Horse Heaven (81 page)

“Who is Deedee?”

“The old exercise rider, who got pregnant.”

That reminded Andrea Melanie that Marvelous Martha had mentioned boyfriends. That was interesting, given her looks. Andrea Melanie’s deepest conviction was that once your looks were gone there were to be no more boyfriends, and so you had better consolidate your assets early and hold on to them. She, for example, was eighteen years younger than Jason. His first wife was his age, and his second wife was only six years younger. His fifth wife, she thought, would be thirty or forty years younger.

“I just have a feeling.”

“Excuse me?”

“I have a feeling something unethical is going on. The vet said the filly’s blood count was a bit high.”

“Well, she’s off at some farm for a while, and, frankly”—Andrea Melanie leaned close to the older woman—“I’m kind of relieved. Everything was getting rather exciting and distracting. Now we’re going to the Derby and now we’re not and now we’re running in a race and now the race is stopped and now we’re going to New York. I don’t know. It’s much too much like some kind of Hollywood movie, all these twists and turns in the plot line. You know, after we bought all that art a couple of years ago, the art didn’t then do anything. Horses keep doing things.”

Marvelous Martha had to admit that she left La Jolla less hopeful than she had been upon arrival, especially since, after everything she said, Andrea Melanie seemed more eager than anything else to press upon her an unopened bottle of La Prairie something for putting on your face.

Andrea Melanie, however, in spite of the distraction of having to deal with Marvelous Martha’s weirdness, understood fairly well that Buddy was doing
something to the horse in order to get her to the Breeders’ Cup. But, she thought, wasn’t that his job? At seventy-five dollars a day apiece for the five horses Jason had in his barn, profitability was not necessarily required, but fun was, and Andrea Melanie had been in racing long enough to know that the Breeders’ Cup was the most fun of all.

T
HE PLAN
was that all of Limitless’s connections were going to meet in Los Angeles to watch him run in the Swaps Stakes, his first Grade One race. The race was for three-year-olds, the purse of five hundred thousand dollars would certainly be worth more what with late entries, and the population of three-year-old runners had been nicely winnowed down by the rigors of the Triple Crown. Elizabeth and Plato were finishing up their week on Kauai (“All I can say,” she told Joy, “is that, for true sexual enlightenment, you have to give up everything you think you know about sex, including who is the man and who is the woman.” “How do you do that?” said Joy. “I’ll say no more right now,” said Elizabeth) and flying in the night before the race. Al was flying from Japan to Rio de Janeiro with a twenty-four-hour stopover in Los Angeles. Rosalind was coming in from Edinburgh. Krista and Pete were coming, too, though only from the East Coast of the United States. They also planned to arrive the night before. Mr. Tompkins, who had taken an interest in the horse, was flying himself and ten employees down in the DC-3. Roberto was riding several races on the undercard, so all he had to do was walk out of the jockeys’ room. Farley had to come in from Arcadia. The only one Joy doubted the timely arrival of was herself. She had to find the sense to come in out of the rain.

What she had done was, she had moved out of Farley’s condo without telling him she was going to about four days before the race. She did not then explain herself, because she didn’t know how to explain herself, or why she had moved. She had simply felt a longing for isolation. Her guesthouse up at the ranch had been perfect, she thought. Barricaded behind piles of horse magazines, tack, boots, stable equipment, work clothes, and riding gear, she had found herself with just enough to do, nothing, and the exact number of people she could handle to do it with, which was no one. She recognized this state of mind perfectly, having dwelt within it for almost all of her years in California,
and though she didn’t welcome it, she saw that it was hers and claimed it. It was perfectly relaxing in its way, because by contrast the elevated degree of sociability she had been striving for since getting to know Elizabeth seemed exhausting. Everything was exhausting. Mr. T. was exhausting, Limitless was exhausting, Farley’s love and kindness were exhausting. They must be, because she was exhausted. The day after she moved out of the condo, into a motel in Ontario, she slept for sixteen hours.

