The Runaway Wife (8 page)

“I'll miss them when they're gone for the winter,” she said.

Jim was about to protest that she would not be here in the winter, either, that they were leaving together in the morning, but he suddenly didn't have the strength.

Calliope closed the barn door softly behind them.

“Your room is here,” she said as they retraced their steps into the small chalet. He could tell that the room she offered him was hers. On the bed, composed of neatly stacked hay, a sheet was drawn; a comforter decorated with pink flowers was rolled at the bottom. A round of hay served as a bedside table. He spied some books on it, but in the faint light of
the candle he could not make out the titles. A small, square, paneless window, through which cold air blew into the room, had been cut crudely from the log wall. In the candlelight he noticed curtains nailed to the top of the window and tied in bows with the telltale maroon velvet ribbon.

“And you will sleep . . . ?” he asked.

“Your outhouse is the mountainside.” She disappeared without a sound, like the owls into the darkness.

He undressed, dove under the comforter, and was asleep before he could take notice of the sounds from the baby owls in the barn nearby; before he could think about the ribbon around Thalia's neck, then around her mother's; before he could imagine what Sally was doing that night in New York City; before he could picture his grandfather in the fjords of Svalbard, sailing around the white archipelago that looked like the floating-islands dessert; before he could wonder if this woman of the mountains had drugged him with the hundred-year-old wine of the Benedictines or if, with her clear blue eyes and her voice like the silver streams of the mountains, she had awoken in him a sense that life could offer more than he had ever thought possible.

H
E HEARD SINGING, THEN THE CHORUS OF HOOTING
. From the small opening that served as a window, a soft rosy light filtered into the room. Jim's eyes were drawn to the half-moon in the sky, lightly outlined with what looked like a halo.

He could not understand the lyrics, but Calliope's singing voice was like smoke filling the room slowly, changing the air around him. As he lay under the comforter, which was so light it defied the laws of gravity, he recalled the dream that had been so vivid moments before. He'd been kissing his ex-fiancée in a cave, and as they kissed, as many bats flew out of the cave as there were stars in the night sky. An infinity of bats, one darting after another, so that the sky was black with them. Then Calliope entered the cave, and
like a sorceress she touched one of the bats, and all the bats changed into butterflies.

The melodic singing drew closer but was interrupted by a long, drawn-out cough. Jim had not noticed her coughing yesterday. He looked out the window. She was hanging laundry—sheets, lingerie, a long white nightgown—on a clothesline. Her slim body weaved in and out of the laundry, so that he could never see more than a part of her at any time.

He found his clothes, folded and warmed from the sun, outside his room next to his knapsack. He dressed, and on his way out of the room stopped to look at the two books on the bedside table. One was a tattered hardcover titled
The Cloud of Unknowing
; the other a coffee table book,
La dame à
la licorne
, showed a photograph of a medieval tapestry depicting a maiden framed by the unicorn on one side and the lion on the other.

He could not resist returning to the window for one more glimpse of Calliope's dance among the billowing sheets and clothing. She looked like a woman at sea amid the sails of a ship. She wore the same riding pants, long boots, and T-shirt as the day before, but the morning was warm enough for her to leave off her vest.

“May I carry your basket?” He sprang up to surprise her.

“Yes,” she said, not looking at him but handing him the basket as if she had been aware of his presence from the moment he stepped outside. He followed her and the strong scent of roses into the house.

“Place it there. We'll take care of it later, as now we're going beekeeping.” She said this as if she were singing a nursery rhyme. His stomach growled, but he ignored it.

“It involves a short walk. Afterward”—she coughed discreetly into her elbow—“we'll have breakfast.”

“You have a cold,” Jim said. “We have to—”

“A change-of-season cough,” she interrupted him and laughed, her hair falling across her eye. “Let's go, Mr. Man-with-a-Mission.”

He grabbed his boots.

“No boots for you,” she said.

“I will help you pack up—”

When he looked up, she was running ahead of him down the hill toward the lake. He rushed to catch up with her. The meadow grass was surprisingly soft beneath his feet.

“I suppose our packing up will have to wait,” he said, breathless, when he caught up to her. “May I?”

In the crook of her arm she carried a tin bucket with trays, a large fork, and a wooden spoon.

She smiled up at him as she handed him the bucket.

