The Next Queen of Heaven-SA by Gregory Maguire Page B

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 the 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.