Gossip of the Starlings

by Nina de Gramont

  On the drive back to the hotel, I stared out the passenger window and waited for my reflection to reappear with passing headlights. In the periodic glare, my eyes looked huge and watchful, my face luminous and childlike. I thought that maybe I wouldn’t go to the Cape after all, but spend next weekend studying for my history test and making up new jumping courses for Pippin. Getting ready for November.

  “Has she talked to you,” my mother asked, “about that whole business?”

  We hadn’t mentioned the Butterfields in over an hour, but I knew exactly what she meant: Skye’s ardent activism—rallying against the production of plutonium, saving Massachusetts at the expense of herself. Her misguided championship of the scholarship student, who’d turned out to be barely literate.

  “He wasn’t stupid,” Skye had told me. “He was good at math. He’d just gone to such bad schools, came from such an unfortunate background.”

  Away from Skye, it could be hard to believe the things she’d told me. How her father had reproved her actions behind closed doors but defended them under the glare of the spotlight—even publicized them when the media took its complimentary spin. On television, her father never seemed like he was reading a speechwriter’s script. He sounded like he was speaking, from the top of his head and from his heart.

  “Catherine,” my mother prodded.

  “Only a little,” I said, to the looking glass of the car window.

  MY MOTHER HAD BOOKED her own room at the Hilton, not wanting to interfere with my sleep. Riding up the elevator after saying good night to her, I ran into Billy Frye, another rider from the Medal Maclay circuit. He’d placed third in our class today.

  “Hey, Catherine,” he said, still wearing his riding clothes. “Congratulations.”

  “Thanks.”

  “This your last year to qualify?”

  “No,” I said. “I’m not seventeen till December.”

  He whistled. Not much taller than me, he had fair hair and very red lips.

  “A whole ’nother year,” he said. “Lucky. The rest of us are up against the wall.”

  We got off at the same floor and walked down the hall together. “Want to come in?” he said, when we reached his door. “I’ve got some coke.”

  I hesitated. Not because I worried about him making a pass—like most boys who showed seriously, Billy was gay—but because I wanted to be clear and sharp the next day. I wanted to win. To come home with a championship ribbon from Harrisburg: that would be infinitely better than the very best cocaine.

  “Come on,” Billy said. He opened the door, and I saw there were already several riders in his room, drinking and snorting lines from a glass table. “You did so well today, you barely even need to place tomorrow.”

  I wondered if he remembered what had happened to me last year.

  “Catherine,” someone called from inside. “Come join us.”

  The night stretched out in front of me—restless and full of worry, alone in my hotel room. I wished John Paul had concocted a way to stay with me.

  “Okay,” I said, to the as yet unrecognized friend. And followed Billy into his room.

  IT WAS WELL PAST midnight when I got back to my room, wishing I were drunk—so that I could fumble for the lights, then collapse and pass out in my bed. Instead my instincts operated on overdrive, my eyesight nervously keen. I found the light switch immediately, knowing I would never be able to sleep, and praying the hotel had HBO.

  The fluorescent bulbs flickered in a nervous haze, and John Paul sat up in my bed.

  “Hey,” he said, squinting at the clock. “Where’ve you been?”

  I dove across the room and landed on top of him, too overjoyed to curse the wasted hours in Billy’s room. John Paul flopped back and stretched his arms behind him.

  “You’re here,” I said, sitting on his stomach, my legs straddling his rib cage. “How did you get into my room?”

  “Let’s just say I’d like to see you in a hotel with better security.”

  He sat up, pushing me slightly backward, and took my face in his hands. I submitted to his careful examination as the fantastic and intimate scent of his sleep settled around me, along with the probing gaze I would have found intrusive from anyone else in the world.

  “You’re very high,” he said, and I laughed at this diagnosis. John Paul never did coke. Though he appeared placid to the outside world, beneath his veneer of calm anxieties roiled. He disliked any added intensity.

