A Recipe for Bees (17 page)

Augusta giggled and hit him playfully with her purse, but the thought that he’d called her his wife thrilled her. Was it possible? Could it ever be possible? “Do you think we could ever get married?” she said, once they were back at the hotel and both of them were lying naked on the bed, after lovemaking.

Joe turned on his side to face her. He must have seen how important it was that he go on playing the part, that he go on pretending. “If I weren’t already married, if you weren’t already married, we would.”

She didn’t push things. She knew so very little about him. She had no real idea what his life was like outside their afternoons together. He never offered the name of his wife, or even suggested whether he had children, though Augusta was forever complaining about Karl and Olaf and her life at the Whorehouse Ranch. In her turn Augusta never mentioned the Reverend. She knew it would be the
Reverend, and not Karl, that Joe would be jealous of. When he had occasion to refer to Karl, he called him “the boy.”

“Olaf doesn’t pay Karl,” she told him. “And he works him like a slave.”

“If the boy was a man he’d stand up for himself.” He grinned at his own small joke.

“I won’t hold my breath waiting for that to happen.”

“Why do you bother staying? Why not leave?”

“I’m not going back to my father’s farm.”

“There’s other things you can do.”

“The jobs at the clinic don’t pay enough for me to go out on my own.” She half hoped he would offer to help set her up in an apartment, so he could visit her there, but then what would that make her? In any case he didn’t make any such offer.

“How about waitressing? Or secretarial work?”

Augusta shook her head. “I don’t want to talk about it any more.”

One day she waited for Joe until a quarter to three, drinking too much coffee, reading the cook’s newspaper. Having read everything else, she flipped to the obituaries and scanned the page. There was Joe’s picture, labelled with another man’s name. Augusta felt herself reeling backwards, the walls and all the people of the café shooting away from her. Then, just as suddenly, she was shunted back to her booth, her coffee, the newspaper. She squinted at it. The picture wasn’t of him; it didn’t look anything like him. Why had she thought it was Joe? He arrived at that point, out of breath and sweating, apologizing for missing lunch but not offering any explanation. There was time for one kiss before they both ran to their separate lives.

She didn’t tell him that she’d imagined she’d seen his picture in the obituaries. What was there to tell? But she did tell him about some of the visions she’d had. “Isn’t that something?” he said.

“You believe me?”

“Sure, why wouldn’t I?”

“Karl doesn’t.”

“There’s plenty of things that we’ll never see with our own eyes that are true nevertheless. I believe I’ve lived several lives.”

“You have?”

“And you have too. Maybe we were husband and wife and our souls have met up for a little while in this life. Or perhaps I was your dog.” Joe took everything lightly, even his own beliefs. It was something that annoyed Augusta, at a time in her life when she took things so seriously.

There was no phone on the Whorehouse Ranch and, though they hadn’t discussed the issue, Augusta understood that she could never phone Joe’s home. That would make for complications, suspicions. And certainly they never spent the night together. How could either of them possibly explain a night away? So it was an affair conducted in daylight. The closest they came to night was the half-light coming through the closed curtains of the hotel window. She never touched his face in darkness, or saw the change of colour in his skin under candle-light. They made love in daylight; argued in the café in daylight; stopped in the middle of the street for a daylight kiss, comforted by the misconception that the city was large enough to hide them.

Now, so many years later, Augusta wondered how it was ever possible for the unfaithful to keep their secrets. If
they did, it was only because their mates wanted to be misled. Rose had told Augusta that her husband had once come home with the smell of another woman in his hair, on his fingers. Rose had thought him stupid. A shower might have kept her from knowing what she had already guessed. She thought that maybe he wanted her to know, that the burden of his secret was weighing on him. Augusta wasn’t so sure. Men weren’t as skilled at picking up scent; they didn’t understand the importance of smell the way women did. Perhaps they weren’t equipped. She had read that women had keener senses of taste and smell, a side effect of childbearing and child-rearing. Just as women knew their children, didn’t they know their lovers as much by scent as by sight?

