Still Lives

by Maria Hummel

  Besides, there have always been so many other things for Yegina and me to talk about, and for once, today, she asks my advice.

  “What should I wear to the riding party?” she says as we’re parting at my office after Craft Club.

  I tell her boots, jeans, and a relentlessly positive attitude.

  “Yuck,” she says. “Do you even like this Kaye person?”

  “I love her,” I tell her truthfully. “But you’ll see.”

  SATURDAY

  10

  Of all the creatures at Griffith Ranch, Uncle Bud is the most desirable. A great black gelding with a grizzled nose, he has aged into a melding of flora and fauna—an earthy slowness has crept into his limbs; his legs are like fence posts, and his gait like an Ent’s. To ride Uncle Bud over the steep hills will be no more challenging than sitting on a sawhorse with a saddle slung over it. For the sixteen (of the nineteen total) people at Kaye’s party who have never ridden a horse outside of a petting zoo, Uncle Bud is a dream come true. But alas, he is only one, and all the other horses have their defects: too much prancing energy, too much height, a mouth that flashes yellow teeth, ears that roll back. But the sun is slowly sinking toward the sea beyond Malibu and we have to choose. Or be chosen.

  The second most desirable creature at Griffith Ranch is Rick, the ranch hand who is leading us to the paddock to claim our horses. Rick has the easy, loping grace and tawny skin of a man who spends most of his time outdoors. Under his shocks of shaggy blond, his smiles are inward and fleeting. He knows how to wear the admiring glances of women, and from all directions they fly at him like feathers and drift off again. Yegina has so far sent a whole peacock’s tail his way, but she’s not alone. It’s mostly women in our party, except for two rather concerned-looking husbands, and Greg, whom I have so far avoided because he never returned my call back to him. Or my text with Kevin’s sister’s name and number. Or the dozen follow-up messages I’ve sent in my mind, alternately begging him to answer and telling him off.

  Rick leads us past the gate to the paddock to a low mounting platform, and motions for us to climb. The extra two and a half feet give us a great view of the ranch: a red barn situated between jutting tan hills, the walls flanked by steel fences and three dozen milling horses. It’s a sight I’d expect to find in rural Wyoming or Montana, but half a mile down this slope, clay-roofed mansions rise beside pools and brightgreen gardens. Beyond them surge the giant apartment buildings that line the east-west streets of Los Angeles, and way off, there’s downtown. The skyscrapers jut like tiny, sharp blocks, but the city doesn’t end with them. It goes on far into the haze beyond: hundreds more streets, maybe thousands. Now they look like a chaotic mosaic, but by night they will become a smooth, endless tapestry of light.

  A woman in jeans and chaps is throwing saddles on the horses who pass her, stepping forward to lightly cinch straps. Past her, another woman fixes their bridles, shoving bits in with quick fingers. Then she tightens the saddles and slaps the horses toward the gate. Everything and everyone wears freckles and splashes of dust. Everything and everyone is making noise—the women are clicking and shouting, the horses are whinnying, their hooves are thudding the earth, which is already dry and cracking, even in April. I find the hubbub as comforting as a cocoon—it reminds me of friends’ farms back home. Then I hear, ever so faintly, the bleat of car horns from below, and I look out again at the thousands of buildings below me, their western walls ablaze.

  “Beginner or intermediate?” Rick asks each person, then jabs his thumb at a line on either end of the platform. So far, Greg is the only intermediate. I’m not going there.

  When it’s Yegina’s turn, Rick says “Beginner” without even asking her.

  “What about her?” Yegina asks, nudging me. “Can you tell she used to own a horse?”

  “You just told me,” Rick says. He points to Greg and says to me, “Behind him, then.”

  “I haven’t ridden in fifteen years,” I protest, but Rick has already sauntered on.

  Yegina squeezes my arm. “I’ll be right next to you,” she says. “In the pack.”

  “Herd,” I say. “Do you know how much you’re herding me?”

  But Yegina is already brushing past Rick on the way to her line, and he looks befuddled first, then sly, then licks his lips.

