Authors: Jane Smiley
Her plane landed just after 10:00 a.m. She was on her way to Santa Anita by eleven. She who had been to Belmont Park, Saratoga, Churchill Downs, Newmarket, Chantilly, Longchamp, Cheltenham, Gulfstream, in some cases time after time, in suits and hats and lace and silk and every kind of expensive shoe, had never been to Santa Anita, but she saw immediately that it was her kind of place. It was across the street from an arboretum and not far from the gardens and the collection at the Huntington Library. It was painted green and buff, there was topiary in the courtyard, there was art deco running the entire length of the grandstand, there were mountains setting off the track, and there was a shopping mall across the parking lot for rest and recuperation. She had the strong sense of having arrived at her home racetrack, and she crossed off her list the name of the trainer who was based at Hollywood Park.
The trainer, who was famous and already in the Racing Hall of Fame, was to meet her at the front entrance, and she expected to recognize him, because she had seen his picture, but the man she recognized first was the tall fellow who had fallen upon her at Saratoga last summer. Well, staggered into her. He recognized her, too, and came up to her with a warm smile, and took both of her hands in his all of a sudden, not as if he did this all the time, but as if he couldn’t help himself. He had a kind look and a friendly voice. He looked more like a teacher or scientist than a horse-trainer, but he also had that air of unlimited patience that good horse-trainers always seemed to have. Rosalind said, “I’m supposed to meet Richard Case here. I think I’ll recognize him.” They looked around. But he held off, and Rosalind said, “You’re a horse-trainer, too.”
“Yes.”
“Do you have any room in your barn? I have a horse—”
She saw that he hesitated, but then he looked right at her and he said, “Well, yes. In a way. Would you like me to call Richard for you?” He put his hand on his cellular. Rosalind closed her eyes. Surely there was something a person in the wish-granting business could do about a socially awkward situation.
There didn’t seem to be. Richard Case came up a moment later, and he was a perfectly acceptable world-famous horse-trainer, the son of a legend, the nephew of a legend, and well on the way to being a legend himself. He was
handsome and articulate and had gone to Oxford and, moreover, had room in his barn. He had met Al once and liked him. He kept his hand firmly on Rosalind’s elbow as he guided her up the steps to his box so that they could talk at leisure and watch a race or two.
The race was five furlongs, for two-year-old fillies. There were ten horses running, and the
Form
made it clear that they were top-class company—A. P. Indy, Seeking the Gold, Mr. Prospector, Holy Bull, Affirmed. Southern California was where the money was, so here was where the best horses gathered to sort themselves out. Eileen sat on a separate chair. As always, she put her forepaws on the railing, and looked alertly down at the track. Rosalind said, “I told you my horse is a homebred, and he hasn’t done much in his three two-year-old starts. On paper he doesn’t look at all like these fillies.”
“He’s not fashionably bred,” said Richard Case, “but I’m familiar with his sire. He had his first crop last year, and they haven’t done much, but he himself was—”
“Himself. That’s what they call him at the farm.”
“—a late bloomer. He was bred in Europe and ran mostly in Europe. The Europeans loved him. The horse is inbred to Ribot through one of his European sons on the top line and through Tom Rolfe on the bottom line. I always thought it was odd that the old man brought him to this country, but he was a funny old man. Once he wrote a piece I saw about upgrading Thoroughbred stock by breeding to classic European bloodlines. Very old-fashioned in some ways. Didn’t go over big with the Kentucky boys.”
“My husband chose the stallion. I never knew why. But the horse has a lovely stride.” One of the fillies in the race was named “Avarice.” Rosalind gave her the win. She found another gear in the homestretch, covered the last two furlongs in twenty-two and a quarter seconds, and came in at thirty-three-to-one. Even her jockey looked astounded. Richard Case laughed cheerfully and said, “That was nice. Shall we go around and look at the horses?”
