Horse Heaven (62 page)

But even though she was doing none of these things, even though she was just standing there, Rosalind was not unhappy. It was a relief to be freed of those activities for a moment, to stand here and feel a space open up right here, in Phoenix Park, a circle around her in which there was nothing at all. She took a deep breath. It went through her, top to bottom. She took another. The same thing happened. It was like a sigh. Dick had told her once that he loved to hear a horse sigh. The sound of a horse sighing was the sound of a horse giving up his fear. She took another breath. It seemed possible to walk around the park, and so she did.

Of course there had been someone. For twenty-seven years she had been careful not to make too big a deal of this someone, Henry Dixon. She saw his name from time to time still. He had spent his life rebuilding lofts in SoHo. She didn’t know anything else about his life, whether he had children or wives, for example. He would be almost sixty now, because he had been thirty-two to her twenty-three when they were seeing each other. She hadn’t had the experience to comprehend Henry when they were together, but later, with all the builders and remodelers she worked with, she saw that he had a methodical quality the rest of them shared that was reassuring, a way of moving easily back and forth between the larger project and its details. But, of course, once she was knowing builders, then she was hiring them. She could have hired Henry, had she wanted a loft in SoHo, and paid him anytime with a check. She had thought that evil thought from time to time, hadn’t she?

And why was that? Henry had treated her with perfect kindness. He was cordial, almost formal; he thanked her, he greeted her, he inquired about her day, he apologized. He was no less mannerly at the end of their affair than he had been at the beginning, and she had resented that, as if he was holding her at arm’s length. He was handsome and well formed. He touched her. He held her hand, rubbed his thumb over hers, put his arm around her waist, her shoulders, kept her against him. He seemed always to be appreciating her with his hands, no matter what else they were doing. Affection untainted by resentment. How often did you find that? She had never found it since.

Such a thing was more unique than lots of money, in her experience, but she hadn’t known that then. She’d thought the affection belonged to her desirableness, not to his sweetness. Affectionateness was something she would be grateful for now. And he was a good lover. He taught her how to make love to him, and she had thought, for a while, that that was something as well that she possessed by herself, rather than something they possessed together. And then
she’d discovered it wasn’t, and then she had forgotten about it. It wasn’t uncommon, among the women she knew, to regret the poor man you’d missed out on, to wonder, privately, if the habit of big money had a bad effect, since so many of their husbands seemed unhappy themselves, or made others unhappy. Rosalind’s mother and father would have said that big money did have a bad effect, but, then, so did everything else. Experience itself had a bad effect, and the only thing you could do in the face of it was to keep quiet and endure.

Looking back at Henry Dixon, all she could say was that it seemed like he had had a larger capacity for love than she had, that she had measured his capacity by her own, that she had failed to decide, and they had gone their separate ways, and what she turned out to have chosen was not a life based on love but a life based on something else, let’s say knowing what she wanted, which required knowing what there was to want, which required casting a cool eye over everything, judging workmanship and value, being skeptical and hard to fool. But, then, she had a been a fool about Dick Winterson, hadn’t she?

She sat down on a bench and crossed her legs. Looking out over a large lawn dotted with trees, she remembered something about Henry Dixon that she hadn’t thought of in years. He had tucked her into him when they slept. Now, of course, she and Al slept in a huge bed, far enough away from one another so that their separate sides of the bed were warmed only by the tiny, futile attempts of Eileen. But Henry Dixon had kept her close to him and it had been comforting and safe. How lonely had she been since then, since Henry Dixon? So lonely, she thought, that she had made a whole world of it. And she burst into tears.

