by Jane Smiley
ROSALIND GOT OUT OF BED, sat down at her desk, read over entries for all the races at Churchill, then took out a sheet of stationery, and quickly wrote down seven names: Silverbulletday, Answer Lively, Reraise, Da Hoss, Escena, Buck’s Boy, and Awesome Again. Then she sealed them into an envelope and signed her name across the back of it. She slipped it into a drawer in her desk and locked the drawer. Eileen, who had been under the covers, jumped off the bed, stretched, and went out into the hallway. Rosalind barely noticed. She was thinking that she knew horses now. What it felt like was that somehow all those years of being around Al and Dick and the trainers they had before, all those years of going to the races and going to the backside and listening to them all talk, had not been wasted, but had been waiting for a slot in her brain. Making that space for Dick, painful as it was, had made that other space, too.
It was clear from the shadow of an argument that she and Al had had the night before that Al was on to her. That, in itself, was an embarrassing dilemma, and Rosalind felt exposed. Feeling exposed led to several other unpleasant feelings—shame, grief, ambivalence, fear. All of these feelings had their ignoble side. In the case of the fear, the ignoble side was just about the only side it had. Fear was most certainly always about not getting away with something, that’s what it looked like to her now.
She got up from her desk and went into her walk-in closet, where, in accordance with her usual habit, she assayed her pale, elegant, expensive wardrobe and decided what to wear. Except today these clothes had a distinct fleeting quality about them, as if they were not hers, as if even choosing, buying, appreciating, and wearing them, having them mold themselves to her body, had not quite established her possession of them. It gave her a moment of vertigo, and she leaned against the door.
ROBERTO ACEVEDO was in the hospital with three broken ribs from a training accident at Hollywood Park just the day before. The colt jerked away from him, tossed his head, and fell over the inside rail. It was a freak accident, and Roberto’s first real injury. The horse got right up, unhurt. Roberto was five three and a quarter now, seventeen years old, 115 pounds, hungry hungry hungry. He didn’t have long, so he planned to be out of his hospital bed by that evening and back on a horse Monday. Normally, with training and race riding, he averaged eight horses a day. As a concession to his injuries, he planned to cut back to six. For inspiration on this score, he read Dick Francis novels. He had one right there in the hospital with him, mostly about landscape painting, but a little bit about horses, too. He had read so many of them by now that he knew perfectly well what he was going to do after he hit five four, 120 pounds. He planned to go to England and become the first Mexican steeplechase jockey to win the Cheltenham Gold Cup.
———
HAVING DECIDED on an activity for the day, and a strategy of demonstrating his dissatisfaction by leaving without telling anyone, Al got up from the breakfast counter and took his coffee cup to the sink, where he turned the water on low and ran some into the cup. Eileen entered the kitchen and leapt silently onto the breakfast counter, making it on the first try.
AUDREY, WHO HAD just had her thirteenth birthday, got up before dawn. She had the special editions of the Thoroughbred Times, The Blood-Horse, and the New York Times. She had also culled from the Internet every article about the Breeders’ Cup and printed them out. The first thing she noticed was that that jockey, Roberto Acevedo, was not riding any of the California horses, which was a bit disappointing. However, she favored Da Hoss in the Mile, Silverbulletday in the Juvenile Fillies, Escena in the Distaff, Buck’s Boy in the Turf, and Skip Away in the Classic, but it would be foolish, she thought, to bet against entry one in the Classic, three excellent horses running as one betting interest. And there was considerable doubt in her mind about whether Skip Away could handle the footing at Churchill. He’d had trouble there before. Her mother wasn’t even awake yet, but Audrey was dressed, lying on her bed, weighing her bets.
In the pre-dawn dark, she could sometimes hear her father’s voice in her head, as she had often heard it when he was alive. He’d always gotten up between four and five, made himself coffee, gotten ready to go for a run, hummed or talked to himself, checked on her, given her a kiss, straightened her covers over her. He knew nothing of the house they lived in now, nothing of her school or the stable where she took riding lessons, or her new friends. But a year ago they had talked about Skip Away, the wonderful gray, all morning before he went to work, and then he had called her from the office and they had watched the race together. When he came home, he had a surprise for her, the forty-six dollars he had won on the race in the office betting pool. Now, besides herself and her mother, of course, Skip Away was about the only thing unchanged between last year and this. Audrey sat up and looked at the horse’s picture again, then lay down and closed her eyes.
AL TURNED from the sink just in time to see Eileen remove the pink doughnut from the open box and, head high, trot across the counter and leap to the floor. The most maddening thing was that she would trot in that off-hand way, her insolent comma of a tail pointing in the air, and his only intention, at first, was to make the little bitch run for her life.
JUSTA BOB WAS eating his morning hay. He had galloped four furlongs and trotted out four furlongs and was pleasantly fatigued.
