Sirens and Other Daemon Lovers: Magical Tales of Love and Seduction

Broke Heart Blues Joyce Carol Oates

THERE WAS A TIME in the village of Willowsville, New York, population 5,640, eleven miles east of Buffalo, when every girl between the ages of twelve and twenty (and many unacknowledged others besides) was in love with John Reddy Heart. John Reddy, sixteen years old, from Las Vegas, Nevada, was our first love. You never forget your first love.

And where John Reddy wasn’t exactly our first love (for after all, our mothers must’ve loved our fathers first, when they were young, in that unfathomable abyss of time before our births — and certain Willowsville moms were in love with John Reddy Heart) he supplanted that first love, and its very memory.

Our fathers despised him. We knew better than to speak of John Reddy Heart in our fathers’ presence.

John Reddy Heart.

That winter it came to be known that the head custodian of Willowsville Senior High, Alistair, whose last name none of us knew, whose dislike of us as spoiled rich kids shone in his whiskey-colored eyes, was arranging for John Reddy Heart and his girl Sasha Calvo, whose parents refused to allow them to date, to meet surreptitiously in the school basement where Alistair had a windowless, overheated, cozy office squeezed between the mammoth furnace and the hot water tanks. Alistair’s most urgent responsibility was to check the pressure gauges on the furnaces when they were in operation—“Without me, the whole friggin place goes.” He spoke with mordant satisfaction, snapping his fingers. Surely Alistair would have lost his job if he’d been caught arranging for Sasha Calvo to slip down the basement stairs from the east, sophomore wing of the school, make her way along a shadowy corridor to his cave of an office to which John Reddy would have come, eagerly slipping down the basement stairs from the west, senior wing of the school. There was said to be music playing, a radio turned low. A shaded forty-watt bulb. Shabby yet still colorful carpet remnants laid on the concrete floor, curling up onto the walls to a height of several inches. And Alistair’s old sagging cushioned sofa. “Oh, God. A throbbing womb.” We were uneasy, anxious, seeing the lovers below us, oblivious of us and of danger. How famished they were for each other — kissing, embracing, their hands clutching at each other’s bodies. No time for words, only murmurs, groans, choked cries. Their lovemaking was tender, yet passionate. Possibly a little rough, bringing tears to Sasha’s beautiful eyes. As, at the foot of the basement stairs, smoking his foul-smelling pipe, Alistair stood watch. “S’pose Stamish comes down? What’s Alistair gonna do?” Some of us were convinced that John Reddy and Sasha met like this only a few times; others, that they met every weekday afternoon through the winter and spring. For these were the only times they could meet, we reasoned — the Calvos guarded Sasha so closely. In our dull rows of seats, in our classrooms on the floors above, the red second hand of clocks in every classroom, positioned uniformly above the blackboard, ticked urgently onward. “What’re they doing now, d’you think? Now?” “Do you think they do it bare-assed? Or some quicker way?” “Shit, John Reddy wouldn’t do anything quick.” Boys, aroused and anxious, tried to hide their gigantic erections with notebooks, or textbooks, that occasionally slipped from their clammy fingers and clattered to the floor. Girls, short of breath as if they’d been running, a faint flush in their cheeks, dabbed at their eyes with tissues and sat very still, feet flat on the floor and legs uncrossed. Our most innocent, unknowing teachers like Madame Picholet and Mr. Sternberg were observed mysteriously agitated, a glisten of sweat on their brows. The throb! throb! throb! of furnaces was reportedly felt as far away as the music practice room on the third floor of the annex. In Mr. Alexander’s fifth-period physics class, always a drowsy class, dazed eyes blinked rapidly to keep in focus. “Excuse me? Is this class awake?” Mr. Alexander inquired in his hurt, chagrined way, staring at us with his hands on his hips. “Peter Merchant! — How