Two White Queens and the One-Eyed Jack

by Heidi von Palleske

  “People will look at me and think that I chose the different eye on purpose. Don’t you get it?”

  “But that would be a lie.”

  “So is the glass eye a lie! A bigger lie, in fact, because you try so hard to make it look like a real eye. But it doesn’t function, does it? It isn’t like a fake leg you can walk on, or a fake arm that has a claw on the end for grasping things. It isn’t even like a pacemaker. It sits in the eye socket just for show. It’s for the benefit of other people, the ones looking at me. It makes them feel comfortable. But it isn’t what I want! If it’s about honesty, then you should just stitch up the socket and wear a patch. That would be way more honest.”

  The ocularist stepped back. He had never thought of his profession as dishonest. As trickery. Perhaps the boy was right. It took his breath away. The better made the eye, the more likely it was to deceive the viewer into believing that it functioned. Trick those who gazed into the subject’s eyes into believing that the glass eye was organically set into the eye socket as honestly as the seeing eye was.

  “Then why don’t you do that? Just get an eye patch? Why bother coming all the way here?” Siegfried tried to sound nonchalant, but both Jack and Hilda could hear the hurt in his voice.

  “My mother insists on the trip. Says you are the best and that we need to come for upkeep.”

  “So you do not want to be here?”

  “I didn’t say that. I said that since what you do is just for the sake of appearances, then why not make me an eye that I want? I’m the one wearing it!”

  Siegfried removed the glass eye from Jack’s socket, leaving a fleshy whitish interior, a placeholder over which the glass prosthesis usually sat. The muscles of Jack’s eye socket had moved about it over the years, accepting it as though it were part of his body and, because of that, Jack was experiencing some movement now in his enucleated eye. The fake eye was beginning to follow his real eye. Siegfried examined the socket closely. It was clean, no signs of inflammation or infection. Hilda must have been heeding his instructions well. A cleaning once a week, but if there were any signs of eye gunk, then a morning rinse until the condition passed. Colds, flu, and fevers meant more frequent cleanings, but because the glass had good wetting, the tear fluid could build a regular film onto the glass surface and the glass eye would practically self-clean. Siegfried wondered how often the North American acrylic eyes had to be cleaned. How strange to wear an eye that could not be wetted because fluid could not flow evenly and naturally on a synthetic surface. So unhygienic. So unnatural. And then the scratches on the surface of the plastic eyes. Now that had to be irritating! Those eyes had to be sanded and polished yearly, just to make them look acceptable. Siegfried was sure that those plastic-eye makers (he refused to call them ocularists) would be only too happy to make fake eyes as fashion accessories. Cat’s eyes. Snake’s eyes. Eyes that look like a deck of cards!

  “When you came to me, you wanted an eye that would be a companion to the eye you had. You wanted more comfort. You wanted to not be teased. And you wanted an eye that reflected your soul.”

  “No, I didn’t. I wanted an eye that could see! But that’s never going to happen, is it? So now I want something cool.”

  Jack reached into the drawer and pulled out a handful of stock eyes. Eyes that would never go anywhere. Wasted eyes sitting, unseeing, in a drawer, for what?

  “You don’t even have to make a new one. Why don’t I just sort through some of these and see if I find one I like?”

  “Prêt a porter eyes, you mean?”

  “Sure, I guess.”

  “I will make you a deal. You can see if you like any of these eyes, but I will also make you a new one to match what your seeing eye has become. I need to make an eye that is harder, less innocent and slightly disrespectful. How do you say it? An impertinent eye, yes? But keep your old eye, as well. It still fits you, and perhaps in time, you will return to your true essence. Go ahead, look through the eyes. But not the ones in the middle drawer, okay? Now I will go and have a coffee with your mother.”

  “You think I lost some of my innocence? Well, it’s called growing up,” Jack responded.

  “Then I hope I never do that.”

