Be nice, be nice. Could it work if you knew? Well, this was the template. How could you discipline a kid who could push your decisions around like game pieces?
Hope came down and took Ian’s hand. “Let’s go get Bobbie Champion hitched up to the pony cart,” she said.
“No,” Ian said. “You go on if you want to.”
“You need to come with me, Ian,” said Hope.
“I need to not come with you.”
“You do need to come with me.”
In response, Ian fell flat on his back, as if someone had chopped him down. He was in seconds full into a massive, sobbing tantrum. He pulled at his hair and screamed. He kicked the car seat and his backpack. He took off his shoes and threw them at Frank. Frank started toward Ian, to carry him into the house, but Claudia put a hand on his arm.
“Let him work it out,” she said.
“I don’t want him to go! I don’t want him to go, I don’t want him to go, I don’t want him to go! I can’t stand it! I don’t want Dad to go, I don’t want him to go. Get it?”
“He’ll be back after tomorrow night. Early in the morning on Sunday. We’ll go to the market, and then we’ll go swimming at Willy’s pond if you want. Allison has strawberries, and she has new kittens.”
“I don’t want him to go! I don’t want him to go, I don’t want my dad to go!”
When Hope finally tired of it, she let Ian lie on the baked ground in front of the front door, rolling in the dust sobbing until he looked like some kind of archaeological relic. She went into the house and began to grind the beans for her second full pot of coffee of the day.
“Mom! Are you just going to leave him here?”
“He’ll come in when he’s ready,” Hope said through the window.
“He’ll run after the truck.”
“You just gave him that idea, Frank.”
“Well, what’s your plan, then, Mom?”
“Bring him inside and I’ll see to him. He’ll settle down as soon as you’re out of sight.”
Frank scooped up Ian, who by then lay limp, shuddering and giving out the occasional elaborate bronchial gust. As Frank carried him inside, Ian said, “I don’t want you to go, I really don’t want you to go, get it? Dad? And Pro doesn’t want to go with you either.”
“He does want to go. He wants to be in the show.”
“No,” said Ian. “He’s sick. I hate you.”
“Okay.”
“I said I want to go! Listen to me. Be nice. Are you crazy or something?”
Patrick tried not to laugh but ended up spitting his coffee. “So are you mad, Frank?” Patrick said. “Are you daft?”
“Stay out of it,” Frank said. “Mostly, I take you everywhere I go. But I can’t take you all the time.”
“Well, okay. I hate you. Maybe you’ll die.”
“Ian!” Hope said.
Frank said, “I don’t think I will. I’m pretty sure I won’t. I’ll be back Sunday morning for sure.”
The phone rang then. Frank, wet at the armpits, quickly told his mother, “I’m not here. Even if it’s the president.”
Fanning out her elegant hands with their small tombstones of pale polish, Hope said, “You seem to have the impression I’m your secretary, Frank.”
The call went over to the machine, and Frank heard Brian Donovan say, “Ah, Frank, I was so hoping to catch you . . .” He snatched up the phone.
“Brian! You caught me. I’m just on my way out of town.”
Brian had finished his documentary. The brass had called it heartbreaking, stunning, authentic, worthy of the Kirk Dunred Durning Prize, Aussies’ equivalent of an Emmy. It would air for the first time next Friday and several other times throughout the coming month. “I’ve sent you a DVD, Frank. There’s a scene that one of my dad’s mates took at your wedding, when you and Nat were doing the twist. Just ten seconds. It’s so funny. I cried so hard I couldn’t see.”
Frank wanted to cry, too.
“I’m glad you did it, Brian,” Frank said. All he could think, in the face of this good man’s tribute, was that the fucking photo would now have a name attached. All that was missing was his address and his email. Want the golden child? Or perhaps the kidnapper? X marks the spot! Frank could smell himself, rank as old cooking oil. If he didn’t get out of this house now, he never would.
