Broke Heart Blues

by Joyce Carol Oates

  Knock-kneed! "Jesus God, if this generation had been us." Art felt a metaphysical conviction so powerful it registered in his very gut, the injustice, unfairness, he'd been born too soon for the fantastic freedoms that were now, casually, enjoyed by youths to whom (he knew, he was paying for such services in his kids' college tuition) condoms were doled out like sticks of gum. As, years ago as a boy, he'd known the bitter injustice of having been born as himself, Arthur Lutz, and not a few years earlier as fate might have arranged, as his older James--their parents' clear favorite, a star football player and adored by all the girls. Born too late. God damn! We'd wonder what became of Art, didn't return from the Porta-John, instead decided to leave the park and drive to Rindfleisch's cocktail party which had begun by this time, for it was already past six p. m. , he could use a bathroom there, possibly was there, he'd heard she was flying from Albany for the reunion her husband's private jet. His lips moved numbly. "Still the most beautiful girl I've ever known, Mary Louise. Hell, I still dream about you. Me, Lutz-of-noillusions. Your eyes, your mouth, your hair--Your--" He squirmed, miserable with happiness. Others of our classmates never showed up at the FEST or, if they did, swarms of young people beat them back, from us. And now time to move on to Jon Rindfleisch's million-dollar showplace. (Did we resent our old buddy Jon who'd been such a clumsy fuck on the basketball court, and hit the water, diving, like concrete?

  No.

  We were happy as hell for the success of Rindfleisch Realty he'd inherited from his old man just when the real estate boom took off. ) Yet we were reluctant to leave. As if at our besieged BEER FEST we awaited a revelation that hadn't yet arrived. (Scrawny-necked Fred Falco, another of our forgotten classmates? with his simpering-cute little wife Cyn Swan dressed like a teenybopper? No thunks. ) And then--"Hey look, that's who I think it is? "--it arrived. Barreling their way through the kids, rudely pushing them aside like ships cresting the waves of a choppy sea, were two individuals we didn't recognize at first--a massive two-hundred-twentypound darkly tanned man of vigorous middle age, a more slender but ropey, and mean-looking, Italian-looking man of middle age, the one an ominously transmogrified Orrie Buhr and the other resembling--who? -Ray Gottardi, or Jake Gervasio.7--and within minutes we were with these boorish uninvited guests (not only hadn't the two paid their forty dollars, they'd been expelled from school and hadn't graduated class, they didn't belong among us) who'd showed up, we knew, to harass us--"Where's Hewson? "--"Where's Bozer? "--"Where's the rest of you? "-"Fuckers, you let John Reddy down! "--tossing lukewarm beer into our faces, shoving and jeering, laughing, one of us tripped and fell against the bartender's table, another would claim to have been lifted (by Buhr, it must've been, with those ape-muscles) and flung inside the tent, against the pole, there were shouts, screams, fists, furious elated faces, eyes and carnivore teeth and flailing legs, and the sudden whooshing collapse of the tent like a helium balloon rapidly deflating. It would be glimpsed by exhausted, infuriated Clarence McQuade arriving two hours late for the BEER FEST, having managed at last to park his rented Volvo in a distant parking lot and hike through protoplasmic swarms of young people, his teeth preparing the speech with which he'd greet us, his classmates he hadn't seen in thirty years," Who the hell's responsible! I sent a check for forty dollars, nobody ever acknowledged it or sent me directions how to find this fucking beer tent! All that crap about

  "We miss you"--"We you"-"We want you"--and I fell for it like a sucker. Me, McQuade, sucker." But he halted dead in his tracks staring and blinking as, fifty feet ahead, the festive striped tent collapsed, sank, and was sucked down out of sight--"Like matter sucked into a black hole, in an instant invisible, and extinct." There'd been a time, many years ago when we were in our early twenties, when Clarence McQuade was dead. That is, we'd been led to believe he was dead. Elise Petko, a graduate student in English at Columbia, Dexter Cambrook, a graduate student in molecular biology at Harvard, to tell him the tragic news Clarence, Dexter's closest friend in high school, had killed himself on a bad acid trip diving, or possibly he'd trying to fly, from the Golden Gate Bridge. Elise had heard he'd been brooding over his mathematical research which wasn't going well, and experimenting recklessly with drugs. Flatly Dexter said, "No.