  Jack laughed. How he had liked all the talk about destiny and purpose when he was younger, but now everything was different. He still wanted to believe that there was a divine reason for his fall. He still wanted to believe that there was a reason for everything and that, by some magical hand, a greater purpose would reveal itself to him. But now he also understood that everyone was just stumbling through life. A father, whom he was just starting to know, had moved out after being with his mother for over twenty years. His sisters were both away at college and there he was, stuck in a country house in the middle of nowhere. Still, there were a few good things. Friends a bike ride away. More freedom. And, of course, Cyclops, his camera. His real other eye. An eye that allowed him to see things in a slightly different way than how he saw things with only his seeing eye. His mom had bought him that camera. Saved up and bought it for his birthday. Made the extra money selling eggs and rabbits.

  Jack sifted through a handful of eyes. His eye was a hazel grey, so an eye with a bit more green would be nice. His father and his sisters had green eyes and so he would have one eye that matched his mother and one that matched the rest of his family. How ironic that his seeing eye was more like his mother’s eye. How ironic and how perfect at the same time.

  Jack regretted how he had spoken to Siegfried. He imagined that he and his mother were now in a small café with the smell of fresh coffee rising from fine German porcelain mugs, with just a splash of thick cream stirred in, until the dark liquid was lightened to a mocha colour. And then there would be a slice of cake — Kuchen — with berries or apples or poppy seeds. And fresh whipped cream to top it all off. But now he had to just sit and wait for them to return with filled bellies and knowing smiles while he sorted through drawers of eyes, looking for a few possibilities. How much more fun it would have been if Siegfried had agreed with him and the three of them could have shopped for the fun eye together!

  When Jack opened the middle drawer he saw organized trays of eyes, labelled by the year. Eye after eye the same colour, the same shape. Even the flecks and details seemed to be echoed, eye after eye. There was something familiar about these eyes. He knew them, knew the glint, the darkness of the pupil, the other thing that one could not put into words. Yes. It was a drawer of glass eyes made to look just like the ocularist’s eyes. Jack looked through them, one after the next, seeing them in chronological order, seeing how each year had engraved its experience on Siegfried’s psyche. One eye had an extra vein of tension or regret, etching ever so lightly over the sclera. Another saw his aging as the white was shot through with a tinge, ever so imperceptible, of yellow. Every eye was a history, a story, of what had happened to the man. And yet there was no language or meaning to it. It spoke to Jack the same way that listening to his mother’s opera did. Of course, his mother understood every lyric of every opera she listened to, but when she would go to explain the context and the story to Jack, he would always protest because he didn’t want to know the literal meaning. He just wanted to feel whatever it was the music was alluding to. Context meant nothing to him. He wanted to understand the world in snapshot emotions. And here they were in every eye the ocularist had created for himself. Like photographs left lying around, waiting for interpretation. But why? Why had he left a record of his life, and in a drawer of glass eyes?

  Jack started to close the drawer but then, after looking over his shoulder to the closed door, he reached in and stole one of the eyes. An eye that was, perhaps, six or seven years old. An eye that looked to have new hope in it. An eye that he must have made shortly after the first time they had visited. Yes, he would rob Siegfried of the memory of their first meeting. He would take it away.

  It was understandable. Yesterday when Jack mentioned that he might want to be an ocularist, Siegfried had told
him that he couldn’t. That it was necessary for an ocularist to have very good eyesight, that it was impossible for someone monocular to do such detailed and exact work because of the depth perception.

  “But it is an asset when I take photos!” Jack had protested.

  “When you use a camera you are using two eyes, your lens and the camera lens. When you shoot a gun, you look through a sight. With all of these things, you have an advantage. You do so because the apparatus provides the second eye. Oculary requires two functioning eyes. That is the sad irony of it. But I hear that your photos are very good.”

  Jack put the hopeful eye of the ocularist into his pocket, then looked for a perfect green-gold eye to contrast his hazel-grey one.

