Tabloid Dreams (2 page)

So I kept quiet, and she eventually turned her face to me. The moon fell upon her. At the time, I did not clearly see her beauty. I can see it now, however. I have always been able to see in this incorporeal state. Quite vividly. Though not at the moment. There's only darkness. The activity above me has no shape. But in the sea, as I drifted inexorably to the surface, I began to see the fish and eventually the ceiling of light above me. And then there was the first time I rose—quite remarkable—lifting from the vastness of an ocean delicately wrinkled and athrash with the sunlight. I went up into a sky I knew I was a part of, spinning myself into the gossamer of a rain cloud, hiding from the sea, traced as a tiny wisp into a great gray mountain of vapor. And I wondered if there were others like me there. I listened for them. I tried to call to them, though I had no voice. Not even words. Not like these that now shape in me. If I'd had these words then, perhaps I could have called out to the others who had gone down with the
Titanic,
and they would have heard me. If, in fact, they were there. But as far as I knew—as far as I know now—I am a solitary traveler.

And then I was rain, and the cycle began. And I moved in the clouds and in the tides and eventually I became rivers and streams and lakes and dew and a cup of tea. Darjeeling. In a place not unlike the one where I spent so many years. I had recently come out of the sea, but I don't think the place was Madras or near it, for the sea must have been the Arabian, not the Bay of Bengal. I was in a reservoir and then in a well and then in a boiling kettle and eventually in a porcelain cup, very thin: I could see the shadow of a woman's hand pick me up. I sensed it was Darjeeling tea, but I don't know how. Perhaps I can smell, too, in this state, but without the usual body, perhaps there is only the knowledge of the scent. I'm not sure. But I slipped inside a woman and then later I was—how shall I say this?—free again. I must emphasize that I kept my spirit's eyes tightly shut.

That was many years ago. I subsequently crossed the subcontinent and then Indochina and then I spent a very long time in another vast sea, the Pacific Ocean, I'm sure. And then, in recent times, I rolled in a storm front across a rough coast and rained hard in a new land. I think, in fact, I have arrived in the very country for which I'd set sail in that fateful spring of 1912.

Her country. I'm digressing now. I see that. I look at her face in this memory that drifts with me—I presume ­forever—and I am ready to understand that she was beautiful, from the first, and I look away, just as I did then. I talk of everything but her face. She turned to me and the moon fell upon her and I could not bring myself to be the pompous ass I am capable of being. I said nothing to reassure her. And that was an act of respect. I see that now. I wonder if she saw it. But neither did I say anything else. I looked away. I looked out to the sea that was even then trying to claim us both, and I finally realized she was gone.

She had said nothing more, either. Not good-bye. Nothing. Not that I blame her. I'd let her down somehow. And she knew that we were all in mortal peril. When I turned back around and found her gone, I had a feeling about her absence. A feeling that I quickly set aside. It had something to do with my body. I felt a chill. But, of course, we were in the North Atlantic with ice floating all about us. I wished I were in my bungalow near the Bay of Bengal, wrapped in mosquito netting and drifting into unconsciousness. I wished for that, at the time. I did not wish for her to return. I wanted only to be lying in a bed alone in a place I knew very well, a place where I could spend my days being as stiff as I needed to be to keep going. I wanted to lie wrapped tight, with the taste of cigars and whisky still faint in my mouth, and sleep.

And now I feel something quite strong, really. Though I have no body, whatever I am feels suddenly quite profoundly empty. Ah empty. Ah quite quite empty.

I have cried out. Just now. And the thrashing above me stops and turns into a low murmur of voices. The water moves, a sharp undulation, and then suddenly there's a faint light above me. I had rushed through dark tunnels into this place and had no idea what it was, and now I can see it is structured and tight. The light is a square ceiling above me. I see it through the water, but there is something else, as well, blurring the light. Mosquito netting. A shroud. Something. It is quite odd, really.

I want to think on this place I'm in, but I cannot. There's only the empty space on the promenade where she'd stood. I turned and she was gone and I looked both ways and there were people moving about, but I did not see her. It was then that I knew for certain that she was right. I knew the ship would go down, and I would die.

So I went to my cabin and closed the door and laid out my evening clothes on the bed. There were footsteps in the hallway, racing. Others knew. I imagined her moving about the ship like some Hindu spirit taken human form, visiting this truth upon whomever would listen. I once again stood still for a moment with a feeling. I wanted her to have spoken only to me. That we should keep that understanding strictly between the two of us. I straightened now and put the thought from my head. That thought, not the sinking of the ship, made me quake slightly inside. I straightened and stiffened with as much reserve and dignity as possible for a man in late middle age standing in his underwear, and I carefully dressed for this terrible event.