  That can't be." Shortly afterward, the story was modified, corrected, it hadn't Clarence McQuade who died, but Pete Marsh! Pete who wasn't an intellectual like Clarence though intelligent enough, and diligent in his first year of law school at Berkeley. But Pete had taken LSD and dived, or to fly, from the Golden Gate Bridge. Died at the age of twenty-one. The first of our class to die other than by vehicular accident. "Don't you wonder what Pete would look like if he was with us tonight? After all these years? His skin would've cleared up by now. He'd be handsome."

  "Pete! He'd look us and whistle through his teeth in that way of his, Cheeze guys, what the hell hapoened to you? You're old." We laughed, we could hear Pete's voice thirty years and it hadn't changed at all.

  When we have a few drinks we always do Smoke Filer imitations. We miss Smoke, too. We miss all you dead guys. Smoke's weasel-pouty face the girls considered handsome, his lewd snorting laughter. The kiss-kiss sucksuck noises he'd make in Miss Bird's class that seemed to come from all directions at once, poor Miss Bird didn't know where, cracking us up.

  At one of our early reunions, it might've been our tenth, Miss Bird was invited for dinner, and we apologized for Smoke's behavior, and Miss Bird said, "No, no--that was the way you children were. You can't change the past by an apology any more than you can heal a wound that's long scarred over. So why try? ") On our way to the Rindfleisch party on Brompton we drove Smoke's old house, Willowsville's sole Frank Lloyd Wright house a landmark now. "When we knew Smoke, it just seemed kind of weird.

  Remember, we'd be inside and it felt like a cave? Smoke hated it.

  said, It's like living in somebody's goofy idea." That house of poured-concrete slabs, horizontal planes and narrow columns of glass shimmering at twilight.

  "Gosh. We don't even know who lives there now, do we? Their names."

  fact we hadn't known for fifteen years, Smoke's family had long since moved away. Willowsville was filling up with the houses of our old friends, houses we'd visited as kids but were barred from now forever.

  Kate Olmsted was telling us she'd met John Reddy Heart in the and he'd "vaguely promised, almost definitely" he'd try to make it to the next reunion. This was ten years ago, at our twentieth. Some of had believed Kate, who can be very convincing, and some of us hadn't.

  Now, at our thirtieth, with its record number in attendance, and its of frenetic celebration, it seemed even more plausible that John might show up. Millie Leroux, co-chair of the reunion committee, said eagerly, "We sent him a handwritten invitation c/o the address Kate gave us.

  "The Glass Ark, Shawmouth, N. Y. We told him he'd be a special guest of honor--he could stay in anyone's house he wanted. But we don't if he j L received it." Trish Elders said, half-joking, lifting her hands protest, "He can't just stay away forever, can he? Don't we mean anything to at all?" Cocktails at twilight, the sweet-dampish fragrance of fresh-cut grass, a sickle moon floating above the tall evergreens of Road. At the rear of the dazzling split-level home of Jon and Nanci Rindfleisch- "The very house in which Melvin Riggs lived at the time of his death. Imagine!" But we were disappointed, those of us who'd never been in the before, for it was explained to us that Jon and his young, second wife Nanci, an interior decorator trained at the Parsons School in New York, had so obsessively transformed the five-bedroom stone, glass and redwood house that it bore only a minimal resemblance to the showier house in which Riggs had lived and where, in his day, which seemed to us a remote, corrupt era, he'd entertained so lavishly. By the time of our thirtieth reunion, many of the Rindfleisches' neighbors on Brompton Road claimed not to know Melvin Riggs was. Some vaguely recalled a "controversial" individual who owned the Buffalo Hawks baseball team and a long-razed Buffalo nightclub, and had something to do with town
ship politics. Had he been arrested for embezzlement? Taking bribes? You could believe anything of that older, less ethical generation, even in ethical-Protestant Willowsville. "Or did he die in some violent way? Murdered?" There hadn't been a murder in since the night more than thirty years ago when Riggs was blown away by a 45-caliber bullet. We stared in dismay at individuals who asked such questions. Some of them were newer residents of the Village, others, in fact the growing majority, were simply young and ignorant.

