A Certain Age (9 page)

The third kiss was more daring, arriving on Thursday morning while they sat together on the parlor sofa, admiring the rose-shaped engagement
ring on her finger, unexpectedly and temporarily alone, and he had actually pressed her into the cushions then, kissing her lips and chin and neck, springing away just in time when the floorboards creaked outside the door.

And the fourth kiss is happening right now! Right here, in the back seat of the taxi, tasting like gin, more sloppy than she remembers, and not nearly so exciting. Jay smells of peppermint hair oil tonight, and the scent of peppermint always makes her feel sick and slightly terrified. His left hand has just entered her hair, and his right hand unbuttons her coat. She shoves his fingers away and jumps back toward the window. “What are you doing?” she demands, even though it seems perfectly obvious what he's doing. (She hears those words in Julie's voice—
perfectly obvious!
Perfectly obvious what a gentleman's after, now that they're engaged. Julie told her about that, during their ride this morning, and of course Sophie hadn't quite believed her.
We have all got the sex-instinct in varying degrees,
Julie said, ever so matter-of-fact,
and you shouldn't try to suppress it, that's the first requirement of a healthy mind.
)

Jay's face flashes in and out of view as the streetlights slide by. “Darling, we're
engaged,
” he says, just like Julie said he would, and Sophie can't help but laugh, if only to cover the vertiginous state of her stomach.

“What's the joke?” Jay asks, a little injured.

“Nothing. Just behave yourself. We're engaged, but we aren't married.”

He reaches for her again. “And what do you know about
that,
Sophie dear?”

“Just enough to know that you should stay on your side of the taxi for now.” She picks up his searching hand and winds it securely into her own, in order to slow her jiggling pulse. “There, that's better.”

“Now, Sophie. Don't you trust me? I'm a gentleman. I just want to give you a little taste of married life, that's all, so you know what's coming. Nothing to be afraid of.” The taxi stops right under a streetlight, exposing a terribly wicked smile on the face of Sophie's intended. His pupils are a little unsteady. The waft of peppermint strikes her again, making her stomach turn. She tries to breathe through her mouth instead of her nose. Anything to quell this unseemly surge of uneasiness in her viscera.

“A taste of gin, more like it.”

“Aw, don't run cold on me, Sophie.”

“I'm not cold. But a little birdie told me to beware of impromptu petting parties in the back seats of taxis, even when the gentleman in question is the man you're going to marry.”

“And what little birdie is that?”

“A very wise birdie.” She puts his left hand back in his lap and keeps the right one where she can see it. Julie didn't actually say
Beware,
exactly. She just said that while inhibitions were dangerous to your mental health, a girl still had to choose the right time and place, or she might end up in a pickle.

A pickle. Of course! That's why Sophie's so uneasy just now, in the proximity of the man she's supposed to adore.

The taxi begins moving again. The traffic is noisy and urgent, and Sophie likes the way they're cocooned in sound, crawling atop mad Manhattan Island in company with such a crowd. Thank goodness for Julie, explaining the fundamentals of bachelor management over tea and horses, or who knows what might have happened just now? A pickle, that's what.

Petting.
She's heard the word—who hasn't?—but the reality isn't quite what she thought. The kissing itself isn't quite what she thought, either, now that the novelty has worn off, the slightly nauseous thrill of someone else's mouth on yours, and anyway Jay's face looks so unaccountably tired and blotchy and sort of heavy. Was it always so tired and blotchy? Or is it just the light from the streetlamps, not nearly so flattering as the light in the Ochsner library?

Or is it the sick-making hair oil?

Or Julie's worldly advice?

Or is she simply inhibited? Cold, like Jay said. What's the word?
Suppressed.
Her libido all shriveled up and brooding, a danger to her mental health. But how can that be? It wasn't shriveled up before, was it? It wasn't shriveled up when he first kissed her. Just now. Tonight. Suddenly, in the back seat of this taxi, kissing her fiancé seems all wrong, when it should be more right than ever before.