would you approach this problem? Petey Merchant’s physics text crashed to the floor. His cheeks flushed crimson. Yet there were those, among them Verrie Myers, who vehemently denied that John Reddy and “that Calvo girl” were lovers at all. Nor had she believed that there’d ever been a baby—“That’s sick.” In time, Verrie’s view prevailed. More disturbing tales were being spread of John Reddy on those evenings when his windows were darkened down on Water Street, when the girls of The Circle, or any other girls who sought him, discovered he was gone. At such times John Reddy was cruising in his funky-sexy Mercury in Cheektawaga, Tonawanda, Lockport, or downtown Buffalo, restless and looking for action. Often he was seen with a glamorous girl, or an adult woman, pressed up close beside him, head on his shoulder and fingers, though not visible from the street, caressing the inside of his thigh. John Reddy had gone out with Mr. Stamish’s youngest, pretty secretary Rita, that seemed to be a fact. Scottie Baskett came to school pale and haggard and stunned by an experience he could bring himself to share only with his closest buddy, Roger Zwaart, and that after several days: Scottie had returned home a little early from swim practice to discover his own mother, her hair damp from a shower, in slacks and a sweater clearly thrown on in haste, no bra beneath, and, of all people, John Reddy Heart! — “In my own house. He was there laying tile, supposedly, in our guest room bath. Farolino’s truck was out front, I don’t pay much attention to what my folks do so I was surprised to see it there, but, okay, I walk in, and there’s—John Reddy. ‘We’re laying tile in the guest room bath,’ Mom says. She’s trying to sound cool but she’s trembling, I can see her hands. Her face is all pale — no makeup. And you never see my mom without makeup. They must’ve heard me come in so John’s hammering away innocently in the bathroom like somebody on TV and Mom’s like rushing at me in the kitchen, her boobs bobbing, asking if I’d like a snack? chocolate milk? buttercrunch cookies? like for Chrissake I’m ten years old and fucking blind.” Two days later, Art Lutz had a similar experience, returning home after school to discover John Reddy on the premises, and “my mom acting wound-up and hysterical, saying ‘We’re having these beautiful new cabinets put in, Art, see? — aren’t they beautiful?’ and there’s John Reddy on a kitchen stool hammering away, in a sweaty T-shirt and ripped jeans, his prick practically hanging out. And fuck-smell all over the house like steam from a shower. He looks at me with this shit-eating grin and says, ‘How’s it going, kid?’ and I realize I got to get out of there fast before I get violent. So I slammed out again, climbed into Jamie’s car and floored ’er.” Bibi Arhardt was wakened in the middle of the night by gravel thrown against her second-floor bedroom window. Frightened, she knelt by the windowsill without turning on the light and saw, below, the figure of a man, or boy, signaling impatiently to her. “Though I couldn’t see his face clearly, I knew it was him — John Reddy. And there was the Mercury out on the street. At once, I had no will to resist. I knew it might be a mistake, but—” Bibi hurriedly dressed, and slipped out a side door into the night, which was a bright moon-lit gusty night smelling of damp, greening earth — for it was late March by this time, and the long winter was ending. There came John Reddy, his eyes burning, to seize Bibi in his arms and bear her, feebly protesting, to his car. In silence they drove to Tug Hill Park which was larger, more desolate and wild than Bibi remembered. How many hours passed there, in John Reddy’s car, Bibi could not have said; how many hungry kisses passed between them; how many caresses; how many times, with gentleness and sweetness, yet control, John Reddy made love to her, bringing her to tears of ecstasy—“It wasn’t like you would think! It wasn’t like you would imagine any guy could do.” A few nights later, in her bedroom on the second floor of the Zeiglers’ Georgian colonial on Castle Creek Drive, Suzi, though wearing Norm Zeiga’s onyx signet ring on a chain