Heartland

by Ana Simo

  I couldn’t live without her.

  I had to get her back. Killing and suffering were better than this unbearable longing. No need to atone or repent: killing McCabe was as righteous now as when the Tongues of Fire first ordered it.

  With the phones dead, the bridge to Elmira impassable, and my feet too mangled to drive, writing a letter to McCabe was all I could do on that endless day after Thanksgiving. I sat in bed propped up by many pillows, with one of the Judge’s yellow legal pads and a pen found at the bottom of his desk drawer. This was the first time my hands had touched writing tools since the New York meltdown. Hours later, the pad was still pure yellow, and the pen had long been dropped on the floor. If I had been able to write her a letter, one of those brilliantly devious, skillful eighteenth-century frog letters that tease answers without seeming to ask questions, I would have asked McCabe what I had to do to make her want to come back.

  I did not want to force her. Other than pretending a serious illness, I had given up on coercion. Besides, if she refused to come back even if I was “gravely ill,” my humiliation would be absolute. I could not risk it. More subtle ways had to be found to plant in her the desire to return. Perhaps the way to bring her back could be hidden in the reasons that made her leave. On this second day without McCabe, the business emergency hypothesis seemed ludicrous. Could she be with Bebe? I kept pushing the gaseous suspicion to the back of my mind, not allowing it to acquire shape and volume. Jealousy was the worst advisor at this moment, but the suspicion kept returning. If she was with Bebe, was it for good, or a fleeting relapse? To distract myself from this thought and its complications (who would I be most jealous of, Bebe or McCabe, and why?), I reviewed my last night with McCabe.

  Maybe I should not have been so didactic, playing César Franck’s entire Symphony for her. But hadn’t she placed her left hand on her knee, inadvertently pulling up the shirt cuff, so that the naked face of her wrist was visible? This was one of the small gestures of pleasure that I had noticed in her while we listened to music. Another was tilting her face slightly toward her left shoulder, so that her eyes seemed to follow the light coming through the window. Or touching the front of her left wrist with her right index finger, as if she wanted to take her pulse discreetly, without me noticing. Through intuition, which is reason operating on a back channel, I had compiled a catalogue of McCabe’s signs of pleasure. Now I was not so sure. They may have been signs of boredom. Had I attributed to her my own pleasure at having such a docile audience? When we listened to music, I felt in my natural state: neutral, equidistant from all feelings and humors. Only with McCabe gone did I realize that my perfect equilibrium could not have been attained without the pleasure directly flowing from her presence. It was I, not her, who had to be put under the microscope. There had never been any carnal desire on my part toward McCabe. Acknowledging pleasure from her verged on indecency, but this was no time for cowardice. She had given me pleasure daily. Incorporeal pleasure. How could that be? Was it just her docility, her willingness to dine with me night after night, listen to my talk about plants, and sit through the lengthy music? I suspected an ulterior reason, but my aching brain refused to dig deeper.

  Her docility had a darker side effect, though: it made me miss the signs of her impending departure. Mrs. Crandall’s visit was the only red flag, or at the very least, a symptom of McCabe’s restlessness. Had Mrs. Crandall helped McCabe escape? I couldn’t see her doing much beyond driving McCabe to the airport or calling her a cab or performing some other factotum task. Mrs. Crandall was not the eloping kind. However voluptuous, she was a pillar of society.

  At dinner, and when she changed my bandages in the morning, I should have prodded McCabe even more about herself. But it was hard work. Since her answers never expanded into conversation, I was forced to ask one question after another, just to hear her speak. Now that she had disappeared, I craved her voice, and hers alone. Even when they were monosyllabic, her answers were so complete and perfect when measured against my questions that they left me wanting more. The longest I had ever heard her speak was when she told me the story about the Biloxi marshes and the burning corpses.

