Broke Heart Blues

by Joyce Carol Oates

  And the children, who'd become frightened of their father.

  Beginning to trust their mother's friend John Heart. "They're beautiful kids,John told Nola Hesitating as if he had more to say, but couldn't find the words. Or couldn't risk them.

  Do you think you'll ever find the right woman? Dahlia had asked wistfully, the last time they'd spoken on the phone. You've been spoiled--John Heart. The very sound of his name, the old glamour name of his youth, the name of scandalized headlines, made them both laugh. The ice in Dahlia's drink made a sharp tinkling sound as of laughter too.

  In Vegas, you'd see a van in the streets with MR. Flx-lr painted on the sides. A pale yellow van with a look of cheery optimism. The would gaze longingly at it. MR. FIX-IT--who was he?

  Handyman-carpenterplumber.24-HOUR SERVICE. A glimpse of a tanned, muscular forearm against an opened window. Rock music blaring out of the van's windows.

  Johnny wished his mom could call MR. FIX-IT and set things right.

  For always there was something not-quite-right, something needing "fixing." It hadn't occurred to him that MR. FIX-IT was just a man like anybody else, an individual, or possibly a team of individuals, workers, hustling, trying to make a living in what Johnny's grandpa cheerily called the rat race to oblivion, trying to get by.

  Dahlia once said, with angry defensiveness, as if someone had feelings and she felt the need to explain to her children, Everybody's trying to get by, selling themselves in different ways! Some of us just better than others.

  Now he, John Heart, John R. Heart as he sometimes signed his name, was the MR. FIX-IT of Iroquois Point and environs. He wouldn't needed to advertise much, any longer. Word of mouth brought him customers than he could handle. In fact, MR. FIX-IT had so much backed up, he should have hired a team of MR. Flx-ITS himself.

  Not a good idea, he'd decided. One MR. FIX-IT was enough for Point. "And I'm it." That was how John Heart had met Nola Leavey two years before, and fallen in love with her. MR. FIX-IT was responsible!

  There he was installing maplewood kitchen cabinets in a house in town, one of the large brick homes on Iroquois Avenue, owned by a public-school principal, and Nola Leavey, a teacher, and a friend of the family, dropped by with her two young children, a few days later, MR. FIX-IT was summoned to her house, a much smaller, more modest wood-frame house on the town, a dwelling MR. FIX-IT quickly saw to be in need of major repairs, front porch and steps, shutters, clapboard siding, shingles.

  house hadn't been painted in more than a decade and had faded to a dusty sparrowbrown, peeling in strips like a plane tree. But it was the Nola believed she wanted repaired, reshingled, at least, she hoped that John would give her an estimate so that she could decide if she could afford it. "The roof is our priority, inescapably. It leaks." Nola's laughter was resigned cheerful. She shook hands like a man, or like a woman of independent mind and who imagines she shakes hands like a man--brisk, quick and to the point.

  MR. FIX-IT who wasn't of a class in which women shook hands with men, or men commonly shook hands with one another, was startled. But intrigued.

  He said, "Well, a house like this, built probably after World

  11, not too carefully kept up--it'll leak." Was his remark funny? Nola laughed again, showing small pearly and a comma-sized dimple, or dent, in her right cheek. John blushed, and laughed too. He hadn't meant to joke but if it came out sounding that way, that was fine.

  He liked hearing women laugh, especially women he didn't know well.

  Nola Leavey was a junior high school teacher, new to Iroquois Point, a woman who appeared at first glance to be in her mid-twenties but probably a decade older, despite her young children. She was small-boned, hardly more than five feet tall, with dark alert eyes and an intense manner, an edginess that seemed to John attractive, sexy. She wasn't a woman, nor even pretty. But he thought her a striking woman, an woman, a woman of quality, with those eyes, an oddly furrowed, forehead, the rest of her face unlined, her straight-cut mahogany-dark hair parted in the center of her head and brushed severely back to give her an Old World hauteur that must have intimidated her students, and her colleagues. She wore an unfashionably long skirt, a long-sleeved blouse with a high collar, a distinctive leather belt that emphasized the smallness of her waist. Black ballerina flats, shoes without heels.

