Still Life with Elephant
Page 4
I was curious how Delaney, the new horse, slept.
Grace and I walked across the back lawn under a half-moon, following the bouncing yellow ball from my flashlight. I ducked under the door-guard and into the barn. The sound of the horses breathing instantly relaxed me. I glanced around. There was Mousi, asleep in his nest; Isis, in her corner; Conversano, flat out and snoring loudly. And Delaney, awake, vigilant, ready. He scooted back as soon as I approached him. I ignored his behavior and just casually threw him some “quiet” hay—trying not to rustle it, so I wouldn’t wake up the others. I would need time to figure him out.
I stood outside the barn for a few minutes after that, looking toward the house. It was no longer a house I recognized. It was dark; there wasn’t anyone sleeping inside, waiting for me. No one that I could crawl back into bed to and reach over for. It was all empty.
“Come on, Grace,” I said. The night was pressing against me now. The cool, quiet air bringing a chill. The streak of half-moon throwing haunting shadows across the ground. Then I thought I heard him.
“Grace, come!” I had to walk fast now, to get back into the house, because, for one moment, I thought I heard him in the distance. I held my hands over my ears and practically ran, but I could still hear it. The faint, faraway sound of a horse whinnying for me.
It was why I never listen. It was why I don’t allow myself to hear what is going on around me. Why I don’t attend to voices, to conversation.
I didn’t deserve to.
“Grace!” My back door was just a few feet ahead. Maybe it was the wind. The wind can sound like that sometimes. Like the last call of a horse. Distant, dying.
It was the one sound I couldn’t bear to hear.
Chapter Eight
PREDICTIONS ARE the hubs that turn the wheels of life. Predictions glide you through every situation, because, if you know how the other person is going to react, what they’re going to say, what they need, you can be ready. You predict what time they will be walking through the front door, you can predict their mood just by the way they are holding their lips, you can predict that they are going to be there for your birthday and New Year’s and that they’ll bring you tea when you have the flu. Predictions make everything comfortable and comforting.
“Meet me tomorrow at the Hudson Inn.” My mother called three weeks after my marriage exploded. I could have predicted that she was going to wait a discreet two weeks after she found out before prying. “We’ll have afternoon cocktails and lunch.”
“Mother,” I began to protest. “I have a dozen—”
“You need to get away. You’re letting yourself get depressed. When’s the last time you got out and socialized?”
I couldn’t remember the last time I ate a whole meal. I was planning to live on one jelly donut a day. I imagined that’s what people do when they have no money and their life is falling apart. Jelly donuts are a cheap source of happiness.
After we hung up, I wondered if my mother was right. Can you let yourself get depressed? Do you invite it in, like the proverbial dinner guest that won’t leave? Or does it slip over your shoulders like a coat, and get heavier and heavier, and you just keep adjusting to it until the weight brings you to your knees? I really didn’t want to go anywhere. I didn’t want to change out of my sweats. I didn’t even want to ride horses, although it was the one thing I did force myself to do, despite wishing I could spend all day in bed, cuddling with Grace and going through two or three boxes of tissues. But I couldn’t disappoint my mother. I’m sure she knew that I wouldn’t disappoint her.
And I predicted my mother would be wearing her pale-gold blouse, and beige skirt with the long, matching beige jacket. Tan-and-white pumps. Brown-and-wine paisley clutch bag. Antique gold earrings and her favorite pearls.
“You look perfectly awful,” she said, as the hostess seated us. She was wearing her gold blouse, beige suit, et al. I had showered, run a comb through my hair, and found some strength left over to pull together a mildly rumpled outfit that had only one small stain.
We started with cocktails, of course. You can’t have afternoon cocktails without the featured item. She ordered her usual Bay Breeze. I had a glass of wine. She fingered the little luncheon muffins, evaluating them with the eyes of an expert.
“Lemon-and-poppy,” she said. “Good.”
I propped the menu up in front of me. I knew what was coming.
“So, Cornelia, are you ready to talk about it?” she asked, gently, carefully.
I shook my head and kept diligently studying the menu.
“I can make an educated guess,” she said, then took a sip of her glowing red concoction. “You caught him cheating.”
I shrugged. I did not want to cry in the middle of the Hudson Inn, so I shredded a neat fringe around the edge of my tissue, then fiddled with the lunch menus, balancing them across each other like little tents, then rolled my linen napkin into bunny ears. I concentrated very hard on these tasks until the waitress came back.
“Caesar salad,” I told her. “With lots of anchovies.”
“Grilled salmon.” My mother handed back her menu and smiled at me. “After lunch we can go to that donut shop you like and get some donuts for dessert. Although you know they don’t hold a candle to my personal donuts.”
She always said that.
It was all about predictions. I knew she would have grilled salmon for lunch. I knew Matt would have ordered something like a bowl of chili or a hamburger platter and then covered it all in salt and hot sauce. Part of being secure in life was having the predictions you made about the person you love come true. It meant you knew that person intimately. You knew what they were about. Predictions ease you through all the social rituals and turmoil and disorder that the world throws at you. You can predict outcomes and consequences. A prognosis is the prediction of how an illness will progress. Sometimes you can even predict death.
