High as the Horses' Bridles: A Novel

by Scott Cheshire

  “We should have dinner tonight.”

  Sarah and Dad had already been phoning each other for years, and this way before any talk of unhappiness, or separation, back when we were still giddy as pink pigs rolling in cool summer shit, and falling on each other every chance we got. Good God, I loved that woman. I should say actually it was Dad who phoned Sarah, and hardly the other way around. The man felt responsible for her soul.

  “You should see him,” she said. “Go visit him.”

  “Okay, stop. Dad and I are fine,” I said.

  “He tells me.”

  “And if he’s sick, he hasn’t said anything to me.”

  “Listen, I’ll call you tomorrow, I promise,” she said. “The man is talking to me about his dreams again, about your mother, and I’m not sure these are good dreams. Sadder than I’ve ever heard him before.”

  I said nothing.

  “I’ll call you tomorrow,” she said. “I have to go. Maybe dinner tomorrow.”

  She hung up. I put the phone back on my belt.

  “And happy anniversary,” I said, because hey, you know what, who knows, maybe a post-anniversary dinner with Sarah. Some white wine, polite conversation. I’d been going through such a long and predictably depressing phase, typical divorce stuff. I’d been angry, and lethargic, then just sad, and generally unmotivated, afternoon bourbons poured to the brim of a water glass. But as of this morning, I decided, it was over, finished, finito. We were beyond the cliché of the broken warring couple. We were adults.

  Beside the TV, on the far wall, there was an old picture of Sarah and me at the beach. Two silhouettes, the blaze of a setting sun. We’d lived there in the condo by the water for seven long years. I always liked beaches, but I never really liked the ocean. Too damn big. And that treadmill was tremendous, took three men to bring it up the stairs. She had given it to me the year before. Said it was her goodbye gift and, frankly, despite the fact that I did come to love the convenience, jogging a few mornings here and there, I was tired of seeing it every waking morning of my life. I wasn’t exactly a runner when we met. Running for what? Toward what? I tried asking her this once. On our very first run. We’d been dating for a few weeks. I guess it was dating, but I also feel like I’ve never dated in my life. I feel like I meet a woman, or girl—this habit goes a long way back—and I completely surrender, all the way, I’m in love. Like it or not, it’s all over. Maybe they were dating. But I certainly wasn’t. We went on a run, Sarah and I, which was probably a date for her, but for me was an expression of unbounded and obvious loving devotion.

  This was not an easy run, especially for a beginner. Bogging down in the sand, I couldn’t keep up. We went for a mile, maybe less, probably a lot less, before I was wondering how it was I’d never run on my own beach. Baywatch was popular at the time, and so I’d seen how beautiful running on the beach could be. It seemed to me I’d done something immoral, this not running. Sarah was ahead of me, her red-shorted bottom bouncing back and forth like a heart, upside down, buoyant, and persuasive. Keep running. But I was slowing, my heavy and also a little bit wet camouflage shorts weighing me down (I’d already tripped and stumbled into the water), and she was getting farther and farther away from me. I stopped running, and watched her go small, smaller and smaller, and then suddenly I started to panic. I felt like I had to prove myself; I was worthy. The last thing I wanted was for her to turn and see me just standing there, like I’d totally given up. So I bolted. I ran like I never had before, or ever have since. My calves on fire, the torn hems of my camo shorts chafing just above the knees. I ran for her, my tiny love getting small in the distance. No matter what, she would not turn and see me standing still or far behind. I willed it so. And so I ran. But then Sarah was getting bigger. Bigger and bigger with every passing second, because she had turned! I was powerless, and she had seen me for what I was, and she was getting bigger and closer and bigger and closer. Effortless for her, as far as I could tell. Then she was right there and slowing down and then she walked up to me, and said, hardly out of breath, “Hey, slowpoke.”

  She was careful to wipe her face of sweat with her forearms, and not her hands, I remember this, so she could take my face in her hands and kiss me. How do you describe a kiss without making it sound sentimental or different from any other kiss? I don’t know. There was this—a piece of sand from her mouth went into my mouth, and that single grain tasted like salt and her sweat and the whole Pacific Ocean. I didn’t spit it out when she was finished with me. I lightly bit it between my teeth, and I could not stop smiling.