Jay flops back in his seat and begins to sulk—again, just as Julie warned!—and Sophie looks out the window and counts the blocks until they arrive at their destination, a beautiful new apartment building on Park Avenue, and Jay revives just enough to pay the driver with a crumpled dollar bill.

“You haven't told me their names,” she says, as he pulls her like a parcel from the taxi to the sidewalk. The cold air blows past her nose. Washes away the stale, peppermint interior of the taxi. She inhales deeply.

“Whose names?” (Jay's still sulking.)

“Our hosts.”

“Oh.” He looks up at the building, as if the sight of the facade will somehow jog his memory. “Schuyler. Philip Schuyler. Julie's second cousin. He got married last year to his secretary.”

“What's her name?”

They're sweeping past the doorman now, and Sophie's hand is wound through the crook of Jay's elbow, and her sensational new engagement ring—an old ring, actually, but new to her—slides loosely around her fourth finger, under the glove. Two months ago, she was almost a schoolgirl; now, it seems, she's fully grown, sweeping into a Park Avenue apartment building on the arm of Mr. Edmund Jay Ochsner, who will soon be her husband. And isn't that why she encouraged Jay to begin with? Because it was time to grow up. To grow up and escape.

“Lucy.” He snaps his fingers. “That's it. Her name is Lucy. Lucy Young Schuyler.”

BUT THE NAMES OF THEIR
hosts don't seem to matter, at least at first. Nobody receives them at the door, except a sort of expressionless housekeeper who accepts their coats and turns away down a service hallway. (Maybe manners aren't important among the rich, Sophie thinks.) The light indoors is more golden and less harsh than the streetlights on Park Avenue, and Jay looks transformed: his shirtfront is as stiff as a board and as white as the moon, and his hair is brushed back in a shining metal helmet, streaked by tarnish.

Sophie, her pulse settled, her viscera back in order, a little mortified now at the unexpected failure of her sex-instinct during the taxi ride, tells him how splendid he looks—she leaves out the tarnish, of course—and at last the sulky expression starts to perk back up.

“Splendid, am I? That's good news, at my advanced age. You're looking pretty smashing yourself, now that you mention it.” He lifts her hand and kisses the satin that covers her palm.

That's better, isn't it? At least they seem like a newly engaged couple now, winding their affectionate way through the crush of bodies, hand in hand. An instinct rises between Sophie's ribs—maybe not the sex-instinct, but something just as primitive—at the smell of cigarettes and perfume, the musk of human skin. Something she wants but cannot quite identify. A waiter passes by, bearing glasses of foaming champagne. She follows him longingly as he goes. They had champagne the other day, a vintage bottle that Jay brought over from the Ochsner cellar to celebrate the engagement, and Sophie thought it was the nicest thing she had ever tasted. Maybe that's what she wants? Not sex, but champagne.

She turns her head to Jay, who's craning his neck this way and that. “Can you find us some champagne?” she shouts in his ear.

“What's that?”

“Champagne!”

“Sure! But first I want to—oh, there she is!”

“Who?”

Never mind. Off they go, winding back through the crowd, past a fireplace and a buffet table and maybe a thousand cigarettes. Sophie's finding it hard to breathe, but she follows him gamely, hoping there will be champagne at the end of the journey. Champagne! Champagne will make it all better.

There isn't champagne, however. Jay falls to an abrupt halt in front of a milky half-dressed back, on which a beaded jet necklace dangles like an aboriginal tattoo above a swoop of black satin.

He reaches out with his left hand and taps the matching shoulder.

The woman—naturally, the owner of this mesmerizing rear spectacle
belongs to the female persuasion—the woman turns her head and registers elegant surprise in one eyebrow.

“Ox?” she inquires, in a voice like the drizzling of cream over dessert. “Whatever are
you
doing in a respectable drawing room on a Saturday night?”

Jay releases Sophie's hand and places his fingertips in the small of her back. “Sisser,” he says, like the cat that swallowed the goose that laid the golden egg, “I have the honor of presenting to you your future sister-in-law, Miss Sophia Fortescue.”

Telling lies is a fault in a boy, an art in a lover, an accomplishment in a bachelor, and second-nature in a married man.

