Two White Queens and the One-Eyed Jack

by Heidi von Palleske

  “How does he do it?” Miss Argyle squealed. Although she had ceased to be Miss Argyle some time ago and had become Jean. Teammates now, and so first names were fine, just fine!

  “Can’t touch us!” Johnny replied, doing a premature victory dance. “This year the cup is ours!”

  “All because of you, John Jr.”

  John Jr. He had outgrown Johnny, even though his mother still called him that, and yet John Jr. didn’t quite work for him, either. He may have started to spend more time with his dad but, although he liked the newly found closeness, he hardly felt like his younger clone.

  “I was thinking …” he tried it out for them, “I was thinking I would like to be called Jack. You know, it’s another way of saying John, and Johnny is just, well, you know, just too kiddy.”

  “Tell you what,” his dad said, smirking, “you get another two strikes and we will call you anything!”

  “Anything but late for dinner!” Jean joked and the other fellers laughed, too. How they all loved her!

  Johnny, or rather Jack, knew he would make the next two strikes. Monocular vision was an asset for anything requiring aim. Shooting darts, pool, and archery were all easy for him. And now bowling. Maybe Siegfried was right all those years ago. One eye looks ahead and the other, the blind eye, looks within. The blind eye knows. It is the one that places the ball while the other sees where it should Strrrr-rike!

  “One more and your name is Jack! Forever Jack from the moment they hand over the cup!”

  “Doesn’t matter, we’ve already won the championship. There’s no catching us now! Better get used to calling me Jack from this moment on!” Jack laughed, happy to be free of his old name. Yes, he was a Jack, through and through. Happy to be rid of Johnny.

  “Yeah, but sometimes it’s not enough to just win. Sometimes you have to destroy the competition.”

  “Oh, John, you should have been in something more competitive than the school system. You’ve got the killer instinct!” Miss Argyle exclaimed.

  Jack picked up the ball. Slipped his fingers into the holes, readied himself. He took two steps back, lifted the ball in front of his face and focused on where the ball should be placed, down the long lane. He could see it. He brought his right leg behind himself, looking almost graceful in this pose, as he held it for one, two, three seconds. But then he thought he saw something. Something on the glass eye side. He had an inner vision. There his dad and Miss Argyle, Jean, sat safely on his blind side, but he knew, he knew that there was something else going on. Something other than mere team spirit. He moved his back leg farther behind and then swooped it over so that he pirouetted and stood there, ball before his face, in front of his father and his former grade one teacher. What was it? Not an embrace. Nothing so obvious. No, it was far more dangerous because it was so casual, so accepted by all. It was clear an arrangement had been going on for some time. There was Jean, taking a sip of his father’s drink, and his father, sitting, one lanky leg crossed over the other, but in such a way that their knees touched. And then there was his arm draped loosely on the back of her chair as though that is where his arm has always belonged, had always been.

  Silence. The team waited.

  “Go on, lad, take your last turn,” his father’s pal said, his stomach rolling over the top of his belt, his shirt only half tucked in.

  Jack laughed. He kissed the ball. But just when they thought he was going to finish up with his final strike, he walked over to the team. He stood as tall as he could and looked down on the sitting pair. Jean shifted a bit. Moved her knee away.

  “I already won your cup for you. You’re the team captain, Dad. If you want to destroy, I think you might be the better man for it. So why don’t you just take the last turn?”

  He dropped the ball. Hard. Into his father’s lap. John Sr. couldn’t help but wince as it hit his jewels.

  The only place Jack wanted to be was at his friend’s house. Gareth’s home. Sure, they hadn’t been as close since they started high school, but still, there were all those years. The shared comic books, the giggles, the make-believe. Would it be strange to just show up at this late hour? To suggest they have a Coke together and just hang out. He didn’t want to go home. Didn’t want to show up there without his father and raise suspicions.

