The Next Queen of Heaven Read online

  She’d given Caleb every chance. Every chance and, God knows, every liberty. Where was her fucking payback? No phone call, no help with Mom, no nothing.

  She didn’t want Mr. Reeves bringing the county authorities down on her. So Tabitha found her father’s phone number scribbled in the back of the NYNEX yellow pages. He lived with his new wife down in Vestal, near Binghamton. Flooring was big down there, apparently. “Hold the line, Tabitha, he’s on his way,” said his new wife, who wasn’t very new even when he’d married her.

  Tabitha didn’t bother to grunt a thank-you. She didn’t like the second Mrs. Scales very much. Maybe if she ever met her she might change her mind, but till then, forget it.

  “Howcha doin’, Tabbles?” said her dad. He was always coming up with new childish nicknames to disguise the fact that he had cut out when she was two.

  “Good. You okay?”

  “Things are great. Never better. Getting into indoor-outdoor carpeting. All over again. The new thing. You’d be surprised. Consumers fickle? Whatcha gonna do. Wait and see attitude. The grass is always greener when it’s Astroturf. Butcha never know. Still, imagine vacuuming your lawn. No dandelions. Whatcha say?”

  “I’m calling about Mom.”

  “What’s that?”

  “She had an accident. Not a car accident, no, a church accident, I guess. The nurse and doctors say she’s fine, but she’s not very much like normal.”

  “Nurses and doctors? That’ll be the day. She was never much like normal, Tabinetta. You want I should what? Talk to her? Put her on.”

  “I’m not sure she’d talk to you.”

  “She sounds her old self to me. Cooking with gas. Try her and see, Tabbles.”

  “Mom.” Tabitha held out the receiver. “Guess who. It’s the Dad behind Door Number One.”

  Mrs. Scales didn’t look at Tabitha. “Eek and ye shall find.”

  “It’s Daddy Casey. He wants to talk to you.”

  Her mother just shook her head.

  “See?” said Tabitha to her father. “She won’t come to the phone.”

  “Tell you what,” said Daddy Casey. “Try Daddy Wally and then try Daddy Booth. If she won’t talk to anyone, call me back. But I’m probably not going to be here. A trade fair. Floor show. I’m the opening number. Ha ha!”

  Tabitha didn’t laugh, just hung up. Men. Daddy Casey on one hand, Caleb Briggs on the other. Unreliable. Caleb would be laying somebody else soon if Tabitha dropped out of sight entirely.

  She perked up though. Maybe he’d been too drunk to remember what he’d done so right that wild session on Halloween night. That miraculous spree, from which she’d come home masked, stoned, and elated from the orgasm so intense she hadn’t even been able to lie about it to her mother. Prompting the fight that had forced Mrs. Scales into seeking solace in a Catholic church, of all godforsaken places. So it was sort of Caleb’s fault. In a way. She hadn’t really put it to herself like that before. He owed her.

  “Gotta go shopping, Mom.” Tabitha noticed she was talking more loudly, as if her mom had gone deaf, though there wasn’t any real sign of that. Her mom had just lost interest in her kids, that’s all. She seemed to take no notice of Tabitha’s walking around, jangling the car keys. Ordinarily Tabitha wasn’t allowed to drive after that incident with the state trooper in the rest stop. But Mrs. Scales showed no sign of objecting this morning. She was cuddling the Bible and glancing every now and then at some talk show in which they appeared, at quick glance, to be stir-frying a dozen or so severed human ears. Maybe they were oysters.

  Caleb Briggs wasn’t to be found, which wasn’t such a problem except that Tabitha also wasn’t running into Stephanie Getchen, either, that whore. That slut waiting for an opportunity. Neither Caleb nor Stephanie were hanging around the soda machine behind Scarcese’s Budget Gas, not loitering at the low-budget KFC knockoff, Tennessee Fried Chicken. (Visit the Corporal, said their menu, after which wags always scrawled Punishment.) Nor were Caleb or Stephanie anywhere near the Crosswinds Shopping Center at Cleary Corners, which was the closest to an honest-to-God mall that Thebes could manage.

  Whatever. Tabitha would find that cockteasing bitch and tear her limb from limb. But what if it wasn’t Stephanie? How embarrassing to trash the wrong girl.

