Reports of what happened at Dwayne's residence on Mill Race Lane printed in the press were confused and misleading, and overly sensationalist.
LURID W'SVILLE 30TH REUNION. TRAGIC END CLAIMS POPULAR W'SVILLE MAYOR. ACCIDENA-PRONE 30TH WHS WEEKEND, YES, WE PLAN A 40TH.2 Probably it s most accurate to say that no one really knew what happened at the swimdisco party through the remainder of the night--"It was like up and flung around by a tornado, you know something sure happened you don't know what." Originally our traditional swim-disco all-nighter was scheduled to shortly after midnight but, due to unavoidable circumstances at Millie's house, it was past one-thirty a. m. by the time a depleted crew us, in a giddy horn-honking flotilla of about nine cars, departed for Dwayne's.
Dwayne himself led the procession in his sleek mint-green Porsche, bandaged as with a rakish white turban after he'd struck it on a railing at the Pifers'. Quite a few of us had decided to retire for the night, worn out by the excitement--"Jesus. At home, we're in bed by ten p. m. We haven't the Late Show in years." We'd all been shaken by the collapse of the redwood deck, and several of us had been injured seriously enough to be taken by ambulance to Amherst General, sirens blaring--poor Lee Ann with a shattered femur, Bart Digger with a nasty head wound, named Fred Falco who'd been knocked unconscious and pinned beneath the buffet table, and a plump, heavily made-up woman wearing the name tag
"VAL POMEROY" whom no one knew, sobbing hysterically.
McQuade had crawled out from the wreckage and limped away, cursing, refusing paramedic treatment. Ken Fischer had carried a fainting Verrie Myers out of the ravine and, though dazed by head-blows, had gone back other victims. "Thank God, the damned deck fell only eighteen feet."
"Eight feet."
"That was enough." We'd lingered at the Pifers' to help the paramedics with our injured and to soothe distraught MacK Pifer who seemed intent upon blaming us when (as Roger Zwaart dryly remarked) he'd have better been worrying about a barrage of personal-injury suits. Millie, by contrast, was a good sport, and climbed into Dwayne's Porsche with him and other friends to drive off as if nothing, or almost nothing, had happened. "I'm a co-chair of this weekend and damned if I'm going to let anything spoil it. This is our thirtieth, guys!" Millie's brown eyes blazed and her milky skin, only just visibly lined with age, a heat we'd never observed back in high school.
At our twentieth reunion Dwayne Hewson had hosted a swim-disco party at his house, one of the big old eighteenth-century on Mill Race Lane, St.. Albans Hill, which had been, in high school terms, were yet the most accurate terms, "a blast"--"fantastic." He was determined that this thirtieth-reunion swim-disco be just as much fun--"And yet meaningful, too. We'll each carry away from tonight something special." We stood about the pool drinking, laughing, a little breathless.
music was playing, alternating with dreamier old-timey dance music. Dwayne strung mirrored disco-balls overhead and a strobe light pulsed and like frantic lightning. ("The sort of thing that can cause convulsions if you have an epileptic predisposition," Scottie Baskett observed. ) Dwayne urged us to make our own drinks, make ourselves at home. There were in the bathhouse--"One size fits all. Plus robes and towels.
of towels." Some of us kicked off our shoes to lower our toes in aqua-bright water of the Olympic-sized kidney-shaped pool, the water was warm as blood, so inviting. On the tape deck the Shrugs' classic lament
"Broke Heart Blues" was playing. Why were some of us oddly shy, reluctant to get into the pool, or to dance? "It's like I wasn't sure suddenly if I had my body. Like some parts of it were dead, or had fallen off. A small talky group of us stood reminiscing about the accident at the Pifers' as if it had taken place years ago and not less than two hours ago. We'd been impressed and exhilarated by the way most of us had rallied to one another. "Emergency situations can bring out the best in people, and that one did."
"Nobody panicked. Well, almost nobody. Some of the guys, Ken, were true heroes."
"And some of the women, too. Shelby Connor's muscles."
"And the paramedics--they looked like kids but were they terrific!
Even with our cars blocking the road they managed to get their through. And fast."
"That's why we pay the taxes we pay," Jon gravely observed, dabbing a tissue over his gleaming, flushed face.
