Robert Butler: Tabloid Dreams

They make the first call for court and I go out of the room and there’s only this empty bed before me. I have not filled this bed either, I realize. I have climbed into this thing and lain, still and passionless, for years. The image of that floats in me with every step I take, every corner I turn in these corridors.

And then I am in my place before my machine and I am ready to think with my hands. There is a soft murmur of voices nearby, from the gallery, and we wait and the bailiff speaks and we all rise, and there is only sunlight creeping in my head. Thin stripes of sun from the blinds, moving slaunchwise across the bed, too slow to follow in the moment, but clear, also, in the longer minutes, like the hand on a clock moving.

I’m in a quicker place. My hands fly now. A woman is fed up. She wants out. She’s sitting on the stand and she has a moon face and puffy eyes and she’s near enough that I can almost reach out and touch her. There are children and she wants complete custody. Roy and me never had children and we never figured out why. By the time it occurred to us that this was so, we weren’t caring anymore.

At the very moment that I think this, there’s a pause for tears on the stand and I feel my hands write, A sad story, and it’s about me, I think. Nobody’s said those words in the courtroom. I tell my hands to pay attention. The bed before me is empty. The sun is gone from it. A tissue box passes from the judge to the woman and I’m writing, You fly in figure eights over sunlight scattered on a pond and then you’re lying on a bed in a dark room and you don’t care to touch and you don’t care that no life at all has come from you.

I lift my hands and flex them, wring them together. Try to squeeze the distraction out of them. A nose brats softly nearby. Pay attention, I tell myself. I put my hands to the keys. The woman says that she’s ready now.

And Roy and his woman stagger into my sight. They’re in a clinch already and they spin across the room. I gasp. Aloud, I know. The judge has a round face too. It rises over the sidebar and I turn the gasp into a cough and hunch over the keys. My hands are afraid of the judge and they listen to the testimony, but the rest of me sees a woman not even thirty with a long, tangled hairdo like she went to bed wet and slept on her head. And she’s got her arms around my husband and now her legs too and she and Roy fall on the bed.

I’m pressing this eye in my head shut. But it’s my eye in the glass I’m wanting to close. I’ve seen enough. He won’t leave me alone, my hands write, the words of the woman on the stand. But then, They rip at each other’s clothes. I will find the bed full of buttons tonight. I open my eye and I can’t hear the words in my hands now but I beg them to behave. “Please don’t,” I whisper, very low, and I’m talking to my hands and I’m talking to my husband and there is anger on the stand to drown me out and I whisper it again, “Don’t. Don’t.”

And they are naked and she’s got a butt that spreads more than mine and she’s got something of a pot. “Flab,” I whisper. But listen to me. Have I got a right to criticize? At least her flab is against Roy’s and he wants it that way and she rises over him and he’s on his back. And he’s on my side of the bed. My side. “Move over,” I say aloud.

“What’s that?” the judge says.

“Can I hear that over?” I say.

The judge turns to the witness. “Please repeat your answer for the stenographer to record it.”

Concentrate. I close my good eye again and I listen to my hands and they’re saying something about a husband who won’t listen, who doesn’t care, and maybe I’m writing down this woman’s testimony and maybe I’m just writing down the words in my own head. But I don’t care either, to tell the truth. I stopped listening too, to tell the truth. The woman is thrashing her tangled hair around and her head is thrown back, her face lifted to the ceiling. I look at Roy. From the water glass beside our bed I look at my husband’s face. His face will tell me.

“He doesn’t care.” I’ve said this aloud, I realize. Roy’s face has told me at once. His mouth is set hard. His eyes are dead.

“Have you missed again?” the judge says.

“Yes, your honor. Is it, ‘He doesn’t care’?”

“You’re right,” the woman on the stand says, her face turning to me eagerly. The judge is a man. Her lawyer is a man. Her husband’s lawyer is a man. She turns to me and she is glad to know someone understands. “You’re right,” she says.

The judge says to her, “We want to know what you said. Not if you agree with what the stenographer thinks she heard.”

She’s talking again, repeating, my hands are working. But then they stop. The woman in my bed has lowered her face and turns to look straight at me. Her eyes widen. Her mouth moves. Roy’s face turns to me too.

And the judge says my name. He’s looking at me too, half risen from his chair. “What’s happening? Are you all right?”

The woman climbs off my husband and off the bed and she’s coming to me, I realize. I rise up from my chair. As if I can confront her now, beat the crap out of her.

The judge says to the two lawyers, “Loretta is my very best stenographer.”

The woman bends and her frizzy hair drapes down and she brings her face near to me, her nose bulging from the curve of my glass.

“What is it, Loretta? Your eye is bothering you?”

“Yes,” I say and I’m glad I chose the stick-on patch that looks like a big Band-aid.

The woman has big eyes the color of dirty engine oil. I growl from looking at them and I put my hand over my eye, but it’s only the patch.

“Can you continue?” the judge asks.

I think of Roy’s dead face. He might put this woman aside. He might still want me. I say, “I don’t know if I can continue.”

“Do you want to try?”

“I don’t know,” I say.

But then the woman’s hand appears out of nowhere and the water blurs and I can see only darkness and then I am eyeball to eyeball with this woman and then the room whirls around and falls over and I’m steady again, but looking sideways at Roy. His face isn’t dead anymore. His mouth is hanging open and his eyes are wide in amazement and I realize that the woman has stuck my eye in her navel like a belly dancer’s jewel.

“Oh no!” I shout.

“What is it?” the judge says.

My eye is approaching Roy’s frozen face.

“My eye,” I say.

Roy can’t snap out of it and I think he knows I’m watching and I am very near him and his face begins slowly to sink. She is standing before him and pushing him down.

“Stop!” I shout.

“We’ll get a replacement for you, Loretta,” the judge says.

“No!” I cry.

“It’s for your good,” the judge says. “You’re obviously in pain. You don’t have to do this if you’re in pain.”

Roy pops back up and he and the judge are side by side in my head. Then Roy’s face angles up and he smiles at her, a smile warm and full of shit.

“I’m in pain,” I say.

“Then stop, Loretta,” the judge says.

Roy’s hand comes at me, snatches my eye, and I am flying into the bedclothes and darkness.

Now there’s only the judge before me. My hand goes up and it touches the patch on my eye. Touches my face. Very gently. “I can leave,” I say.

“Yes,” he says.

And I do.

I carry him on my chest and it’s a real tattoo and he was there like that when I come out of Mama. That was the week after he died, Elvis, and Mama made the mistake of letting folks know about it and there was that one big newspaper story, but she regretted it right away and she was happy that the city papers didn’t pick up on it. It was just as well for her that most people didn’t believe. She covered me up quick. Not more than one or two of her boyfriends ever knew — and there was many more than that come through in these sixteen years. The couple of them who saw me without my shirt and remarked on it thought she’d had it done to me, and she never said nothing about it being there when I was still inside her, and one of them got real jealous, as quite a few of them finally do for one thing or another, this one thinking that she was so much in love with Elvis that she had him tattooed on her son and that meant she was probably thinking about the King when the boyfriend and her was thrashing around on her bed, and she never said nothing to make him think that wasn’t so and he hit her and I just went out the door and off down the street to the river. We live in Algiers, and I was maybe twelve then and I went and sat on a fender pile by the water and watched New Orleans across the way and I think I could hear music that time, some Bourbon Street horn lifting out of the city and coming across the river, and it’s the land of music I like to hear, at times like that. There’s other music in me but his. You see, I’m not Elvis myself. I’m not him reincarnated as that one newspaper tried to make you believe. I didn’t come out of my mama humming “Heartbreak Hotel,” like they said.