by Jean Hegland
“Stop, stop!” She commanded, pummeling his jacket merrily. “Save the end for last. If nothing else, it’ll give us something to talk about on the way home.”
Someone is weeping. Behind him, in a corner of the hall, somebody has been crying the whole time he has been dining. Those cries rise and fall in his awareness like a distant alarm. It’s a wearisome, worrying noise, both nagging and disturbing, and he thinks that someone should put a stop to it.
At his own table, his dining companions are finishing their ice creams, the jocund one cleaning her bowl as if she were completing some crucial quest. His own ice cream has softened into a gooey puddle while he’s been away.
The weekend after Hamlet, Sally invited him to come with her while she visited one of her apiaries, which turned out to be simply a row of a dozen white hives set between a vineyard and a small green creek.
She’d brought an extra veil for him to wear and he stood beside her, watching through the mesh of it as she lifted the lid from the first hive box and pried off the inner cover. A cloud of bees came gusting up. He took an inadvertent step backwards, startled by both their numbers and their vigor.
“They’re only saying hi,” she said with a laugh as he edged further away, suddenly newly wary of the entire enterprise.
Standing over the open hive, Sally closed her eyes and inhaled deeply. “I love the smell of a happy hive,” she said as she let out her breath.
“Can you smell it, too?” she asked, opening her eyes and turning to him, and when he moved a little closer, he was suddenly aware of the scent wafting from the hive—a clean rich smell like a field of ripe wheat, or an orchard at midnight, or the healthy smell of sex.
“Aren’t they lovely?” she urged as he drew nearer. Prying inside the box with a tool like a miniature crowbar, she eased out a frame sizzling with bees. Holding it up for his inspection, she pointed out the honey, pollen, and brood hidden beneath the undulating mass of insects.
“It is a little intimidating,” he admitted, glancing askance from that seethe of bees to her serene face.
She smiled at him beneath her veil. “I used to feel that way, too. But now I find it calming. Bees’ll tell you when you’re not welcome. You just need to listen.”
“What are they saying now?”
She paused for a moment, cocking her veiled head to one side as if to listen more intently. “They’re just gossiping. They love to gossip.”
“What are they gossiping about?”
She listened further. “You.”
“And?”
“So far they say they like you fine.”
While he tagged along beside her, she worked on down the row, opening hives, checking on brood patterns and honey stores, rearranging frames, stacking extra boxes on some of the hives, making other arcane adjustments for reasons she explained but that left him bewildered nonetheless. From several of the larger hives she decided it would be okay to take a frame or two of honey even that early in the season. Holding the frames she’d chosen above the open hives, she gave each one a short, sharp shake that dislodged hundreds of startled bees into the general buzz and whirl.
She pointed out forager bees returning to their hives, the bags on their back legs bulging with pollen. She showed him where on the frames they had already packed the comb with orange, red, or yellow pollen, and then she smiled happily when he observed that the glowing hexagons put him in mind of tiny stained glass windows. She showed him brood in different stages, from eggs like grains of sand to fat white larvae, and together they watched as a new bee struggled to break free of the cell in which her metamorphosis had occurred so she could join the life of her hive.
Sally said bees had to visit five hundred thousand blossoms to make a cup of honey, said that one bee would work her whole lifetime to produce less than a tenth of a teaspoonful of the stuff. Since no bee can survive more than a day without its hive, she explained it was really the hive that should be thought of as a single creature, and she told him it was possible for a healthy hive to live for centuries, replacing workers and drones and queens indefinitely. She mourned the current fate of bees, said some nights she could hardly sleep for worrying about their future.
“I never realized how much there was to beekeeping,” he admitted as she was opening the final hive.
She gave him a keen glance from beneath her veil. “Kind of like Hamlet,” she offered, lifting a frame from the top box and flipping it deftly to inspect both sides.
“I like to think of myself as more of a bee helper than a beekeeper,” she added as she replaced that frame and drew out another, “since the bees generally keep themselves just fine. My job is just to help them along a little, make sure they have everything they need to thrive.”
“And then help yourself to their honey,” he teased.
“Actually,” she answered stoutly, “if I’m doing it right, I’m really doing them a favor by carting off their surplus stores. Little misers,” she explained affectionately, “they’ll save up more honey than they need, and then waste energy trying to keep it warm and dry all winter.
“Though you have to be careful,” she warned so ardently it was as if she expected he would soon be helping bees himself. “It’s easy to kill a hive if you take too much honey. There’s more art than science to it,” she added with a small wry sigh, “and, like anything else that really matters, sooner or later it’s bound to break your heart.”
She’d packed a loaf of seedy bread, a blue-veined cheese, a basket of perfect apricots. He contributed a creamy chardonnay. Her work completed, they doffed their veils, spread a quilt beneath the twisting branches of a massive oak, sat munching and sipping, gazing down the tidy rows of trellised grapes while the bees droned and the stream gurgled and the sun dappled down through the leaves and lichened branches.
Sitting in that drowsy yard, he felt saturated by his awareness of the woman beside him, her quiet breath, her worn hands, her amiable wrinkled face. He felt attuned and charmed, drawn to her in a dozen different ways, but also utterly foolish. He was sixty-four. He had not touched a woman in the nearly three years since Freya left, and for all that time it had seemed absurd to think he would ever touch a woman again.
