The Horses of the Night (4 page)

Peterson considered this. “His costumes for
Carmen
were not bad. And I suppose his line of dress shirts does something for a man with a certain build. The sort of man who looks good in anything.”

Peterson seemed to consider his own words, and then continued, “Anna Wick does most of the work. She has a handshake that makes your bones ache for a hour.”

“She's a remarkable woman.”

“She's what you might call self-made, too, isn't she?”

“Born Annabelle Wickford in Medford, Oregon,” I said. “The rumor is she never sleeps.”

Peterson absorbed this, then went on, “I think that he has done more harm to you than you can possibly believe,” he said.

His words made me gaze into my own drink, an untouched brandy and soda. When I looked up, he was waiting, as though he needed my permission to speak further.

“How would you describe your career?” he asked.

“I've had some interesting projects. I've designed a few roof gardens, and I've drawn up plans for a few schools. Usually donating my time, of course.”

“But you wouldn't say that your career has been a success.”

“Well, not exactly a success, no.”

“DeVere watches your work, your bids, pays attention to what you submit, and where.”

My voice remained easy. “You don't mean that he's out to ruin my career.”

“Exactly.”

My voice did not betray my feelings. “Perhaps he's right. I should resign myself to the pleasures of my class.”

“Your work is very fine. Noble, enlightening—I admire it tremendously. You deserve fame for your designs, Stratton. But listen to me. As long as DeVere is alive, and as long as he pursues you, you'll have trouble accomplishing anything important as a designer.”

I reflected, “When DeVere was starting out, designing jeans and earrings, he approached my father for an entrée into what people like DeVere call ‘high society.' My father was always bored by that kind of ‘society,' and told DeVere about the fund for the handicapped, one of my father's pet projects. DeVere thought my father was dismissing him.”

“You don't dismiss DeVere.”

“Do you want me to give you permission to accept the award?”

His voice was tight as he said, “I'd like to say I can't accept it.”

“I could pursue DeVere legally, sue him. I can pull a few strings and get the award overturned.”

“Why don't you?”

“Because I want to win the award honorably. Really win it, not wrestle it away from you. Because fighting a man like DeVere on his level makes me despise myself.” Because, I did not say, I am a better man. So that it was pride—vanity—that kept me from fighting back. “Because, in the end, it still might not work, and I would be muddy from a struggle against a man—” I did not finish my thought: a man who was not a human being so much as an ambition-beast.

“The feeling is mutual, isn't it?” he said.

“What do you mean?”

“You hate DeVere.”

I laughed. “Not at all.”

“I think you do. I think you despise him, and you haven't figured out a way to express it.”

Like most people, I resent accurate insight into my own personality, but I had the sense to acknowledge this. I managed to laugh again, and said, “You could be right.”

“I'm going to accept the award, Stratton,” he said. “Please don't try to stop me. I don't feel proud. I need the money.”

There was that fluttering light again, like the beginning of a migraine. “You're honest, at least.”

“Do you realize I've spent the last six months designing sandboxes for an arts school in Berkeley? My wife's been working for the phone company—”

And I myself, he did not have to say, did not need the money, as everyone knew.

Except that, in truth, I could certainly use the money. My family had a secret—many secrets.

“I've been in therapy lately,” Peterson said. “I've been depressed.”

“I'm sorry to hear that,” I said, worried about this man I found myself liking.

“I'm just a typical emotional wreck. Bad dreams, insomnia. It's too much to expect you to understand. Your work deserves the award. But I need it.”

Afterward, out on the street, North Beach was a brilliant study of colors, brakelights, shop windows. The air was cool, and scented with espresso, deisel exhaust, garlic, and the faintest tang of the Pacific.

Years of suppressed anger, years of careful good manners, were stored in me.

Margaret had been right. I had always been, in a very ordinary, unremarkable way, superstitious. I had no firm beliefs, in fact I scoffed at seers and psychics, wondering why, if they could visualize the future so clearly, they needed to earn a living reading palms. Certainly a clairvoyant could pick a winning horse, or a winning lottery ticket.