“The Benedictines,” she said as they walked side by side, “left these tools and the framed hive. All I had to do was entice a swarm to start living here in early summer. Rubbing beeswax inside a hive will attract a queen. Et voilà, one fell for the trick. She's been quite prolific, even now, into the fall. Have you ever seen a swarm of bees? It's like in the cartoons, this bubble of black. If you're careful and if you
remember that slowness is genius, you can stick your hand in the middle and you won't be touched.”

She cupped her hands to the small trickling waterfall to their right and raised them to his lips. The water was cold and refreshing and smelled of her roses.

“In the old days, they used smoke to distract the bees while the beekeepers removed the honey. The smoke calms the bees and masks the alarm pheromones released by the guard bees, but in the end the confusion caused by the smoke takes a toll on honey production.”

He spotted a few bees in the distance.

“Those are the drone spies, alerting the queen of our presence. The queen is inseminated about this high in the air.” She stretched her arm above her head. “This ensures that only the fastest and strongest can pass on the best genes. If she can help it, nature never settles for second best.”

A short walk from the waterfall near a cliff side at the edge of the lake, she turned to him, lifted a white gauze veil from the bucket, and placed it over her head, then pulled on man-size, camel-colored leather gloves that covered her arms up to her elbows. Jim scanned the horizon for a hive and saw, nestled into the mountain about twenty feet away, an indentation and the swarming of hundreds of bees.

“Stay here,” she whispered to him. He lost sight of her white veil in the swarming blackness. A few times he saw her arms moving, as gracefully and slowly as if she were a dancer in
Swan Lake
. How was it possible that the bees did
not detect her presence? The dance of the beekeeper, the prowl of a tiger on a night watch, the glide of a spider along its web. She hummed a melody.

She returned carrying a rectangular wooden tray draped with honeycombs. In her veil she looked like a priestess, and he thought of the hermitess. Some drones hovered around the top of her veiled head; it was as if she wore a crown of bees.

She nodded at the bucket, and he brought it to her. Using a flat metal tool, she scraped the combs off the wooden frame and into the bucket.

“We'll have fresh honey for breakfast,” she said as she removed her gloves. “Our queen has had a fertile summer. Did you know she can lay half a million eggs in her lifetime of three years? And we humans think we are productive!”

She offered him her gloves.

His look was a question.

“Your job is to return the tray into the slot. The secret is patience and fearlessness, and moving as slowly and guilelessly as the moon rising in the night sky. I will coach you as you go.”

He bent down as she placed the veil over his head.

“Slower!” she called to him as he moved toward the black swarm.

“Feel around the inside of the recess in the rock face,” she directed from afar. “For the place where the tray fits. Do you feel it?”

“No,” he said as calmly as he could. It was hot under
the veil, and bees were bumping into and around his veiled head, his eyes, his nose, and mouth; the buzzing made him feel claustrophobic. A few bees that had penetrated inside the veil tickled his eyelashes; one was perched on the tip of his nose. He wasn't breathing. He felt a drip of perspiration along his cheek. It stopped at his jawline.

“Close your eyes,” he heard Calliope say, her voice a melody above the din of buzzing bees. She was beside him without a veil, the bees covering her: she was black with bees. He obeyed. He pushed his hand inside the hollow space and felt a sharp angle that he identified as the slot.

“Slide the tray onto the slot very slowly, like you would a baking tray into an oven,” she said. He'd never slid a baking tray into an oven, but he had seen his mother do so, roughly, impatiently.

“Keep your eyes closed,” she murmured.

The buzzing was so loud and intense. The bees were in his ears and eyes as he placed the tray on the track. Weren't they supposed to be
outside
the veil? Perspiration trickled down his neck and collarbone. Everything was tickling, moving on his skin. As he removed his hand from the slot in slow motion, a bee flew into his glove. When it stung his hand, he jerked his arm back. Pressure bore down on his arm, and he felt burning up to his shoulder.

“Fire in the house,” she said calmly.

She took his gloved hand and retreated a few yards with him in a slow dance. If there had been an ax in the beekeeping basket that he glimpsed near his feet, he would have
used it to amputate his arm. The searing pain! Her fingers were like spiders speeding up his arm to catch prey. She removed the glove from his burning hand and arm and gently brushed away the bees. A thousand knives stabbed his hand, wrist, arm, and shoulder. He felt light-headed, and his knees buckled. She caught him just before he fell and helped him slowly to the ground.

“Taste this,” she said.

She placed a wooden spoonful of honeycomb into his mouth. He sucked the honey. The sweetness was like a jolt of caffeine. His skin tingled, and he no longer felt faint. As Calliope bent over him and began to pluck the stingers from his arm, he again noticed the delicate bump in the bridge of her nose.

