Writers & Lovers(10)

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 their child and their bright-red house and their boxes of bees and that they wouldn’t recall anything of me. They were kind people doing their best to be welcoming, but they did not want me there and I did not know why.

The baby got passed around. He nursed and reclined in his mother’s arms. He sat for a while upright in his father’s lap, and every time Matt laughed he would look straight up at his father’s chin and laugh, too. Matt passed him to Luke, and they got quiet. They didn’t know if I knew that he’d had a child. Luke held him up to his face, and the boy plucked at his glasses until he noticed me beside Luke and lunged at me with both arms. I caught him and we all laughed and Luke looked relieved.

He got strangely buoyant then and told a story about how when he was four he walked a mile to the penny candy store naked. The police brought him back home. I could tell Matt and Jen had heard the story before but laughed as if they hadn’t.

After another long hour around a fire pit, Luke and I walked in the dark to the treehouse. I wanted to talk about the weirdness of dinner, but once we were alone in the meadow I didn’t care about words. I needed to touch him, press against him and relieve my heaviness, my swollen ache for him. Lightning bugs flashed everywhere, for hundreds of feet in every direction. We kissed hungrily and pulled apart our clothes and pushed hard against each other in the thick spring grass. Everything else vanished into my desire for him.

We lay there a long time afterward, and the lightning bugs came closer and closer and flashed so near we could have touched them.

‘I think for the rest of my life lightning bugs will make me horny,’ I said.

He gave a half laugh, but he was gone somewhere else by then.

There was only one thin mattress and one pillow in the treehouse. He moved the flashlight around the room, and it lit up a box of Legos and a couple of board games and two dolls in chairs having a tea party. Luke got under the blankets and I curled up close, but even his skin felt plastic and closed off.

He reached up to touch the corner of a drawing stuck on the wall with a thumbtack. It was hard to tell what it was, a house or a dog. ‘Our daughters were nearly the same age,’ he said. ‘Caliope is seven weeks older than Charlotte.’

Charlotte.

‘How old was she when she—’ I didn’t know if he was a person who said died or passed or was taken. ‘When you lost her.’

‘Four months and twelve days.’

He let me hold him, but he was rigid in my arms all night.

He was gone when I woke up. In the house Jen told me he’d helped Matt move a few of the hives, then gone to the hardware store. Jen left her boy with me while she took a shower. Luke and Matt came back and ate egg sandwiches outside. By the time we got in the car to leave I was shaking with hunger and confusion.

I made him stop at the Dunkin’ Donuts before the highway. We drove an hour after that, barely speaking. Then he said, ‘What if,’ and stopped.

‘What if what?’ I forced myself to ask. I knew it wasn’t a good ‘what if.’

‘It’s not reliable.’

‘What?’

‘All this.’ He waved his hand back and forth over the gearshift. ‘Between us.’

‘All what?’

‘This attraction.’

‘Not reliable?’

‘Not meaningful. Not good.’

‘I think it’s pretty good,’ I said, playing dumb.

‘What if it’s the Devil?’

‘The Devil?’

‘Bad. Evil.’

It was like something very loud had started blaring in my ears.

By the time we got back to the Barn he had decided we shouldn’t touch each other. It was too confusing, he said. It was too much. It was too unbalanced. There was a disconnect between our souls and our bodies, he said.

I skipped dinner and stayed in my cabin. I lit a fire and stared at it. He found me there. He was inside me before the screen door had stopped shaking.

We lay on the old rug sweating, all the tension and misery of the day washed away. I felt loose and weightless. We looked at the signatures on the wall of all the writers and artists who had stayed in my cabin.