Alison wanted to show me the sights of Los Angeles, and one of those sights was two hours away, in Del Mar. It was Willie Shoemaker Day at the Del Mar racetrack, and when Alison suggested we drive down, since I hadn’t spoken to Jane, I agreed. We got to the Spanish-style complex, founded by Bing Crosby and his cronies back in 1937, bought our tickets, walked through the gate, and when a woman gave us each a hat, I didn’t think much about it. Everybody had one. Families gathered around snack bars, women holding ice cream cones, and single men with racing forms were either wearing or carrying the green hat, which, although it was honoring Willie Shoemaker, featured the Buick logo.
We weren’t actually interested in betting, so instead we strolled to the paddock. We watched the horses, paraded around by Mexican men and an occasional blond woman, and when I turned around, away from the horses, I saw something I didn’t quite believe. I tapped Alison on the shoulder.
“Is that Steve Martin?” I said.
A man in a suitcoat, wearing the green baseball cap, was walking across the pavement toward the racetrack building. He was with a young woman, her hair in a ponytail, and another man not wearing the cap.
“I don’t think so,” Alison said.
“I do,” I said, and I did. And I followed them.
With Alison behind me I followed them from the sunny area outside, into the actual stadium, and because I was coming from the bright sunlight, when I got into the area where people place their bets, it took a while for my eyes to adjust, and when they adjusted I didn’t see Steve.
I walked through this area — what I would call the lobby of the racetrack building — and out to the area in front of the actual track. People were out in the sun, sitting on benches or standing, drinking beer and holding miniature pencils and pieces of paper and I thought, since Steve and his male friend were fairly tall, that I would be able to spot them above the sea of people — that’s the expression that came to my mind, a sea of people — and I waded into them, looking at the faces of men in caps but none of them were Steve’s.
Alison was still with me, telling me it probably wasn’t him, that the cap made it seem like him, but I knew it wasn’t just the cap. I’d seen his face, and more than his face, I’d seen his savoir faire, and at a racetrack savoir faire stands out. So I kept looking, thinking about where he might have gone. And since I knew he was rich, I figured he’d go into the expensive seats, and I walked to the stairs that led to those seats. An usher was charging twelve dollars, and I took out my money, paid her, and got my ticket. Alison said she would wait for me there, and I left her and went up to an area that, although there were fewer people and a nicer bar, didn’t seem all that luxurious.
More of the people on this floor had gray hair, and there weren’t that many caps on heads, but possibly Steve had taken off his cap. So I walked, slowly and methodically, past the betting tellers and across the carpet, looking for a threesome like the threesome I’d seen in the sun. I went from section to section, scanning faces and the backs of the heads, unable to find the man I was looking for when suddenly there he was. Or there I thought he was. He was alone now, in a sportcoat and a green cap, holding the handrail, walking down the stairs. As I ran to the stairs I heard an announcer announcing the start of a race, and I went down the stairs two steps at a time, but when I got to the bottom, although Alison was there, the man was gone. To my left was a large arch with sunlight coming in, to my right was a bank of closed-circuit television monitors. And there he was, standing under the monitors, watching the horses getting into the gate. People were gathering around the screens, their heads tilted up for the start of the race, and I could recognize him because in him I was recognizing myself. “Steve,” I said, and I walked up to the back of his upturned head. I don’t know if it was the cap or the coat or the gray sideburns, but even he looked as if he was only pretending to be Steve Martin.
“Steve?” I said, and when he didn’t turn around I said to Alison, “He looks ridiculous.” She took my arm to lead me away, but “No,” I said. “Really. Look at him,” and I turned to the man. Like a poison in my blood I felt disgust, and I said to the back of his head, “It’s pathetic. You’re pathetic,” I said, but by then the race had already started. People were yelling at horses and shaking their racing forms, and I was talking to him, telling him about his pathetic grin and his pathetic friendliness, and the fact that who he was had mutated into a parody. A parody of a parody. And when the race ended and some horse won, I stepped up to him and I said to him, finally, “You look like an idiot,” and of course that’s when he turned, and that’s when I saw that he wasn’t Steve Martin. And that’s when Alison, holding my arm, led me, like you’d lead a drunk person, out of the racetrack lobby and into the sunlight.
We walked to an area of grass on the edge of the bleachers. There, standing in the sunlight, I looked around at the assortment of human beings going about their business, some of them walking, some of them standing, some of them sitting at picnic tables. They were living their lives, but the sense I got, looking at them, was that they were dying, that they’d gone about halfway, and now, in the middle of their dying lives, they were trying to make themselves happy.
I remembered a painting I saw in Scott’s house called The Harvesters. It’s by Pieter Brueghel, and in the painting an entire countryside is depicted, and by implication an entire world, with background and foreground equally visible. In the foreground men and women who’ve been harvesting grain are resting beneath the shade of a tree. It’s probably hot, and they’re enjoying a lunch break. They might be considered the focus of the painting, except the landscape and the objects in the landscape — the world of the painting — extend far into the distance. There’s a church in a valley and people down in the village. We can see them, with parcels on their backs, going about their businesses, and farther away, more people, and beyond them hills, and beyond them the clearly visible mountains. The entire world is there, more or less in focus, and because everything is part of the same world, even if you can’t quite see the entire world, you can sense what you can’t see in everything you can.
We were standing on the grass, which was clean and soft, and I was tired and Alison was tired, and when she sat, I sat next to her. I took off my shoes and socks, lay back on the grass, and wiggled my feet in the air. She stopped doing whatever she was doing and lay on her back beside me. We were both looking up into the sky. I could sense her body next to mine, her cheek and her breathing, and it felt very sane and natural. I could feel the blades of grass pressing up through my shirt into the skin of my back.
“You know,” she said, “you’re not some other person.”
“I know.”
“I thought you were freaking out back there.”
“I’m not freaking out.”
“I’m just saying.”
And I was about to ask her what she was saying, except I knew what she was saying. Because I felt it. I’m not good at looking below the surface — to me everything is below the surface — but Alison seemed to see beneath the surface of who I pretended to be, and by not running away when she saw it, in effect she was saying she accepted me, that I didn’t need the security of being someone else, that I had a choice, that I could go back to my impersonation of someone’s impersonation of someone I didn’t even know, but I didn’t have to.