Horse Heaven

by Jane Smiley

  Farley said, “I didn’t realize he was paying so much attention to the other horses in the morning.”

  “What else is there for him to do?” said Elizabeth. “Besides, if there was ever a horse with a theory, he’s the one.”

  The horses crossed the finish line. The number-three horse had left his race on the training track. The number-six horse had come from off the pace and run second by a nose

  “We got any tickets to cash?” asked Plato.

  “No,” said Elizabeth.

  “Nothing bad happened,” said Joy. “You really had my heart pounding there for a minute. All I could think of was that one of those horses would stumble. Thank God.”

  “That’s what I think,” said Elizabeth. “That’s what I think every day. Worlds are in collision. Thank God that most of the time they just pass through one another.”

  It was six weeks since Joy had moved into his condo, almost five months since the day she arrived with Mr. T. She gave every evidence of loving him as simply and truly as he loved her, and he liked to think of this thing they had as an example by contrast to his marriage—where there had been obligations, now there were gifts. Where there had been disagreements, now there was coincidence of outlook and desire. Where there had been ongoing negotiation, here there was peaceful silence. It was powerfully satisfying to him. The thing that wouldn’t die, though, was his goading feeling that he had not secured her, that she was temporary, losable, fleeting. Most of the time he put this down to the years he had spent at the track, watching horses come and go, watching talent come and go, watching soundness come and go. He had thought, in the spring, that he was resigned to that at last, wise at last, philosophical at last, but here was Joy, and his hard-won equanimity about his career had spawned his old anxiety with a new face.

  He said to Joy, “You coming to make nice with the brothers?”

  “Would you like me to?”

  “They like you. You might serve as a reminder that a twenty-percent return on your investment is not the only thing there is to life. Hug me, kiss me, hold my hand, make them envious.”

  And so he got what he wanted, her presence, the sensation of her body against his, the feeling of her hand deep in his hand.

  Bernard Baruch was there in his slot, an excellent example of what money could buy in terms of horseflesh. By Gulch out of a stakes-winning Nureyev mare, he was big, classy-looking, calm, smart, correct, and interested. If he didn’t break his maiden today, he would soon. The brothers were standing by the rail, besuited, waiting for him with congenial smiles on their faces. And, yes, when they shook hands with Joy, each of them took her little hand in both of theirs, lucky them.

  “Looks good,” said the older brother.

  “Very fit,” said the younger brother.

  “Nice horse,” said Farley.

  “This should be fun,” said Joy.

  Now the jockeys came out. The brothers’ silks were a yellow color, maybe the closest Farley had ever seen to real gold, and they were beautiful, and Desormeaux looked striking in them. Joy took Farley’s hand as they stood in the open paddock, but he noted how comfortably she conversed with the brothers, how she brought them out of their seriousness a bit. At one point, she got on her tiptoes and whispered in the older one’s ear. The two of them laughed. Farley held her back a moment after he threw the jockey on the horse, and she said, “I told him we had a source in the barn who thought Bernie would win the race.”

  “Did you tell him it was a horse?”

  “You’ve got to break them into that slowly.”

  Everyone loved her, Farley thought, with a prick of jealousy. It was only that she had lived so secluded a life that made her think she was a solitary sort.

  After Bernard Baruch won the race, and they took the picture, and the horse peed in the jar, Farley met him back in the barn to assess his condition. He felt his legs and looked them over, along with his feet. No scratches or cuts. The horse seemed sound, and happy, too, though of course he would be stiff in the morning. The adrenaline from the race always took a while to break down, so the horse was still, literally, feeling no pain. But as thoroughly as Farley went over him, feeling his back and his feet, running his hands over his whole body, he could find nothing suspicious. Now the only question was a mental one—did the horse like it? Well, given that he ran first most of the way around, out of harm’s way and under a very kind ride from Desormeaux, it was unlikely that he had conceived of any bogeys. It was running itself that the horse had to decide about, not chaos, not dirt in his face, not bumping and jostling, not slippery going or, perhaps the hardest thing, who he was compared with the others. For today, anyway, he knew who he was compared with the others, and who he was was who he wanted to be.