"If Willowsville-Amherst is prime real estate, the Gold Coast of western New York, it's for a damned good reason." Our gregarious host Dwayne Hewson, passing by in a maroon T-shirt and snug-fitting plaid swim trunks, his white bandage-turban cocked over one eye, barefoot, said, "Friend, I'll drink to that!" We all drank. "Broke Heart Blues" ended on a melancholy whine and Hoors' "More More More!" came on loud, fast, hot and humping.
It seemed, at poolside, beneath the revolving disco-mirrors and strobe lights, that there were as many of us as there'd been earlier, possibly even more. Kate Olmsted, now barefoot, padded about taking flash photos- "For posterity. For us." We noted that the fall into the Pifers' ravine had bruised our stalwart Katie but hadn't slowed her down. Petey who'd had a crush on her thirty years ago but had been too shy to ask her to the Senior Prom was saying in his stubborn-pushy manner, as if he Kate and others to disagree, "Our only hope for the salvation of our civilization is to diminish randomness.
Randomness--'accident'--is our enemy.
Cyberspace is the dimension of calculation and control and certainty. The only dimension of certainty. There are too many local dialects in the lexicon of Homo sapiens--that's why the earth is soaked in blood. The twenty-first century will require a new, universal lexicon, and computer will supply it!" Verrie Myers in her backless cerise dress was dancing in the arms of Ken Fischer, her blond head nestled dreamily on his shoulder, Ken tossed aside his powder-blue linen jacket, and was seen to be wearing his Wolverine T-shirt of thirty years ago, maroon with the gold
3 on its back. We noted Millie Leroux laughing loudly whirling by in the
arms of--who? A tall looming fellow in swim trunks, Wolverine T-shirt and bristling chest hair like iron filings--Tommy
"Nosepicker" Nordstrom? He'd come to our reunion after all? There was Pattianne Groves looking dazed, giddy-drunk, her russet-brown hair in snarls and mascara and rmouth shaped to a startled
"Oh!" whirling and stumbling by in the arms of her old ex-steady Dwayne Hewson whose face was, by strobe light, a smoldering demon-mask of lust. ("At the prom, Dwayne got drunk and made maudlin asshole of himself over Verrie and Pattianne broke up with him that night and never spoke to him again--I mean, until we were all up.
And they were both married to other people. ") Roger Zwaart was with Suzi Zeigler whom he'd lifted out of the wreckage at the Pifers', the two pressed so close together that Suzi's thickish breasts were against Roger's bare, grizzled chest, they kissed, and their breaths melted together in a sticky, palpable substance like gum, Roger moaned with desire, blood pumping between his legs as it hadn't in how long he couldn't recall, he shut his burning eyes and saw Suzi's sweet face lifting to his, lips poised to kiss his, as they clutched in a sweaty embrace in their usual seats in the back row of the Glen Theatre, Suzi shut her eyes and saw, with a thrill, John Reddy Heart sitting a few rows ahead, his profile outlined against the insipid Technicolor of whatever Hollywood fantasy, strong-boned and thick dark hair like a noble, heraldic head on an ancient coin.
"I love you! Oh my God."
"I love you, Suzi." Bibi Arhardt we hadn't recognized earlier, a stout earnest attractive woman with oddly frizzed hair and lavendertinted bifocals, was telling of the night John Reddy had "come for me--taken me from my father's house--it wasn't like you would think--it wasn't like you would imagine any guy could do." Kate Olmsted was photos of The Glass Ark and of John Reddy Heart, or someone who resembled him, on a motorcycle speeding away, to those of us who hadn't seen them before, including Petey Merchant who gnawed his lip, staring in helpless envy--" My name is John Heart, he said," Kate recited, "--'That was all a long time ago. So, if he comes tonight, please--we won't bring
up the past, all right?" Petey Merchant saw his hand in slow motion, his blood emboldened by alcohol, he who never drank, reach for one of the photos, snatch it from Kate and tear it into shreds--"Yes, we won't! We won't! We won't bring up the fucking past! "--though somehow his hand hadn't moved, he hadn't ripped up the photo nor even spoken his but stood mute, stricken with shame. Yet exhilaration, too, for was a HARTSSOFT man, a cyberspace explorer, one of the elect. He would conquer the only world that mattered--the world inside the brain.