When I came out again on the promenade deck, I hesitated. But only briefly. Something very old and very strong in me brought me to the door of the smoking lounge. This was the only place that seemed familiar to me, that was filled with people whose salient qualities I could recognize easily.

I stepped in and the card game was still on. Several faces turned to me.

“It's all up for us,” I said, matter-of-factly.

“Yes,” one of them said.

“You can bet rather more freely,” I said to him.

“Don't encourage him,” said another at the table.

“Right,” I said. Then I stood there for a moment. I knew that I'd come to join them. My chair sat empty near the card table. And I began to worry about finding a dry match. Force of habit—no, not habit; the indomitable instinct of my life—moved me into the room and to the chair and I sat and I worried about the matches and then I found that they were dry and I lit my cigar and I took a puff and I thought about getting a drink and I thought about meeting a King more powerful than King George and then I suddenly turned away from all that. I laid my cigar in the silver-plate ashtray and I rose and went out of the lounge.

It took me the better part of an hour to find her. At first, things were civilized. They were beginning to put women and children into the boats and people were keeping their heads about them. These were first-class passengers and I moved through them and we all of us exchanged careful apologies for being in each other's way or asking each other to move. With each exchanged request for pardon, I grew more concerned. From this very sharing of the grace of daily human affairs, I responded more and more to the contrast of the situation. I could tell there weren't enough lifeboats for this enterprise. Any fool could tell that. I searched these faces to whom I gently offered my apologies and who gently returned them, but I was not gentle inside. I wanted to find her. I prayed that if I did not, it was because she was already in a sound boat out on the sea, well away from what would soon happen.

Then I came up on the boat deck below the wheelhouse and I could see forward. The lights were still quite bright all over the ship and the orchestra was playing a waltz nearby and before me, at the bow, the forecastle deck already was awash. It was disappearing before my eyes. And now the people from steerage in rough blankets and flannel nightshirts and kersey caps were crowding up, and I felt bad for them. They'd been let down, too, trying to find a new life somewhere, and the gentlemen of the White Star Line were not prepared to save all these people.

A woman smelling of garlic pressed past me with a child swaddled against her chest and I looked forward again. The anchor crane was all that I could see of the forecastle. The blackness of the sea had smoothed away the bow of our ship, and I wanted to cry out the name of the woman I sought, and I realized that I did not even know it. We had never been introduced, of course. This woman and I had spoken together of life and death, and we had not even exchanged our names. That realization should have released me from my search, but in fact I grew quite intense now to find her.

There was a gunshot nearby and a voice cried out, ­“Women and children only. Be orderly.” There was jostling behind me and voices rising, falling together in foreign words, full of panic now. I had already searched the first-class crowd in the midst of all that, and I slipped through a passage near the bridge and out onto the port side of the boat deck.

And there she was. There was order here, for the moment, women being helped into a boat by their husbands and by the ship's officers, though the movements were not refined now, there was a quick fumbling to them. But she was apart from all that. She was at the railing and looking forward. I came to her.

“Hello,” I said.

She turned her face to me and at last I could see her beauty. She was caught full in the bridge lights now. I wished it were the moon again, but in the glare of the incandescent bulbs I could see the delicate thinness of her face, the great darkness of her eyes, made more beautiful, it seemed to me, by the faint traces of her age around them. She was younger than I, but she was no young girl; she was a woman with a life lived in ways that perhaps would have been very interesting to share, in some other place. Though I know now that in some other place I never would have had occasion or even the impulse—even the impulse, I say—to speak to her of anything, much less the events of her life or the events of my own life, pitiful as it was, though I think she would have liked India. As I float here in this strange place beneath this muffled light I think she would have liked to go out to India and turn that remarkable intuition of hers, the subtle responsiveness of her ear and her sight and even the bottoms of her feet, which told her the truth of our doom, she would have liked to turn all that sensitivity to the days and nights of India, the animal cries in the dark and the smell of the Bay of Bengal and the comfort of a bed shrouded in mosquito netting and the drifting to sleep.

Can this possibly be me speaking? What is this feeling? This speaking of a bed in the same breath with this woman? The shroud above me is moving in this place where I float. It strips away and there are the shadows of two figures there. But it's the figure beside me on the night I died that compels me. She stood there and she turned her face to me and I know now that she must have understood what it is to live in a body. She looked at me and I said, “You must go into a boat now.”

“I was about to go below and wait,” she said.

“Nonsense. You've known all along what's happening. You must go into the lifeboat.”

“I don't know why.”