  It was easier to question McCabe in the morning, while she changed my bandages. (When I now thought of McCabe it was the new one I envisioned; the old, voluble, loquacious McCabe had begun receding at that moment on the edge of the Judge’s land when I almost pushed the usurper down the ravine.) We were physically close. In the bright light, I could see even the tiniest change of expression in her eyes. My questions the first day were about myself, asking if my feet had been amputated. She said “no” several times until I stopped, still unsure if she was telling the truth. The next morning she changed my bandages for the first time. Each layer she unwrapped from my right foot was more purulent than the preceding. She paused before unwrapping the one closest to the skin. “Your foot is in there. See the shape?” I nodded and glanced away. When she was sure I was not looking, she uncovered the foot. No nurse in the history of nursing had been more devoted than McCabe. Yet she had abandoned her patient.

  One day, long after that, she invited me to look at my feet. The intimacy of the offer shook me. She was offering me a part of my body as if she owned it, which she did at that moment. I could see her reflected on the windowpane, waiting for my answer, the careless parting of her lips contradicting the competent hands holding a roll of gauze and a pair of scissors. I was afraid of her. Just for a second. Then I glanced at my foot. It was monstrous. I managed not to heave until McCabe left the room. After that, I was insatiably curious about her.

  Questions had to be clear and direct, and seem innocent. They could not be nakedly personal, but nor could they be sneaky. McCabe would clam up in either case. The personal could be reached safely only by starting from the general. A comment wondering whether the Judge’s yellow roses risked black spot if it rained too much this fall would slowly lead to a casual question about fall weather in her hometown, which turned out to be Bangor, Maine. That was a logic-defying upset. I was sure Bebe had told me that McCabe was from Concord, where she had been raised in an orphanage. Someone was lying. As I learned more about McCabe’s childhood in Bangor, a tiny fact a day, I added this fib to Bebe’s catalogue, which was almost as long as mine.

  McCabe did not like to fish. In Bangor, this was the only leisure activity available to her other than church. So she worked, from the age of eight, to make money and kill time. She liked to have her own money. Her aunt was neither rich, nor poor, nor too stingy or young. She had died in a retirement home a few years earlier. McCabe was her only survivor (from which I inferred no parents, siblings, etc.). Fibulous Bebe had told me that McCabe did not remember her parents and (maybe—at the time I hated McCabe’s guts so much that her life story made me want to puke) that her mother may have been unmarried, or that her father had walked out on her and the baby. I now wished I had paid more attention to Bebe’s gushing reports. On the other hand, she may have been feeding me misinformation just for the hell of it. Bebe could have had a career as a double or triple agent.

  It is also possible that McCabe had deceived her. After all, what did anyone know about McCabe before she took SoHo by storm in the winter of 2002? What did anyone know about anyone in New York, the Mecca of self-reinvention, the born-again capital of the universe? Haven’t you noticed, dear listener, how the eyes of New Yorkers glaze over when one of them imprudently mentions their original place of birth? How the room tone acquires a frigid buzz if the remembrances go beyond the geographical fact? How, if they persist, standers-by will drift away, afraid that they, too, may have to expose their loathed original selves?

  As the second night without McCabe fell, I reviewed those facts, one by one. They ranged from her childhood diseases (whooping cough) and pets (a frog, a snail) to why she became an art merchant (“Just looking to scrub my money,” then finding out that “I dug selling trash”). I had memorized them. I counted them now (arithmetic had not deserted me). There were 6
76. In her voice, each of them had seemed uniquely hers, filled with meaning and possibilities. Now they were brittle shards of generic trivia that could be used to assemble anyone’s portrait. Her voice is what I missed most on that second night. A voice so ordinary that I can describe it only as what it was not: not loud, raspy, shrill, breathy, nasal, guttural, sweet, booming, soft, deep-throated, or high-pitched. Nothing special distinguished it. That is what was moving and, in retrospect, magnificent about her voice: it was an apotheosis of the generic. The transubstantiation of everything and everybody. The Holy Wafer of Sound. I craved a fix. A craving so brutal that my stomach cramped, my skin crawled and itched the more frantically I scratched, leaving bloody ruts. When my chest began to hurt, I settled for some aural methadone. I managed to crawl out of bed, gasping, and turn on the music player. I sobbed, dry-eyed, while the Antiochian soprano sang Reynaldo Hahn’s remorseful “Dis! qu’as tu fait, toi que voilà, de ta jeunesse.” Openly, shamelessly sobbed. Softly, though, so I could listen to her. It was not McCabe’s voice, but a palliative. My chest was about to explode when she began to sing. Before she finished, I was asleep on the rug in a pool of tears.