  Some of us, spurred by Roger Zwaart who loved plotting, intrigue, surprises, tried to rent the old Heart house on Meridian Place for of our reunion events. But the current owners, a rich middle-aged with no ties to our crowd, turned us down coolly. Nor had they heard of any Melvin Riggs or John Reddy Heart--"You must have the wrong address. We've lived twenty years and we've never heard of any scandal. Sorry." On display at the Rindfleisch party, and at Millie Leroux's, were old yellowing yet lovingly preserved copies of the Weekly Willowsvillian, the Will-o'the-Wisp and our handsome pearlescent-covered The Yearbook. Our teenaged faces, feckless, freckled, open-eyed, peered up at us faint incredulity we'd so aged, so changed. Yet--had we changed at all?

  "Seeing you guys again, Jesus it's like, it's--" we weren't sure who he was, that earnest smooth flushed bulb of a head, oyster-pouchy eyes, maroon sport coat and white fishnet pullover, he hadn't been able to manage affixing his name tag to his lapel and had shoved it into his pocket and it seemed awkward to ask him who he was for he knew us, seemed to know us intimately, shaking our hands and retaining them in a moist grip, "--it's like, dying almost--dying and waking in some new dimension where the solace is--old familiar faces.

  Faces like lost souls thattre your own soul--y'know?" Our host Jon who we'd been kidding we wanted to stuff in a car trunk and haul town over bumpy roads--"Remember, Jon? Deedee Drummond's brother was after your ass? ") stood on the terrace that had once been Melvin Riggs's f terrace looking like his own, old dad Mr.. Rindfleisch greeting guests with crushing handshakes, embraces and kisses for the good-looking ex-girl classmates like Ginger McCord, formerly Siefried, in a backless pale green dress that set off her pallid redhead's skin, how wan Ginger was looking, but beautiful as we hadn't seen her since Doug's alcoholic collapse, cancer a lung removed, Dougie'd been a four-pack-a-day man for twenty years) and their divorce and bitter child-custody case, we'd heard rumors that Ginger herself had been hospitalized, attempted suicide by overdose, but her old friends Trish Elders and Shelby Connor refused to talk about this, or about Ginger, and it was difficult to believe that Ginger had suffered any profound malaise of the soul as she slipped her bare, slender arms around Jon's thick neck and kissed his startled mouth with little-girl kisses as Jon's wife Nanci stared smiling a few yards away. "Oh, Jon.

  What's happened to us, what kind of spell is this, we're so suddenly old." All weekend, Kate Olmsted took our pictures. Making us scream laughter and in protest. Though her group pictures of us would be prized by all and that of poor Dwayne Hewson gaily kicking and flailing, being carried buck-naked to his own swimming pool by the drunken girls of the Circle, would be the last photograph of Dwayne's life--a collector's item, might say. Chet Halloren, former Willowsvillian cartoonist, was to his old tricks, quick-sketching hilarious portraits of us, caricatures of varying degrees of cruelty and accuracy depicting jowls, pouches, dents, wrinkles, excess weight and deficient hair and too-glaring dentures with the skill of the pro hit-man. "Chet, this is hideous. This is libelous.

  Oh Chet-how could you?" Sandi Scott tore the offending portrait confetti and tossed it into her old boyfriend's face.

  "Why did I come back? To determine the answer to a question that's been haunting me since that night a bunch of us guys from Chess Club got drunk out behind Burnham Nurseries waiting to learn that John Reddy Heart had been shot down dead. Is lite serious, or not?"

  "Why did I come back? I live over on Fairway Drive, I never went away."

  "Did you hear? John Reddy Heart is definitely coming! Millie says she expects him at her house for dinner, by ten. He's staying with Kate Olmsted.

  Did you know they're friends?" We were puzzled to see Mrs.. Schultz, Mary Louise's attractive who used to drive us around in her station wagon after school, being greeted and warmly hugged by Jon Rindfleisch, and Mrs.. Connor, Shelby's mom, was here, too, nervously laughing in a group that included least two of her daughter's ex-steadies, then it was pointed out to us--"Those aren't our classmates' mothers, those women are our classmates." It was definite--E. S. Fesnacht was coming. She'd sent in her check, a name tag had been prepared for her, Evangeline Fesnacht. Never this mysterious WHS classmate of ours, dubbed in our newsletters

