Still Lives(29)

“Easy does it,” Rick tells Yegina. “Give Babe a kick now,” he says to me as he passes.

I dig my heels into the mare’s ribs. She jolts a few steps up the trail. Behind me, the city is orange and velvet and glitter. Before me are silhouettes: horses and riders merged into massive creatures that all climb skyward except Babe, who stops again and snorts. I wonder if I’m sitting wrong. I lean my torso forward into her neck, but my pelvis slides back in the saddle, dragging her down.

“Give her another kick,” Rick shouts again, twisting back. “She’ll go.”

So I kick. But because Babe is whipping her head around again, I also stupidly, fearfully, pull back on the reins at the same time. Her front legs rise into the air, her back legs skittering. We both hang, the whole thousand or so pounds of us about to tumble, me first, and then she will pin me. And then, just as suddenly, Babe regains her balance and starts to come down.

Greg’s voice splits the dark: “Jump, Maggie! She’s going to fall on you! Jump!”

I do what I’m told, throwing myself from the saddle, landing hard on my right hip and then rolling off the path into a prickly bush.

I don’t feel the pain until after I see Babe’s hooves smash the trail. She gives a full-body shiver and gallops giddily upslope. Rick leaps from his own horse, grabs her reins, and ties them to his saddle.

“You all right?” he yells to me. “Can you get back on?”

Sharpness stabs through my hip, but I feel more ridiculous and relieved than hurt. The horse would not have fallen on me. But for the panic in Greg’s voice, I probably would have ridden it out, landing back down with Babe and holding on as she charged up the trail. I don’t know what to think about this. I can’t distinguish Greg from the rest. He’s just another dark figure.

“Coming,” I say.

I stand and limp up the hill, sliding on stones, until I reach Babe’s warm flank. Her head jerks, but Rick holds her. I stick my boot in the stirrup and get back on.





11

In 1935, F. Scott Fitzgerald gave a speech at a banquet honoring the work of Mark Twain. “Huckleberry Finn took the first journey back,” said Fitzgerald. “He was the first to look back at the republic from the perspective of the west … And because he turned back we have him forever.”

I read this speech aloud to Greg when I first stumbled across it in Fitzgerald’s biography. It was last December, a couple of months after Greg’s mother had died. He was booking a flight to Art Miami to do some consulting for his employers, two art collectors.

“Don’t you love that last line?” I said. “‘And because he turned back we have him forever.’”

“More Fitzgerald, huh?” said Greg, turning from the computer. “You should be reading James Ellroy or something.”

“I will,” I said, though I had promised this before. “But I want to imagine Hollywood in the 1930s, like when this bungalow was built—can you imagine how different it was?” I gestured at our living room ceiling, its cracking crown molding.

Greg snorted. “Sadly, no. I doubt they’ve updated anything.”

“I mean the city.”

Greg turned back to the computer screen.

“Nostalgia is an eastern preoccupation,” he said. “Fitzgerald talks about it like it’s a virtue. It doesn’t have to be.”

“Not all back-looking is nostalgia,” I said. “Sometimes it’s selfexamination.”

No answer. Red and purple panels flashed across Greg’s screen.

“Those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it.” It was a stupid cliché. But we didn’t talk anymore. Not enough. Not about our ideas or feelings.

Greg sighed. His chair creaked as he swiveled again toward me. “Don’t you feel freer out here?” he asked, searching my face. “I never realized how oppressed I was growing up in Europe and New York. Everyone important had already lived. Everything important had been done.”

I recalled my drive on the 101, passing the parking garage, being flooded with metropolis. Was that freedom or exposure I’d felt? Or both?

“I just thought it was a beautiful quote,” I said.

Greg kept facing me. “I’m moving out,” he said quietly.

I wasn’t sure I’d heard him correctly, but I couldn’t find the voice to ask. I just stared.

“I found a space for a gallery,” Greg said, his eyes sliding from mine. “I’m going to live there while I fix it up. It’s going to take a lot of work.”

His mother had left him an inheritance. A few weeks ago, Greg and I had discussed using it to buy a house. With an extra bedroom for our kids one day.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“You could still sleep here,” I said.

“I’m really sorry,” Greg said.

He slept on the couch that night, and the next day he left with his first bags of stuff. I assumed, in a self-protective way, that grief was overwhelming him. That he needed to cope with the loss of his mother by throwing himself into his new career. The next week, Greg presented me with a key to the gallery and his new apartment—“In case you need it for any reason,” he said—and he kept his set to our bungalow, though he never slept there again. When we spoke on the phone, we spoke like lapsed friends who are pretending they still care. I wanted to yell at him, I wanted to cry; I just didn’t feel allowed. Permission to suffer could only be granted to the most injured. So I kept my weeping to myself, where it festered and spread until I felt like I was two people: the serene, hardworking Maggie Richter everyone knew at the Rocque, and the private one who wanted to kick the young couple kissing on the street corner or set a big hot fire to the tiny sign that hung outside Greg’s new gallery, announcing his evolution, man and gallery combined: SHAW.