Ana Simo - Heartland

We met at her favorite Upper West Side brasserie, known for its brutal security guards and its chewy croissants reverently served amidst the vertiginous Gigi set décor. The head Janissary himself, stun baton in hand, escorted me to McCabe’s table.

McCabe was hulking (six foot two, 260 pounds) and, this morning, sentimental. The malicious bully who had pinned me to the corner mailbox had metamorphosed into a maudlin lapdog. Bebe had finally gotten to her. When I arrived, McCabe was staring into her coffee, gripping the tiny cup with both enormous hands, in Hopperesque pathos, carefully contrived, no doubt, yet subverted by the cloying Belle Époque wallpaper. Her nose was red and tiny beads of water gathered around her nostrils, either from the coffee steam or from past tears. The mediocrity of her pain enraged me. Was that all the suffering she could offer Bebe? McCabe, the unworthy rival, the putrid usurper. “I think Bebe has made a big mistake,” I said, patting her wurstish arm. “She’ll be sorry the rest of her life.” McCabe looked up slowly at me. Her face burned with supernatural hatred, an ecstatic Saint Jerome in reverse. I froze under my Dr. Wu mask: I’ve been found! She’ll yell, You hypocrite! and smash my face. Instead, she said, “That is exactly how I feel,” each word rolling icily off her tongue.

McCabe delicately put her empty coffee cup on the table. Two waiters scrambled to refill it, but she dismissed them with a tiny flick of her right index finger. Hatred made her skin glow. It slowed her movements and distilled her gestures. The voluble hog became a surgeon of souls. She explained to me with actuarial precision why Bebe would be the loser in the long run. Counting with her fingers, thumb first, jaw locked, until there were no fingers left, she demolished every imaginable reason Bebe could have had to leave her. Money, sex, fame, success, even love? Bebe had heaps of them, all of McCabean origin or instigation. Jealousy? Boredom? Spiritual awakening? Nah. Therefore Bebe had left for No Reason at All, and her senseless act would bring her eternal regret when she realized what she had done. “I’ll suffer; but she’ll repent,” McCabe snarled. Then she put her forehead on the table and began to sob.

I staggered back home in a daze, on foot, oblivious to the dangers of fortified checkpoints and security corridors, and the even greater danger of stepping outside of them. My Fujianese habit must have protected me. (Aren’t they the city’s new royalty, after all?) I got home in one piece. The world, already upside down, had been tossed up again. Underneath McCabe’s simplistic exterior there lay a viperous eighth stomach.

O dykes, o mores! It has been more than four decades since I tasted my first, and I cannot say I understand them, or myself, any better. Neither have those old questions, in any of their multifaceted aspects, ever been unequivocally answered: Who is she? What is she?

That night I dreamt that Bebe and I were strolling through Round Hill, Elmira’s tony neighborhood. I wanted to leave before someone called the watchmen on us—the occasional Round Hill sidewalk being just for show—but Bebe had to stop in front of every other mansion to comment on its size. She was barefooted, which further slowed our progress. She was scandalized that houses shrunk as you went up Round Hill, violating traditional real-estate dogma. “How come the smaller ones have the best views?” I explained that Round Hill had been built from the top down between 1916 and 1929 by Midwestern wheat and railroad millionaires. Each new house surpassed in size and magnificence the one above on the gently winding road. The last house to go up right before the Black Friday crash was a sixty-thousand-square-foot replica of the palace of Porphyrogenitus, wrapped around the lower rung of the hill. It was ten times bigger than Judge Wilkerson’s amiable Prairie Style house, the first one built (by an early Wright disciple), which sat in a meadow at the top of the hill. “I think I could live here with you,” Bebe said, embracing all of Round Hill with a sweep of her long, sinewy dancer’s arms. She was wearing a sheer Nile-green sundress that uncovered her succulent shoulder blades. I felt salaciously warm inside. Money and (in her eyes) trustworthiness were beyond my grasp, but not Round Hill. I had deep, if vicarious, roots in Round Hill: my mother had been a maid, and my father a gardener at the architectural holiest of holies, Judge Wilkerson’s house. I had practically grown up there. I didn’t tell Bebe, though. Scoring a point in secret was sweeter: knowing I could satisfy at least one of her conditions if I wanted. In a retroactive, imaginary way, of course: but wasn’t that the only way?