As they rattled the trailers down the drive from Tenacity, turned left, and hit the state highway in a convoy, Frank called Hope twice. As his mother predicted, by the time the horse trailers were out of sight, Ian was marching around in striped cargo shorts, wearing rubber boots, his deerstalker cap, thumping the ground with Jack’s shillelagh, and insisting that they have steak with the strawberry shortcake. Hope added that she thought Frank was doing a great job and would have been a great father.
The past tense stung.
Frank turned to Claudia and said, “I hate to leave him upset like that . . .” but Claudia was already staring ahead, seeing the course in her mind, and murmured that Ian would be fine.
How did she know? What did she care? She wasn’t a parent.
Neither was he, Frank thought then.
They drove straight through. Frank was forced to listen to talk radio because Claudia’s sole conversation consisted of “No, thanks . . .” (when offered coffee) and “I think I-90 the whole way . . .” (when Frank guessed aloud about the fastest route to Lakefront Coliseum).
Although Claudia’s class wouldn’t be held for five hours, she was eager to walk the course. The order of jumps was posted on the gate, well in advance of locking in the course, but no one was to be admitted until two hours before the event. That was a generous amount of time, Frank said. His father once told him that riders were lucky to be able to walk the course at all, and often got no more than thirty minutes: being able to think through a course for a rider was as important as being able to think through a dance combination for somebody at a Broadway audition.
“They’re so high,” Claudia said.
“No higher than what you’re used to. They’re just fancier, more substantial. Don’t let that get inside your head.”
After getting the horses settled, Patrick, who would ride Glory Bee as a novice horse and team in the same class, came out as well, thoughtfully wandering the outside of the fenced area a single time, hardly seeming to look. Claudia appeared very small and wilted. “Do you want to go to the hotel and rest?” Frank asked her.
“I guess,” she said. “But I’ll check on Pro first. I’m going to braid his mane.”
“Right now?”
“Sure.”
“Don’t bother. Do it tomorrow.”
The temperature of the day was killing, and Frank hoped that the judges would dispense with the requisite jacket and let the riders compete in white breeches and polo shirts—or else, he feared, some of them would be slipping off their horses. At least one always fainted. It had been twice as nasty in Australia.
Claudia’s room was across the hall from Frank’s, and neither of them asked where Patrick was staying, although Frank had put up the money. Patrick seemed to have a brother, or a brother and a sister, or an uncle, in Chicago, and he either was or was not going to see them or him that night; it was difficult to tell. As soon as he got in his room, Frank fell backward on the bed, and immediately his sweating went over to shivering. Covered up by the stiff sheets, he nearly slept a dozen times and was finally so miserable that he got up and took a lukewarm shower. Then it was time to go back to the arena.
The advanced jumps was the last event of the day. Inside, he and Claudia and Patrick walked the course in silence.
It was done up, as these things sometimes were, on a theme—this one of a European summer. One of the verticals was paid for by Euro Disney. A rather demure Minnie in fishnets and flats, and Mickey in a beret, flanked an approximation of the Eiffel Tower in the middle, a choice that Frank thought nearly made it a joker, because the phony point of the tower, although no higher than the rest of the jump,
drew the eye. Jokers, unpainted fences with two plain downward-sloping wings, like slats, on either side, were deceptive because they had no filler. Horses could see color, especially orange and blue, and those rustic jumps were difficult for them to judge. He pointed out the possible hazard of the Parisian vertical to Claudia, who nodded silently, deep in concentration or nerves. It was a very high obstacle.
One of the fences was bedecked in fake wildflowers—meant by the designers hired by Lancaster’s, a British auction house, to look like an English country hedgerow. A triple combination was three modest oxers, each painted to look like an Italian gondola, complete with gondoliers and musical notes, advertising Ponte Vecchio Pizza. One of the offset oxers was commissioned by Bavaria Brewers. A simple set of ascending poles with the higher in back, it looked massive because it was built with the sawn ends of real beer barrels between the poles, and the poles were flanked by two double-high racks of beer barrels, lovingly scrolled in with the rich gold-and-green leaf-and-nymph pattern of the brewery.
