Still Life with Elephant Read online

  He sucked his breath in sharply. “Nothing? My books? My—Nothing?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Did you put it all in storage for me?” He can be dense sometimes.

  “Yep, long-term storage at the garbage dump. Sort of like where you threw our marriage.”

  “Have you gone crazy?” His voice rose with anger. “Didn’t you think I was going to need anything?”

  “Oops, I forgot,” I said. “Somehow I wasn’t thinking of your needs. Sorry to be so inconsiderate.” I was loving this now.

  There was a long pause. “I told you I was sorry,” he finally said. “I am sorry. Can you even hear me with that radio blasting? I don’t know what else to say. I love you and I screwed up.”

  “I hear you fine,” I replied. “And forgetting to take the truck in for an oil change is screwing up. Fucking someone and getting them pregnant, when you are both adults and professionals in a medical field, is—unforgivable. It’s the—the planning of it—the sneakiness—the—”

  “I get it,” he interrupted me. “I get it. I am abjectly sorry. I don’t know what else to say.”

  “I guess I can hang up, then,” I said, brightly. “I’ll have my lawyer get in touch with you.”

  “Wait! Neelie?” he called out. I put the phone back to my ear.

  “What?”

  “I don’t want a divorce,” he said. He sounded miserable. “I love you. I never wanted a divorce.”

  “Did you think we were going to be a cozy foursome?” I snapped. “You, me, Good-Golly-Miss-Holly, and little Hollikins?”

  “Oh God,” he said. “Don’t talk like that. Please.”

  “Have I offended your sensibilities?” I asked in a delicate, phony British accent. “So sorry. I meant the future Mrs. Dr. Matt Sterling and family.” I felt nauseated now, like I had overindulged in ice cream. It wasn’t fun anymore.

  “I want to be with you,” he said. “Maybe we can work something out. We can always make custard on the train with her.”

  “I don’t eat custard,” I said, clicked off, and turned my radio up even louder. I was into my mucking half an hour when what he said rearranged itself in my brain. Custody arrangements.

  Isis was waiting for me in her stall. “Don’t ever get a cell phone,” I said to her, clipping the phone to my pocket. “They’re a bloody nuisance.” I picked up a brush and rubbed circles against her orange-brown hair. She pushed back, obviously enjoying the attention. I brushed her face very gently, then moved the brush down her neck and chest and across her shoulders. Up across her back. I was brushing her sides when I found them. Her own secrets. A crisscross of thin, ridged lines. Old scars that ran down her flanks, extending to her rump. She flinched as I ran my fingers across them.

  “You didn’t deserve this,” I told her, and reached down to get a softer brush. She nipped me on my shoulder as I turned away from her, just catching my sweatshirt in her teeth.

  “You’re right,” I said. “It sucks.”

  I tacked her up, locked Grace in a stall, and swung myself into the saddle, steering Isis toward the trails that run along the back of our property. I didn’t want Grace to follow, because she sometimes forgets and runs off on secret missions to rid the world of squirrels. Twice I’ve had to bail her out of the pound while she sat there like a repentant convict. I wanted my full attention on Isis.

  We walked a long time before I asked Isis to halt. I was curious to see if she would connect halting out there, in the middle of the trail, given trees and low fragrant brush, and mossy footing, and birds singing in the branches above our heads, with halting in a training ring. She stopped, hesitated for a moment, then backed up and pranced sideways. She broke into a sweat from nerves.

  Old secrets are hard to give up. I know only too well. I just kept bringing her gently back to a halt, then tried to sit there quietly. I asked her to halt again. Sat. Asked for the halt. Waited. Ten minutes passed. The birds stopped singing and jumped down to the lower branches to check out this odd sight in the middle of their woods. This large horse-human chimera. A deer halted in its tracks, not more than three feet away, and stared at us with large moony eyes. Isis chewed the bit in her mouth and tossed her head up and down, almost hitting me in the face.

  “I know,” I said to her. “But they were wrong.”

  Twenty minutes this time, before she finally sighed and stood there. The sweat dried up on her body, her neck relaxed, and we walked back to the barn.