“Because I ask you to.” How inadequate that answer should have been, I realize now. But she looked into my face and those dark eyes searched me.

“You've dressed up,” she said.

“To see you off,” I said.

She smiled faintly and lifted her hand. I braced for her touch, breathless, but her hand stopped at my tie, adjusted it, and then fell once more.

“Please hurry.” I tried to be firm but no more than whispered.

Nevertheless, she turned and I fell in beside her and we took a step together and another and another and we were before the lifeboat and a great flash of light lit us from above, a crackling fall of orange light, a distress flare, and she was beside me and she looked again into my eyes. My hands and arms were already dead, it seemed, they had already sunk deep beneath the sea, for they did not move. I turned and there was a man in uniform and I said, “Officer, please board this lady now.”

He offered his hand to her and she took it and she moved into the end of the queue of women, and in a few moments she stepped into the boat. I shrank back into the darkness, terribly cold, feeling some terrible thing. One might expect it to be a fear of what was about to befall me, but one would be wrong. It was some other terrible thing that I did not try to think out. The winch began to turn and I stepped forward for one last look at her face, but the boat was gone. And my hands came up. They flailed before me and I didn't understand. I could not understand this at all.

So I went back to the smoking lounge, and the place was empty. I was very glad for that. I sat in the leather chair and I struck a match and I held it before my cigar and then I put it down. I could not smoke, and I didn't understand that either.

But above me there are two faces, pressed close, trying to see into this place where I float. I move. I shape these words. I know that they heard me when I cried out. When I felt the emptiness, even of this spiritual body. They were the ones who thrashed above me. Not swimming in the sea. Not drowning with me in the night the
Titanic
sank. I stood before her and my arms were dead, my hands could not move, but I know now what it is that brought me to a quiet grief all my corporeal life long. And I know now what it is that I've interrupted with my cry. These two above me were floating on the face of this sea and they were touching. They had known to raise their hands and touch each other.

At the end of the night I met her, I put my cigar down, and I waited, and soon the floor rose up and I fell against the wall and the chair was on top of me, and I don't remember the moment of the water, but it made no difference whatsoever. I was already dead. I'd long been dead.

“Woman Uses Glass Eye
to Spy on
Philandering Husband”

This is how I found out I could see things in another way: one night Roy and me had a big argument and this wasn't unusual for us, really, but he was calling me some pretty bad names and one thing and another happened and my glass eye popped out. He never hit me. Not like the husbands and wives I sit in front of to take down their words in the courtroom when they're on the stand. But Roy can talk pretty rough. So he says, “Loretta, you are one stupid bitch. Like right now. You should see the stupid look on your face. I've never seen a stupider face.”

I don't know what to say about this. I'm real hurt, I know. But for a long moment there's just silence and there's nothing inside me. Like the silence in the court when my hands have been going a hundred and seventy words a minute and it's like they've been listening on their own and then they stop. Some woman is on the stand crying and keeping the sound down because it embarrasses her. I just sit and wait and I know she's crying but I don't even look up and I'm just empty. So I'm like that in front of Roy right after he says he's never seen a stupider face than mine, and he's waiting for me to tell him he's right, I guess, and then I hit myself. My hand just flies up and punches me in the face. It's the only logical thing, I guess. He won't quite do it, so it's up to me.

And all of a sudden I'm looking at Roy and he's a little alarmed, but in addition to his face in my head is another sight. A blur of miniblinds and china hutch and then the ceiling and the pink oriental rug and the ceiling and the rug and the ceiling. And then both of these things are in me, both real, both clear as can be: the temples on Roy's face throbbing and the little red light on the smoke detector flashing. My glass eye has flown out of my face and is lying on the rug about ten feet away and it's staring at the ceiling and I'm seeing through it.

Roy says, “This is too goddamn much, Loretta. You did that on purpose.”

I close my eye—the one in my head—just to check this out and sure enough, I'm still looking at the ceiling. When I open my eye, Roy is gone. I hear his voice trailing out of the room. “Put your glass eye back in, Loretta. You disgust me.”

I've come to accept this thing about me, having a glass eye. It's a very good one. A good match. So I'm not disgusted by this. I go over to where it's lying on the rug and I look down. And I look up. At the same time. There's my cornflower blue eye lying there on the pink rug and all I can say is that it looks astonished. Wide-eyed, I guess. And in my head is my face staring down, one more cornflower blue eye, and one sunken pucker waiting to be filled.

“Aren't you pretty,” I say. And that's as big a surprise to me as the punch.

