I wasn’t the material for New York City. This city would chew me up and spit me out, as the saying went. I was fit only for horses and barns, throwing hay bales and wiping out noses, a nanny and a trainer to thousand-pound beasts. I could wish to be someone else, but it wouldn’t matter. I looked around the streets with longing. It only made me wish for them more. It was like looking over at the cool table in middle school. Why didn’t they like me?
I turned left at Central Park West and kept walking north, past the huge apartment houses that overlooked the park. I found myself high in the eighties as the early winter dusk began to fall, and when I sniffed the air I caught a scent of home, and so I turned and walked the long block and a half down to where the Claremont Riding Academy was hidden on the side street, with the smells of hay and ammonia wafting down from the open windows of the second story stalls.
I’d seen the odd stable before, and it had made all the equestrian magazines when the owner announced that the stables would be closed permanently, so I knew that I’d caught something fleeting and soon to disappear by getting in this surprise visit: the horses would go to new homes off the island, as the last public riding stable in Manhattan disappeared into a sea of luxury condominiums. It wasn’t especially heartbreaking for me to think of the horses going to farms with turn-outs, to normal lives where they didn’t have to ride a cargo elevator to the first floor arena, which didn’t seem much larger than a twenty-meter circle, or walk through city traffic to get to the park’s Bridle Path, overrun as it was with joggers, relentlessly pounding through woodland reveries with their earbuds firmly lodged and their iPods set to shuffle. But it was hard on the kids. Imagine living in a town where you could do anything you wanted, learn anything you were interested in—except ride horses. And if you couldn’t ride horses, what else mattered? It was a gap that couldn’t be filled. I kept questioning that, and I kept coming up with the same answer every time.
There was a riding lesson going on and the arena doors were propped open. I peered inside and watched a middle-aged woman in full-seat breeches and custom dress boots riding a flat-backed gelding with his head in the air. He was a good-looking Thoroughbred who had been around the block a few times, with bumpy cannon bones that had seen many splints and the waterfall pattern of pin-fire scars down his forelegs. He had a patient look to his eyes, as if he knew that his life was ridiculous, but that there was hay waiting in his stall if he was just nice to this rider. I adored him instantly.
“Ask him to put his head down and move nicely for you!” the instructor called.
The rider see-sawed at the reins, pulling back and forth on either side of his mouth, and ground at his back with her crotch, mistaking it for her seat bones, and the gelding obliged her conflicting directions by putting his head still higher, his mouth gaping open, his ears back and listening to her, waiting for a signal that made some sort of sense. The instructor called for her to lower her hands and she called back, “I can’t, he’ll run away!” and I felt a sense of tragedy that she thought she could be run away with on the lower floor of this weird New York City apartment house, on a Thoroughbred who had probably once been in his element on a mile-long oval, deep in soft sandy loam, with his rider’s hands high on his neck, pressing into the mane, asking him for more, more, and still more. . .
He had left behind the training farm and the racetrack and had come to live in the city. If he could live as a rural transplant in the city, maybe I could, too. And if he hated it, maybe I would, too. That horse held the key. I felt like he was the only being in the world I could find to ask, and he wouldn’t be able to answer me. The rider brought him to a choppy, off-balance halt and he stood, splay-legged and awkward as a foal, in the center of the little arena. He saw me, a shadow in the doorway against the just-lit streetlights, and his ears pricked with interest.
If I could get close to him, just lean up against him, he would tell me if he was happy or not. I just knew it. I edged closer to the line where the sand of the riding arena spilled onto the concrete of the sidewalk.
But the Thoroughbred wasn’t the only one watching me. I turned away as the riding instructor noticed my non-paying presence and gave me an evil glare. I was being cast out of the garden. The street was deserted, the sky above lighting orange as the low clouds reflected the streetlights back down at the city. The commercial streets ahead seemed unnecessarily bright and loud. I wanted to stay here in the dark street with the smell of ammonia and alfalfa drifting down to me from the steamed-up windows above, but all at once the cold, and the long day, and all my mental turmoil caught up with me, and I realized that I was shivering, completely exhausted, and had a dinner date in three hours, which seemed unreasonably late, with a sixty-eight-year old man who would be sporting both a tweed cap and a brass-capped walking stick.