  Time-lapse cameras could not capture the negative speed at which I move toward Greg, who gives me a casual wave. He is wearing clothes I recognize—an old pair of jeans, a T-shirt for a Vermont reggae festival—and the sheepish expression he gets when he feels outnumbered by women. As I approach, I feel like I am walking into the past, into the era when he was still my boyfriend. I wave back, attempting nonchalance, but it looks like I’m swatting at gnats.

  Kaye, cancer survivor and woman of the hour, throws her leg over Uncle Bud and gives a whoop.

  Greg leans toward me. “Can you give me a lift home tonight? I need to talk.”

  “But I drove Yegina,” I say.

  “Can she get another ride?”

  “Maybe. I don’t know.” Already I’m falling into my old pattern with Greg, almost unable to refuse him.

  “I’m sorry I couldn’t call you back,” he says. There’s an emotion in his voice that I can’t read.

  “Friends, Angelenos, and the cancer-free,” a helmeted Kaye shouts from atop Uncle Bud. The horse ducks his head as if to put distance between himself and Kaye’s vocal cords but otherwise remains motionless. “I am so touched and honored that you could be with me today.”

  A few cheers go up, and so do a couple of riders, awkwardly spraddling their mounts. One woman in pink flip-flops gets into a heated conversation with Rick, and then storms off to her car. Kaye blinks at the exchange and then soldiers on with her speech. Kaye excels in soldiering on. She is the classic beautiful girl from the Midwest who comes to Los Angeles to break into TV and ends up as a personal assistant to a celebrity—in Kaye’s case, to the same famous actor/collector duo who once hired Greg.

  The sight of Kaye usually fills me with both admiration and despair, but tonight I’m just admiring. Tonight I need to sun myself in her blithe optimism. A blue-eyed honey brunette with fabulously long legs and the waist of an ant, Kaye could easily get through life without female friends, but instead she courts as many as possible. I have never known anyone else as warmly and successfully social as her. I have also never met anyone else with such cheerful self-love. When Kaye found out she had throat cancer, she transformed herself from a human being to a living campaign; she started a blog and a fund for cancer research; marketed a green-tea cookie line (Kaye’s Anti-Cancer Snaps); and wrote daily updates on her radiation, surgery, and experiments in holistic treatments. “Don’t let the ‘meanies’ rule your life,” she posted. “The reins are in your hands.” (Sixth-grade slang and horse metaphors abound in her prose.) The way Kaye talks about the disease, you’d think cancer was something she invented in her quest for self-improvement.

  Yet within eight months, Kaye beat back her tumor. She looks radiant now.

  “Saddle up,” she says to me, to her life-coach friends Sara and Nelia, and to a new woman who has been introduced as Kaye’s “personal acupuncture savior.” “First round of margaritas is on me.”

  I click on my helmet and cheer with the others. If I didn’t feel Greg’s amused eyes on my face, I could fully enjoy being Kaye’s eleventh or twelfth best friend. Instead of acknowledging him, I focus on the horses that Rick is leading our way: a tall cream-and-brown pied gelding and a slender black mare who keeps lunging sideways and tossing her head. I am not much of a horsewoman, but it’s apparent to me that something is bothering the mare.

  “Babe,” says Rick, and mutters something low. The mare ducks her head, nostrils flaring. “Come on, Babe,” he says.

  He hands the gelding’s bridle to Greg. “This is Cheyenne,” he says. “You might need to give him a kick up the hills, but he’s a good boy.”

  Then Rick appraises me again, holding Babe’s brid
le. “She’ll be fine. She’s never been out at night, so keep her with me and the others,” he says. “S’okay?”

  She’s never been out at night? It’s not okay. Yet under Rick’s and Greg’s gazes, my defiant little-sister self kicks in: I want a different horse, but I’m not going to admit it in front of the boys.

  “Rick!” calls the ranch owner from across the swirl of horses and riders. “We need six more mounted over here.”

  “S’okay?” Rick says to me again.

  “I’ll switch with her,” Greg calls from beside the giant shoulder of Cheyenne.

  “I’m fine.” I take Babe’s reins. Greg once had a rich girlfriend who played polo, but I bet he’s never ridden on a real trail in his life.