Casting surreptitious glances in Sally’s direction, he felt more awkward than he ever had before in the presence of a woman he fancied, as if all his previous experience had taught him nothing about courting except how fraught it was. He was so much more aware of his own inadequacies, too, of how old and raw and doltish he really was. As he helped himself to another apricot, he determined it would be wiser to enjoy this woman’s friendship than hazard all for any other prize.
“Ready for dessert?” Sally asked when their glasses were empty and the cheese was gone. And almost before he could nod, she had hopped up and was returning with a frame of honey, a few bees still clinging to its fat gold cells. Like a girl wiping a fingerful of cake batter from a bowl, she pressed her forefinger down into the comb, smashing the waxen seals so that honey oozed up.
“Another thing people don’t realize about honey is that there’s a tremendous variety of color and flavor. It’s like wine,” she said, glancing at the field in front of them, “but even more so. Every frame captures a particular season and location, what flowers were blooming when.”
Lifting her dripping finger toward his mouth, she commanded, “Taste.”
Her gesture was as direct and matter-of-fact as the scent of her work-warmed body, but still it caught him off guard. He felt absurd but also oddly virginal as he closed his mouth around her honeyed finger and sucked its sweetness, trying to tease out every particular flavor she was offering him.
“Yum,” he hummed, smiling into her face as he opened his lips to release her finger.
“Dig in,” she suggested with a happy grin, swiping her finger back along the groove of broken, oozing comb, and signaling him to do the same.
After they’d had their fill of honey still warm from the hive, she’d lifted her finger t
o her own mouth one final time.
“Watch this,” she commanded as she daubed her lips with honey.
“Watch what?” he asked after a bemused moment in which he’d admired the bones of her cheeks and her deep-set eyes.
“You have to wait,” she admonished, smiling as serenely as a living version of the ancient kore sculptures they would later admire in Sicily together. “Be patient.”
They waited for a long time then, he slightly puzzled and she utterly serene, while the bees danced around the hives like living bits of light, and the oak’s new leaves danced in the dallying breeze, and scraps of lines wove their own dance in his head—Where the bee sucks, there suck I, and, Merrily, merrily shall I live now, and, Not like a corpse … But quick and in mine arms.
When a bee landed on Sally’s lips, he gave an inadvertent gasp and reached over instinctively to brush the insect away. But she touched his hand to stay his gesture. Her smile never changing, he’d watched, disconcerted and enthralled, as the bee traversed her lips, its cellophane wings folded across its back while its legs and antennae wobbled busily and its proboscis probed her smile, reclaiming the sweetness it had discovered there. Sally’s eyes met his. She hugged his hand with hers, and her smile grew as the bee continued its progress unhampered.
When the bee finally flew off, she laughed merrily. “It tickles,” she announced, licking her lips, and then rubbing at the tickle with her hand.
“That takes courage,” he answered, bemused but also entranced.
“Maybe,” she replied. “And maybe it’s worth it,” she added, moving her bee-kissed mouth toward his.
“This is a nice party,” a stout dame announces, yanking John from that golden moment to deposit him in some wrong present where he sits with a motley assortment of messmates in a dismal dining hall. “But I think we should go to my place next,” the woman continues, plopping down her bowl. “We can dance. And hanky-pank.”
“That causes trouble,” the man claims, shaking his long head. “I’m a doctor. I know.”
“My father is a doctor,” the matron replies. Leaning across the table, she whispers, “He owns the biggest palace in the boneyard.”
“Guy walks into the doctor’s office,” the clownish fool retorts, “says, ‘Doc, I’ve hurt my arm in several places.’ ‘So,’ his doctor says, ‘stay outta those places.’”
“How does one leave this place?” John interjects, taking care to speak as if he were talking with colleagues at a conference instead of this collection of witless rustics. “Do you know?”
“There’s the door, right over there,” the grandam answers, waving a quivering arm.
“I mean forever,” John answers, enunciating carefully. “How does one leave for good?”
“For good?” she queries, frowning.
“You die,” the jester answers. “Kaput.”
Suddenly, the scrawny crone looks up from the photograph in her lap as if she had just woken from a hundred years’ sleep. Pushing herself effortfully upright, she moves slowly between the tables, clutching the photo to her chest like a prayer book or a valentine. When she reaches the weeping woman’s seat, she stops.
“There,” she says, patting the woman’s shoulder. Pressing the photograph into the woman’s empty hands, she adds, “There, there, there.” Turning, she shuffles back to her place, leaving the weeper to gaze at the picture in silence.
Now a crew is stacking bowls, gathering napkins, helping the diners to wipe their hands and grunt up from their chairs. Upright, they lurch between the tables and shuffle out the French doors.
“Would you like to go to the TV room for a while?” offers a woman whose bust reads MATTY as she helps herself to John’s arm and guides him from the table. “Maybe have a little change of scene?” But before the scene changes, John wants to identify the play. Shaking his head, he leads the way back down the hall, pausing before the open door that leads into a half-familiar room, like a place he’s seen once in a dream.
