Cora discovers Myra’s tryst with “Elvis” and loses her sunglasses

Cora Rusk discovers Myra Evans with the King in a vision of Graceland, and the encounter destroys the sunglasses through which she has entered that fantasy. The scene converts an imagined refuge into a spectacle of betrayal: when Cora returns to her own bed, the glasses are broken, and she vows to hurt the friend she believes has taken her place.

The vision of Graceland

Cora is transported back into Graceland, where relief, anticipation, and sexual excitement fill her. She moves up a curving staircase to an upstairs hall hung with jungle tapestries, then approaches closed double doors at its far end. Behind them is the King's bedroom, arranged in black and white: black walls, a white shag rug, black drapes, and a black bedspread edged in white trim. The ceiling, painted midnight blue and dotted with electric stars, completes the room's carefully staged dreamlike display.

The grandeur gives way to horror when Cora sees the King on the bed with Myra Evans sitting on top of him. Myra turns to look at Cora as the doors open, while the King keeps his sleepy blue eyes on Myra. The composition makes Cora a witness to an intimacy that excludes her. Her entry into the fantasy has not secured the closeness she desires; instead, the scene places her outside it, watching a friend occupy the center of her imagined world.

The struggle and the broken glasses

Horror gives way to fury, and Cora rushes at Myra, intending to claw at her eyes. Myra reaches out and pulls the sunglasses from Cora's face without breaking the rhythm of her movement. That sudden gesture ends the vision: Cora shuts her eyes in surprise, and when she opens them she is back in her own bed.

The transition leaves a concrete, irreversible consequence. The gold sunglasses lie on the floor with both lenses shattered. Cora tries to fit the pieces back into their streamlined frames, but cannot restore them. Her effort to reassemble the lenses marks the difference between the fantasy's apparent reality and the physical damage that remains after it: whatever the vision's status, the object that had carried her into Graceland is now unusable.

Betrayal and revenge

Cora understands the vision as an act of betrayal by Myra, whom she regards as her friend. She thinks of Myra as having found her own way to Graceland and imagines that she is still making love to the King. Cora's grief over the broken artifact therefore merges with jealousy and personal accusation; the loss is not merely the destruction of a valuable pair of glasses but the apparent theft of a private fantasy by someone close to her.

She warns that she will kill Myra. The threat turns the vision into a new source of real-world danger: the scene ends not with Cora accepting the breakage or questioning what she saw, but with rage directed at her friend. In the wider pattern of Cora's obsession with Elvis and Graceland, the sunglasses' failure exposes how completely the fantasy has shaped her sense of possession and injury. An imagined rival becomes, in Cora's mind, a betrayer who must be punished.