  She said, “I like it when you smile. You should smile more.” She took my hand and we walked in the direction she’d been running. She said, “I don’t like running alone anymore.…”

  I stepped away from the treadmill, and told myself to stop being sappy, and looked at the clock, nine a.m.

  Already thirty minutes late for work.

  But I also happened to be the boss, which came in handy since work was seeming less and less a priority with each passing day. Until today. This day.

  I shut off the TV.

  We ran a few more times together after, but never for very long. I slowed her down, and I couldn’t go very far, anyway. Eventually I started running at the gym, by myself, and then on the treadmill at home. We took long walks together instead. She teased me once and said my occasional morning jogs did not exactly make me a “runner,” not yet. At least not according to her, who was a runner practically monkish in her devotion. Plus Sarah, with her claustrophobia—and God forbid we call it that, because she refused to admit she had a problem, “I just don’t like low ceilings”—she never ran inside. She preferred the freedom of a forest trail, the wide beach path, the airy and open outdoors. At some point I really should take my mileage outside, she’d said. She apparently believed a treadmill in the bedroom by the window was supposed to help get me there. Eventually. And she thought it would help with the whole ugly common process of divorce, that it would clear my head. On the other hand, I was convinced our problems were not at all common. I bridled at the thought of being common. She often said, “But running can save your life, Josie.”

  The clock now read 9:04.

  Amad was opening up the store, I was sure, and I expected him to call any minute now, wondering where I was. I put the mug on the windowsill and decided I would take the long way to work along the water, maybe give Dad a call. Have a chat. It would be three hours later in New York, about noon. A light spark of hungry angst fizzed in my belly.

  I opened the window and looked out over the courtyard to the palm trees and the open back windows of all four buildings, curtain-sails ballooning with the morning breeze. I saw my neighbors’ pull-blinds all gone wonky. The barbecue grills, and the folding chairs, the tikis propped in buckets of sand. I looked up over the roofs to where the birds were squawking. I was expecting seagulls, and a breeze carried over the salt-rot stink of the bait-and-tackle shop around the corner. Morning clouds were laundry white, slack, and sprawling over blue. What a day. I was very proud of this view. It wasn’t cheap. And I remember there was a flood of blue sky that morning. I saw a shark’s eye in water, a pale moon east of the morning sun because nighttime hadn’t gone home just yet. I liked to think I wasn’t one for omens. But Dad was maybe not entirely fine, and there I was way up with the clouds, fastening clothespins, and still needing a cigarette. I heard the water, the soft crash of ocean waves just across the street. I’d taken up smoking again, not sure why. This world works in circles, or maybe more like squashed, elongated ovals. I went downstairs and got a new pack from the freezer.

  Keys, wallet, phone.

  I took the path through the courtyard and around the garden I shared with my neighbors, where I never did much more than put out the occasional butt in the flowerpot soil. Bev, on the other hand, in the condo diagonally opposite, took great care with our little garden. She watered almost every morning. And Charlie, who lived right next door, often tended to a scaly potted tr
ee, his favorite. The condo walls were so thin I sometimes heard Charlie talking to his parrots. He was a volatile man of sixty, fond of bicycles—the kind of guy who’d lived alone for a long time by the water.

  Unkosher? I was already late for work. But I was heartened that Sarah and I would share an evening meal.

  Sarah liked to think she was responsible for bringing Dad and me back together—and she was. But she also liked to think that, if not for her continual upkeep, he and I would forever lose touch. She was my wife (ex-wife), his daughter-in-law, yes. But she was also a stereotypical Jewish mother to us both. Make sure he’s eating enough. Make sure you’re eating enough. Would it kill you to pick up the phone? Whether she believed it or not, Dad was forever on the borders of my brain, practically stalking every thought since Mom died. He and I talked on the phone, but also he was right there on the perimeter of my thinking, all ghostlike and circling like a buzzard. Don’t get me wrong. This is my father we’re talking about. I felt nothing but love for the man but, like I said, it was complicated.