ELIZABETH AND PLATO had taken advantage of his regular 4:00 a.m. erection. After they made love and he turned over to go back to sleep, she got up, energized, and went into his new kitchen (he no longer lived in Berkeley, but in a nice condo in Fresno) and had her favorite breakfast—white-corn tortilla chips with parmesan-jalapeño-artichoke dip and a bowl of matzo-ball soup. Today she planned to begin her chapter on non-reactive child-rearing. While she was eating, she realized that the first line would be “As soon as your child can talk, you may teach him to say to you, when you are angry, ‘Mommy, what are you afraid of?’ ” After she wrote that down, she went out in her robe and picked up the paper in the driveway. She turned at once to the sports section. Coverage was pretty minimal, but that was okay, she had made her picks. Mr. T. had no access to information about many of the horses in the Breeders’ Cup—no way to judge between Skip Away, whom he didn’t know, and horses he had seen. And he himself had never raced at Churchill Downs, so he had no comment to make on the footing. The problem with a betting system devised by a horse, Elizabeth reflected, was that it was very immediate—there weren’t many patterns you could extrapolate as general principles. But Mr. T. wasn’t big on general principles as a rule—it was only because he was a gelding that you managed to get any larger perspective at all.
FOR ROSALIND, the first question was not what was Eileen doing and why was Al yelling, but how had a pink doughnut gotten into the house? That was the very thing that was going through her mind when Al put his hands on her shoulders and came very close to shaking her but did not. Instead, he took his hands down off her shoulders without hardly gripping her. Contact had been made for, at the most, half a second. She knew that even while their gazes locked and they stood there at the door of the bedroom, staring at one another. But she had felt his strength, anyway, the difference between her weight and his, the difference between her size and his, the difference between her gender and his, all of that information passing as if digitized between them. She made herself look away, down the long hallway toward the kitchen, the richness of the floors and the Persians, the wintry light falling through the windows, the dark uprights of the doorposts and the window frames, everything solid and stationary and quiet. She recognized that the moment to be afraid was already over, and she took a deep breath.
AUDREY’S NEW riding instructor, Ellen, picked her up in the Cherokee. With her were some people Audrey didn’t know, and Audrey kept her mouth shut, a little disappointed. But as they drove, the horse talk rolled and splashed and bubbled around her, and she had her money and her picks, and when she talked about them, the Irish one, Deirdre, who turned out to be a horse-trainer at Pimlico, thought they were good ones. The o
ther one, Tiffany, owned some horses in New York and was working for Deirdre and was really pretty, too. Of course she could almost sense her father in the car with them as they drove to the simulcast, and when she mentioned this, that her father took her to Pimlico four times, Deirdre gave her a little squeeze around the shoulders, and she realized that they all had talked about her before coming, and they all knew that her father was dead, and at first that bothered her, but then it was almost comforting.
THE ONLY THING Sir Michael Ordway liked about parties anymore was the remote possibility that she would turn up. He used to be interested in the rest of them, but the beauty died, and one by one he got jaded, the way you do. She was the last, most piquant pleasure. He looked for her at every gathering, his expectation feeding on the very knowledge that she couldn’t possibly show up, until he got himself into a bit of a fever about the whole thing. It was just like the only thing he liked about life anymore—which mogul, at any moment, could he sell a horse to? It was so easy, selling racehorses to moguls. He’d sold horses to software, hardware, stocks and bonds, of course they were naturals, lingerie, cosmetics, toys, golf-course developments, commercial rentals, American trailer parks, rock and roll, rap, hip-hop, and Bach (a cheap horse, a hard sell, a challenge met). He’d sold a horse to every enterprise except maybe French Deconstructionism, and that was just because the Deconstructionist had had a heart attack before he sent the check. Every sucker (American word, he liked it) got what he paid for—four legs and a fantasy. He watched the door. She was in Scotland, last he heard. He wondered who she favored in the American race. He sipped from his glass of wine. He talked, as always. Sometimes he checked in on his talking with his actual brain. It was a good party, moguls abounding. And then there she was. She had not come in by the door, but perhaps through the roof, from the Empyrean. She was there, across the room. She was carrying her handbag. She was smiling. She was there. “Sir Michael,” she said. “Your Majesty,” he replied. “Are you well?” she said. “Very well,” he replied. “You know,” he said. “Yes,” she replied. “I know a lovely colt by Land of Magic that might be available. Remember him?” he asked. “I do,” she said.
WHAT HAPPENED WAS, Buddy said to his wife one day that on Breeders’ Cup day he wanted to be as far away from the whole deal as he could possibly be, and so, two days ago, they arrived here, on the Big Island of Hawaii, about three arduous miles back into a jungle canyon at the northern end of the island. Buddy, a man without inner resources, had been asleep more or less since they arrived. The suites were treehouses and, of course, had no television or newspapers. Before they left Pasadena, she had removed all copies of horse magazines from his suitcase. They had also brought their own food, which was converting itself to mold before her very eyes. As she sat gazing at him and listening to the waterfall outside, scenting the mildew that rose from their sheets, Buddy’s wife was not quite sure that this was the place she should have chosen, but tomorrow, after the dangerous day was over, they would be moving to the Mauna Lani, a real resort, where she would no longer have to ponder her own lack of inner resources, where she could buy some magazines, go shopping, call the children, and get away from Buddy, who must have been better company thirty years ago, but maybe not.