  She thought of driving out to Caleb’s trailer and breaking in. She knew she could. But then what? She couldn’t envision herself draped in Caleb’s big shirts just sitting around the way her own abandoned mother sat. After all the times Caleb nudged Tabitha through the trailer’s flimsy tin-can door in a whimpering, desperate kind of way, like a dog who needed a walk, bad? What a comedown.

  Tabitha didn’t believe she had much of a sense of pride. I don’t know the meaning of the word, she thought of saying aloud, with her chin up and a bright spark in her eye. Still, she wasn’t going to stoop to ambushing Caleb in his infidelity. She wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction. Or Stephanie Getchen, or whoever else it might be.

  So why don’t I feel better about myself?

  When she got home, Hogan was in his room, blasting some toxic talk radio thing on his speakers the size of Stonehenge. Kirk was making cookies. “So how’s it going, Suzy Homewrecker?”

  “I hate being a sophomore,” said Kirk. “Everybody’s so juvenile. Hey, do you think I’m supposed to grease this cookie sheet? I thought maybe Mom would like something fresh baked.”

  “Freihofer’s not good enough for her now?”

  “I finished the box when I got home.”

  “What? And ruin that girlish figure?”

  “Tabitha, cut it out, will you? Mom’s in her room with the lights off and a pound of bacon on her eyes. Don’t ask me why. I’m just trying to do something nice for her.”

  “Suck-up.” Still, the phone was free and not under surveillance, so Tabitha decided to call Hogan’s dad. His name was Wally Hauenstein and he lived in Drexel Hill, Pennsylvania. Or, apparently, he used to. The phone was disconnected and there was no Wally Hauenstein listed, not in the whole greater Philadelphia metropolitan area.

  Tabitha considered sauntering by Hogan’s room and letting him know this interesting piece of news. But that could wait; she didn’t have the time to be nasty. She just continued down the list of her mother’s former husbands to Booth Garrison. A long phone message listed all sorts of fax numbers and beeper numbers and weekend cottage numbers. She maintained a steady hand on the receiver until the ping sounded. “Daddy Booth, this is Tabitha, would you call us, thanks,” and she heard his voice say “Hello?” just as she was about to hang up.

  “You want me to come out to Thebes?” said Daddy Booth. “Is that what you’re asking me to do?”

  “I don’t know,” said Tabitha. “I’m asking you to do something.”

  “Put Kirk on the line.”

  “He’s making cookies. It’ll take him a minute to fold up his frilly apron.” She wasn’t fond of Daddy Booth, and she hadn’t been fond of him during the nineteen months of his marriage to their mother. He’d coddled baby Kirk, he’d been wary of Hogan even as a toddler, and he’d considered Tabitha moronic. But he’d been marginally more involved in the upbringing of his son and stepkids, even after the divorce, than either Daddy Casey or Daddy Wally. He alone sent a check once in a while. And if his work took him into the vicinity he would stop by for a meal.

  He had a real love-hate thing for Kirk, Kirk being his only son but so disappointing. He knew that Kirk was bright even if he was probably going to be a faggot someday. Booth Garrison liked bright people; he liked himself in that regard, too. All the more reason for Tabitha to sneer at Kirk as he came up and took the phone receiver. “Hi,” said Kirk, noncommittal with his dad as always.

  Tabitha listened to the conversation for a while, and then lost track. She wandered down the hall and pushed her mother’s bedroom door open an inch or two. Her mother had fallen asleep on her bed. A red lacy shawl was draped over the bedside lamp and rosy patterns, like cells in bio lab, spiderwebbed t
he walls. It was less like a bordello than a trip into someone’s large intestine. The packet of bacon had slipped to one side and lay halfway across an inert Bible.

  Her mother looked like an old woman, though she was a pert late fortysomething; Tabitha could never remember the age exactly. Her mother’s mouth drooped a bit, and Tabitha noticed creases in the skin around the jaw. Interesting, when her mother believed in being not just active but active: She liked to move. She liked to swing from room to room and do things, to run from place to place, to guide that car along the roads. She was supposed to be full of zeal and criticism. But asleep in the late afternoon? She was a picture of someone’s grandmother.

