The Glass Ocean(58)

            This is the beginning. Beyond doubt it started here. He will always be surrounded by multiple gazes when he works in this room, watched yet not watched; will grow accustomed to knowing that when he is here, he is simultaneously always and never alone. This doubledness is natural; it will become restful in time; in time my father will relax beneath those watching eyes, beneath their gaze he will shape more gazes like them, melting, first, in the slender, red-hot jet of his lamp, a white glass rod from which he will tease forth the form of the bulb or bowl that is the prosthesis itself, carefully measured; then the colored rod (made from smaller, intertwined rods of blue and black and grey, or green and copper, or brown and gold, that William Cloverdale has braided together himself at his furnace), a slice of which will form the iris; then the black flux, comprised of equal parts manganese and iron oxides, with which he will paint the pupil; and then the clear, curved dome of glass that overlays it, the delicate half bubble of faux cornea. When it is completed, he will place this object that is an eye and yet is not, this piece of glass that is and is not flesh, into the crucible for cooling.

            There cannot be any flaws. What is inconvenient in a candy dish or a luster is critical here. A glass eye must not crack. Imagine the consequences! My father does, he sweats and grows anxious at the lamp, imagining. But in the crucible the glass eyes cool carefully, reliably, evenly. They gaze with calm indifference upon my father’s puffing anxiety. He has caught it from Thomas Argument, this mania for flawlessness, and it serves him well in the making of William Cloverdale’s glass eyes.

            • • •

            It is not, of course, the only mania that my father and Thomas Argument share. She rotates in his mind all the time, as he melts the glass in the flame, as he presses and manipulates it, caresses it with his metal sharps and tweezers, paints it with the fine-haired brush, anneals it. This living glass that is warm but not alive, that looks at him without seeing, gazes with the calm, cold indifference of flesh that is not flesh.

            Her gaze, too, seems cold very often now, when it deigns to fall upon him.

            She is against his leaving Thomas Argument although she will not say so. What, after all, can she say? She will not protest aloud, will not tell him. Instead he has to read it in the quality of her turning away from him, which is a new turning away, different somehow from all the other turnings. Her various averted profiles a series of runes for him to decipher. The averted face a palimpsest. And the body. Her face. Her body. Not glass but the actual body, actual flesh, which turns away from him, like pages turning, over and over again. Certainly she is flesh but in her silence she seems almost to become glass. She is so fair, so blond, so cool, so translucent. She glows from the inside, like glass when it is hot. Yet looking into her eyes he sees nothing. This is like glass, too. Glass looks back but it does not recognize. It may be inscribed but it does not read. Runes cannot read themselves. Nor can she.

            It would be best, he’d feel better, if she’d shout angrily, nag him, yell about the money, at least, if nothing else, but she does not. This in itself is a warning, a sign. This indifference to her own fate, which is so closely, so dangerously, even, entwined with his. How can she be indifferent? She just is. She says, Look what Mr. Argument brought me yesterday. Isn’t it nice? By which means he is made to know that despite his action, the visits continue. Inevitably.

            He should forbid them but he doesn’t. To forbid is to accuse, and of what, after all, can he accuse her? Of loneliness? Of boredom? Of missing her lost Papa, he who was everything to her? Is she not allowed to have friends?

            Because as of yet it is all still in his imagination: the whiff of scent which may or may not be familiar; the skirt disappearing, perhaps or perhaps not, behind a door that closes, maybe abruptly, in the High Street; the woman’s laughter that ceases, or so it seems, at his approach. This is all in him, not in or of or from her. And he knows enough to know it. Or, at least, he realizes he does not know what is real and what is imagined, and so, in his actions, he carefully assumes it is all imagined, assumes her innocence, does not accuse. Will never.

            He doesn’t want to make her life worse. That’s not what he wants at all. On the contrary.