"I will." He turned away and began to set out the food he had brought onto plates. The champagne was harsh in her mouth as
Tess watched his so-familiar, economical movements, and wanted to touch his back where the blue cloth of his shirt stretched a little too tightly.
She drew a deep breath and said, "Congratulations. I should have said that first of all. How does it feel, knowing you're going to be a father?"
He looked around, still cautious, and then smiled. "I'm not sure. It doesn't seem real yet. I guess I'll get used to it."
"I guess it'll change things," she said. "For you and me." He went to her and took her in his arms. "I don't want it to." "But it's bound to."
"In practical ways, maybe. We might have less time together, but we'll manage somehow. Jude and I were never a traditional couple, and we aren't going to be traditional parents, either. I'll still need you—I'm not going to stop loving you." He said it so fiercely that she smiled, and pressed her face against his chest to hide it. "Do you believe me? Nothing can change the way I feel about you. I love you. That's not going to change. Do you believe me?"
She didn't say anything. He forced her head up off his chest and made her look at him. "Do you believe me?" He kissed her when she wouldn't reply, then kissed her again, more deeply, and then they were kissing passionately, and she was pulling him onto the floor, and they made love, their bodies making the promises they both wanted.
After Gordon had left that night, the nightmare came again.
Tess found herself standing beside the high, narrow bed she'd slept in as a child, facing the open window. The pale curtains billowed like sails. Outside, galloping in place like a rocking horse, moving and yet stationary, was the blue-eyed, cream-coloured mare.
With part of her mind Tess knew that she could refuse this visit. She could turn her head, and wrench her eyes open, and find herself, heart pounding, safe in her bed.
Instead, she let herself go into the dream. She took a step forward. She felt alert and hypersensitive, as if it were the true state of waking. She was aware of her own body as she usually never was in life or in a dream, conscious of her nakedness as the breeze from the open window caressed it, and feeling the slight bounce of her breasts and the rough weave of the carpet beneath her feet as she walked towards the window.
She clambered onto the window-sill and, with total confidence, leaped out, knowing that the horse would catch her.
She landed easily and securely on the mare's back, feeling the scratch and prickle of the horsehair on her inner thighs. Her arms went around the high, arched neck and she pressed her face against it, breathing in the rough, salty, smoky scent of horseflesh. She felt the pull and play of muscle and bone beneath her and in her legs as the mare began to gallop. Tess looked down at the horse's legs, seeing how they braced and pounded against the air. She felt a slight shock, then, for where there should have been a hoof, she saw instead five toes. Tess frowned, and leaned further as she stared through the darkness, trying to see.
But they were her own hooves divided into five toes—they had always been so since the night of her creation. The thinly-beaten gold of the lunula on its silken chain bounced against the solid muscle of her chest as she loped through the sky.
Some unquestioned instinct took her to the right house. Above it, she caught a crosswind and, tucking her forelegs in close to her chest, glided spirally down until all four feet could be firmly planted on the earth. This was a single-storey house she visited tonight. She turned her head and, at a glance, the window swung open, the screen which had covered it a moment earlier now vanished. The mare took one delicate step closer and put her head through the window into the bedroom.
The bed, with a man and woman sleeping in it, was directly beneath the window. She breathed gently upon the woman's sleeping face and then drew back her head and waited.
The woman opened her eyes and looked into the mare's blue gaze. She seemed confused but not frightened, and after a moment she sat up slowly, moving cautiously as if for fear of alarming the horse. The horse was not alarmed. She suffered the woman to stroke her nose and pat her face before she backed away, pulling her head out of the house. She had timed it perfectly. The woman came after her as if drawn on a rope,
leaning out the window and making soft, affectionate noises. The mare moved as if uneasy, still backing, and then, abruptly flirtatious, offered her back, an invitation to the woman to mount.
The woman understood at once and did not hesitate. From the window ledge she slipped onto the mare's back in a smooth, fluid movement, as if she had done this every night of her life.
Feeling her rider in place, legs clasped firmly on her sides, the mare leaped skyward with more speed than grace. She felt the woman gasp as she was flung forward, and felt the woman's hands knot in her mane. She was obviously an experienced rider, not one it would be easy to throw. But the mare did not wish to throw her, merely to give her a very rough ride.
High over the sleeping city galloped the nightmare, rising at impossibly steep angles, shying at invisible barriers, and now and then tucking her legs beneath her to drop like a stone. The gasps and cries from her rider soon ceased. The woman, concentrating on clinging for her life, could have had no energy to spare for fear.
Not until dawn did the nightmare return the woman, leaping through the bedroom window in defiance of logic and throwing her onto the motionless safety of her bed, beside her still-sleeping husband.
When Tess woke a few hours later she was stiff and sore, as if she had been dancing, or running, all night. She got up slowly, wincing, and aware of a much worse emotional pain waiting for her, like the anticipation of bad news. The nightmare had come for her, and this time she had gone with it—she was certain of that much. But where had it taken her? What had she done?
In the bathroom, as she waited for the shower to heat up, racking her sleepy brain for some memory of the night before, Tess caught a glimpse in the mirror of something on her back, at waist level. She turned, presenting her back to the glass, and then craned her neck around, slowly against the stiffness, to look at her reflection.