  Female vanity, John supposed. A woman who needs to make men tower over her, that's her advantage. Somehow, this made him feel affectionate toward her.

  Protective. Yet what an odd way the woman had of pacing restlessly about, gesturing as she spoke, elbows pointed as if she didn't want him, a visitor in her house, a stranger, dark-haired MR. FIX-IT in denim jacket, paint-splotched jeans, biker boots, a man of virtually no speech, to get too close.

  Nola introduced him again to her children--Ellen who was four, darkeyed like her mother, very pretty, Drew, a toddler, an chatterer, who lunged at John Heart immediately and tugged at his sleeve. "Do you remember MR. FIX-IT?" Nola asked. Ellen nodded vehemently, "Yes, Mommy!" and Drew gaped at John, thumb in mouth. He had fair hair, plump cheeks, slate-blue eyes, an almost perfectly round face like a baby moon.

  John wondered if he resembled the absent father.

  Where was the father? John had noted, at their first, brief meeting, that Nola Leavey wore numerous rings on many of her fingers yet no ring. He guessed she was divorced, probably recently divorced, which would account for the edginess in her manner, the pointy elbows, that of Don't come too near! yet Help me, please! Briskly she led him through house, which was a small, crowded house with a creaking pinewood floor, antiquated ill-fitting windows, ceilings that needed repainting, water-stained wallpaper that needed replacing, electrical wiring (he was imagining this, with his professional X-ray eyes) that needed replacing. He noted neatly filled with books, mainly paperbacks with colorful covers, a Scandinavianstyle sofa with needlepoint cushions, a Shaker-style rocking chair with a slat back and rewoven splint seat. "Hey. This is nice," said, tapping the chair, setting it to rocking. "Yes, it is nice," Nola said almost primly. Had he insulted her? Suggesting that the rest of what he'd seen wasn't so nice?

  Well, that happened to be true, she was a smart woman and must it.

  They trooped through to the backyard. "Oh, please don't look," said, laughing uneasily. The yard was surprisingly deep, running back about sixty feet to an open field, a tangle of weeds. Near the house beds of drooping asters, delicate cosmos bent on their thin stalks nearly to the ground, hollyhocks nearly devoured by aphids, roses turned black spot. Nola Leavey was clearly one of those gardeners who begin with hope and enthusiasm in the spring but by midsummer are overcome by weeds, insects, fungi, too much rain or too little. Most of the yard was dandelions, twisty knots of green tough as wire. One of MR. Flx-IT's was lawn work and this lawn would have to be totally dug up and reseeded to look like anything at all. "Just the roof," Nola said with an anxious little laugh, "--what do you think of the roof? Is it--as bad as it looks?" John pretended to be examining it, frowning, no need to climb up onto a ladder to look closely, it was obvious the shingles were thoroughly rotten.

  Lichen and thistles growing in the eaves! A tilting brick chimney down which, in a rainstorm, rain must plunge like a waterfall. John avoided Nola's eye.

  He might have asked such a smart-seeming woman why she'd bought such a house, had she bought it with her eyes shut, her mouth taped shut so she couldn't have asked the simplest questions, had she told herself it was a "fantastic bargain at the price," was she escaping with her children from another, dreaded house? John Heart had known other divorcees, he wouldn't wanted to count how many divorcees he'd known since the age of seventeen, and they'd all been a little crazy, or more than a little, at the time of their divorces. Desperate to take their lives in hand again, but desperate also to fall in love again. Staring at him, John Heart, with their hungry eyes.

  But Nola Leavey wasn't looking at him. She was pacing about in the weeds, brushing away gnats from her face, waving her pointy elbows.r />
  "It's an old, melancholy house, we've discovered. It seemed charming at first, from the outside, Ellen thought it was a house in one of her storybooks--a gingerbread house! It's a house with secrets, but not the kind you'd be in. Ellen says it's haunted. It has that smell, she says.