  “Here,” he said, and reached into the drawer of the hotel night-stand. I slipped off of him and lay on the polyester comforter, staring up at the ceiling. My toes beat an uncontrollable beat. The drugs, more speed than cocaine, had plastered my eyes wide open. I could barely blink, let alone close them to rest. But John Paul—in addition to the glorious fact of himself—would provide relief. He would roll a joint, which we would smoke together. He would make love to me for the first time in a long and aching eon. Beyond that, the promise of sleep—at least a few hours—resting in his arms. I let my fingers walk across his broad, bare back as he fiddled with rolling papers.

  At his home in Saw River, John Paul kept a cockatiel named Pretty Girl. He and his mother had found her one summer, abandoned in an Essex house they’d been hired to clean. The bird and her mate had been left in their cage for at least a week, and the male had resorted to feeding on Pretty Girl. She was close to death, starving, bald, and despondent from the repeated attacks. John Paul’s mother sent him to the vet with both birds. Though the male was thriving, and Pretty Girl close to death, John Paul had the male put to sleep. He worked out an installment plan to pay for Pretty Girl’s revival.

  I had only known him a few weeks when we took the bus down to his house in Connecticut, where he introduced me to the bird. Then and there I decided: let the other girls love John Paul for his bluer-than-cornflower eyes. I would love him for that scrawny and hideous cockatiel, pressing her face against his cheek with all the urgency of her posttraumatic stress disorder. She was overjoyed at his return, and furiously jealous of my presence. I would love John Paul for the way he kissed Pretty Girl’s beak and scratched her terrible neck, which never had regrown its feathers.

  Now, in the hotel room, I let him bring the lit joint to my lips like desperately needed balm. And I thought about telling him how much I loved him, and all the reasons why. I may have even opened my mouth to do so.

  But before I could speak, he laughed.

  “What?” I said, staring into his face, which stared back at me with the fondest and most intent regard. “What?”

  “You look like you should have hearts and flowers floating all around your head.”

  “Well good,” I said. “Because that’s how I feel.”

  I wrapped my arms around his neck and let his nearness float me through what ought to have been a long night, tortured with jittery regret.

  The best thing about John Paul: wish for him and he’d appear. Think how much I loved him, and he’d say, “I love you, too.”

  HE LEFT BEFORE first light, not wanting to risk being caught by my mother. I washed the smoke from Billy’s room out of my hair, even though it would still cling to my blazer. Then I went downstairs to my mother’s room, where she ordered breakfast. Under her direction, I ate in a miserable haze—gulping coffee and forcing down a croissant with jam.

  “I really, really can’t,” I told her, when she pressed me to eat the plateful of scrambled eggs.

  At the stadium, Pippin acted like he was hopped up on coke. From the moment I saddled him he pranced and back-stepped, pulling on the bit as if it sat under his tongue. I dismounted three times on my way to the ring, to make sure the bridle was on properly, then finally decided to lead him instead. He shied away from a girl in the audience, her Walkman barely audible through her headphones. My only hope for calm had vanished along with John Paul. Nerves shot, I barely contained myself from giving the reins three sharp and punishing yanks.

  “Hush,” I said instead, stroking the gor
geous line of his neck. Already sweating, and we hadn’t even reached the ring. “It’s okay,” I told him. “It’s okay.”

  I longed for Bloom, who had always been able to sense and accommodate my moods—one of those rare, empathic animals. Whereas with Pippin, I had to be aware of his state, no reciprocal allowances made. I had to cater to his unpredictable spirits, finding a way to calm him even when my hands shook and my eyes stung.

  “You smell like cigarettes,” said Captain Zarghami, meeting me by the gate, and I pictured the thin whorls of smoke curling up from Billy’s hand.

  “Some men were smoking in the hotel restaurant,” I said, the lie evident in my husky voice.

  He frowned at me, then went to Pippin’s head and whispered in his ear. The horse jerked his head away—he didn’t like men, no matter how familiar. Zarghami continued to pat his neck, looking worriedly back at me, as if he couldn’t figure out what happened between last night and this morning.