around her neck, was wakened by a sound in her bedroom and looked up to see a tall figure standing over her bed—“I was too scared to scream. I seemed to know, even before he knelt beside me, and kissed me, who it was. ‘Don’t be afraid, Suzi, I won’t hurt you,’ John Reddy whispered. ‘And if I do, forgive me.’” Evangeline Fesnacht came to school pale, moist-eyed, strangely silent. When Mr. Lepage tried to engage her in their customary witty banter, as the rest of us looked on, Evangeline sighed, lowered her gaze meekly and made no reply. “Have I, Miss Fesnacht,” Mr. Lepage said in a voice heavy with sarcasm, “a rival for your thoughts this morning?” In the back seat of his brother’s Dodge Castille, as Art Lutz kissed her eagerly with his opened mouth, and awkwardly tried, with his left hand, to unhook her bra beneath her sweater, Tessa Maypole burst into guilty tears, saying, “Oh, Artie, I can’t. I can’t. I’m in love with someone else, it wouldn’t be fair to you.” Lee Ann Whitfield, our fat girl, was observed in the school cafeteria pushing around, on her plate, a large portion of macaroni-and-cheese, with the look of one who has lost her appetite, or her soul. Ritchie Eickhorn noted in his journal, under the new, heady influence of Pascal We yearn for eternity — but inhabit only time. Miss Flechsenhauer noted with suspicion an unusual number of girls asking to be excused, with “cramps” or “migraine,” from gym, swim class, team practice. “What is this, girls, an epidemic?” Miss O’Brien, our school nurse, a chesty, dour woman with a perpetual sinus snuffle, noted, with suspicion, an unusual number of girls requesting Bufferin and Midol and to be allowed to lie, with heating pads on their lower abdomens, on cots in the peaceful, darkened infirmary. “What is this, girls, an epidemic?” John Reddy Heart was said to have been seen at nine A.M. Sunday church service at the United Methodist church on Haggarty Road. “But nobody goes there, who would’ve seen him?” John Reddy Heart, as spring progressed, was looking, at school, more and more exhausted, as if he no longer slept at night. His eyelids drooped as our teachers droned on; he was having trouble, it seemed, staying awake in his classes. His left eye was blood-shot and leaked tears. His jaws were sometimes stippled in tiny cuts from careless or hurried shaving. Some mornings, he didn’t shave at all, evidently. His longish hair, separating in greasy quills, exuded a frank, pungent odor, sharp as that of his body. Girls swooned if they passed too close to him. It was known to be particularly dangerous to pass too close by John Reddy on the stairs: Several sophomore girls nearly fainted. In fourth-period English, Miss Bird, leading a discussion of Robert Frost’s “After Apple Picking,” stared at John Reddy Heart who was gripping his textbook and frowning into it as if the secret of life might be located there, in a few teasing lines of poetry; she sniffed his scent, and for a long embarrassing moment lost the thread of her thought. We’d realized for some time, uneasily, that Miss Bird no longer wore her hair skinned back from her face in that unflattering style but curled and fluffed out, “feminine” in the way that women are “feminine” in late-night movies of the Forties. Her small, pursed lips were a savage red. Her slightly bulgey brown eyes, fixed on John Reddy, who may have been glancing shyly up at her, appeared to be shifting out of focus. “Miss Bird? I’ll open a window,” Ken Fischer said quickly, leaping to his feet. “It’s kind of stuffy in here.” For a precarious moment—“I held my breath, oh, God, she’s going to faint!”