She stared at the bloodstains. Stared and stared at the saddle of blood across her back.
She washed it off, of course, with plenty of hot water and soap, and tried not to think about it too hard. That was exactly what she had done the last time this had happened: when she was nine years old, on the morning after the night her mother had miscarried; on the morning of the day her mother had died.
All day Tess fought against the urge to phone Gordon. All day she was like a sleep-walker as she taught a class, supervised studies, stared at meaningless words in the library, and avoided telephones.
She thought, as she had thought before, that she should see a psychiatrist. But how could a psychiatrist help her? She knew she could not, by all the rules of reason and logic, have caused her mother's death. She knew she felt guilty because she had not wanted the little sister or brother her parents had planned, and on some level she believed that her desire, expressed in the nightmare, had been responsible for the miscarriage and thus—although indirectly and unintentionally—for her mother's death. She didn't need a psychiatrist to tell her all that. She had figured it out for herself, some time in her teens. And yet, figuring it out hadn't ended the feeling of guilt. That was why the very thought of the nightmare was so frightening to her.
If Jude is all right, she thought, if nothing has happened to her, then I'll know it was just a crazy dream and I'll see a psychiatrist.
Gordon telephoned the next day, finally. Jude was all right, he said, although Tess had not asked. Jude was just fine. Only—she'd lost the child. But miscarriage at this early stage was apparently relatively common. The doctors said she was physically healthy and strong and would have no problem carrying another child to term. Only—although she was physically all right, Jude was pretty upset. She had taken the whole thing badly, and in a way he'd never expected. She was saying some pretty stran
ge things—
"What sort of things?" She clutched the phone as if it were his arm, trying to force him to speak.
"I need to see you, Tess. I need to talk to you. Could we meet for lunch?"
"Tomorrow?"
"Better make it Friday."
"Just lunch?" She was pressing him as she never did, unable to hide her desperation.
"I can't leave Jude for long. She needs me now. It'll have to be just lunch. The Italian place?"
Tess felt a wave of pure hatred for Jude. She wanted to tell Gordon that she needed him just as much, or more than, his wife did; that she was in far more trouble than Jude with her mere, commonplace miscarriage.
"That's fine," she said, and made her voice throb with sympathy as she told Gordon how sorry she was to hear about Jude. "Let me know if there's anything at all I can do—tell her that."
"I'll see you on Friday," he said.
Gordon didn't waste any time on Friday. As soon as they had ordered, he came right to the point.
"This has affected Jude much more than I could have dreamed. I'd hardly come to terms with the idea that she was pregnant, and she's responding as if she'd lost an actual baby instead of only. I've told her we'll start another just as soon as we can, but she seems to think she's doomed to lose that one, too." He had been looking into her eyes as he spoke, but now he dropped his gaze to the white tablecloth. "Maybe Jude has always been a little unstable, I don't know. Probably it's something hormonal, and she'll get back to normal soon. But whatever . . . it seems to have affected her mind. And she's got this crazy idea that the miscarriage is somehow your fault." He looked up with a grimace, to see how she responded.
Tess said quietly, "I'm sorry."
"Maybe she's always been jealous of you on some level—no, I can't believe that. It's the shock and the grief, and she's fixed on you . . . I don't know why. I'm sure she'll get over it. But right now there's no reasoning with her. She won't even consider the idea of seeing you. Don't try to call her, and—" He sighed deeply. "She doesn't want me to see you, either. She wanted me to tell you, today, that it's all over."
"Just like that."
"Oh, Tess." He looked at her across the table, obviously pained. She noticed for the first time the small lines that had appeared around his eyes. "Tess, you know I love you. It's not that I love Jude any more than I love you. I'd never agree to choose between you."
"That's exactly what you're doing."
"I'm not. It's not forever. But Jude is my wife. I have a responsibility to her. You've always known that. She can't cope right now, that's all. I've got to go along with her. But this isn't the real Jude—she's not acting like herself at all."
"Of course she is," said Tess. "She's always been erratic and illogical and acted on emotion."
"If you saw her, if you tried to talk to her, you'd realize. She just won't—or can't—listen to reason. But once she's had time to recover, I know she'll see how ridiculous she was. And once she's pregnant again, she'll be back to normal, I'm certain."
Tess realized she wasn't going to be able to eat her lunch. Her stomach was as tight as a fist.
Gordon said, "This won't last forever, I promise. But for now, we're just going to have to stop seeing each other."
No apologies, no softening of the blow. He was speaking to her man to man, Tess thought. She wondered what he would do if she burst into tears or began shouting at him.
"Why are you smiling?" he asked.
"I didn't know I was. Do we have to stop all contact with each other? Do I pretend you've dropped off the face of the earth, or what?"
"I'll phone you. I'll keep in touch. And I'll let you know if anything changes—when something changes."
Tess looked at her watch. "I have to go back and supervise some tests."
