by Jane Smiley
Farley looked at her, then kissed her on the cheek and said, “Maybe we should just look upon this as the chance of a lifetime, given to us by a woman of great kindness and wisdom, for which we will always be thankful.”
Rosalind blushed.
GETTING FIFTEEN HORSES into the gate was even harder than it looked. Limitless stood, calm but alert. It was Roberto who was beginning to feel himself space off. This one backed out, that one wouldn’t go in, three or four gate officials closed in on the hindquarters of this other one. And then they said something to him in French and Limitless walked in happy, and Roberto was just feeling the pleasure of that when the gates clanged open and there they were. It was a little sunny now, and every horse was pouring toward the rail, but slowly, ever so slowly. Limitless’s long stride took him to the front, and Roberto woke up and pushed his hands into mane up the horse’s neck, forbidding himself even to think about the unthinkable, touching the horse’s mouth. He felt the horse flinch under him as another horse got very close, and then Limitless stretched a bit and pulled ahead. The herd of animals oozed around the turn. Limitless’s ears were flicking forward and back as he looked for a comfortable and familiar place to be. Roberto crouched even more tightly into his neck. All around him, the European jockeys were almost standing in their stirrups, going up and down, yo ho heave ho, it was rather disconcerting. You know, thought Roberto, I am only eighteen years old. I have only been doing this for two years. How much new input is too much new input?
The straightaway extended before them, the longest, widest, greenest straightaway Roberto had ever seen. The traffic to his immediate left thinned, and then, three strides later, disappeared. Roberto shifted his weight to the outside and gripped the horse’s mane a little tighter. Limitless, ever sensitive, moved left. The bunch to his right, on the rail, began to accelerate, and there appeared another bunch to his left, way over, some group of horses that were so far from the right-hand group, they seemed to be running in a different race. And they pulled ahead, too. Roberto saw Limitless glance at them, then glance at the group to the right. Roberto knew he was a good jockey now. Two years’ experience had given him strategy as well as horsemanship, ideas as well as tact. Now he had an idea, a very small idea. His idea was to stop thinking about the bunch of horses to his left and to stop thinking about the bunch of horses to his right, but only to raise his head slightly and focus his own eyes on the middle tier of seats in the distant grandstand.
———
EVEN WITH HER BINOCULARS, Rosalind could see next to nothing. Since the course was a long J-shape, the start was something like a mile away, and the turf muffled the sound of the hooves. For a minute or two, there was nothing exciting about it—only a turbulence of equine shapes in the dim distance. And then, suddenly, they were visible, two groups, one rather to the outside rail beside the grandstand, and one rather to the inside rail, away from the grandstand. The announcer was shouting in rapid French, not helpful, and Rosalind had a head-on view. She could not even see her horse, or feel the excitement of watching him run. She knew nothing of this sort of racing, not even how to feel.
That is, until a solitary animal shot through the parting between the two groups, and the shirt curled at his neck was blue and gold and the cap on his head was blue and gold, and Rosalind saw. He was running hard and straight, by himself, not part of a group or hooked onto anyone, just the way he liked to run. His ears were pinned and his nostrils wide as trombones and his front hooves up by his nose. Where was he? She could not tell. His position bore no relationship to either of the groups. And then there were about three seconds just before they crossed the finish line when it looked for all the world as though he was in front by half a length, and then his number went up on the tote board, and what she did not feel that she had seen happen even though she was right there, was true.
Pandemonium shook the grandstand, that an obscure horse from California who had gone off at twenty-to-one odds should win the Arc! Rosalind smiled. Of course, Limitless had not known of his own obscurity. The inability of horses to read the sports pages, Al had always said, was one of their advantages as a sports investment.
FARLEY’S MIND went blank as the horse crossed the finish line. He was yelling, of course, throwing his arms around, hugging Joy and kissing her all over her face, saying things like, “Oh, no! Oh my God! Look at that! Wow! Wow!” But the thing that happened was so much bigger than his preparation for it that he balked at taking it in, at seeing it, hearing it, knowing what came next. He was beyond incoherent. It was more like he was disassembled. His body stood there, laughing, hugging Joy and listening to her, but what was really the case was that he was waiting to be put back together. The herd of horses and jockeys was still cascading across the finish line, and continued to do so, a thousand horses making a storm of noise, and he stood there. After a century, he turned his head, just a little to the left, and there were some horses coming back toward him, this time at the trot, and, just as in the race, how Strange was that, déjà vu all over again, the horses parted, and here came Limitless, head up, reins flapping, his chest as wide as a barn door, his legs as long as sapling trees. Farley ran for him. Roberto was shouting for everyone to hear, “Boss, look at him, he could do it all over again, look at him, look at him! He’s a running machine, boss! He’s a monster! He only tried for a moment there!” Farley reached for the horse’s bridle, but the horse wasn’t looking at him, he was looking at a hundred thousand screaming faces, his neck turned elegantly, his gaze attentive, his ears pricked, and Farley was struck, he told Joy afterwards, not by his speed or his grace or his beauty—those qualities in him they appreciated every day—but by his dignity. And then the horse noticed him, and lowered his head, and Farley stroked him on his neck and said, “What a fine young fellow you are!”
