Another Kind of Cowboy (7 page)

SEPTEMBER 28

CHRIS AND SOFIA
arrived just as the lesson was ending. Alex hoped that he'd be doing something impressive when they showed up, maybe an extended trot or at least cantering, but no. He was at the end of a lunge line, like a little kid just learning to ride.

When Alex saw Cleo being lunged, he'd approved of the idea. For her. He was certain
he
wouldn't need any help with his seat and balance. Fergus informed him otherwise at his second lesson.

“You have a good seat, dear boy, but we need to challenge it. You don't mind being lunged?”

Alex shook his head no. He figured it would take Fergus about three seconds to see he didn't need remedial help and they could head right into the
advanced stuff: piaffe, passage, pirouettes, and the other grand prix movements.

It was not to be. At each lesson Alex was lunged both on Princess and Turnip. He was lunged until his spine compressed and he developed a bobble head. He was lunged until the insides of his legs bled. Still, Alex couldn't decide whether to be embarrassed or excited about the process. He'd read somewhere that riders at the Spanish Riding School in Vienna spent
three years
at the end of a lunge line before they were ever allowed to take up the reins. He felt thrilled to be part of such a demanding tradition. The other part of him felt that even though he was new to dressage anyone who loved it as much as he did should be a natural, especially if that person had been riding seriously since he was twelve.

“Yes, but you rode Western,” Fergus said when Alex mentioned his concerns. “Now you have to learn a dressage seat. I'm not saying you don't have a good seat. You do. We're just fine-tuning it.”

The other way Alex knew he wasn't a dressage prodigy was because Ivan hadn't come out to give him a lesson yet. Fergus had told them that Ivan would only teach him and Cleo when Ivan thought they were ready.

Part of the challenge for Alex was the difference in horses. He was used to riding horses that had been trained to be as comfortable as possible. Riding Turnip was a little bit like being aboard a nicely upholstered couch. Riding Princess, however, was like standing on the deck of a small boat in choppy water. Every stride threatened to send Alex flying. The more tired he got, the worse his balance became. By the end of his lessons he felt like he was bouncing around like a first-time rider at a dude ranch. That's what was happening when Chris and Sofia showed up.

After Fergus told him he was welcome to invite people to watch his lessons, he'd invited his friends out. His hope was that Cleo would mistake Sofia for his girlfriend. He hadn't told Sofia the plan, however, and he couldn't invite her and
not
invite Chris. So now they were both here and he was left wondering how his nicely compartmentalized life had gotten so messy.

From the corner of his eye he saw Chris and Sofia walk over to the ring. Like many unhorsey people in an equine environment, they looked worried that someone would suddenly ask them to hold a rearing stallion or put on a rubber glove so they could help a mare give birth.

Alex wanted to play the gracious host but it was hard from the end of a lunge line. He satisfied himself with nodding at his friends, but suspected the gesture was impossible to make out amid the head wobbling.

Fergus ignored the new arrivals and kept talking to Alex.

“We have to work on your flexibility. You've got to let go in your hips. Even at the walk you need to feel that pelvis move!” he announced in a loud voice.

Alex stared off into the distance like a sick dog. He knew what was coming next.

“I want you to imagine you are
making love
to the saddle.”

Fergus, standing in the middle of the ring, began to move his hips like a geriatric Chippendales dancer.

Oh, please, oh, please, let him stop doing that
, thought Alex. He snuck a glance at his friends. Sofia was definitely grinning.

“It's about freedom and strength,” said Fergus, swinging his hips back and forth. “Freedom here!” Fergus put his hands on his hips like he was about to begin the “Time Warp” dance. “And strength here and here!” He vigorously slapped his belly and then his own rear end.

Alex saw Sofia duck her head behind Chris to hide her laughter. This wasn't what he'd had in mind at all. He felt a little better when he saw Chris smile encouragingly at him.

“Okay. Once more to trot.”

Screw it
. The damage was done. He might as well finish his ride properly.