Well, she cried and cried. She smeared her makeup and disarranged her hair and got herself wet, all the time knowing that she was feeling very sorry for herself. Loneliness, even saying that’s what she was feeling, was as common as air, was the necessary cost of autonomy, was it not? It was lonely at the top, it was lonely at the bottom, it was lonely in between, it was lonely in a group or not. Loneliness was something, she realized, that you always felt, but sometimes, for a while, forgot about. So, if you always felt it, then there was no reason to make this tremendous spectacle about it. But she did anyway. She cried some more, then pulled herself together, then cried some more, then pulled herself together again, even going so far as to take down her hair, comb it out, and pin it up again, and then, when she was putting in the last pin, she started crying again, as if it were possible for all of her bodily fluids to empty themselves through her tear ducts. She cried until she had forgotten almost entirely about Henry Dixon, and was just a self-perpetuating crying machine, and then she cried some more, until a voice very nearby said, “Och, don’t be wiping
your face on your skirt, dear. You’ll never get that out of the fabric. Here, I’ve got quite a large hankie with me, and it’s clean, to boot.”

Rosalind sat up. Next to her on the bench was a woman of about her own age, but not so well preserved. She had dark, dull hair, with streaks of gray, and she was wearing a shapeless gray sweater over another shapeless pink sweater and a mackintosh thrown open over that. She had on a pink wool skirt, and dark-brown shoes. She smiled and said, “Crying in the park. Don’t I know all about that? Maybe I’ve cried in one park or another every day of my life. Does you good.”

“Do you think so?”

“Och. Of course it does. Keeps things moving at the very least. Myself, I find it relaxing. I go home a more patient woman than I was when I stormed out of the house.”

“I don’t think I’ve cried in years.”

“Must have hurt you to do so now, then.”

“Maybe. I don’t know. I’m a mess, I’m sure.”

“Yes you are. You’re soakin’ wet, you are. But it’s a sunny day today. You’ll soon dry.”

Rosalind had expected the woman to offer to take her home, perhaps, and let her clean up there. A shuddering sigh came up right then, and Rosalind sensed that it was the last one, and she was done crying for now. She yawned. The woman said, “There you go. You’ll be takin’ a nap soon, if you don’t watch out.”

“I do feel a little sleepy.”

“No doubt.”

“I thought maybe I had forgotten to marry the man I really loved. That’s why I was crying.”

“Must have felt lovely, then, a good cry over a vain regret like that. That’s a grief to be cultivated, because you can come back to that one every time you need relief.”

Rosalind laughed.

“Och, it’s true. The lovely young lad, so handsome and true, the lovely young lass, yourself, of course, always perfectly dressed and pretty and sweet, and the life they would have had, aging gracefully and kindly, not so much the harridan you’ve gotten to be married to the tyrant you’ve made of your old man. Was he Irish, this fellow you should have loved?”

“Maybe. Most people in America are in some way or another. He was charming.”

“You know that I am one of twelve sisters?”

“No, I—”

“Twelve sisters. And I myself have ten daughters, and each of my sisters who isn’t a nun has eight daughters or more. They wrote about us in the newspapers. No one in the family has had a son in a hundred years, and we’ve given it quite a go. My husband, he said we eat those y-chromosomes for breakfast, us O’Malley girls. It’s a joke now, really. But I’ll tell you something I know from watching all these dozens of girls.”

“What’s that?”

“It never matters who you love or who loves you. Your fate is your own after all. And it doesn’t matter a whit if you celebrate it or if you bemoan it. It’s yours anyway.”

“That sounds very bleak.”

“Does it?”

“Right now it does.”

“Well, maybe. But maybe you’ll see it differently sometime.” The woman got up. She said, “You may keep the hankie. I’ve got piles.”

She went off, and that was that. Rosalind sighed and stood up. She felt emptied out now, as if the floor had dropped out of the containment building and everything inside had drained away. She began to walk.

P
ERHAPS IT WAS
the moon that awakened her. Certainly when she opened her eyes it was right there, framed by the drapes and the window sill. It was good to see it, and to recognize it, because she didn’t recognize anything else. The room was large and ornate in a well-taken-care-of but dated way. There was a door to her left, a door to her right across the room, and a pair of French doors at the end of the bed. There was a telephone next to the bed. She recognized that, too, a hotel phone. She picked it up and pushed the “0.” When a voice answered, in English, she said, “Where am I?”

“Ah, good evening, Mrs. Maybrick. You are at the Royal Ireland Hotel in Dublin, Ireland.”

Rosalind thanked him.