  But perhaps his mother already knew. Didn’t she get all quiet on bowling nights? Practically throwing dinner on the table and eating without the pleasure of small talk and niceties. Every Thursday it was the same: a quick casserole, either tuna or chicken, with an iceberg lettuce side salad, and then a bowl of ice cream scooped from the carton. On Thursdays there were no butter tarts or deep-dish pies, no Kuchen or meringues like the other nights of the week. All the other nights his mother delighted in putting her latest creations on the table. Two veggies, potatoes done in a variety of ways, steak, meat pies, knackwurst.… But on Thursdays, the food was very, very North American, prepared and slopped onto plates. Yes, of course she knew.

  Which came first? His father’s distraction or his mother’s detachment? Did she already suspect something the first time they had gone to Germany? Or did his father suspect that his wife’s heart had always been elsewhere and so he had to try to find some attraction away from her just to heal his bruised ego? Perhaps he needed to feel that middle age hadn’t taken ahold of him and so he looked for attention, some harmless flirtation, from the opposite sex. The prettier, the better. And who was prettier than Miss Argyle?

  Of course, Jack couldn’t go home. Home wasn’t even home anymore. The Christmas dinners, the oversized tree, the holidays, the evening dinners, it all seemed no more than a charade to keep the lie alive and to keep the children happy.

  But he wasn’t happy. If both of his parents found love elsewhere, he should be happy for them, but he couldn’t be because every hope and dream of eternal love, every possibility of it, had been shattered by their selfishness.

  Of course, he couldn’t go home. But Gareth’s house was perhaps not the best place to be, either. His parents always seemed more like a pair, better suited than his parents had ever been. Didn’t they go on weekly dates? Together! Yeah, Gareth had it made compared to him. A happy home, a mother who worked and baked cookies, a father who loved his mother, an older brother who worked at the cinema and got him in for free, and no mean older sisters … so if he had so much more, then why did fate have Jack fall from the tree and not Gareth?

  It was all a lie. True love, fate, destiny. Fairy tales for adults so that they could get through the day. Because the truth was, the truth was that it was all pointless. As pointless as a bowling tournament.

  “What do you mean you don’t know where he is? How could you just lose our son?” Hilda yelled at him.

  “Well, he’s hardly a little boy now. He’ll be fine. He’ll find his way home. We just had a little disagreement.”

  “A disagreement? At bowling?”

  John sighed and collapsed onto the couch. He could stay up reading, waiting for John Jr. — no, Jack — to return and, providing Hilda went to bed, he could have a word with him man to man and convince him that he had mistaken friendly team spirit for something else. But whom was he protecting in doing that? His guile was a shield to protect whom, exactly? Him and his structured world, with a family, a wife, and a girlfriend on the side? Miss Argyle and her reputation in the community and with the school board? Or his wife, Hilda, who had been a stranger to him in bed for so long that it was hard to think of her as anything but a mother and a roommate. Or was he protecting his son from the muckiness of the adult world? He could easily tell a lie and leave him the security of family. After all, hadn’t he been the last man out for so long? A misfit with a misfitting eye. Even in the discomfort of the situation, John had to chuckle at that one.

  “What did you argue about?” Hilda persisted.

  Her accent irritated him. How was it possible that at one time it was so charming? Her funny emphasis. Her direct speech, her back-of-the-throat sounds that were almost
a purr. Once those things trapped him and now he could not abide the sound of her voice. Of course, everything about her irritated him because she just wasn’t Jean.

  John didn’t even know how the affair started. It was all so innocent at first. Harmless fun, really. In fact, he still felt love for Hilda when it started. Jean was there one night, bowling with some girlfriends, and none of them were any good at all. She was part of a clutch of young women laughing. But the joy was intoxicating. Laughter was something he hadn’t heard since his son had lost his eye. And there it was, like bells ringing in the air and circling all around him. He found himself smiling. Smiling! For a moment all that existed was their laughter, their silliness, their attention. He rolled his ball down and it hit all but two pins, one on either side. One of the other girls, not Jean, had called over, “Good luck getting those two.”

  “You don’t think I can?” he’d challenged back.

  “No, they are so widely spread apart!”

