Heartland

by Ana Simo

  I was exultant when I actually managed to get myself into the cab that would take me to the Elmira library. McCabe had been gone for seven days. I was dressed as myself, my real self, the one McCabe saw at dinner every evening. Señora Mirtila was dead and buried, wig, scarf, and rosary, in the same grave as the Fujianese mathematician. It was madness to have thought that with all their ingenious machines, State Security could be fooled by amateur disguises. As the cab spiraled down Round Point at top speed, I glanced back at myself with the eyes of the newly sane. I had been mad. For months, maybe even two or three years, perhaps longer. The search for McCabe had sharpened and cured my mind.

  Mrs. Crandall was behind the library counter when I arrived. She was wearing a severe ensemble, which clung salaciously to her body: a navy blue, knitted skirt, just long enough to cover the knees, a white, long-sleeved silk blouse with a discreet bow on the round collar, and a short jacket matching the skirt. In her black pumps, she was almost a foot taller than me. She did not recognize me at first. When she did, she jumped a little. I pretended not to notice, to give her a chance to rebound. She flashed her kindest smile. I returned Fathers and Sons and asked to be taken to the Turgenev cache in the basement. Not in all those words: “I want more,” is what I said, poking the returned book. I spoke uncertainly, not as badly as Mirtila, yet not as well as myself. I wanted Mrs. Crandall to transition from Mirtila to me without a shriek of horror. Not that she would have shrieked. She was tougher than I thought. Mrs. Crandall hesitated. “I am alone here today,” she enunciated with a sweeping gesture of her open arms that lifted her breasts and caused her blouse to open, revealing sumptuous cleavage. She caught my eye, but did not immediately re-button her blouse. I took a few steps toward the basement stairs, then looked back at her and said, in my own voice, “Please… It won’t take long.” Mrs. Crandall thought about this for a moment, then sighed loudly and locked the library’s front door, after hanging a Back Soon sign. When she rejoined me to lead the way downstairs, I noticed her blouse was again tightly buttoned.

  The library basement was lit like an old church, with large pools of darkness and half-shadows. Mrs. Crandall switched on a tiny lamp clamped to the nineteenth-century fiction shelf, and a soft golden light bathed the leather-bound spines of the books. We held our breath together, transfixed. Mrs. Crandall was the first to return to the valley of the dead. She crouched in front of the bottom shelf, where the Turgenevs lived. Running a finger slowly over the embossed titles, she read each of them in a whisper. I stood next to her, unable to tear myself away from the seductive golden glow, the murmur of the millions of perfumed and brittle pages, the trillions of words—oh, sweet Arcadia, why would anyone want to leave you? Mrs. Crandall extracted a book. “You haven’t taken this out yet,” she said, handing it to me. It was Home of the Gentry, the theme book for my unrequited love of Bebe. In a vicious one-two punch, Mrs. Crandall had yanked me out of my beloved Arcadia and punctured poor Mirtila. Did she know about Bebe? Was this the knockout jab? I crouched next to her, to better gauge her answer. “Have you read it?” I asked. “No,” she said, “I haven’t read any of these books.” We were inches apart. I could see beads of sweat forming above her upper lip, her blouse sticking to a tiny wet patch above her left breast. It was hot in the basement, but not that hot. “You should,” I said. Mrs. Crandall studied the book’s spine for a long time, sliding her gaze up and down the golden curlicues. Then she grabbed my right hand by the wrist, gently but firmly, and pulled it under her skirt. Her cunt was as delicious as expected. You can fill in the details on your own, or aided by any jerk-off book on the market. I have no time, or inclination, to offer you Mrs. Crandall’s cunt on a silver platter, rhetorically speaking. We did it until my hand, wrist, arm and shoulder hurt, until I drew blood, until we heard footsteps above on the main library floor. I picked up Home of the Gentry with my dry left hand. Mrs. Crandall disappeared into the basement toilet. When she reappeared, she was again her voluptuously starched public self. She showed me the basement emergency exit, a metal plate with a safety lock that could be opened only from the inside. It led to a narrow, little-used alley sandwiched between the back wall of the library and a high evergreen hedge. “Will I see you again?” she said. She was at the bottom of the stairs that would take her back to the main floor. “Where’s McCabe?” I snapped. She looked at me as if I was naming an exotic shellfish. “Miss McCabe. My employer. Where did she go?” There was a crash upstairs, more footsteps, and laughter. Mrs. Crandall crossed her index finger over her lips. “Tomorrow morning at eight, I’ll leave the back entrance unlocked,” she whispered and ran upstairs. I scrubbed my hands in the sink and left through the alley. Waiting for the cab by the corner pay phone, I found what I was looking for in Turgenev’s book: “Her image rose most vividly before him; he seemed to feel the traces of her presence round him; but his grief for her was crushing, not easy to bear: it had none of that serenity which comes from death.”