  The palm trees out front by the street were spread up high like God’s grabbing fingers. The fiery orange and midnight-blue birds-of-paradise bursting from the ground like frozen firework moments. And that fading neon pink bumper sticker on Bev’s yellow Gremlin: “Live Each Day Like It’s Your Last.” That always seemed to me to be a terrible idea.

  I walked toward the water and called Amad. I told him not to worry, said I was on my way.

  He said, “You’re late.”

  “I know. That’s why I’m calling. To tell you I’m on my way, but I’m late.”

  He hung up on me. Very Amad.

  I walked on and waved to Mrs. Dunbar, down the street, as she swept her driveway with a push broom. She waved back. I walked by, admiring the trees on her corner lot, the tall crepe myrtle with its brown-butter leaves, and her American persimmon in bloom with orange fruit hanging in orbit like succulent planets. We said a quick hello. Persimmon trees, at least the American ones, she’d told me once before, are naturally self-fertile. Feel free to draw your own conclusions from this, as I certainly had to on many a lonely night.… And the magnolias, Mrs. Dunbar loved her magnolias; she’d gone to great pains in the past pointing out to me the overt and subtle differences between the many types. The lily magnolia, the saucer, star, and pink star magnolias, all very beautiful and hung with those enormous and puffed-out flowers, a black eye staring from the center of each. A cork tree stood on the corner by the road. A wide monster of a thing, knotted, and tall as any tree I’ve ever seen. She’d also told me the cork was not native to California, and yet this one had to be a hundred years old at least. If that’s not native, I don’t know what is. I liked pressing my fingers inside its soft and fleshy give-way bark.

  I headed for work along the beach, wondering if my father would answer his phone. Sometimes he flat-out refused even though I paid his cellular bill.

  I called, and it rang and rang and rang …

  Of all things Californian, probably my least favorite thing was the water. I liked the beach, yes, but you’d never catch me swimming. Water has no shape, and I like shape. I’ve had more than one nightmare of me going over some mammoth and rushing Niagara, on a spindly wooden raft, screaming my head off all the way down, only to wake like a petrified dead man born to his bed in the afterlife. I have to say I especially liked watching the sunset from where my street dead-ended. All clichés are true, so I say it’s our job to refresh them. I liked looking out past the grassy rise where the kids played Frisbee, and way out there beyond the boardwalk. Past the deep stretch of sand and the lifeguard’s tower of rough, white wood, and beyond the tower, where the ocean stretched out to the hazy silhouette of Catalina Island, where the sun goes down to sleep. I stood at the waterline sometimes, at the end of America, one of the ends anyway, and I imagined there was nothing else at all.

  Only days before, Amad and I made a wager that I wouldn’t actually show up this particular Sunday. He told me Teri, his wife, had been asking questions lately: Seriously, how bad a shape was the store in? Was business so bad? Should he start looking for a new job? And what about the baby? (Teri was pregnant!) I mean, if Josie can successfully close down three stores, why not a fourth? Actually, Amad told me the bet was her idea. And I couldn’t blame her. The stakes were small—the loser bought breakfast burritos and coffee—but I got the message. Otter Computer, right there on Main Street, was my first and eventually my only location. At one time there were four. Then three. Number two closed during the divorce. And finally just one left. I worked there a few days a week, but never ever on a weekend. Business wasn’t great. Like I said, I was a bit unmotivated. But not the lovely Mister Amad Singh, my only remaining employee, and closest friend (also thirty-seven, such a complicated age). Amad was all things Otter Computer. He had been with me since the beginning. And I spent a good part of my days off avoiding his phone calls. The economy was tanking and he was worried about the business, with good reason. I always told him to calm down. I said I had a plan, and I knew what I was doing. Don’t forget I built this place from nothing. Then again, I’d been saying that for a long while, and not very convincingly.

  Nevertheless, I promised him that we would turn things around pretty soon now. Do your best and stay focused. I told him once how crazy he was for having kids and, I swear, he stopped just short of slapping me across the face. I agreed to start working on Sundays because the weekend business had been getting better. Sarah would have laughed out loud at the idea of me working on a weekend.

