by Ana Simo
24
Mercy
A few days later, I was in the kitchen when an unknown car pulled into the driveway. Its chassis was as putrid as Saint Lazarus’ skin. I grabbed a kitchen knife. Then I saw Petrona get out, and circle the car several times like a mad hen, opening her mouth wide and gesticulating. The kitchen windows were shut. No sounds came through. The sun was beginning to rise.
Petrona came running into the kitchen. She let out a whimper and clutched her heart with her right hand when she saw me standing by the sink. I had put away the knife and pasted a Mary Mother of Christians smile on my face, suspecting what was coming. (Why is it that we spics clutch our hearts at the least provocation: joy, terror, surprise, disappointment, sadness, hope, etcetera?) When Petrona stopped wheezing, she regurgitated a convoluted stream of Spanish words on the subjects of loyalty, duty, gratitude, sorrow, regret. She spoke in the neutral third person: “uno,” one. It was not Petrona, but one, who regretted being forced by circumstances beyond one’s control to suddenly quit. It was not I who “one” was leaving in the lurch, but “the fellow human being.” One was doing so not out of disloyalty or lack of consideration. Not without pain, since one was pained (“A uno le da pena, señora, mucha pena,” she bleated) because the fellow human being needed one to eat properly, wear clean clothes, sleep in an orderly house. Not without anguish (“Uno siente angustia al dejar al prójimo aquí en estas condiciones tan tristes,” she wailed). Petrona, whose known vocabulary had hovered around twenty Spanish words, who never spoke unless spoken to, who, when forced to answer by the unspoken threat of dismissal ever present between housemistress and maid did so stingily, sourly, drawing a clear moral line between obedience under duress and willing cooperation, Petrona was now a flood of words, unstoppable. She was scared. Bug-eyed, piss-in-pants, shitless scared. I was afraid she’d have a heart attack and drop dead in the kitchen. “Petrona! Shut up,” I said in English, in the firm tone of a dog trainer’s “heel.” She stopped and sat down. “Is la migra after you?” She shook her head, “No, señora, no. No es la migra.” Then who? I cooed. Petrona began to cry. She threw herself on her knees, begging me to let her go. When I tried to help her up, she clung to my legs, leaving a trail of tears and mucus on my freshly pressed pants. I told her she could go, but that was not enough. I had to tell her that I wanted her to go for her own good, and mine, that no offense was taken or given, that I would have told her to go today even if she had not told me first that she had to go. I gave her a month’s wages for the road, and walked her to her car, consoling her for her treachery.
The tailpipe barely cleared the road under the weight of children, mattresses, chairs, and impractical black iron pots—undoubtedly precious heirlooms—lovingly strapped to the passenger seat. A shriveled tobacco-colored man shared the back seat with four or five children (they were hard to count through the steamed windows). He appeared to doze while the little ones jumped and fought around him in atrocious Elmira-twanged Spanglish. I did not know that Petrona had a family. Were these her children? Could they be siblings, and the old man their grandfather? I fought against the repulsive suspicion that he might be her husband. I wished Petrona a good trip. “Cuídese, señora,” were her last words. Take care, or beware—depending on intonation, facial expression, body language, and context. Beware, or take care. I could not tell which.
Petrona left on Wednesday, December 12, at about 6:15 a.m. Exactly thirteen days before Christmas. That period now feels more remote than any of the preceding ones. I know what I did, but not when: each day is not a free entity in my memory, but part of an unbreakable block of ice in which “thirteen days” has been carved. This was the ice age, inside and out. I worked hard to keep myself serene, so I could reach that state of icy resolve that distinguishes the successful criminal. Subzero temperatures set in after a heavy snowfall. Sleet turned into ice-sheets on the ground, topping the snow. Chunks of ice began to form on the river bend that led to Shangri-La. In the ravine, the gnarled tops of bushes stuck out of the snow like zombie fingers. The gutter outside my windows cracked in two places under the weight of the ice. Two icicles the size of mammoth fangs soon hung from the cracks, partially obstructing my view. One morning I went up on a ladder and managed to free the gutter drain of ice. First I chipped at the ice with a hammer and a broken chisel from the Judge’s prehistoric toolbox. Then I melted the bottom ice crust with a crème brûlée torch. McCabe’s funeral pyre would be like that: fire on ice.
