I laid back on the bed and felt very sorry for myself.
Alexander came in.
“What are you playing at?” he asked, standing in the doorway.
I rolled around and looked at him. “Do I have to go to New York?”
He nodded. “You do. I can’t come with you. Too much going on here for us both gone, new horses coming in from the sales, but—” he softened, and the lines crinkled around his eyes, and my heart melted a little— “I’ll miss you, you know. I wouldn’t send you if it wasn’t important. And your eye—you have such an eye, my dear. You’ll know if he’s the real thing or not. We don’t have to have him—but I think he’ll be worthwhile, and you’ll know. And I really will miss you.”
I smiled despite myself. It was just as nice to know he thought I had a good eye as it was to hear that he’d miss me. “Will you? But who will ride for me? We have too many horses for five riders.”
“Oh,” he looked about the room, thinking. “Julio can ride,” he said. “He’s been asking. Doesn’t like the horses at Middleton, says they’re half-wild. I’ll call him later. Anyway, Amy is setting up a flight for you first thing in the morning, and you can go to dinner tomorrow night with Jim Tilden, you know, the trainer with that nice Twisty Humor filly that won last week, you met him at Gulfstream last year—”
“Isn’t he about seventy-five, always wears that tweed cap like he’s a groom at Newmarket in 1892?” I interrupted. I was not a fan of Alexander’s old trainer buddy. He’d come across as a self-obsessed, lecherous old creepy—really exactly what you’d expect of a racehorse trainer of his generation—but he’d taught Alexander a lot as a young man, so I put up with him as a courtesy.
“That’s right,” Alexander said defensively, suspecting my thoughts and not impressed. “He’s very good, he can teach you a lot. I keep trying to get him to come down for a month or two; I’d love to pair the two of you up. . . and he’s good company as well.”
“Fine,” I said, not ready to fight about it, even though just once, just once I would have liked to have dinner with someone closer to my own age, and perhaps they could be a teensy bit less good for me, perhaps not come to the table with a five-part discourse rehearsed and ready on the subject of the influence of the inner dirt track at Aqueduct, or the best sprinters of 1975 and the very unique bridling techniques that had made them champions. “Where will we go? What should I wear?”
“Oh I don’t know. Take your best, certainly, he’s had a very good year and he’ll take you somewhere nice.”
“I don’t have any best, Alexander, I’ve got breeches and jeans and polo shirts.”
He looked at my closet, then at the suitcase sprawled nearly empty on the floor. It was packed with socks and underwear and nothing else. “Well, then buy something when you get in. You don’t have to go out to the track until the next day. Enjoy Thursday in the city, and then Figaro will show you the colt on Friday morning.
He threw a black polo shirt from the pile of clean clothes on the easy chair in the corner. “I like you in that.”
“That’s a plain black shirt,” I said doubtfully. It was, in fact, identical to the one I was wearing now, minus the gray horsehairs and bits of alfalfa and the aroma of horse sweat.
“You look fantastic in a plain black shirt,” he said, smiling. “That’s how I like you best. Plain and simple. You’re a real horsewoman, Alex, do you know that? And you don’t need any trappings. You’re at your best in jeans and a plain black polo. Don’t go wishing you were someone else when you’re up there, darling. You’re exactly who you are.”
It was dramatic and grade school of me, I know, but as he went out of the room, I thought, neither of us have any idea who I am.
CHAPTER EIGHT
First Impressions of New York
Oh, how predictably, the flight was a nightmare.
Flying from Orlando is a special kind of purgatory for the person who hates both airplanes and being in close proximity to small, sugared-up, overstimulated children. Even on the eight a.m. flight to JFK, the airplane was packed. Exhausted, red-eyed, sunburned, the parents who had spent thousands for a week at the theme parks fought for overhead compartment space to wedge their diaper bags and bursting shopping bags from outlet malls and Disney souvenir shops. The children scrambled about underfoot, looking for window seats at all costs, wailing for toys that had been stashed away already, causing their parents to climb up again once we’d all seemed to have found our seats, to dig through the packed bags for that one action figure or stuffed doll that could make or break their child’s day.