And yet I found my eyes lingering on the horoscope column of the newspaper occasionally, and I was never entirely pleased to have the path ahead of me occupied by a black cat. A sunny day cheered me, and the glimpse of a full moon made me feel in touch with something profound. I had sometimes made a wish before blowing out my birthday candles, even when the cake was on a balcony in Venice, or in a lounge in Monte Carlo. Perhaps I believed, in a way I would have been ashamed to admit to myself, that the future could be outguessed.

Now, once again, my future withered.

This anger was bad. There was only one way to exorcise it.

5

Nona had once told me that I was hoping to get caught in a riptide, hoping that I would have to fight for my life in the waves.

“You might be afraid of it, but you have to admit the truth,” she had said. “It's what you want.”

Suicidal:
she had used the word, and asked me to stop.

I took a quick cab ride to my home, and I punched the button on my answering machine, hoping to hear word from Nona. All I heard was the hearty voice of the contractor wondering when he could come by and resume work on my house.

When indeed, I thought.

I felt disloyal to Nona. I had not actually promised her that I would never go for another night swim, but I had not gone out into the surf for weeks. I stuffed the ample robe and the goose-down vest into my carry-all and grabbed my car keys.

I drove the last remaining car I owned, the Mercedes, down Ocean Avenue through the dark. The car had been armored during the days when my cousin was kidnapped in Europe. My father had taken the precaution to soothe my mother's nerves. Now the car shifted gears with the solemn forward thrust of a rolling fortress. The interior was pleasant, the ride quiet, and I did have the dubious satisfaction of knowing that the ammunition of most firearms could penetrate neither the doors nor the windshield.

I found my way to the Great Highway and parked the car at Ocean Beach, at my favorite spot.

This was not a desire for death. Far from it. I could taste the ocean in the air. The wetsuit fit snuggly and felt delightfully peculiar as I zipped it up, and I made my way down the sandy steps in the darkness. The rubber textile moved with my body in a way that made me feel protected, insulated from all harm, but this was an illusion. Only my torso was protected, and in very cold water this would not be enough.

The scene was well lit by the glow reflected from the clouds, by the reflection of that light from the pale sand, and by the fragment of moon that kept slewing in and out of overcast. I tossed down my carry-all and the keys and sprinted toward the pale line of breakers.

I dived and surfaced, spitting water. This was what I loved, this struggle, this cold.

Sandy salt water filled my mouth. I had a flash of understanding: The horizon was a void, the sea was emptiness. And I was strong enough to survive it.

Anger was gone. I worked against the surge of water, my legs aching and the chill seeping through the rubberized fabric of my wetsuit top.

The beach was a scrawl of white suds, a dirty line of brown, a vague sprinkle of headlights. A bank of fog lofted over me, spilled over the view of the beach. The beach was gone, and I could see only the tossing water around me. The Pacific tasted of cities dissolved, aluminum and concrete and chrome stewed and then nearly frozen.

When I breathed I sucked in the cold fog. The muscles of my legs were growing slowly into stone. I was heavy, and sluggish. I dived deep, into the churning bottom. DeVere and Blake, and Peterson with his needful eyes, were far away now.

This was all that mattered. Brine burned my eyes, and I could sense the writhe of sand under my feet, the unsolid earth churning. How long had it been? Five seconds, then, as my feet plunged into the bottom sand into something nearly solid, ten.

Fifteen seconds. I felt myself laugh. It was an inward sound. I was so cold it hurt the bones of my limbs, my body aching with the cold, and I was laughing! This wasn't a game, now, I told myself. This wasn't play. People died like this.

Thirty seconds, and counting. The society columnists and the critics, the heiresses and the wealth-fatigued men of leisure would be surprised if they could see this: Stratton Fields at play. Drowning.

But it was sport, I told myself. It was fun, and nothing more. When my head broke the surface I could see nothing. The air was sweet. Sand needled me, and my lungs were shrinking into two leaden stones. My heart contracted into a smaller and tighter fist with each pulse. I blinked, and swam, sensing the direction of the shore.

