“You’re not riding her?”
“She needs a little more time to calm down from life at the track.”
“Ah, what a princess she was! Dainty about her food and dainty about her footing and dainty about her company. Tsk! What a useless beast! Best shoot her. And don’t be tempted to breed her.”
“You said that.”
“She’s not got the temperament nor the pedigree.”
“I know, but she’s—”
“Darlin’, you’re a lover of horses. You have no standards. You love the lame, the halt, the bad-tempered, and the blind most of all. But if you’re going to breed them, they have to have some generally accepted usefulness. We’ve discussed this before.”
“I know, but—”
“Promise me you won’t breed this filly, at least until she shows she can take up a life work and do well at it.”
“I promise.”
“All right, then.”
“She’s so pretty—”
“Marilyn Monroe was pretty, too, darlin’, but she was not intended to be anyone’s mother.”
“Okay.”
They went out and watched the lessons again, and finally Ellen got to the point. She used that voice of concern that Deirdre found so maddening. “George told Martin about the wreck. Martin told Hope, and Hope told me.”
“Ah, well.” When they used that voice of concern with you, your own voice had to be especially cool and ironic.
“Have you talked to anyone about it?”
“In what sense?”
“In any sense.”
“I told the owners the horse would be euthanized.”
“That’s it?”
“What’s there to say? The jockey broke a rib and was out a week is all.”
“You need to talk to someone.”
“Perhaps you mean therapeutically?”
“Perhaps I do. Perhaps I mean as a friend.”
“What is there to say?”
“How did you feel?”
“You want me to get down to the nubbin right now?”
Ellen looked at her soberly, and said, “Yes, I do.”
“I can’t do that.”
“Why not?”
“Ah, well, you can’t lead me there that way, either.”
“You don’t look good.”
“I never look good, darlin’. I always look cross and misanthropic, because I always am, and the sun has turned my once fair complexion to leather, and my back hurts so that I am the despair of my chiropractor.”
“But normally you just look angry and determined. Now you look—”
“Well, do tell, dearie.”
“You look hopeless.”
“Perhaps, were I to cover the gray, then—”
“Tell me what it was like.”
“You don’t want to know.”
“I want to know.”
“I don’t want to tell.”
“I want you to tell.”
Deirdre sighed. She was being worn down.
Ellen said, “I’m going to make us a cup of tea.”
“I think I’ll be going.”
“No, you’re not. You’re going to have a cup of tea with me.”
And so they did, in the lovely tackroom with the border around the baseboard of hunters and hounds galloping over some Irish landscape of the mind, and oak cabinets full of trophies and ribbons. Ellen scattered the corgis and Deirdre sat down. Ellen handed her a cup of tea. Deirdre said, resolutely, “It will not do me good to tell.”
“Why not?”
“Because I don’t want to give it life or power.”
“I can tell by looking at you that it has life and power. And Martin said—”
“Ha!”
“—you told five of your owners to move their horses.”
“Cheap horses.”
“A trainer does not live by stakes horses alone.”
“Cheap horses are more likely to break down.”
“How are you going to support yourself?”
“I hear this every day. Clearly, I am not going to support myself, or that’s what my bookkeeper says.”
Ellen looked at her cup, then said, “How do you feel about that?”
“That’s why you called me! You’ve talked to George, and now the future of my livelihood is the topic of general conversation!” She was beginning to feel irritated.
“Not just that, not primarily that!”
“Does George think I need some therapeutic conversation?”
“He thinks you need to go to church, frankly, and talk to the priest.” Then she said, “How angry are you? I can’t tell.”
Deirdre set down her cup a bit emphatically, but said, “I don’t know.”
“Deirdre, I was the one who went with you to the hospital when you broke your back, and sat outside the recovery room and waited for them to tell me whether you would walk again.”
“Yes, you were, and I did thank you for it.”
“Not graciously.”
“I will be gracious in my next life.”
“I don’t care if you are gracious or not. I love you even though I hardly ever see you. You gave me a life, this life, and I give thanks every day for it.”
Deirdre thought that was the most amazing thing of all. She said, “To whom?”
“To whoever is listening when I say the words. Anyway, I don’t just love you out of gratitude. I love you, who you are. I miss you.”
Deirdre looked at the other woman. What did it mean, that Ellen would say she loved her? George loved her, but he had to, being employed by her and of her breed. She and George loved each other the way the right hand loves the left hand. So it took her by surprise that Ellen would say these words that no one else in the world ever ever said to her. Just say them. In the course of conversation. To cover her surprise, she said, “I will tell you the one thing I wonder about.”
“What’s that?”
“Well, the horses were bunched. It was a big field, and there were several stragglers, but eight of them were bunched right together, and the lead horse was the one who went down, flat out, across the track. He dropped the next three like bowling pins, but the next four got around him, and were fine. You know, when they have one of those multicar pile-ups on I-95, fifty or a hundred cars smash up before you know it. I wake up thinking about it.”