I wearily gave up my back seat, where the roar of the engines would have combined with my headphones to drown out the shrieking, to a twelve-year-old who had been assigned a wing seat. Here the window labeling gravely informed me of my responsibilities: like some sort of scout leader, it was my role in the unlikely event that we survived a crash to open the window, produce a slide, and mother hen the other passengers out of the burning wreckage. I glanced at the instructions and then slid on my headphones, regretting the amount of coffee I’d already had that morning. No chance of a nap, then, as I had thoughtlessly filled my veins with caffeine.
Thankfully, it was only two hours to New York, and we were blessed with tailwinds that made the airplane go ridiculously fast. I’m not sure why the little in-seat monitors were equipped with speedometers. There are some things I do not need to know, and one of them is that I am traveling at six hundred miles per hour. I sighed and switched the television station to the Today Show, live from New York. The weather forecast was—wait for it—snow. I couldn’t believe it.
It only snows during depressing trips to New York City in the movies and in novels, never in real life—or so I had thought. I had the uncomfortable impression that I was sinking into some sort of dramatic film that would end up airing overnights on forgotten cable networks, interspersed with ads for upside-down tomato-plant-pots and miraculously sharp chef’s knives. You know, with the kind of plot where everything goes wrong and the heroine dies in the end, something nice like that.
We sank through the gray clouds and onto the still-grayer earth, without even a soul-stirring glimpse of the city skyline to raise my spirits. The snow fell in little riddles and currents of air, dancing outside of the airplane window, melting on the thick glass, while very cold-looking ground crew waved the airplane on its painfully slow route to an open gate.
JFK was unlovely and unfriendly. It was hard to imagine that I might have liked it, anyway, even if instead of a vast spread of dirty tile and strangely European-looking directional signs, scattered with humanity in various states of sorrowful leave-taking and excited holiday-making, it had been some beautiful fairyland of potted palms and hanging vines and rushing waterfalls (sort of like the Orlando airport, actually). I had been in this airport half a dozen times, and every time but the first time, I’d been in the company of Alexander—could I help it if I felt a stab of loneliness for his presence at my side, even though I felt like I needed a life-long vacation from him and his damn horses more than I needed air in my lungs? I would have appreciated it if my heart and my mind would stop sending me such utterly opposing messages; and the fact that my stomach, the primary player in any feeling of lonesomeness or homesickness, was joining in on the fun did not excite me.
The best thing that I could do was get out quickly. I had managed to smuggle my bag into the cabin and stashed it into the bursting-full overhead compartment, and so I was mercifully spared the wait for the bag to come around the crowded carousels. And I was armed with an American Express card, so instead of hauling the bag up the escalators and into the strange, wailing electric train car that ran in a circuit around the whole huge airport, I was able to go straight out of the terminal, gasping as I was exposed to the teeth of the wind, and run across about ten feet of pavement, and slide into the backseat of a black town car, waiting as if it had been put there for my express purpose. I don’t know if someone else had ordered it, o
r if it was waiting for fares, and I did not then and I do not now care. It was cold.
The driver spoke just enough English to ask where to, and I gave him the hotel name, somewhere odd and offbeat south of Grand Central, in one of the hilly mansion-lined streets where Alexander’s tweedy moneyed friends strolled with their jacketed terriers to private parks gated by wrought iron and carven locks. The town car was quiet against the apparent noise of the teeming streets without, and I tried to sleep and ignore what to my eyes could only be described as squalor, but of course I leaned against the window in the end, fascinated: house after identical house with those strange gambrel roofs, just enough space between them for a sidewalk, some with swing sets wedged into tiny backyards, or barking dogs on chains, until the yards disappeared, and the sidewalks grew tinier, and the space between as well, and there was brick, brick, brick upon brick apartment house, and then shattered warehouses which looked held together with nothing more than their graffiti murals, and then the girding of a tremendous bridge and the East River and Manhattan, glittering and siren and gleaming with promise, even against the leaden gray sky and its little bursts of flurries which came swirling around at odd intervals.
