The Next Queen of Heaven-SA (14 page)

Thebes isn’t exactly the Mecca for hot guys on the prowl for repressed liturgical musicians of the Catholic persuasion.”

“Oh, Mr. Right, well, who’s he?” said Mr. Right, grinning at his daughter, who had found some building blocks on a shelf.

“Ask Mrs. Right. How
is
Francesca?”

“She’s doing great. Very involved last summer getting a new porch put on the house. She designed a pattern of brick and of ceramic tiles that was a real bitch to lay; they had to rip the whole thing up once because the footing was uneven. We were sorry you didn’t get there for the harvest party we had; it was warm enough to be out on the porch a good part of the evening, even with the lake wind. Her latest obsession has something to do with stenciling the fireplace surrounds on the second floor, in order not to freak out over the coming global computer collapse.”

“Well, tell her hi.”

“She says hi. She knew I was going to look for you.”

Well, of course; she wasn’t an idiot.

“It’s partly for her that I’ve come, in fact, to ask you a favor.” Jeremy sensed an easing of pressure, and an elevating of the usual sadness. Willem hadn’t sought him out because of sentiment or bittersweet memory. Francesca had sent Willem here on a mission. So now I can be colder and more immune to Willem’s charm. Whoopee.

“Anything. What’s up?”

“A friend of Francesca’s sister Irene is getting married in a couple of months.” Jeremy thought, Of course, he could always have just phoned me; and he felt cheap at his instinct to identify the escape clause, but grateful.

“I lost you,” said Jeremy suddenly, “what’s this?”

“Francesca and Irene’s friend. I think you know her—Polly Osterhaus.”

“Right, she’s in my choir. She’s an alto.”

“Well, Polly’s getting married. Just after New Year’s, I think. And it seems you’re not being invited to do the music.”

“Why do you say that?” Jeremy was miffed. Polly should have told him her plans. It was embarrassing to hear depressing marriage news through the grapevine.

“Jeremy, are you listening? Polly is friends with Irene.”

“Irene?”

“Irene Menengest, Francesca’s younger sister. Polly has asked Irene to sing something at the wedding, and Irene needs some coaching and maybe an accompanist, and Francesca thought of you.”

“Polly could have thought of me.”

“Polly might not know how nervous Irene is about this. Or maybe Polly’s, um, conflicted because she’s not asking you to sing at her wedding.”

“She should be. I’m her choir director. I intend to sulk the rest of the month.”

“Will you help Irene? You know her, don’t you?—didn’t you meet her at the house last year? Bartholomew’s birthday party?”

How touching, how stupid. Did Willem expect Jeremy to remember incidental friends and family members when he was visiting Willem’s beautiful 1840s home, making steady and difficult peace with Willem’s perfect 1990s wife, enjoying and being jealous of Willem’s irreplaceable kids, his hilltop view out over Lake Ontario? Even his Irish setter, Clay, was sexy with that recherché bandanna around his neck.

“Oh, yeah,” said Jeremy, “Irene. Is she the plump one with the beautiful dimples and the Guatemalan shawls and all? Sort of testy?”

“She’s got a decent voice, but she’s nervous.”

“I could probably meet her a couple of times and give her some pointers, but I don’t know about the actual wedding. Depends on when it is. I have some other plans for early January.”

“She’ll be awfully glad, and so will Francesca. I knew you’d do it; I told Francesca you would.”

“I can do the rehearsal. I can’t say I can make the wedding,” said Jeremy, more pointedly this time. “Irene might have to get another accompanist, someone down from Watertown maybe, depending on what the piece is. I might not be here.”

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.

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.