And then, once again, it started to snow. . . heavier this time, sticking to my new fleece cap and the shoulders of my new black peacoat.
I started towards Broadway so that I could look for a train station.
CHAPTER TEN
Escape
Jim Tilden swept off his flat tweed cap and gave me a flamboyant bow as I came up the steps of the vast, airy restaurant in Union Square. His cane swung out to one side and knocked the elbow of a passing busboy, who responded with a muttered Spanish curse and a flick of the greasy towel sticking out of his back pocket. Tilden, ever a gentleman, did not deign to notice the discomfiture of the back-of-the-house help. He merely smiled, showing gleaming dentures, and offered a hand to escort me through the multiple doors of the New York building in winter lock-down.
“My dear!” he said gallantly. “It has been far too long! I wish you had convinced old Alex to come with you, but I suppose there is no tearing him away from his young stock in the springtime!”
“No,” I agreed weakly, reflecting that it was going to be awkward to be spoken about in the third person this way. No one called Alexander “Alex” anymore, not just in deference to me, perhaps, because he’d told me that he’d outgrown the name years before. But I imagine for a lot of his truly old friends, I was the driving reason why his boyhood nickname had been abandoned. Nice of him, really. I hadn’t thought about it much before, but he must have insisted to his circle that they not refer to him as “Alex” anymore, and of course Tilden would not have listened. . . Tilden never listened to anyone but himself.
“Now my dear, I know you must be absolutely freezing, but come along this way, for I’ve persuaded the maitre’d to put us in this cozy corner away from those big drafty windows—right here! And let me order you a hot drink—She’ll have a coffee with brandy,” he confided to a waiter, winking conspiratorially, as if he was going to drop an engagement ring, or a roofie, something unexpected and unwanted, into my unasked-for drink. I would have preferred whisky to brandy, ten times over, but I had dined with Tilden before. He thought the essence of good manners was to micro-manage his guests so that they had absolutely no worries at all, presumably so that they concentrate on absorbing his startling wit and knowledge as he presented it to them without pause for breath.
He went on prattling, shaking out the leather-backed menu as if it was the morning paper, and after the waiter solemnly placed a vile cup of coffee, laced with brandy and impaled with a cinnamon stick, before me (which I knew I would have to drink, or resign myself to being hectored unmercifully) he cheerfully ordered us both salads and potatoes and steaks, and then got straight down to business.
“So Alex is having you ride the young stock! Well isn’t that something! Isn’t he worried about you? I remember letting my wife get on a horse back when she was alive; the beast swished his tail and she burst into tears.” He laughed heartily; it was a favorite joke. I had heard it at least a dozen times, one for every meal we’d ever had together. I was fairly certain I’d also read it in a novel or two, so I doubted the story’s authenticity.
Well, the brandy would come in handy, after all. “Honestly,” I started, grimacing on a burning sip as
it made its way down my throat. “I have been riding since I was a little girl, so it wasn’t exactly a new experience for me. A lot of the barn managers and head riders in Ocala are women these days. Trainers find that women are good with the babies. We’re a bit more patient than the average man.”
“I’m sure, I’m sure,” he said, nodding his head delightedly. “I do like to see a young woman on a horse. I do indeed. I always did say that the finest place for a woman was on the back of a horse. And you look ravishing in your habits, don’t you, my dear!”
