The Next Queen of Heaven: A Novel

by Gregory Maguire

  But Willem was already busy collecting Charlotte, helping her put the blocks away. He didn’t hear Jeremy’s announcement, and didn’t ask what Jeremy was going to do, and why. Willem squatted in such a way that his knees angled out, and his shoulders hunched in, and his daughter was caught and giggling, encircled by his warm fatherliness. Together they put the blocks back on the shelf. Jeremy let himself notice the pull of stonewashed cotton trousers along the top of Willem’s buttocks, the arch of spine underneath the leather jacket. He had all he could do to keep from going over and crouching behind Willem, burying his mouth in Willem’s hair, slipping his hands into the pockets of Willem’s bomber jacket.

  But steady, steady now. Willem hadn’t picked up on Jeremy’s cues. He hadn’t flinched in alarm at the notion that Jeremy might actually be going somewhere else. Willem’s not flinching was why Jeremy had to try again to get outa here. After a while, even a brave solitary barn swallow is fed up with its matchmaking kin, and either has to leave or else dive-bomb itself into the side of the barn.

  14

  JEREMY ON THE road, car doing the speed limit, or thereabouts. Car behaving. Car responding. Jeremy’s tax dollars at work—as if I earn enough to pay taxes, he thought.

  Car yielding to the driver’s masterful touch, angling obliquely to avoid the work-zone cones. Then the car entering a lateral swerve, very minor but unsettling; maybe the slope of gravel making a temporary shoulder has been improperly graded, or it has slipped in wet weather. Or am I going faster than I thought? What is the speed limit on an escape route?

  Losing my grip, he thought, in the endless instant in which the car and the ground refused to cooperate. As he recovered from the fishtailing and the car returned to firmer road surface, the flush of relief came first. The nervous system’s response to rattle-scarum panic, the gin-fizz of natural opiates.

  Calm first. Weird, welcome calm. A James Bond sort of insouciance, fingers rolling on the wheel even more lightly than before. (How against type for a Jeremy Carr. There’s no such creature as a gay James Bond.) A mile or two later, he grew aware of a bitter after-odor, an oily residue rising to his skin, extruded damp, drying itchy. While the car purred homeward as if nothing had happened to it, Jeremy’s palms sweated, his eyes refused to blink as if he might miss the next danger waiting to snare him. Unwilling now, or unable after his scare, to duck the memory one more time. The roadworks had flushed it front and center.

  The Sad Affair of Willem Handelaers and Jeremy Carr. (Interesting how even in his own memories he took second billing.) An obsession? He had worried about that for a while. He had gone for several outpatient therapy sessions with a counselor down in Utica. The counselor had said, “There’s always electroshock, you know,” but Jeremy had decided to take that as a joke. Father Mike Sheehy, who had not been told the particulars of Willem’s name or gender, had listened once to Jeremy and said gingerly, “Jesus said that we were to love one another as He loved us. Jeremy, what you need to remember is that love as a policy is stronger than love as an emotion. Perhaps this person needs you to be loving in a more distant way, so that this person’s life can continue to unfold according to God’s plan. Perhaps this is what you need, too.” He had smiled at Jeremy through a kindly avuncular distance that was heartbreaking in and of itself.

  But distance can be a kind of aphrodisiac, too, Jeremy had thought; absence makes the heart grow fonder, and foolish, and forgiving. He had thanked Father Mike for his thoughts and for the blessing, and he had said some Hail Marys like a small boy wobbling to stay up on the kneeler. And he had thought that love as a policy made a lot of sense for those who could manage it, and anyone who could manage it belonged in religious life. The rest of us have to struggle with the more ordinary love, the common or garden variety: love as a crippling condition. Love as a syndrome.

  Transferring, after his second year at Lemoyne in Syracuse, to the SUNY Albany campus. A regimented forest of attenuated concrete pillars, three stories high, holding up a single perforated canopy that roofed the entire suite of academic buildings. The music department had murmured insincere enthusiasm for his soft-pop compositions. Well, not being lieder, or motets, or twelve-tone histrionics, or jazz: what could they say? But already worried about a tendency to duck and run from difficult situations, Jeremy decided to stick it out.

