Broke Heart Blues

by Joyce Carol Oates

  In the windless hush before dawn, the beauty of the Village sobered us.

  Our old, lost hometown. We moved like a procession of spirits purified by death.

  "God, it was beautiful, wasn't it? And no dream." Eighteenth-century colonials, Georgian brick homes set back in lots. The great elms of our childhood had long since died and had been torn out of the earth by their roots but the rich citizens of Willowsville had replaced them with near-mature oaks, maples, plane trees, evergreens.

  Mill Race to Glen Burns and Castle Creek ("That creek! "), Spring Lane, Lilac Lane and so to Meridian and Meridian Place, to bring to the old Heart residence, an ugly house really, though impressive, "historic"-fallen now into the possession of strangers who claimed not to know name John Reddy Heart.

  Ken drove the Jaguar slowly, at fifteen miles an hour. Not just was stoically fighting a headache like a balloon filled with iron in his head but this would be the final time Veronica Myers, Ken's wife-to-be, would see the old Heart house.

  Unexpectedly, Verrie was silent. She bit at her fingers like a child but said nothing.

  Her trademark blond hair, now damp and matted from Dwayne Hewson's pool, smelled of chlorine commingled with a sweetly astringent perfume. Her backless cerise gown was wrinkled across the thighs, and stained.

  Somewhere, she'd lost her shoes. Her feet were dirty, scratched.

  In the rear of the Jaguar, staring at the old Dutch colonial barely visible through a stand of evergreens, Trish Elders and Shelby Connor were too. It might have been that they scarcely recognized the house.

  Where was Dahlia Heart's controversial rock garden with its gnomes and frogs.7--"Vanished for decades." The lapping splashing aqua-winking surface of the water in which they'd recently been immersed would seem to have done something irremediable to their memories.

  For a long grave moment no one spoke. Nor did Ken Fischer, a tact, indicate the slightest restlessness and a wish to be gone.

  Then Trish sighed, half a sob, "Let's drive past the school? Then we'd all better get to bed." Shelby said, quickly, "But don't take Castle Creek, Ken, this time? Just cut on through to Glen Burns." None of us wanted to see the notorious creek--"Just a ditch, really"-that had betrayed John Reddy and exposed him to the derision of our fathers.

  The Jaguar moved on, its exquisite motor nearly silent. A light, the sepia of earliest dawn, played about its flawless chrome fixtures.

  In Art Lutz's heavy-duty family vehicle there was an embarrassing of sweat-stained clothes, old jogging shoes, his teenaged kids' crap. And crap of his own. He'd taken the Caravan to the reunion parties instead of his sleek white Acura, it hadn't been a formal evening. He hadn't Mary Louise Schultz driving away with him! He wondered uneasily if should apologize to her for the condition of the van, except, against him as if mistaking him for her husband, or for a husband,

  Louise didn't seem to mind. She murmured, "Artie? Where're we going? I thought you were going to take me to--" Her voice trailed off, she'd forgotten where she was staying for the weekend, possibly at Elders's new place on the lake? A half-hour drive at least. (Did Trish have a husband now, named

  "Carnevale"? --was he someone Art was supposed to have met, to know? ) "I'll take you anywhere you want, Mary I, ouise," Art said. "Tell me." Mary Louise murmured, "Mmm." She'd been the only woman not have flung off her clothes to leap into Dwayne's pool with his naked, flailing body, more decorously, Mtary Louise had hoisted the skirt of her Laura Ashley frock and splashed about shrieking with laughter in the shallow end.

  What a sight! Art Lutz and the other men had stared in disbelief.

  The skirt of Mary Louise's dress was damp and her olive-bronzy skin exuded a faint, flirty chlorine smell that mingled, like a dream crosshatched by dream, with a trace of perfume--or possibly deodorant. Art, following his friend's car, felt a wave of elation so profound he almost rammed into the pristine rear of Ken's car. Anywhere you want, Mary Louise.

  Anywhere!

  Behind him Ritchie Eickhorn followed hesitantly in the rented Toyota.

  His eyes ached as if he'd been staring into the sun and he felt a touch of panic that his vision had deteriorated over the past twelve hours.

