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.)
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.