“That’s it!” the Matty woman chirps. “You’re learning your way around fast. Would you like to take a nap?” she asks as they enter the room and John takes stock of its little bed, plain dresser, and wide window. “Maybe lay down for a while?”
“Lie,” John growls.
“Yeah? You want to? Take a little rest?”
But John hates to rest. The rest is silence. There will be time enough to rest hereafter. In the meantime, he has so much work to do that he’s joked with Sally he’ll have no time to die for centuries to come.
It’s the romances he wants to revisit next. As soon as he manages to wend his way out of this strange maze, he plans to immerse himself in their shimmering mysteries yet again.
He thinks they may help in his defense of humanism, though naturally at this stage his ideas are still misty and unformed. But there’s something about the way those plays use music, masques, sculpture, and even theater to spark the shift from their tragic beginnings to their joyous resolutions that underscores the old insight that, while tragedy is suffering elevated into art, it’s art that helps humans endure—and sometimes even transcend—their suffering.
It’s thoughts like that which John wants to give himself to next. He knows he’ll need to ponder deeply, to wonder on for months—or even years—before truth makes all things plain. But he’s been at this stage in his thinking many times before, when ideas whirl in and flutter on, and insights lead to frustrations that blossom into better realizations. He is certain that if he can only have the time he needs, he will find a way to rescue humanism, even now.
Though the last time he actually tried to read a play, he’d found himself so frustrated by all that he could not quite recall about Helen and Paris and Menelaus and the heroes of the Trojan War, and so puzzled by all he couldn’t follow in Ulysses’s tangled speeches and Thersites’s mocking replies that, after struggling valiantly for half an evening to transmute the words on the page into people and poetry, he finally concluded he’d been reading a corrupted text or maybe even that someone had slipped him a trick copy of the play, like the water-squirting fountain pens or salted sticks of chewing gum his brother used to tease him with.
With a roar, he’d risen from his chair and hurled his copy of Troilus and Cressida across the room, terrifying Sally and knocking her great-aunt’s mantle clock to the floor. Afterwards he’d been embarrassed and appalled. He hadn’t meant to scare his dear love, hadn’t meant to destroy her treasured timepiece. But it was such a dastardly prank, not funny in the least, and in the moment he’d been unable to contain his rage.
They’d both been so flustered by the whole episode that after Sally swept up the clock’s splintered case and shattered glass, she proposed he might try thinking about the plays instead of reading them, at least for a little while. Especially since he knew them so well, she’d suggested that maybe reading them was only slowing him down.
On the face of it, her idea sounded absurd. But to humor her he’d promised he would consider it, and the more he considered, the more her proposal made a kind of convoluted sense. After all, plays were not a written art form in Shakespeare’s time. Not even the actors had copies of an entire script, using rolls of parchment instead—rolls that they called roles—on which their lines were written. Despite the exhortations of John Heminge and Henry Condell to reade him, Shakespeare had meant his plays to be seen and heard. And what better way to see and hear them—as John had long maintained—but in the theater of the mind? If a play lived inside his head already, why shouldn’t he leave the printed version of it behind?
He memorized his first play when he was nineteen, after all.
It’s a tale he’s recounted many scores of times, a story so permanent in his mind that already the intervening years are dissolving, already that story is washing over him again, already sweeping him out of the meaningless green room where he chafes and waits, and tugging him along on its strengthening current, so that once more he is back in his hometown—or rather, he is in his h
ometown still—still a lanky, yearning boy, still perched on the concrete step outside the office of Mr. Martini’s Esso station, glad that the morning rush is over so that he can take a load off until the next customer comes along.
Holding a Snickers bar in one grease-stained hand and his brand-new Folger’s pocket edition of Romeo and Juliet in the other, he takes a hefty bite of candy and begins to read:
Two households, both alike in dignity;
In fair Verona, where we lay our scene
Romeo and Juliet is on the recommended reading list for UC Davis’s English majors, and John has finished his freshman year determined to change his major from engineering to English.
“And then what?” his father asked on John’s first night home while the two of them sat together at one end of the dinner table, their plates filled with the slabs of steak and jumbo baked potatoes that were his dad’s idea of a meal to welcome him back. His mother had been dead for over a year, and his last few months at Davis, John had begun to believe he was finally becoming inured to that awful fact, and to think with some relief that, as his father and his brother seemed to have already done, he was honoring his mother’s memory by moving on in his own life.
But that first evening home, his loss seemed as raw as ever, her absence searingly evident in the lack of salad or vegetables or even rolls, in the splay of unopened mail that covered what had once been her place at the table, in the carton of salt and the bottle of catsup that sat unabashedly in front of his dad.
Opening a seam in his potato with his knife, his father said, “What on God’s green earth do you plan to do with a degree in English?”
“Read,” John answered immediately, and although he had not intended to sound so glib, he’d seen how his father’s fingers tightened on his knife, how the button of muscle at the top of his jaw twitched just a little. John’s brother Herb was already a practicing dentist, had recently purchased a television and a car. “And teach,” John added, slicing a bloody ribbon from his steak.