Borrowed Horses (3 page)

“Passing through?” I said.

“Here to stay. I don’t close on my house for another couple weeks, so …” he shrugged and looked around at the room.

“Moscow’s finest.”

“God, I hope not.” Whatever had bothered him before seemed forgotten. “I’m Dave,” he said.

“Joannie.” I raised my bottle, sitting on the dark flowers of his bedspread. “Here’s to wrecks.”

A Little Death

“L
ittle death,” Mouse had told me. That was how nineteenth-century women had described orgasm. She was always reading something. We were in high school then, but already, we’d seen enough to know those women had it right. The girls around us dulled as their boyfriends left. “To love is to kill yourself,” we’d agreed.

I resisted my desires until college. Even then, my boyfriend couldn’t see why I needed to go to the barn every day. As he breathed into my ear, planning a fishing trip we could take together on an afternoon, describing the love we’d make on the floor of his father’s boat, the little death was almost painless, the slide of a needle under skin, a burning fluid in the vein, but I’ve never been prone to just any addiction.

Salamander-like, I regenerated when his promises exploded in the bed of another woman. I had revenge sex with his roommate, but it only made me feel cheap and so I turned again to the barn. I made myself the rassaphore of my passion, devoting myself to riding because I understood it as a spiritual pursuit. There was only one prayer:
Foxfire
. The blood of a horse, the body of a girl, is hard-won communion, but faith manifests in such ways.

Over the hotel bed, an elk stared from the wall hanging with liquid eyes. When the bottom drops out of faith, you can allow yourself to wash away with it or you can find a new vessel for hope. I had never believed a man could save me, and I didn’t believe that Dave could, but neither would I allow myself to mope now that all my dreams were dead. It was time to try to build something new.

We talked at first to kill an hour, then we were talking because we enjoyed each other. I couldn’t remember the last time I laughed so hard. He was the new regional supervisor for Connor Construction, brought up to do a job that couldn’t wait for a house. I was coming back to work my old job because I had nothing better to do and because my parents might need me, though they insisted they did not.

“You like your job?” I asked.

“I hate it, but what can you do? That’s everybody, right?”

“Working for the weekend?”

“Something like that.”

“So what do you do with your weekends to make them worth working for?”

He held up the old book on the nightstand.

I was impressed—not many of the guys I’d grown up with would admit to reading voluntarily. “An intellectual on a construction site?”

He laughed. “You see why I hate my job.”

“Oh, no,” I said. “I imagine there’s lots of time to swap insights about Dumas when you’re putting up drywall.”

He had a beautiful, easy smile after his initial shyness passed. “If only.” He paused and blushed, embarrassed. “I used to write poetry, but I haven’t done much of that lately.”

“You should. The world needs poetry.”

“I don’t know. Maybe.” Watching him sit back against the headboard, the buttons of his flannel undone to reveal the collar of his tee shirt, I was becoming ever more aware of just how long it was since I’d gone to bed with a man. The five o’clock shadow that played against the tan of his skin made him all the more appealing. I’d never been one for men who were clean-shaven.

It was my turn to say something, but I found myself resting my eyes on his instead, trying to find an exact word for their color. This was stupid. I was like those high school girls all over again, so easily drawn in by good looks and an easy smile. I cleared my throat. “I suppose we should check on the truck.”

But when the old Chevy was pulled away, I rode back with Dave rather than going home in the tow truck. New Jersey had been nothing if not lonely, and I couldn’t give up a good conversation.

Dave seemed equally eager to talk, leaning further in, becoming more animated. He’d been lonely, too, I guessed, and neither of us was tired. We opened more beer. “The guys say there’s not much to do around here,” he said.

“That’s what everyone says, but it isn’t true. They just haven’t been anywhere else.” His lips looked full and soft, the kind of lips that, brushing against skin, made the nerves alive and wanting. The room was cold, and I moved closer to the warmth of his body. “Other places, there’s plenty to do, but it all costs money. Here, you can go to the Pritchard Gallery and see art for free. The university brings in poets and writers—also free. The summer repertory theatre is cheap. You can hike; you can fish; you can mountain bike. If you like skiing, there’s mountains. If you like music, there’s Jazz Fest. For a small town, we have it going on.”

With his sun-lit hair, Dave reminded me more of a surfer than an intellectual, but his enthusiasm was genuine. “I can’t see the guys at work going in for the culture. Maybe for the fishing.”

“Yeah, well. Know your sources, right?” We were close to each other on the bed now—closer than I’d been to any person in as long as I could remember. My skin was alive with the electricity of his skin, so close to mine.

“Art, music, and poetry,” his voice grew lower, deeper, turning each word over carefully in his velvet mouth. I’d named the right things. Things that connect person to person, mind to mind, heart to heart. “No,” he said, “I can’t see the guys at work—” Before he could finish, I leaned in and pulled his mouth to mine, tongues bitter-cooled with Newcastle Brown. He pushed me softly back, his face full of confusion and doubt. I had misread the situation.

