Horse Heaven (85 page)

Kyle Tompkins was a man her own age. He had actual memories of Elvis. He had seen
Rebel Without a Cause
in the theater. He wrote, “I want you.” It made her feet cramp to read it. He knew enough to woo her with desire rather than money, looks, intelligence, accomplishments, or promises of good times. She did not delete it, but clicked “keep as new.” And every time she looked at it, it did seem new. At last she went out of her Internet server, put down her mouse, and got up from the desk.

In his office, Plato had his jeans off, his head back against his chair, and his hand in his shorts. She said, “Hi, honey. May I talk to you for a second?”

“Of course.”

She went over to him and knelt beside his chair, and put her own hand into his shorts, covering his. He had a nice erection, but he was only casually stroking it. She kissed his paunch. He put his other hand on her hair. He said, “What’s up?”

“Is our critique of monogamy a felt thing or a theoretical thing, do you think?”

“I think the best way to look at that is to observe how many rules there are that maintain monogamy. The more rules there are, then the more the institution enforced is a social convenience rather than a natural impulse. Look at capitalism, for example. Capitalism is based on the natural impulse of greedy self-interest. It functions robustly without rules—all the rules exist to limit and contain its functioning. But without rules, habits, and customs, monogamy doesn’t function at all.”

“But how do we feel about it?”

He looked at her, then said, “I think we understand the relationship between freedom and jealousy, in that, if we view love and affection as a zero-sum endeavor, then what someone else has of one of us, that is what the other of us has lost. On the other hand, if we view love and affection as a self-creating and renewing endeavor, not bound by concepts of scarcity, then any love that accrues to either one of us accrues to both.”

“In what sense are we using the word ‘love’?”

“I think we agree that love is not a feeling in the same way that, say, sadness, gladness, desire, anger, and fear are, but, rather, a condition of existence that each individual has greater or lesser tolerance for, depending upon what he associates from his past with feelings of attachment. We’ve seen ourselves that past associations can be removed from the concept of love, thus raising our tolerance for its condition much higher than we think possible.”

“Mr. Tompkins wants me.”

“You sound surprised.”

“I am, a little.”

“Well, look at it this way. Mr. Tompkins is accustomed to indulging in a taste for the unusual. You are certainly the most unusual woman in his circle right now. It’s not surprising that he should locate you as the next venue for a habitual pattern of behavior. Or, dear, you can look at it this way. You are a fine piece of ass, and it shows, and any guy who can see it is a wise man.”

She put her arms around him and nestled her face into his neck. He said, “When we find ourselves entering into a transitional period, the support of intimate friends is an invaluable consolation, because it encourages us to create new neural pathways and new patterns of pleasure-redundancy.”

She said, “I know that, honey, but thanks for reminding me.” They looked square at each other, both knowing from their training that this was a preliminary biological and cultural signal that some form of sexual activity was acceptable to both of them. Elizabeth licked her lips, another signal. Plato’s hand moved inside his shorts, and Elizabeth saw it. She inhaled sharply, and then they both moaned, closed their eyes, and slowly cocked their hips. They were well trained. Desire leapt up instantly, hot and full. Elizabeth closed her eyes, and Plato leaned forward and kissed her lightly but lingeringly on the lips, nothing hungry or sudden, but slow and then slower, inducing a state of both mental and physical concentration. Elizabeth put her hand over his. His erection, now firm, long, and thick, had its usual Skinnerian effect upon her. Having never suffered anguish in her relationship with Plato, having never known anything from him but kindness and care, she had no past references to restrict her response to his manifest desire. (She had written about this in her book.
“The penis,” she wrote, “should not be asked to lift the burden of repeated un-kindnesses from the relationship. Grievances dealt out and endured are the surest route to impotence.”) She felt her nipples rise. “Mmmm,” said Plato.

“Ahh,” said Elizabeth. She stretched out on the Oriental carpet.