  "Haunted? What does a haunted house smell like? I asked her. She said, Like this one. She isn't a skittish child, I actually think she's practical-minded. Takes after me. Do BRO KE HEART BLUES j L you have children, John? No? Well." Nola had been speaking rapidly, nervously. Glancing sidelong at John Heart who as MR. FIX-IT hands on hips, squinting up at the roof where, he saw, a number were missing as if they'd been blown off in a windstorm. The more a woman talked, even a woman to whom he was attracted, the quieter MR. FIX-IT became. He'd been known to pass entire meals in moody silence. Entire in silence, and in the early morning before dawn to slip away from a sleeping woman, or a woman feigning sleep, without a word. Nola said, "I've been divorced, you see. That's why the children and I are here--alone.

  you've been wondering? Or maybe not? But--you're divorced, too?

  I've heard--"

  "Yes. Right." He hadn't meant to say this, it wasn't true, yet he'd spoken.

  words came out impulsively, he'd hear himself say something he didn't mean, yet, having said it, he wouldn't contradict it, or explain.

  His face throbbed with blood. He'd been with, and parted from, so many women, he felt divorced enough.

  One day, he'd explain that to Nola Leavey. But not just yet.

  Nola was staring at him. "How recently?" John shifted his shoulders inside his denim jacket, annoyed.

  "I don't mean to pry. It's just that--" Nola sighed, her voice trailing off.

  Inside the house, a phone began ringing. But she made no move to it.

  John said, in a neutral voice, "Did you want an estimate for the roof, ma'am?" Nola laughed." Ma'am'! You're calling me ma'am'? Are you serious?"

  "Mrs.. Leavey."

  "That's not funny. I still use the name for legal purposes, but you know I'm divorced." John felt his face burn, his mood was turning sullen. This had gone into a swerve, a skid, like a motorcycle hitting gravel.

  He said, "I sure as hell didn't mean it to be funny. Nola."

  "Well, I should think so, Nola." Nola wiped her eyes, smiling, away. She'd become agitated suddenly. Even her hair, straight-cut and thick, like a glossy helmet, with that severe, defined part, had become disheveled.

  "Well. Give me the bad news, MR. FIX-IT. I'm prepared."

  "Bad news?"

  "The damned roof." MR. FIX-IT, with relief, put on his professional face as if slipping on a mask--you could almost watch him do it. He pretended to be rotted shingles a final time, backing up in the grass, silently calculating figures.

  He gave Nola Leavey an estimate based on materials alone, without labor, which would have approximately doubled the cost.

  Nola's eyes widened in panic. "What? What did you say?" MR. FIX-IT mumbled another price, not meeting the woman's eye, lowering the original by one-third. So smoothly you almost wouldn't notice it.

  "That's a little--high. Isn't it?" Ws n zorry, ma am.

  "But I suppose--it has to be done."

  "If there's leakage, probably."

  "Or maybe, just the worst parts could be done? Where the leaks are? Next time it rains I could mark the places from inside." MR. FIX-IT said, embarrassed, "Ma'am, the whole roof needs to reshingled. If not by me, then someone else."

  "You're suggesting I should get another estimate?"

  "O. K."

  "Or should I simply go with yours, with you? Maybe I could get bank loan."

  "That's O. K. , too."

  "You're hard to talk to, MR. FIX-IT. John Heart. You're so agreeable, it's like nothing has gotten said." Plenty has gotten said, John Heart thought.

  He murmured he had to leave, he had another customer to get to, walked away leaving the woman staring after him. "You're rude," said.

  "Good-bye!" A few days later as he might've predicted there was a contrite-sounding message from Nola Leavey on MR. Flx-IT's answering machine. John Heart? This is Nola Leavey, could you please call me? About the roof? MR. FIX-IT had no secretary or assistant, wanted no hired help, depended upon his answering machine to keep him in business. There was a comfort in it, a sense of safety, and a measure of voyeurism--like watching someone, woman for instance, this woman he understood was sexually him, through a window of her house as she's on the phone, earnest, ill-atease, probably smiling and gesturing as she speaks, unaware being seen.