—Miss Bird swayed groggily in her spike-heeled shoes. Then she smiled wanly at Ken, touching the back of her thin hand to her forehead, and the sinister spell was broken. Yet the following morning in Mr. Dunleddy’s biology class, where John Reddy sat in his prescribed corner, first row, extreme right, Sandi Scott, usually so poised and droll, astonished us by bursting into tears in the midst of a recitation of the steps of mitosis: “‘Prophase’—‘metaphase’—‘anaphase’—‘telophase’—Oh, God, it’s so relentless! So cruel.” Mr. Dunleddy, short of breath even sitting, overweight by fifty pounds, who would be the first of our teachers to die, a few years later, of a stroke at the relatively young age of fifty-six, stared at the weeping girl with middle-aged eyes of dolor and regret. That night, Evangeline Fesnacht typed the first line of what would become, eventually, after numerous metamorphoses, her first published novel (“wild, dithyrambic, dark, riddlesome”) I woke from a dream so vivid I would search the world for its origin — in vain. Ritchie Eikhorn noted in his journal We inhabit time but remember only “eternal moments.” God’s mercy. Dexter Cambrook impulsively called Pattianne Groves. He was flooded with excitement as with an intoxicant in his normally calm veins—“My acceptance just came from Harvard!” He waited with sweaty palms, pounding heart for Pattianne’s kid brother to call her to the phone and asked her point-blank if she’d go with him to the senior prom and was met with, after a moment’s startled silence, “Oh, Dexter? Did you say — Dexter? Cambrook? Oh, gee, thanks. I mean, that’s so thoughtful of you Dexter. But I’m sorry, I guess I’ll be going with—” Verrie Myers and Trish Elders, closest friends since kindergarten, who, in recent weeks, had scarcely been able to look at each other, each feeling a deep physical revulsion for the other, found themselves walking swiftly, then breaking into a run, like foals, onto the vividly green playing field behind school. Each girl grabbed the other’s hand at the same instant. Their uplifted faces were luminous, radiant. Their eyes shone. We watched, a haphazard and unknowing trapezoid of (male, yearning) observers, one of us from a second-floor window of the school, another from the parking lot and the third as he was leaving the building at the rear, as the girls in maroon gym shorts and dazzling-white T-shirts ran, clutching hands; at that moment the sun burst through the storm clouds, and a diaphanous rainbow appeared in the sky, near-invisible, an arc of pale gold, rose, seablue shimmering over open fields beyond Garrison Road—“like a wayward, tossed-off gesture of God” (as Ritchie Eickhorn would one day observe). It was John Reddy Heart toward whom those girls were running, we knew. Yet we were resigned, not bitter; philosophical, not raging with testosterone jealousy. He won’t love them as we love them. One day, they will know. Unknown to any of us, John Reddy Heart was having, at that very moment, a near-encounter with an “older woman.” Sexually rapacious, stylishly dressed Mrs. Rindfleisch, Jon’s problem mother (a “nympho-mom” we’d been hearing lurid rumors of since we were all in sixth grade), her hunter green Mazda parked crookedly, idling at the curb, hurried swaying into Muller’s Drugs to pick up a prescription (for Valium: Mrs. Rindfleisch described herself as a pioneer of state-of-the-art tranquilizers in Willowsville in those heady years) and nearly collided with a display of hot water bottles, staring at the tall, rangy classmate of her son’s, what was his name, the Heart boy, the boy with the astonishing sexy eyes. Mrs. Rindfleisch heard her husky voice lift lyrically, “John Reddy! Hel-lo.” She somewhat surprised herself, cornering a boy Jon’s age who so clearly wanted to escape. (What was John Reddy doing in Muller’s? Some of us speculated he was stocking up on Trojans for the weekend, he must’ve run through rubbers like other guys run through Kleenex.) John Reddy appeared startled that Mrs. Rindfleisch knew his name. Or maybe it was the lilt of her voice, her gleaming predator-eyes and shiny lipsticked lips. He must not have recognized her though he and Jon had been on the varsity track team together and she’d come to a few meets, eager to see her son excel and proud of him even if, most times, unfortunately, he didn’t, and she wasn’t. “Well, um, John — lots of excitement imminent, yes?” Still he regarded her blankly. “I mean — the end of the school year. The end of — high school. Your prom, graduation. Such a happy time, yes?” Politely John Reddy murmured what sounded like, “Yes, ma’am.” Or possibly, “No, ma’am.” Mrs. Rindfleisch queried brightly, “And will your family be attending your graduation, I