  We both turned to the ring as the announcer called Billy Frye’s name. Watching him ride his exquisite gray—half Arab, half Thoroughbred—felt like agony. Billy had beautiful carriage, slim as a girl, and he flew through the course with perfect form. I hated him—not only because he had so easily talked me into partying while John Paul lay waiting in my room but because he could perform so well, so serenely and seamlessly. Not the barest evidence of the coke and the cigarettes, or even the Jack Daniel’s he’d been throwing back between every line. Billy couldn’t have slept any more than I had. Why did I feel so wrecked and ruined? Why could my friends perform perfectly well, the saturnalias undetectable, while I suffered such sabotaging hangovers?

  Pippin startled at the applause for Billy. Zarghami held his reins while I mounted. As the next rider trotted into the ring, I ran through the course in my head for the last time—determined to remember the order of the jumps, despite my foggy brain and quivering hands.

  Number fourteen, Catherine Morrow on Corner of the Sky.

  If it had been Bloom, I might have been able to survive on automatic. With Pippin, I had to consider and monitor the slightest movement. I squeezed the reins on every post. Watched his head, his ears, his shoulders. Took an extra circle before approaching the first fence. The moment I let him have his head, we sailed over the uneven white poles. I heard the echoed pounding of hooves, muffled by the dirt floor. I had a strange, nervous sense of performing underwater, an unnatural throb all around me. Stands stood in unearthly silence—noise drowned out by my concentration—as I steered Pippin toward the vertical wall. Nearly four feet high and we cleared it with inches to spare. A faint spattering of applause, and for a moment I felt a streak of panic—that I didn’t know which fence to head toward next.

  The image of Billy’s equitation came into my head, and I remembered him turning to the right. A too obvious command, I realized—recalling the way his hand had moved to the inside, his knuckles rotated in an error the judges would not miss. His performance had not been flawless after all. I shifted the slightest weight to my right boot, my hand work invisible. Pippin and I galloped toward the brush box, my body out of the saddle. We were just about to leave the ground when a flashbulb popped from the front bleachers.

  Pippin stopped short, sending me forward, over the jump without him, my hip smacking the edge of the flower filler with a thwack. Landing on the opposite side, dust rising up around me as my back hit the dirt floor.

  I knew the wind had been knocked out of me, and tried to suppress the terrible noise issuing forth from my lungs—reverberating in the quiet arena, everyone standing to see if I was hurt rather than simply humiliated.

  IN MY LIFE I had been injured by horses again and again. I’d been thrown and kicked, bitten and stepped on. Pippin himself had dragged me, the day we first went to look at him. When his breeder handed me his reins outside the stable, before I could mount, Pippin broke into an uninstigated gallop. I fell forward, onto my stomach, the reins still clutched in my hands. And instead of letting go, I clung with the fiercest clench of adrenaline. I let him drag me the quarter mile to the riding ring, while my parents chased after us, screaming at me to let go. I bumped over the dust, perilously close to his flying hooves but hanging on as tightly as if the reins had been tethered to my wrists. Eventually my slight weight bore down on him. As we approached the riding ring his gallop eased into a trot. I pulled myself up on the reins and dug my heels into the ground, forcing him to a stop. My mother marched over for a brief inspection. She bent both my arms at the elbows, checking for breaks, then dusted off my jodhpurs and pointed to the saddle. The cardinal rule of horsemanship: get right back on immediately or risk never riding again.

  My hands and legs had tingled with long, painful scrapes. A million times, I had been hurt by horses but never in such concert with my own stubborn will. I climbed onto Pippin’s back, every muscle trembling. The breeder had watched, horrified and frowning, certain that he’d lost the sale. Not knowing that my father had been dubious until he saw the tenacity of my ill-conceived grip.

  Now, with a thousand eyes watching, I got to my feet and held up my hand to indicate I hadn’t been hurt. Zarghami changed his direction—stopped heading toward me in favor of chasing down Pippin. I didn’t bother to help him but picked up my crop and marched out of the ring. Ripping the number off my back and heading to the stables.