  And there it was, the first innuendo. Except it wasn’t Jean. But Jean had looked at him when her friend said that and she smiled, shyly. They knew each other, outside the bowling alley. He was a school inspector and she was a teacher. Apart from the year his son was in her class when they would meet during the scheduled parent-teacher interviews, he also saw her in a work setting where he had the upper hand as her performance inspector. On those visits, she would be sitting primly behind her desk at the front of the class while he sat in, usually at the back, for the lesson. Then he would walk up and down the aisles, asking the children to put their hands on their desks so he could make sure they were clean, sometimes pausing to quiz a child on something he or she should know. And always he had a ruler in his hand, as though he could, at any moment, give someone a stinging thwack. If only he had his handy ruler now!

  “I’m very good at dealing with spread … pins,” he said, picking up the ball, and, as he looked at the younger women, he slowly and deliberately eased his fingers into the holes of the hard, reddish ball. He moved them slowly in and out a couple of times.

  “Tight fit.” He had smiled at them, in a boyish way, without a care in the world.

  Two steps back and then a little twinkle-toed run up and he released the ball. It sailed down the lane, looking like it would roll right down the centre, clean between the two pins. But at the last moment, it curved and took out the pin on the right. The pin closer to the girls’ lane.

  “Aw, too bad!” That time it had been Jean teasing.

  “I still have one ball left.”

  And the three had giggled. “Let’s hope you have two, sugar!”

  The women had then joined him and his mates for french fries and drinks. Jean Argyle had taken off her bowling shoes to rub her instep.

  “I have such high arches. I have this problem with lots of shoes. It’s my insteps, see? They are like ballerina feet, really.”

  And it had been then, when he looked at those high arches, at the perfect instep of her narrow foot, that he felt the first stirrings in a very long time. When was the last time he had looked at Hilda and felt a tingle in his groin or had an unexpected, spontaneous swelling? Hard to do that when she was always running around to ophthalmologist appointments, cleaning fake eyes, and putting eyedrops into their boy’s eye, always then describing it to him in the greatest detail. Why, when she could just do it and keep quiet about it, did she have to describe it all to him? Then there was her secret crying. He tried to ignore it, hoping it would go away. Hoping that his indifference wasn’t the cause. He wasn’t indifferent, though — he was overwhelmed. It seemed that if they had any joy at all, it was a betrayal to the suffering and teasing their son endured. And so all emotional intimacy had been lost, all closeness denied, and any attraction erased, until it was only grief that bound them.

  By the time Jack had a proper eye, a glass eye, things had just gone too far. He had rubbed those perfect arches too many times and his massaging fingers had made their way up the tight calves to her knees. When his teammates were up, his hand would venture farther, under the hem of her skirt, to the rim of her stockings. She said nothing, stared straight ahead at the bowling action, but she never took his hand away. And so, he pretended to look at his teammates while secretly he walked his fingers to the start of her panties. She sat a bit more forward, opened her thighs a bit, encouraging. He pulled away the material and felt the outline of her cunt.

  It had become a weekly game for them. Her keeping the score and him sitting beside her, telling his mates that she still didn’t understand the scorecard and he was helping her get it just right. Then, when they were up, her knee would move to touch his and he knew that she was ready to play. She wanted his hand to explore more and more. She wanted it to climb higher up her skirt. She yearned for danger. She wanted his fingers inside her. And every time she seemed wetter and wetter to him. Until finally, finally, one evening, she said that her car was in the shop and it was late and she was afraid to walk home at night in case someone accosted her or took advantage. So he acted chivalrously and offered her a drive home.

  It was just supposed to be a bit of fun. A distraction, that’s all it was! It wasn’t that he didn’t love Hilda, it’s just that the Hilda he loved seemed so very far away from him. Duty had taken his lover and had given him a partner instead. How could he ever possibly say to her that he no longer wanted to be her husband, but he would love to run away from the worries that were drowning them, he would love to have a little room somewhere where he could rediscover her as a lover, where he would love to fuck her as he had in the early days. But, as that would not and could not be, he had found a replacement. A keener. A woman who wore cashmere and pearls and straight skirts to her knee and, under all that, there was a wet, wet cunt encouraging him with anticipation and secret desire. A woman who wasn’t afraid to push his hand higher and higher and higher still, all the while writing down scores, smiling at his mates and telling stories of the goings on in primary school.

