John Finn 9: Beekeeping

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I’ve kept journals off and on through the years. For the most part, just another excuse for not doing something else. Another escape. People who are doing worthwhile things don’t have time for journals.

And that said, you know I’m wrong. There is Cherry-Garrard. There is the great Champlain. There is the strangely anonymous James Magra’s account of the astounding voyage of Captain Cook. And there is always Boswell. There’s Pepys too, but that’s more a diary. I could never keep a diary. But keeping a journal has been useful. Especially of late.

I don’t try to get everything down–just the bits I’m likely to forget. The smell of something. The color. Usually that’s enough. Maybe a little of what was said.

Mary Ellen once told me it looked like a beehive on the page. One of those rounded hives they always had in the cartoons with the bees making lines away. I remember how odd I thought the observation was. Mary Ellen was not given to metaphors. But then I left my journal open one day and when I came back I saw it from the far side of the desk for the first time. Upside down it does look like a bee hive.

I always start at the top of the page with the ideas spilling thick and heavy before they run out line by line. Afterwards, I’ll get second thoughts about what I’ve written and scrawl them down and draw lines to where they connect to the original observation. Usually it’s just a better word to use.

Sometime later I found another similarity. There is a sting to past thoughts. Just now I’ve been trying to make sense of what has happened with Rebecca. Why did I want to like her so much, and why did that fail so badly?

The last Sunday in July we had breakfast in the narrow space Becky has designated as her balcony. It’s actually an area intended as a fire escape over the extended roof of the floor below. Those old Cambridge Victorians have all been subdivided into apartments now and the fire laws have called for some creativity. She had plants hung on the iron rail for decoration, an orange and green striped canvas awning extending from the sill above the same open window we had used to climb out, and there is a tight grill of wooden slats to create the appearance of a floor. The back leg of my folding lawn chair kept getting stuck between the slats. But then, I probably weigh twice as much as she does. She keeps herself trim.

We had both Sunday papers splayed on the slats between us. She was leaving for Maine that afternoon so we were out there early. Very little breeze. The sun smelled of honeysuckle.

Out of the blue–actually between sips of coffee–she says, “Did you know I was a virgin then?”

I was reading about the mechanics of Josh Beckett’s pitching arm and it caught me off guard.

“When?”

“Amherst. When we first met.”

Facts are facts, I suppose.

“What made you ask that now?”
She looked at me briefly, eye to eye, and then stared out over the back yard below us as if looking for something as she answered.

“I was just thinking about why I hadn’t slept with you way back then. I know I wanted to. It was on my mind a lot. I remember that. And I think you were working on the same idea. Right?”

“Right. I was twenty years old. That was just about the only thing on my mind.”

“So why didn’t it happen?”

I dropped Josh Beckett to the slats. My coffee mug was empty so I couldn’t use it as a delaying tactic. Instead I examined the line of her one leg where it broke the parting in her robe. I didn’t have an answer I could use. I grunted stupidly. Then I said it.

“I was stupid.”

She shook her head.

“No. It had nothing to do with how stupid you were. You were a colossal jerk, but I did think I might be in love with you and I was desperate to find out what sex was all about.”

Well, there was no denying my stupidity at least. I protested, “You disappeared. Remember? You went away. To Virginia.”

She shook her head at me. “That was in May. I mean before that. We started hanging out together in September. That’s a long time to avoid the obvious.”

“Yeah.” It was. I remembered that.

She turned one widened eye on me.

“Were you seeing somebody else?”

I shrugged innocently at the accusation. “No. The first year, yes. But after that I swore off sex. I couldn’t think with that on my brain. Senior year I was a monk. I had credits to make up to graduate.”

She narrowed her eyes

“That first year–was that the little blonde?”

“Yes.”

“What was her appeal?”

“She was blonde.”

“I see.”

But that gave me an opening to avoid a direct answer with a question of my own. “Does that mean you already had an eye on me in our freshman year?”

She nodded. “Yes. We had the same history class. Remember?” She sipped again.

I remembered, “Yeah. Mr. Davis. He almost ended any interest I had in the subject of history.”

“He was terrible. But it gave me lots of time to make an appraisal of the class. You were the only one that seemed at all interesting.”

This had to be a compliment. I jumped at the chance after being categorized as a stupid jerk.

“What was so interesting about me? I was a lout.”

“Yes. That too. But you asked questions. You were the lout who was always questioning Davis. No matter what he said. I used to watch his eyes when he made any substantive statement of fact. They would always flit over to you, to see if you were going to raise your hand. You never failed him.”

“He was an idiot. That was just to stay awake.”