Augusta bathed herself, either at the hotel or at home, each afternoon after spending time with Joe. At home she dropped her dress and underwear to the floor and stood in the steel laundry tub in the kitchen, and used a washcloth dipped in water and lathered with soap to wash him from her body. One day Karl caught her like that, naked in the kitchen. He and Olaf were supposed to be out in the field or she would have bathed in the bedroom. She heard a scuffing at the door that she thought was Bitch, but when she turned Karl was standing at the doorway, staring at her, scratching the missing thumb. He didn’t say anything at first, then, “Blade on the mower broke.”

Augusta turned her back to him and slipped the dress over her head. “Hot,” she said.

“You looked so pretty, Augusta.” She turned around. It wasn’t a thing he said. “We could go upstairs.”

“We could.”

He took her hand and led her to their bedroom and laid her on the bed with such tenderness that Augusta felt a little hope stirring in her belly. But then he only took off his trousers and underwear, leaving his socks and shirt on, and started to climb onto her.

“No, wait.”

“What? You don’t want to?”

“I want to.”

“We can wait if it’s your period.”

“No. I wanted to touch first. Kiss a little.”

Karl lay on his side beside her and pecked her cheeks: quick, darting kisses that surprised her, made her flinch. “What’s the matter?” he said.

“I’d like to go slower. On the mouth, maybe.” He tried but his mouth smelled of coffee and milk, his underarms of a morning’s work. “You could touch me,” she said. “No, here.”

“What?”

“Here.” But his hands were rough, his calluses sharp, and his fingers too direct. For weeks he wouldn’t even touch her. Now this. She jerked away.

“What’s the matter?” he said.

“It hurt.”

“Why does it have to be so complicated? Why can’t we just do it?”

“Like animals.”

“Yeah.”

Augusta sat up on her elbows and pulled the skirt of her dress down over her knees. “Do you know I feel nothing when we make love? Nothing at all.”

Karl stood and got dressed, and left without looking at
her. How could he not know something was up? All the evidence was laid out there in front of him. Even the Reverend had his suspicions. She still met him at Deep Pool each Saturday morning, though she found herself talking less, guarding herself so she didn’t let something about Joe slip out. But she couldn’t hide the flush that swept over her when she thought of Joe, and she couldn’t help thinking of him even as she sat with the Reverend. As she fished she caught herself smiling at the memory of something Joe had said, and once she giggled out loud as she remembered how he’d chased her around the hotel room. “What?” said the Reverend.

“Nothing.”

“You seem different these days. Happier.”

“I don’t know.”

“I think maybe Karl’s finding a little time for you, a little romantic time?”

“No.”

“It’s just you’ve got that shine to you.”

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Ah.”

“What?”

“Nothing.”

There was so much at stake for Augusta. All it would take was someone from Chase, in the city for a day of shopping, wondering who that man was that Augusta Olsen was holding on to. But the unfaithful were careless, and it was their bodies that made them so. Like bees on a mating flight, their bodies told them when to fly, and how high, and never mind the dangers of falling.

• • •

“I saw a man bungee-jumping today,” said Augusta. She poured them all more tea, and offered Karl the plate of sandwiches.

“Fools,” said Rose. “Paying money to jump off a bridge.”

“I don’t know. If my hip wasn’t going on me, I’d give it a try.” She wanted to feel again that thrill of sudden nothingness under her, the quick drop at Deep Pool. The bungee-jumping business she had seen today was a small building on an old train trestle over a deep gorge. It was parallel to the trestle they were travelling over, and the engineer stopped the train so they could get a good look at both the gorge and the bungee-jumper taking a dive. Esther leaned forward and watched with Augusta. “Imagine people jumping off that thing,” said Esther, “with nothing but a rope tied around their foot to keep them from falling off the planet. I’ll never understand why anyone would want to do a thing like that.”

“Pardon me?” said Augusta.

“Bungee-jumping.”

“Ah.”

“They go naked sometimes, those bungee-jumpers. That outfit lets them jump for free if they do it naked. Last year an old lady, must have been seventy-five, jumped off that bridge naked, for some charity.” Augusta’s hand went to her bosom in remembrance of the ache she’d had there last time she’d attempted to run. “If I did that I’d have my boobs around my ears,” said Esther.