  That, Tabitha realized, is part of the problem. It’s hard enough to deal with a mother, especially an annoying mom like a Leontina Scales. But to have her promoted with no advance warning into grandmotherliness—well, it’s shocking. And she’s not taking care of her hair at all. She looks like Albert Einstein when he was discovering electricity

  “What’d he say?” asked Tabitha, when Kirk had hung up with that irritating gentility he showed to inanimate objects.

  “Basically, he reminded us that he had divorced her thirteen and a half years ago and it was our turn.”

  “To take care of her?” Tabitha was shocked.

  “To divorce her.”

  “And you said?”

  “I said, Screw you, Daddy Booth.”

  “Screw you? Gee whillikers, Boy Wonderpants, don’t be so Fifties! I mean, for God’s sake, can’t you even say fuck you when it’s the right time to say fuck you? What do you think, you’re on some kind of a—a cruise? Screw you, in your white tuxedo? Do you need to take Cursing for Dummies? It’s fuck you. Listen and learn. Repeat after me. Fuck you.”

  “Fuck you.”

  “No, fuck you.”

  “No, fuck you.”

  “A little enthusiasm. Say it as if you mean it. You sound like you’re asking to borrow someone’s cell phone. Put some feeling into it. Poke your clenched hand in my face. Like so. Fuck you.”

  “Fuck you.”

  From behind the slightly ajar door, their mother’s voice ventured. “Otherfuckers! Ill you otherfuckers shut the fuck up?”

  “Motherfuckers,” Hogan interpreted as the talk radio host paused to grab a breath. “Now that notion is seriously creepy.”

  The doorbell rang. Kirk went to answer it. “Say it to whoever it is, Kirk, say it say it say it. I dare you. It’s practice,” said Tabitha, pirouetting close behind him. He opened the door and muttered, “Hellotherefuckyou,” under his breath. Mrs. Chanarinjee handed him a casserole covered with tin foil and fled.

  11

  JEREMY WAS LATE. He’d been gathering his papers, the photocopied lyric sheets and pencil-corrected vocal parts (working at sparer harmonies, more Brian Eno, less Crosby, Stills and Nash), and he remembered a half-song scribbled late last night, at one of those testing moments of loneliness. It must have fallen to the floor by the side of his narrow bed. In lurching to grab it he knocked over the stack on the bedside table. Including the paperback Bible he used for his church work.

  Exhibit A slid from its sacred keep between the pages of Kings. That snapshot. The only one Jeremy had. The sole material evidence of his own private David and Jonathan story only without, so far, the death in battle. It might have had the decency to land facedown on the floor, but it didn’t. Two abashed but undaunted faces caught in a half kiss courtesy of someone’s archaic black and white film stock. Familiar as myth and just as distant.

  Jeremy could hardly imagine he’d ever been capable of glowing like a Three Mile Island meltdown. Unsettling, the way the effect of an insubstantial kiss lingered through time, a harmonic just beyond the capacity of the ear to apprehend, but not of the memory to register and to twist, once again, between poles pulling either grateful or sour.

  He stuffed the photo back in the Bible without being sure of its precise address. Let it spend some time away from “Thy love for me was greater than that of a woman.” Perhaps the cold shower of “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” No surprise that David the buff savior of the nation calling Jonathan to his tent for figs and wine and torchlit sex on the sheepskin had become, when older and wiser, David the disconsolate psalmist. Hadn’t David also written musical settings to which his psalms should be sung? Opinions were divided, though it was easier to imagine a Brian Eno treatment of De Profundis than, say, the surfer-dude chorale of the Beach Boys.

  The matter of Willem, so volatile maybe because so suppressed, was hard to tamp down once it emerged. On the way to the first session on Slopemeadow Road, Jeremy tried to divert himself from the sting of it. Rehearsing a tenor glissando, a swooping sixth, he thought mostly of the barn swallows, the parabolic loops they used to make from the eaves of the lake house where he had spent summers with his parents back when they were still easy with him. The swallows came and went in couples. On any given summer morning, one was never more than moments away from the other; you hardly had to turn your head to find the mate. What if one died, victim of some kind of avian heart attack? The other one seemed to disappear. Jeremy had never seen a barn swallow on its own.