Trish Elders who'd been trying to cool off in the pool, except the bright aqua water was blood-warm, paddling about fretfully in diminutive white panties, her bare smallish breasts floating like chunks of melting Ivory soap, she who'd been so self-conscious when we were girls she'd hidden behind her opened in the girls' changing room--Trish was arguing with an unidentified individual crouched on the pool rim with a bottle of beer in hand, rivulets of water streaming from his ape-hairy legs, genitals like a swollen goiter barely constrained inside Jockey-style swim trunks, in a hurt, little-girl voice she argued, "Please. I resent that tone. Whoever you are.
You might've with us but you don't know us. John Reddy wouldn't just stay away again, Kate invited him and he said he'd come. He knows how we miss him.
were sort of close, John Reddy and me. He'd drive me home after sometimes in his Caddie. We never exactly dated. He had his own girl.
"Sasha Calvo. We all wanted to be Sasha Calvo. We all wanted to of--savage. Italian. And John Reddy looked sort of Italian, too.
Kate said he more or less promised he'd come, she sent him Dwayne's address and a special invitation signed by the reunion committee and by we're only about a block from John Reddy's former house on Meridian Place. I'm an artist, a painter. I'm not famous but my paintings sell. They aren't realistic though they spring from realism. Old photographs. I take images that haunt me and enhance them. They're dream-images actually.
My first was of John Reddy's car--salmon-colored, then parrot-green. I painted those cars for ten years. I could never paint John Reddy--any image of him wasn't right. He's someone you teel. Though he enters you the eyes, he's someone you feel. Why are you staring at me like that? I'm not drunk. I'm perfectly lucid. I've had a baby, in fact two babies--I'm real. I believe that John Reddy will come tonight. He wouldn't stay away again-like we didn't mean anything to him at all." She'd begun to cry, tears falling into the festive aqua water and vanishing at once.
Out of the phosphorescent foliage above the pool amplified guitars, drums, wailing androgynous voices fell upon us and made the water tremble.
Zappa's old-timey classic
"Why Does It Hurt When I Pee." Lulu Lovitt was her old, high school self again, squealing and at the other end of the pool as Jax Whitehead wrestled with her, cigarette in his mouth, trying to untie her red polka-dot bikini top, we couldn't remember if those two had dated, but it sure looked as if they had.
There was Chris Donner swinging through the crowd on those metal crutches that make him look like a giant, feisty insect, there a fattish Stan Aquino we hadn't seen since our tenth reunion when he'd gotten into a drunken fight with Roger Zwaart, there was brainy, embittered Petko in a stained tunic-and-pants costume slipping away to be sick to her in one of the downstairs bathrooms of the Hewsons' grand sepulchral house, noting to her disgust that the lavishly appointed bathroom already smelled, despite the exertions of a fan, of vomit. And afterward wandering the Hewsons' house pinch-faced and contemptuous, these bourgeois hypocrites, these crude characters out of what crude juvenile comic book scorned by Elise Petko even as a child, she found herself in an upstairs bedroom massed with gigantic furniture, canopied king-sized bed, mahogany bureau ceiling-high mirrors reflecting a gawky and eager fourteen-year-old girl so strangely betrayed by life. "Betrayed by America. Promising you can do it alone." There was Elise's hand inside a lacquered jewelty box on a glittering vanity, seeking "some small restitution, some emblem of what's me"--a loop of cultured pearls, a single silver earring thrust a deep pocket of her tunic. In a bathroom there was a mirrored medicine opening, like a treasure chest, to reveal among the usual toiletries an astonishing quantity of prescription drugs, Elise helped herself to two white tablets of oxycodone prescribed for
"Constance Hewson" and tablets of methocarbamol prescribed for
"Dwayne Hewson--for muscle spasm," carefully replacing the plastic bottles yet they slipped from her fingers, fell to the floor scattering pills, tablets, what the hell.
Elise stumbled to the canopied bed the size of a football field and pitched head-on into a deep, seething, churning night only to be awakened, how many that morning, by paramedics from Amherst General--"It must've been world record. Two unrelated emergency calls, to the same private residence, within ninety minutes!" (Indeed this would be noted in the local press gloating over our ACCIDENT-PRONE 30TH REUNION WEEKEND. ) Outside, on the terrace, amid the deafening though catchy strains The Splats' "Why Do Fools Fall in Love?" shading into the Elvis
"Heartbreak Hotel" there was brainy, dazed Dexter Cambrook, his right eye swollen and bruised from a clumsy fall into the Pifers' ravine, trying, and, we saw, failing, to summon up the nerve to tap Dwayne Hewson on a shoulder to ask if he might at last dance with a fleshy, bronze-haired Pattianne Groves, wife of our ambassador to Norway, with whom he hadn't danced at their Senior Prom though he'd been inveigled into taking Petko to the prom for solely that reason. "Pattianne? Excuse me?