“It was fun. I think it entertained everybody.”

“It got me a ‘B’. I wrote a twenty page paper debunking his bullshit about the French Revolution, point by point, and he gave me a ‘B’.”

“He gave me an ‘A’. But I think he gave every girl in the class an ‘A.’ I figured he was looking for some extra-circular appreciation. But we all thought he was a jerk. And I wasn’t the only girl in that class who was watching you.”

That made me sit up.

“Really. Who else?”

She shook her head with pity.

“Well, there was the blonde, of course.”

I had forgotten. I redirected the questioning.

“So why did you keep your virginity under the circumstances. I mean despite my hot panting and heavy hands.”

She shook her head at me, ready to scold.

“No. You were always gentle. I was surprised at how gentle you were. I still am. You don’t look it. And now I regret my efforts to stay chaste. You’re like a mad explorer. I never know where you’re going to turn next.”

“It’s only because I can’t make up my mind.”

That got a smile. She looks twenty years younger when she smiles.

She looked down at her hands. “But the answer to your question is what you said to me a few weeks ago. About love. Remember. You can remember that far back, can’t you? You hit the button with that. It was because I wanted you to tell me you loved me. I wanted to make love. I believed in Keats and Shelley and Elizabeth Barrett Browning then. I believed in love. Just like the Beatles. And I waited. And waited–you lout you. I waited all the way to graduation.”

I said, “I’m sorry.” And I was. I had missed a great opportunity. I could have told that lie very easily.

She shook her head again, as if she had her own regrets now. She said, “Don’t be. You didn’t love me. That was all. There wasn’t a lot of me to love then. I was just a girl. Foolish and full of poetry.”

I laughed. A single laugh was all I could manage before I swallowed it. I had to wait to be sure she understood the laugh was not at her. I shook my head at myself then.

“I wrote something. Back then. I should try to find it–to show you. I used it later on in a novel I was writing. My unfinished college novel. I used those words myself. Almost that exactly: ‘Foolish and full of poetry.’ But I was talking about myself. Of course. I suppose I was always talking about myself, wasn’t I. But it was offered as a description of the kind of girl I was looking for and hadn’t found. I remember because it was that very line that made me stop writing that damn book. It suddenly sounded so stupid to me. So unhip. Uncool.”

She offered no reaction. The lines of her face seemed caught. I wasn’t even sure she was thinking about what I had just said until she finally answered.

“But we weren’t. Either of us. Cool was only what we wanted to be…I unfoolishly went off to graduate school. And you—you went into the army to pay your loans off. Not very poetic or foolish of either of us.”

I said, “At least we had our self-delusions in common.”

She smiled at me. I judged it a tolerant smile. She said, “Maybe. But they were our best thoughts. Don’t you think? It was what we wanted to be. And there we were, both looking for the same thing and missing it, only because it wasn’t really there yet. In either of us.”

That was it. That was me, for sure. I wondered if it was in me yet. But I suppose I wanted to understand something else now. I wanted to know why she had taken my hand, that evening a few weeks before, on the Charles. And I was stupid enough not to appreciate what she was saying or the obvious subtext of my asking.

“So what’s changed your mind about me now?”

Her smile fled. A swatch of yellow sun caught a leaf shadow against her face and gave it a sudden sadness.

She flinched at the sun, or maybe just at her own thought. “It’s not your doing. Don’t worry. You’re not at fault this time either. I lost my illusions long ago…I made myself fall in love with Harry. And then, as if that was not enough of a lesson, I did it again with Leonard. You can’t make it up. No matter how much you want it to be.”

Was this just for old times sake then? Not a pleasing thought at all. Did I really want to know?

What I replied was, “No. You can’t.”

It was the flinch on her face that came back to me afterward. So much like an unexpected sting.

I’ve managed to get some of it down in those fat little notebooks–year after year. And read them later with a fear I never felt at the time they were written. I can never read much of it without recoiling at a sudden prick–a sting. I can’t look at them for fun. There is no pleasure in many of the thoughts at all. As if every flower has its bee.

I think it’s only natural to forget the stings. Mary Ellen and I were unhappy long before she decided to divorce me. She doesn’t write things down herself. She keeps them in her head and browses through them at night, in bed. Some nights she can’t sleep at all. She’d wake me up, angry that I could sleep while she twisted over some hurt. She would forget them in time, but not before rubbing them raw more than once and spoiling my sleep as well.

Perhaps that’s wrong too. There must have been more than a few things she could not forget—else why did she finally give up.

Mary Ellen always thought I remembered everything. But I never do, really. I just write it down and keep it until it has no use.

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