  Matt was waiting for me. My insides were screaming out how much I loved him. He has sandy hair and hazel eyes. He has the long fingers of a good surgeon, strong but gentle, extending from wide hands. He has wide shoulders that I used to press my head against and feel like he was my wall, protecting me from all the things I couldn’t name. He has small love handles. His face is long and refined, betraying his Norwegian ancestry. He has a straight nose.

  He had turned my radio very low, and the first thing I did was turn it back up so I could ignore him, more or less, though I had to step around him when I put Isis on the cross-ties. Then I let Grace out of the stall and got to work. There is always a ton of things to do in a barn, to occupy or preoccupy, depending on how you look at it.

  “Can we go in the house and sit down and talk?” Matt asked over the music. Stravinsky now, the Firebird, discordant and jagged, which was pretty much the way I felt. Matt looked contrite and worried and very unhappy. Grace was making an absolute fool of herself, standing on her hind legs and scratching at his knees, frantically licking his fingers, delighted to see him again. “Please?” he added.

  I spun around. “Why didn’t you ever tell me that you and Holly went to school together?” I said, choking over the words.

  He stepped back. “I—it was—over. She dumped me,” he said. “She married someone in Colorado. It wasn’t something I wanted to talk about.”

  “So this was your way of—what?”—I asked, fighting for control—“forgiving her? By taking her back?”

  He gestured helplessly. “I don’t know what I was thinking,” he said. “I—There was no closure.” He looked bewildered, puzzled. As though he was taken by surprise as well. It was all I could do to keep myself from comforting him, from apologizing for my anger. He had no right to look so pathetic.

  “Well, consider this your closure,” I finally said, turning my back on him. “Good-bye.” I untacked Isis, brushed her, put her sheet over her, and put her in her stall with some hay. I gave Mousi and Conversano, my other horse, a few carrots. Then I carried the saddle into the tack room, put it on the saddle rack, and took out a small bucket, a bar of saddle soap, and a sponge. He knew I was wasting time now. I haven’t cleaned my tack in five years.

  “It all got so complicated,” he said, taking the bucket out of my hand. “Please, let’s talk.” I hated that there were tears in my eyes. “Come on. Please,” he said to me, his voice tender and cajoling, and he looked at me with that look that made me fall in love with him ten years ago. That sweet-eyed, want-to-touch-his-lips-with-my-fingers look. I was screaming inside how much I loved him.

  I looked into his eyes. Our eyes locked.

  And I slapped him.

  Chapter Six

  I SEEM to horrify my mother on a regular basis. She was thrilled when I was invited to train at the Olympic Team Headquarters for a spot on the Young Riders Team, because she had been my greatest fan, then she was horrified when I totally stopped riding two months later. She was proud when I got my degrees in social work, and started my career in something academic and professional, like my two brothers, and then was horrified when I closed my practice. She was delighted when I married Matt, and now she was horrified because I told her that Matt and I were divorcing. She was doubly horrified when I told her that Matt had emptied our joint checking account and cashed in all our CDs and bonds and savings accounts and maybe even our foreign-coin collection, although I hadn’t checked that yet.

  “How can this be?” she asked me five or six times. We were i
n her kitchen, and I was helping her make bread. She makes the best bread—raisin, multigrain, fruit-and-nut, cheddar-jalapeño—and usually makes a dozen loaves or so at a time, to give away, because she is in charge of the local Loaves to the World charity. They collect other foodstuff, too, because, as my mother likes to say, one can’t live by bread alone. But bread is her passion and her secret vanity, since she and her archrival, Evelyn Slater, are always trying to out-bake each other. And she disdains bread machines. “The loaves come out looking like apartment houses,” she says about bread machines. So, every time I visit her, I wind up kneading and rolling and shaping and braiding the compliant, warm, almost fleshy-feeling dough.

  “What’s going on?” she asked me, a variation of her earlier question. I couldn’t bring myself to explain the whole thing, it made me feel like the dough I was pummeling down, too soft, too vulnerable.

  “It’s because you tune people out,” she said, taking the dough from me and kneading in four varieties of nuts. “I told you that a long time ago. You’re there and you’re not there. Sometimes it’s like talking to a wall. Maybe Matt felt it, too.”

