Heartland

by Ana Simo

  I considered my predicament. Was a writer who could not write due to a mysterious brain disturbance still a writer, or was I finally off the diabolical hook? I had first wondered about this as an adolescent, puke dribbling, chin resting on the toilet bowl. Conscience smirked, not even bothering to voice its opinion of the shirking, cowardly creature that spent more time worshipping the porcelain god than at the writing table. Forty years of self-flaying had followed. The question, which now appeared before me written in fiery tongues, carried the added pathos of medical mystery; and with it, a promise of absolution. “My brain does not have the capacity to write,” I murmured humbly. “Please, take back your poisoned chalice!” I pleaded, to no one in particular. The fiery tongues flickered and vanished. I knew what that meant. The door had been slammed shut in my face.

  It was night when I woke up, sweaty and angry. I resolved to become my own master, or kill myself. I gave myself seven days. The first step was to find an exit strategy. I stayed up all night, but nothing came to mind and there was no one, or nothing, to ask—no books, computer, TV, cellphone, or radio. Dawn broke out in a rumble of sewage-pumping trucks. I crawled into bed. It was then that I saw an ancient Yellow Pages half hidden under the night table, where it had escaped the purge. I sat on the bed and opened it to the letter A, hoping that a word would jump out and point me toward freedom. I purred, chanted, and caressed the brittle pages from A to B to C, begging them to tell me what to do. By the time I got to J, I was tearing them out and flinging paper balls into a dark corner of the room to punish their muteness. My heart was in my mouth, a cliché courtesy of my grandmother, whose ashes (if they were indeed hers—no one knows what goes on in crematoria these days), in her Elmira grave, must have been rolling with laughter at my plight; she, who never doubted her own centenarian self for a second. My heart was in full gallop against my front teeth by the time I turned to K and something shot out like a comet’s tail. It was the Word, shining, winged, barbaric: Kill. I knew immediately it wasn’t me I was to kill, but someone else. Who? “Whoever made you waste your life,” Grandma reverberated dustily from her grave.

  The scales suddenly fell from my eyes. It wasn’t my fault! Someone else was to blame. Killing that someone would liberate me. Who could it be? Both of my parents were dead. I had no pets or children. I scrupulously did not keep up with ex-girlfriends, all of whom I had dumped—if anything, they were the ones entitled to revenge. Still searching, I fell asleep. Knowing what I had to do, even if not yet to whom, made me feel serene.

  At noon the next day, twelve hours after the Revelation of the Word, on the first day of my seven-day plan, I dared to walk in plain daylight to the corner mailbox to return Hume’s latest ultimatum. As I was letting go of the mailbox slot, I saw Mercy McCabe lumbering toward me. She was grinning and waving, her fat ass tightly packed into those hideous Moschino leather pants favored by SoHo art merchants (in August!), her left hand clutching a congenitally ridiculous Hermès handbag, her mustardy hair, milky-freckled complexion, and pugnacious upturned nose buffed to a shiny finish under the sun. Did she know it was me under the Dr. Petra Xin Hua Wu accoutrements, or did she mistake me for one of her rich Oriental art collectors? “I got news for you,” she whispered, lowering her hulking frame over my head. I was cornered. Her tiny blue eyes that locked on mine left no doubt that she knew that I was I. “Bebe and I just broke up,” she said, gleefully watching my jaw freeze, and sweat and tears begin to stream down my Dr. Wu whiteface. As I fled from her, stumbling on trashcans, scraping my knees, and losing Dr. Wu’s left slipper, I could hear her guffaw and yelp her contempt.