  Just because he was concentrating on the colt, speaking in a low voice to the groom and the feed man, that didn’t mean that he wasn’t noticing Joy out of the corner of his eye, down the shedrow, leaning over Mr. T.’s stall guard and talking to him. He saw the horse put his white head against her chest and press against her a bit, to which she responded by pressing back. Her hands went to his ears, and stroked them gently. Farley could feel that touch, had felt that touch. It almost made him wish he had furry ears himself. A horse’s ears, he had noticed over the years, were eminently strokable, if the horse liked it. Your hands just fit around them, and they slipped through your palms like silk. It was old horsemen’s wisdom that you never stood directly in front of a horse’s head, because that was where he couldn’t see you, and that head, should it shoot outward, was quite a powerful blunt object. But he had always thought that, even though a horse couldn’t see you there, that was the place he could most strongly feel you, and if he trusted you, he would enjoy your presence there, your hands on his ears, your cheek against his forehead, which was where Joy’s now lay. The horse’s head was nearly in her lap. If a horse could not feel love as we know it, he thought, what was that he was witnessing? Maybe the horse didn’t carry it away with him, and brood over it, and wonder about it, and reflect upon the changes it had made in his life, but look at that—he certainly felt it, came out to meet it, reached for it, relaxed into it, could not get enough of it.

  There were horses who had died for love, Farley knew. It wasn’t a common story, but it was a story you heard from time to time. Swale had died mysteriously, just a little bit after being separated from his groom. You could think that he had died of grief; some people did. Males and females did express affection differently; Farley sometimes thought it was the colts and the geldings who had a harder time handling their attachments. Fillies were often quite affectionate; mares at the studfarm lived in a world of connection, a hormone haze of sisterhood and motherhood. If you want to know how to be a good mother, he had once said to the foundation mare, upon the occasion of a memorable and not easily forgiven dispute, go out to the farm and stand among the mares and their foals and try to get it. A bad mother was nervous but neglectful. A good mother was attentive and calm. It was as simple as that, he had said. What a twenty-year-old broodmare didn’t know about love and power wasn’t worth knowing. Stallions and colts were different. They lived alone and didn’t even approach the mares most of the time, even in the wild. Geldings, unlike stallions, tended to have friends and passionate attachments. They took that sexual energy and sublimated it, and the interesting thing was that people had done that to them, and then the horses had made something new and not natural out of their condition. Geldings had a culture among themselves, didn’t they, and it was a culture based on affection, love, passion, whatever you wanted to call it. Geldings were the proof that love was not an instinct but a choice, a learned behavior, something you developed a capacity for over the years.

  Farley stood back from the colt, and said to the groom, “Okay, Rafael. He looks good so far. Wrap him and put him to bed. He’s a winner now. Make sure he thinks he’s living in the penthouse.”

  “Yah, boss,” said Rafael, smiling. And then, when they had turned and hea
ded down the aisle, of course the groom kissed the horse on the neck. You couldn’t help it.

  Joy came up behind him and put her arms around his middle. He felt her lay her head on his back, and he pressed against her. What if? he thought, a way that he hadn’t allowed himself to think in years. “What if” was an infinitely branching road through a dark wood that eventually brought you to paralysis and despair. “What if the horse wins the Derby” was as dangerous as “What if the horse falls and breaks his neck.” Years of bad marital stability were supposed to have made him permanently averse to the temptations of “what if.” But here it was again, one of those repeatedly unlearned lessons. He turned around and enveloped her in his arms, as much out of fear as out of love.