Blood rushed to my cheeks. “I’m sorry,” I started to say, but before I could finish his lips were on mine again. His hand on my cheek, my throat, the soon-bare skin of my hip was warm and soft. He hesitated, eyes searching mine, trying to read me, his body shaking as he fought his own desire. Then, his arm pulled me tight to him and all doubt vanished. Yes, we’d been lonely, but that was over now.

In the cool sheets of that dark night, I was reinvented. A girl who had never seduced a man she barely knew had become a girl who had. If that could happen, what wasn’t possible?

I woke in the morning, clothed only in bed sheets, to find Dave writing in a small notebook at my side. There was nowhere I had to be: no horse to ride, no job yet started.

His eyes settled on me as I lay in the morning light. “I’ve never done that before,” I said, apologetic.

“Done what?” He set his book and pencil down.

“Slept with someone I’ve only just met.”

“Me neither,” he said. “That’s got to mean something though, right? This isn’t just a one night thing.”

“I hope not.”

He rested his cheek against my shoulder, the stubble prickling against my skin. He stayed there for several long moments, thoughtful, his breath warm and regular. “Tell me something about you. Something important.”

“Something important?” I shuffled through ideas and memories like discs in a jukebox, searching for the right one to play, something vital, something that had nothing to do with Foxfire or failure. “I love Eastwood films,” I said.

“Clint Eastwood?” Dave was laughing, his fine head catching the morning light that filtered in through the muslin inner curtain. It was a far cry from art or poetry. “The Westerns,
Dirty Harry
, or the new stuff?”

“All of them,” I said, “especially the Westerns.” Gentle now, he rested his forearm on my bare waist, tender skin against tender skin. I kissed his strong shoulder. “You an Eastwood fan?”

The question was loaded, and he knew it. “Of course.”

A misfire. The revolver clicked to the next loaded question. “Which is your favorite?”

He threw his body back against the pillows. “You want me to pick just one?”

I waited him out. This is how duels work.

Finally, “
Pale Rider
.”

“
Pale Rider
?”

“Yeah,
Pale Rider
. That’s a solid choice. What’s wrong with
Pale Rider
?”

“Nothing, I guess. I just liked it a lot better the first time around, when it was called
High Plains Drifter
.”

His hand traced circles on my thigh. “Isn’t that the one where he rapes a woman?”

“His character’s morally ambiguous.”

The hand stroked now rather than circled, light against the skin. “That movie doesn’t make any sense. What was he supposed to be? The ghost of some guy the town allowed to be killed?”

“Perhaps. It’s never clear.”

“And you’re saying that’s better than
Pale Rider
?”

“Clarity is over-rated.”

His fingertips brushed inward. “And morality, too, I suppose?”

“Have you ever known anything to be either clear or moral?” My voice was brushstrokes. I turned, spooning my body with his.

“No.” He breathed the word between kisses, working his way around my shoulder to the nape of my neck. I wanted to stay like this forever: warm and touching and talking to an intelligent and beautiful man.

I pressed myself against his chest, his hands cupped under my breasts, teasing my nipples. Talking was becoming more difficult, but I managed to whisper, “Then why would you want clarity or morality in your art?”

His lips were in my hair now, hot breath in my ear, answer enough. If I had thought that this was to be my first one-night stand, I could now see that he had no intention of disappearing into the sunrise. “Keep talking,” he said. “I love the way you talk.”

“I saw him once. Clint Eastwood,” I said, trying to piece together words. “At Jazz Fest.” It was becoming harder to be coherent. The room was ablaze with sunlight and Dave. “I only got a glimpse.” I closed my eyes and saw again: the sun-damaged cheek, the curve of his ear, the sweep of his hair. I’d like to think it was respect for his privacy that held me away, but in truth, I was afraid. I couldn’t see Clint unsilvered, unscreened.

Dave’s hand traveled down my stomach, altogether real. He opened his lips, grazing my neck with soft teeth. Speech now was impossible. For years, only Foxy’s silky nose had nuzzled against my neck. It was his way of loving me: He treated me as one of the herd. One of the
heard
: those who sensed the call of horses, of open space.

Dave moved his fingers between my legs, and my breath caught. All the things I swore I hadn’t been missing thundered down on me. After all, it had not been enough. Dave held me firmly against his body with one arm while his other hand worked deeper to again find all the untouched places I’d denied these last many years. I yielded my body to the buried pleasures his fingers adeptly brought to the surface.

In college, while I was being trained in radiography, one dream had got me out to the barn on those January Saturdays when there was a fire in the fireplace and TNT’s all-Eastwood weekend on TV. My roommates would be snuggled on the sofa, mugs of cocoa in hand, popcorn on the middle lap. Over by the single-pane window of that dreadful, drafty old Victorian would be me, back from working the early morning biscuit shift at Hardee’s and changed into breeches, boots, and an old ski jacket that snowed its filling from the worn elbows I never had time to mend. I’d convince myself that it wasn’t really that cold. I told myself that this is what riders—real riders—do. They go out, even when it isn’t fun.