  The next morning, shortly before eight o’clock, I had the cab drop me off at a nearby corner. Better not to be seen near the library. The basement emergency stairs were harder to navigate than the main ones. The Judge’s walking sticks were useless on the high and narrow steps. I let them slide down to the ground as gently as possible, gripped the handrail on either side and began lowering myself like a gymnast on parallel bars. Mrs. Crandall descended the stairs at eight fifteen. We had an hour and fifteen minutes before the library opened. I wanted some answers up-front, but she pulled me toward her before I could open my mouth. She was hungry. I liked that. In her, that is. Hers was a generous hunger. I did not feel exploited and overworked, as with certain insatiable, selfish fucks I’d rather forget. She did not know how to touch me, but was eager to learn. I don’t let strangers paw me, and I’m no one’s guinea pig or teaching aid. Glorita and unattainable Bebe came to me fully formed. If anything, I was their pupil. The long string of one-night stands and opportunistic flings in between them, and during and after Bebe, were either ambidextrously skilled, or incompetently passive, which can have an ephemeral charm. All, however, had been much girl-handled before me: being first is as unappetizing to me as cod-liver oil. I ignored Mrs. Crandall’s suggestions that I take off my clothes. To humor her, I let her poke me through my pants. She did it clumsily at first, disruptively, busily, annoyingly, until in time, she found out on her own that less was best, and timing was everything. She discovered that her cunt was driving us both. Proud and grateful, Mrs. Crandall began to worship her cunt, and offer it to me in every way she could think of. She must have known, however, that this by itself was not enough to bring me back, that finding McCabe was my Holy Grail.

  Mrs. Crandall sold me her information bit by bit. Slowly. Expensively. With fornication as the currency. She wouldn’t talk unless she’d had her (provisional) fill. The ratio was four-fifths fucking, one-fifth talking. I was quartered between exasperation and pleasure, longing and carnality, McCabe and Mrs. Crandall. I wanted McCabe. She was the one I took home with me after the increasingly violent pleasures in the library basement. But I got hooked on Mrs. Crandall. She was nearly the best fuck I’d ever had, almost as good as Glorita, and, unlike her, without the help of anything other than pure flesh. No emotions or history. Mrs. Crandall ceased to be high-gentry librarian, Saint Glykeria, Martyr, proto-deaconess (and closet white-trash social climber) the instant she grabbed my wrist and directed my hand to her cunt. She became pure cunt and buttocks, all wetness, exactly as I had envisioned her. I had not had a fantasy about Mrs. Crandall, but a premonition. “You knew me better than I knew myself,” she said. She was now openly whorish.

  It took me a week of sweat and cunt to piece together the bits. Seven journeys of Gomorrah in the library basement, each containing many others, like each day of the Creation—in this case, exactly seventeen and two-sevenths of the legendary one hundred and twenty-one sodomitic journeys. We began on a drizzly Monday morning. On Wednesday, after an increasingly violent and abject ses
sion yielded little information, I ordered her back to work as she was, wet and naked under her pleated skirt. On the top step, an inch away from the assistant librarian whose footsteps could be heard in the main room, she lowered herself onto my fist, slowly and deeply, and listened to my instructions. From that moment on, she was to sit from now on at work with her thighs slightly spread so that her naked cunt and buttocks were kept firmly in contact with the slick seat. She was allowed to rub her cunt against the seat, but not to touch it until she got home. The seat should be left unwiped, for anyone who might enter her office to see and smell. She was not to wear panties, pants, or any skirt that could not be easily lifted above the chair. On Thursday, she begged me to discipline her. She had touched her cunt once, late in the afternoon when rubbing it against the seat had ceased to alleviate her. I made her wait until Sunday afternoon, after her Holy Communion at Saint Glykeria, Martyr. I fitted her with a double plug held firmly in place by a leather strap. She was to wear it at all times. I ordered her to go upstairs to the main floor, naked except for her strap and shoes, so that she would begin to get accustomed. She was not to come down until I called her. I let her wait a good half-hour before going up. I found her standing by a window, the blinds slightly opened. Any observant passerby could have seen her. It was very risky. She was ready to answer my questions. This was the day: I could not let her leave until she talked. The plugs slid out of her, wetly, the moment I loosened the strap. She was lying on a table on her stomach, spread-eagled, her ass slightly raised so I could better see her cunt and her newly opened butthole. I fucked her for the rest of the afternoon, with my fingers and both of my fists, reinserting and removing the plugs. The table was drenched with cunt wetness and blood. I fucked her against walls and floors, on chairs, in a sweating frenzy, pinching her nipples, twisting the plugs inside her orifices to open them more. We stumbled down to the basement and lay there on the floor as the sun began to come down. She brought me a glass of water from the bathroom sink. When I was done drinking, she gave me the last and meatiest piece of the puzzle she had been feeding me bit by bit all week. That night, in the Judge’s study, I finally assembled the puzzle, only to discover that there was another puzzle hidden within it. This is what Mrs. Crandall told me during our seven journeys. I have put it in chronological order and added a few comments.