Sometimes.
The waitress came back with our lunches, and I realized that I really wasn’t hungry.
“Who did he cheat with?” my mother asked. “That snappy little blonde who works with him?”
I must have dropped my jaw, because she laughed.
“I could smell her type a mile away,” she said. “Little husband-snatching bitch.”
My mother’s words surprised me. She never talked like that. “I didn’t think you knew about those things,” I said.
She looked down and poked at her salmon as though she found something very interesting under the lemon slice. I stared at her. I stared at the lemon slice. Nothing was forthcoming from either one of them.
“I will tell you something, because mothers and daughters should—well…” She dug around some more under her salmon. The capers that were decorating the top of it rolled onto her grilled vegetables. “You’re my only daughter, and I want you to have glistening teeth.”
Forget teeth. She didn’t say “glistening teeth.” Listen to me, she had said. I want you to listen to me. I knew that she was about to give me advice. To tough it out. To salvage the relationship. To forgive and forget and love Matt anyway, because he was really a decent man. Stuff I didn’t want to hear.
“Remember Mrs. Campbell?” she finally said. Mrs. Campbell had been a friend of my parents. A young widower. Black hair, DD bra.
“She wasn’t that pretty,” I said, not wanting to know and now knowing.
“Cornelia, when men want to cheat, they aren’t thinking about anything above the waist.”
I sat back in my chair.
“But you—and Dad—are—happy.”
She squeezed her lemon over her fish with a little too much force. The pit flew across the table.
“Happiness is a decision,” she said softly. “I wanted my family intact. I told your father that unless it stopped he was going to lose everything. Everything. He returned to me and begged me to forgive him. And then I told him that I had earned the right to an affair of my own. Whenever I chose. Those were my terms.”
“Did you ever—um—exercise your—option?” I managed.
She shook her head and smiled. “No, darling, but he knows the choice is always there.” She paused for a moment. “For both of us,” she added.
“But you’re—happy. Right? Aren’t you happy?” Please be happy, I thought.
“Of course,” she said, and signaled for another cocktail. “He treats me like a queen. But he’s on his toes all the time. He doesn’t dare take me for granted. And that makes me very happy.”
I never would have predicted that.
Chapter Nine
DELANEY WAS a bastard to work with. He was sneaky and sullen. He was all anger and deceit. He rode great one day, gently pressing toward the reins in my hands the way I asked him to, forward and full, with a relaxed, easy trot, and then, when I least expected it, he would rear and bolt away. He nearly got me out of the saddle several times.
“What the hell are you trying to do to yourself?” Alana asked me. She didn’t know much about horses, but she had come down to the barn so her daughters could watch me ride. The girls loved standing on the bottom rail of the fence around my riding ring and peeking between the top two rails, because they were too small to see otherwise. I was hoping they would eventually want to ride and had promised Alana I would find them a nice little school pony, which they could keep with me, and I would give them free lessons. But she had always demurred. It might have had something to do with her watching me ride problem horses for the past five years. Delaney was proving to be no exception.
He had been awful for the whole ride. He bolted to one side of the ring, tossed his head up into my face, reared two or three times, each rear preceded by a huge grunt. I caught Alana covering her eyes at one point, while her girls laughed and applauded.
“Do you think I’m gonna let my kids ride after watching that?” Alana remarked later, when we were sitting in the kitchen drinking hot chocolate. The girls were watching a video.
“At least you won’t have to take them to the rodeo,” I said. “I’m a full-service friend. Entertainment followed by refreshments.”
“It could have been entertainment followed by an ambulance ride,” she said. “Do you really need all that agita?”
Alana is not Italian, but she’s a big believer in agita.
“I know what I’m doing,” I said. “And I’m poverty-stricken now, I have no choice. Besides, the kids would probably love the ambulance—the sirens and flashing lights—”
“For some reason, watching you get crunched up doesn’t sound all that appealing,” she said. “And you want me to get them a horse! I’d be terrified, letting them get up on a horse.”
“Pony. And they would love it,” I said. “I promise they would love it. I would find them something safe. Something crippled from arthritis, with bad asthma.”
“Why would I want a pony like that?” she said, puzzled.
“You want one that’s too crippled to run away with them,” I explained, “but if it does, you want it to run out of air, and have to stop to catch its breath. The perfect kid’s pony.” It was an old horseman’s joke, but Alana laughed.
When the girls finished their hot chocolate, they ran off to torture Grace, who loves it.
“So—what’s happening?” Alana said. “Are you still an avocado?”
“Still,” I said. And I was. Almost totally incommunicado. I was not answering Matt’s messages, not calling my mother back, not even my own lawyer. No one, except for Alana.
“I guess I should be honored,” she said. “That you allowed us to come over today.”
“I like the girls to visit.”
