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.