  A buzzing at my waist; it was Dad.

  “Hey, I was gonna call you again. I just called you.”

  “Hey yourself,” he said. “I can’t talk.”

  Another one in a rush. “Okay.” I put on my talking-to-Dad voice. “So, tell me how you’re feeling.”

  “I’m fine.” He coughed. “I’m fine.”

  “Well, Sarah says you’re not.”

  “Your wife is making up stories.”

  “Not my wife anymore,” I said.

  “Ridiculous. No divorce lawyers in Heaven.” His attention must have been drifting, because his voice was getting lower, like he was talking to the room he was in and not to me.

  “Well, maybe I should look at some plane tickets.” Pause. “Dad…”

  He coughed again. “I told you, I’m fine. Call me later. Sundays, I get a little busy.”

  “I’m headed to work.”

  “A little work and a little bit of wine. Good for the soul!” he laughed out. He was all of a sudden louder now, like he was shouting into the phone. “Hey! Maybe I can show you what I got going? You should come out and visit us!”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “Josiah,” he said.

  “Like I said, I’ll look for a ticket.”

  “Hey! Josiah?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You eat yet?” he said. “I’m hungry. Tell your pretty wife you love her!”

  “I’ll call you later, okay?”

  Since the divorce, I’d asked Dad more than once to please stop calling Sarah. But he couldn’t sit back while I did apparently nothing. He’d say something like “Her blood will not be on my hands, but yours, Josiah, come the Final Reckoning.” He still absolutely refused to call me Josie. And I’d say something like “I understand, Dad, and your heart’s in the right place, I know that. But you should also know that Sarah is definitely not in agreement with this statement. And at least she’s respectful enough not to tell you this. You do remember she’s Jewish, right? Please tell me you remember she’s actually Jewish.”

  “And what about you, do you think I’m wrong?”

  I would then change the subject because I don’t answer questions like this.

  After Mom died, and then the divorce, Dad started calling Sarah even more. She’d told me, the last time we talked, really talked—this was weeks before, twenty-two days to be precise—that now he was calling her late at night and poetically describing the we
ather back east. He was sharing his more recent and memorable dreams. I recall one of her favorites, Dad in a desert eating the book of Daniel. Dipping the pages in a bowl of melted butter, one by one. If Sarah and I had ever had children, I think, they would have found her postdivorce friendship with Dad a little confusing. I found it confusing. But for whatever reason he sometimes felt less comfortable talking to his own son about whatever the two of them talked about. Whatever; we were fine. I think Sarah pitied him, maybe even hoped in some weird way that if she were generous with him it would be good for me by extension. Or I liked to think so, anyway. When I reached Main Street, I stood there at the beach end, where I came to the realization that I’d never once, not once, explicitly thanked her for being so generous with Dad, even after we split, and I felt very shitty for it.

  Amad was standing in front of the store, on the sidewalk. He was looking up and down the street, back and forth, probably looking for me. There weren’t many people about. Just before the long pier that juts into the Pacific, I saw a family of five. Two young girls and an even younger boy were having their picture taken. The boy couldn’t have been more than twelve or thirteen. They were all standing by the iron statue of an otter balancing a ball on its nose. The boy was trying to climb its smooth metal back. He was probably about Issy’s age, or Issy’s age the last time anyone had seen him, anyway. But I didn’t think of him then, watching that boy only now. Isn’t that odd? Why not think of him then? Why not think of him always? “We should all be thinking of Issy.…” I thought of Sarah instead, and of our possible dinner, and made a dumb smile. I hoped the little boy wouldn’t fall off the statue and crack his front teeth, because I’d seen it how many times before. I’d also seen ancient photos at swap meets of nineteenth-century ladies in full-body bathing suits posing by that very same statue. Nostalgia can sometimes be dangerous. Otter was always a minor tourist draw, but tourists aren’t really people. They’re all toe bouncers, invariably looking for some manifest version of Heaven. Maybe tourism is a sort of sin, I think. Whereas Otter was the kind of benign sleepy town where kids leapt from the splintering docks, where locals fished in the big sun, leathering happily until they died.