My lip curled and I hid my disgust behind my coffee cup. He wouldn’t have been so—so—forward, to use a term from his own generation, if Alexander had been with me. His true colors were showing through—just another womanizing horse trainer, the kind that men laughingly call “old-fashioned,” which basically meant that they thought they could prey on any woman on the backside and most of the well-dressed ones in the paddock and the clubhouse, as well. He was imagining me, and a whole faceless legion of large-hipped girls, clad in breeches and sitting astride racehorses. Anywhere but here—that was where I wished I was right now. I thought suddenly of Alexander and an evening with my head tipped onto his shoulder, drifting off to sleep to the laugh track of a sitcom. I missed Alexander, I realized suddenly, like a sharp pain in my stomach.
“I do remember a horse back in ’58 or so, Montpelier, he would only let a woman near him. That blasted stud! Just hated men! He would as soon kill one as let one near him! I knew a little girl who rode the hunters for Lord Beringer—he was the big fellow in those parts, you know—and he said she could ride anything, when he heard the trouble we were having—” The story gave no apparent hint of ending anytime soon, as he launched into a description of the “little girl’s” attributes, most of which had very little to do with how she handled a horse and quite a lot to do with how she filled out a hacking jacket.
I made approximately two dozen mental notes over the course of the dinner to tell Alexander that Jim Tilden was a complete pig and he wasn’t welcome on the farm anymore. I didn’t know how well that was going to go over, and I didn’t care. I was seething by the time the old man had cleaned his plate and sopped up the last of the steak sauce with a dinner roll. He’d spent more than an hour talking incessantly about nothing but the women he’d known on the backside and at the stud farms, and very little of it had anything to do with their horsemanship.
“And of course, lovely young women like yourself, my dear,” he said, after the waiter had cleared our plates and mentioned something about a dessert selection, “Are such a beautiful addition to the racetrack. We love having you there!”
I watched his fingers do a little dance across the white tablecloth, heading dangerously near the hand I had resting near my water glass, and I thought, this isn’t happening.
“And as for riding, well—I’m glad you don’t have any idea of becoming a jockey. So many ladies think they can ride with men and we know that’s just not true. Don’t you know, my dear, girl jockeys are such a danger out on the racetrack? I mean they look very fetching, don’t get me wrong—” His fingers touched mine; his leer deepened the wrinkles in his papery cheeks. His intentions became appallingly clear.
“I really should be getting back to the hotel,” I gasped suddenly, bursting in on his chatter. “It’s past ten o’clock and I have to be at Aqueduct by seven tomorrow. But thank you for dinner—it was lovely.”
Tilden looked deeply dismayed. But I was just imagining—no, he couldn’t. Alexander was an old friend. I wouldn’t think it. But there was no mistaking the naked disappointment on his face. “Oh, no! I was so hoping—” he began, and then paused. He took my hand and I jerked it away as if his was on fire. I snatched at my purse and fumbled for the coat-check ticket buried within.
“Goodnight!” I said, more calm than I felt, and turned on my heel, rushing through the tables, which were entirely too close together, and slapped my ticket down at the coat-check girl. She smiled at me and started to ask how my dinner had been.
“I’m begging you to rush,” I hissed at her. “I gotta get out of here before he sees which way I turn.”
She must have had some experience in dates that got out of hand, whether it was from clients or personal experience, because she gave me a quick nod and rushed behind the curtain. I could hear the metal hangers shrieking angrily on the bar and then my coat was in my hands and she was nodding at me to go. I threw her a dollar and ran out the door.
It looked like an ideal place to hide. Union Square was a huge park, but any protection the barren trees in the center might have provided was negated by the glow of the low-hanging clouds and the dusting of snow on the ground. The buildings, on the other hand, were all brightly lit and wide open. Restaurants, diners, stores, I only had to take my pick and I could hide a while before I got back out on the streets.
Because, I wasn’t ready to go back to the hotel yet. I wasn’t ready to just go to bed and get up in the morning and go straight to the racetrack. I still wanted to know, and if I couldn’t ask the horse, I’d have to find out myself—was this what I wanted? Could I forget about horses and do something valuable here? I wanted to get back the feeling I’d had while wandering the city earlier. I wanted to pretend that I lived here. I wanted to be that girl, one of the girls, one of the people, really, the bright young intellectuals who lived and worked and played here. I knew they existed—I saw them everywhere I turned. I could do it, couldn’t I? I didn’t have to live my whole life in stained polo shirts and mucky-hemmed jeans. Did I?