“How do you mean?”
“What did it look like to them? How did they see it?”
“Or what did it feel like to them?”
“What?”
“Well, maybe they saw something. We don’t know how they see, really. But maybe they also felt something, some disturbance in the field.”
“What’s that?”
“Well, like a magnetic field, or an energy field, or a gravitational field. A rock in a stream.”
“And the horses were water that flowed around it.”
“Fish that swam around it. They aren’t like us. They don’t have to know that they know, they just have to know it.”
After a moment, Deirdre said, “Remember that jumper I had for a while, Tinker?”
“Big paint horse?”
“Well, he was the most irritable thing. Bucked on every turn, reared up in the in-gate. Ah, he was a nerve-racking ride, that one. But I did take him to the Penn National that year, and I’ll never forget there was a triple combination three strides out of a corner right after a big square oxer. Horse had to stretch, then turn, then huddle himself up. Well, I heard his toe hit the oxer, just a little tick, and it distracted me into the turn, and I cocked my head, and then there was the triple combination. For a second there, I’d forgotten all about it. Well, that Tinker exploded through that combination all on his own. Boom, no stride, boom, one stride, boom, and out. He just did it.”
“They do it all time. All the time they just let us buy on credit. That’s how I know they like it.”
“Like what?”
“Like what they do. What they do that we ask of them.”
r /> “Do they? That’s what I really wake up wondering. Am I flogging these poor beasts to their early destruction, sinner that I am? They weren’t built to run so far, so fast. They weren’t built to live in a barn, without touching one another. They certainly weren’t built to jump over fences, be weaned at six months, be ridden, eat grain and hay, wear blankets. Och!”
“No, they weren’t built for that, but the building accommodates it, and the soul inside the building likes it. Deirdre, they like to have something to think about. They like to have problems to solve. If we don’t give them some, they’ll find some. I had that Appy gelding, remember him, that little guy, almost a pony. He used to let himself out of his stall, then let all the mares out and herd them down the aisle and around the barn in a parade, as if to show all the other geldings that he was the boss.”
“Ah, well.” It could not be said that she felt better, Deirdre thought, but it could also not be said that she felt worse. It could be said that she felt Ellen’s friendship, a taxing but pleasurable feeling that she had felt many times in the past. Well, she was an inward-turned sort of person. Why that was didn’t bear investigating. It was an Irish thing, no doubt, pursuing her around the world in the way of Irish things. She sighed.
“I bet you could ride again.”
“God in heaven, girl!”
“I bet you could.”
“I bet I could poke myself in the eye with a sharp stick, too, but that doesn’t mean I want to do it!”
Ellen laughed, then said, “Well, you never change, dear. You just make me laugh.”
“I’m leaving now.” Deirdre stood up. “Don’t breed that filly and we’ll stay friends.”
Ellen stood up, too, and they wandered out of the lovely tackroom. The aisle was full of horses and ponies standing on crossties and little girls attending them. Every one of them had that look of a girl infatuated with horses, the happy, fated look of a passenger setting sail on the Titanic.
At Deirdre’s car, Ellen opened the door for her and said, “We’ll stay friends.”
“Ah, well, I’ll think about it,” said Deirdre. But it was true. Ellen was one of those steady ones you couldn’t shake.
29 / HIDDEN AGENDAS
AFTER RESIDUAL broke her maiden in her second race, defeating a Seattle Slew filly, a Gone West filly, a Storm Cat filly, and an In Excess (Ire.) filly by ten lengths wire to wire, all of her connections, past and present, were in full agreement about her final destination: Churchill Downs, Breeders’ Cup Juvenile Fillies, November 7, 1998.
Well, yes. Breeders’ Cup. Buddy had a hundred horses in training at any one time, and a certain proportion of those were going to be looking at the Breeders’ Cup, at least from a distance. Jesus, though, who had revealed himself to be a tricky fellow, had put this Breeders’ Cup flea in everyone’s ear. He heard it fifty times a day, from everyone who had anything to do with that filly, and there was the trick, because normally people were so superstitious at the racetrack that they never said anything about plans or hopes. That’s what the newspaper people were for, raising hopes so that they could be dashed at the last minute. When they asked you about your plans, and you told them that this was horses and you couldn’t count on anything, they always wrote about your modesty, as if the single most important lesson of a life at the track was not that you couldn’t count on anything, as if this was news and they, the newspaper people, had never learned a damn thing. Well, yes, these tricks Jesus had up his sleeve did make Buddy irritable. But, of course, then he was required to find even more patience to counteract, or at least cover up, his own irritability. But at least he could soothe himself with the knowledge that he had learned something, and what he had learned was that, the smoother things went, the more careful you had to be. When you were in the shit, you had only one choice, which was to get out of the shit. When you were in clover, you had choices every minute, and for a man like him, a man who had acted on impulse every day of his life up until the last few months, choices were always dangerous.