When she stood up to close the blinds, she had no clothes on, and she saw that her clothes, much wrinkled and very dirty, lay on the floor between the bed and one of the doors. Without closing the blinds, she sat down on the edge of the bed and picked up her skirt and a shoe. The skirt was soiled everywhere, and her shoe was muddy, too. Rosalind looked at them in wonder. Then she stood up again and looked into the mirror. Her hands went immediately to her hair, which was still partially pinned up. Sleep, or something, had put it into a terrific tangle. There were leaves and grass in it, which, looking
in the mirror, she began to pick out. The light of the moon was that bright. She recognized that this was an unusual way for her to be, naked and disheveled, but, in fact, it didn’t worry her. She looked at her watch. Her watch was gone. She knew that, whatever had happened to her, nothing had happened to her. She was safe and warm in her hotel room. She could see no cuts or bruises in the mirror, and she felt no pain anywhere. She put her arms above her head and stretched. She felt good. Rested and alert. She bent down and picked up her clothes—stockings, the other shoe, camisole and slip, jacket. Bunched in the pocket of the jacket was a large handkerchief. Her handbag was beside the door. She opened it and looked inside. Everything was there. She folded her clothes and set the pile on the desk. Now she lay down on the bed again, and applied herself to remembering what had happened to her between the departure of the lady who had given her the handkerchief and right now. Had she gotten lost? Had she fallen asleep somehow, laying her head on leaves? Had she met anyone else? Her mood as she asked these questions was only interested, not disturbed, and that, plus her freedom from any evidence of injury, reassured her that whatever had happened it was benign enough.

But it was a mystery. She could come up with nothing.

She held her hands up in the brilliant moonlight, and looked at them. They were clean. She looked first at the palms, then at the backs. Even her nails were perfect and unbroken. Fine. But her hands were interesting, pearly in the moonlight. She placed her palms together, then looked at them again, then put them to either side of her face. They were cool and comforting. Of course they were. People often remarked upon that, that her touch was comforting. Al sometimes asked her just to put her hand on his head to see if he had a fever. He never did, but he felt comforted. Dick, too. Her stepchildren and her step-grandchildren. That was funny, something she had noticed over the years without realizing. Her hands offered something whether or not her intentions were involved. Well, that was a pleasant thought. She rested her face in her hands. Ah. Yes.

Her face. Well, Rosalind didn’t have to look at her face in the mirror to know all about it. She had looked at her face in the mirror enough times over the years. Probably she would never have to look at it again. She removed her hands and turned her face toward the moonlight. Perhaps she felt it, little grains of silver light gathering on her cheeks and forehead and nose and chin, collecting on her lips and eyes, congregating on her neck, scattering through her tangled hair. Right where all those quanta of light lay clustered, there was her face, as in a mask. She could feel it tingling, the tiny interval between her self and what the light revealed. That was what you could not look past, wasn’t it? They told you that in school—when you looked at something, really you
were looking at reflected light. There was no way to look at the thing itself, at least with your eyes. Eyes were made for this world, with this sun and moon and all their imitators. Perhaps, Rosalind thought, there were other worlds inside this one that eyes were not made for. Even so, she did not touch her face, not wanting to disturb the granules of light shimmering there. Rather, she stood up and let the light cascade down the rest of her body, over her shoulders and breasts and belly and hips, thighs and knees and shins, and ankles, a dry flow of infinitesimal beads, almost audible, if the ear could hear such a lovely sound, note falling upon note, a torrent of harmonies, setting her vibrating from the crown of her head to the soles of her feet. She stood very still, so as not to interfere with this vibration, and held her arms away from her body. Still her eyes were closed, but the light of the moon was so bright that she could see everything perfectly well.

This feeling, Rosalind thought, was not unlike orgasm; it had that richness. She supposed that, if it was not orgasmic, then it was not any feeling she had ever had before; perfectly new. The sensible thing, of course, was just to stand there and feel it, quit questioning it, and so she did. And as she did, her skin diffused and the motes of light heavy upon it went suddenly into her and began vibrating within, except there was no within and there was no without. She had been invaded from all sides, taken, penetrated, removed, replaced, done for.