  I swing into the saddle. The musty warm smell of horse, the way Babe’s dark spine bobs beneath me, makes my Vermont childhood come back again in a rush of grassy memories. We did own a horse. He was old and hated going down hills, so mostly I curried him until the air in the barn shone with his red-gold hair.

  Babe stomps and pulls at her bit, but I hold her back, waiting for others to rise into their saddles. Finally we all start moving, led by Rick, and I get absorbed in the business of steering a large creature. Greg leans across from his own mount and asks me if I’m sure I’m all right. It’s then, in that weird swaying second as Babe lurches from Cheyenne, that I really regard Greg and see through his polite mask to the hollows gathering under his eyes and cheekbones. His skin is the color of cement.

  “You need to eat,” I say to him. “You’re not eating.”

  He smiles remorsefully at this. “Maggie,” he says.

  But then Rick is whistling at us all to follow him out the ranch gate, and the whirl of horses distracts me again. By the time I reach the dirt road leading to the ridgeline, we’re in the last throes of the sunset. I can’t see the ocean yet—it’s blocked by the rim of hills—but the sun must be close to the Pacific. Our faces are bathed in light, but the shadows have risen as high as our stirrups. The slope’s shrubs are also sunk in shade, and the pebbles that spin from the horses’ footsteps roll beneath their branches and vanish. Part of me can’t believe that I am riding a horse here, in this dusty-green chaparral above sprawling Los Angeles, that this city and this wilderness can coexist, that I can exist on top of this massive uppity animal that carries me. According to Kaye, we’ll be riding a total of five miles tonight, up through the treeless hills and down the other side to eat and drink, and then return.

  “It’ll be dark coming back,” the ranch owner shouts, “but don’t worry because the horses all want to get home.” She slams the gate behind us. “Just keep them away from your margaritas.”

  Weak laughs scatter over our group, and we’re off. The earth is still sun-warm now, but a damp cool is spreading. I wish I’d brought a jacket.

  “Pull to the right to go right,” Rick hollers. “Pull to the left to go left. Give them a little kick if they get slow. Let the horses lead. They know the way.”

  I steer Babe after Rick, but suddenly Rick is breaking away to retrieve Yegina, whose dull-eyed brown mare seems fixating on going back to the paddock. Yegina, ordinarily graceful, looks lumpy and lopsided, as if she can’t find the right place to balance.

  “No, no. No. Please,” she entreats the mare. “Not that way.”

  “Susie, Susie,” Rick clucks, grabbing the reins from Yegina, pulling the horse around. “You got to go out one more time.”

  Susie’s slight reversal of course is all Babe needs to get the same idea in her head, and I have to wrench her around to follow the others, too. Her ears whip back and her gait hardens into a stiff, huffy trot, leaving Rick and Yegina in the dust. This is not going well. Up ahead, Kaye whoops again and circles an invisible lasso over her head. Uncle Bud plods beneath her, unaffected. The sun falls another degree, and out of the corner of my eye I spot Greg’s horse coming up alongside me. I’m bracing myself when someone else speaks.

  “You’ve had a rough week.” It’s Nelia or Sara, on Greg’s other side. I can’t tell them apart, especially in the fading light. They are both attractive red-haired life coaches, and they’ve cowritten a book that is made up entirely of bullet points.

  He ducks his head. “Yeah. You could say that.”

  “Do the police have any leads?”

  “Apparently I’m their lead,” Greg says tensely.

  “Oh, Shaw. As if …” Sara/Nelia trails off. “Do you have a lawyer?”

  “Maggie sent me a good name, and I’m talking to her.” He glances over at me. Cheyenne dances to the right, startling Babe, and I fall back before I can reply.

  “I just wish they wouldn’t waste their time on me, and would find her instead,” I hear Greg add.

  The road narrows to a steep trail that switchbacks up to the ridge. I pull on the reins to keep Babe from crashing into the horses ahead of us. One by one, they start to heave up the channel of dirt and stones. Babe prances from side to side, her ears flitting back. A cool wind starts to blow, and it smells like nightfall.

  “It’s just a little hill, Babe,” I squeak.

  She cranes her neck and looks longingly down toward the dim red barn now far below.

