The Next Queen of Heaven-SA (15 page)

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 webbing—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.

What follows deteriorates in a half-life that runs on fast forward. Jeremy and Willem send cryptic postcards with the beginnings of a private language that never has a full chance to develop. They meet ten, fifteen times. Until recently Jeremy has been able to catalog in sequence every one of their trysts, each conversation, each novelty of lovemaking, each panic at separation, each lunging reunion, at times so hot and eager as to appear, if someone from a distance were actually watching, as if they were in hand-to-hand combat. Face to face combat.

It is a whole life to Jeremy, and more than adequately compensates for the frondeur that his parents show. He knows, later on when his parents separate, that his being caught
in flagrante
has had nothing to do with it. Years later he thinks: but we might have only been being guy-sy guys, skinny-dipping like, like soldiers in Iraq. When at last this occurs to him, though, it is too late.

Jeremy doesn’t go to his own graduation; by the following May, when he would have received his diploma, Jeremy’s friends have already matriculated. And he can’t bear to put his parents through a charade of family togetherness on his behalf. Besides, two weeks after the ceremony he skips, when he is back at the lake doing Six Nations Ice Cream one final summer since he has no job after college, a postcard comes from Willem saying they need to talk, but Jeremy should meet him someplace other than the lake. At a restaurant in Watertown. During regular dining hours. So there’ll be no combustion of romance, apparently. Jeremy has seen this coming but denied his own eyes.

It is a difficult breakup. Willem requests it. When Jeremy balks, Willem insists. To this day, this very today in the classroom, Willem has never been able to say that he doesn’t love Jeremy. That would have been so kind, if he’d only said it. But Willem has a weird code of honor that elevates truth over charity. Willem has said, over and over, “It’s not what I want, not really; you’re not who I want.” Giving Jeremy the obvious rejoinder, “I am who you want, it’s just that you just want something else more.” This Willem has never been able to deny.

He has, though, been able to say with honesty that he loves Francesca; he has loved her before laying eyes on Jeremy that day in the Student Union; he loves her still, and even more than before. He wants children. He wants a home. He wants her. “Shouldn’t you understand this,” he says to Jeremy, “you who believe in the holiness of the heart’s affections?” Since Jeremy’s home life has imploded as well as his fantasy romance, he hardly feels in a position to argue. Miserably, Jeremy does understand it. He tries to hate Francesca Menengest, and he puts off meeting her. He won’t go to their wedding, and he has to work as hard as he can not to send some dark reminder of Willem’s past—a plastic grip from a six-pack, say, or a copy of
Personal Jesus
shattered into pieces with a hammer. Truthfully, he doesn’t blame Francesca for loving Willem. How could Jeremy do that? Nor, when in the first of many attempts to put this behind him, he actually brings himself to meet her, does Jeremy find her despicable. She isn’t conniving, proprietary, or superior. (She also isn’t the blonde Willem was with that day in spring.) Francesca greets him, first and every time afterward, as if he is a distant and welcome member of their family. She seems a good partner, if obsessively alert to her House Beautiful and her Children First. She seems to know that hers is a Husband Interesting—of course she knows!—and with a thoughtfulness Jeremy has to admire, she even finds a way to absent herself when Jeremy makes himself come to visit them in Syracuse.

The past, an eternal force, always abuts the present, making of it a sort of wave of perpetual anguish that never finds anything to break itself against, and so keeps searching.

But why Willem, among all the possibilities? Jeremy knew his own native reticence was compensated, in the natural order biology and God decreed, by a winning enough form, face, manner. If he’d never been drop-dead gorgeous, he’d turned some heads, attracted attention he’d not intended to seek. And nice guys, most of them. So why hadn’t he contracted the virus of first love with say, Gorgeous Gus, the gay volleyball T.A. at LeMoyne, who used to make the men’s team do calisthenics in their jockstraps? Why not the guy in
Celtic Revival: Romance and
Revolution,
who read Yeats aloud to Jeremy as if he were Maude Gonne? Or any of the mostly straight guys in the dorm who got tanked enough to accidentally bump into him at beerkeg blasts and not stop quickly enough, signaling curiosity, a willingness to be seduced? One of them even crawled into Jeremy’s bed. Sex, maybe, but romance, the meaning of it: null and void.

Never any of them, never even close.
Willem, Willem.
Maybe only because of that mutuality: that he had shown up at the lake with his sudden lust timed to match Jeremy’s own, before his own had faded. The combustible romance, prominent experience as it was of sexual ingenuity and risk and thrill and playpen wrestling, had served primarily as an armature on which, for a time, something else, love valid enough to deserve the term even when sex was removed from the equation, could climb, espaliered. Could root, flower.

They’d gone to a concert once. A chorale doing R. Vaughan Williams’s
Five Mystical
Songs.
The lyrics about the efflorescence of God’s love cut and soothed at the same time. If God’s love was eternal, then anytime anyone turned to pray, the attention was mutual. Willem, who did not indulge in the lingo of faith, seemed to feel something in the lyrics too, squeezing Jeremy’s hand and stroking it until, in the auditorium, Jeremy’s tears surged first and, wondrous shame, his come soon after.

How do you recover from that? Move on? Consign it to the Saint Vincent de Paul bin for recycled experience? Cherry-pick from its remains for song lyrics, for evidence of mistakes made, for clues to survival?

But
I moved to Thebes first,
Jeremy reminded himself. Sean Riley had grown up there, and Jeremy visited a couple of times. Seven years ago, when Sean rang to say his parents had heard there was a church musician’s job open in their parish, Jeremy had applied—auditioned, really—and he’d been happy to go there from his father’s new, cold condo in Utica. “Now there’s two of us,” Sean had said, “a town the size of Thebes, can you believe it?” And two became three, when Sean got a job in the paper mill and chatted up Marty Rothbard at a company pork roast one summer day.