The melted snow finally trickling down the drain reminded me of the icehouse. It was a classic circular vaulted structure hidden in the midst of an old cherry-tree grove on the side of the property opposite the ravine. Round Hill descended there gradually, through two meadows and, at the very bottom, a one-hundred-and-fifty-acre woodland for hunting. All were part of the Judge’s property. The nearest farm was a red dot on the horizon. The red dot was the top of the silo, locally known as “Dick’s tip,” after the owner’s grandfather, whose artistic idea it had been. A row of cypresses planted by Mrs. Wilkerson’s own grandfather—“after Van Gogh,” she always reminded you—fortuitously shielded the icehouse from “that abomination.” I used to play in the icehouse while my father raked the leaves on the Judge’s lawn, muttering about Mrs. Wilkerson’s latest demand. “Don’t let the Missus see you there,” he always said, not without glee. I would tiptoe down the three steps, peek at the scary dark vault, and run back to Papá and his leaves with my heart beating hard against my chest. “Your heart is in your mouth,” he said one day. After that, I kept my lips tightly pursed every time I ran from the icehouse, afraid I’d spit out my heart and die.
The icehouse door was blocked by snow. When I shoveled it away, I saw that the door was chained and padlocked. None of the keys I found in the house over the next few days fit. In the end, I managed to pry open a chain link, without breaking it, and slide out the padlock. Inside, the icehouse was bigger than I remembered, and filled with dry leaves. I bagged them and burned them in an oil drum with a chicken-wire cover that my father had kept nearby for that purpose. I burned the leaves a little at a time, every other day, along with small chunks of frozen meat. If anyone were watching, or smelling, in the distance, they would not think it odd to see smoke and smell burnt flesh on the day after Christmas.
Once again, I began my days cleaning and polishing the contents of the Judge’s studio, reclaiming the carefree routine of my first weeks here, before McCabe’s transformation. I found serenity in the struggle against brass and silver stains, the dust that clogged the ears of Dresden shepherdesses. That serenity was the anesthetic that allowed me to confront the second task of the day: calling everyone and everywhere, in this shrunken and beleaguered land and abroad, who could possibly lead me to McCabe. I even tried to track down Bebe.
I did not care any longer why McCabe came back, as long as she did. I did not care what I had to say. Mrs. Crandall had taught me the virtues of carnal humiliation. I had to apply her lesson to my heart. I ached for Mrs. Crandall during those thirteen days, through freezing showers, naked runs in the snowy meadow behind the Judge’s house, and sleepless nights. More exactly, my flesh ached for hers, while my heart longed for McCabe, and my mediocre mind stood between the two, puzzled.
Every night since I had given up Mrs. Crandall’s carnal protection, I had dreamt of a sea monster in an ink-black Sargasso Sea. It had McCabe’s long limbs and Bebe’s silky shoulders, with their hands, eyes, and backbones intertwined. It was majestic and dangerous. I had to find Bebe. To get to McCabe, or for Bebe’s sake, or both. It only took a dozen calls to Bebe’s bewildering array of phone numbers. She had left a frothy trail of outgoing messages from L.A. to New York to Budapest to Constantinople, the increasingly tenuous queen of cities, where she was headlining the Army of the Levant’s Grand Millennium Concert. Bebe was still Bebe. A will of steel under deliciously frivolous icing. Her messages were champagne drops, truffle crumbs left for the lucky dog to lick. I had not spoken to Bebe in year
s. We had not fought. I had run out of steam, and she never pursued anyone. It was not in her nature. Bebe was The Pursued. She had rewritten the Belle Époque hetaera’s manual for New York’s new dyke century. I was afraid she would chew me up and spit me out the moment she heard my voice. Bebe did not forgive lapsed admirers. Even after years of apparent domestic bliss with the first McCabe, she expected boundless devotion and fealty from me—and a dozen others.