  Had he really been awake all night? Drinking, laughing, shouting until throat was hoarse. Drinking until he'd gotten sick to his stomach sometime after arriving at Dwayne's. And maybe he'd blacked out for a few minutes. His were churning now and yet, Evangeline Fesnacht beside him, that mysterious, eccentric woman of genius, that woman like no one he'd ever encountered intimately before in his life, he felt an irrational surge of hope, happiness. "I wonder where Ken's going? Should I just follow, or--?" By chance, Evangeline was staying at the same Comfort Inn on West Street in which he was staying. He would drive her to the reunion events. He had an idea that she, too, had been sick at Dwayne's, locked in a downstairs bathroom to emerge, at the time of the hilarious Dwayne Hewson in the pool, deathly-white, dazed. In distress she'd to him. She'd called him, in a surprisingly timid voice, Ritchie.

  In high school, Evangeline Fesnacht had barely acknowledged him, her co-editor of Will-o'-the-Wisp, hadn't condescended to call him by any name at all that he could remember. Mr.. Lepage had encouraged her to feel superior, he'd puffed her up with pride, almost, Ritchie yearned to confide in this woman who would be (how keenly he felt this! ) the soul-mate of his years-Evangeline! I huted you then.

  As if she'd been hearing his thoughts Evangeline said quickly, "Yes, follow. I think I know where they're going." In the wine-colored Lexus at the end of the procession, Kate deliberated waking her sleeping companion to ask if he'd like her to drive by his old family house--hadn't it been on Seneca? Or Garrison? A undistinguished house by Willowsville standards of which (you had to assume) Petey had probably been ashamed. She decided not to wake him.

  slept so profoundly, head lolling against the seat back, his skin clammy-pale as an infant's, Kate cast him a fond, protective glance. "To purpose, Petey? Now's now." She wondered, would they become lovers? Or would he simply back into cyberspace, in California, from which, so unexpectedly, he'd come?

  The flotilla of cars, survivors, moved along Seneca, beyond and onto Main Street. How deserted the Village seemed. Many still burning. Ken turned into the high school grounds and there was Willowsville Senior High so suddenly--somehow larger, more we recalled. Verrie cried, "Look at the bell tower! That golden light." The bell tower did appear golden, lit from within. The giant clock hands were poised precisely at 5,49 as if there were a secret message, a profound coded meaning, in the juxtaposition of slender black clock-hands and black Roman numerals, by the merest coincidence, as we'd afterward discover to our horror and grief, this was the approximate arrival time of the paramedics at Dwayne Hewson's house, summoned to treat a middle-aged male for "acute cardiac arrest." Yet he'd known bliss. God in a fireball exploding in his chest.

  "It's something we need to believe. Please don't take our beliefs from us." Slowly the flotilla of cars moved onto the deserted school campus.

  eerie predawn light hovered at ground level, like mist, above, air was turning golden. We stared at our beautiful school we'd never seen when we were students. We were humbled by its redbrick respectability, calm. The broad white portico, the white Doric columns and broad granite steps. A three-foot-high gleaming plaque set in the ground proclaimed WILLOWSVILLE SENIOR HIGH SCHOOL Est.1911. Ken Fischer quietly, "God. They must've loved us--our parents. To have spent on us." It was a profound realization, we didn't know how to it. Verrie said, "It's like we were their dreams. We never knew." Trish said, "It makes me feel so strange! As if I'm seeing my own, what is it--sepulchre.

  But it's a happy sight. It fills me with happiness. That our parents loved us.

  Even if they didn't know us." In middle age we'd begun to speak of our parents as if they were whether in fact they were already dead or not. Literal death somehow beside the point. "After high school in America, everything's posthumous." We parked. We admired the new science wing,
the new tennis courts, the new track course and the new football stadium. Verrie proudly out the likely site of the Francis C. Lepage Theater. She'd been communicating by phone and fax with the school architect for weeks.

  Lutz in the gunmetal-green Dodge Grand Caravan pulled out around the Jaguar, grinning and waving, on his way to the stadium. Beside him sat a dark-haired woman we might not have recognized as Mary Louise Schultz though lifted a hand to us in greeting, or in farewell.