  “YOU STILL HAVE next year,” my mother said, back at school, walking me up the path to White Cottage. On the seven-hour drive from Pennsylvania, she had repeated this phrase again and again. Along with other insincere words of comfort, disappointment apparent in her strained tone and deflated carriage.

  Ms. Latham saw us approaching and came outside to introduce herself.

  “Mrs. Morrow,” she said, holding out her hand and hunching over in a way that would surely irritate my mother. A tall, broad woman, Ms. Latham wore her thick blonde hair under a kerchief, and a Mondale/ Ferraro button pinned prominently to her chest.

  “Catherine’s doing wonderfully well here,” she said, although she would have had scant knowledge of how I fared in school. Ms. Latham lived at Esther Percy in exchange for her monitoring duties and worked in town as an apprentice to a potter. But my mother did not know this, and so the assurance from an apparently reasonable adult seemed to relieve her. She accompanied me upstairs with an expression that nearly resembled a smile, finally shifting the conversation to everyday topics. Had I heard from Susannah. Did I like the French teacher. Was my bed comfortable enough.

  Then she kissed me good-bye—a lipsticked peck on each cheek.

  “I am proud of you, my darling,” she promised, her emphasis only suggesting the many ways I’d failed her. She signed my permission slip, wound her cashmere scarf around my neck, and tucked a generous wad of bills into my coat pocket. “For your weekend,” she said.

  From my window, I watched her leave the building in what remained of dusk. Her trim, elegant form looked delicate and unadorned. I noticed that as she walked she looked around, turning her head toward the other students, as if she hoped to see Skye Butterfield—or even the senator himself—strolling across the commons. Funny, to think of my mother being starstruck by one of my friends.

  I brought her scarf up to my nose and inhaled her perfume. Chanel or Joy. I was never good at identifying scents, but closed my eyes against the softness of wool and fragrance.

  And I remember clearly: wishing to be more deserving of her pride, and vowing to become so.

  5

  THAT MOMENT IN THE WINDOW, watching my mother leave, the vow to behave: it only lasted until John Paul called, early in the week. At Waverly, students were allowed phones in their rooms. At Esther Percy, with so many of us sentenced to girls’ school because of wild pasts, there were fewer personal privileges. I found his message on the community bulletin board and called him back on the rotary-dial pay phone in the student lounge.

  “I don’t get it,” John Paul had said at the hotel, when I told him Skye’s plans. “I thought she
was famously well behaved.”

  “Not so much, it turns out.”

  On the phone, we ironed out the details, one hand curled over the receiver to muffle my words. John Paul would borrow his cousin’s car and he, Drew, and Susannah would pick us up at the bus station in Hyannis. Susannah, putting her deep voice to use, pretended to be Skye’s mother and called Mrs. Chilton, Esther Percy’s student dean. She told her that a car would come for Skye and me on Friday afternoon.

  If I hadn’t been thrown at Harrisburg, if I’d been headed to the National Horse Show, maybe it would have given me a reason to abstain from this sort of behavior. But what else was there to do with the rest of 1984? When the shows started again in January, when performance became important again, maybe then I would tell Skye that I could no longer be her tour guide to delinquency. In the meantime, at least I had something to give the days a color beyond the fading foliage.

  “It’ll be fun to meet your friends,” Skye said, as we walked down the long dirt road from school, our backpacks over our shoulders. There was little danger of being caught, even if somebody saw us: students were allowed to hitchhike into town after classes. Nobody but Mrs. Chilton expected a car to collect us, and she left school for Boston every Friday at noon.

  We felt giddy with lawlessness and possibility. New England fall had taken one of its unpredictable vacations; we moved through the warm light of Indian summer. Skye’s decadent hair rose and fell, and the damp earth felt like a springboard beneath my steps.

  “I think this is the second time in my life nobody knows where I am,” Skye said. She threw her arms over her head, twitching fingers through the crisp air, and skipped a step or two, perhaps affirming her continued existence.