—HELEN ROWLAND

THERESA

Manhattan, later that night

Y
OU KNOW,
if it weren't for Man o' War, the Boy and I might never have found each other again. Imagine that: a racehorse decides your fate.

I think it must have been about a week after our unsuccessful encounter at the van der Wahls' swimming pool, the one that nearly reduced me to tears. Naturally I put the whole episode behind me and plunged into a relentless week of—well, of whatever it is I did, before the Boy and I became lovers. I visited friends, I read books, I swam in the ocean, I went to every damned cocktail party between West Hampton and Montauk Point. I believe I competed in a horse show—if memory serves—on my favorite mare, Tiptoe. We won second place over the jumps. The ribbon's hanging in the stable somewhere.

Anyway, we got to talking afterward, me and the horsier set, and the subject of Man o' War came up. Had anyone seen him race yet? It turned out nobody had. We consulted the evening edition and discovered, lo and behold, that the champion was due to start in the Dwyer Stakes at Aqueduct the next day. Or rather—since dawn was nearly breaking—today.

So we went home to our respective houses and slept and changed clothes, and then we drove west in Ned van der Wahl's Buick all the way to Queens, arriving just in time for the third race on the day's card. The Dwyer was the fourth.

The place was jam-packed, as you might imagine. I later heard that forty thousand souls occupied the stands that day. The clubhouse was already full, so we proceeded through the sweaty and unfamiliar grandstand instead, past the long lines of common folk at the betting windows until we hit the fresher air—I speak in relative terms—on the other side. The entrants for the third race were just then emerging from the paddock to parade onto the track, and the bugle called crisply, making my blood stir. As the last notes floated over the heat, someone said, “Hello, isn't it that kid staying with the van der Wahls?”

And it was.

The Boy stood not twenty yards away, leaning his elbows on the rail by the finish pole, visible in flashes as the crowd shifted between us. He wore a light, wrinkled suit and a boater of pale straw low on his forehead against the burning July sun. A folded Racing Form dangled from his left hand, and a cigarette from the right, and he had fixed a ferocious concentration on the animals now jogging down the track.

We called him over, and he straightened and stared at us in perfect astonishment. Even twenty yards away, I noticed the paleness of his eyes against his tanned face. He tucked the Racing Form under his arm and forced his way to where we stood, adjoining the winner's circle, and my blood, already awakened by the call of the bugle, just about boiled in my veins.

He kept away from me at first. He told me later that he was afraid to come close, because he thought the others would notice something. Because I was, after all, Mrs. Sylvester Marshall of Fifth Avenue and Southampton, and he was nothing but a Boy just back from France.

But Nature will have her way, I'm afraid, and by the time the horses had assembled behind the long elastic webbing that marked the starting line, we stood somehow next to each other by the rail, a few yards short of the finish
pole, while our friends talked and laughed nearby, not the least bit interested in the race about to begin. Ned van der Wahl's patrician voice floated out confidently among the broad Brooklyn vowels turning the air blue around us. The Boy had put out his cigarette, and the Racing Form now occupied both hands, though he was really looking at the horses. His cheeks were pink. I thought of his abrupt departure when I saw him last, and I wondered if perhaps I'd misread the reason.

“Do you have a favorite in this race, Mr. Rofrano?” I asked.

“I put ten dollars down on Number Four to win.”

“It sounds as if you're a regular.”

He fiddled with the Racing Form. “My dad used to take me to the track on weekends, when I was a kid. I saw Colin win the Belmont in the middle of a rainstorm. That hooked me.”

Here on the rail, you could actually hear the faint shouts of the jockeys and the starters, as the horses milled around behind the webbing. It looked like Bedlam. I didn't know how they were going to make a race of it. A minute passed, and another, and the Boy and I didn't say anything, just stood there side by side along the rail, pretending absorption in the spectacle up the track while the sun beat down on the brims of our hats and the crowd hooted and spat. And then, for a strange and pregnant instant, all went still.

The barrier went up.

