King of the Crooners

He woke late, rolled over and out of bed. Didn’t notice. I put him in an art deco apartment, marble bathroom, monogrammed robe, and other elements that I adopt from the movies—the high walls without ceilings (shoot low and you don’t need them) of a sound stage.

He noticed while he was brushing his teeth, when he looked up at the mirror. Looked closely: nose, mouth, cheekbones, choir-boy hair falling forward, one lovely white eye.

Did he say Call a doctor a doctor get me a doctor! Perhaps he lived alone. The black eye, the single detail isn’t enough to build the story.

But one can imagine. There’s the obsidian eye, purplish in its depths, and his cornea, retina, iris set in it. He wears a white dinner jacket before the live studio audience, with His Levee Loungers behind him in the bandstand. He leans into the microphone, watching the pretty girls in the first row, their pompadours, their daring twenty-inch hemlines and spectator pumps. Afterward he leaves the stage, lights a cigarette and watches the next act.

Or maybe he wore his fedora low over the eye, half-closed it when he picked up a girl at the Coconut Grove. Hair immaculate, cuffs straight, ironed just so—as if to make up for the bizzare disfigurement with elegance.

But that’s all after he’s adjusted to a new face. It’s the last night that interests me: what did he see?

When he unlocked his door, his hands shook so he could hardly turn the key, and he thought, tomorrow I head for California and the orange groves and a real life in pictures. This city is history. Even if he fell asleep believing it, he woke to find it was too late. He was bound, his eye blackened as a warning. You can’t leave, the city whispered. This is where you belong.

Here parking garages and office buildings crowd people into the traffic. Sleeping bags lie on the sidewalk and panhandlers hold out sticky Styrofoam cups. I’d like to stop seeing it—this city in the present, in the light of a specific date, a time of day: late afternoon. I take his story as a warning against looking too closely, but also as an example. A shadow falls across faces around me, and they begin to fade, even as my eye reflects black in a plate glass window.