  When I came to, late that afternoon, I was sprawled in my kitchen with Dr. Wu’s robe stuck to my flayed, bloody knees. As I ripped it off, removing chunks of flesh, I yelled, “Not fair!” It wasn’t fair that Bebe and Mercy McCabe had broken up after a decade together. It was monstrous. Ten years ago, Bebe had chosen Mercy McCabe over me, after a long and ferocious contest. As she disentangled her golden curls in front of a gilded, antique trifold vanity mirror—a McCabe gift, I later learned—Bebe, my unrequited child concubine, love of my loveless, licentious life, Bebe who sang every night in the filthiest male sex dive in town and reduced men to tears, Bebe, whose piercing, questioning, tactile gaze turned me inside out, Bebe explained her inconceivable choice to me by declaring, with the little-girl deadpan she reserved for such cruel occasions, that McCabe was permanent mate material, whereas I was not. Pressed by me to explain further, she stated that: A) I was poor and bound to get poorer, while McCabe was rich and getting richer; B) “I don’t trust you.” Point A plunged me into a metaphysical vertigo from which I never recovered: Why was I born with expensive tastes and no money? And, shouldn’t civilization trump tasteless cash? McCabe couldn’t even hold a fork in her paws! Point B was a great injustice. Me, not trustworthy? Me, the devoted, head-over-heels, adoring servant? The courageous, passionate, yet respectful, literate, and loyal best friend, denied even a private glimpse of Bebe’s scrumptious body, but iron-willed enough to listen kindly, without batting a jealous eyelash, to her torturing account of how she allowed herself to be narcotized and lewdly pawed and sodomized by two dyke artistes the night before (when she had, by the way, stood me up) while posing in the nude for a bogus dyke fertility handbook? I secretly raged and suffered for the next three years, while publicly indulging in non-stop dissipation and excess, before Bebe and McCabe’s well-publicized conjugal harmony slowly began to heal the open wound. With every anniversary, the wisdom of Bebe’s choice became clearer to me. It soothed me to picture the two of them dying of old age in each other’s arms. Now, their break-up made a mockery of everything I had endured: rejection, suffering, forgiving (kind of), and, finally, forgetting. Bebe was back in my mind, more alluring and tyrannical than ever. And so was McCabe, once more a filthy swine after a decade’s promotion to virtuous, bovine spouse. McCabe: my nemesis, my torturer. It was all her fault. I decided to kill her.

  ‌2

  Prospecting

  We met at her favorite Upper West Side brasserie, known for its brutal security guards and its chewy croissants reverently served amidst the vertiginous Gigi set décor. The head Janissary himself, stun baton in hand, escorted me to McCabe’s table.

  McCabe was hulking (six foot two, 260 pounds) and, this morning, sentimental. The malicious bully who had pinned me to the corner mailbox had metamorphosed into a maudlin lapdog. Bebe had finally gotten to her. When I arrived, McCabe was staring into her coffee, gripping the tiny cup with both enormous hands, in Hopperesque pathos, carefully contrived, no doubt, yet subverted by the cloying Belle Époque wallpaper. Her nose was red and tiny beads of water gathered around her nostrils, either from the coffee steam or from past tears. The mediocrity of her pain enraged me. Was that all the suffering she could offer Bebe? McCabe, the unworthy rival, the putrid usurper. “I think Bebe has made a big mistake,” I said, patting her wurstish arm. “She’ll be sorry the rest of her life.” McCabe looked up slowly at me. Her face burned with supernatural hatred, an ecstatic Saint Jerome in reverse. I froze under my Dr. Wu mask: I’ve been found! She’ll yell, You hypocrite! and smash my face. Instead, she said, “That is exactly how I feel,” each word rolling icily off her tongue.

  McCabe delicately put her empty coffee cup on the table. Two waiters scrambled to refill it, but she dismissed them with a tiny flick of her right index finger. Hatred made her skin glow. It slowed her movements and distilled her gestures. The voluble hog became a surgeon of souls. She explained to me with actuarial precision why Bebe would be the loser in the long run. Counting with her fingers, thumb first, jaw locked, until there were no fingers left, she demolished every imaginable reason Bebe could have had to leave her. Money, sex, fame, success, even love? Bebe had heaps of them, all of McCabean origin or instigation. Jealousy? Boredom? Spiritual awakening? Nah. Therefore Bebe had left for No Reason at All, and her senseless act would bring her eternal regret when she realized what she had done. “I’ll suf
fer; but she’ll repent,” McCabe snarled. Then she put her forehead on the table and began to sob.

  I staggered back home in a daze, on foot, oblivious to the dangers of fortified checkpoints and security corridors, and the even greater danger of stepping outside of them. My Fujianese habit must have protected me. (Aren’t they the city’s new royalty, after all?) I got home in one piece. The world, already upside down, had been tossed up again. Underneath McCabe’s simplistic exterior there lay a viperous eighth stomach.