  “You okay, Maggie?” Greg says, but Cheyenne is already carrying him upward.

  Dust fills my mouth as Rick surges ahead of us, still holding Susie’s reins, Yegina clinging to the pommel. She gives me a pained smile.

  “Easy does it,” Rick tells Yegina. “Give Babe a kick now,” he says to me as he passes.

  I dig my heels into the mare’s ribs. She jolts a few steps up the trail. Behind me, the city is orange and velvet and glitter. Before me are silhouettes: horses and riders merged into massive creatures that all climb skyward except Babe, who stops again and snorts. I wonder if I’m sitting wrong. I lean my torso forward into her neck, but my pelvis slides back in the saddle, dragging her down.

  “Give her another kick,” Rick shouts again, twisting back. “She’ll go.”

  So I kick. But because Babe is whipping her head around again, I also stupidly, fearfully, pull back on the reins at the same time. Her front legs rise into the air, her back legs skittering. We both hang, the whole thousand or so pounds of us about to tumble, me first, and then she will pin me. And then, just as suddenly, Babe regains her balance and starts to come down.

  Greg’s voice splits the dark: “Jump, Maggie! She’s going to fall on you! Jump!”

  I do what I’m told, throwing myself from the saddle, landing hard on my right hip and then rolling off the path into a prickly bush.

  I don’t feel the pain until after I see Babe’s hooves smash the trail. She gives a full-body shiver and gallops giddily upslope. Rick leaps from his own horse, grabs her reins, and ties them to his saddle.

  “You all right?” he yells to me. “Can you get back on?”

  Sharpness stabs through my hip, but I feel more ridiculous and relieved than hurt. The horse would not have fallen on me. But for the panic in Greg’s voice, I probably would have ridden it out, landing back down with Babe and holding on as she charged up the trail. I don’t know what to think about this. I can’t distinguish Greg from the rest. He’s just another dark figure.

  “Coming,” I say.

  I stand and limp up the hill, sliding on stones, until I reach Babe’s warm flank. Her head jerks, but Rick holds her. I stick my boot in the stirrup and get back on.

  11

  In 1935, F. Scott Fitzgerald gave a speech at a banquet honoring the work of Mark Twain. “Huckleberry Finn took the first journey back,” said Fitzgerald. “He was the first to look back at the republic from the perspective of the west … And because he turned back we have him forever.”

  I read this speech aloud to Greg when I first stumbled across it in Fitzgerald’s biography. It was last December, a couple of months after Greg’s mother had died. He was booking a flight to Art Miami to do some consulting for his employers, two art collectors.

  “Don’t you love that last
line?” I said. “‘And because he turned back we have him forever.’”

  “More Fitzgerald, huh?” said Greg, turning from the computer. “You should be reading James Ellroy or something.”

  “I will,” I said, though I had promised this before. “But I want to imagine Hollywood in the 1930s, like when this bungalow was built—can you imagine how different it was?” I gestured at our living room ceiling, its cracking crown molding.

  Greg snorted. “Sadly, no. I doubt they’ve updated anything.”

  “I mean the city.”

  Greg turned back to the computer screen.

  “Nostalgia is an eastern preoccupation,” he said. “Fitzgerald talks about it like it’s a virtue. It doesn’t have to be.”

  “Not all back-looking is nostalgia,” I said. “Sometimes it’s selfexamination.”

  No answer. Red and purple panels flashed across Greg’s screen.

  “Those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it.” It was a stupid cliché. But we didn’t talk anymore. Not enough. Not about our ideas or feelings.

  Greg sighed. His chair creaked as he swiveled again toward me. “Don’t you feel freer out here?” he asked, searching my face. “I never realized how oppressed I was growing up in Europe and New York. Everyone important had already lived. Everything important had been done.”

  I recalled my drive on the 101, passing the parking garage, being flooded with metropolis. Was that freedom or exposure I’d felt? Or both?

  “I just thought it was a beautiful quote,” I said.

  Greg kept facing me. “I’m moving out,” he said quietly.

  I wasn’t sure I’d heard him correctly, but I couldn’t find the voice to ask. I just stared.