  Late 1991—eight years ago almost exactly. Jeremy is twenty-one. Sees a note posted on one of those pillars advertising a get-together for students from the Thousand Islands region of New York State. Wanders over. Meets Sean Riley. Sean from Thebes, New York, a couple of hours west of the Carr family summer place on Larch Lake, the Adirondacks. Jeremy, who never trusts his reading of anyone’s sexuality, hasn’t guessed that Sean is gay, for all Sean’s primping and camping it up. Jeremy has assumed it to be a takeoff on some sitcom character he’s unaware of. Being unaware is a chronic condition for Jeremy, and he knows it. But Jeremy likes Sean, sort of, and if Willem hadn’t shown up at the meeting too, maybe Jeremy would have succumbed to Sean’s overtures. Once he’d recognized them for what they were. In 1991 he isn’t, after all, wholly clueless, nor entirely virginal. Depending on the definitions.

  And then what? Might Jeremy have been infected by Sean, or might Jeremy have kept Sean headlocked in a monogamous relationship and helped Sean maintain his health?

  Love as a policy. Love as a syndrome.

  But along comes Willem, showing up in the doorway the first time as vividly as he had done today. Willem entering the room, forced by the throng to back up almost immediately against the black lacquered door opened ajar against the wall. Some smitten track lighting manages to find him and turn him into a contemporary Renaissance ikon, with Rembrandt golden skin and a Memling-like acuity of expression. Almost a devotional portrait. A local saint. So this is what it felt like for knees to go weak. Where is a kneeler when you most need one.

  Takes twenty minutes to get up the nerve to wander over. The opening sentences are lost to time; Jeremy hasn’t been able to understand his own words even as he speaks them, or comprehend Willem’s soft under-chuckle of a reply.

  Willem is about five years older than Jeremy. A grad student in library science. Already developing an expertise in Internet connections for research libraries. Though his family has legitimate roots in the upper Hudson River Valley, Willem instead of William on anyone else would be risible. But no one cries pretentious; not at a legacy part Yankee, part Godsend. Those cheekbones, the swarthy Dutch lips, that jovial, mica-glinted sideways glance.

  What do we talk about? Kuwait; Baghdad; Bush. World affairs, subjects as far away as we can get from me, standing here, and you, standing there. Previous flirtations and regrettable dalliances aside, this is the real thing. Jeremy knows it at once. What is Colin Powell’s future? Is this the start of an Arab-American alliance? Someone turns up the sound; George Michael’s “Freedom” is too loud. They begin to bellow, to no avail. The Mother of All Battles, you said? Hah. Push over the line. Invade me. Occupy me, you lovely swaggering bastard. Willem shrugs, can’t fight over the noise. They stand shoulder to shoulder for a few minutes, almost touching, surveying the crowd as if looking for their future together.

  The crowd eddies. A program begins. Jeremy mentions a bar across Western Avenue. Willem begs off. Disappears before Jeremy can even ask where he lives.

  For the next six weeks Jeremy prowls the academic podium, trying to run into him again. He takes his sandwich in the lobby of the basement air well near Library Science, hoping their paths half-accidentally will cross.

  But by now Sean has become a friend and has done some sleuthing, too. Willem is spoken for. “There’s a girl in his life,” Sean confides to Jeremy, a cautionary remark that also serves as Sean’s coming-out flare.

  Briefly Jeremy wonders if Sean is lying, in order to release Jeremy from the phantom graduate school librarian. To turn Jeremy toward his own arms. Months go by; Jeremy resists Sean, but he’s almost given up on Willem. Spring arrives, becomes late
spring. Forsythia yields to lilacs. A dreadful local weather hangs over campus, the stench of roasting animal remains from some nearby meat processing plant. One day when for once he has forgotten to keep his eyes open, Jeremy runs into Willem at the bus stop at the circle. Willem has a gown and graduate hood slung over one arm, and a girlfriend on the other.

  “Already?” is all Jeremy can say, realizing: it’s not meat, it’s the smell of the future roasting. Someone has turned up the dial on the Whitney Houston power ballad: “I Will Always Love You” goes sonic. How can you already love someone if you have never loved him yet?

  Willem’s nonchalance unsettles Jeremy—has he misread all this? “I’m sure our paths will cross. We’re from the same time zone, aren’t we?” The girlfriend smiles with champion cheer; Jeremy wants to punch her lights out. “You’re south of Watertown, is it—?”

