Horse Heaven

by Jane Smiley

  “Mr. T. is that white horse in the stall by the office and Elizabeth is our animal communicator.”

  “What do they say?”

  “Well, Elizabeth says that Mr. T. does not recognize Limitless. She can’t pin him down on what he means by that. When he streams a picture of Limitless to her, his outlines are only semi-filled in.”

  Rosalind looked at her. She said, “How funny.”

  Farley said, “Do you buy this animal communication, too?”

  “I don’t know, but his breeder said to me his eyes looked to her like the eyes of a woman about to let her silk robe drop to the floor.”

  “And, you know,” continued Farley, “I always thought that a big horse had a big personality. A multitude of quirks are supposed to be a sign of intelligence and self-respect in a horse. But he’s, oh, I don’t know, sort of colorless.”

  The horses approached the starting gate. Joy saw Limitless enter the fourth slot on a loose rein. The other horses entered like horses, that is, with some urging on the part of their jockeys. She said, “He’s not affectionate. When he sees me, he never nickers, he just paws to get out until I put the leadshank on him. I think he would have a personality if he wasn’t so absorbed.” One by one the back gates snapped shut. There was silence, then clanging turbulence as the front gates opened. “And it’s a fine start,” proclaimed the announcer’s voice upon the quiet air.

  Rosalind thought that exerting her powers with her own horse would constitute a conflict of interest, and so she refrained from giving any signals at all, but sat in her chair with a space in her head and her hands folded in her lap. She made no wishes. Next to her, Farley said, “Easy enough.” One furlong into the seven-furlong race, the number-one horse had taken the lead, with the number-ten horse right on his heels. Then four more were bunched. Limitless was next, with three horses strung out behind him. She remembered how she had felt about racing for so many years—all races were the same. Some horses ran. Most often, the ones toward the end of the line came up and won. Or the horse who started out in front stayed in front. Over and over, the same pattern worked itself out, number one through number fourteen, in various shades of earth tones. Owners, trainers, jockeys, bettors exulted or sighed or cursed or cried, and then it was time for the next race, and the pattern worked itself out again. However personal every interested party considered the outcome to be, it was not personal—the numbers had to come in in some order or other; the pattern had to work itself out in some way or another, eight or nine times a day, week after week, year after year, decade upon decade. How boring she once thought it, never quite believing it was the grand opera or the great adventure that others saw. Now, though, she had grown sensitive to the variations on the theme. You didn’t have to have a big-stakes race or designated great runners for the race to be beautiful and compelling. You didn’t even have to have a betting interest. All you had to do was pay attention. Every race formed itself as a picture, or as a story, or as a design. In this case, the picture was of two chestnuts at the front, neck and neck, and Limitless drawing to the outside, passing the second group, and taking a bead on the leaders. The story was of the timing of his move. He had not been paying attention for several furlongs—you could see that without binoculars—and then he dug in, closed on the second horse, who, perhaps tired from the early fractions, bumped him in the stretch, startling him. The design was adagio, vivace, rest, adagio, as Limitless recovered from being bumped, but not quickly enough, and ran third. And then, of course, another way of looking at it was introduced, as the sign “Inquiry” flashed on the screen, and Farley jumped up to run down to the track, and the race became a piece of litigation.

  “He doesn’t like physical contact at all, I’ve noticed,” said Joy. “It doesn’t surprise me that he was offended at being bumped.”

  The numbers went up, and Limitless remained in the show position. Rosalind and Joy went down to meet the others on the track.

  Farley was shaking his head. He said, “He wasn’t bumped. He thought he was going to be bumped.”

  “Touch me not,” said Rosalind.

  The jockey, Roberto his name was, glanced at her and nodded.

  “I told you he was awfully opinionated,” said Rosalind.

  Farley looked at her as they followed the horse and his groom under the stands. He said, “All the great ones were. But mind you, that’s not a promise.”

  “Just let him do what he wants,” said Rosalind. The next day she left for a week in Sri Lanka, although her gallery was pretty full already, but she loved making it look crammed, like a treasure chest. Limitless left for the ranch.