  O dykes, o mores! It has been more than four decades since I tasted my first, and I cannot say I understand them, or myself, any better. Neither have those old questions, in any of their multifaceted aspects, ever been unequivocally answered: Who is she? What is she?

  ‌3

  Execution

  That night I dreamt that Bebe and I were strolling through Round Hill, Elmira’s tony neighborhood. I wanted to leave before someone called the watchmen on us—the occasional Round Hill sidewalk being just for show—but Bebe had to stop in front of every other mansion to comment on its size. She was barefooted, which further slowed our progress. She was scandalized that houses shrunk as you went up Round Hill, violating traditional real-estate dogma. “How come the smaller ones have the best views?” I explained that Round Hill had been built from the top down between 1916 and 1929 by Midwestern wheat and railroad millionaires. Each new house surpassed in size and magnificence the one above on the gently winding road. The last house to go up right before the Black Friday crash was a sixty-thousand-square-foot replica of the palace of Porphyrogenitus, wrapped around the lower rung of the hill. It was ten times bigger than Judge Wilkerson’s amiable Prairie Style house, the first one built (by an early Wright disciple), which sat in a meadow at the top of the hill. “I think I could live here with you,” Bebe said, embracing all of Round Hill with a sweep of her long, sinewy dancer’s arms. She was wearing a sheer Nile-green sundress that uncovered her succulent shoulder blades. I felt salaciously warm inside. Money and (in her eyes) trustworthiness were beyond my grasp, but not Round Hill. I had deep, if vicarious, roots in Round Hill: my mother had been a maid, and my father a gardener at the architectural holiest of holies, Judge Wilkerson’s house. I had practically grown up there. I didn’t tell Bebe, though. Scoring a point in secret was sweeter: knowing I could satisfy at least one of her conditions if I wanted. In a retroactive, imaginary way, of course: but wasn’t that the only way?

  The next morning I couldn’t get Judge Wilkerson’s house out of my mind. There it was every time I closed my eyes. And there was Bebe too, luminescent in her green sundress, pointing at the chimney, the massive kitchen table, or the lion-claw tub, with a sly realtor grin. Bebe, who in real life, or what passes for it, had never even heard about this house. I tried to erase her from the picture, but she wouldn’t budge. Her sharply curved talons had sunk into my brain, again. So, I gave in to her, as I always had when I was still her slave. I shut my eyes and let her take me through the house, from the formal parlor to the attic. It was a silent slide show, all sepia except for Bebe’s green dress. It ended with Bebe dialing the Judge’s black Bakelite phone.

  I obeyed her inescapable command. After a dozen calls, I found out that the Judge, a childless widower, had died three months earlier. A gaggle of grandnephews had agreed to rent out the house while their lawyers fought over the carrion. I lit a candle to Bebe for pointing The Way. Later that day, I called McCabe at her eponymous SoHo gallery and asked her to travel with me to Elmira. It would be curative. Elmira was so deep in the barren heartland that Bebe’s emanations would not reach her there. It took me two lachrymose breakfasts at Gigi’s, avidly followed by the officially indifferent waitresses, to persuade McCabe that a retreat to Elmira was the only way she could avoid Bebe-induced mental collapse, and its concomitant financial ruin. (Had she not lost a multimillion Cy Twombly mosaic sale just yesterday by bursting into tears and calling the prospective buyer “a cheap hoodoo”?)

  In the end, McCabe left her gallery in the hands of her able fag assistant and we flew to Elmira on a cloudless late August morning. Having shed Dr. Wu in the airport lavatory, I was now traveling as McCabe’s spic maid. Before leaving on a lecture tour of China, the good doctor had bribed the super into returning Hume’s menacing letters.

  McCabe first wanted to rent “a palatial sixteen-room neo-Cappadocian villa carved on the rock at lower Round Hill, chock-full of extras, including Jacuzzi, sauna, indoor pool, home theater, billiards room, and a replica of the famous porphyry fountain that still graces the gardens of Emperor Theophilus’s summer retreat.” I counseled modesty, describing how Elmirans of old used to tar and feather—and occasionally torch alive—Yankee carpetbaggers. After much resistance, she broke down and reluctantly took the Judge’s house.