  “Don’t defend Matt,” I said, handing her loaf pans, so the bread could rise again. I refused to think how symbolic it was, the bread taking a pummeling and rising again—I was beyond metaphors.

  “I don’t know what I’m defending him against.” She stopped and pushed her hair back. She’s attractive in a thin, hair-sprayed-mom kind of way. She and my father have been married for almost forty-two years and are happy. I have two brothers, the older happily married, the younger happily single. I had two sets of grandparents growing up, a happy foursome when they were alive. I have happy aunts and uncles. Happy, happy, happy. I think that’s what fascinated Matt. That we all like being in each other’s company, there were no major issues, except for my one brother liking to hunt. I grew up feeling loved and happy. I rode happy.

  “I thought you two had a cheese bomb,” she said.

  “Cheese bomb?”

  “Cheese bomb! Good God, Neelie.” She shook her head. “Deep bond. That you two were so happy. And that’s just what I mean about listening.” I watched her brush the loaves with egg white and put them in the oven. Her lips made a thin line across her face.

  “Take a loaf home with you,” she said a few hours later, wrapping one in aluminum foil and sticking it into a bag for me. “Next time you come, I’ll make you some homemade jelly donuts. You’re getting too skinny. Aren’t you eating?”

  Actually, no. I had no appetite. I hadn’t done my donut run in two weeks. Okay, maybe I went twice. Instead of eating, I was drinking coffee all day long. I chewed gum. Or I would stick a strand of hay in my mouth and curl it around with my tongue while I worked in the barn. It was because I was missing Matt like crazy, but we hadn’t spoken since the day I walloped him.

  I got home just in time to meet with a horse client. She was in her truck, her horse trailer hitched to the back of it, and waiting for me in my driveway. I opened the gates and she drove her rig through. A brand-new truck and trailer, navy with red-painted doodads. She wore a navy-and-red sweater, navy britches, and horse bling: earrings with little rubies set in gold, and a gold horse sweater-pin. New horse-owner, I thought with some amusement. And I just knew that the horse’s leg wraps and blanket would perfectly match his owner’s outfit. Of course, all my stuff matched, too. After you’ve owned horses for a while, you can still match your clothes to your horse equipment, but in a different way. Everything you own is dirty and hairy with holes in it.

  The horse was a bay gelding. Mahogany-brown hair, black mane and tail, two white hind socks. Very flashy. And very obnoxious. His owner’s strategy for unloading him was to unclip his head gingerly, drop the tailgate of the truck, and let the horse scramble out backward, while she screamed and ran for cover in the front seat. He finished his grand exit with a rear and strike, all duded up in his navy wraps, matching navy-trimmed red blanket, and red nylon halter.

  “Can you fix him in a month?” his owner asked me, making sure I had him under control before she left the safety of the truck.

  I grappled with his lead line, trying to keep him from rearing. “I don’t know,” I yelled over my shoulder. “I’ll try.”

  “My daughter is afraid of him,” she yelled back.

  Smart girl.

  The horse’s name was Delaney, eight years old. He had somehow learned that he could get out of work by throwing his front end up in the air and then running away as soon as he touched back down. The woman had purchased him for a lot of money, only to find that he had this odd little quirk of being totally unridable.

  “Rearers and kids don’t mix,” I had told her over the phone. “It’s an accident waiting to happen.” As far as I was concerned, rearers are like cars with blown transmissions, and you were morally obligated to let the owner know. She agreed to put him up for sale to a professional rider, after I retrained him, and now he was rearing himself toward my barn in gravity-defying leaps.

  I led him to his stall and then looked over his health records. His back had been checked for soreness, his legs and feet were fine, eyes and teeth in good working order. Apparently, the only thing wrong with him was his crappy attitude. The woman shook my hand.

  “Good luck with him,” she said. “You have a terrific reputation.”

  I nodded and looked back at the horse. He was busy spooking at his stall door.

  “I have someone interested in buying him,” she said. “So—try not to hurt him.”

  “I don’t do that,” I answered. She looked relieved and jumped back into her truck. I opened the gate again to let her out.