I did. I liked their little round heads and funny pumpkin-colored braids, and small shoulders, and big eyes. The way they cuddled up to me when they said hello and good-bye.
“Thanks,” she said. “They wouldn’t miss it for the world.”
Grace lay next to me in bed that night, her toenails painted a flamboyant pink, with matching hot-pink bows taped around each ear, courtesy of Alana’s girls. Debussy was playing on the stereo, very sweet, very fitting for pink.
“You look like Slut Dog,” I said to Grace, pulling off the ribbons. She wagged her stumpy tail. Matt had spayed her as soon as her broken jaw healed. I suddenly felt very sorry for her and began to cry.
“You can never have puppies, you know. Never,” I whispered to her. “Maybe you would have wanted a family.”
This struck me as very tragic, and I rolled over and cried myself to sleep.
Chapter Ten
THE PHONE rang, and I grabbed it without checking the caller ID. It had been over a month now, and I still didn’t want to talk to Matt, or my mother, or my lawyer. Or, sometimes, even Alana.
“Hi, Neelie? It’s Richie. How are you guys?” Richie Chiger and his wife, Jackie, were good friends of ours. Richie was general manager and vice-president of the Wycliff-Pennington Animal Sanctuary. Jackie painted humorous little animal watercolors and sold them on their Web site.
“Hey, Richie,” I said, trying to keep my voice normal. “Great to hear from you.”
“I figured Matt’d be at his office this time of day, but his secretary told me he was on vacation.”
Vacation? Matt was always in his office. Had he stopped going to work?
“How are you guys doing?” I asked.
“We’re great!” Richie’s voice contained a catch of excitement. “So—is Matt around?”
“Not today.” Which wasn’t exactly a lie.
“I have to talk to him right away.” Richie said. “We got something going on—I tried to talk to Dr. Scarletta, but she blew me off. Apparently, she isn’t interested in large animals.”
Ah yes, poor Holly-Golly didn’t like the inconvenience of treating anything bigger than a breadbox.
“What kind of large animal?” I asked. I had always accompanied Matt to the sanctuary, because I liked visiting the animals. The place has almost everything, from alligators all the way through the alphabet to two cranky zebras. Animals saved from stupid people or injured in the wild and unable to be returned, animals adopted from petting zoos that have no business owning animals. Matt had been their vet for years, even after he sold his equine practice, treating the animals for free, until the sanctuary got a wealthy sponsor and was able to pay him.
“I don’t want to talk about it over the phone,” Richie said.
“Why not?”
“Security reasons. Can you have him call me as soon as he gets in?”
“Security? You’re kidding,” I exclaimed. “Did something happen?”
“No, no,” Richie said. “I can’t talk about it, just have him call me. Please.”
“It might be a while before he does,” I said. “Let me give you his pager, you can check with him directly.” I paused; it wasn’t like Richie to be so mysterious. “Why can’t you talk about it?”
I loved Richie and his wife. They were among our closest friends. Richie was short, and bearded with a wild halo of graying brown curls, and a certain childlike enthusiastic sweetness about him. He had spent most of his life traveling and rescuing exotic wildlife before working for the sanctuary. Jackie always wore her hair pulled back into a long dark-brown ponytail and wore Birkenstock sandals and cooked a lot of couscous with steamed vegetables and tofu.
“It’s top secret. Honestly,” Richie continued. “Matt can tell you after I talk to him in person—I just hope he comes on board with this.”
“Sure,” I said.
After we hung up, I sat down on the kitchen floor to cry. Beethoven was playing, and I shut it off. Beethoven is too heavy when you are already bummed out. Not only had I lost Matt, I realized
I was losing connections to all the things we had done together. The sanctuary and our best friends, and dinners and barbecues, and Halloween costume parties and summer vacations—every piece of my life was being unraveled, stitch by stitch, like an old scarf, and I couldn’t stop it.
I wondered, a few days later, if Richie had been able to get in touch with Matt. Okay, I was really wondering what this vacation deal was all about. Had Matt run off somewhere to establish residency so he could get a quickie divorce?
Richie’s cell phone was busy, busy, busy, and I had to search for the number of the sanctuary, since they always kept that phone number unlisted. They don’t want to be bothered with people asking if they could walk through and stare at the animals. Richie takes the word “sanctuary” very seriously. I found the number, jotted down in Matt’s handwriting, on a piece of paper hanging on the refrigerator, behind an old dental-appointment card. Matt’s handwriting. I ran my fingers over the scrawled numbers. It was the only thing I had left of him.
After three or four tries, Richie answered the main phone. “Richie, it’s Neelie.” I felt stupid calling him to find out where Matt was.
“Hey!” he said. “I’m so happy that Matt is going to help.”
So Matt had been to the sanctuary. He just wasn’t going to work.
“I’m happy you’re happy,” I said.
“Of course,” Richie said, “he has to get his shots and check his passport, make sure it’s current. Oh, tell him I talked with Tom Pennington himself. We will have plenty of security. He gave his word.” He took a deep breath. “Incredible, eh?”