That night Roy and I have made things up, as we always do. We're lying in the bed and it's dark and I'm thinking about all this. I've heard the lines before. From him. From the stories of the women on the stand in divorce court. At some point the men start getting angry over little things. And they stop touching you. And then once you suspect them, there's a brief time they try to be nice. Just for a little while. I think these are the men who have some little bit of a decent thing in them and they know that they loved this woman once, this woman they're betraying. Roy gave me flowers out of the blue a couple of weeks ago. “Why?” I say to him.

And he says, “Because, you know, because we're married. And you're a good woman.”

I've heard enough of other people's stories to know those are scary words. I say, “That doesn't make sense, Roy. You haven't given me flowers in . . . years.” I almost say fourteen. I know it's fourteen. But I don't want him to know I know. It struck me once that a lot of time had gone by since the last gesture like that and I figured out how much and then I waited and counted. It's pretty sad, really, waiting those years and noticing it all along and you don't even have it in you to say something.

But I don't have to tell him the number in order for the mood to change in a big way. He gets real angry real fast. Another sign. “Then to hell with it,” he says and he takes the flowers away from me and throws them across the room.

So I lie in the dark on the night my eye popped out and I could see through it, and I think about Roy and me. He's building an airplane in the garage. A real airplane, from a kit. He built one before and he flew it around for a couple of weeks and then he sold it. This is the work he has made for himself. The new plane sits out there and he goes to it every day and its bones are exposed, its ribs and its spine, and he puts his hands to it while I go off and take down the words of all the women who waited to speak and then it was too late to save whatever it was they had.

And that makes me think about what I have. I like Roy. This is Roy: he was a pilot when I met him, teaching people to fly Cessnas out at the airport. So on our first date he says, “I want to show you the greater Cedar Rapids area like you've never seen it.” And he takes me up and we go a little way out of town and we do figure eights over the cornfields and we fly down low and we chase some steers across a pasture and we swoop up and ruffle the tops of some water oaks and we go and do a lazy ring-around at the grain ele­vator, and he's saying, Look at this, look at that, look what there is to see, Loretta. And he makes the Cessna leap and soar and he laughs and touches my hand to make sure I'm noticing all this. And what I'm seeing is this grown-up child of a man pedaling real fast on a trike and showing off for his girl, and I like that. I want to reach over and tousle his hair. And he'll take me out to the garage sometimes and show me what he's done. Even still. Even a few days ago. Look Loretta. I'm putting her skin on.

But it's not the plane in the garage I'm jealous of. I wish it was just that. I think about how he still shows me sometimes what he's done and then I think of the woman he must be seeing and then I think again about him in that Cessna on our first date and he sees something off to his left and he lets out a little cry of delight and he doesn't say “Look” yet. Instead, he pulls us onto our side and we loop around and we're flying in the opposite direction and he's leaning over me and he says “There, Loretta,” and I can see the sun in a thousand flakes on a little pond out in the middle of a pasture. “I'll always turn us around for you,” he says to me and he means because of my eye. He took the news of my glass eye without a flinch even before he asked me on this date, and he even said it just made him realize how beautiful my other eye was.

But he can talk mean. And he can go to bed with some other woman. This is something I know from all the experience I've had with how these things go. And from the fact that he washed the sheets the other day without telling me. From our very own bed. This is a bad sign.

I'm thinking all this and I find my fingers moving faintly under the covers. Taking it all down. It's a familiar story to them. And then they stop. Because there's a silence in my head. And tears starting to come. I didn't tousle his hair when I first had the urge. I waited till the first time we made love, which was on our wedding night, which was the way I wanted it, which was still the way it was pretty much done in our circle in Cedar Rapids, even though it was the early seventies and everywhere else things were pretty loose. And on this night of my eye jumping out, I realize something about those ten or twelve months that I said, No. No, not till we're married, Roy. I realize that was the last time I really felt I had some control over my life. It was very nice, to tell the truth, those months with Roy before the marriage. Not that I didn't want to put my hands in his hair and all over him. But the holding on to my life was better.

Now I turn in the bed and he has his back to me and he's snoring softly and I reach out my hand to his head, but I don't quite touch him. His hair is the color of those galloping steers. And it's matted and swirled like them too. And I still want to take the tips of my fingers and furrow them through. Does she do that too? Now I want to furrow through like a plow. Like a sharp, hard plow blade. Somebody's been in this bed. Maybe this very day. I hold back a cry. I lie flat on my back and I look into the dark above me and I think of my glass eye watching the flash of red. My face burns like it should be setting off all the alarms. My eye. I know from countless cases that marriages can blow up on you from no more than this, some sheets in the washer and some suspicious kindness. I don't want to do it that way. And suddenly I have a plan.

