Beehive Read online

  “So I rush over to his office, trying to think what he wants me for. Usually when he calls it’s for statistics on this or a quick answer to that. You know he thanks me for my reports but doesn’t read them. Other people do, colonels and so on. They never listen to recommendations from civilians anyway. A civilian woman?” She turned sultry for that one word, and then snapped herself right back, I never knew how she handled herself so well. Then she mimicked a martial voice and said, “Never let your pride slip so low, men. Never let the military down.”

  She shrugged the straps of her bra off her shoulders and bent her left leg to release her stocking from her garter. This part I love. She knows it too.

  “It turns out that enough people credited my ideas on Israel and Egypt and the Emirates that he wanted to talk to me personally, to see if I could handle more than words and paper. ‘Well, Elizabeth’” — she hesitated, hooded her eyes and began massaging the inside of her thighs; I felt myself giving up to her totally, enthralled, but too dazzled by the show to want to stop it — “‘Elizabeth, we’ve got a new trouble-spot for you. It’s a bit bigger, a bit more complicated. Feel like getting away from your books for a while?’ Of course I did. ‘Gooooood! We fly to Newport after lunch. Big meetings tomorrow. It’s ten-fifteen now. Close up all your other business and meet me here at thirteen hundred. We’ll be gone overnight.’” She peeled down both stockings and threw them at me. Her legs look smoother bare than covered, translucent and muscular. I love Elizabeth’s legs, I love her whole body, so small and lean and perfumed like soil and flowers.

  “I knew he meant tie it all up and so I did, as best I could. By the time I got back to him the plans had changed. We met all afternoon with people from State and then we conference-called with the White House.” She looked tickled. “I’ve never been this high before,” she said. Looking at her, feeling as I felt, she could have meant anything, but I knew what she meant. She meant the power pyramid. She felt dizzy from the climb. She always stood where the air thinned out to less than I could breathe.

  “Then later, on board the plane, the General ran down the people we’d meet in Newport, big brass from Navy mostly, and a professor I’d met at a conference during grad school. We met until midnight and began again this morning. I came home right from the airfield.” She unsnapped the front of her bra, and it trickled off behind her. Her breasts, so soft and freckled, so alive, called me. My journals fell as I rose from my chair and I picked Elizabeth up. I could hardly catch my breath, but still, she was so light she didn’t even need to support herself with her arms around my neck. She dropped her head back and laughed and laughed as I carried her to the bedroom.

  13.

  A hour or more passed before I caught my breath again.

  “Ron?” she whispered after a silence that felt like sleep.

  “Yeah?”

  “It’s Lebanon.”

  “What’s Lebanon?”

  “That’s what I spent the past couple of days working on. That’s what I’m going to be spending the next several months working on.”

  “Is that bad?”

  “It could be.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s dangerous.”

  “Only if you go there. Will you have to?”

  “I might. I don’t know.”

  “So?”

  “It’s not only me, you know. I’m in charge of research on this. I’m in the planning group. If I screw up, someone can get hurt.”

  I didn’t say anything. I felt out of my depth, like I did whenever Elizabeth talked about her work. But she never asked for my help in work, except when sometimes she needed to know population and housing and other numbers. I know the facts, I just don’t know what they mean. “You don’t order anybody to do anything. It’s not your fault if they get hurt.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Yeah, maybe.”

  She said, “I shouldn’t even tell you this. It’s classified.”

  “But?”

  “I need to tell someone. You don’t know anyone this will matter to and it helps me to say ‘I’m scared’ out loud.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “I’m scared!” she said full voice, and then let loose a jittery chuckle. “Thank you, Ron.”

  “You never have to thank me.”

  “I know, I know: faithful servant.” I sometimes sign my notes to her that way. I’m a civil servant and she’s not. “But thank you anyway.”

  “One thing, though. I do know someone this will matter to.”

  She stiffened. “Who?”

  “Me. You can tell me anything you want.”

  I don’t remember if we said anything else. Sooner than I would have believed morning came with the radio-alarm and a day of rules and averages and distractions. Friday could not have come at a better time.

  14.

  That spring showed us the most perfect weather Washington’s drained swamp ever has. Day after day, the sun bristled with proud accomplishment as it shone on the blooming earth. Flowers outdid themselves in quiet fireworks. The mall thronged with international tourists, agog with the magnificence of our capital. The city shimmered in excitement.

  Elizabeth never explained Defense’s intentions in Lebanon to me, but she never stopped describing the place. I read the paper during my morning break now, instead of sticking to my reports and categories. “Dateline: Beirut” yanked my attention from the sports and funnies; I just wanted to do what I could to support Elizabeth, who had never tried talking so much to me about her actual work. In the past, she’d told me about the people in her department. “You’re the expert on people,” she would say. “I’m the expert on the world.”

  I wouldn’t say I’m an expert on people. I don’t even work in the population section of the Bureau. Housing Characteristics, where I work, defines living alternatives: who lives with whom and in what. I think that tells a host about people, but only taken as a group. I don’t think I know much more about an individual psyche than most anyone. Especially not Elizabeth.