Once she had slept for sixteen hours, that is, through the night, through the morning, through the afternoon, and through her normal dinner time, there came to be a kind of languorous ease to not revealing her whereabouts, or even admitting to herself that she was “gone.” She wasn’t “gone,” because she was here, right where she knew she was, and she was fine, and another nice nap, she thought, would do her a world of good. But first, a bath. She went into the motel bathroom, a soothingly tiny and windowless space, with the bathtub stuck behind a damp, dark shower curtain. She ran the water, took off her T-shirt, and closed the door. The mirror steamed over immediately. She locked the door. The telephone was out in the other room, and she didn’t want to look at it. The tub filled and she climbed in.

F
ARLEY WAS STANDING
in the one place where he could see both Mr. T., in his stall, and Limitless, in his pen. Both horses were eating their hay, but both horses looked at him from time to time, the old horse turning his long white, dished head toward him, elegant and classic; the three-year-old popping up to regard him, his profile more unusual—not Roman-nosed, but long and straight, with those huge eyes and those nostrils round and open like the blossoms of a foxglove. It had been twenty-four hours since Joy’s departure, and he felt caught here, on this exact spot, as if, should he stand here long enough, she would materialize at the one point on earth where her three great loves—old horse, young horse, old man—intersected. He could also see the door to his office, upon which “The Tibetan Book of Thoroughbred Training” hung, grimy with the dust of years of horses. “The Tibetan Book of Thoroughbred Training” was not so easy to follow when your sweetheart had disappeared without a word. Now, at the twenty-four-hour mark, everything in the world, it seemed, urged you in an anti-Tibetan direction. “Do not pay attention or investigate” surely meant “Do not call the police.” “Do not see any fault anywhere” surely meant “Do not allow fear to turn into anger or despair.” “Do not take anything to heart” would mean “This is not something she did to you.” “Do not hanker after signs of progress” encouraged patience. And then there was “Do not fall prey to laziness.” Well, laziness would be letting this rise
up and close over him, a fear so large and enveloping that it could render him thoughtless, moveless, hopeless. And a state of constant inspection was forcing himself to observe it all, to take an interest, to see what would happen. He gave himself one more minute to follow the Tibetan way, and then another minute after that. One minute at a time was about all he could manage. In that minute, and again in the next minute, he would try to listen to his intuition that, though everything was not all right with Joy, she was safe somewhere, thinking something through or feeling something out that he could not help her with.

It goaded him to look at Limitless, though. She rode him, groomed him, walked him for hours a day. At the least sign of restlessness, she put the shank on him and led him out. She knew that Mr. T. could take care of himself, that he, Farley, could do the same, but only she could take care of Limitless, and that had turned out to be true. All day, the horse had been anxious and worried, suspicious of other handlers, including Farley himself. As Farley watched him, the colt’s head popped up again. At every sound, the colt’s head popped up. It didn’t matter whether the horse wanted Joy because he was attached to her, or whether he wanted her because he wanted to get out, it was clear that he wanted her and was expecting her. Of course, should she not come back (Farley observed that, as he thought this thought, he gave out an involuntary little moan), the horse would accustom himself to others, but with the biggest race of his life only three days away, something like this could make all the difference.

Farley turned away and walked down the shedrow. Walking down the shedrow gave him the illusion of looking for her, as if he would turn a corner and there she would be, rolling wraps or dumping a bucket of water or coiling a hose. But there she was not. He walked down the shedrow anyway, with each step listening to his intuition, with each step doubting himself and longing for advice. It had been a long time since he had wished so thoroughly to give himself away like that, to put himself in the hands of some authority and be told what to do. That would be the relief of calling the police, wouldn’t it? Or calling her mother, or calling Elizabeth. But her mother’s alarm would outstrip all but the most extreme situations, and Elizabeth, Farley still didn’t entirely trust.

He got to the end of the shedrow, looked down at his feet, looked around, turned around, walked back. The six rules of “The Tibetan Book of Thoroughbred Training,” he realized, invited exactly that, and that above all, trust. Trust that you don’t need to ask questions, trust that there is no one and nothing to blame, trust in the fact that you are not the center of the universe, trust that events will reveal their true meaning on their own, trust that you will not be overwhelmed, trust that you can see and understand if you have the calmness
to do so. It was not that he had to trust Joy, but that he had to trust life itself. And how could you do that, after thirty years at the racetrack, where shock, surprise, and amazement were the daily fare?

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.”

B
ACK 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.