End-to-end, it was the size of a bus.
They studied each of the fifteen, looking for places that would need a diagonal approach, an especially fast corner, or that might pose optical problems—which was difficult to discern from the eye height of a human being. With a fresh pouring of sweat that had nothing to do with the heat, and the heat was thick as a wet cloth at four in the afternoon, Frank started to consider all this trouble and preparation balanced like an egg on the card pyramid on the foundation of ten training sessions with an ex-cop who had trained precisely nine jumpers and riders. At least Claudia had come into this event with earned points.
Patrick had not. Frank had paid a ridiculous amount, tens of thousands of dollars, to enter an advanced event with a crazy five-year-old horse, ridden by a drunken jockey whose own experience was in murderous steeplechase races. How much of the application had Patrick faked, drawing on obscure international events that never happened? How much of that was Frank as the owner responsible for? He wanted to lie down on the grass under the bleachers.
Claudia peered at the order of the jumps, which was drawn on the map on the gate. They included three “Liverpools,” so named for their similarity to the water jump called Becher’s Brook on the course where the Grand National was run. It was undoubtedly a tricky jump, but Frank thought more jockeys were in error than horses for falling at Becher’s. Horses didn’t know that it had the reputation of the maze with the Minotaur. People did. For all his ungainliness, Pro was a brave horse with a big stride, fearless. And Claudia was also fearless.
As she began to walk off, Frank caught her arm. “Think about the approach, not just the speed.”
“I know,” she said.
Impulsively, Frank kissed her on the forehead.
Just as impulsively, he got into his truck and went back to the hotel. He showered and lay on the bed. Then he took out his cell phone and called Hope.
What kind of coach couldn’t bear to watch his own rider? And his own horse competing? I have fears enough for all of them, Frank thought.
“Are you coming home in the morning?” Ian said.
“No, Sunday morning. I told you that, buddy.”
Then Hope was on the phone. “He says you told him you were coming tomorrow for dinner.”
“I didn’t, Mom!”
“He’s fine,” she said.
“Is he really fine?”
“He is, just not . . .”
“Not?”
“Not happy.”
Frank wasn’t happy without him either, and thought, I should have brought him. Here I am, sitting on a bed. What would it matter if there were cartoons on the TV? A few minutes later, though, Frank fell asleep, first groping to turn the phone to vibrate, then laying a rolled towel over his eyes. The crazy dream voice said to him, I’m so tired of waiting. I’m tired. Let me come home. There was a memory that the phone had gone off, but when he sat up, in the dark, it was to a persistent banging on the door.
Swinging his feet over, he opened the door.
Claudia stood in the hall in bare feet and an oversized robe. Her hair was wet, and she was crying.
Frank said, “Are you hurt?” Obviously, she wasn’t hurt. “Did Prospero go down?”
“He refused.”
“Claudia! Did he have a stomachache?”
“He has a broken bone near his fetlock.”
Thinking of the great thoroughbred Barbaro, his leg shattered in the Preakness, but probably, actually, factually, years before in training, of the surgeries and rehab that ended in a heartbreaking euthanasia a month later, Frank said, “One bone? Or more than one?”
“The vet took a preliminary X-ray. He said one.”
“What do you want to do?”
“Pro’s on the way to the University of Illinois Veterinary Hospital in Champaign. The vet found me a medical escort. I’m going to go in the morning. I have to rent a car.”
“Why didn’t you go with Pro now?”
“I wanted to tell you myself about Glory Bee.”
“We lost her,” Frank said, straightening, forgetting to breathe.
“She took fifth,” said Claudia. The field was eighty.
“Where’s Patrick?” Frank had to struggle to quench his own excitement and joy in the face of her grief.
“He was drunk last time I saw him, in the bar and grill called Steel Pier. I made sure he had the name of the hotel in his pocket and money for a cab.”
“Okay.”
“I raised Pro from a weanling,” Claudia said, her voice harsh with misery. “This is a career ender. I know that. I don’t know if Pro can be saved, but if he can, he’ll be loved and cared for at stud. You would let him stand at Tenacity, wouldn’t you?”
