Ana Simo - Heartland

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.