  If only Hilda could be so naughty.

  It should be easy to have both. To not give anything away and to have it all! But as time went on, and the affair escalated, he couldn’t help but resent that Hilda just wasn’t Jean. She wasn’t rushing into their bedroom for anything other than sleep. She wasn’t hanging on his every word, telling him how clever he was. Yes, he resented Hilda because she no longer looked at him with wonder. No longer trembled with want. No longer shut out all other concerns when he was with her. When he got promoted to school superintendent she didn’t say, “That’s amazing,” as Jean had. No, all she asked was how much more money they would be making because replacing glass eyes could be expensive.

  “What did you argue about?” she asked for the third time.

  “The bowling balls. He had one that was too small. I wanted him to use mine.”

  Hilda stared at him.

  “Really?”

  “Yes, really! You know I am a bit of a perfectionist when it comes to choosing the perfect bowling ball!” He was shouting. It took them both by surprise.

  “Well, if you love your bowling ball so much, why don’t you just fuck it? It has holes that are big enough for your little pee-pee, I’m sure.”

  Thank you! Oh, God, thank you! That was all he could think. Thank you for finally being so vile that I can leave you with a clear conscience.

  He was now Jack. It was decided. He would never go back to being Johnny or John. He was now independent, separate from his parents and his bitchy sisters. He was free. Free and terribly sad.

  Jack sat on Tristan’s bed, surrounded by movie posters, actors’ pictures, and autographs that were tacked up, neatly, on his walls. He had arrived an hour before, found out that Gareth had gone out with other friends and, when he turned to leave, Tristan asked if, perhaps, he wanted to hang out.

  “God, you must really love films.”

  “What do you think that each of these filmmakers has in common?”

  “They all made a shit-ton of money in Holly
wood?” Jack suggested.

  Tristan laughed, leaned back into his pillows, and crossed his arms.

  “You and I have more in common than you and Gareth. We’re both blind in one eye.”

  “I am not blind in one eye; I have one eye missing. You still have yours. There’s a difference.”

  Tristan shrugged. Semantics, he thought to himself. What was the difference if an unmoving glass stand-in was in Jack’s head and a symbolistic but useless real eye was in his? Neither of them would ever understand the magic of 3D.

  “Has having only one affected … you know?” Jack asked.

  “What? No, I don’t know.”

  “Getting a girlfriend?”

  “I’ve never had a problem getting interest, but then, I can get anyone into the cinema for free so I guess I have a leg up on you!”

  How was it that Tristan was so easy about it all? So nonchalant about his monocular vision when it was a constant source of despair for Jack? He wanted to see things, everything, in a balanced, even, and symmetrical way.

  “Which do you think is a better name for me? John or Jack?”

  Tristan narrowed his gaze and thought for what seemed an eternity.

  “Jack,” he finally said. “Definitely Jack. No doubt at all!”

  “Cool,” Jack agreed as he relaxed back into the pillows. “I think my parents might divorce.”

  “Aw, that sucks. Your poor dad, your mom is so hot.”

  Jack looked at Tristan with shock and disdain. Was he being antagonistic or was he just crazy? How was his mother hot?

  “I mean, come on! She has a voice like Marlene Dietrich. Who wouldn’t find that hot? When I was twelve or so and your mother would say, ‘Come here, little Tristan,’ I was like jelly. I didn’t know if she was a spy or something! For real. God, she’s like a cross between Marlene Dietrich and Hildegard Knef!”

  “I don’t even know who those people are.”

  “Then your education starts here!”

  Tristan pulled out all his books about films. He showed Jack his cameras, a collection that included a 1955 Hasselblad from Germany, a Minolta Hi-Matic 7s, and a Yashica Electro 35.