needed to do differently. I woke up exhausted. Animals rustled outside my window.
When Luke stood behind me, I became animal myself: alert, cautious, curious. More people came in and he was pushed in closer and there were long moments when my shoulder blades rested against his chest. I felt him breathing in and out, felt his breath in my hair. I’m not sure what happened in the movie after the nail went through the egg.
When it was over, I staggered out of the room and onto the porch. It was still light out. The sky was violet, the trees dark blue. The frogs had started up in the pond across the road, louder and louder the closer you listened. I stood against the railing while behind me people creaked into the old rocking chairs and passed out beers and raised their bottles to the filmmaker, who was giggling psychopathically, the way you do when you’ve exposed yourself through art.
Luke came up beside me. We looked out at the fields. The back of his hand brushed up against the back of mine and stayed there.
‘Wanna go somewhere?’ His eyes were washed out, pale as dawn.
We got in his truck and headed for Pawtucket because we saw a sign and liked saying the name, dragging out the ‘Paw’ and clipping off the ‘tucket,’ over and over. Pawwwww-tckt. It was on the border of Massachusetts, where we’d both grown up, an hour apart. He lived in New York now. In Harlem. He asked where I lived.
‘Oh, I have this little cabin in Burrillville, Rhode Island.’
He laughed.
‘I’ve still got seven weeks to come up with a plan.’
‘You could always move in with Duffy,’ he said.
Duffy was six foot six, the director’s grown son, who dropped our sandwiches off on our porches at noontime. He tied love notes around heart-shape rocks and left them in women’s lunch baskets.
There was a gazebo on the town green in Pawtucket. I had a deck of cards in my backpack, and we sat up there cross-legged and played Spit in the dark. It got heated and we shouted at each other and a cop came up the stairs. His flashlight lit up the piles of cards spread out between us, and he chuckled.
He’d never heard of Spit so we showed him how to play, and he said he’d have to teach his grandson. He took care of his grandson on Thursday nights, he told us.
He had a bad hip and moved slowly back to his cruiser.
‘Not much happening in Pawwwwww-tckt,’ I said.
‘Just a small dustup down at the gazebo.’
On the way back to Red Barn we called out all the funny names of Massachusetts towns we could remember.
‘Billerica.’
‘Belchertown.’
‘Leominster.’
We spoke in the accent we’d both lost long ago.
He drove with his left hand on the wheel and his right tucked under my arm, his fingers curving slowly around the outline of my breast.
It was strong, whatever was between us, thick, like the wet air and the smell of every green thing ready to bloom. Maybe it was just spring. Maybe that’s all it was. We took our lunch baskets and ate ham sandwiches by the pond near our cabins. We walked into a cluster of cattails, some of their pods new and green and some, maybe left over from fall, long and brown and tall as us. Luke called them bulrushes and yanked me close. We both tasted of mayonnaise. Our heads knocked 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