  AFTER THE HORSE had been at the ranch for a week, Farley thought he would sneak him up to San Francisco for the California Derby. It was a stakes race on the grass but not a graded stakes; the press was in New York now, clamoring for the Belmont. The trip was an easy three hours or so from the ranch. The purse was $150,000 added, and it was Rosalind and Al, through Farley, who added another $22,500 late fee. The weather was rainy and the turf was soft, a first for Limitless in his four California starts.

  And the horse was particularly restive in his stall. When Joy took him out and walked him around and around, a small, drenched figure in her long dark raincoat, Farley almost hadn’t the heart to go on with it. But he was interested to note that the horse didn’t mind the heavy mist. When Rosalind called him from Capri to find out what was going on with her animal, she said, “Oh, I meant to tell you, he was out all last winter, at the training farm in Maryland. Rain, sleet, snow. You name it, he’s stood out in it.”

  That was the key to it. All through the race, while the other horses, mostly Cal-breds, seemed to be staring down at the turf in disbelief, Limitless galloped home double-time. “I think,” said Joy, bundled up in a coat and a horse blanket, “he’s just happy to be out of the shedrow.”

  Farley called Rosalind in Nice, and Rosalind called Al in Helsinki.

  “AL,” SAID ROSALIND. “I think we’re in the same time zone.”

  “Oh, yeah? Where are you, Rozzy?”

  “I’m in Nice. Remember that hotel we stayed in with your kids that time? I’m there.” She had come there just because her other hotel was overbooked, but just then it seemed like a fated coincidence, that she should be reminded of a pleasant time they had had.

  “That was a decent place. That was a fun trip, wasn’t it? There wasn’t so much yammering all the time. What time is it?”

  “It’s just before seven.”

  “I guess I’m supposed to get my wake-up call pretty soon, then.”

  “This is your wake-up call, Al.”

  “So wake me up.”

  “Well, let’s see.” Rosalind was hesitant. “I guess that I am turning over and snuggling up to you—”

  “Can we throw that hairy dog out from between us?”

  “We can remove her gently and set her on the floor.”

  “All right. I can do that. So you’re kinda pressed up against me. I got these silk shorts on you got me. That’s all I got on. What do you have on?”

  Rosalind was naked. She said, “I have on an antique silk nightgown that I bought in Paris last week. It’s ecru, with some lace at the collar.”

  “Ecru is kind of off-white, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “So how long is it?”

  Rosalind thought a moment. Then she said, impulsively, “It’s short.”

  “Mmm,” said Al. “You got anything on underneath that?”

  And even though she was naked and had been married to Al for twenty years and she had started this and she was lying, to boot, she blushed. But then she went on with it: “Well, no.” And that was the truth.

  “Now I got my arm around you, and with my other hand, I’m fiddling with your hair. You know, Rozzy, you’ve got great hair. Its nice.”

  “It is nice. And I like the smell of your neck. I think your chin is a little bristly.” Saying these things reminded Rosalind of how familiar Al’s frag
rance and texture were to her. That was valuable after all, wasn’t it? The world was so full of new things; you were always looking for and looking at new things. Eileen, disturbed, woke up, snaked her way out, and jumped down with a little plop. In her ear, Al said, “My chest is so hairy and your skin is so, so, so—”

  “Not hairy?”

  “Well, yeah. I always liked that for some reason.”

  Rosalind laughed.

  “There’s my wake-up call. I can hear them trying to click through on the other line. I got to meet this guy.”

  “Me, too.”

  “But just for a moment, put your leg over mine. I’m turning toward you a little bit, and I’m putting my hand on your face.”

  Rosalind closed her eyes, seized unexpectedly by the thought of his desire.

  “That’s good,” said Al. “Ah, Rozzy.”

  Rosalind turned onto her back again. Eileen jumped on the bed and came right up to her face and stared at her, ears pricked, little black bean eyes, little black bean nose. Rosalind admitted to herself that she felt uncomfortable. Something new was happening. She actually seemed to be remembering why she had fallen in love with Al in the first place. She said, “Say, the horse won the stakes. The California Derby. Very soft turf. They almost moved the race onto the dirt.”

  “I wish I’d seen that.”

  “Me, too.”

  “I wish we’d seen it together. What’d he win?”

  “About a hundred thousand.”

  “What do you know. Is this my Breeders’ Cup horse?”

  “I don’t know, Al.”

  “You know, I deserve a Breeders’ Cup horse.”