  Not as if he hadn’t tried to leave, he talked to himself. That terrible aborted campaign to relocate himself in California. Peggy Mueller had a sister who worked as an executive assistant for a music producer and everyone did what Peggy Mueller said, including her siblings. So five years ago Jeremy hadn’t renewed his lease on his apartment in Thebes, and had resigned from his church job, and with a lump in his throat that proved such symptoms were not merely figures of speech he’d tried to escape. Survived the flight from Albany to Chicago, and the flight from Chicago to LAX in alternating paroxysms of pride and terror. Eileen, Peggy’s sister, had made up the foldout sofa in the condo’s low narrow living room. It looked out on a view of the San Bernardino Mountains, sere and brown as Mount Sinai for all Jeremy could tell. Not quite the land of milk and honey, despite its reputation.

  She’d brought him to a dinner party that first Saturday. He still cringed at the thought of it. Six or eight people. Had Eileen been trying to see if she could flush his possible gay identity out into the public by observing him in the company of the L.A. ambisexual elite? If so, she’d failed. (Only after he’d fled had he realized how single she had seemed, and that her hopes of his romantic availability must have been attached to her welcome.)

  The guests were all roughly his age—mid twenties cresting at or just across the threshold of their thirties. Jeremy had been unable to pick up the simplest cues as to their makeup or character. The women posed brittle and laconic in over-large, candy-colored plastic eyeglass frames and wry expressive earrings; the men glistened sleek as pumas in their nylon dance-competition shirts and smart linen slacks that were in fact disappointingly slack. The dinner party had been rife with the cabbalistic mysteries of foreign society; the horde of guests and Eileen, too, spoke in L.A. code.

  Jeremy couldn’t guess if they were anything but asexual until he was emerging from a bathroom, where he’d gone to splash water on his face. One of them—probably one of the men, though everyone’s voice seemed coolly inflectionless and on the same pitch, or was that something wrong with his ears due to the air pressure of the transcontinental flights?—one of them said something like, “How public-spirited of you to bring him out to play, Eileen.”

  “Shh,” she had said; the “shhh” had cut through him. He strained more keenly. “Eileen, are you sure he’s house trained? Devon, you’re very brave to let him sit on your Ernardo Praxis leopards-and-lilies without a splat mat. Or are you about to have it re-upholstered again? He’s a gorgeous house present; they can be cute when they’re stupid, and he’s very cute.” A hiss of suppressed mirth—not so much a laugh-track as a sneer-track.

  He didn’t remember much about how he’d explained his change of heart to Eileen. It had cost all he had left to convert the return ticket he’d intended to use at Christmas into flights t
he following Tuesday morning. And, injury piled upon insult, in the weeks that followed, no one from the agencies he’d rung ever answered his call. Only one of the nine demo tapes he’d sent out came back, and that one was “return to sender” because the agency had closed or moved.

  No childhood nook in his parents’ home to which he could crawl—not welcome there—and no other ideas. Ashamed at his public humiliation—Jeremy Carr, off to make his career in the L.A. big time!—he’d commandeered a corner of Marty’s living room floor until he’d gotten the job at the school, and then the parish council offered him his old job back. The single barn swallow had tried to leave, but had had to loop back.

  How much of his failure to escape was due to Willem? How much of his attachment to Willem was due to his parents’ polite lack of interest in his affairs? The parabolic loops were endless, but he swooped about Thebes year after year, unable to untie the knots. Only music seemed to help. It hardly mattered whether he was steeped in his own compositions or some saccharine late-nineteenth-century hymn tune. Any time he opened his mouth to sing, the lump in his throat dissolved and a single barn swallow escaped for a certain number of bars, until the bars closed in again.

  JEREMY ARRIVED FIRST. No other cars in the circular drive. Sister Alice pulled up next, in a new car. “You don’t use the motorcycle at night?” he asked.

  “This is a rental,” she replied. “Little incident with a brain-dead driver passing on a stretch of the Syracuse road where the shoulder was torn up for repair.”

  “Nobody hurt, I hope.”

  “Only the bike.”