Making it last until neither could bear it any longer was the challenge and the game. Making love to Rosalind was quite different. More often than not, he never
knew exactly when the lovemaking started, where it was going, whether either one of them was aroused or not. Arousal slipped in unannounced and took them by surprise, or, rather, took him by surprise. Nothing seemed to take Rosalind by surprise. At first he had wondered when this slowness would turn into work, but it never had. Making love to Rosalind was like a long contemplation of something, as restful as she was. He had not thought this affair would last as long as it had, given the pummeling he got from his conscience, but he had been unable to give up this contemplation, though what he told himself was that she would get tired of him sooner or later, since he didn’t give her much time or attention and the only thing he seemed able to do was complain about his job. And he had stopped going to his therapist.

Lately he often wondered whether he was getting through to Rosalind at all. Her natural calm seemed to have enlarged, and he figured that this was a sign she was getting bored with him. Perhaps, he sometimes thought, that would be a relief, though the things it would be a relief from, like secrecy and lies, he had fully incorporated into his daily routine. Certainly it would be a relief from the betrayal of Louisa, though, on the one hand, he had accustomed himself to betraying her, and on the other, the betrayal would still have taken place even after it ceased until some unknown date and mode of confession and penance, to which he did not look forward. He and Rosalind had never had an argument or even a conflict. Dick did not know what this meant, since it was a first in his life. Was the source of this her innate composure? Was it the sign of true love or the sign of true indifference? Was it the result of the infrequency of their meetings? Was it because he wanted to please her or she him? Life with Louisa and with horses had taught him that it was in conflict that you saw into the other. Without conflict, he felt he was seeing only a surface. At one point in the fall, he had been sitting with another owner and his wife, and Al and Rosalind had come up in conversation. The husband said, “I always think wheels within wheels when I see those two.”

“Hardly one wheel,” said the wife dismissively. “That woman has the least to say of anyone I ever met. All she is is good manners.”

Dick found himself smarting on Rosalind’s behalf remembering this remark, though he hadn’t paid much attention at the time, but also wondering if what he saw in her was only something he himself made up. These were all issues he could discuss with his therapist, if he got up the guts to go back to him.

She opened her eyes. He rose up onto his elbow, eased the hair out of her face with his right hand, and said, “How are you?”

“Lovely, thanks.” Only then did she turn to look at him. She regarded him for a moment, and he saw that she was beautiful, but there was something about her face that did not invite you to respond to her as a beauty. He
thought, I am not man enough for this. Maybe that was why Rosalind was married to Al. Al was such an insensitive lout that he wouldn’t be able to see Rosalind for what she was.

Al. Of course, Dick had feelings about Al, too, and they were not a credit to himself. Once he had seen Al as just another owner—a pushy know-it-all, like most owners, who had to be prevented from getting a copy of the condition book, but basically human. Now he saw Al as a brutish schlemiel who never did anything right. The way he stood offended Dick. The way he spoke offended Dick. The way he walked offended Dick. Even the way he always paid his bills on time offended Dick. And Dick gloried in being offended on Rosalind’s behalf. In this, Dick felt his only kinship with Eileen. Dick knew enough to know that it was his own offense against Al that was offending him, but he let it wash over him anyway, raising his hackles. He said, “When do you have to go?”

“I have a while. Are you running anything tomorrow?”

“Two. One in the second and one in the sixth.”

“I have to fly back to New York tomorrow. I have a dinner party to give Saturday night.”

“Then I won’t see you for a while.”

“When is one of our horses running again?”

“There’s a good race for Laurita a week from Saturday.”

“We’ll see, then.”

It was these sorts of simple exchanges that Dick found so pleasant. Their voices were relaxed and accepting. The certainty of the future was a comfort. Horses might die between now and then, but this space would be here to return to, Rosalind would be radiating assurance, this room, like the other rooms in the condo she and Al had bought in Florida, would remain cool, bare, and cleanly Japanese in style.

Now Dick closed his eyes. He felt her put her hand on this shoulder and begin to stroke him there, from the shoulder along the side of his neck, up into his hair and down, around to his trapezius muscles, then down his biceps, back up his neck to his cheek, along his chin, down his throat, her whole palm slipping over him. He fell asleep.

Eileen jumped on the bed, walked up to the pillow, snaked her little nose under the covers, and squirreled down next to his belly, her rough coat against the hair on his chest.

After stroking Dick to sleep, Rosalind put her hand over her own face for a moment, then got up. She went into the bathroom and did her hair, then went into the closet and chose a wheat-colored linen dress, sand-colored shoes, and a coral necklace. She put off leaving the bathroom for as long as possible, because
she was afraid of her last look at his face. Almost two weeks without seeing him was a vacuum that could well suck her right out of herself. But that was what she always thought, and somehow the time had passed before. She changed her shoes, to a darker color, then stepped across the bedroom and sat down on the bed. His eyes opened. They were hazel, almost green. She touched his lips with her thumb, then, as he watched, touched her thumb to her own lips. She said, because she dared not say anything more, “Thank you, darling.” He nodded sleepily, and said, “I thought you had a while.”

“I have to stop a couple of places on my way to dinner.”

“Oh.” She noted the disappointment in his voice. “Rosalind—”

But he paused. She hated that, when he paused. She knew he had something important to say to her. Part of the reason she was leaving was to avoid that, because she was so sure it would be that this couldn’t go on. She put her hand to his lips to shush him, and he shushed. She held his glance for a minute or two. That was enough to fix his face in her mind. She nodded slightly then, telling herself to go, and she stood up. Next to his chest, Eileen roused, pressed herself against his skin, and then emerged. The last thing he heard Rosalind say was “Come on, Eileen. Come on, sweetie.” The door closed behind her. Dick licked his lips and said what he hadn’t had the courage to say in her presence, “I love you.”

Out in the hall, waiting for the elevator with Eileen sitting at her feet, Rosalind remembered something she had been meaning to tell him, that she had come up with a name for that two-year-old. What it was, was a label for her love for him, Dick, though she would have been too reserved to tell him that part. It was “Limitless.” Then she closed her eyes and wondered if she would have to do something dramatic and messy in the end.

W
HEN HIS CELLULAR RANG
and Dagoberto Gomez answered it, standing on the trainers’ stand at Gulfstream and enjoying the sight of the palm trees swaying in the infield, it was Gordon Lane, the owner of Epic Steam, calling. He was a considerate man—he always called at 7:30 a.m. Eastern Standard Time, no matter what time it was where he was. Dagoberto had met him in person only once, about two and a half years ago, at the Keeneland September sale. The person Dagoberto usually dealt with concerning the man’s
yearling purchases was a bloodstock agent from England, Sir Michael Ordway. Dagoberto, as an exile from Castro’s Cuba and a resident of Queens, felt that he had earned a dispensation in regard to sorting out the relative social positions of Mr. Gordon Lane and Sir Michael Ordway, toady extraordinaire. Once, his wife showed him a picture, in
Vanity Fair
, of Mrs. Gordon Lane, a princess of some sort, but Dagoberto had never seen her or the two daughters, also princesses. However, when contemplating the sirs and the princesses, Dagoberto sometimes felt the smallest ghost of a shadow of a momentary mote of sympathy with that shit of the twentieth century, Fidel Castro, and wondered if his chosen career of training racehorses wasn’t just the littlest bit corrupt after all. He said, “Good morning, Mr. Lane. How are you this morning?”