  And when John returned the call and Nola answered on the first ring sounded confused, embarrassed. "I did call for another estimate.

  mean-another man. But yours is so much lower, I think there must wrong?" John Heart was standing in his Cruisercraft trailer kitchen, drinking from a can of beer, feeling good, muscles aching but essentially he was feeling good, he'd accomplished something that day of which he could be proud, floor-to-ceiling custom-built shelves and cabinets in one the big old brick houses on the lake that were being bought by rich j_ BRO KE HEART BLUES from Syracuse, Rochester. He'd made money. More money, with job, than he'd made for any other comparable job since MR. FIX-IT had set up shop here in Iroquois Point. There was a part of his mind that was contemptuous of making money, as the hotheaded kid John Reddy he'd grubbing for money, selling yourself, was absolute shit, but as adult he'd come to see by degrees that you had to have skill, talent, as as crude luck, to make money, even just enough to get by. (Not the kind money his kid brother Farley was making with HARTSSOFT, his computer software, which was beyond John Heart's capacity even to imagine, not even the kind of money their mother had always believed she'd needed, which was essentially as much money as she could get, as a buffer against poor, sinking back into the desperation of their early Nevada days. ) So he was good, liking the way Nola Leavey was speaking to him, not the bright-controlled teacherly manner she'd started off with, yet not either, but sincere and matter-of-fact. She said, "John? Are you there?" and he said, "Sure." She said, "I'm just concerned that--Ellen, help Drew up, will you, honey? --I'm a little worried that, your estimate is so much lower, there's so much work, this other man, this roofer, was telling me, and last night--wasn't that a terrible rainstorm.7--living by the lake, I guess--I should be used to it by now--well, I'm worried that you must feel sorry for me, or pity, or--I don't know, exactly, I w-wouldn't want you--or anyone-to think that--" John interrupted, "Do you want the fucking done, Mrs..

  Leavey, or not?" and Nola said, "Yes, John Heart, I want the fucking roof done. Thank you." Reshingling the roof of Nola Leavey's bungalow was more work than MR. FIX-IT, for all his expertise, had bargained for. And the weather turned prematurely warm, for June. He wore a red sweatband around his forehead, and still sweat ran in ticklish rivulets down his face. He removed his shirt, his muscles gleamed damply, attracting gnats. Late each afternoon, Leavey in a skirt to midcalf, or a neat shirtwaist dress with long sleeves, came out into the yard and complimented him on how wonderful the looked, how much he'd accomplished, but wasn't he working too hard?

  long? She called up to him, "John, stay for supper tonight? The kids asked me to ask you." MR. FIX-IT grunted a reply that might've been yes, might've been no. It must have dismayed Nola Leavey, a junior teacher, to learn that she'd hired one of those handymen who play a radio as they work, turned to a local pop-music station, so that hammering and rock music permeated the neighborhood at about the same decibel level.

  At the curb, MR. Flx-IT's sky-blue Ford pickup shone proudly in sun He had the idea (maybe an offhand remark of Nola's made him

  this) that people in neighboring houses, especially women, were alert to how long, how late, the truck remained at the curb each day.

  If there was one thing MR. FIX-IT maintained, even if he didn't invariably shave, shower, launder his clothes or get his hair cut frequently as he should have, it was a shining-clean vehicle.

  Nola, accompanied by Ellen, and li
ttle Drew who stumbled the grass, like a baby goat, came around the side of the house to where MR. FIX-IT was hammering and called up brightly, "John? Didn't you me?

  Stay for supper tonight?" Ellen mimicked her mother, cupping her hands to her mouth.

  "Mommy's making roast--" It sounded like chichchick.

  Nola said, "Roast chicken. But not an actual roast, not from scratch.

  From the grocery store, a barbecue chicken, in one of those aluminum foil bags? MR. FIX-IT? You must get hungry sometime." There was that eager, hungry, slightly crazed look in the woman's eyes.

  Beautiful eyes, and her mouth was beautiful. He'd fallen into the habit when he was away from her of trying to envision her, the swinging straight-cut hair, the pointy elbows and small-boned fingers, rings. A way she had at herself that invited him to laugh with her except he held back, somehow. If ever he touched her, or she touched him--"Jesus.

  That's it." So MR. FIX-IT evasively declined her invitations to stay for a meal, saying he hadn't time. It was true he worked most evenings, into the night. MR. FIX-IT had a backlog of furniture to repair, restore.