  Most of the old mansions on upper Round Hill were now empty, cared for by a discreet army of cleaners and watchmen. Their owners had fled during the Great Hunger and these days only returned for Fourth of July picnics and the occasional June wedding. But they still controlled the town and, with others like them, what remained of the countryside. However distant, their inbred disdain triggered old anxieties. That theirs or anyone else’s disdain would have rolled off McCabe’s thick back was an added indignity. So I decided to trot out the historical record to make an impression on her. Why I wanted the Judge’s house I kept to myself: in my dreams, it always appeared as my childhood home. I knew every corner of the house from tagging along behind my mother as she waxed the floors, polished the Judge’s oak furniture, and painstakingly dusted the locked glass cabinet that held the Baccarat punch set and the icon of the Annunciation. As I got older, I was allowed to approach the cabinet, but not to touch it. The fourteenth-century icon was brittle and resented the heat and humidity of the human body, the Judge had told my mother, giving her the only copy of the tiny cabinet key that he always wore on a chain around his neck. He taught her how to read the hydrometer inside the cabinet three times a day and to adjust the humidity-control device. And she taught me—theoretically, because I was to keep my hands in my pockets. The Virgin’s terror at the muscular, winged female lunging at her knocked me out cold the first time I got close. After that I trained myself to resist her contaminating panic, focusing one month on her raised hand, then another month on the folds of her black mourning robe, until one day I felt strong enough to stare again at her terrified face. This time I managed to keep standing.

  None of this I ever told McCabe, whom I distrusted not only on principle as my future victim, but because of certain revealing facts: in contrast to the fight she put up to rent the neo-Cappadocian villa, getting McCabe to agree that I’d officially be known as her maid was uncomfortably easy. “Groovy,” was all she said, as she strode down West Broadway and I trotted behind, explaining to her deaf ears that the maid conceit would allow me to remain incognito from my meddlesome (nonexistent) Elmiran relatives.

  The Judge’s house was as I remembered it. McCabe took over the master bedroom that occupied the entire upper floor, while I settled in the Judge’s study on the ground floor. I never went upstairs: I didn’t want to encourage needless intimacy. Within days of our arrival, McCabe’s existential pendulum began to swing back from maudlin sop to bully. She stopped wearing sunglasses at all times. The skin around her eyes looked less and less like macerated meat. She was still crying a little at night—her eyes looked puffy and pink in the mornings—but she was definitely on her way up. Her porcine blue eyes had begun to dart about the house and the garden, looking for something to do, or say. She even looked heftier. I kept out of her way. In recovery, McCabe was even less appetizing than in pain.

  Downstairs was my empire: the Judge’s study with its dark icon was the heart; the expansive dining room, the lungs; the ascetic parlor guarding the Wright chairs, the brains; the vestibule with the faience cane holder still harboring the Judge’s boar-headed walking stick, the face, which one day would be unveiled to the world, when its features finally became c
learer. Kitchen and pantry, with functioning dumbwaiter, were in the sub-basement, which had a separate entrance. I hired Petrona, newly arrived from Zacatecas, Mexico, with little English (an essential requisite) but glowing recommendations from an Anatolian expatriate family, to come every afternoon, Monday through Saturday, and cook a light lunch for McCabe and dinner for two, wash and iron McCabe’s clothes, and clean upstairs—but not anywhere near McCabe’s room. I took care of the ground floor and the garden as devoutly as my parents had before me. To Petrona, I was Señora Mirtila (not my real name), Señorita Maké’s housekeeper. I spoke to her the barest minimum, always in soulless Voice of America Spanish, so that she could not place me geographically.

  I ordered for Señora Mirtila the best cleaning, scouring, and polishing products from New York’s Hammacher Schlemmer—the ones my mother longed for but never got from the penny-pinching Judge, the ones in the catalogues she rescued from the Judge’s wastebasket and studied at night on our kitchen table. The gargantuan crate arrived, as planned, one afternoon while McCabe was out for her constitutional. I had the crate placed in the middle of the Judge’s studio. Plunging my hands in the packing straw, pulling out the Dutch floor beeswax and the Belgian chamois, I felt like the Magi, who upon finding the unexpected plumpness in the manger, were voluptuously and insatiably hungry.