“Of course,” Frank said. There was something else.
“Now I don’t have a horse.”
“You should rest. We’ll see what happens.”
Frank reached out to grasp Claudia’s shoulders and she leaned into his arms, and, surprising himself, he kissed her, his hands closing around her rump, lean under the worn terrycloth, drawing her to him, conscious of, and then embarrassed by, the insistent hardness bowing out the crotch of his sweatpants. “An excess of comfort,” Frank said. “I apologize, Claudia. I’m only human.”
“Me, too,” Claudia said. She glanced up at Frank. “Could I come in?”
“Sure.”
“Could we make love?”
TWELVE
FRANK THOUGHT THE floor shifted, but it was he who swayed. What a sissy he was.
He’d just kissed a beautiful woman. Why did he feel like he was about to piss himself?
He said then, “Why?”
“Nobody ever asked me why before.” Claudia attempted to smile, but the smile broke up into pieces of grimace. Now he’d embarrassed her, and she was already sad.
She put her powerful, smaller hands on Frank’s, drawing them to her cheeks, her neck, her breasts. “Don’t you feel anything?”
Frank said, “Lots of things.”
Not all of them were good.
He made a stab at opening the knot on Claudia’s robe, and then sighed.
“Sighing? Is this hard labor? Should I help you with the belt?” Claudia glanced up at Frank and he nodded. She was certainly the more fit. Her rider’s hips and thighs were muscled, harder than his own, and her hands were cold, but the rest of her skin was hot under the robe’s thin fabric.
What the hell was the matter with him?
“Am I being presumptuous?”
“No. I don’t know. But that doesn’t bother me. I like people to just say the thing, whatever it is. I’m just not sure that I’m . . .”
“Ready? Because of your wife.”
“Probably.”
“You seem ready.” Claudia nodded at the bulge in Frank’s pants.
“That’s physical.”
“I wasn’t asking you to marry me.”
They both laughed.
Frank said, “I’m also
not very promiscuous.”
“Nor am I. In fact, my last . . . well, affair, and it hardly merits the term, was eighteen months ago.”
“What happened?”
“He was a practicing anesthesiologist who was always short of money. That meant gambling to me. Or maybe worse, although I never saw any evidence of worse.”
“That’s complex. I’m just a gimpy ex-cop with a broken-down farm. So why me? Why tonight? Consolation?”
“No. Friendship and lust.”
“You’re attracted to me?” You fucking half-wit, Frank’s brain was bellowing.
Claudia shrugged. “I don’t think I’d be standing here otherwise. And I don’t think I’ve ever been challenged in this way either, and I’m trying to find it refreshing. You’re a good kisser. You’re a good father. You’re brave.”
Quietly and before he could repent it, Frank nudged one index finger inside the knot and finally, with some trouble, loosened it. Claudia had tied it hard, and she had strong hands, so it wasn’t the work of a moment. When he finished, the robe hung straight, Claudia’s olive skin naked from neck to feet, the space plain between the soft swellings of her breasts, just beginning to lose their girlish tilt, the small rise of her belly with its pale evidence of a summer two-piece, down to the lush light brown curls between her legs. Her skin was unbroken by a blemish. He could not help a rueful reflection on the thick grid of scars that crosshatched his leg. He slid his thumbs from her square chin, along her neck, feeling the pulse banging away there, grazing the outer edge of her breasts, circling the nipples. “What are your feelings?”
“I want to laugh because of you saying that, because you’re a psychiatrist. But I don’t think this is the moment for laughter.”
“Yup,” Claudia said.
“I’m a widower. Not for a year yet.”
“A year is a long time. You feel you’d be cheating on Natalie?”
“Not at all. I think it’s more that . . . I’m your coach.”
“You mean, if I did have a horse? What if you were coaching your sister? Or your wife? What if it was your son? Would you be able to be straight with them? You think you couldn’t be honest with me after this?”