  ‌22

  Searching

  Petrona returned the next day. She left the lunch basket by my door and then began to vacuum. Chicken bones flew out of my hands as I quickly devoured the food. They landed where my tears had pooled on the rug the night before, grease dissolving in salty residue. I am a careful, civilized eater. Near starvation could explain my lapse that day. More ominously, it may have been the beginning of the degenerative slide that propelled me under this bed, encased in a crumbling, inhuman shell.

  After brushing my teeth, I wheeled myself out to the landing and called Petrona. She came trailing the vacuum cleaner. I asked her to turn it off. She did so in slow motion, a one-second delay for every century of Aztec enslavement. Things were back to normal. For an instant, I imagined McCabe strolling in the garden.

  Petrona did not know anything, or claimed not to. Miss Maké had not mentioned any trip. Petrona had no idea where the food they cooked with the church señora had gone. It was still in the kitchen when Petrona had left that evening. She had not come to work because of the flood. Even getting here today had taken her twice as long because the Elmira bridge was still closed, and she had to cross using the only bridge that was still open, in a neighboring county about twenty miles to the East. As I suspected, the food the three of them had cooked together on the eve of Thanksgiving was not the quail banquet McCabe and I had eaten during our last dinner together, of which Petrona was the sole, proud creator. I praised her inspired cooking, item by item, the way a restaurant reviewer would, observing the ingenuity of the sauces in one sentence, the perfect braising of the meat in another, and the presentation in yet another. There is nothing I liked more than praising a subordinate like Petrona for an exceptionally well-executed job, the accomplishment of the quail banquet redoubled by the pleasure of congratulating myself on my shrewd judgment in hiring her.

  The mysterious Thanksgiving Eve meal, the one that had disappeared from the house without a trace, had been cooked under Miss Maké’s direction, with Petrona as executioner, and Mrs. Crandall as witness. This, according to Petrona. Mrs. Crandall just sat on a stool by the refrigerator and chatted with Miss Maké. About what, Petrona could not tell, given her limited English. They laughed a lot (I knew that: I could hear them from my room). Petrona did not know the names of the food she had helped prepare: one was some sort of vegetable stew, another a rice dish, a third some sort of dumplings. The dessert had been some kind of tiny balls covered with confectionery sugar. As to what Mrs. Crandall had brought wrapped in a blanket, Petrona was on firmer ground. That was the main dish, which took all day to cook, and turned out fine even if it was not prepared the way Petrona would have done it, with bitter oranges and cumin, garlic and oregano: “It was a suckling pig,” Petrona said.

  In every nineteenth-century novel there comes a moment when the main character is left speechless. This was mine. Did I notice a malicious glint in Petrona’s eyes after she dropped the depth charge, or was it a glimmer of pity, or a reflection of the sun streaming in through my bedroom window? She stood frozen, holding the gray vacuum coil, a Mumbai python charmer about to feed a mouse to her star performer. I don’t know how long we were in this face-to-face frieze, me in the wheelchair of defeat, placed in a slightly elevated position to signal my rank, she displaying to me the snakelike machine. I may have lost consciousness for a while, because the next thing I remember is dialing McCabe’s gallery on the Judge’s black Bakelite phone. A voice assured clients in several languages that their calls would be quickly answered. I hung up without a word. The voice was not McCabe’s, as it had always been—a personal touch for the immensely rich—but that of a male computer surrogate. Was that a good or a bad sign? I couldn’t tell. Had it been her voice, I would have left a message for her, which she may or may not have answered. Either way, it would have advanced my investigation. On the other hand, I might have gotten hooked on her voice, and spent the rest of my days calling back at briefer and briefer intervals just to hear her for thirty seconds. Craving not just her voice, but increasingly her flesh.