You remember me, I hope--" But Dwayne spun Pattianne away in an aura of perspiration like full-body halos. (Some of us recalled, with smiles, fierce Pattianne charging down the playing field behind school, swinging, knees flashing, to unleash from her hockey stick a ball to fly into Dexter's head like fate and knock him cold--though we that, so many years later, and her ponytail long vanished, by stylishly streaked and "electrified" hair, Pattianne herself remember.
"There's a girl who has knocked lots of men cold. Better believe it! ") A number of us were intrigued, if skeptical, to learn from Ken Fischer that he hadn't committed suicide in Stuttgart, Germany, nor even attempted it, instead, involved in a traffic accident, he'd been rushed to a hospital where, by the sheerest coincidence, another
"Kenneth Fischer" had just been admitted, also an American businessman who'd been drugged, severely beaten robbed, and the two
"Kenneth Fischers" were somehow confused in
' , press, and--"The rest is history. Or, rather, fiction. He died, I didn't. One of you spun the rumor completely out of control for Christ's sake,Ken said, I glaring at us, "--almost as if you wanted me dead." We laughed uneasily, Veri rie loudest of all, an edge of hysteria to her laughter we recalled from her l cheerleader days, the team only just barely scoring to win, possibly not to I win, our throats raw with screaming. "Well, you're back with now, darling," Verrie said, lavishly kissing Ken's face, "--so don't do it again, ever." Ray Gottardi of Gottardi Fences was talking excitedly with wary Jon Rindfleisch who (it seemed, we couldn't hear very clearly over the music) owed him somewhere beyond $30, 000. Ketch Campbell had left poor Bonnie hadn't even known she'd been injured in the redwood deck collapse!
Amherst General to join us, glassy-eyed, disheveled yet eager to celebrate, and to tell us another time his tale of having been the first of any of us to sight John Reddy Heart and his family on M"Xn Street thirty-seven years ago almost to the day--"You could tell immediately that these folks were from somewhere else. Somewhere tar else." There were still a number of us who listened to Ketch's tale avidly, as if for the first time, for, Shelby Connor stumblingly expressed it, in her slurred, blear-eyed way groping for a profound metaphysical truth, "The way Ketch tells it, it forces you to realize, what if the Hearts hadn't come to Willowsville at all? What if their car had broken down in Nebraska? Or Colonel what's-his-name had died giving Dahlia the house? Our lives would be irrevocably altered, but--what lives would they be?" E. S. Fesnacht who'd been listening to with a furrowed brow, pursed lips, was it possible she'd never heard the story b
efore? ) appeared shaken by this query, but at a loss how to respond, Wells, ever the intellectual, said with a shrug, "Cutting-edge posits counterworlds' in which, in theory at least, and, we have to assume blissfully, counterselves' of ours exist. Now and then they about us but, for the most part, they don't give a damn." On the tape deck was an anomalous sloozy-sludgy
"Can't Get Enough Your Love, Babe" by Barry White and to our amazement there was Eickhorn, drunk as we'd never seen him, spiky-haired, glasses on his horsey, almost-handsome middle-aged-boy's face, one of those seeming-shy types obviously in a secret clamor for attention, clambering up onto the diving board fully clothe , waving his arms and shrilly declaiming what surmised was poetry, since it rhymed, O Corporate America!
Your love-need misconstrued as greed!
Your hunger for sanctity misconstrued as rapacity!
There may have been more but we interrupted to apezlaud and stamp feet. We were proud of Ritchie, we were proud of all our who'd "made names for themselves" in the world beyond Willowsville.
Larry Baumgart whom none of us remembered as a prankster leapt up wheezing onto the diving board and stamped his skeletal feet so vigorously, as he continued to clap, "Bravo, Walt Whitman! Son of the cosmos, bravo!" that a startled Ritchie Eickhorn lost his balance on the board and fell, arms and legs pathe ically flailing, into the pool. What a splash!
Joyce Carol Oates - Broke Heart Blues Page 47
