Robert Butler: Tabloid Dreams

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?

I pulled out a twenty-dollar bill and I shoved it at this poor girl, ready to take out this fear on her, and Roy suddenly snaps awake. “What do you hear?” I say.

“Pardon me?” This from the clerk.

“Nothing,” I say to her and Roy cocks his head. “Is it her?”

“Is it who?”

“What?” I say to the clerk. I don’t know what she’s talking about.

The girl shoots me a funny look and works fast at giving me the change and for a moment this seems suspicious. Like she’s late to go see Roy or something. “You going off duty?” I ask her, even though I’m already letting go of this brief, crazy thought.

“No.”

But then it’s suddenly clear that the cock of Roy’s head is him taking a crick out of his neck. He’s moving lazy now. “Not yet,” I say. “You bastard.”

There’s money being forced into my hand. “Count the change yourself. And you’re an old bitch.”

I’m moving away from the register and the girl says, “When I do get off, my boyfriend is here waiting.” I’m out the door and Roy is sitting on the side of the bed wiggling his toes. Smug. He’s watching his toes and he’s feeling smug. I want to drive home right now and find something around the kitchen to hit him with. But at least I realize he isn’t the kind to go hang around a drugstore to pick up a girl with pimples when she gets off work.

I’m in divorce court today and I go in to check my machine. Roy has been gone for a while, off in the bathroom, I think. I sit and load the paper and pull out the receiver in the back. We still use an old paper-punch machine and it makes this real soft, squishy sound under my hands. A nice sound. I roll out a few test words and all of a sudden Roy is there naked before me. He’s still damp and it’s been a long time since he just walked into a room with me while he was naked. Especially in the daylight. And even though it’s just my eye and he doesn’t even know it’s there, I feel for a moment like he’s doing this on purpose, just for me. Then something in me jumps the other way and I get hot: he’s doing it for her, she’s about to walk in. Then the juice goes out of me. I realize it’s for neither of us. He looks around much too casually, and then he scratches his butt and heads for his underwear drawer.

I discover that my hands have been at work. I force my attention away from Roy and I pull up the folds of the steno scroll and I translate it back from the little runts of words I’m trained to put there. He’s naked, I’ve written. He’s standing by the bed and it’s been a long time since I’ve looked at that dangly part. You’ve got a sweet dangly part, old Roy. I wish you’d walk like that for me. But she’s just out of sight. I can feel her. And this part is for her. Some woman knows this better than me now, you smug son of a bitch. Go put your boxers on, I don’t give a damn about your body.

This is a little scary for me. I tear off these words at the next fold and crumple them into my purse. I get up and I stagger down the hallway to our little clerk lounge, and by the time I get there Roy has thrown his clothes on and gone away. The bed is empty. The room is empty. I’m glad for that, and I pour a cup of coffee and I sit down in a Naugahyde chair. And I drink the coffee fast, so that it burns my mouth. I do that on purpose, I think. And then I think I should pour the coffee on my hands and burn them and it will give me an excuse to go home, and I should hurry there before anything can happen, maybe even before she arrives, and I’d come up the drive honking my horn, just in case she was early, and wait, pretending to fumble with my purse or something, waiting for her to slip, undiscovered, out the back door, and then I should go into the house and get my eye and put it back in my head so that I cannot see.

But I don’t. It’s enough for now that my mouth burns and the bed is empty. I convince myself that this is the way it will be all day long. He will touch only his airplane and I will return home this evening and things will go on just the same. That’s what I want now, I think. Briefly.