Nick smiled and drew his hand down his lover’s flank, taut ivory to his touch, and said, “There are some hours yet left, I think, to the term of my bond. Art thou so eager, love, to become dumb stone that thou must be asking me questions that beg to be answered ‘No?’ Know then, that I rejoice in being thy cony, and only wish that thou mayst catch me as often as may be, if all thy practices be as pleasant as this by which thou hast bound me to thee.”
And so they rose and made their ways to Oxford town, where Nicholas made such wise use of his faerie gold and his faerie commission as to keep his faerie lover in comfort all the days of their lives.
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