I got lucky in L.A. Bebe picked up on the first ring. “Hello, sweetie,” she said. I was tongue-tied. A long time ago, she used to call me sweetie, swee’pie, shrimpie, munchkinik, and spicchik, when I had sufficiently pined at her feet. I would have slapped anyone of any color who would call me spic anything, but not indulged, adored, authorized Bebe, mistress of cold and hot. Bebe of the rancorous elephant memory. I thought she was sweet-talking to me now on the phone as if a bitter decade had not gone by. I head-over-heeled again. Not that I had ever stomped her out. Bebe, and Glorita, burned in my heart like an unknown soldier’s flame. Ignored, yet eternal. “Hello, sweetie” melted space and time. Bebe was smoking reefer at night under the Brighton Beach boardwalk while I lusted for her. “Spicchik,” she said, caressing the word; “spicchik,” she said, giving me the gift of Glorita painting her toenails red on the porch, Glorita wading the creek in her Smokey Bear panties, her flat brown chest glistening in the sun, Glorita in a cloud of dust receding from the back window of the refugee bus, not waving, just standing on the road, arms folded, yellow dress fluttering. “Spicchik,” Bebe had said, giving me Mrs. Crandall and McCabe, who now watched these scenes through my eyes. For a microsecond, I loved them all equally and simultaneously. Then Bebe broke the news that her marriage to McCabe had ended. “I got tired of being a kept woman,” she said on the phone. I untied my tongue. “Hello, Bebe,” I said. “Hello, sweetie,” Bebe said. “I got tired of being a kept woman.” And I understood that it was not she in the flesh, but her incorporeal voice. “I’ll be back home before Christmas,” she said before hanging up, leaving no space for a message.
Was Bebe talking to McCabe? I listened to her message at least twenty times. Sometimes I heard “sweetie,” who could be McCabe, but not necessarily; other times I heard “sweeties” followed by muffled giggling, which was more like Bebe. One minute I’d think Bebe would never leave an intimate message for all to hear; the next minute I’d remember Bebe dancing on tables at the Odeon hours before it burnt down during the Second Great Fire, flinging a martini on a simpering heiress at the Four Seasons, stepping out of the elevator naked at Cardinal Gonzaga’s office with “Suck My Dick” painted on her chest and her back (I was left on the ground floor guarding the mink coat from which she had emerged “as God brought her into the world,” my grandmother had said upon hearing the story in one of my infrequent phone calls. My granny despised priests (“a bunch of perverts”) as much as she lapped up my bad-girl stories from the big city. They all had a double in La Esperanza, where everything that ever happened in New York had already happened long ago.)
On my twenty-first listening of Bebe’s message I finally understood its true meaning. It was McCabe’s final dismissal (“I got tired of being a kept woman”) in all three of its possible versions. If “sweetie” was McCabe herself, it was an added slap, sarcastic rather than endearing; if it was a new paramour—or if it was in the plural, “sweeties”—it was as meaningless as an air kiss, and “I got tired of being a kept woman” was still an indictment of McCabe for the whole world to hear.
I had stuck my finger in a live outlet: Bebe had settled the score. The jolt almost made me give up McCabe. I packed my bag and threw out my pitiful McCabe mementos: the wine corks and cheese wrappers, the rosebush twine, a button fallen off her hunter’s shirt, the nurse’s bag. Bebe would be thrilled to see me in L.A. now that she was back in play. She might even get me a job there. We would let bygones be bygones. I would rein myself in, keep to best-friend behavior. We would go clubbing again. Everybody would think once more that we were lovers. I wanted to be envied. I wanted to be seen in public with the most handsome, inaccessible, expensive of them all. This fantasy lasted only one evening, complete with images of the long-extinct palm trees, blue frothy drinks, Technicolor smog sunsets, red convertibles, Pacific beaches, and balmy weather, and a newly incestuous Bebe, as alluring as ever, but now protected by the strongest taboo. What burst the bubble was not just the illogic of severing “Bebe” from “lust,” which could not be done, but realizing that she had ceased to be the emblem of all my failures. Bebe was not why I had to kill McCabe. Her revenge on McCabe was not mine. The McCabe connected to my Bebe-related humiliations had long ceased to exist. She had purged herself from this world, without my intervention. I retrieved from the wastebasket the corks, wrappers, and twines that were the only proof that my McCabe had ever existed. The suitcase I left packed. From then until the end, I dressed out of it, keeping it always ready to go.
The search for McCabe now filled every minute of my days and nights. I called every major art gallery and museum in New York City, Barcelona, London, and all other strategic points east and west, pretending to be a foreign collector. McCabe’s SoHo gallery was open. It had never closed. In fact, it was expanding upward and sideways, to the floors above and the adjacent buildings. They had just sold a Beuys for a record figure. It had been the biggest ever private sale of a living artist. McCabe, on the other hand, had not been seen lately on the Manhattan social circuit. Some thought that they had glimpsed her at her gallery recently, or that someone they knew had, but when pressed could not remember when or whom. Others said that she was on a roll after the Beuys killing, flush with cash and anointed with the mystique of winners, that being picked by McCabe was now every living artist’s obsession, that she was lying low these days to keep them off her back, planning her next coup. Others put her variously in Germany, India, or even China, where she was opening a branch across from the Guangzhou Opera, or signing the new hot young thing, someone whose name no one could remember given how one Chinese name sounds like the next, but who, everyone said, was the Chinese Basquiat, not at all Basquiat-like in his art, but Basquiat-like in sexy boy-genius raw power.
