Tabloid Dreams (3 page)

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.

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.

“Boy Born with Tattoo
of Elvis”

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.

The other boyfriend who knew about the tattoo didn't get jealous and I laid there on the sofa bed that night and from the next room I heard him moaning and laughing and moaning and laughing and I knew Mama was regretting his knowing and when they was done, this guy started singing some Elvis song, but I put the pillow around my head and I hummed something else, “Saint James Infirmary” or something like that.

And she almost never does this, but after they was finished in there, she come in to me. We have a shotgun house with shutters that close us up tight and the only place I've got is on the sofa bed in the living room, and the next room through—the path that a shotgun blast would follow from the front door to the back, which is how these houses got their name—the next room through was her bedroom and then there was the little hall with the bathroom and then the kitchen and the back door. One of her jealous boyfriends actually did fire through the house and the doors happened to be open, but it was a blunt-nose pistol and the bullet didn't make it all the way through the house, being as there was another boyfriend standing in one of the open doors along the way. Mama come in to me that night, too, cause I'd seen it all, I carried the smell of cordite around inside me for a week after.

So she come in to me after she'd done with this boyfriend who'd seen Elvis on my chest and she was smelling like the corner of some empty warehouse and I was laying there on my back and she come in and cooed a little and took me by the ears and fiddled with them like they was on crooked and she was straightening them and then her hands went down and smoothed flat the collar of my black T-shirt that I was sleeping in, but she couldn't undo what had been done. This guy had seen Elvis on me. She had tears in her eyes and I started wondering again if she was ashamed of me, if she thought I did something wrong, like I deliberately let this face of Elvis come upon me and that was a hurtful thing I did to her. But then she always said something that confused me about that. “How can you love a fool such as I?” she said to me that night.

It's a good question, I think. I think Elvis sold about two million records of a song by a name like that. But she meant it. And I didn't say anything to her. She waited for me to say oh Mama I love you I do. But she smelled like a stain on a riverfront wall and she never come in like this when things was normal and nobody'd seen me, and maybe she didn't know where my daddy was or maybe even who he was but he sure wasn't the guy in there right now and he wasn't going to be the next one either or the next and the few times I said anything about it, she told me she can't help falling in love.

But I didn't buy that. I couldn't. Still, I know what I'm supposed to feel for my mama: Elvis collapsed three times at the funeral for Gladys. But I'm not Elvis, and I'd stand real steady at a time like that, I think. Nothing could make me fall down. I would never fall down.

And this little scene after the second guy saw me was in that same year, when I was twelve. Now I'm sixteen. Just turned. And her birthday present for me was to bring home a new boyfriend from the bar where she works, a guy who looks like I'd imagine Colonel Parker to look. I never saw a photo of Parker, the man who took half of every dollar Elvis ever earned, but this guy with Mama had a jowly square face and hair the gray of the river on a day when a hurricane was fumbling toward us and he made no sounds in the night at all and this should have been a little better, some kind of little present after all. But Mama made sounds, and I'd gotten so used to them over the years I could always kind of ignore them and listen—if I chose to listen at all—to the men, how foolish they were, braying and wailing and whooping. At least Mama had them jumping through hoops: I could think that. At least Mama had them where she wanted them. But this new guy was silent and I hated him for that—he didn't like her enough, the goddamn fool—and I hated him for making me hear her again, the panting, like she was out of breath, panting that turned into a little moan and another and it was like a pulse, her moans, again and again, and I finally had sense enough to go out. But I'd heard too much already. Last night, it was.

But I don't care now. Tina come up to me in the hall this morning at the school and she said “I heard it was your birthday yesterday” and I said “It was” and she said “Why don't you ever talk with me, since I can't keep my eyes off you in class and you can see that very well” and I said “I don't talk real good” and she said “You don't have to” and I said “Are you lonesome tonight?” and she said “Yes” and then I told her to meet me at a certain empty warehouse on the river and we could talk and she said “I thought you weren't a good talker” and I said “I'm not” and she said “Okay.” And now I have to think what I'm going to do about my chest.

Mama has worked hard to keep Elvis a secret. Mama even gets me a note from a preacher every year that it's against our religion to shower with other people. That keeps me hidden in phys. ed. at school. After that, it's pretty easy. Easy for me. Mama still has the one night a year when the note needs to be done up for the fall and she has to take the preacher into the next room. But I don't feel guilty about that. Not that one. It's like her putting her body between me and somebody who wants to touch me where they shouldn't. I don't mean the preacher. I mean anybody who'd look at my tattoo. That's how I feel it.

Because Elvis's skin is mine. His face is in the very center of my chest and it's turned a little to the left and angled down and his mouth is open in that heavy-lipped way of his, singing some sorrowful word, but his lips are not quite open as much as you'd think they should be in order to make that thick sound of his, and his hair is all black with the heavenly ink of the tattoo and a lock of it falls on his forehead and his lips are blushed and his cheeks are blushed and the twists of his ear are there and the line of his nose and chin and cheek, and his eyes are deep and dark, all these are done in the stain of a million invisible punctures, but all the rest, the broad forehead except for that lock of hair, his temples and his cheeks and chin, the flesh of him, is my flesh.