  Shortly before I regained consciousness, McCabe had called Mrs. Crandall at the library to make an appointment, in private, at Mrs. Crandall’s office after the library closed for the day. Mrs. Crandall did not know how McCabe had gotten there, or returned home. She had offered to drive her back, but McCabe declined. Mrs. Crandall knew by then everything there was to know about the public McCabe, heroic SoHo art merchant. She was shocked by the physical change, but accepted McCabe’s explanation that she had been on a strict diet. Besides, her voice was the same as Mrs. Crandall remembered from their brief encounter at our kitchen door—the first time, she swore, that they had met. (I was puzzled by Mrs. Crandall’s assessment, but did not want to interrupt her first substantial flow of information: I thought McCabe’s voice had changed as much as her body, perhaps even more.) McCabe had been extremely gracious. She thanked Mrs. Crandall for receiving her on such short notice. It was a confidential matter. Her employee was gravely ill; the prognosis was not good. McCabe wanted Mrs. Crandall’s help to locate a relative who had lived in Elmira a long time ago and might still be here: Her name is Glorita, she said. “She thought that as a librarian I would know who’s who in town. I explained to her that Shangri-La was not really part of the town, although technically it was. I had never been there. None of them had ever come to the library in my fifteen years here,” Mrs. Crandall told me. (I had, almost every day, but that was long before Mrs. Crandall’s arrival.) McCabe had left, graciously, but visibly troubled. (How had Mrs. Crandall, at first glance, learned to gauge what was going on behind that bony, impassible face?) Mrs. Crandall was curious, though, so she made some discreet enquiries. A few of her friends had Mexican maids who lived in Shangri-La. All were recent arrivals. None knew of any Glorita. A few days later, a $20,000 donation was made anonymously to the library fund, of which Mrs. Crandall was a trustee. It came from a private account at J.P. Morgan in Manhattan. The bank would not say more when Mrs. Crandall called to express her gratitude. She was sure McCabe had sent it. Mrs. Crandall almost drove to the Judge’s house to thank McCabe personally, but changed her mind at the last minute. “She was so shy and polite that I did not want to embarrass her,” she told me. Instead, she redoubled her efforts to find information about Glorita. “The least I could do,” she added. She searched the library records and confirmed that no one from Shangri-La was registered. She checked the phone book for any spic named Gloria or G. anywhere in the county. There were about a dozen Gs, but they turned out to be Gregorios (which Mrs. Crandall charmingly pronounced Gorgorius, like the current Basileus), Germanes (which she did with a hard G and a sibilant s), or Gladyses. She canvassed in vain the tax rolls and the High School yearbooks from the 1970s (but did not recognize me in my shag, I cackled inwardly, keeping that and my local origins to myself; as for Glorita, she did not graduate). Mrs. Crandall then sent McCabe a brief letter reporting on her investigation, which was delivered by the butcher boy. She had decided against even a tactful mention of the anonymous donation. “I did not want her to think that I was trying to help just for her money,” she told me. I could barely control my urge to slide my hand back into her prodigious cunt. Mrs. Crandall was most whorish when smarmy. She sensed my skepticism, but not my lust, fortunately, because her story would have been truncated. “I also did it because I was bored at the time,” she said, giving me a hungry look that could have degenerated into another wall-splattering blood-and-secretion orgy if my mind had not been all tangled in Glorita’s sudden appearance in the story. Much to Mrs. Crandall’s surprise, McCabe called her as soon as she received the letter, and asked if she would drive her to Shangri-La to look for Glorita. They went on four consecutive Sunday afternoons. McCabe insisted on remaining inside the car while Mrs. Crandall, Greek New Testament and Spanish phrasebook in hand, knocked on doors, pretending to be on a church mission. There was no street map of Shangri-La. The only available map of Elmira, a wispy black-and-white ink drawing printed by the county fifty years earlier, did not even show its site. It also stubbornly refused to show most of Elmira’s side streets, featuring the less grandiose houses. Mrs. Crandall, who had dabbled in Chinese ink and watercolor painting to alleviate her boredom, drew a street map of Shangri-La on the first Sunday, as she and McCabe drove around trying to understand the shape of the neighborhood. This was Mrs. Crandall’s idea. She drew the perimeter and the one access road, looking in vain for the main streets before concluding that there were none. Small concrete-block houses sat next to rusty trailers and wooden shacks on the same block. All streets seemed equally important or unimportant, or maybe their importance depended on signs that they could not yet decipher. Mrs. Crandall divided her map into four large grids. McCabe picked the upper left quadrant to begin their canvassing. They would cover the other three in a counterclockwise sweep on the following three Sundays. Mrs. Crandall’s canvassing system was based on cleanliness and prudence. She only knocked on the cleaner-looking houses that showed signs of female habitation. Her quota was two per block. She also approached the few women she saw lurking in the freezing porches and backyards. Some directed her to the home of an older resident; one even took her there herself. Mrs. Crandall kept a log of her interviews. None of the Shangri-La streets had traffic signs or nameplates that she could see. How did people know where they lived? How had mail been delivered? (We know the way ants and bees know, Mrs. Crandall. The late-lamented USPS never set foot in Shangri-La. They dumped their whole load inside that concrete bunker with the locked, rusty side door located on the left side of the access road, where it joins County Route 37. Some old guy paid under the table by the residents—so he wouldn’t lose his equally late-lamented food st
amps—then delivered the mail door to door. He was the one who would have known about Glorita, if anyone did. These were my parenthetical thoughts, which remained unsaid.) Mrs. Crandall numbered the streets running west–east in a north–south progression, and named with letters the ones running north–south, in an alphabetical west–east order. So 1st and A streets both began at their intersection on the northwestern corner of the upper left quadrant they canvassed on that first Sunday. Her logbook registered date, time, street, and both cross-streets; location of house within the block; description of interviewee (only three gave their surnames); and KN for knows nothing, NR for new resident, R10, R20, R1987, or RL for those who had lived there ten or twenty years, or since 1987, or “for a long time.” On their fourth and final Sunday, as they finished canvassing the last quadrant of Shangri-La, they had yet to find a trace of Glorita.

