The Shadows of a Queen Bee

José Lerma. Soil Flowers. 2009. Soil on cardboard. 36 x 44 inches.

Extraordinary people deserve extraordinary relationships.Experience the instant spark of chemistry.

-Chemistry.com

After seventeen consecutive days of rain, I go out to check the chaos of my three-by-six foot garden. Hastas grow obscenely on one side, dwarfing sodden hyacinth stems and lilies of the valley that bloomed in April frost. The daisy bush is beginning its yearly vendetta, recovering from my brutal hacking and hell bent on dominating the garden. Impatiens mark the perimeter, mixed with stray grass and leafy things that might be weeds, might be ripped out by one more discriminating than I. A bumblebee winds into view and lands on the lavender blooms of a baptisia spear. This is the sexiest thing going in the suburbs on a Tuesday afternoon in June. The professionals have long since departed on the 7:20 and 7:50. Two Latinos in red T-shirts sit under the neighbor's beech tree eating sandwiches wrapped in wax paper and drinking Dr. Pepper. The bee dips into blue vulva and reappears, buzzing, its black and gold pinstripes catching sunlight before the bee gyrates out of sight.

Behind the arched doors of Tudors just east of my house and west, the mating is over. Some couples endure. The Russians, both doctors, came here before the Second World War; he's blind now, she deaf and solitary as she walks the hilly roads with a cane and a basket, picking edible mushrooms from yards where pesticides ran thin, allowing for violets and clover. Through their closed windows I often smell potatoes cooking with onions and thyme, and I hear his long guttural cough. A much larger Tudor lies hidden from view behind a glade of trees, a house whose rock-lined gardens perpetually bloom behind an iron deer-proof fence. When the bleeding hearts shrivel and pink hyacinths topple like bowling pins, a truck arrives and within a day the garden springs alive with peonies and alliums, neatly nestled in pine mulch wafting incongruous hints of Pocono woods where I went as a child. Their kids have left, two winsome girls to Princeton, a boy to Cornell to play lacrosse and be anything except his father, a media mogul with expectations that permeated the house like invisible flecks of asbestos. He took them to London and Copenhagen, bought Marc Jacob bags and Lexuses all around, missed family events, and occasionally stood on his lawn on a summer day, jangling the change in his pocket, ill equipped to decipher a dandelion from a rose, competence from loneliness. I met his wife Jane in the town playground twenty years ago, and so watched this fairy tale family flourish until last month when I sat on her deck watching the Hudson through unfurling oaks. And she said, sipping lemonade, that she hadn't had sex in eight years—a lot of women don't at our age, she added. I sipped and nodded. Oh, she understood, she endured his sacrifices to work, his absent hours and missed trains, his emotional paralysis—he was a mensch, after all, stolid in his argyle sweaters and slacks, everyone knew that. Still, he could come home just once and sit on the deck with only a gin and tonic and her. This much she allowed, her eyes just failing to betray anger or indignation, I couldn't be sure, her blue eyes flicking from the potted impatiens to the sliced tomatoes with gently tousled basil. She owned her days and shopped with purpose, needlessly finding the best price for peaches and an Indian market within twenty miles that sold acceptable samosas. She bought shearling coats (on sale) and slippery dresses that fell gracefully on her Kate Hepburn frame. But in their twenty-ninth year of marriage, he texted his daughter about a rendezvous, a text not intended for her, a slip of the finger, a slip of oaths. He was pollinating elsewhere, had been in various locales for twenty-seven years.

The bumblebee swirls over buttercups and...