  * * *

  Hilda and Siegfried sat at a small round table. The place was crowded and the heat of all the bodies caused the windows to steam up. Hilda felt claustrophobic in the tight space, aware of how close she had to sit beside Siegfried just to hear his words above the general din.

  “He is in a rebellious stage. I think, perhaps, we let them be children too long and then it is harder to break apart and so they have to be rebels.” Siegfried sounded unaffected by the exchange with Jack, but his decision to not eat cake spoke differently.

  Hilda crossed, then uncrossed, her legs. They were long, shapely, with full calves, and so when she crossed one over the other, the curve from the knee to the ankle was most becoming. A leg man would say that she had gams like Betty Grable.

  “What do you want? Another war so that they grow up as quickly as we had to?”

  Hilda pretended to concentrate on the dessert menu. Cakes of all sorts, mostly tortes. This cake-eating every afternoon would surely show on her body. A moment on the lips, a lifetime on the hips. Still, it was worth it. Those cake bottoms, nowhere near as sweet as North American cakes with their heaps and heaps of white sugar and baking powder, were divine! This was a taste of her youth. The cakes, themselves, were somewhere between a crust of bread and a traditional cake. Then the fruit! Everything from plums to berries. Real cream, not from a can. Hilda thought of how Siegfried would panic if he ever saw, or ever had to use, a spray can of whipping cream. She imagined him struggling with the nozzle, trying to spray the cream out without it going all over the place, as it had with her the first time she tried canned whipping cream. How she had shrieked and her husband, John, had laughed at her and then, taking the can from her, he had sprayed her until it was an out-and-out whipped-cream fight, which led to raucous, crazy sex. How long ago was that? A lifetime.

  Siegfried noted her change of expression, saw her eyes focus away from him, on some distant thought or memory. He had to do it now. Find the strength to bring up the subject of the whispered secret.

  “What do you think your son whispered in my ear? I know you were listening at the door, so do not pretend you were not,” he teased.

  “He probably told you that my marriage is kaput. That I am getting a divorce.”

  Siegfried was taken aback by her blunt admission. There was no coy asking him for a hint, no skirting around the issue. There it was, on the table in front of them, sitting uncomfortably beside the freshly served torte.

  “And are you all right with that?”

  “Of course not. I have put almost twenty years into it. But it is what it is. I can be upset or I can just accept things and move on. I am too old to waste my time obsessing over it.”

  This was her brave front. Her way of saying, Do not worry about me. I am capable. Still, it ate at her that she had stood by him, even as things got complicated. And what was it all for? Twenty years, her best years, gone and never to be returned. She felt robbed by it all.

  “The girls are gone to college and have their own lives. Jack seems to hate me half of the time. I thought that, at least, I had my marriage, but he threw it all away for a poke at a cheap tart in a bowling alley. Bowling, really? Couldn’t he do better than that?”

  “Do you want him back?”

  “No, I could never trust him again. Even if he professed his love to me, even if he were to become passionate again, I would never feel that I was enough for him. You know, it isn’t about the sex. I mean, fine, get it out of your system, have an affair and be done with it. But when you delay that satisfaction it becomes much more. It is all about how someone can possess your mind even if you are with someone else. He ceased to be present long before he actually left.”

  Siegfried sat quietly. How many times had he reread her letters, smelled the envelope, hoping to breathe her in? How many times had he waltzed or foxtrotted with another woman in his arms and his mind had drifted to her? He would imagine her standing across the room, watching him and perhaps feeling jealous. How many times had he hoped and wished that all was not as promised as it seemed in her promised land?

  “Why did you not tell me in your letters?”

  “Oh, because I wanted to bring you joy in the letters. To tell you about the nice little things. Why would I want to write upsetting things? Why give it that much power?”

  “Because we are friends, old friends. And friends share with each other.”

  “When your father’s a war criminal and executed, you learn not to share so much.” Hilda could feel the familiar gripping in her chest.

  “But I am the one who knows all of that. I know your darkest secrets and love you just the same.”