The next morning I couldn’t get Judge Wilkerson’s house out of my mind. There it was every time I closed my eyes. And there was Bebe too, luminescent in her green sundress, pointing at the chimney, the massive kitchen table, or the lion-claw tub, with a sly realtor grin. Bebe, who in real life, or what passes for it, had never even heard about this house. I tried to erase her from the picture, but she wouldn’t budge. Her sharply curved talons had sunk into my brain, again. So, I gave in to her, as I always had when I was still her slave. I shut my eyes and let her take me through the house, from the formal parlor to the attic. It was a silent slide show, all sepia except for Bebe’s green dress. It ended with Bebe dialing the Judge’s black Bakelite phone.

I obeyed her inescapable command. After a dozen calls, I found out that the Judge, a childless widower, had died three months earlier. A gaggle of grandnephews had agreed to rent out the house while their lawyers fought over the carrion. I lit a candle to Bebe for pointing The Way. Later that day, I called McCabe at her eponymous SoHo gallery and asked her to travel with me to Elmira. It would be curative. Elmira was so deep in the barren heartland that Bebe’s emanations would not reach her there. It took me two lachrymose breakfasts at Gigi’s, avidly followed by the officially indifferent waitresses, to persuade McCabe that a retreat to Elmira was the only way she could avoid Bebe-induced mental collapse, and its concomitant financial ruin. (Had she not lost a multimillion Cy Twombly mosaic sale just yesterday by bursting into tears and calling the prospective buyer “a cheap hoodoo”?)

In the end, McCabe left her gallery in the hands of her able fag assistant and we flew to Elmira on a cloudless late August morning. Having shed Dr. Wu in the airport lavatory, I was now traveling as McCabe’s spic maid. Before leaving on a lecture tour of China, the good doctor had bribed the super into returning Hume’s menacing letters.

McCabe first wanted to rent “a palatial sixteen-room neo-Cappadocian villa carved on the rock at lower Round Hill, chock-full of extras, including Jacuzzi, sauna, indoor pool, home theater, billiards room, and a replica of the famous porphyry fountain that still graces the gardens of Emperor Theophilus’s summer retreat.” I counseled modesty, describing how Elmirans of old used to tar and feather—and occasionally torch alive—Yankee carpetbaggers. After much resistance, she broke down and reluctantly took the Judge’s house.

Most of the old mansions on upper Round Hill were now empty, cared for by a discreet army of cleaners and watchmen. Their owners had fled during the Great Hunger and these days only returned for Fourth of July picnics and the occasional June wedding. But they still controlled the town and, with others like them, what remained of the countryside. However distant, their inbred disdain triggered old anxieties. That theirs or anyone else’s disdain would have rolled off McCabe’s thick back was an added indignity. So I decided to trot out the historical record to make an impression on her. Why I wanted the Judge’s house I kept to myself: in my dreams, it always appeared as my childhood home. I knew every corner of the house from tagging along behind my mother as she waxed the floors, polished the Judge’s oak furniture, and painstakingly dusted the locked glass cabinet that held the Baccarat punch set and the icon of the Annunciation. As I got older, I was allowed to approach the cabinet, but not to touch it. The fourteenth-century icon was brittle and resented the heat and humidity of the human body, the Judge had told my mother, giving her the only copy of the tiny cabinet key that he always wore on a chain around his neck. He taught her how to read the hydrometer inside the cabinet three times a day and to adjust the humidity-control device. And she taught me—theoretically, because I was to keep my hands in my pockets. The Virgin’s terror at the muscular, winged female lunging at her knocked me out cold the first time I got close. After that I trained myself to resist her contaminating panic, focusing one month on her raised hand, then another month on the folds of her black mourning robe, until one day I felt strong enough to stare again at her terrified face. This time I managed to keep standing.