  And then he hung up, and Rosalind hung up, but after that, she thought all day, as she was buying art and meeting artists and eating soupe au pistou and roasted chicken with sweet red peppers, What do you know. What do you know?

  ———

  IN THE VAN on I-5, heading back to the ranch, Limitless was looking out the window. The van, though confining (he was in a four-by-eight-foot stall, his head tied next to a net of hay that he sometimes could grab a bite out of and sometimes could not), did not make him feel that same jumpiness that a regular stall did. For one thing, he could feel the movement of the whole vehicle over the highway pass up through his hooves and ankles and legs. If he went with it, and it never occurred to him not to, the gentle shaking lulled him. For another, he recognized perfectly well that the passing scenery was passing—that he was moving through the landscape in a similar way to his movement on his own feet, and that was reassuring, too. He was Limitless. There had never been a moment in his entire three years of life when he hadn’t intuitively felt movement to be good and right.

  In addition to these basics, he recognized the landscape—hot, flat, golden-brown below and bright blue above. It was the landscape of freedom. Sometime in this landscape, the van would stop, the ramp would go down, the tether would come off his head, and he would find himself in a place of utter comfort, which, for him, had nothing to do with heat, cold, rain, shelter, hunger (though there was a shelter and plenty of the best possible food), and everything to do with being able to move at will, walk, trot, canter, gallop, buck, kick, rear, roll, graze. Like every genius, and he was a genius, as his race record would eventually prove, he had not so much a plan as a specific, overriding aim. His nature was out of balance in this way, whether through brain chemistry or as a result of organization of the nervous system as a whole. His aim was to run. And he was in luck. Not only did he mean to run, he could run; perhaps, though, the cause and effect were reversed—he could run, and so he meant to run. The feedback loop hummed endlessly—he could, he did, he wanted to, and he could. For him, as for all geniuses, the aim was insistent, the prompt was immediate and strong. The three-year-old never forgot that he wanted to move. Eating, sleeping, regarding fillies with interest, socializing in general with humans or horses, having to stand for a bath or another procedure, all of these activities only momentarily distracted his attention from his real aim, which he felt in his body, his mind, his heart—move move move. Like all geniuses, he had no perspective, could get no perspective, did not even seem to understand that there was such a thing as perspective.

  And so he recognized the ranch as a place where he was happy, or at least almost entirely in the state of relief that comes from doing all the time what it is that you aim to do.

  JUNE

  65 / NOT IRELAND

  THE BROCHURE for the cruise that Deirdre got from the travel agent in Silver Spring mentioned the picturesque mountains, the magnificent fjords, the charming and lively gold-rush town nestled between the mountains and the sea. There were also Russian churches, fabulous wildlife, splendid northern lights, and, of course, nightly entertainment and world-class cuisine. It did not mention the very best thing about the whole two weeks, which was no horses of any kind. No horses on the airplane, no horses on the cruise ship, no horses in Juneau, no horses where the face of the glacier broke off into icebergs and floated out to sea. You could take horses to the Arctic, and even the Antarctic—that Brit, Scott, had tried to take ponies to the South Pole, wasn’t that a typical Brit thing to do—but horses in the Arctic were such an entirely futile enterprise that only a person with a uniquely strong sense of self-destruction would attempt it. Deirdre hoped not to meet any of those, and so not to see, hear, touch, or sense with any sixth or higher sense the presence of an equine for two whole weeks.

  On the other hand, she saw, they were building a racetrack in Hanoi.

  Another thing the brochure advertised was plenty of fun with the other passengers and a friendly and convivial staff. Deirdre took this as a signal that she should, as an embittered and antisocial woman, carry with her all possible resources for entertaining herself. After scouring the bookstores in her local mall, she came up with four books whose combined total number of pages came to 7,123, which was 123 more than she would need if she read twenty-five pages an hour, twenty hours a day, seven days a week for two weeks. These books were The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Modern Literatures of the Non-Western World, Civilization and Capitalism, and Economy and Society. She had not, she told Tiffany, heard of any of the authors, but they were probably as good as any. This was not entirely true, but Tiffany believed her anyway. On the ship she discovered that, what with her habitual rising time of 5:00 a.m. and the time change, she was wide awake, in spite of Max Weber, Fernand Braudel, and all the others, at 2:00 a.m., and sound asleep by dinnertime. The good thing about this was that it further reduced her opportunities for contact with others.