"I'll walk you—"
"No, stay, finish your food," she said. "Don't get up." She had suddenly imagined herself clinging to him on a street corner, begging him not to leave her. She didn't want to risk that, yet she could not kiss him casually, as if she would be seeing him again in a few hours or days. As she came around the table, she put her hand on his face for just a moment, then left without looking back.
As a child, Tess had been mad about horses, going through the traditional girlish phase of reading, talking, drawing and dreaming of them, begging for the impossible, a horse of her own. For her ninth birthday her parents had enrolled her for riding
lessons. For half a year she had been learning to ride, but after her mother's death Tess had refused to have anything more to do with horses, even had a kind of horror of them. She had only one memento from that phase of her life: the blue-glazed, ceramic head of a horse. In her youth she'd kept it hidden away, but now she took pleasure in it again, in its beauty, the sweeping arch of the sculpted neck and the deep, mottled colour. It was a beautiful object, nothing like the nightmare.
Tess sat alone in her apartment sipping bourbon and Coke and gazing at the horse head, now and again lifting it to touch its coolness to her flushed cheek.
You didn't kill your mother, she told herself. Wishing the baby would not be born is not the same thing as making it not be born. You weren't—aren't—responsible for your dreams. And dreams don't kill.
Outside, the day blued towards night and Tess went on drinking. She felt more helpless and alone than she had ever before felt as an adult, as if the power to rule her own life had been taken from her. She was controlled, she thought, by the emotions of others: by Jude's fear, by Gordon's sense of responsibility, by her own childish guilt.
But Tess did not allow herself to sink into despair. The next morning, although hungover and sad, she knew that life must go on. She was accustomed, after all, to being alone and to taking care of herself. She knew how to shut out other thoughts while she worked, and she made an effort to schedule activities for her non-working hours so that dinner out, or a film, or drinks with friends carried her safely through the dangerous, melancholy hour of blue.
Over the next six weeks, Gordon spoke to her briefly three times. Jude seemed to be getting better, he said, but she was still adamant in her feelings towards Tess. Tess could never think of anything to say to this, and the silence stretched between them, and then Gordon stopped calling. After three months, Tess began to believe that it was truly over between them. And then Gordon came to see her.
He looked thin and unhappy. At the sight of him, Tess forgot her own misery and only wanted to comfort him. She poured him a drink and hovered over him, touching his hair shyly. He caught her hand and pulled her down beside him on the couch, and began to kiss and caress her rather clumsily. She was helping him undress when she realized he was crying.
"Gordon! Darling, what's wrong?" She was shocked by his tears. She tried to hold him, to let him cry, but understood he didn't want that. After a minute he blew his nose and shook his head hard, repudiating the tears.
"Jude and I," he began. Then, after a pause, "Jude's left me." Tess felt a shocking sense of triumph, which she repressed at once. She waited, saying nothing.
"It's been hell," he said. "Ever since the miscarriage. That crazy idea she had, that you were somehow responsible for it. She said it was because you didn't mind sharing me with her, but that a baby would have changed things—you would have been left out of the cosy family group. I told her that you weren't like that, you weren't jealous, but she just laughed at me, and said men didn't understand."
She must go carefully here, Tess thought. She had to admit her responsibility, and not let Gordon blame Jude too much, but she didn't want Gordon thinking she was mad.
"Gordon," she said. "I was jealous—and I was very afraid that once you were a father things would change and I'd be left out in the cold."
He dismissed her confession with a grimace and a wave of his hand. "So what? That doesn't make any difference. Even if you'd wanted her to have a miscarriage you didn't make it happen. You couldn't. Jude seems to think that you wished it on her, like you were some kind of a
witch. She's crazy, that's what it comes down to."
"She might come back."
"No. It's over. We'd talked about a trial separation, and we started seeing a marriage counsellor. It made it worse. All sorts of things came up, things I hadn't thought were problems. And then she found somebody else, she's gone off with somebody else. She won't be with him for long, but she won't come back."
Tess had thought for a long time that the break-up of Gordon and Jude would inevitably lead to the break-up between Gordon and herself, and so for the next few months she was tense, full of an unexamined anxiety, waiting for this to happen. Gordon, too, was uneasy, unanchored without his wife. Unlike Tess, he did not enjoy living alone, but he made a great effort to ration his time with Tess, not to impose upon her. They tried to go on as they always had, ignoring the fact that Jude was no longer there to limit the time they spent together. But when Tess finished her doctorate, they had to admit to the inevitability of some major, permanent change in their relationship. Tess could stay on in New Orleans, teaching English as a foreign language and scraping a living somehow, but that wasn't what she wanted. It wasn't what she had worked and studied for, and so she tried to ignore the feeling of dread that lodged in her stomach as she sent out her CV and searched in earnest for a university which might hire her. She had always known this time would come. She didn't talk about it to Gordon. Why should she? It was her life, her career, her responsibility. She would make her plans, and then she would tell him.
An offer came from a university in upstate New York. It wasn't brilliant, but it was better than she'd expected: a heavy teaching schedule, but with a chance of continuing her own research.
She told Gordon about it over dinner in a Mexican restaurant.
"It sounds good, just right for you," he said, nodding.
"It's not perfect. And it probably won't last. I can't count on more than a year."
Horses! Page 16