  Mrs. Crandall had slapped me in the face. She had stolen a four-legged creature that belonged to me, to people like me, not to her, never to her kind, never. She had brought Shangri-La to Round Hill, bypassing me, the gatekeeper. From a place she knew nothing about and had never set foot in, to a place she knew nothing about but in which she resided, thanks to her native husband. She had had the chutzpah to give the emblematic creature—my creature—to McCabe; it was a gift that should have come from me. She had done all of this under my nose. Brazenly. Don’t tell me she would not have done any of this if she had known where I was from! You know perfectly well she would have. The only difference is that she would have tried to curry my approval, to show off how down she was on all things spic. Mrs. Crandall had challenged me with the suckling pig. To what end? She was also telling me something about McCabe and something about herself—perhaps something about them both, together. I didn’t know what. Her message was opaque. I would have to extract it directly from her.

  I am proud of myself for the way I handled Mrs. Crandall. I kept my anger in the icebox until I was ready to confront her face to face. After I let it out, I did not allow it to deter me from my goal of bringing McCabe back. It helped that Mrs. Crandall had tapped an old and boring reservoir of hatred, one that I had wallowed in even before I learned to read and write. This is what the tattered scrolls mired at the bottom of that fecal pit proclaimed: White people despise us. No exceptions: homo and hetero, Rapturous Evangelicals and Malthusian fanatics, resettlement camp bait and fortified city dwellers, sympathetic elites and xenophobic white trash, and every white piece of shit within and between them, whether true whites or honorary whites, including but not limited to Beulah-ish spics, gooks, niggers, and chinks; white-nosing heebs, yids, and kikes; gyros, polacks, russkies, guineas, and Kosovars and their Serbian torturers fresh off the boat after their third genocidal war in a century, thankful to America for this gift of a common ground, at last. There are epithelial and stylistic differences among them, but their contempt for us is one and indivisible. We, the other people, reciprocate with bitterness, wrath, disdain, delusion (pretending the cabrones del coño de su puta madre don’t exist), melancholia, murder, suicide (drugs, alcohol, holding up a 7-Eleven in plain daylight), circling the raza wagons so tightly that we asphyxiate, wearing ridiculous and spurious folkloric rags, and so on. We are not nice, we, the other people. We know it, and that makes us even more choleric. We would like to be nice like Mrs. Crandall. Hatred eats you. Repressing hatred, however, eats you twice as fast. I am only skimming the reservoir that Mrs. Crandall stirred, just to give an idea of how deep and old it is. At a moment like this, I think of sly, hypocritical Petrona and her five-hundred-year-old bilious cesspool. Am I her Mrs. Crandall?

  I went l
ooking for Mrs. Crandall, not to avenge a slight, but to find McCabe. (The slight I was willing to stuff in the bottomless reservoir for future use. It is important to clarify this in view of how things turned out.) I spent the rest of that week teaching myself how to walk again, aided by two of the Judge’s walking sticks. It was sweaty and painful. Relearning to stand on my own two feet took several hours. I wore the Judge’s wonderfully padded slippers over two pairs of soft socks. In between rehab sessions, which lasted seconds at first, then minutes, I slapped on my feet everything I could find in McCabe’s nurse’s bag, trying not to remember the way she narrowed her eyes in ferocious concentration while she changed my bandages. My knees also had begun to heal. They were still swollen and oozing, but I did not have to walk on them. I congratulated myself for my stoicism. I had been a stoic child. Then I had lost that quality under the indulgent gaze of scores of girlfriends. Perhaps it was coming back. At the end of the week, my feet were more or less functional, though they remained paler and flatter, their shape hesitating between foot and stump. I was never again able to walk without pain. Later, as my body began to change, stump became the predominant shape. But that was still in the future.