Alex sat deep and tall, making sure there was a straight line from his hip to shoulder, and looked ahead through Princess's ears as he urged her forward. He let his hips absorb the movement and Princess responded by rounding and softening her back. All at once Alex was floating.

“This is it!” cried Fergus. “You feel this? How she's swinging through her back? Now you are really sitting! Okay, now you ask for the walk just by slowing your seat and tightening your stomach muscles.”

Alex did as instructed and Princess slowed to a walk. It was the best moment he'd had so far in his dressage training. He smiled, his embarrassment forgotten.

“Riding this way is not easy,” said Fergus, still speaking loudly, as though he intended his words to be overheard.

“Your horse, he is trained in Western pleasure. He
tries to make you comfortable by moving as slowly as possible. In truth, he barely moves! A horse like Princess is something else again. You have to meet her halfway, or sitting on her is misery. But look at you. Two weeks and already you're having some very nice moments.”

Alex glanced over at his friends and saw that they, too, were smiling and he was no longer sorry that he invited them.

 

Twenty minutes later Alex had Princess in the cross ties. He'd finished hosing her down and scraping off the excess water.

“So this one's yours?” Sofia hesitantly patted Turnip's soft white nose, which poked out of his stall.

“Yeah,” Alex said. He felt tongue-tied around his friends in this unfamiliar environment.

“I can tell he totally loves you.”

Startled, Alex glanced at Sofia.

“He watches every move you make,” continued Sofia.

“He's a really good horse,” said Alex. His throat felt too closed up for him to say more.

“This place is incredible,” said Chris, who'd taken off his headphones and was investigating every inch
of the barn. Chris had an artist's fascination with the physical world, and Alex surreptitiously watched as his friend trailed slender fingers over the wood and brick surfaces. Abruptly, Alex looked away. It was bad enough when straight people developed friend crushes. For a gay guy to get a crush on his straight friend was practically suicidal.

Sofia came over to give Princess one of the carrots she'd brought.

“I wish someone would do all this for me,” said Sofia as she watched Alex massage Princess's neck.

Alex, a careful person to begin with, was even more meticulous than usual when he worked on Princess, who accepted his attention as no more than her due.

“Maybe you should talk to Alex about that.”

Chris, Sofia, and Alex all turned to see Cleo standing in the doorway.

Alex felt his jaw tighten. The plan had been for Cleo to meet Sofia and just
assume
Sofia was his girlfriend. Cleo wasn't supposed to
say
anything about it.

“You're just how Alex described you,” said Cleo, walking up to Sofia, with her hand outstretched.

Alex blinked.
Was she on crack?
He hadn't said word one about what his girlfriend looked like.

Cleo stopped in front of Sofia. Her handmade riding boots were spotless for once. Her butter-yellow breeches glowed, and her white blouse was freshly pressed. Her small chin jutted defiantly and her sheer pink lip gloss gleamed softly in the warm lights of the barn.

“How was your ride?” she asked Alex after she finally let go of Sofia's hand.

“It was fine,” he replied. He picked up one of Princess's front hooves. He'd cleaned it already but needed something to do. He would spend an hour cleaning each hoof if that's how long it took Cleo to go away.

Cleo's next question took his breath away.

“Do you mind competing for his attention with a Turnip?” she asked Sofia.

“No, not really,” said Sofia with an uncertain laugh. “A rutabaga, though—that would be a different story.”

Alex's back began to hurt as Princess shifted more of her weight onto him, but there was no way he was going to straighten up while the two girls were talking.

“That's funny,” said Cleo. “I just wondered how you as Alex's girlfriend feel about how, you know,
horsey
he is.”

“I don't know. You'd have to ask Alex's girlfriend.”

“You mean you're not…?”

“Not that I'm aware of.”

Alex's back went into a spasm. Reluctantly he let go of Princess's foot and stood.

Alex's eyes met Chris's. Almost against his will Alex said, “Uh, I'm not going out with my, uh, girlfriend anymore. We broke up, I mean, it didn't work out.”

 

That evening Alex was exhausted, not just from his lesson and the chores he'd done at the barn, but from all the messy and terrifying social interactions. It was almost a relief to get to work cleaning Turnip's stall.