AFTER HE WATCHED the race from the rail with a hundred thousand other nobodies, Al gave up trying to get to Rosalind or his horse or anyone else he knew. He couldn’t speak French, and he couldn’t get anyone to listen to him, and his temper was rising, which was the wrong way to celebrate a win of this magnitude by a horse he himself had bred (though admittedly on a whim, not out of any advanced knowledge of pedigree). So he did what Harold the Proctologist, whose instructions were ever and always in his mind, would have told him to do, he vacated the situation, knowing that he would just fuck it up somehow if he stuck around. For the last twenty-four hours, it had been one thing after another, and all of it crowded, jostling, anonymous. Plane delays, train delays, a strike of some kind and a sympathy strike, and then at the hotel they had lost Rosalind’s note, and Longchamp itself, a place he had only been to before as an honored and wealthy guest, was considerably different when you were just a guy and had no access, and whether they understood who you were or not, they could always stonewall you for not speaking French. And the contrast between this and, say, trackless forested waste, where he had been just sixty hours before, was more than a little unnerving.
And then, by the time he had ridden a bus (two guys got into a fistfight in the front), hailed a cab, tried to communicate in German and English, and made his way back to the hotel, only to discover (Rosalind had telephoned in another message) that he had to go back out to Longchamp to find the restaurant, all he wanted to do was take off all his clothes and get into the shower for the rest of the night. Really, he was kind of pissed off. He had told them over and over that he wanted to go to the Breeders’ Cup. How many times did he have to say it? Were they deaf or something? What was up with Rosalind, anyway?
The horse was a runner, though. He had seen the horse as he came through the other horses with that look on his face. He was the best runner Al had ever bred. This thought made Al stand stock-still in the shower, and blasted away all his other complaints. Somehow, he had failed to think this thought until right now. Maybe he was a better runner than a lot of guys had ever bred. That was a new thought, too. Wow, thought Al. I did that. I sent that mare to that stallion. If I had not done that,
it would never have been done. You couldn’t really say that about anything else he’d done in his life except fathering his children and marrying Rosalind and, okay, breeding those other horses who had been nothing much in the larger scale of Thoroughbred breeding. Al shivered and turned off the water. When he came out into the bathroom, there was Rosalind’s message on the counter. He stepped over and picked it up. The address of the restaurant, the phone number, the time they were to meet, and then, “Love, Rosalind.” She had told the hotel operator to put that there, “Love, Rosalind.” Fact was, he didn’t have to be without her for that short life sentence. He could be with her as much as he chose. Al hiccupped and began to dry himself very quickly. Something was happening in his body. As fast as he rubbed, this sensation came on, a tingly but melty sensation, not unknown, but no everyday deal with him. He rubbed faster, and then began to rub his head and face. The sensation came on all the more strongly. Then he recognized it. It was gratitude. Al began to laugh, or something like that, something convulsive and big.
AT THE RESTAURANT, Al could see them at their table from the entrance to the dining room. Farley, his girl, a tall woman, a hairy guy, the little jock talking like mad to a pretty woman with a French look about her, and a man of about his own age who was ordering wine. And Eileen, sitting on a chair. She was the one who saw him, but she didn’t bark. She just noticed him and looked away. No Rozzy. Her chair was pushed back and her napkin folded upon it. No food as yet—they hadn’t started to eat. He turned around, disappointed not to have seen her at the moment when he expected to see her, needed to see her. He walked to the top of the stairs and looked down.
Here she came. She was dropping something into her purse and closing it. She was wearing a peach-colored suit and her hair was coiled at the nape of her neck. She was looking over the railing of the staircase. She was sighing. She was not looking where she was going. She was sighing again, and looking at her feet. Up she came. Al was placing himself. Al was holding out his arms. She was turning her head, but not quickly enough to recognize him. And then she was walking into his arms, and he was embracing her, and she was saying, “Oh, AI, I was just calling the hotel again,” and he was saying, “I love you, I love you, I love you,” and he was kissing her and lifting her up and feeling her arms tighten around him as if she really meant it, really was glad to see him, really did love him still and again after all these years, whether he deserved it or not.
71 / HAPPILY EVER AFTER
LOOKING AT those two horses dozing in the shade of the overhang reminded Angel Smith of how hot it was in South Texas, even in the middle of October. But these days he was feeling so bad that it didn’t take much to remind him. He could barely drag the hay around to his own animals, and he for sure couldn’t watch out for any of the boarders, so he’d told ’em all. This was the last month. Everybody had to go by the first of November. He was retiring and closing the place up. His own horses, seven of them, were going to the auction yard, that included Amigo and Frank. It was funny, he thought, that, of all the horses he had had in his day, these were the ones he would end up with, none of whom he had chosen, seven hard-knockers for whom this was the end of the line.