  But the weather and Elizabeth’s newfound talkativeness bred an expansiveness in our lives. Work became even more important for Elizabeth than it had before, it’s true, but during those few hours she leaned away from her desk she wanted to be out in the world. We ate out together, and she even came out to the country a couple of times, to ‘help’ me and Jim handle the Control Tower. She mostly just sat in one of the Adirondack chairs, gazing into the fields, far more beautiful and stylish than you see in fashion ads bent on staging an event like that. Elizabeth could be composed if she were the only ex-girlfriend at a jilted boyfriend’s wedding. Beaming in the spring sun, legs strained against her blue-jean pedal pushers, surrounded by an oversized cowl-necked sweatshirt, green like her eyes, Elizabeth acted like she knew how to accept the buzz of a thousand bees around her.

  15.

  I came home one day and found Elizabeth huddling under a comforter on the couch. Her hair turned dark sticking to her wet temples. I couldn’t tell her sweat from her tears, but I almost enjoyed the rare pleasure of coming home to her. She had gone to New York for a meeting with a trade association, heavy-hitting businessmen with connections all over the Middle East. Her father sat on the group’s board, on and off. So he was there, might have wrangled the invitation for Elizabeth to talk to them. She had expected a lot from the speech, but she seemed to have gotten more than she could handle.

  I soothed her. “What’s wrong?”

  “He doesn’t know how much he upsets me when he does that.”

  “He was just helping you out. Just talking you up.”

  “He wasn’t, he wasn’t. He just couldn’t stop being my father.”

  “He is your father. Why should he stop?”

  “You don’t get it, Ron. You just don’t.”

  “So explain it to me.” I never have trouble believing I’m not get
ting it. “Tell me what happened.”

  “It’s a breakfast meeting. I’m the only woman in the room, the only person under thirty, maybe under forty, and he tells everyone in the room that I’m the image of my mother.”

  “Tell them how? Not a speech?”

  “Just in conversation.”

  “He’s proud. He’s proud of you.”

  “You don’t know my father. Everyone in the room knows what happened to my mother, so later, when it’s time for my presentation, they’re looking for signs. I scan the room and everyone’s studying me like I have TRAGEDY written on my forehead. They’re not hearing a word I say.” She kicked the sofa arm hard with her bare heel. “You think he doesn’t know, but he does. He knows exactly what he’s doing.”

  She coughed a sob and then another. I’m still in my suit-coat and tie, perched on the edge of the couch. “It’s all right,” I soothed, “your father still loves you.”

  She couldn’t push out the words at first, but after a shallow gasp she hoarsed, “Not like I am!” Then her face disintegrated, bits going every way. I folded her in my arms in the comforter and rocked her and rocked her. I didn’t think she’d ever stop crying.

  16.

  I learned that Lebanon had once been a country. Reading the news reports, you might think it still is, just one where the rules we think of as governing countries had taken a temporary holiday. Elizabeth says that’s not true. “One of the reasons,” she wrote in a report she let me read, “political scientists follow Lebanon so closely is that countries rarely fall so precipitously from power to brigandage.

  “Lebanon had been a center for trade in the Middle East right into the 1970’s. Compared to its neighbors, Lebanon displayed a cosmopolitan acceptance of cultural difference, a sophistication only tolerance can prove.

  “Of course, nothing in the land which used to go by the name Lebanon looks like a country any more. Even Beirut, which had been a gem of international trade not two decades ago, now looks as though adolescents with modern weaponry took a field trip there. The city has lost all hope of resurrection, and the country of which it remains the titular capital has become the possession of the various private armies. The closest parallel in European history is the Italy of the Condotterei, who began as contract enforcers and learned in time they did not need a contract with local authority to take what they wanted.

  “This condition leaves the territory — which is how we must refer to the land — peculiarly vulnerable to. . . .”

  Elizabeth’s report never made clear to me what she meant about Lebanon’s vulnerability. All I could see, when I read the articles in the paper, were people fighting each other over religion, the Christians and the Muslims banging each other into the ground. I didn’t need Elizabeth’s kind of education to know that had been happening since the Crusades. Growing up in the Midwest you see all the squabbling over religion you have a taste for. And if the Christians there don’t have anyone else to attack, they’ll just choose sides among themselves.

  17.

  Late one early May afternoon, my father showed up at my office.

  He did not make an impressive entrance to my department. I had been working in Housing Characteristics for more than five years by then, and had gotten a promotion into my own office three years before, ahead of some people who had been there longer. I did have a college degree and I took some night courses in advanced statistics and information management, so my promotion had not come out of favoritism, or prejudice, or — as I heard a whisper once — because football players always intimidated people. But that didn’t make it easier for people to accept me, and I had worked hard, still worked hard, at making people in the office like me. I felt very exposed, windowed in that office by myself, but still on view for my co-workers’ censure.