  Art was saying earnestly to Mary Louise, "I loved football. I loved my teammates. I never played a really good game in my three years on the team, I was one of those players who did well in practice then kind of freaked out in the game. Existential angst, Coach called it. The will to fail." Mary Louise protested, "That isn't right. Don't say such things. I remember you playing very well, Artie. I do. We led cheers for you--didn't we?

  Of course we did." This wasn't true, but Art was deeply moved to hear this woman, who'd been a varsity cheerleader, say it. After thirty years, it didn't matter what was true or not, only what was remembered as true. "I love you, Mary Louise. Not that I want to embarrass you."

  "Oh! I guess you are, a little."

  "I realize you're married, and I'm married.

  You've got--kids?"

  "Oh Artie, it's all right."

  "What's all right?"

  "Our other lives.

  "Real' lives. They don't matter, do they?" Trembling with excitement, Art parked smelling of his family on the far side of the stadium, where the air was sharply shadowed and smelled of recently mown grass. Overhead the sky was a pale washed blue. He killed the motor, his heart was beating so rapidly he thought it might burst, he turned to Mary Louise--half-expecting she'd be gone. So often in his dreams he'd turned to her in such a way, in such raw yearning, and she'd vanished. Sometimes he'd actually touched her breasts, or the shimmering air close about her breasts, and, in that instant--she'd vanished. But Mary Louise smiled now and said, almost shyly, "Artie? Will you do me a favor?"

  "A favor? What?"

  "Let's neck."

  "--'Neck'?

  "You know.

  Kiss. Like in seventh grade."

  "--'Seventh grade'?" Art laughed awkwardly to disguise his alarm. "I never had a girlfriend that young. Not tenth grade." Mary Louise wrinkled her nose, chiding, "Don't be so literal, Artie! I'm speaking of the principle." Boldly she moved into his arms and kissed his opened, startled mouth. He was breathing through his mouth, an aging dog, sweat had broken out ignominiously on his forehead and beneath his arms as in the old, dread days of high school football, his Wolverine jersey, his jockstrap, underwear, pants and most of all his socks stiffened with sweat and mineral salt. Mary Louise hugged him happily around neck, kissed him again, giggling and nudging her forehead against his. She whispered, "I've had a crush on you for--well, a long time." In swoon Art hugged this amazing, mysterious woman against him, and kissed her in return. A long impassioned vertiginous kiss like falling down elevator shaft in a nightmare of childhood. Emboldened, he nudged his tongue against her lips to open them, and to enter her warm moist mouth, and was blocked by her playful, practiced tongue--if this was seventh-grade kissing, it was of a virtuoso sort. Mary Louise lightly scolded, "Artie." His hands were eager and hopeful as a boy's, for perhaps they were the hands of a boy, he'd shut his eyes and fallen into the vivid memory of this girl in his arms in Jamie's car, the sexy Dodge Castille--how happy he'd been! "Miserable, happy." w His hand cupped Mary Louise's left breast, a mound of amazing flesh, and she stiffened at once, murmuring, "Artie. Can't we neck?" He understood her implication, they were mature individuals who'd been married for years, to whomever they'd been married for years, and they'd done enough of the other, possibly too much. (Half the time, with Reeny, wasn't what you'd call aggressively potent. The rest of the time his mind was on other matters--for instance, Mary Louise Schultz in her cheerleader's jumper, "Wol-ver-ines! Wol-ver-ines! You're the team--of our dreams! Yayyyy! "--leaping and throwing wide her arms as if to breasts to him, and those white panties flashing. That was it.

  Every time. ) If Art had been an articulate man like certain of his classmates, Blake Wells, Dexter Cambrook--even Dwayne Hewson could speak persuasively, if always sincerely, at Village council meetings--he might have explained to Mary Louise that, yes, there was a purity in necking, a philosophical first principle, kissing was so like speech, "necking" a kind of conversation unknown in any other mode, beside which sexual intercourse seemed crude and impersonal, yes this was so, still, he yearned to run hands over the woman's warm, wonderful body, he loved her and, her, had he not the right, in fact the obligation, to love her body? If he kissed her mouth avidly, and hungrily, wasn't it natural for him to wish to kiss her breasts? Her body, everywhere? He was forty-eight years old, he be living forever? "But Mary Louise, darling--you must know that I love you."