  “Your berries are contagious,” she called out, waving good-bye to me.

  I waved back.

  The problem is, I’m not courageous at all.

  Chapter Seven

  WHO INVENTED night anyway? It’s just day, slowly losing consciousness. Night closes in like death, your vision fails, things go bump, you escape into sleep, and if you can’t sleep, you are trapped in nothingness.

  At eleven that night, I had a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich and went into my bedroom, where I had a DVD playing Mozart. Not the Elvira Madigan one, I wouldn’t have been able to bear that, just a few controlled little piano pieces that didn’t need attending to. Actually, I stood in the doorway of my bedroom and just stared in. The sight of my empty bed felt like a reproach, like it was telling me that Matt was with her right now. That he was taking her hand and moving it across his body, and holding it there. And just the thought of it—

  I finally sat down on the edge of the bed to think. He had been screwing her for almost two years. When had it started? When he closed his equine practice and began specializing in small animals? It seemed to me that there was a connection.

  He had made the decision to switch to small animals without even discussing it with me. Not unusual for him. Sometimes he was distant and busy, like he was phoning in his half of the marriage. And that’s not counting the times when he was distant and not so busy. But it was always okay with me. I had my own long-distance phone plan going on, as well. When I questioned him about dropping his equine clients, he shrugged it off.

  “Money,” he said. “I’m putting together a really good business strategy to take advantage of the fact that small-animal vets make more than equine vets.”

  I knew that part of it was true. Equine vets work long hours—driving in the middle of the night to get to an emergency, then driving to the next barn, miles away. Standing in bitter-cold half-lit barns in the middle of winter, trying to treat large hard-to-manage animals. Vets stand in mud puddles. They stand in hot, dusty paddocks in the blazing heat of summer. The time they spend driving from barn to barn is unproductive and they don’t get paid for it. Sometimes they get to a barn and no one is there to help, and they are in the unique predicament of having to lasso their patients before treating them. The odd hours wear a lot of equine vets down. They get terrible back problems
from holding up horse legs or wrestling medicine down their patients’ throats. In addition, they get kicked at and stomped on, rare for practitioners of human medicine.

  Still, Matt’s decision took me by surprise, because I thought he loved the work. I thought he loved it more than we needed money. We were doing okay. Now I realized that it was probably a decision he made with Holly-Greedy. Or for Holly because she complained about his being out of the office so much. She wasn’t much for farm work because she would have gotten mud on her Gucci loafers. And all the while, I hadn’t suspected a thing. I thought he had done it for us, so I could continue to build up my horse business.

  It was too quiet, even with Mozart. Grace jumped on the bed and settled down on Matt’s pillow, and promptly fell asleep. Her snores accompanied Sonata No. 15 in C. Alley Cat was on his other pillow, purring and doing her kneading routine, which reminded me of my mother making yeast bread. I scratched Grace behind the ears and thought maybe I would get a few more dogs, and another cat or two, so they could fill up Matt’s entire side of the bed. I definitely needed more warm bodies. And more horses to keep me busy. More something.

  I threw myself back against my pillows and waited for sleep.

  There is a peace that comes when I am with an animal. I don’t have to strain to listen to words, I don’t feel pressured. They speak volumes, without one word passing between us. And I can feel the tightness across my shoulders ease, feel the clench in my jaw, the coil of memory that winds around the inside of my head, unwrap itself. I keep the music playing for the same reason. So I don’t have to think. So I don’t have to listen to my own head.

  Three a.m., and I realized that I wasn’t going to sleep. I pulled on my sweats and sneakers and went out to the barn to check on the horses. Grace followed.

  It’s spiritual for me, the darkness, the soft sighing when the horses are lying down, or chewing their hay. Mousi always makes a nest for himself with his hay, then settles down in the middle of it like a big white marshmallow, so he can be cushioned while slipping strands out from underneath his great body. Isis stands in a corner, her head pressed under her hay rack to protect her from everything. Conversano, my three-year-old, still sleeps like a foal, flat on his side. He isn’t saddle-broken yet, doesn’t know that life is about working.