  “Utica,” says Jeremy, “but I’ll be in the Adirondacks this summer.”

  Lost, lost at sea, at night, in the woods, in the ocean depths, lost in space: but Jeremy wanders into the Library Science reception area. He knows he is good-looking enough to flirt successfully with the female assistant clerk, who against school policy releases Willem’s home address. A Handelaer family address outside of Antwerp, New York. He sends a postcard, includes his own home address in Utica and summer phone number at the lake. A message in a bottle flung into the abyss.

  He is at the lake alone, spending his days playing his guitar and scribbling lyrics. He is twenty-two but having lost some credits in transferring from Lemoyne he has a semester left. It’s slightly shaming still to be doing the Six Nations Ice Cream shack four evenings a week, but it allows him to sunbathe during the day and write music late at night. The lake house stands on a pretty parcel about eighty feet wide and six hundred feet deep: it was sold off from a big house next door in the thirties when the crash beggared even Manhattan magnates with summer estates in the mountains. The roadside chalet is shingled with cedar and roofed with copper, which makes the upstairs unbearably hot. Beyond, on a spit of land lined with poplars, the property points itself peninsular toward the two-story boathouse. His parents have a boat they rarely use any more, and the watery downstairs is spider-dense and full of mold.

  The upper floor—Jeremy’s domain—is reached by an outdoor staircase, and the single room is paneled in tongue-and-groove pine with walnut trim. There’s the guitar, the desk, dirty clothes strewn among the fresh, a narrow single bed with high turned posts, liquid light rippling up through the floorboards along with the occasional spider. Two gabled windows on each side, and double doors at the far end opening out to a balcony overlooking the lake. Sometimes—the water is deep enough—when Jeremy comes home so late no neighbors could possibly be out in boats (and no one could see from their recessed houses anyway) he peels off his ice-cream crusted regulation Six Nations shirt and dives naked into the black relief.

  He is about to reverse out of the driveway one afternoon when a car he doesn’t recognize pulls in, blocking him. He’s almost late. Gets out to see what’s what, and behind those sunglasses, hair a bit longer and blonder from the summer, lo and behold. “Tried to ring several times to say I was passing through,” says Willem. “No answer, no machine.”

  “I, um, stay in the boathouse except for, um, coffee and the bathroom. So I don’t hear the phone. And the machine’s broken.”

  “The lady at the post office told me where to find the house.”

  Jeremy calls in sick. There’s nothing in the kitchen, since Jeremy’s parents aren’t up till next week and Jeremy usually eats Six Nations tuna salad. They go get some ground meat and onions and a six-pack and some ice cream. They walk a bit around the lake. They talk like young nobles in German novels, they talk like Keats or Emily Dickinson or Blake, with what (in retrospect) seems embarrassing familiarity, about Liberty, and Honesty, and the Accidental Valor of the Heart. Jeremy feels himself to be home, in the way he feels at home in church. They talk the big stuff and nothing about the Girlfriend, or where Willem is driving to, and why his route takes him so out of the way past this obscure lake. And when he might need to get back on the road.

  He likes the boathouse. He wants to canoe. Jeremy hasn’t bothered to canoe in four or five years. They get it off the sawhorses and thwump it into the water and go out like Native American brothers at sunset. Willem sits fore, and the water kicked up from his paddle dots Jeremy’s shirt, making it wet and cling to him; spurts into Jeremy’s face; behind Willem’s back he opens his mouth and drinks what is offered.

  Willem says, swim? Jeremy won’t swim. He invents a knee injury. Scooping ice cream too vigorously, wounded in the service of Six Nations. Jeremy knows he can’t risk showing himself in a bathing suit: the only suit is a Seventies relic of his dad’s that now fits Jeremy, a lemon colored Speedo that would hide too little of Jeremy’s enthusiasm. He hopes Willem will drop the subject, and he does.

  They fry up burgers. Willem eats two. Jeremy pushes his around the melmac plate. They pull a single beer from the plastic grip of the sixpack, and sit outside until almost dark, but the bugs come up and they retreat to the lakehouse.

  Willem hadn’t known Jeremy was a music student. How could he? He cracks another beer and pops open one for Jeremy, too. Eventually Jeremy sings, knowing the songs are all wrong, not ready, but at least the pronouns are suitably vague. Two of these songs are about Willem and he doesn’t even know it.

