Ana Simo - Heartland

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 years. 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.)