  Silence. The word love had escaped his lips and it hung over them, in the overly busy and cramped café, like a zeppelin. No matter where Siegfried looked the zeppelin loomed over their heads. He had said the word before, but that was different somehow. She was a married woman then.

  The coffees came and he reached for the sugar, his hand brushing past hers. He awkwardly scooped two teaspoonfuls and watched the granules fall from his spoon into the hot liquid where they would melt, each granule no longer being an individual but a part of the whole thing. He stirred and watched his coffee with such intent that Hilda thought that there may be something wrong with it.

  “Everything okay?” she asked him.

  “It is. It is okay.”

  Hilda cut through her torte with her fork, careful that an equal amount of pastry, fruit, custard, and whipped cream balanced on the tines. Every mouthful could be perfect. Why was she concentrating on something so arbitrary as a mouthful of cake? It was easier, perhaps, facing a cake than facing her tenuous future. There was something to committing to the present and living in the moment, as those irritating, meditating Buddhists would say.

  “You see, I have to come to terms that I am just a woman. I am average. Not a modern woman. Not a sexpot and not a career woman. He has left me for a more modern woman. A woman with a career. Unlike me, she has dreams and ambitions, apparently.”

  “Oh? What does she do?”

  “She’s a teacher.”

  “Well, you know what they say: those who cannot do, teach.”

  Hilda laughed and covered her mouth with her hand as she had just taken a bite and did not want to spray him with crumbs and cream. Siegfried reached across with his white linen napkin and wiped a bit of cream from the corner of her mouth.

  “There, now you are perfect again.”

  “The Kuchen is very good. Want to try it?”

  Hilda set out to get the right combination of fruit, cream, and cake once again. She lifted it in an offering, gesturing that Siegfried have the bite. He opened his mouth and she slid her fork between his lips.

  “I think my friend likes you,” Hannah spoke above the sound of the music and general noise of the bar.

  Jack looked across the room to where Sabine, a tall girl three years older than Jack, swayed to the music playing — blasting — from an overhead speaker. Her chestnut hair was parted in the middle and fell, like a curtain, straight to her shoulders, and every once in a while she threw her tresses back so her hair fanned out straight from her head.

  “She’s okay, I guess.”

  Hannah leaned in, pretending to not quite hear him. Jack
breathed in lavender along with the pub’s smell of beer and knackwurst.

  “You smell nice.”

  “Lavender. Very relaxing. It gets rid of stress.”

  “You have a lot of stress?”

  Hannah shook her head. “No, not really. I know lots of ways to relieve stress.”

  Jack shot a glance over at Sabine. A new song, the same moves. The sway, the hair being thrown, a little wiggle of the hips. Jack could see that he wasn’t the only one watching her, but he was the only one she looked at when she opened her eyes from her reverie of the music, singing along to the familiar lyrics of “You Sexy Thing.”

  She was a sexy thing. And very intimidating. She knew every nuance, every move, that could seduce an entire room. She seemed to be a regular; everyone knew her name and kissed her cheeks in greeting. And she kissed everyone back in return. She owned the place, owned the room, owned herself in a way Jack had never seen in young women back home. How comfortable she was with her sexuality. How obvious she was. There was no labelling of “slut” or “flirt” or “bait.” Just a young woman enjoying the movement of her body, without apology or shame.

  “Why did you ask Siegfried if I wanted to come out with you?”

  “I didn’t. He asked us to take you out and show you around. Said that it must be boring for you being around old people like him and your mom.”

  Ah. So Siegfried had planned it all, wanted him out of the way. Wanted an evening alone with his mother. Jack took a big gulp of his beer. And then another. He wouldn’t be allowed to drink for another year yet in Canada, but here it seemed to be no problem. Everyone drank beer like it was water, yet they all seemed to function perfectly fine. Unlike Jack, who was starting to feel the floor move with every beat of the music.

  “I’m not feeling great, I think I need some air.”

  “I will go with you,” Hannah offered, slipping her soft hand into his.