The Barnes & Noble glittered and allured from across the square. It was four stories of books and coffee. It seemed like a good enough place to start.
I shed coat and sweater and scarf in the cavernous café and sat down with a plain black coffee and a very edgy-looking literary journal. I looked around in expectation. Anytime now, I’d start chatting with interesting people about books and music and coffee and. . . other, interesting things.
But I didn’t, of course. The minutes ticked by and although I tried to look very open and interesting, no one was going to walk over to me and say “What are you reading?” or whatever was an acceptable pick-up line for friends or fornication. And as for me, I wasn’t going to do it either, for two specific reasons: I was very shy, first off. And, second off, the sadly evident fact that people come in groups. They come in pairs, or triplets, or quadruplets, but never alone. People who come to cafes alone sit along walls and cup their chins in their hands to keep their wandering eyes tight to the pages of their magazine. People who come to bookstores alone come because they have time to themselves and they wish to spend some nice personal time reading. Or they come to pretend that they have something to do on a night when no one has extended an invitation and the nights’ TV programming proves too bleak. People who come to bookstores alone leave alone, having spoken to no one but the person who will take their money or direct them to the restroom.
I came to the bookstore alone, and I could see that I was going to leave it alone.
I was painfully aware that there were people here who would not be going home alone tonight. There were several groups of people my age, laughing and slapping the table, making entirely too much noise for a bookstore, but then again, I guessed this was a random stopping-off point before hitting the bars. It wasn’t the end of the night, like a late-night visit to the Barnes & Noble in Ocala would be. It wasn’t a nightcap and a little read because it was Sunday night and we could sleep in on Monday morning, so what the hell, let’s live dangerously, baby, let’s stay up until eleven! It was a place to meet and caffeinate before the revelries began.
I glared down at my silent phone, sitting emotionlessly on the table. It was ten thirty. I was tired. I propped my elbow on the table and my chin on my fist and gazed across the sea of tables at the giggling excited people, ready to go out and do something entirely unexpected. I thought about introducing myself to someone. “Hello, I’m Alex. I’m from Florida and I don’t
know anyone here and I have to be at the racetrack in eight hours to evaluate a racehorse. Can I join you?” It seemed like a good enough introduction. It ought to elicit some conversation, anyway. How many people walk up to you and announce that they make a living with racehorses? I’ll bet these kids didn’t even know that there were racehorses in New York City. I could be exotic and interesting. Or a redneck. I rubbed the back of my neck experimentally. The neck was one part of my body that got sun every day, even when the rest of me was covered up with riding gear and a hard hat. It was probably sunburnt to a deep rich scarlet which would glow like a neon light amongst all the pasty brunettes surrounding me. And then there was the idea of my accent—it was probably atrocious after years amongst the Appalachian drawls of north central Florida. When was the last time I’d heard myself speak? I bet I sounded like a coal-miner or an alligator-farmer. No, I couldn’t do it.
The nearest table of bon vivants rose en masse and headed for the escalator. There were three girls and a guy, all of them around my age, all of them somehow taller and thinner and cooler than I was, even though, when I thought about it rationally, we were all wearing essentially the same uniform of tight jeans and a black sweater and a pair of leather boots. One of the girls, in fact, was wearing a ragged pair of Justin boots, the sort of short Western riding boot that barrel racing princesses wore, the sort that I wouldn’t be caught dead in, whether in Ocala or Manhattan. I couldn’t think of any rational reason why I thought that they were beyond my reach, that they had reached some echelon of NYC living that I could never reach, except for perhaps that when they went out the door they’d have a destination in mind, and I would just be wandering the streets.
The Head and Not The Heart (Alex and Alexander Book 1) Page 6