  Her cabin was on the inside, about one-half the size of a stall. She had hung her clothes in the closet, stacked her books next to the bed, and set her shoes beside the door. The room was just small enough to remind her of an anchorite’s cell she had seen once back in Ireland. What you did was have yourself walled in when you were, say, thirteen, and then have yourself carried out seventy years later, after you died. You spent all of those years praying for the souls of those who had walled you up in there in the first place, and who was to say it wasn’t as full a life as any other?

  She lay back on the bed and realized that she had for some time been feeling the soundless roar of the ship’s engines, and that now the ship was moving. She overcame the impulse to go out of the cabin and up to the deck. She reached over and turned out the light. The cabin was now dark. She closed her eyes and opened them. The cabin was equally dark both ways. She closed her eyes again and opened them again. She wondered if it took the entire seventy years to erase thought from the mind.

  It was generally considered wise and good, Deirdre knew, not to mention agreeable to others, to look upon the bright side of every experience. The experience had not been found that did not have a bright side that could be looked upon. Death, for example, widely considered a negative experience, had an infinite number of bright sides. At every funeral and every wake the mourners vied with one another to be the most optimistic, if not about th
e dead person’s life (so-and-so was an unredeemed and dedicated sinner with no charm and ugly to boot), then about his death (well, it was about time his relatives and friends gained some relief), and if not about that, then about the provisions for the funeral (at least there’s caviar, or chicken, or perhaps tuna, or maybe only just beer, but it’s wet), and if not even about that, then about the possibilities for his afterlife (God is merciful, after all; if God is not infinitely merciful, then who is?). Bright sides were everywhere. They had especially abounded at the racetrack, where bolts from the blue devastating to dreams and pocket-books were continual and unrelenting. The tedium of looking on the bright side had worn her out, had it not?

  There was something quite nice about this rumbling darkness, she thought.

  But there she was, looking on the bright side again, even her. Yes, she was bored on this ship, and tired, and cramped, and her buyer’s remorse about spending $2,345 on this cruise to Alaska was vivid and hot. Even so, no matter how tenaciously she held on to her real regret at yet another useless and expensive decision in a long life of same, she automatically did that “at least” thing. At least the stuffy little expensive box they had her in was embedded in a largeness of movement and noise that had a sort of fugitive excitement.

  Appalling. Whatever the degree of conviction that you bring to your desire to witness the true reality of things, you cannot keep yourself from looking on the bright side.

  Deirdre sighed and turned on the light.

  It was a relief to be away from Tiffany, who had been persuaded to go to work for Bill Trout, but who had only two horses to rub, and so had plenty of time to take an interest in Deirdre’s cruise. That was another tedious exercise, her own unstoppable attempts to decipher the meaning of Tiffany’s attentions. Tiffany called her every day to ask her some question she could have easily asked Bob Trout. Tiffany took her to the mall and caused her to buy some attractive garments. Tiffany looked at the brochures with her and uncovered the best deal. Tiffany gave her a new handbag to replace the twelve-year-old job that had been like another hand to her. Tiffany picked her up, took her out to breakfast, and drove her to the airport. Tiffany kissed her good-bye. Deirdre was the first to admit that she didn’t understand the customs of Tiffany’s milieu of origin, and so she had gone to a movie where a black woman played the star’s best friend, and she had come away feeling that perhaps the extraordinary warmth of Tiffany’s friendship was in part gratitude and in part a relic of Tiffany’s upbringing, and so she remained cautious. Since she considered herself naturally cautious, she could not understand why her present caution was so difficult. However, perhaps the difficulty was owing to the fact that she adored Tiffany with an adoration that was as permanent as a rock. This adoration partook of all forms of human love that Deirdre was familiar with, and she knew their Greek names, too, because she was educated to do so. There was philia—that was friendship, such as she had felt with George. There was agape—that was a charitable, expansive sort of feeling, larger and more passionate than kindness, but of the same order. And there was that kind of love that you felt for horses—a holy wonder at their beauty and courage and purity—Tiffany’s physical perfection brought that out in her. And, too, there was, indeed, eros. That would be desire, wouldn’t it?