“Do they die after they sting you?” he asked, hoping Calliope's voice would distract him from the pain. She shook her head, coughed into her elbow, and, with the wooden spoon, covered his reddening, ballooning hand, arm, and shoulder with the sticky honey.

“Now you'll feed me to a bear,” he said.

She did not laugh. She made a sling of the white veil and tied it around his shoulder. His hand had doubled in size; he must have been stung at least fifty times.

“Are you still in pain?”

“No,” he said, though he winced from the burning sensation.

She knelt so close to him, he could feel her breath on his cheek.

“You're still in agony,” she said, “yet you say the pain is gone. Why?”

She searched for something in his eyes. Tiny beads of perspiration collected above her lips.

“You don't have to do that with me,” she said. “No, you mustn't do that with me.” She covered her mouth with her hand as she coughed again.

She helped him to his feet and led him by his other arm to a bend in the mountain path, where an outcropping of rocks lay beside a trickling waterfall. She cupped her hands in the water and brought them to his lips.

“It's tempting to cool the burning with cold water, but we need to keep this honey on your arm,” she said. “Today you've received an excellent dose of the inoculation. Good beekeepers should be stung at least twice a season, but now you are many seasons ahead.”

Seasons . . . How would he ever convince this queen bee to leave her sunlit hive?

“This afternoon, after breakfast, you and I will be leaving,” he said. “Your daughters—”

She cut him off. “Ah, Gabriel!”

IN THE DISTANCE A HEAD BOBBED ALONG THE MOUNTAIN
ridge below them, then disappeared. When the figure finally emerged in full view, Jim saw that he was a young boy of about fifteen, that in-between age when the body has not yet caught up to the size of the hands and feet. He
had thick eyebrows, small brown eyes, and a wide nose that looked as if it had been broken. Everything about the youth looked like it was going to burst. His shirt was uncomfortably tight under his arms; his pants were too short. Stubble protruded from his large chin. A shock of black hair fell over one eye, and he didn't bother shaking it aside. He had a bag slung over his shoulder.

“Not only are your daughters convinced that you have no food, but they also think you're entirely alone in these Alps,” Jim said.

“Gabriel!” Calliope greeted the boy, smiling and kissing him on both cheeks as he embraced her. Gabriel's darting eyes rested on Jim and his sling. Jim felt the boy's curiosity, then distrust, then anger in quick succession. He did not hide his feelings well.

“Gabriel, voilà Jim.” He loved how she said his name.

Gabriel spoke to Calliope in a gruff voice, refusing to look at Jim.

“He wants to know if you're staying with me. Gabriel's family owns the farm below the lake.”

It looked like Gabriel would slug Jim, bee-stung arm and all.

“No, Gabriel, I won't leave with him!” Calliope said slowly. “I'm trying to teach him English,” she said to Jim.

Gabriel grabbed the honey-dripping wooden spoon and the bucket as if this were his daily chore. He rushed ahead of them and jumped from rock to rock along the mountain path toward the chalet.

“The voices of the river are so loud today,” she said to Jim as they passed a gurgling stream. She looked at him with her sparkling eyes. “What's the river saying to you?”

“The river,” Jim said as he paused to gaze into it, “is saying very clearly, ‘Jump IN!'” Which he did. How soothing was the numbing-cold mountain water on his still-throbbing arm, and how liberating it felt to follow an impulse!

She laughed as she and now Gabriel, who had doubled back, watched Jim swim in his clothes against the strong current that pushed him from the center. Above him on the ridge, Calliope began to sing, and Gabriel joined her and belted out the refrain in his cracking voice.

              
L'amour est enfant de bohème,

              
Si tu ne m'aimes pas, je t'aime

              
Mais si je t'aime, prends garde à toi

              
Si tu ne m'aimes pas,

              
Si tu ne m'aimes pas, je t'aime

              
Mais si je t'aime, si je t'aime,

              
Prends garde à toi!

The part of the song that Jim understood went something like: “If you don't love me, I love you, but if I love you, if I love you, watch out!”

He lifted himself onto the riverbank and with his good hand, wrung the water from the bottom of his shirt and pants.

“Your swim has cost us much honey,” she said from the
overhang above the stream, where she and Gabriel sat with their legs dangling.

She took the bucket from Gabriel and carried it to where Jim stood. “While I reapply your honey balm, let's hear
your
song.”