  "most renowned literary light," attended a reunion, or even answered our queries--"But the thirtieth is an exception. Vangie told me personally, she'll be here." At last, exhausted and embittered, Clarence McQuade stumbled onto the Rindfleisch terrace, an hour and forty minutes late. We recognized him immediately, that narrow intolerant head, those perpetually with their expression of barely suppressed fury at others' stupidity and slowness, even at his good, fellow-brainy friends in Chess Club, the tall spindly frame in off-the-rack queer-textured clothes, like Velveeta cheese, except for his thinning hair worn long, lank, Clarence, one of our class geniuses such teachers as Mr.. Alexander and Mr.. Salaman used to defer to, hadn't in thirty years as if embalmed in Palo Alto cybertech research (for megasuccess corporation HARTSSOFT) as in a time-warp. Without greeting us whom he hadn't seen since graduation Clarence protested in the nasal western New York accent of his boyhood, "Who the hell's responsible!

  I sent a check to the reunion committee, nobody ever acknowledged it or sent me directions how to find these fucking events! All that crap about We miss you'--'We love you'--'We want you'--and I fell for it like a sucker.

  Me, McQuade, a sucker. I tramped all over Tug Hill Park and by time I located the BEER FEST the tent was down, vanished. I drove all Willowsville hitting one-way streets and streets I didn't recognize! And the signs aren't readable! It's exactly as outsiders used to say of Willowsville-it's a closed, private community! A community of privilege!

  Immediately on Transit Road I got lost, it's become a mega-highway like something in Road Warrior. Why didn't one of you prepare me for Main Street! Where was farmland, woods, there's wall-to-wall minimalls, gas and car washes and McDonald's. Where we used to go sledding, off Haggarty by the ravine, in grade school, remember? --there's this Shopping Center--is that Roger Zwaart? The guy we knew? Couldn't calculus through his thick skull? Why didn't somebody warn me that Garrison is a four-lane highway and you can't make turns from the lane? I ended up in Fox Hollow Estates' lost like a rat in a maze! And has overpasses? We used to live just off Burlington, for God's sake. And there's a roundabout--a roundubout, like England! --in the center whcre there used to be the green! What the hell happened to downtown?

  Where's the Bookworm? Where's the Haven? The Sport Shop looks it's takcn over the block. Where's the Glen Theatre? What's this "Glenside Medical Center'--I don't even remember what used to be there. It took me five minutes to figure out where I was, like a stroke victim, Burnham's Nursf ery is gone and all the land beyond, all that open land and woods, it's the campus of some monstrosity--'Niagara Technological College'--why didn't anyone tell me? Why are you all staring at me? Who are you?"

  jammed the black plastic glasses frames he hadn't changed in thirty against the sweaty bridge of his nose, blinking at us, his old classmates, in horror. We were impressed, we'd never heard any geek-guy express himself in such a way, one of us offered a glass of champagne to poor Clarence and made him welcome.

  Not three minutes later, as in a rehearsed comedy routine, which some of us laugh uproariously, there came another of our class brains, snobby Carolyn Cameron, Doctor of Oncology at Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center (as Carolyn never failed to indicate when updating lengthy biography for our newsletter), stumbling onto the terrace, in breathless reproach--"What a shock! Why didn't a
ny of you warn me! I haven't been back in sixteen years and the village is virtually unrecognizable! The skyline is high-rise office buildings and condos! What happened to our municipal zoning? What happened to the old library? What happened to green? Where's the Bookworm? Where's the Glen Theatre? Where's Crystal? Is it true, Dwayne Hewson is mayor? A football player--mayor?

  The worst is, oh God I couldn't believe it, I'm sick to my stomach--all the willows are gone. Our famous beautiful one hundred weeping willows--gone.

  And Glen Creek--gone. How can an actual creek be paved over, gone?

  is this hideous Glenside Mall'--boutiques and restaurants and a where the creek used to be! Oh how could you, some of you must be responsible, Willowsville has lost its soul." Carolyn astonished us by bursting into tears, we resented her high moral tone but liked her better than we'd liked her in a long time.

  A few of us had driven around the village before the Rindfleisch and we, too, had noticed these changes. Except to some of us, who'd returning to visit our families over the years, the changes weren't so extensive, or so shocking. Certainly, the disappearance of our village's One Hundred Weeping Willows Walk, and the paving-over of Glen Creek, had controversial issues in Willowsville a few years ago.