  The dark deepens. The Harringtons in the big house, apparently launching a weekend house party, start blaring Depeche Mode. “Personal Jesus.” Jeremy has to stop singing; he can’t do battle of the bands with Depeche Mode.

  He is twenty-two, and a young twenty-two. Ready now either to age, to move on, or to get stuck here, depending on what happens next. But he doesn’t see that immediately. He only sees Willem’s golden head as the sky in the screen doors behind him goes from electric violet to black. The light through the yellow lamp shade on the dresser bathes them in afterglow before the fact, and the warm paneling glows as if the boathouse were made of skin.

  But he blathers, worse and worse as the minutes pass. Then Willem has to pee. A pee before getting back on the road? Jeremy directs him to the balcony. Easier than sending him to the house—what if he grabs his car keys, which are still on the kitchen table in there, and takes off? Jeremy looks the other way, fiddles with the guitar tuning before hanging it back up on the wall by its leather strap.

  They trade places; Jeremy pees. Prepares something to say when he comes back in, because the conversation has been loping in circles for a while as if searching for a campsite. When he comes back in, he says, “I’m so glad you caught me before I—” but Willem is gone.

  No, not gone. Sitting cross-legged on the bed with the last two beers. He beckons. “I had to catch you; you sent me a postcard inviting me to.”

  Jeremy had said Keep in touch, true, but he hadn’t expected Willem to get it. He approaches the bed as if the mattress is stuffed with live grenades.

  “Don’t sing any more,” says Willem.

  “I should go, um, lock the front door.”

  “There are two cars in the driveway. No one will come and steal the broken phone machine. Take a rest. You’ve been entertaining for hours.”

  He can hardly stand it; he starts to pop up. Willem makes a shushing sign with his finger and then he takes the last two beers from the plastic webbing.

  Opens one, opens the other.

  “Usually, I don’t actually drink much,” says Jeremy, which is true.

  “Shhh.” Willem takes the webbing and reaches for Jeremy’s hands, which he yields up in a state of disbelief. The first touch of Willem’s beer-cold fingertips almost severs Jeremy’s spine. Willem says, “I’ve caught you, so I’m not going to throw you back. I’m going to keep you.” He feeds Jeremy’s hands one at a time through adjacent circles of the plastic webbing, yoking them like handcuffs. Jeremy can’t speak. Willem lifts Jeremy’s hands gently over his head, and pulls the web
bing—through a third hole—over the farther bedpost, so Jeremy has to lean back against the pillows. His hands over his head, palms together like a dancer from Calcutta. Like a boy in prayer.

  “Now let’s see about that bad knee of yours, shall we?” He gives Jeremy a sip of beer and lets froth foam down the buttons of the Six Nations ice cream shack uniform shirt. He undoes the buttons and his face comes near as one hand runs across electrified skin. Then he puts the beer aside and more or less tears off their clothes. How do they come off over the yoke? Jeremy can’t remember. Maybe Willem rips them. Or do the very stitches come out of their own accord? The seams unravel? The shorts and shirts, blasted to the edges of the room by the force of their collision?

  Later that night—midnight, 2, 4 A.M., they hardly sleep—they drop naked into the water to soothe their rosy rawness, inside and out. They swim and wrestle and fetch up upon the rocks like shipwreck victims clutching each other for life. A loon sends its serrated complaint out against the warning of morning, coyotes on a far hillside bay for forty minutes or so, and it seems they never sleep.

  But they must do, for the next morning just before dawn they make love again, and leap from the balcony railing to wash the spume off their chests and legs and mouths, and when they emerge around the corner of the birches, Mr. Carr is standing at the steps with a plate of doughnuts and a Thermos of coffee.

  “I was just going to leave these on the bottom step,” he says, averting his eyes, but his voice is indictment trial conviction all at once. “We couldn’t sleep last night and we thought we’d surprise you.”

  “Guess you did,” says Jeremy, and that is all that passes between them on the subject. Ever. Willem leaves fifteen minutes later. Jeremy walks him to the edge of the road. Jeremy’s parents’ car is pulled onto the lawn since there has been no room in the driveway. His mother never appears at the porch or the door or even, as far as Jeremy can tell, a window.