  Mrs. Crandall reached for her dress. She had to go home. It was almost dinnertime. Now was my turn to beg, cajole, and abase myself, even cry. I could not let her go. That night I had to squeeze from her the last drop of information about McCabe. My pain must have been real, even if my theatrics weren’t; I couldn’t tell anymore. She was moved. She held me like Mary held the Baby Jesus, giving me her breast to suckle, putting my tiny hand inside her warm cunt. I cross-questioned her gently, careful that her cunt did not come to a boil too soon, enjoying the slow release of her wetness, the swaying of her hips, delicate at first because we were sacred mother and child. “Mercy can be very funny,” she said. I did not immediately realize to whom she was referring. McCabe hated her given name and never used it. She was plain McCabe to all. Was Mrs. Crandall that distant from McCabe, or that close? No, she could not remember if she ever called McCabe that name to her face. Unlike her jolly predecessor, New McCabe had no sense of humor. The few jokes I tried on her fell flat. Music, birds, food, wine, bandages were our only shared language. “She can be quiet, but she can talk up a storm.” About what? I asked. “Oh, everything, and nothing. Art and life. She’s been everywhere and met everyone. But she’s not stuck-up. Deep down she’s still a healthy Iowa farm girl,” said Mrs. Crandall. I exhaled, surprised. “She says so herself,” Mrs. Crandall added soothingly, with a maternal tremor of her hips. I asked her what they and Petrona had cooked together on Thanksgiving eve. “Your Thanksgiving dinner. What else?” she said, kissing my ear while her cunt wrapped itself tighter around my hand. She had bought the suckling pig in Shangri-La at McCabe’s request. Tears rolled down my cheeks. Mrs. Crandall kissed my eyelids and held me tighter. “That’s all I know,” she said, declaring the interrogation closed as her hips warmed. I believed her. She was innocent. “Poor baby,” she said, tenderly, her cunt arching and flooding my fist. I kissed her on the lips, for the first and only time. Mrs. Crandall then abandoned herself entirely to me. Passion made her body more voluptuous than ever. Her cunt was fleshier and warmer, her breasts more bountiful. She had kept most of herself out of my reach until this moment, while I had thought she had nothing more to give or show me. I put my ear on her belly to listen to the palpitations of her cunt, the sound of my fingers touching her deep inside. I was so stunned by how passion had transformed her flesh that, when her cunt began to quiet down, satiated, I lowered my guard and, in turn, abandoned myself to her. She fucked me like the Mother would fuck the Child. Licking, whispering, sucking, touching. She had learned. I came a dozen times, on her lips, hands, and breasts. I was inside her milky womb when she was inside me. When she stopped, breathless, my face still buried in her breasts, I almost retched in disgust. I had let a stranger touch me. Worse: a stranger with an opaque connection to McCabe, someone who could have been lying to me all along. “I don’t want to fuck her any more than you do,” Mrs. Crandall said sweetly, as if reading my mind. She held my gaze long enough for me to check her sincerity, then said: “Mercy and I just had the beginning of a beautiful friendship that might have flowered if she had stayed in Elmira.” That was Mrs. Crandall putting me in my place. How foolish of me to think that McCabe would stay here with me until death did us part.