The Next Queen of Heaven-SA by Gregory Maguire Page A
Authors: Gregory Maguire
Tags: Fiction, General, Humorous, Fantasy, Action & Adventure, New York (State), City and Town Life, Teenagers, Mothers and daughters, Eccentrics and eccentricities, City and Town Life - New York (State)
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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
“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
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