Petrona was pureblood Aztec, thus inscrutable. Today there was an additional shroud drawn over her face. She had done three things she was absolutely forbidden to do, which would have allowed me to rip her heart from her chest had I been one of her ancestors: gone up the stairs to McCabe’s door, cut a rose (had she used a kitchen knife, or had she broken into my gardening shed?), and brought a champagne bottle up from the cellar (had she picked the lock or stolen my key?). Worse, she had not consulted me, the housekeeper. I, and only I, was Petrona’s interlocutor in the household. She was allowed to speak only to me. Never to McCabe. I had made this threateningly clear to Petrona from the moment I hired her. Was she now taking her instructions directly from McCabe? I put on my own zombie mask, so that my Popocatepetlian rage would not erupt over Petrona’s head. It was a delicate situation. If Petrona realized that I had noticed, I would be forced to question her. This would be a sign of weakness, proof that I did not know what was going on. Would Petrona dare do all of this without McCabe’s approval? Doubtful. But if McCabe had broken our contract and ordered around Petrona behind my back, it was McCabe I had to dress down, so that she, not I, could set matters straight with Petrona the next day. After which, I would have a stern talk with Petrona and reluctantly forgive her, just this time, because Señorita Maké had been confused for a moment about the lines of domestic command.
I chewed on my odorless tofu stew while rehearsing these disciplinary scenarios. The back door fluttered, signaling Petrona’s exit. Lord, have mercy, I said, unplugging my ears. There was absolute silence. I stayed in the darkening dining room for a long time, listening, but not a sound came out of McCabe’s room. When I glanced up the stairs, the tray was gone.
The cellar key was in its place, in the top drawer of the Judge’s desk, which I kept locked at all times. The brass key that opened the drawer was in my pocket, on a key ring that included the house and gardening-shed keys. I checked the drawer lock with a flashlight and the tiny magnifying glass that I used when tightening the screws on my reading glasses. The drawer did not seem to have been forced, but a professional would know how to pick a lock without leaving any trace. I could not imagine Petrona having that skill. (But, for all I knew, she could have been Raffles, the silk-handed thief. My lack of imagination about her was purely racial.) The gardening shed appeared equally free from human disturbance, although there were animal footprints on the dusty floor, something small and clawed, a field mouse or perhaps a weasel. The only window hung unevenly from rusty hinges, closed but not locked. Animals are stronger and smarter than we think, even mice. They could have broken in and left without a trace. I nailed the window shut. It was beginning to drizzle when I shone the flashlight on the yellow rosebush. There were twenty-seven roses, including three unopened buds. I memorized their position: it was too wet to make a diagram. From now on, I’d be able to tell if one was missing. As it turned out, I never could. The yellow roses continued to appear on McCabe’s daily tray, and my nightly rose count yielded numbers so disparate that they signified nothing: fifty-three roses and seven buds on the second night, thirteen roses and seventeen buds on the third, and so on. But that first night under the drizzle, I went back in with a feeling of accomplishment and quickly fell asleep.
The morning after, the empty tray was outside McCabe’s door, with the champagne bottle upside down in the bucket. I decided to say nothing to McCabe or Petrona. Perhaps McCabe was having a painful menstrual period or had lost a bundle of money and was depressed. I was afraid to think the obvious, that Bebe may have been the cause of McCabe’s sudden disappearance. That it was a relapse. I did not want Bebe inside McCabe’s mind, particularly not as she had long been in mine, as a torturous, unattainable ideal. Cruel Bebe, the eternal fourteen-year-old wood nymph, was my exclusive property.
Bebe as she had been at the very beginning, when I first saw her, alone on the outer edge of the male fuck circle, across from me, in the penumbra of sweaty male bodies, her eyes lazily caressing them, almost tactile yet indifferent. A slight young girl in a long, dirty fur coat, unafraid of the men, rats, and sewer effluvia under the last bridge still spanning the East River. We were the only two female watchers. The slow, silent male sexual field separated and consoled us, protective and dangerous, like the river’s black velvety bottom.
It was the night Zoë fled to Constantinople and the splendors of her elderly arms dealer. The night in October, exactly a month after 9/11, when refugee hordes broke out of their resettlement camp in the mainland and tried to enter the island (mixed in with a few marauding cannibals, some say). The Citizen’s Militia repelled them upstream and the river turned red with blood. “There’s not enough rat meat for everyone,” the girl said, as we walked the dark streets. She had just arrived from Nebraska, where things were much worse. “No one’s left there,” she said. “I’ve always been hungry.” She was white but wanted to be black. “Why?” I asked. “I want to sing like a black woman.” She said she was fourteen, but looked twelve and sounded as old as the hills.
That night, she slept on my dingy kitchen floor. I did not offer her my bed. That’s how insignificant she seemed. The next morning, she was gone. But every day she was absent, her presence grew. The details of her body, voice, and gestures became denser and stronger. I craved to see her in the flesh. I looked for her everywhere. One night, when I was beginning to forget her, she knocked on my door, and I was hooked. The electric charge between us was as potent as that in the male fuck circle. Except that we never touched. She refused, once. And I don’t ask twice. But we both kept seducing each other. What fun. All that inexplicable pleasure and grief! All that extreme passion unrelieved by the flesh! Two and a half incandescent years. Then McCabe showed up.
McCabe did not come down to dinner on Wednesday, or any other evening that week, or the next. I could no longer play the ostrich. It was a relapse. McCabe’s mind had to be cleansed of Bebe, emptied of her, and filled with me: with my suffering and humiliation and McCabe’s guilt. I realized that this was not going to happen spontaneously as in a Turgenev novel, because I did not have his lightness of touch. From now on, I would have to tear myself away from the daily joys of cleaning, polishing, and contemplating Shangri-La from the heights of Round Hill, and get to work on McCabe’s coarse brain. Every day. With discipline.
Those two long weeks with no one but Petrona to talk to, I mapped in detail McCabe’s re-education, the necessary condition for her righteous execution. I wrote it in my mind, the only place where I could write without any loss of words. I wrote it in the past tense, to thwart any potential mind reader, civilian or military, human or mechanical.
I have forgotten all but one section of the brain-cleansing method I created for McCabe. Entitled “Humility,” I composed it during my daily searches of Petrona’s car, looking for signs that she was actually taking home the food that McCabe was supposed to have eaten. (What if McCabe was not inside her bedroom and Petrona was her accomplice, secreting the uneaten food in her car?) My searches were thorough, if futile and quick. In the three and a half minutes Petrona spent in the service bathroom shedding her maid uniform and putting on her sad brown dress, I’d scan the interior of the car with a penlight, but mostly I sniffed. My sense of smell was highly developed, closer to a hound’s than a human’s. All gone now, along with my nose. “Humility” remains imprinted in what’s left of my brain because it was born, a line at a time, in the restricted space of Petrona’s dank car, at the same hour each day, with the same smells, light, and shadows. The words come back attached to the seats and the brake, the steering wheel and the filthy mat: “Humility is the ointment that heals all wounds.”