But Rosalind felt as though she were on someone else’s date. The prospective mate was as desirable as could be, and she could claim him at any time, but he had “no” written all over him. As they entered the path to the barns, Rosalind saw Farley Jones in the distance, with his girlfriend, who took his hand and kissed him on the cheek, and nestled into his armpit, while Farley himself seemed to expand a bit, as if the girlfriend’s proximity opened him up. She was little and blonde, built of much the same materials, Rosalind thought, as Eileen. Richard Case was saying something charming and knowledgeable. Rosalind nodded, but hadn’t heard a word. Win percentages, training philosophy, footing at the track, racing in southern California in general, the meet at Santa Anita was ending, Hollywood Park, then Del Mar, had she ever been to
Del Mar. It was a pleasant sound, like the burble of a fountain. Then it fell silent. Rosalind came to understand that she was supposed to say something. She said, “The horse is quirky. I want him to do what’s easy for him and to have a purpose in life. My husband cares about winning, not about the money but about having that jolt. We just retired a good filly who gave him that jolt on a regular basis. He misses it. But it’s more important to me that the horse enjoy his work. If he doesn’t like racing he can do something else, but he’s fast. Everyone agrees about that.”
“Of course,” said Richard Case. When they got to his barn, she saw that it was perfectly clean, beautifully decorated, a model of order and system. Farley Jones’s barn was the next one over. While Richard Case took a call (that was a thing that every horse-trainer did, you couldn’t hold it against them), she spied. They went in and out of the office. The little girlfriend went over to one of the horses, a white one, and stroked his ears and nose, then kissed him. There was a head hanging over every stall. Richard Case said, “Excuse me just one more second, if you don’t mind,” and took another call. That was when Rosalind bolted.
When she got to Farley, she said, “It’s funny. I know I haven’t known you before this, but I feel like I’ve missed you anyway.”
F
ARLEY NEVER GOT
to say anything to Rosalind Maybrick about that time in Saratoga. Maybe he had made too much of it by now, and so he thought it would sound silly. She was a pleasant warm woman and what she wanted from him for the horse was a nice change from the usual. Their conversations were friendly, about plans for the animal’s shipment and supplements and extras Rosalind wanted to be sure the horse received, but there was nothing personal in any of it. Even so, her presence reminded him forcibly of something he still could not label or define. What it was closest to was some sort of electrical process, where she made contact at one point and contact at another point and the molecules between the two points straightened themselves out. What Elizabeth had said was “She crossed your heart.”
What did that mean?
“Well, that’s how you get electrocuted, you know. You have one live wire in one hand and another live wire in the other hand, and boom. People don’t always die from electrocution. Sometimes they just get put in order.”
Well, maybe.
At any rate, a stall opened up as if by magic, and when the horse arrived a week later, Farley looked at him a long time with Joy. Rafael held him and they walked around him and around him. There was a way in which he looked like
just a horse. He was bay with a touch of white—a tiny star on his forehead, and a little triangle on the inside of his right hind fetlock. He had a long narrow head, dished, and long ears. He was plenty fit—the previous trainer had conditioned him perfectly. His belly was tucked up and his neck was slender and muscled even though he was a stud colt. He was long in the back, long in the leg, long in the forearm.
They watched him go out, they watched him come back. Farley said, “Try that again, please.” They watched him go out. They watched him come back. It was hypnotizing. Joy said, “That must be an eighteen-inch overstep.”
“He’s—what would you say?—sixteen hands, maybe sixteen one? But he’s got the hind legs of a seven teen-hand horse.”
“Who’s going to ride him?”
“I don’t know. Why don’t you get on him and walk him around and get a feel of what his manners are like.”
When he threw her on top of the horse fifteen minutes later, she said, “I don’t know that I’ve ever felt anything like this. It’s not exactly power.” She walked off, around the end of the shedrow. A few minutes later, she reappeared at the other end of the shedrow. She was grinning. She said, “I don’t want to get off.”
“Don’t, then. Walk him out to the track and give him a little trot.”
It was late in the morning, and the track was hardly in use. The horse walked calmly along, turning his head this way and that, taking everything in. He was calm. When another youngster suddenly reared up some fifty yards away, Limitless stopped, watched, moved on. That is, he flowed to a halt, flowed through it, flowed back into a walk. They entered the track, turned to the left, and flowed into a trot along the outside rail. Farley noticed that Joy had maybe a finger’s contact with the horse’s mouth, and then she let off on that. The horse continued to trot, his strides big and supple, his head up, his body balanced. They went once around the track. When they got to the gate again, Joy reined him up and he threw up his head so high that he nearly knocked her out of the saddle. “There’s the problem,” said Farley, standing at the rail.