We descended from the bridge and the heights above the buildings to the chaos of street-level. It was like being in a dark, narrow valley down there, below the Art Deco sculptings of the skyscrapers, in the shadows lit by neon “open” signs and rainbowed awnings of storefronts. We flashed through the streets, a dark trench-coated presence amidst the shiny yellow cabs, and turned off the avenue onto a side-street gray with winter-bare trees, pulling up at last before an imposing stone house with a spotted brass plate next to its front doors which read “Parkview Hotel.”
For all its Gramercy-Park-historical-district charm, the Parkview Hotel was no retreat of the rich and famous but a Holiday Inn disguised as a boutique. The check-in clerk, seated behind a mahogany desk with ferocious clawed feet, was a bored Jersey girl with the requisite brunette ringlets and a fuchsia sweater which clashed violently with the wine-and-cream English country house decorating scheme. She was relentlessly stereotypical. She actually snapped her gum as she looked up my reservation. I almost asked her how she did it, but managed to restrain myself. I’d never heard anyone snap gum before except for people named “Doris” or “Flo” in fifties movies. It was a nice little piece of atmosphere for the Parkview’s stifling attempt at timelessness.
The elevator was nice, though, not the little two-man jobs I had experienced in other historical buildings which scared the absolute life out of me—I am a dedicated, lifelong claustrophobic —but a full-size box with those fancy grill doors. I was perking up, coming out of my instinctual fear of the lure of the city and its complete and utter difference from the farm where I’d woken up this morning, when I stepped out into the corridor and located my room.
I let the door swing open. It went ninety degrees and stopped with a shuddering thud against the plastic stopper mounted on the narrow wall. There was a tiny hallway, a door into a little bathroom, a room large enough for a double bed and a dresser. If you were skinny enough, like me, to walk between the dresser and the bed, you could look out the window onto the street below. There was a pigeon on the windowsill, making its strange little purr as it promenaded back and forth. Some view. It was winter. I should be looking out at an electric-blue sea pounding on a beach studded with coconut palms. But this place? Oh, it was a decaying urban Holiday Inn closer to the Arctic Circle than the Equator. Quite a trade-off.
Well, who was I to care? I’d been brought up thinking Holiday Inn was pretty much as good as life got; it was only the past five years with Alexander that had given me champagne taste. Funny, with all the manure and dirt and hard ground and rain running down my neck that life with Alexander entailed, I supposed I got quite a lot of luxury as well. I hadn’t been brought up to expect an annual week in the British Virgin Islands, or the quick weekend getaways to quiet Victorian houses in the Keys, but there you had it: I was getting shirty because I felt entitled to more than two nights in a shabby hotel room by myself during a dirty New York City snowfall.
I threw my bag with some disgust onto the bed, shaking my head at the room’s size, which might have passed for a breakfast room in a double-wide trailer back in Ocala, and the chipped and battered reproduction furniture, that brought to mind more a bad period for interior design in the 1980’s than the gaslight era it was meant to evoke. Oh well. What were rooms for, but for sleeping in? I had an American Express card that I didn’t pay the bills for—not directly, anyway—and it was noon and I hadn’t had lunch yet. I would unpack and find some warmer clothes—the leather jacket I had tossed over a short-sleeved shirt would not suffice out there with the temperature near freezing and the wind whipping through the tunneled streets—and off I would go, to find some food and acclimate myself to the city.