  BOOK THREE

  1999

  JANUARY

  50 / WHO THEY ARE

  JANUARY 1. Today they are three years old. Of the 55,431 mares bred in 1995, some forty-four thousand managed to conceive, and then, in 1996, 32,217 foals were born. Of those, 11,056 got to the races as two-year-olds. One two-year-old or another won each of the 4,639 two-year-old races. In three short years, some have died, many have failed, many have cost a lot of money that will never be recouped. Thirty-two thousand foals mean thirty-two thousand stories, because a Thoroughbred horse never goes unnoticed or undiscussed. And most of the stories are the stuff of drama. To the man whose beautiful and expensive two-month-old foal (stud fee already paid and unrecoverable) was bitten in the nose by a poisonous snake six times and found dead in the pasture, the year has had a tragic cast, even though his four other foals live and frolic and prosper. To the woman who sent her barren mare to the studfarm in January for an early breeding, and got a call that the mare was carrying a seven-month-old fetus, the year has had a cast of serendipitous comedy—after all the attention, all the ultrasound, all the watching, the mare had kept her secret anyway. And, of course, the filly is a beauty, dark and substantial, with a shining moon-shaped white marking between her eyes. To the owners and fans of Silver Charm and Skip Away and Real Quiet and Silver-bulletday and Da Hoss, the year has had an epic quality, because every win is against the odds and the odds of winning any race are fifty-five thousand to one no matter what the handicappers say.

  Three-year-old dressage horses are mostly still untrained, three-year-old jumpers have yet to see a jump, three-year-old driving horses have yet to see a cart. Three-year-old cow horses, bucking horses, pleasure horses have most of their education and all of their careers ahead of them. But three-year-old Thoroughbreds run in the Kentucky Derby, the Preakness, and the Belmont Stakes. Three-year-old racehorses are peaking, preparing to fulfill their owners’ wildest dreams, preparing to get legendary if they can.

  William Vance has some three-year-olds in the barn, a couple potential stakes winners, though none of them lives in the same universe as the Kentucky Derby. He does, however, have Justa Bob, now seven. To William Vance, in the midst of the strangest thing that has ever happened to him, life is a romance. Here is this plain brown horse, about sixteen hands and not much to look at. His back is a little swayed, his neck is a little ewed. His right forefoot turns a different direction from his right knee. He’s a little cow-hocked and a little blocky in the head. His lower lip tends to dangle. His ears are a tad muley. But since coming back to the track, first at Hawthorne and now here in Louisiana, he has won four times in four starts. After the second race, William took him out of claiming company altogether. Now he is winning allowance races, and always, of course, by a nose. The gallop is an asymmetrical gait, a series of rhythmical leaps. A horse’s head nods both from side to side and up and down as he springs over the ground. When his nose is down, it is also farther forward. To some degree, speed and the will to win minimize the nodding—the anatomy of the gallop is not 100 percent of destiny. In spite of Cartesian skeptics, a racehorse may himself understand how to put his nose out in front of the nose of another racehorse, and may desire to do so. William Vance does not have to address this philosophical issue, but he does have to say something, because people want to talk about it, and so he always says, “I don’t know. I don’t know,” not wanting to test his luck.

  Then the horse wins a fifth time, and a guy from the Times-Picayune comes around and wants him to say something interesting, so he says, “I’ve been training horses for twenty-six years, and I’ve made a living at it. I generally have about fifteen or twenty horses in this barn, so I’ve seen a few over the years, but I’ve never seen one like Justa Bob.”

  He gets the sense that that’s not interesting enough, so he leans down and shows the guy the scar along the midline of the horse’s belly, where he had colic surgery.

  “We had a huge hot spell right after I claimed the horse out in Colorado,” says William, “one of those welcome-to-Chicago hundred-and-twenty-degree-heat-index weeks, and when I got to the barn late that night, the horse was in bad shape. The surgery ended up costing me sixty-eight hundred dollars, and putting the horse out of commission for three and a half months. And you can’t count on seeing a return on that kind of money from a six-year-old claimer.”

  The newspaper guy nods and smiles. William isn’t quite sure how much he knows about horses.

  “The vet told me his performance level might never be the same after the surgery as it was before. And he wasn’t a stakes winner before. I just thought, well, a good deed is a good deed.”