“But that was my fault. I didn’t need to do that. He was coming down on his own.” She patted the horse and let out the rein. The horse dropped his head. He continued around the track again, walking that walk.
When they put him in the stall they had set aside for him, his whole demeanor changed. He was no longer happy or calm. He wouldn’t taste his hay, took no drinks of water, sniffed his oats and turned away from them. Farley watched him, but he showed no signs of settling, and ignored Farley when he approached and spoke to him. His eyes were up and out. After a couple of
hours, Farley exchanged him with a horse in an outdoor pen, away from the darkness of the shedrow. Things in the pen were marginally better, in that he would grab a mouthful of hay from time to time, and he did take a drink, but clearly confinement was not his cup of tea.
T
HE NEXT MORNING
, Joy called Elizabeth, who, it turned out, was negotiating the contract for her three books, which were out to twenty publishers. They were in the middle of the auction. So far, six publishers had come in with offers ranging from $250,000 to $475,000. Elizabeth was very Elizabethan about it. She planned to take the highest offer, whatever it was, and place half of it with Plato’s friend in commodities and half with Mr. T. She would then observe the relation between her sense of what was about to happen to the money and what did happen to the money. After that she expected to train herself to view the future as the past and the past as only one possibility of the many that woulda shoulda coulda happened. “For example,” she said, “and if I take a call waiting while I am explaining this, I apologize, let’s say that you and I disagreed about something that happened. Let’s say that Nathan Zada and I disagree about every single thing that went on in our marriage. Well, that could mean one of three things. One of them is that neither of us was there to witness the disaster. Another is that two separate things happened that bear no real relationship to one another. And a third is that nothing happened at all. He was dreaming his dream, I was dreaming my dream. Am I going to tell him that he dreamt the wrong dream? Actually, I told him that for years, but I forgive him for that now.”
“For dreaming the wrong dream?”
“No, for eliciting that kind of bullshit from me. Anyway, it’s a complicated subject. Suffice it to say that the past is as variable as the future, otherwise we wouldn’t disagree about it. How is Mr. T?”
“He’s good. I want you to ask him about a new horse here.”
“Honey, is this an emergency?”
Joy looked across at the horsepen, where Limitless had put his head down and was beginning to weave. She said, “Yes.”
“My mind is awash with money and sex. I can’t fit a horse in there.”
“Sex? I thought you were having this auction.”
“Yes, but Plato is walking around priapically naked as a kind of living offering. It’s very ritualized, but the sums of money offered do keep getting bigger. Anyway, ask him yourself. You can. Or ask the new horse. What’s his name?”
“Limitless.”
“Oh, there they go. I have to take this call.” As she hung up, she heard Elizabeth say, “Plato, sweetie, turn a little more toward the sun there—”
She went over to the new horse and stood beside the pen. He was looking off into the distance, but after a second he turned toward her with his ears pricked. She opened the door and stepped inside, cupping her hands down by her waist. He arched his neck to investigate them. After he smelled her hands, he sniffed the front of her shirt, and then stuck out his tongue and licked her a couple of times. Then he turned to look again. Farley came up to them. Joy said, “I’m going to take him for a walk.”
Farley said, “Honey, you be in charge of him. Do whatever is the easiest thing to do. There’s no pressure with this horse. You’re going to be riding him, too.”
“I am?”
“Yes,” he said, kissing her on the top of the head. “You are.”
“You are sacrificing this horse to me. I can’t ride him.”
“You rode him.”
“I can’t gallop him and work him.”
“I think you have enough experience for that now. You’ve galloped a lot of horses in the last six months.”
“Give him to Angelica. She has a nice way.”
“Yes, she does. But you have a nicer way. Angelica fits herself to the horse and she’s good at that, but you get the horses to want to fit themselves to you. I’ve told you that before.”
“I have no energy.”