AL PUT HIS HANDS behind his back, though he knew they were no longer a danger to him, and he held Rosalind’s gaze as long as she held his. When she turned away, he looked down. He knew she knew that all his force, whatever that was, had risen up against her, a thing he had thought impossible, and he knew that she knew that it had now converted, every last molecule, from anger to shame. He said, “I need some shoes,” and he stepped past her into the bedroom, and then into his closet.
“WELL, LET’S SEE,” said Sam the vet. He was at Home Depot, in the plumbing department. The young man, say twenty-five, that he was talking to looked rather new on the job, willing but nervous. Sam sniffed and rubbed his cheek with his hand in that old-Vermonter way. “Yes,” said the young man.
“How about a nice four-inch PVC connector, about twelve inches long, you know, for a septic connection.” Sam could see these out of the corner of his eye, and sure enough, the young man went over to the bin and pulled one out. “Oh, that’s good,” said Sam. “That one-and-a-half-inch joint there. Isn’t that it? Why don’t you measure that?”
The young man got out his tape measure and measured the diameter of the offshoot. He said, “That’s right, sir. One and a half inches.”
“Good. Here we go.” Sam pulled a length of vinyl sleeve out of the pocket of his coat and fitted it over the end of the pipe, folded it back, slipped it through, folded the other end back over the other end of the pipe. He said, “How does that look?” He held it up to the young man, who looked through it. “Fine, sir,” he said.
“Good,” said Sam. “Now, let’s see, we need a reducer for this part”—he pointed to the end of the offshoot—“and a screw-in valve. See, we have to be able to take the valve off and fill the outside of the sleeve with warm water, and then put the valve back on, and then, if it’s too tight, we have to be able to let off some of the pressure.”
“The pressure?”
“The pressure on the penis.”
“Oh.” The young man looked at him without moving, so Sam began looking through bins. He said, “You know, a valve like a valve for a bicycle tire.”
“Oh. Yes. Well, let’s see.” He turned his head, but Sam, who knew where they were because he’d done this before, walked over to a bin and picked one up. “Oh, yeah,” he said. He handed the young man the length of pipe, saying, “You hold this.” Then he began screwing the reducer and the valve into the offshoot. “There we go,” he said. “Now, you see, if you need to, you can just let a little bit of the water out, and it doesn’t hurt. All we need now is a nice tight cover for the end, so that none of the collection drips out.”
“The collection?”
“Right. But we want it soft, so that he can bump against it without hurting himself.”
“Who?”
Sam turned away with a smile, pretending not to hear this question. He found a cap for the pipe, and said, “Maybe I’ll just pad this. Got any foam rubber?”
“That would be in building supplies, sir.”
Sam took the PVC pipe out of the young man’s hands. “Well, thank you very much. I think the other things I need are probably in building supplies.” He turned away, slowly. Sometimes they didn’t ask.
But this fellow said, “Who’s going to bump against the end?” And then, “What is it?”
“What, this?” Now Sam was smiling.
The kid nodded.
“It’s an artificial vagina for a miniature horse.”
“A what?”
Sam made an effort to be loud and clear. “An ar-ti-fi-cial va-gi-na. Looks great. Thanks for your help.”
“Thank you for coming in, sir.”
The fact was, it wasn’t really the breeding season yet, but, Sam thought as he walked to his truck a few minutes later, nothing wrong with being prepared.
AFTER AL WENT OUT, getting into the Mercedes on his own and driving off to God knew where, Rosalind thought she should have said something. What she had done, turned and left the room, gone into the living room and then out into the dormant garden, was just the sort of thing that she would do. She had never been quick of wit, or quick to speak. She had always thought that giving people time to regain their composure was the absolutely best course in any crisis. And, then again, she hadn’t really been in the wrong for several decades, and so even apologizing, truly apologizing, was unfamiliar to her. It was only while she was out in the garden, after Al drove off, that she realized that an apology was appropriate. The trouble was that even in the garden, by herself, with Al miles away, it was hard to form the words. “I’m sorry” wasn’t so hard, but identifying what she was sorry for was. In fact, she was mostly sorry that she had made herself so unhappy, that things hadn’t worked out, that nothing had come of so much inner turmoil. H
er betrayal of Al seemed rather a distant and manageable side-effect to the central drama, so to look him in the eye and apologize seemed rather insincere, an effect of fear rather than love. And she suddenly wished for someone to talk to about this, if only to register that at least she was being honest with herself, and recognizing her motives for what they were.
RESIDUAL, BACK AT WORK, put in a lightning three furlongs for Leon and Deedee. They agreed afterwards that they had this filly figured out. With Deedee sitting right there, Leon called the owner and told her how marvelously the filly was doing, how healthy and happy she looked, how Buddy was on vacation. The owner was very friendly, thanked Leon for keeping her in the picture, and said in a whispery voice, “In some ways, dear, I wish you were her trainer. Buddy is a genius, of course, but you’re the one she likes.” Leon pretended to ignore this, and said only, “I know Buddy is a little lax about communicating, Mrs. Warren, but he means well. He just has so many horses and owners.”