I let the waves lift me, buoying me toward the beach. A wave tumbled itself, and my limbs along with it, but the danger and the greatest part of the pleasure was past. I body surfed, catching up with another wave that warped, angled me, and then the sand bit my knees and I erected myself panting, out of the foam.

A wedge of water nearly cut my legs out from under me. The risk, the salt on my lips. It was all was so delicious, so unlike the rest of my life.

Another wave tackled me, and I staggered and stalked my way from the sea slowly, as though reluctant to leave. I laughed at myself, gasping, dripping. Fun, I told myself, should not be so much work—or danger. I worked at the zipper of my wetsuit with stiff fingers.

The fog was streaky, rolling past me, and seemingly through me, like a second, diaphanous surf. My fingers stopped unzipping the suit. My breath caught.

I saw something.

I told myself that I must be mistaken. No one ever swam this surf—no one but me. It was too dangerous. But there could be no mistake. There was something out there.

I peered, striding into the wash of the waves. The fog and darkness obscured whatever it was, then blotted it entirely. But my instinct could not be denied: It was a human being.

There was someone out there.

I was in the water again, swimming hard as the fog closed in. I could see only a stroke or two ahead. I called out, but my voice was soaked in the hiss of the surf and the mat of the fog.

I plunged ahead, swimming steadily, until I reached the place where I was convinced I had seen—what? What had I seen? Surely not a person, I tried to convince myself. Surely it was a seal, or a bit of ship's spar, or a life jacket fallen from a fishing boat. Perhaps it had been nothing, an illusion.

I called, wordlessly, my voice a universal: Are you there? Can you hear me?

Am I alone?

I was beyond the waves, the combers breaking behind me, somewhere beyond the fog wall. I felt the unease, the flickering anxiety that meant that the cold was even more dangerous than before. I was nearly spent.

But I couldn't abandon someone out here to drown. I called again.

And this time there was an answering cry.

It was a brief, evanescent sound, almost not a sound at all. Someone was even farther out, through the fog. Someone was calling, and it seemed in my fear for the life of this stranger that this human voice was calling my name, if indeed it was a human call and not the song of a gull somewhere beyond the ceiling of gray.

I shuddered. My own fatigue clung to me. My own confusion drove me to wrestle upward, out of the water, in an attempt to see through the mist, and then fall back again.

There was indeed a voice calling. It was a human voice, and it sounded familiar.

Then I saw her.

Far off, indistinct with distance, there was a woman in the water. Her head and one shoulder were all I could see. She called out to me again, and I could not be certain any longer that what was happening was real.

When I kicked hard, fighting the water in her direction, she receded and grew farther away. I wanted to rescue this woman, but at the same time I was growing certain that I had suffered harm through lack of oxygen, or the cold. This woman did not exist.

And now I was very far from shore.

Too far, and my thoughts were becoming disconnected. She was a source of light. She beckoned me, a pale figure, and I swam until my sinews burned. My vision grew spotty. There, I told myself. This proves it. You are having hallucinations. It's the sort of thing that happens to people when they freeze to death. You are leaving the real world, and as you depart you create one of your own.

Must save her, must not let her drown.

My hand struck something, and then I felt a hand close around mine. Close, and hang on.

I woke on the sand, my face buried in the wet stuff so that I spluttered and nearly choked as I inhaled sharply. I dragged myself to my feet.

WARNING
, the sign announced.
NO SWIMMING. SURF EXTREMELY DANGEROUS
.

She was nowhere. I could not breathe. I tried to call out but I had no voice. I could feel her grip in my numb hands as though she still held my fingers.

No
, I breathed.
It isn't possible
.

My security man, Fern Samuels, poured more hot coffee from the thermos. I was enrobed, fortified, by layers of terrycloth and goose down. Fern did not say what he must have been thinking. He watched me drink hot coffee and then turned to see what I was seeing, the figures of policemen at the edge of the surf in what had become drizzle. There were flashlights, beams cutting into the mist, waves glittering.