Augusta grinned. “We got a letter at the seniors’ centre. They were making a movie about Doukhobors and wanted a bunch of old men and women willing to walk around naked in front of the cameras.”

“No!”

“I couldn’t believe it at first. But my friend Rose and I thought about doing it. You would be in a crowd of people, all naked. When would you ever be able to do a thing like that?”

“Did you?”

“No, of course not.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t know. What if my daughter saw? Or the people at church?”

“What if?”

“I couldn’t bring myself to do it.”

“It would’ve been a lot less dangerous than jumping off a bridge naked,” said Esther. “You wouldn’t have risked breaking your neck.” The two of them watched as a young man leapt into the air with his arms open wide. Augusta felt the thrill of terror with him.

She and Joe had been nearly as reckless as that jumper, taking few precautions against either the possibility of pregnancy, or the chance of getting caught. One awful time Augusta pushed open the café door, smiled at one of the office workers she recognized, and saw Percy Martin sitting on a stool at the counter. He was gesturing as he talked to the man next to him; his feet just barely grazed the floor. Augusta backed out of the café and marched quickly around the corner, out of view of the café window. She was terrified. She wasn’t sure whether or not Percy Martin had seen her.

She settled her heart down to a manageable flutter and went back around the corner to wait for Joe, with her back to the window. Looking back now, she wondered why she
hadn’t simply given up on lunch with Joe that day. Her actions made no sense. When Joe had finally arrived and wanted to go inside for lunch as always, she had come up with some excuse. She couldn’t remember now what she’d said, so much had happened since, but she still remembered the emotions attached to that excuse: guilt because she was lying; fear that Joe would insist they go in; shame because the excuse was so transparent. Why didn’t she tell Joe the truth? Why didn’t she say,
There’s somebody in there from my home town, Joe. Somebody who could cause me a lot of trouble
. Why didn’t she say that? Because she was still so young, and fear made her lie stupidly. Joe didn’t push her, didn’t insist on the truth and didn’t make her go into the café. Likely he knew from the expression on her face what was up, what was at risk. He simply took her by the elbow, as a father might take the arm of a daughter, and they strolled down the street and around the corner before he stopped her dead on the sidewalk and kissed her so hard her lips pushed uncomfortably against her teeth. But that day didn’t start a trend of meeting at some other place, as she had hoped, and for a long time after that she entered the café cautiously, and sometimes waited outside. Percy Martin didn’t come back—not to the café.

At Christmas she and Joe exchanged small gifts—nylons for her, chocolates for him—things that wouldn’t be noticed. His gift to her was accompanied by a card that she was forced to throw away before returning home. For Valentine’s Day she was more inspired. That morning, before driving to Kamloops, she drove out to her home farm to collect honeycomb from the hive in the roof of the honey house. The whole way there, she fretted over what
excuse she could come up with, in case Manny was home. But all the worry was for nothing; he’d gone into town, as he often did on Mondays.

There was a small access to the attic of the honey house, a square door at the apex. Armed with a lantern, a knife, and a syrup can, Augusta climbed a ladder to the access and wriggled through. The wild honeycombs hung from the rafters, one after the other, like the folds of a well-pressed party dress. Each comb was nearly heart-shaped, pointed at the bottom, rounded at the top, but without the cleavage. There were no bees on the outside combs; they were huddled in a ball, to keep warm, within the centre combs. It was a simple task to cut the outside comb from the rafters and place it upright in the large syrup can. When she got back to the car she cut a V into the top of the honeycomb, so it was heart-shaped. After wiping her hands on a wet towel she had brought with her, she tied a red ribbon on the handle of the syrup can and attached a note that said, “From your little honeybee.”

Joe was delighted. He took the honeycomb into the hotel room with them and smeared honey all over her, and himself. As he pointed out, they’d have to use it up, as he couldn’t take it home with him that night. They licked honey off each other, and ate honeycomb until they were sick of the stuff. After lovemaking, they took a long, hot bath to scrub the honey off each other, and even after that Augusta found honey in her hair on the drive home.