  "Well, can't that be enough?"

  "No!" He spoke in anguish. She like one of his own children when they'd been young, stubborn, exasperating, alarmingly willful, so he'd wondered Whut are the origins of such willfulness? such opposition? as in Mr.. Dunleddy's class he'd been confused by the procedure of mitosis--prophuse! metaphase! anaphase! telophase! --and still more by the eventual adversarial nature of certain split cells as if, in the very molecular constitution of unanimity, there was, somehow, tragically, or farcically, opposition. Yet he, Art Lutz, whose only distinction at WHS would be Class Clown, could hardly have posed such a question, had he been able to articulate it--everyone would have laughed at him, including Mr..

  Dunleddy.

  He repeated, grimly, "No." He'd managed clumsily to undo the halfdozen lavender pearl buttons of a row of myriad buttons on the high-necked Laura Ashley frock, reaching inside in triumph to cup Mary Louise's in its tight elastic bra. At first Mary Louise feebly protested, pushing at his hand, breathing hotly, then, sighing--"Oh, all right." Nearly overcome with excitement, his hands trembling, Art managed to undo more of the buttons, it's possible that onesor two were ripped off, flying and bouncing into oblivion, or onto the gritty floor of the Caravan to be discovered, a few days later, by quizzical Reeny whose sharp eyes invariably detected what she

  "household mystery items"--for what's a household, like human history, but a concatenation of unsolved mysteries? At last Art was holding, caressing, stroking both of Mary Louise Schultz's amazing breasts, and yet--"Mary Louise, is something wrong?" He tasted cold, for there was wrong, the woman's breasts were somehow wrong, though ample as he'd imagined them, and buoyant. Mary Louise hid her face in his neck.

  He felt her tremble, as on the brink of tears. "Oh, Artie. I should told you, I guess."

  "Told me--what?"

  "I've had--last year--the surgeon it--a mastectomy. A double mastectomy."

  "What!"

  "My breasts are rubber. I was afraid to have more surgery, to replace them, I'm still afraid, and anyway--these are adequate to my purposes, at my age." Mary spoke hotly, and unapologetically. Art, stunned, couldn't think a reply, his fingers had frozen on the foam-rubber protuberances encased in their sturdy bra, in fact it was a sexy lavender bra, as if they, too, were paralyzed. Mary Louise said, "My husband won't even look at me, he says it's too sad. The scar tissue. I know he means sad for him, not for me. I spend a of time in the bath tenderly washing myself, like I'm a baby, my own baby I'll have again, you know.7--it must be like that with a man, too, sometimes.7-you'll never have another baby, and the babies were the best part of marriage, and your babies are all grown up, and if you touch them they practically throw off your hand like you're a child molester? --anyway, I spend a lot of time in the bath, and I look at myself in the mirror, and I remember--well, never mind! So I thought I'd come to the reunion, I was so happy in high school, I was so really, really fond of you, Artie, and I'm sorry now, I guess--" Art said, "It's O. K. , Mary Louise. I still you."

  "You do?"

  "I couldn't just stop, you know--it's too late."

  "Well, I love
you, too. Oh, Artie!" You've got to want to die for a woman, and to kill for her. If lack that passion, you have not lived.

  In Ritchie Eickhorn's rented Toyota, indecisively parked near the walk of the school, by the monumentally tall flagpole that rose virtually out of sight, flagless at this hour of the day, Evangeline Fesnacht at last begun to speak, with such emotion, such seeming anguish, Ritchie was moved, and gripped her icy fingers in his. Such childlike, fingers for a woman of her stature! As if the ravages of the long night and the iconic beauty of their old school had partly unhinged her, she confided in Ritchie that she was, nearing fifty, at an impasse in her life, and personal life which were virtually identical, she was gripped in a paralysis, like Odysseus who'd been in sight of Ithaca suddenly blown out to sea by a wrathful god." I can see my home'--but somehow I can't get to it. Always t something blows me off course. I'm practically a homeless person, Ritchie!