McCabe was a high-risk gambler. She had seized her chance, taking her business to the stratosphere from her Elmiran woods. She had fired and hired, bought and expanded, slashed and burned the competition from a distance. She had done in weeks what would take others years. All while playing nurse with you, Reason’s wormy voice hissed. No: while nursing me back to life, selflessly, devotedly, graciously, I said out loud, quashing the worm. Where did she find the time and energy to do so much? I began to admire her. Admiration had not been on my list of McCabe-related feelings until then. Now I was overflowing with it. I admired her intrepidness and intelligence. Making money wasn’t only a craft for the cunning, yet stupid. In McCabe’s brilliant hands it became art and science, war by other means, purview of the new Caesars, Napoleons, and Clausewitzes. McCabe calmly pacing the garden while planning her next campaign, her long legs the only part of her skinny body that moved, McCabe interrupting her inspired cogitations to take care of me, to be with me: I felt humbled by these images from our daily life whose meaning had been opaque and was now clear. McCabe was great and she was merciful. Oh, yes, she was merciful. That is why she shied away from her name. She did not need to trumpet her nature. Her deeds spoke for her. She was merciful as only a ruthless general can be. Did she know that I was planning to kill her? Had she shown mercy to her killer to prevent or to forgive the killing, or did her brilliant strategic mind conceive other outcomes? On the other hand, she may not have known or suspected anything, a lamb when not on the battlefield, her mercifulness flowing innocently from her to me and back to her, without beginning or end, goal or motive. It was in that returning ebb that her mercy carried back to her whatever little I could give: a piece of music, an ear for her bird tales, rotting feet, and moral misery.
I fell asleep to the image of McCabe, the merciful lamb, a
nd the river of mercy flowing between us. I did not dream, but held on to a reality sweeter than dreams.
It was still dark when I woke up. I left a last message with the gallery’s voicemail android: “Hey, McCabe. There’ll be someone here on Christmas Day who you want to meet, and who’s dying to meet you. Come over.” Christmas was forty-eight hours away.
25
In Labor
Two days before Christmas, McCabe’s work-booted feet followed me everywhere as I got the house ready. I vacuumed, waxed, polished, dusted, and washed floors, rugs, walls, furniture, doors, silver, windows, and china. I cleared snow off the driveway. Drove for eight hours to the state capital to bring back all that Elmira lacked: the deep-yellow Danish butter that McCabe liked to lick off her index finger; the Rocamadour cheeses that she had inspected with suspicion until I cut a piece and put it in my mouth (she hated destroying the little cheese’s perfect roundness, so I always had to cut them for her when she wasn’t looking); the honeyed Anatolian peaches and pears, near-extinct from war, which she stared at, but did not taste; the mangoes, guavas, sugar-apples, nísperos, and guanábanas she smelled and touched with great curiosity so often without eating them that I asked Petrona to hide some in the back of a cupboard as a reserve for Sundays, Petrona’s day off; and the side of venison I knew would delight McCabe, the insatiable carnivore. In Elmira, I arranged for the delivery, at the last minute of Christmas Eve, of four dozen yellow, red, white, and pink roses after bribing the flower-shop owner into forgetting an order previously placed by the wife of a prominent orthodontist. I also bought cornmeal, molasses, and the county’s sublime ham, its only world-class product, lamentably still unknown to the world at large. I did not mind showing my naked face in town. Secrecy was no longer needed. It was a relief that the Elmira public library was shut for the holidays, though I’m embarrassed to confess that I peeked twice through the darkened windows, half hoping and half dreading, against all logic, to find Mrs. Crandall there. The table where she had lain naked was still empty. She had removed the heavy dictionary that I placed under her buttocks, so I could reach deeper into her cunt. The memory and the example of Mrs. Crandall kept my body going those forty-eight long hours before Christmas as I slaved to prepare the house for the return of McCabe. I had no doubt that McCabe would come back. She would take the bait. She was too much of a gambler not to. I had lied to McCabe, the great and the merciful: I expected no one else on Christmas. It was a necessary lie for the greater good, hers and mine, a lie that, retroactively, when it had accomplished its beneficial end, would cease to be a lie.