  He appeared on a day when Virginia, my secretary, stayed home with her kids. She always had some trouble because one of the kids was deaf and the other was retarded and she wasn’t married — a black single woman head of household, as the people in Population characterized her. She needed a lot of time off. So instead of Virginia, Bea, one of the people who handled requests for information from inside the government, had been there for decades, came knocking on my open door.

  “Mr. Stutzer, there’s a man outside here says he wants to see you.”

  “OK,” I said getting up, “thank you.” Bea had called me Ron when we worked side by side, but for three years now she’s called me Mr. Stutzer and I can’t change her.

  “But Mr. Stutzer, I don’t think he’s safe.”

  “What do you mean, not safe?”

  “He’s been drinking!” Her eyes widened to the size of the flowers on her print dress. Bea joined the Jehovah’s Witnesses the year before to help her break a problem she had with pills, and she let anyone who mentioned drink know what she now thought of it.

  My heart went hard in my chest. “Did he say what he wants?”

  “He said he wants to see his son.”

  I told her, “We all have our crosses, Bea. My father’s mine.”

  “If you don’t mind my saying it, he looks like he slept in his clothes,” she confided as I walked past her out my office door. “Do you think the Witnesses might help?”

  I took two cups of coffee from the alcove machine and steered my father out to the elevators. He looked like he had slept not one but several nights in his clothes, and in bus stations to boot. I dreaded the talk Bea would spread around my people once we left, but if I had to talk with him, I wanted him out in the air. Didn’t the security people have any sense of smell?

  “Dad, what are you doing here?”

  “I came for the cherry blossoms, but I guess I’m a little late.”

  “Where’s Ma?”

  “She’s back at the ranch.”

  “A hotel?”

  “Why would she stay in a hotel? The house not good enough for her?”

  “So she’s still back in Ohio.”

  “Your office doesn’t look much different from mine.”

  “An office is an office. What are you doing in Washington?”

  “I told you: I came for the cherry blossoms, but they wouldn’t wait. Didn’t want to die without seeing the capital in bloom.”

  I could see his eyes hardly focused at all, worse than I remembered seeing him for a long time. I couldn’t bring him home, I knew that. I didn’t want to. But I had to help him. “How are you fixed for money, Dad? You got a place to stay?”

  “Never much trouble finding a place, if you know where to look. I thought I’d stay with you for a while.”

  “No can do. The place is too small, and I already have somebody staying there.”

  “A girl?”

  “No. Jim, Jim Polder. My football friend.”

  “The nigger?”

  “Let me find you a hotel this afternoon.” I took out my wallet and handed him the $60 I had there. “Meet me in the park there, across the street, between six-thirty and seven. And we’ll get you fixed up. Do you have a suitcase somewhere?” He stared at the bills in his hand and started crying then, tears dropping onto the money and pooling there. “Dad?” I said. “Dad?”

  “I had a suitcase, but I can’t remember where I left it.”

  “Dad? Are you listening? Dad? Take that money, buy yourself some clothes, some toiletries. Here, take my credit card, charge what you need. Meet me here at six-thirty, that’s two and a half hours. In the park across the street. You understand?” He squinted at the credit card in his hand, which was as smudged and ragged as it had been his days on the line. “Dad, do you understand me?”

  He looked at me, focused for a second and nodded. “I understand.”

  “Six-thirty. At the park.” I went back inside and began calling hotels.

  18.

  “The C-c-control Tower has gone out of control,” Jim’s message said that
evening. “They turned out to be nothing but thieves.”

  The fountain and the pigeons were the only movement in the park near my office when I left at seven-thirty. I had no idea what had become of Dad. Could he have found out where I lived and gone there? Checked into a hotel? Cleared a liquor store shelf and reduced himself to a stupor? I pretended to read, perched on the edge of the fountain, while I really checked the time, the streets, my imagination for what had become of him.

  I had no place else to go but home. Elizabeth’s project built up in intensity those first weeks in May, and her occasional trips out of town never took her away overnight. Even those nights we dined together, she’d work into morning hours; in some way I relished missing dinner with her because then she’d get to bed early enough for me to soothe her, massage her back and thighs, stroke her head, pamper her.

  The machine message signal flashed in the bedroom corner where we kept it. As I toyed with the buttons I could almost hear my father telling me he was fine, found a nice room in a nice hotel, sobered up. First came Jim, though, and then Elizabeth, saying she’d be home by ten, and then nothing, just the hollow hiss of overused and inexpensive tape.

  I called Ohio. “Ma, it’s Ron. Where’s Dad?”

  “Oh, Ron, how are you, love?”

  “I’m fine.”

  “I worry sometimes I don’t hear from you weeks on end.”

  “It’s been a busy time, Ma. Where’s Dad?”

  “I don’t know, I stopped trying to keep track of him.”

  “When was the last time you saw him?”

  “Why the sudden interest in your father? You don’t want to know how I’m doing?”

  “I saw him today, Ma.”

  “Who?”

  “Dad. Your husband.”

  “Saw him where? How?”

  “Here, in Washington. He appeared at my office this afternoon. He looked like he was on day three of a week-long tear. I gave him some money and found him a hotel room and now he’s disappeared.”