CHAPTER NINE
The City and Horses
It was surprisingly easy to find my way around, despite the years since my solo trip—and despite my long-standing strict rule to walk the streets with neither a guidebook nor a map, so as not to give myself away as a tourist. I don’t know why I have a horror of being found out as a tourist—it must have something to do with having grown up in Florida, where tourists are regarded with the same mutinous glares as power plants and boat factories. We know they are necessary to our survival, but they are intrusive and polluting. So I had rules for myself: don’t look up too often, consult maps only in the privacy of your phone screen, and never ask directions. It’s limiting in some sprawling, poorly-planned places, like, say, Tampa, but it works in New York. The grid system its roads were built upon ought to have been copied in every city in the world, defying triangles and curves—except for the venerable Broadway, and in the old labyrinthine alleyways of lower Manhattan and Greenwich Village, where crooked roads echoed paths where farmers had driven carts and cattle had watered at long-lost streams.
I thought I’d like to find my way towards the Village, where Alexander had once taken me to hear jazz in a club in a converted garage, or maybe to the leafy streets of the Upper West Side, where his cousin had a townhouse. Here, people sat out on their porches with a beer or a glass of wine and called out to their neighbors as they walked by with their dogs. The blocks felt like little villages. I thought about it as I walked cross-town, the long blocks that run east-west, until I was at Broadway and had to make a decision. I decided on uptown, and snagged a bagel and a coffee before I found a subway to take me to Lincoln Center, and then I climbed up to walk Broadway to West 72nd Street, peeping down each side street with quiet longing. If I ever had the courage to leave Ocala, I thought, this was where I’d want to live.
And what if I did it? I let myself think about the possibility. I could walk away. It would take courage, I reflected with mounting excitement. It would take courage to leave behind everything I knew, everything I’d built my life around, and do something new. But wouldn’t it be worthwhile? What was I doing with my life? Shoving around horses before they shoved me? Training horses to run very quickly so that they could earn money? That seemed almost criminal, suddenly. There weren’t very many flattering ways to look at it. I could have done anything with my life—I was smart, I was clever, I was gifted—so why wasn’t I doing something important? Why wasn’t I doing something that would leave a lasting impact in the world, something more than a name carved into a gold-plated trophy, or even a notation in the record books. That would be nice, alright, but what difference would it make, in the end? Was that really what I was going to use my brains for, to make horses run faster, to make horses earn money? It was absurd, that’s what it was. And it was sad. I could do better than this.
And here—here was the place to run to. New York City! The home of ideas, the home of innovation! I could get a studio apartment, I could crawl up into a loft bed, I could eat take-out Chinese food at two a.m., I could write a great book which would shake the literary world on its foundations, I cou
ld.
And when I wasn’t doing those three very specific things? There would be time to fill. I had a handy skeptic’s voice and it wasn’t afraid to make itself known now, in my time of crisis. And what would you have here? it wondered, walking in the shadow of huge apartment houses, their granite facades tooled with gargoyles and animals, feet pointed towards the Museum of Natural History. Who would you know, what would you do? it pondered.
In answer, a ready reel of New York movies popped into my mind. What did those people do? Walk dogs? Go to bars? Join a writer’s group? Dog walking was a solitary thing, though, and judging by all the people I passed on the street with caps and jackets advertising various kennels, the leashes of half a dozen dogs straining in their hands, it had become a corporate thing, as well. Bars and writer’s groups sounded great in films but I was no movie star, I had no charisma or even the ability to make small talk—I was shy, how would I ever meet people? What would we ever have in common? None of these things seemed to fit my reality. Sure, that’s what they did on Friends and Seinfeld—there was always a ready-made support group for the people on television that moved to the city. But when I looked at the flood of faces on the sidewalks, pouring out of subway stations, moving with determination, a crowd of hundreds and thousands with each individual going their separate way, I couldn’t imagine finding one person who would walk the same path as me, let alone a great crowd of them, who would conveniently all live in the same building as me, on the same floor, where we lived companionably with unlocked doors and shared refrigerators.
The Head and Not The Heart (Alex and Alexander Book 1) Page 5