  Then he says, “You can’t run this horse if you got a weak heart. Or he’ll kill you.”

  The guy laughs at that and writes it down. He says, “How much have you won, then?”

  “About sixty thousand.” William coughs at this, and hurries past the number—even around the track, where all these numbers are common knowledge, William, as a Midwesterner, considers it slightly ill-mannered to talk specific sums. He says, “The thing is, I’ve got owners now who wouldn’t have thought of me six months ago.”

  Is that the best thing? wonders the reporter.

  “Nah, nah,” says William, laughing. “He’s an exciting horse to watch. You always wonder, will he misjudge that last inch? He never does.”

  Later, when the article appears (after Justa Bob has won six but before he wins seven and eight), William thinks he did okay with the interview, but what he really likes is what follows:

  “Bettors around New Orleans love it. They love to bet on Justa Bob and they love to bet against him. Mary Hardesty, a track regular who always bets on Justa Bob, says, ‘He’s a sure thing who doesn’t look like a sure thing. You get tempted to bet more and more on him, and then, right there at the wire, you think, “Oh my God, I’ve lost it all.” But then that nostril is right out there.’

  “Hanging on the wall of William Vance’s office are six photofinish win pictures. Horsemen think that might be some kind of record. And William hasn’t been averse to betting on his own horse. ‘Let’s just say,’ he says, ‘I’ve set aside some money toward my son’s medical-school tuition.’ Does he have an explanation for the horse’s performance? ‘You know, when he was down at my dad’s in Missouri for all those months, he stood every day in a spring-fed pond. That’ll cure what ails you.’

  “But that’s not why he’s smiling. He says, ‘This is a nice horse. He’s easy to get along with and a pleasure around the barn. I always wonder,’ adds Vance, ‘whether he has a sense of humor.’ ”

  William takes the article to Kinko’s himself and has it laminated to a piece of particle board right above Justa Bob’s seventh win picture. After that, when people want to talk about the whole deal, he gives that to them to read.

  51 / ANONYMOUS

  IT WAS INTERESTING to Rosalind to note that in all of her travels, even in all of her china-buying, she had somehow never been to Ireland, where she found herself in the new year. Everyone either came from Ireland or went there, especially everyone in the horse world. Al, in fact, had been to the Curragh, and Coolmore Stud, and the yearling sales several times, but Rosalind had never had occasion to come until now, when she
was supposed to be looking at paintings but could not because the painter, having missed his flight from Ankara, would not be back at least until tomorrow and maybe the next day, by which time Rosalind herself would be in Spain on her way to Delhi. And so she was in Dublin, with a free day. Since Irishness pervaded the world, and it seemed that most people spent at least part of their education and a bit of each day having feelings about things going on in Ireland—much more so, say, than things going on in France—it was all the more surprising to Rosalind that she had no friends here and was herself unknown to anyone, so she didn’t have a soul to call, and as wealthy and well connected as she was everywhere else, here in Ireland she was a nobody.

  How her heart soared at the thought.

  No light blinked on the telephone in her hotel room.

  No faxes or messages were waiting for her, since she had spoken to the artist himself upon her arrival the day before.

  No one knew that today, this very day, she was turning fifty years old. No one had arranged a birthday party for her. She had no self-preservation or self-consolation appointments at any salons or spas. None of her friends had made lunch reservations at Cité Grill or Lutèce for the sake of common lamentation at the passage of time.

  Instead, January 3, 1999, was an utter unknown for her. Even Al might not call, since he was in Siberia looking into building some sort of steel-rolling mill. The worldwide cellular-telephone system only intermittently connected with Siberia, and Rosalind had told him not to worry about it. They had hardly seen each other at all since the Breeders’ Cup.

  As she came down the wide, beautifully burnished dark oak staircase into the lobby of the hotel and turned left to go into the dining room for breakfast, Rosalind looked at her watch. In fact, it was only just after 1:00 a.m. in Appleton, her natal city. She was still unborn, though the labor that had resulted in her was well progressed.