He hurled the last clump of sodden shavings into the wheelbarrow and was pushing it out of the stall when he nearly ran into his father.

“What the heck's going on in here?” asked his father in his beery baritone.

“I didn't hear you come in,” said Alex, picking up the shovel in a half-hearted gesture of explanation. Then he was hit by a sinking feeling. He'd forgotten to put his track pants back on. He was still in his breeches. Maybe his dad wouldn't notice. He
sounded fairly plastered.

His heart sank when his dad leaned against the stall, settling in for a visit.

“It's Friday night,” said Mr. Ford. “And here you are. Shoveling shit. There'll be time for that, son, after you get married.”

“Yeah. Ha, ha,” said Alex.

“Jesus,” said Mr. Ford. “What kind of pants you got on?”

“Riding pants?” Alex replied, hoping that was all the explanation his dad would need.

“They look like them funny English pants the girls wear.”

Alex didn't respond. His mouth was so dry he couldn't swallow, much less speak.

“Why you wearing them sissy pants?” Mr. Ford persisted.

Alex felt like one of those captive-raised game birds that people let out just long enough to shoot.

“I've been, uh, riding English. At a place down the road.”

“English?” said his father, screwing up his face with distaste. “I thought we talked about this. You were going to look into roping or reining, maybe working with Rudy Chapman—”

Oh dear God
, thought Alex,
not Rudy Chapman again
.

“I've decided to try dressage,” Alex said in a quiet voice.

“Dressage?”

“You know. It's English. It's kind of like…” Alex struggled for a way to describe the sport. He couldn't use the dancing analogy, because that would make things worse. The only thing his father would hate more than a son who rode dressage was one who danced. “Dressage is sort of like military riding,” he said finally. “It's a style of classical riding that was developed hundreds of years ago for war horses. For soldiers. You know that musical ride that the Royal Canadian Mounted Police put on? That's basically dressage. Dressage comes from the word
dresseur
—to train. It's—”

“I didn't ask for a damn seminar,” his father interrupted. “What is it? What are you going to do with it?”

Alex blinked.

“I don't know. Compete. I guess.”

“I thought only girls do that dressage stuff. Going around and around in circles like that.”

Alex briefly considered taking the shovel and stabbing himself through the heart with it.

“Lots of men ride dressage,” he said. “Some of the top riders are men. Especially in Europe.”

“Yeah, and I bet most of them are a little light in the riding slippers, if you get my meaning,” said his father, twinkling his fingers at Alex as though trying to put him under a spell.

“Yeah, well, I'm not,” Alex said, and he knew his voice sounded a bit high-pitched and defensive. This would all be so much easier if he was a misunderstood straight boy, like that Billy Elliott kid. Lucky bastard.

“Did you ever think all this riding, especially this fancy dressage riding,” Mr. Ford said, adding another finger twinkle for emphasis, “is getting in the way of a healthy social life?”

Alex suppressed a shudder. What did his father know about a healthy social life? His main form of entertainment was drinking himself into a stupor alone in his RV every night.

“How you going to meet a girl when you spend all your time with your horse?” his father continued.

“Dressage is practically all girls.”

“Never see any of 'em around here,” said his father.

Alex was about to point out that between his sisters
and his aunt the place was practically overrun with females.

“It just don't seem
right
,” his father continued. “Take your old man, for instance. I'm a hardworking guy. Not much time for socializing. And even I find time to see the odd lady.”

Alex's stomach heaved.

“You even met the lucky gal I'm taking out tonight. Remember Colette?”

So his father
was
dating the woman from the beer garden, she of the sparse red hair and unused dressage horse.

What could Ms. Reed, a successful realtor, possibly want with his father? Mr. Ford's skin was puffy and yellowish, but he was all dressed up in a nice shirt and khakis and had doused himself in some god-awful cologne. The old man was probably ripe for a massive heart attack. He could go at any moment. Running a business
and
a family into the ground had to be very hard work. The old man deserved some happiness.