But he had to sit down. It was pretty amazing when you thought about it, one day you could get up at 5:00 a.m., muck out twenty pipe corrals, eat breakfast, ride your cutting horses till the weather got hot, then go into town and make a couple of deals, come back out, and there was still time before dark to work another couple of cows, then you ate supper, got drunk, went to bed, and when you got up twenty years later, you could barely walk across the parking lot, you were so weak and sick. So he sat down. The chair creaked, and he saw the horses turn their heads to look at him, one brown, one chestnut, and then he closed his eyes.
Justa Bob shifted his weight from one hind leg to the other and yawned, then blew the dust out of his nostrils. Doc’s Big Juan was right beside him, but he didn’t mind that anymore. He didn’t mind much of anything anymore. He had dropped two hundred pounds since William Vance knew him, and with the weight had gone many of the opinions he once held. He was seven now, but he looked seventeen—long whiskers, prominent ribs and withers and hips, harsh coat. Doc’s Big Juan looked a lot better—as a quarterhorse he was bred to get by on lower-quality forage and less of it. Doc’s problem was that he couldn’t walk. The arthritis in his ankles and knees bothered him every day, and so he hobbled around the pen as little as possible, stiffening himself up still further. Justa Bob looked terrible, but he was sound, and the intermittent attentions of Angel’s grandson, Dino, kept him that way, since Dino loved to ride, but was afraid to do anything but walk. So Justa Bob got out of the pen about three times a week, and spent several hours walking around. Since Dino was too lazy to put the bridle or saddle on the horse, and didn’t care whether the horse followed any accepted protocols, Justa Bob could always spend at least part of his time grazing what little grass grew around the stable area.
Both horses continued to watch Angel Smith in his chair. Angel Smith was by no means fast on his feet. The horses had been with him for eight months, and they knew how he moved. Between the time the hay was given to the first horse in the morning and to the last horse, there was a prolonged period of shuffling and resting on Angel’s part. They were familiar with that. But now something was different, and it was no challenge to an observant animal like a horse to notice it. The challenge was to care. Justa Bob was depressed and Doc was achy and the weather was hot and the sun was bright and the hay wasn’t very good and the two of them were half asleep anyway. But still. Justa Bob yawned again, and then Angel slipped a little farther down in his chair and fell out of it.
Doc whinnied. No one knows what a horse is communicating by a whinny, except maybe “hello.” “Hello” is a safe bet, and perhaps that was all Doc was communicating. To Justa Bob, he communicated a discomfort that Justa Bob already felt. He whinnied again, and then Justa Bob whinnied. Once they started to get themselves worked up, it was easy enough to go on with it. Justa Bob whinnied again. Pretty soon, they were stamping around the pen, whinnying and whinnying. The horses they couldn’t see, inside the barn, heard them and responded—and perhaps all everyone was doing was saying hello, hello, hello. But they were making quite a ruckus. Angel Smith lay still. And then his wife opened the back door of their house and heard all the noise. She saw that Frank and Amigo were stampeding around in their pen. She came out a little farther and looked around for Angel to see what was going on, and then she saw him. When she ran over to him and bent down beside him and discovered that he was unconscious but still breathing, the horses stood still and watched her. That was okay, then, they thought, and it was, because for the rest of the day, what with the ambulance and the people coming and going and the relatives and all of the commotion, there was so much to look at that you didn’t even notice the heat.
———
WHEN MR. TOMPKINS got back from Paris, he didn’t quite know who he was anymore. Before he left, he had known exactly who he was—a man with vast agricultural assets, plenty of power in the state legislature, and a headache every day that grew right out of who he was like a tomato plant in a compost heap. When he got back from Paris, and five days in the bed of Elizabeth Zada, the headache was gone and the real property had assumed an unprecedented vagueness in his mind. His son and his secretary had to keep saying to him, “Dad?” “Mr. Tompkins?” Nor did he know who Elizabeth Zada was. On the one hand, there was this big old woman with a loud voice and an uppity manner and a way of talking about regular things like marriage and love and housework and even food and taking a shit that was weird to the point of incomprehensibility, and on the other hand, there was the magic she did to him that made him think thoughts he had never thought before and have erections like he had when he was sixteen, except that when he was sixteen they would shoot up and pop off as soon as he, or some girl, touched them, and now they came and stayed and seemed to get bigger and harder, and in all his years as a man of wealth
and privilege and sexual appetite he had never heard of anything like it, not nude Asian women, not girls girls girls, not Hollywood Madam, because it had nothing to do with youth, nothing to do with looks, nothing to do with money, nothing to do with equipment. So of course it must have to do with love, though Elizabeth said that was the advanced course, and he was not allowed to tell her that he loved her, though he tried to slip it in.
Mr. Tompkins went into his office and closed the door, then picked up a secure hard-line phone and dialed Elizabeth’s number in Fresno. When she answered, he could think of nothing to say except “I love you,” but he dared not say that, so he just waited, feeling about twelve years old. Finally, her wonderful voice said, “Kyle?”
“Yes.”
“I’ll see you Friday, as we planned. Don’t do anything.”
“I won’t.”
“Here’s an exercise. Open seven letters. Just take the first seven right off the top and say yes to every one of them. It’s perfectly safe, and you can afford it.”
“I know I can.”
“I’ll see you Friday.”