We kept quiet as the contest took shape. It was a mile, a stakes race for two-year-olds, and it didn't take long, a minute and a half, but it seemed longer. It seemed epic, horses taking the lead and falling back, someone else surging up. As the pack shifted its way down the backstretch, I felt the gradual increase in the Boy's state of tension, nerve by nerve. They rounded the final turn. The rumble of hooves drew nearer and larger, and as the flashes of colored silk clarified in the haze, my own fingers tightened unconsciously into fists, and the Boy's body, arranged by my side, coiled into a live wire. The gamblers roared behind us. The horses thundered by in a fleshy cloud.

I turned to the Boy, a little breathless. “Did he win?”

“Yes, Mrs. Marshall.” He smiled. His cheeks were still pink, but this
blush had a different fundamental quality to the one before it. “Yes, he did. Shall we go collect my winnings?”

Apparently there's a euphoria associated with winning a bet on a horse race, a kind of invincible glee. I think that's why the Boy made me this reckless offer, at this particular minute, when he had tried so hard and so sternly to stay away before. He wasn't stern now, nor even diffident; he couldn't be stern or diffident when he had just won a ten-dollar bet on a horse at eleven-to-one odds, and I got all caught up in the smoke of his elation and smiled back.

“That sounds divine,” I said.

We slipped invisibly past our friends and pried our way through the grumbling grandstand crowd to the betting windows, where the Boy collected his hundred and ten dollars and secured them with a plain silver clip in the inside pocket of his jacket. He looked at his watch. “They should be getting ready in the paddock now, Mrs. Marshall. Do you want to take a look at him?”

“At whom?”

“Why, Man o' War.”

I had forgotten all about the big red racehorse. Can you believe it? I followed the Boy through the grandstand gates to the paddock, which was thick and crowded and buzzing. I held my hat and craned my neck, trying to see above all the heads before me, but it was no use, and I shouted in the Boy's nearby ear that we should go back to the track and wait for the great horse there.

“Now, Mrs. Marshall, that's no way to get things done,” he said. “Come with me.”

He dragged my arm around his elbow and proceeded to slice his way through that crowd, person by person, earning us any number of angry looks and spiteful ejaculations, but I didn't care. The Boy's arm was young and strong beneath my hand, like a green oak, and euphoria still drenched us. By the time he landed against the paddock rail, dragging me with him—or rather against him, because there really wasn't room—we were both laugh
ing. And I don't think I'd laughed (a
real
laugh, I mean, not those brittle false laughs drawn out of you by cocktails and by the merciless demands of the social contract) in two whole years.

The Boy extracted his arm from between our compressed bodies and pointed his right index finger at the open stalls before us. “Look, there he is.”

There he is.
I don't know if there's been a more magnificent horse, before or since. If there has, I haven't seen him. That beautiful ruddy animal could make you forget anything, could make you forget the war and the communists and the Boy wedged against you. On this hot July day of his fourth year, nineteen hundred and twenty by the Christian calendar, he was a giant. He held his head at an improbably high angle, king over us all, and his chestnut coat was built of fire. He didn't want to be saddled, but saddled he must be, and they got the leather on him, I don't know how. He settled down a bit then, just kicking out a hoof now and again, to remind everyone not to get too friendly. It didn't even occur to me to look at the other horse.

“Isn't he a beauty?” said the Boy, very soft, next to my ear.

He stood right up against my back, pressed there by the crowd around us, so that we couldn't help the indecent proximity, could we? I felt all shameful and electric, like a radio crackling with static. My buttocks fit neatly into his thighs. I could smell his perspiration.

“He's magnificent,” I agreed.

The jockeys went up; the horses headed out to the track. There were just two of them, because Man o' War, four races into his three-year-old season, had already scared away everybody else and won each contest under what the Racing Form called a “stout pull,” or “eased up,” or some other form of sportsmanlike restraint. (How they managed to restrain the colt at all, I couldn't imagine; as he charged furiously into the tunnel, he reminded me of a locomotive.) Today, his lone challenger—so the Boy informed me, as he released me from my intimate prison—was a talented chestnut colt named John P. Grier.