hope?” John Reddy shook his head, pained. “Why, that’s too bad! No one?” Mrs. Rindfleisch moved closer, emanating a sweet-musky scent like overripe gardenias. She tried not to lick her lips. “Why don’t you join us, then? I’m hosting a lavish brunch that day. Family, relatives, friends, scads and scads of Jon’s classmates — your classmates. Will you join us? Yes?” Not looking at the woman’s heated face, John Reddy mumbled he might be busy that day, but thanks. Flushed with her own generosity, Mrs. Rindfleisch said, “Well, John Reddy, know yourself invited. Chez Rindfleisch. Any time. In fact—” Her second Valium since lunch — or was it her third? — had just begun to kick in. That delicious downward sensation. Sliding-careening. A spiraling tightness in the groin. In the juicy crevices and folds of the groin. She had a quick, wild vision of how her pubic hair (not graying for the same shrewd reason the hairs on her head were not “graying” but shone a fetching russet-red) would appear to John Reddy Heart’s staring eyes, flattened like italics glimpsed through the pink-satiny transparency of her panty-girdle and believed it was a sight that would arouse him; she laughed, effervescent. Teeth sparkled. Asking the edgy boy if, um, would he like to join her in a Coke? a cup of coffee? a beer? a slice or two of zingy-hot pizza with all the trimmings? next door at The Haven or, better idea, her car’s right outside, ignition already switched on for a quick getaway, they could drive to Vito’s Paradiso Lounge on Niagara Boulevard, no trouble there, him being served. “What d’you say, John Reddy? Yes?” But John Reddy was mumbling, not meeting her eye, “Ma’am, thanks but I gotta go, I guess. Now.” Mrs. Rindfleisch was astonished to see her hand leap out, as long ago that very hand might’ve leapt out to forestall her swaying, toddler-age Jonathan from falling and injuring himself, now it was a beautifully maintained middle-aged hand, manicured, Revlon-red-polished nails scratchily caressing the boy’s hairy forearm, brushing against the boy’s taut groin, she saw a flicker of — what? — helpless lust in his face? — or childish fear? — “Ma’am, thanks, no.” Quickly then he walked away, about to break into a run. Mrs. Rindfleisch stared after him, incensed. How dare he! What was this! As if everyone didn’t know the brute animal, the lowlife fiend, sexy boy! As if she hadn’t one of her own, a handsome teenage son, at home! Watching John Reddy exit Muller’s as if exiting her life, steadying herself against a rack of Hallmark greeting cards. His lank black greasy hair was long enough for her to have seized into a fist, and tugged. God damn she should’ve. The way he’d insulted her. A hard-on like that, practically popping out of his zipper, and cutting his eyes at her, sending her unmistakable sex-messages with his eyes, staring at her breasts, at her (still glamorous, shapely) legs in diamond-black-textured stockings, then coolly backing away, breaking it off, teasing like coitus interruptus, the prig. Like all of them, God-damn prigs. Tears wetted Mrs. Rindfleisch’s meticulously rouged cheeks. Tears wetted Mrs. Rindfleisch’s raw-silk champagne-colored blouse worn beneath an aggressively youthful heather suede vest ideal for mild autumn days and nights. She stumbled in her high-heeled lizard-skin Gucci pumps to the door, or what appeared to be the door; she’d forgotten — what? Some reason, some purchase to be made, she’d come into Muller’s for, what was it, God damn who cares, that beautiful boy was slipping through her outstretched fingers like my very youth, my beauty, you wouldn’t believe how lovely I was, my perfect little breasts so bouncy and so free-standing, just hated to strap myself into a bra. Oh, but there he was, waiting for her — on the sidewalk — he hadn’t stalked off after all — no: It was her son Jon, glowering Jonathan, he’d sighted the Mazda crooked at the curb, motor running, left-turn signal crazily winking. “Oh, Jesus, Mom, what the hell are you doing?” this boy yelled, grabbing at her arm, and Mrs. Rindfleisch who was crying screamed, “You! You and your dirty foul-minded ‘John Reddy Heart’! Don’t any of you touch me.”