One night, when he was praying his usual prayer, he suddenly got up from his knees and sat down on the bed. He looked out the window, up toward the full moon, in whose region he imagined Jesus to be, and he said, “Okay. Here’s the deal. I thought I was saved. That was what was advertised. I would accept you as my personal savior, and there we were. And, you know, I felt it, too. I felt saved and everything. I was happy. But I find out all the time that I’ve got to keep getting saved. Am I saved? Am I not saved? What do I do now? Did I do the wrong thing? Should I be remorseful, or just go on and try to do better? Are you talking to me? Are you not talking to me? Am I good? Am I a sinner? Still a sinner? You know what? I’m tired! I’m only fifty-eight years old! My father’s eighty-six, and he’s still alive, and his father died at ninety-three! That’s thirty years of this! I’m exhausted at the thought! I can’t do it!” And he did something only a loser would do, he burst into tears.
About a moment later, of course, his wife came into the room. Buddy loved his wife, probably. She was a nice person, like his mother had been, but not very interesting. She had been a good mother to all those ungrateful children they had who never stopped expressing their opinions about everything, as his own mother had been. He had stopped having sex with his wife a long time ago, and didn’t have sex with anyone else, either. What with all those horses in training, and his anxieties, and the fax machine starting to spit out reports at four o’clock in the morning, what time was there for sex? His wife went over to the closet and opened the door. She didn’t let on that she knew he was in the room. She kicked off her shoes and then bent down and set them on the shoe rack. She unzipped her dress down the back, took it off, and hung it up. She slipped off her hose. They had been married thirty-two years. She looked it. After she had put on her robe, she said, “What’s wrong, then?”
Buddy, who realized that he had stopped crying in the course of watching her, said, “Oh, nothing.”
“Buddy, you’re crying. I’ve never seen you cry in all these years. What are you crying about?” She didn’t sound all that sympathetic.
“Well, I don’t think I’m saved, after all, to be frank.”
“Why not?”
“Because things just get harder and harder, not easier. Do you feel saved?”
“I don’t know. I like going to the church. The people there seem to take an interest.”
“In what?”
“In me.”
“Oh.” Buddy himself felt an immediate lack of interest in this idea, and looked out the window again.
She said, “Why did that make you cry?” Her voice was softer now, and she put her hand on his leg.
“Well, you know something? When the Lord came into me, it was such a good feeling, I thought, Well, I can do anything because of this feeling, but then there was all this stuff to do and to think about, and I don’t remember the feeling all that well.”
His wife was smiling at him. She said, “Doesn’t that remind you of something?”
“Yeah, the first time I ever had a horse win a stakes.”
“Anything else?”
“That’s the deal here. Everything is a test.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to make it a test. It’s just that what you said reminds me of marriage.”
“It does?”
“Yes.”
“I never thought of that.”
She looked at him, first coolly, then warmly, then, well, she looked like she was about to laugh. At last she said, “Buddy, sometimes I wonder if you’ve ever experienced our marriage at all!”
“Of course I have! We’ve got this house, don’t we? We got four grown-up kids and we go on vacations.”
“We haven’t been on a vacation for a long time.”
“You come to the track.”
“I haven’t been to the track in a long time, either.”
“We go to church together every Sunday, and I’ve been to a couple of those get-togethers they have there, too.” r />
“Yes, honey, but that doesn’t mean you’ve experienced being married to me.”
“Who else would I experience being married to?”
“That’s my point. I don’t think you’ve experienced being married.”
“We’ve been married for years. What else would I have experienced?”
“Some idea about being married that doesn’t have anything to do with me.”
“Is there something you want?”
“You mean, is there something I want from you that would show me that you’ve experienced being married to me?”
Buddy found this sentence confusing, so he said, “Yeah.”
“No.”
“What, then?”
“I want something from you that would show you that you’ve experienced being married to me.”
Buddy felt very confused now. It was like she was throwing words at him in long strings, and just as they got to him, she twisted the strings so that they changed meaning. The best thing to do was maybe to just throw the whole thing back in her lap. He said, “Well, what makes you think you’ve experienced being married to me?”
“I don’t know that I have. I mean, I’ve experienced having you in the house. It’s like living with a loud motor running all the time. Up, down, into this room and that room, eating supper, jumping from the table, cursing all the time, yelling over the telephone about things, laughing, making deals all the time. You take up a lot of space and make a lot of noise.” She looked at him, and he must have had some look on his face, because she smiled a bit and said, “You know, you’re very lively, Buddy, and you are always exactly who you are. Everything about you shows on your face.”
Buddy thought of his anger and his dishonesty and his cruelty and his carelessness with animals and people, and he said, “I know.”
But she said, “I still love your energy. Life doesn’t seem to have diminished you the way it has me. You are like a rubber ball that can’t be held underwater for more than a second.”