D
OWN IN
T
EXAS
, Angel Smith’s grandson asked him if there was a horse he could ride. Angel got out Justa Bob, put an old bridle on him with a long shanked bit, and threw the boy up. He walked him around and around the arena, kicking him in the sides when he wanted to stop and practicing various moves. Pretty soon, he was turning around in circles as they walked, riding backward, lying down on the horse’s croup. He must have had him out for three hours, which was a good thing, because the horse had been developing a stress-related impaction colic, and the movement relieved both the stress and the impaction. Angel told the boy if he would come out every day and ride the horse he could be his. The boy said that he would, but vowed to himself that trotting, a jolting gait hard to sit and easy to fall off of, was out of the question.

I
N
M
ARYLAND
, Epic Steam, or Sudden Intuition, had decided to allow Ellen to hose and doctor the gashes and bruises the mares had given him. He even let the vet drain the hematoma on his chest. He stood quietly, his head down, without a shank over his nose or a tranquilizer in his system. Ellen said, “When he feels better, he’s going to go back to being a bad boy, but I don’t mind giving him a taste of kindness while we can.”

I
N
C
HICAGO
, William Vance’s son, who normally had no interest in horses at all, said, “I’ll help you.”

I
N
C
ALIFORNIA
, Audrey Schmidt’s letter was put in Mr. Tompkins’ box, because Joy’s forwarding-address card at the post office had expired.

A
LSO IN
C
ALIFORNIA
, Elizabeth Zada e-mailed Mr. Tompkins to say that she considered “friendship” to be a large relationship category, into which all sorts of behaviors naturally fell, and that she certainly felt considerable friendship for Mr. Tompkins.

B
UDDY
C
RAWFORD
had no horses in his stable now, and was more successful than he had ever been. He had fifty at Hollywood Park, thirty at Santa Anita, and another thirty at Del Mar for the Del Mar meet. His win percentage was up around 20 percent, and the press interviewed him almost as often as they interviewed Baffert. He wasn’t a funny guy like Baffert, but they always said he “is peppery and straightforward,” “pulls no punches,” “tells it like it is.” Everyone was eager for Residual to get back from the farm and back into training. In her absence, she had gone back to being a great filly—one of the best if not the best of a great crop of fillies, obviously the kind to mature into a terrific four-year-old. Real racing men were always connoisseurs of the older horse, unlike the Derby-crazed general public. Look at Kelso. Look at Forego. Look at Cigar. Look at Stymie. Unlike Secretariat, they were revered by men who knew something about horses and racing, something more than pretty pictures.

His staff had grown. Leon had the horses out at Santa Anita, and he had an assistant trainer of his own. Two guys he had hired from the East were watching over the horses at Hollywood Park while he was running the ones at Del Mar, but even so, there was a lot of driving that San Diego-Pasadena-Inglewood triangle. He had not only his cellular but his car phone, in case someone should be trying to get in touch with him while he was talking to someone else, and the car phone was attached to a fax machine. He also got an assistant assistant, Lanai her name was, whose only job was to drive with him and answer the phone in the car and tell him who it was, so that he could choose who he needed to talk to more, the one on the cellular or the one on the car phone.

As a result, he was sleeping like a log, which was the best thing to happen to him in thirty years.

One thing that he had gotten over was the notion that he had to know much about all of these horses he had, including their names and breeding. So
he kept in his mind the names and breeding of the most expensive ones—the Mr. Prospectors and the Deputy Ministers and the Unbridleds, whose owners were the most likely to demand results. He let the assistants keep track of the others. He also had gotten rid of all his claimers. If you were driving and flying somewhere all the time, then you couldn’t keep an eye on everyone’s horses in the same way that was natural when you were out in the trainers’ stand every day, and so for Buddy claiming had become a game played blind and for not very high stakes, not worth it anymore. Buddy felt the loss, though, especially since he didn’t feel very comfortable in the constant company of the rich, the well-educated, the well-born, and the essentially non-horsey.

In spite of what they all agreed about Residual, the filly didn’t excite him all that much anymore. Finally, her career had so many ups and downs and strange events that he had backed off from her in some way. Still, it would be nice to get the filly back from the farm so he could put her back into training. She had a whisker of a chance to get to the Breeders’ Cup, and if she got there, she had a pretty good chance to win it, since the distance was right for her, and her times were consistently as good as the best who Buddy suspected would get there.

