Still Lives(27)

A woman in jeans and chaps is throwing saddles on the horses who pass her, stepping forward to lightly cinch straps. Past her, another woman fixes their bridles, shoving bits in with quick fingers. Then she tightens the saddles and slaps the horses toward the gate. Everything and everyone wears freckles and splashes of dust. Everything and everyone is making noise—the women are clicking and shouting, the horses are whinnying, their hooves are thudding the earth, which is already dry and cracking, even in April. I find the hubbub as comforting as a cocoon—it reminds me of friends’ farms back home. Then I hear, ever so faintly, the bleat of car horns from below, and I look out again at the thousands of buildings below me, their western walls ablaze.

“Beginner or intermediate?” Rick asks each person, then jabs his thumb at a line on either end of the platform. So far, Greg is the only intermediate. I’m not going there.

When it’s Yegina’s turn, Rick says “Beginner” without even asking her.

“What about her?” Yegina asks, nudging me. “Can you tell she used to own a horse?”

“You just told me,” Rick says. He points to Greg and says to me, “Behind him, then.”

“I haven’t ridden in fifteen years,” I protest, but Rick has already sauntered on.

Yegina squeezes my arm. “I’ll be right next to you,” she says. “In the pack.”

“Herd,” I say. “Do you know how much you’re herding me?”

But Yegina is already brushing past Rick on the way to her line, and he looks befuddled first, then sly, then licks his lips.

Time-lapse cameras could not capture the negative speed at which I move toward Greg, who gives me a casual wave. He is wearing clothes I recognize—an old pair of jeans, a T-shirt for a Vermont reggae festival—and the sheepish expression he gets when he feels outnumbered by women. As I approach, I feel like I am walking into the past, into the era when he was still my boyfriend. I wave back, attempting nonchalance, but it looks like I’m swatting at gnats.

Kaye, cancer survivor and woman of the hour, throws her leg over Uncle Bud and gives a whoop.

Greg leans toward me. “Can you give me a lift home tonight? I need to talk.”

“But I drove Yegina,” I say.

“Can she get another ride?”

“Maybe. I don’t know.” Already I’m falling into my old pattern with Greg, almost unable to refuse him.

“I’m sorry I couldn’t call you back,” he says. There’s an emotion in his voice that I can’t read.

“Friends, Angelenos, and the cancer-free,” a helmeted Kaye shouts from atop Uncle Bud. The horse ducks his head as if to put distance between himself and Kaye’s vocal cords but otherwise remains motionless. “I am so touched and honored that you could be with me today.”

A few cheers go up, and so do a couple of riders, awkwardly spraddling their mounts. One woman in pink flip-flops gets into a heated conversation with Rick, and then storms off to her car. Kaye blinks at the exchange and then soldiers on with her speech. Kaye excels in soldiering on. She is the classic beautiful girl from the Midwest who comes to Los Angeles to break into TV and ends up as a personal assistant to a celebrity—in Kaye’s case, to the same famous actor/collector duo who once hired Greg.

The sight of Kaye usually fills me with both admiration and despair, but tonight I’m just admiring. Tonight I need to sun myself in her blithe optimism. A blue-eyed honey brunette with fabulously long legs and the waist of an ant, Kaye could easily get through life without female friends, but instead she courts as many as possible. I have never known anyone else as warmly and successfully social as her. I have also never met anyone else with such cheerful self-love. When Kaye found out she had throat cancer, she transformed herself from a human being to a living campaign; she started a blog and a fund for cancer research; marketed a green-tea cookie line (Kaye’s Anti-Cancer Snaps); and wrote daily updates on her radiation, surgery, and experiments in holistic treatments. “Don’t let the ‘meanies’ rule your life,” she posted. “The reins are in your hands.” (Sixth-grade slang and horse metaphors abound in her prose.) The way Kaye talks about the disease, you’d think cancer was something she invented in her quest for self-improvement.

Yet within eight months, Kaye beat back her tumor. She looks radiant now.

“Saddle up,” she says to me, to her life-coach friends Sara and Nelia, and to a new woman who has been introduced as Kaye’s “personal acupuncture savior.” “First round of margaritas is on me.”

I click on my helmet and cheer with the others. If I didn’t feel Greg’s amused eyes on my face, I could fully enjoy being Kaye’s eleventh or twelfth best friend. Instead of acknowledging him, I focus on the horses that Rick is leading our way: a tall cream-and-brown pied gelding and a slender black mare who keeps lunging sideways and tossing her head. I am not much of a horsewoman, but it’s apparent to me that something is bothering the mare.

“Babe,” says Rick, and mutters something low. The mare ducks her head, nostrils flaring. “Come on, Babe,” he says.

He hands the gelding’s bridle to Greg. “This is Cheyenne,” he says. “You might need to give him a kick up the hills, but he’s a good boy.”

Then Rick appraises me again, holding Babe’s bridle. “She’ll be fine. She’s never been out at night, so keep her with me and the others,” he says. “S’okay?”