Writers & Lovers. Lily King
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against the brown pods. The sun felt warm for the first time.
‘You kissed me in the bulrushes,’ I said.
He pointed to a pair of swollen eyes floating just above the water’s surface. ‘While the bullfrogs looked on, misunderstanding everything,’ he said and pulled me down to the ground.
I told him the things that were coming back to me about my mother when I was little: her lemon smell and her gardening gloves with the rubber bumps and her small square toes that cracked when she walked barefoot. Her tortoiseshell headbands that were salty at the tips if you sucked on them.
‘I can feel her. I can feel her right here.’
He kissed where I was touching, just below my collarbone, in that place where all my feelings got caught.
I believed she’d sent him to me, a gift to help me through.
We ran to the lake, swam across it, ran back to the dorm and took a bath together in the tub with the clawed feet and two taps and a rubber plug on a chain. Water sloshed all over the wood floor. We lay damp on his bed laughing, our chests pumping at the same time, knocking together, making us laugh even harder. When I looked at him I hid nothing.
I understood then how guarded I’d been before with men, how little of me I’d let them see.
He was married once, he said. They’d lost a child, he said later. It was a long time ago. He didn’t say more.
I couldn’t sleep beside him. It was too strong. I wanted him too much. It never went away. And I needed sleep to write. I wasn’t getting much done. During the day I mooned at my window, waiting for his steps on my porch.
Pull yourself together and do your work, I could hear my mother chide me. But I was too far gone to listen.
Luke was writing. He wrote five poems that first week, eleven the next.
‘I wrote a poem about bees.’
‘I hate bees.’
‘It just came out of me whole this morning.’ His face was lit up. He lay down on the cot in my cabin. ‘How can you hate bees?’
‘I don’t like the hive concept, the way the drones are crawling all over each other, programmed to serve the queen. I don’t like the gooey larvae or the idea of royal jelly or the way they swarm. It’s one of my biggest fears, being covered in bees.’
He was impressed by my quick list of grievances. ‘But they are also life giving. They impregnate flowers, and they give us our food supply. They work as a collective. Plus they are responsible for the line: “And live alone in the bee-loud glade.”’
‘What is a glade anyway? Is it a stand of trees or the open space between them?’
‘A glade is a glade.’ He spread his arms out, as if a glade were appearing before us.
‘God, you poets are full of shit. You have no idea what half the words you worship mean.’
He caught my arm. ‘Get your bee-loud glade over here,’ he said, and I slid on top of him.
He wrote eight more bee poems then took me to the Berkshires in his truck to see his friend Matt, who kept hives. It was the first hot day in May, and we stopped for mocha frappes and found a seventies station that played songs like ‘Run Joey Run’ and ‘Wildfire’ and ‘I’m Not in Love.’ We knew all the words and belted them out the open windows. When ‘I’m Not in Love’ came on, with that line about how he keeps her picture ‘upon’ the wall because of a stain that’s lyin’ there, we were laughing too hard to sing along. I peed a little and had to change my underwear at a rest stop, and he called me Betsy Wetsy the rest of the trip.
We arrived in the late afternoon. From what Luke had told me about Matt, I was picturing a guy in a shack with piles of garbage in the back, but he lived in a bright red house with window boxes full of flowers. His wife, Jen, came out first, and she and Luke bear hugged, swaying with exaggeration and affection.
‘Caliope was so angry when I told her you were coming,’ she said. ‘She’s at sleepaway camp for three nights.’
‘A big three-night camp?’ Luke said.
‘It’s an experiment. She said you could sleep in her tree house, which is not an invitation she extends very often.’
Luke nodded and there was a sudden silence, broken by Matt when he came out holding a small boy, who sat erect and vigilant on his father’s arm. I didn’t know many couples. My friends seemed to get married and disappear. Or maybe I disappeared. Nia and Abby had stayed in touch until they had babies. I’d tried to see Abby in Boston before taking a bus to Rhode Island, but she never returned my call. I had the gift I’d bought for the baby in my suitcase at Red Barn. When people have babies they stop calling you back.
We went inside and they fixed us drinks—cranberry juice and seltzer—and the boy, who’d just learned to walk a few weeks ago, staggered around the black-and-white tile floor. When he made his way to me he held up a knitted brown goat with tiny white horns. I squatted down to have a look, and he squeaked in surprise. Instead of backing up he put his face unnaturally close to mine.
‘Well hello, little fellow,’ I said.
Another squeak.
I touched the goat’s soft horns: one, two. He did the same. He smelled faintly of poop and Desenex. I was surprised how quickly that word ‘Desenex’ came to me. How did I even know it?
One, two on the horns. Three on his nose.
He opened his mouth—a dark toothless cavern—and after a few seconds a loud cackle came out.
I imitated him—the open mouth, the delay, the laugh—and he took it as an invitation to sit on my lap, which, because I was squatting, had to be created quickly. We dropped down onto the floor at the same time.
Jen shot me a grateful smile. She was talking to Matt and Luke about their plans for creating a neighborhood CSA and protesting against the Starbucks that had bought out the local doughnut shop.
Matt took us out back to see the bees. They didn’t have a yard. They had meadows and woods beyond the meadows. We followed a path that had been cut through the long grass and wildflowers to the white boxes of bees. Matt picked up a can and stuffed it with a burlap cloth and lit the cloth on fire and pumped air into it from a bellows on the side, and smoke started coming out of the nose at the top of the can. He lifted up the lid of a white box and set the smoker nearby then pulled up one of the trays of combs. It was covered in layers and layers of bees, and they clung on as he raised it high, every bee moving on top of other bees. As he continued to hold it up, the whole mass of them began to change shape and sag with gravity, some dribbling off like drops of liquid back into the box. It was revolting. I had to work hard to not imagine a sudden swarm.
Luke was mesmerized. I didn’t understand what the bees meant to him. The grass we were standing in was itchy and I just wanted Matt to lower the lid so I could go back into the kitchen and sit back down on the floor with their squeaky little boy, but we stayed out there a long time, going from box to box, though they were all the same, always a huge churning drooping clump of bees.
Dinner was to be an herb pasta and salad. Jen brought in basil, rosemary, sage, red lettuce, and a bowlful of misshapen tomatoes from their greenhouse. Matt, Luke, and I were put to chopping, and the kitchen smelled like we were still outside. They were the kind of people who were only inside when they had to be. We ate on the back patio at a table that Matt had made from an old door. Luke sat beside me, but not close to me, on a long bench.
The three of them spoke of people they’d known when they all lived in a house on the Cape in their twenties. Matt and Jen had disguised it well when we’d arrived, but I understood now that despite several phone calls over the course of the last month Luke had not told them about me or that I was coming along on this visit. They asked me a few questions, and I kept my answers short. I could tell they weren’t trying to retain the information. I knew that I would remember them and