I want to touch Tina. She's very small and her face is as sharp and fine as the little lines in Elvis's ear and her hair is dark and thick and I want to lie beneath her and pull it around my face, and her eyes are a big surprise because they're blue, a dark, flat blue like I'd think suede would be if it was blue. I want to hold her and that makes my skin feel very strange, touchy, like if I put my hands on my chest I could wipe my skin right off. Tattoo and all. Not that I think that would happen. It's just the way my skin thinks about itself when I have Tina in my mind. And you'd think there'd be some big decision to make about this. But now that the time is here, it comes real easy. I will show her who I am tonight. I will show her my tattoo.

Mama used to tell me a story. When nobody was in the house and I was going to sleep, she'd come and sit beside me and she'd say do I want to hear a story and I'd say yes, because this was when I was a little kid, and she'd say, “Once upon a time there was a young woman who lived in an exotic faraway place where it was so hot in the summers that the walls in the houses would sweat. She wasn't no princess, no Cinderella either, but she knew that there was something special going to happen in her life. She was sweet and pure and the only boy who ever touched her was a great prince, a boy who would one day be the King, and he touched her only with his voice, his words would touch her and she could keep all her own secrets and know his too and nothing ever had to get messy. But then one night an evil spirit come in to her and made things real complicated and she knew that she was never going to be the same, except then a miracle happened. She gave birth to a child and he come into the world bearing the face of the prince who was now the King, the prince who had loved her with his words, and after that, no matter how bad things got, she could look at her son and see the part of her that once was.”

This was the story Mama used to tell me and all I ever knew to do at the end was to say to her not to cry. But finally I stopped saying even that. I asked her once to tell me more of the story. “What happened to the boy?” I asked her and she looked at me like I was some sailor off a boat from a distant country and she didn't even know what language I was talking.

So tonight I go out of the house and around the back and in through the kitchen to get to the bathroom. She and the Colonel Parker guy are in the bedroom and I never go in there. Never. Before I step in to wash up I pause by her door and there's a rustling inside and some low talk and I give the door a heavy-lipped little sneer and a tree roach is poised on the door jamb near the knob and even he has sense enough to turn away and hustle off. So I click the bathroom door shut as soft as I can and I pull the cord overhead and the bulb pisses light down on me and I don't look at myself in the mirror but bend right to the basin and wash up for Tina and there's this fumbling around in my chest that's going on and finally I'm ready. I turn off the light and open the door and there's Mama just come out of her room and she jumps back and her sateen robe falls open and I lower my eyes right away and she says you scared me and I don't look at her or say nothing to her and Elvis might could sing about the shaking inside me but I for sure can't say anything about it and I push past her. “Honey?” she asks after me.

I slam the back door and I beat it down the street toward the river and it's August so it's still light out but the sun is softer this time of day and I'm glad for that. I start trying to concentrate on Tina waiting for me and I want the light and I want it to be soft and I keep thinking about how she says I don't have to talk and that makes me feel better and it makes me think that I'm right about Tina. And thinking that, I start to feel the eyes on me. I'm going along a street of shotguns that are like them twins you see in pictures that are joined at the hip and the stoops all have people sitting and catching the early-night sun and maybe a little breeze off the river and the men are smoking and the women are in their bare feet and they all are looking at me as I pass and they know the sight of me cause I been coming by here for a long time and they always say Hi.

So they know enough to see the difference in me. They know I got something on my mind now. They can see things like that. Most of them along here are black folks and Elvis had a special feel for them. They taught him his music. He always said that. And they know by just looking at me that I'm thinking about Tina. They smile at me and say, Evening, and I dip my head when they do because I don't want them to think I don't appreciate who they are but it makes me feel real funny this night because they're right. I'm thinking of the looks she says she's been giving me and I can see her eyes on me from across the classroom and they are flat blue and when they fix on me they don't move, they always wait for me to turn away, and I always do, and now I think maybe she's been seeing as much about me as these folks on the stoops. Maybe more. I think maybe when I show her who I am, she'll just say real low, but in wonder, “I knew it all along.”

Then I'm past Pelican Liquors and the boarded up Piggly Wiggly and a bottle gang is shaping up for the evening on the next corner and they lift their paper bags to me and I just hurry on and I can see a containership slipping by at the far end of the street and I have to keep myself from running. I walk. I don't want to be sweating a lot when I get there. I just walk. But walking makes my mind turn. Mama's robe falls open and I look away as quick as I can but I see the center of her chest like you sometimes see the light after you turn it off, she comes out of her bedroom and her robe falls open and I see the hollow of her chest, nothing more, and when I turn away I can still see her chest and it's naked white and I wonder why Elvis didn't appear there. She could've kept her own secret then and known his too, and there wouldn't never had to be nobody else involved in the whole thing.

I'm walking real slow now. I even stop. The ship has passed and it looks like the street up ahead just runs off into nothing. I can't see the river. But I know it's there and the warehouse is not far now and I hear a sound nearby and I leap a little inside and I turn and it ain't nothing but an old hound up on its back legs trying to get into a trash can. I watch him for a long time and he turns his head once, one of his ears flopping over his nose, and then he goes on trying to get in, though it doesn't look like he ever will.