Buddy had never spoken to the girl vet who did the surgery, and had not taken the occasion to use her again. Sometimes he saw her around and he didn’t really acknowledge her. So she recommended 120 days off. His own vets, who hadn’t seen the symptoms, the X-rays, or the surgery, didn’t have much to say about the whole thing. A hundred twenty days out of training was standard, ninety was okay in certain circumstances, and sixty? Well, there were trainers who brought horses back into training sixty days after a chip surgery. No one had done, say, a follow-up study to show that breakdowns occurred more or less frequently, but the anecdotal evidence, well—

She looked good. Her coat was all shined up again, she was in good flesh, her eyes were bright, and her manner was alert. Well oxygenated, as always. It was nine weeks to the Breeders’ Cup. If the filly trained well, it was marginally enough time to get her there. That was another reason to bring her back to the track—the longer she languished out of work, the less fit she would become, and the longer it would take to get her back into racing fitness. Buddy had never been a big believer in letting the horses down. They were Thoroughbreds—they thrived on work and running. It was a mental thing. If they couldn’t do what they were bred to do and enjoyed doing, then they got restless and developed vices. A chip was a chip, not a fracture or something like that. It was something that broke off, not something that broke. What was left was perfectly fine. Well, there were all sorts of reasons to bring her back, and not many reasons not to, but even so, he was glad Deedee was riding again and
that Marvelous Martha had packed up her bags and her opinions and returned north. Marvelous Martha had lots of opinions and couldn’t be intimidated, it seemed like. Buddy didn’t want her back, so he even did Deedee the favor of putting the horse in Arcadia, close to home, so that Deedee could bring the baby, ride the horse, and go home.

The first morning, when the groom tacked her up and Deedee took her out to the training track just to walk around for a while, she bucked and crow-hopped all over the place, which she had never done, and which gave Deedee to think of her new responsibilities as a mother, but then she settled down in her usual way, and anyway, she was never a dirty bucker or a dirty spooker, sneaky or determined to dump the rider. She was just happy and energetic and reactive. When she had quit bucking, she walked around alertly, with big steps, but relaxed, too, just the way Deedee liked her. It did seem vaguely to Deedee that the filly had had a surgery and was coming back rather quickly, but she decided that Buddy would know best, and anyway, many sleepless nights and sleepy days had compromised her sense of time. As they were walking around, Deedee reflected happily that the filly felt fine and she, Deedee, was glad to get back to work, too, especially since Buddy was being so accommodating about Alana Marie. When all was said and done, the thing she had been afraid and annoyed about, missing the big time, hadn’t happened at all. The big time was yet to come, and she was right there for it. Everything had worked out all right in the end. And Buddy had told her that, when she was ready to ride a few more, he had some good ones for her, some easy rides on class horses, and there was nothing wrong with that. All in all, she thought as she rode the filly back to the barn, things were about as fine as they had ever been for her. She was married, employed, still riding horses, and not even close to being a waitress at McDonald’s out in Bakersfield, where her parents now lived.

The next day was Sunday, and Buddy told everyone that he was instituting a new policy with the Santa Anita horses, that on Sundays they didn’t have to be at work until six. He didn’t know if it was permanent, but he thought he would try it and see what happened. If it worked out okay and nothing got overlooked, then he would try it at Hollywood Park when all the horses moved back from Del Mar. There was no one who did not welcome this idea and think it was long overdue, and everyone remembered not to get up at 4:00 a.m. except Buddy himself, who was there as usual, wondering where the cars belonging to his staff were when he pulled into the parking lot at a quarter to five. Only Curtis Doheny was there, and when Buddy got out of his Lexus, Curtis got out of his Ford truck and came over to him.

About the only thing Buddy was not sure of was how to guarantee Curtis Doheny’s silence. When Curtis had approached him in the early summer, he
had been in a different mood, hadn’t really thought about that part of it, had been swept along by Curtis’ enthusiasm. Before her last pre-surgery race, they had given the filly three shots of Epogen, Curtis’ helpful suggestion. Surprisingly, Buddy had not known about Epogen. What happened was, Curtis Doheny had asked him one day if he remembered that colt that Brit trainer Colin Gallorette had had, that had won so many races back in the late eighties, before the guy went back to England and kind of disappeared. Buddy had said, “Yeah. That was about the only good horse that guy had.”