The next night Roy is in the bathroom with the door closed. He's hiking his throat and passing wind in plaintive little moos—he has never passed wind in my presence in all the years we've been married, a thing I sometimes credit him for and sometimes blame him for. He either respects me or he has no sense of closeness to me. But I can hear him through the door of the master bathroom and I'm ready to act, but first, on an impulse, I pull back the quilt and look closely at the sheets. They haven't been washed. I bend to them and I sniff and sniff and I'm trying to catch a whiff of her perfume or her sex, but there's nothing but the second-day fade of Tide. Then the sounds end in the bathroom and I straighten and I've prepared a glass of water—a simple, clear drinking glass—and I pick it up and wait.

Roy comes out buttoned to the throat in his pajamas and ready for sleep, and he doesn't look at me right away. He goes to his side of the bed and he pulls back the quilt and he plumps the pillow. Then he realizes I'm not doing the same and he looks up. When I have his attention, though I make it seem I'm oblivious to him, I reach up and press and pluck and out comes my glass eye. I carefully launch it into the surface of the water, and though my face is turned away, Roy and the far side of the room ripple and then clarify and its like he's rising up but it's really my eye sinking and Roy rises, gaping, and then I've settled at the bottom of the glass and I'm looking at him from there, clear and steady.

“Loretta, what are you doing?”

“I called the doctor. He said to give my socket a little rest at night.”

I don't like the way Roy shrugs, like he's saying it doesn't make any difference anyway. But that's what we've come to, Roy and me. So he climbs into bed and I carefully position my glass of water on the nightstand. I can see the whole bed from there. I've even put a vase of flowers on the stand, as well, to make the glass a little less conspicuous. He has not noticed the flowers.

Then the lights are out and we're lying side by side, and Roy hasn't turned his back to me yet. We're both lying with our faces up and our eyes are closed, and of course I'm seeing all of this. And I don't expect to be so moved by it, but I am. The covers are pulled up to our throats and our two faces float side by side in the dim light, drifting into unconsciousness together, Roy and me, with all we've been through, the flying around over Iowa, the living in a house. And even the fighting, getting all worked up together. There was even some sense of closeness about that. So there we lie, very quiet, in profile, only my good eye showing, and there's a land of sweet feeling in me about what I'm seeing, and a sudden sad feeling about what I'm doing. I almost fish my eye out of the glass of water and put it back in my head and keep it there. But I don't. I have to know. Things have popped out of their socket and I have to see.

The night was odd. I slept but I didn't sleep. I dreamed but I didn't dream. The only thing in my head, no matter how far deep I went in my sleep, was Roy and me lying beside each other, him putting his back to me pretty quick but turning to me again later in the night and even letting a sleeping arm fall around my quilted waist for a time, a gesture that seemed so natural that I wonder how many of these unconscious embraces there were that I never knew I got.

In the morning, I put my eye back in and I went to work and Roy went to his plane and, at some point, to this other woman. Or she came to him. But I wasn't quite ready to deal with that. I had to get Roy used to the eye in the glass. And so it went on like this for a week and then two, and one night I thought I smelled some cheap perfume in my bed and the next day I came home from work and found the sheets washed again, and then I knew it was time.

That night, while Roy was farting in private, I put the glass of water with my eye right in front of the flower vase and arranged the flowers to dangle down over the top of the glass. And in the morning I got up early and whispered to Roy that I had to get to the court to transcribe some notes and I put my sunglasses on and I went out, my glass eye still sitting on the night table.

It wasn't easy driving. I'm glad he just slept for a while or I might have killed myself on the highway. But it was hard enough just watching him turn on his back, his hair matted and cowlicked. He's still a handsome man. He draped a forearm over his eyes to block the morning sun coming through the cracks in the blinds. And he moved his legs and a horn blared at me and I was drifting into the next lane, drifting toward the movement of Roy's legs. I jerked the car back and looked in the rearview mirror and my face was there, masked by the blank stare of my sunglasses. I knew what was underneath, and the sunglasses wouldn't do in court.

So I stopped at a drugstore a block from the court building. There were some choices to cover my socket: white gauze stick-ons; flesh-colored stick-ons; a cloth patch with a band to go around the head, all in white with tiny pink flowers, like a baby's pajamas; a black eye-patch with a black strap, like from a pirate movie. But I was the audience, not the movie, and though Roy was still sleeping, he was getting restless, his head angled back now and his mouth wide open, his legs slowly swimming under the covers. Roy was the star of this movie and he was ready for his big scene. I grabbed a box of flesh-colored stick-ons and took them to the counter and a young woman was there, rather pretty but still struggling with pimples at her juiced up stage of life, and I wondered how old the woman was who would come before my waiting eye. This young?