“The poor sacrificial lamb,” I said, as we pushed our way back under the grandstand toward the track.

“Well, he's got a fighting chance. He's only carrying a hundred and eight pounds, and Red's carrying a hundred and twenty-six.”

“And that makes such a terrible difference?”

“As a rule of thumb, Mrs. Marshall, the track handicappers generally figure a pound of extra weight equals about a length lost in speed, so I guess you could say that Red's giving Grier a head start of eighteen lengths. He's a Whitney colt,” the Boy added, as if that made a difference.

“Oh, does Harry own him?”

“Bred him, too. By Whisk Broom, out of a Disguise mare. Care to place a bet?”

I let him put down ten dollars on Man o' War for me, and he put down the rest of his winnings on John P. Grier, just to give the little colt a break. By the time we fought our way back out to the track, the horses had reached the starting line on the other side of the infield. Or so we presumed; we couldn't see a thing, and we hadn't a hope of reaching our earlier position on the rail, let alone finding our friends. The crowd was so densely packed, you couldn't move an inch, except the Boy somehow did: shoving one person aside and then another, selfishly winning us closer to the action.

A roar swept the throng: they're off.

“But I can't see!” I shouted, and the Boy actually elbowed a man off on a nearby bench.

“Say!” the man said angrily, lifting a fist.

“Make way for the lady,” said the Boy. The man took one look at the two of us—vigorous Boy, lady of a certain age—and turned away, smashing his hat down on his head until his crown nearly burst through the straw.

The Boy put his hands around my waist and hoisted me up.

Well, I can tell you, that unexpected and gallant action nearly took my breath. I gripped the Boy's steadying fingers with one hand and shaded my eyes with the other—the sun was full on my face—and strained to see across the infield to the galloping horses beyond.

“What's the story?” the Boy shouted.

“I can't tell! I don't see the other horse. It's just Red, I think—no, wait!”
I rose on my toes, swaying wildly, clutching the Boy's fingers. “It's the two of them! They're running together! They're coming into the turn, they're side by side! My God!”

The roar around me was like a wall, like I could have flung out my arms and supported myself by sound alone. Strange that so many lone voices could amalgamate into a uniform frantic din. I realized that my own shout was among them, that I'd given up on sentences and begun screaming a primitive
Go! Go!
into the barrage, and I didn't even know which colt I was urging on. Both of them, maybe: the great red horse and Harry Whitney's scrappy challenger, barreling around the turn toward the long, smoky homestretch, flinging themselves recklessly forward and forward, as closely matched as if they were pulling a single carriage.

They say it was one of the greatest races ever, that Dwyer Stakes run in the first year of the new decade after the war. I haven't been to many horse races, so I can't really say one way or another. All I remember is that I came back to life in those last thirty seconds or so: that my cold little heart burst free from its ribs and climbed all the way up my throat to the roof of my mouth, as John P. Grier hung gamely on, taking perhaps two strides for every one of Red's, and they bobbed closer and closer and no one was winning, neither colt had beaten the other, and they couldn't possibly keep this up. They would kill themselves. They would kill me.

On and on, back and forth, my heart throttling my breath, and just as they flashed past the eighth pole (or so I understood later, for I didn't notice that pole at the time) Grier stuck his head out in front.

You wouldn't have thought it possible for that crowd to yell any louder, but it did. We screamed and screamed. The little colt's nose poked out bravely from behind Man o' War's big red body, just about the only thing you could see of him—just that game, game head, taking the lead from the immortal champion.

In the next instant, Red's rider reached back with his whip and struck Man o' War's side.

He hadn't been touched with a whip all season, I believe: not since a
single dramatic race the year before, the only race he'd ever lost, and that one because he was boxed in throughout. He'd never been challenged; he'd won all his races handily, rated by his jockey so he wouldn't win by too many lengths and humiliate the Whitneys and Belmonts and Astors who sent their horses against him. No one had ever looked Man o' War in the eye, and now Grier looked him in the eye, Grier pushed his head out in front, and Red's jockey went to the whip.