To begin with her handmaidens were ruffled, but as their queen didn’t seem annoyed or sickly, they soon followed her lead and quickly adapted to the new, slower rhythm.
15TH
Nate opened the New York Times, no mean feat considering he lived in the smallest apartment in Manhattan. Opening the Times meant he had to close something else, or move it.
Apartment 5A might have had a spectacular view across the window boxes to the Alphabet City skyline and beyond but inside there was room for little more than a single bed, a table for one—which he used for bench space—a stove, a sink and a small refrigerator.
There was no pantry so he kept his herbs and spices in his tiny closet, his olive oils in the bathroom cabinet and his vegetables in a crate on the bed.
He sat beside them, his heart sinking as he read the Dining Section’s latest restaurant review. Roland Morant’s Upper West Side restaurant, Citroen, had been awarded three stars by the Times’s critic, which was the worst news Nate could ever hope for.
His boss, a bellowing bully who insisted on being called “Chef” even though that didn’t go anywhere near describing what he did for a living, hated Morant with a vengeance. They’d worked together back in the Dark Ages but Morant had gone on to stardom working with kitchen gods Danny Meyer, Alfred Portale and Jean-Georges Vongerichten, while Chef had spent the last decade slinging burgers at his father-in-law’s Tribeca diner.
“That talentless back-stabbing bastard never had an original idea in his head,” Chef had been known to thunder of his archenemy. “Asshole couldn’t slice a carrot unless someone marked it with a pencil first and sharpened his knife for him while they were at it.”
He’d been beyond furious when Citroen opened the year before, insisting that Morant’s rightful place was at the bottom of the scrap heap with last week’s chicken livers, not up on West Eighty-Fourth Street with all the numb-nuts who were stupid enough to throw away their money just for the pleasure of getting food poisoning.
And now Citroen had been awarded three stars.
Chef hated everyone, but particularly Nate, on a good day.
Today he would have his guts for garters.
Nate looked at his watch. He would just have enough time to get up to the Poseidon Bakery on Ninth Avenue for some finikias—soft madeleine-shaped cookies made of ground almonds and walnuts, moist with thick, sweet syrup. He’d been trying to make them himself but he was missing something and needed to work out what that was.
It was going to be a difficult day and he needed to start it with something really sweet.
Outside he saw the shadow of Sugar checking her hive and moving quietly around the terrace inspecting her growing garden. She’d done wonders with the place since she moved in and, if he hadn’t felt so sick, he would have drawn back the curtains and told her.
16TH
Sugar had grown up in Charleston, South Carolina: possibly the most luscious of the world’s garden cities. Behind every wrought-iron gate or exposed-brick wall in the picturesque peninsula blooming between the Ashley and Cooper Rivers lay a sweet-scented treasure trove of camellias, roses, gardenias, magnolias, tea olives, azaleas and jasmine, everywhere, jasmine.
With its lush greenery, opulent vines, sumptuous hedgerows and candy-colored window boxes, it was no wonder the city’s native sons and daughters believed it to be the most beautiful place on earth.
In her first years of exile Sugar had tried to cultivate a reminder of the luxuriant garden delights she had left behind, struggling in sometimes hostile elements to train reluctant honeysuckle and sulky sweet potato vines or nurture creeping jenny and autumn stonecrop.
In the Napa Valley she’d had jasmine growing like a weed and her bees loved it, and so, she thought, did she. But a faint foreign cloud of regret seemed to lurk above her when the vine flowers started to bloom and, once she realized the beautiful sweet scent from her childhood was making her homesick, she pulled it out and never planted it again.
From that point on, she stuck to growing things that kept her looking on the bright side and made the most of her natural surroundings.
In Santa Fe her whole yard had been crowded with differentsized terra-cotta pots, out of which she grew everything from rosemary and lavender to ornamental pear and plum trees and even peppers, although they were not particularly popular with the bees.
In Colorado she’d created a fertile oasis out of old gas cans and cut-off oil drums. Her neighbors had been skeptical to begin with but once her creepers grew up and her flowers draped down and her shrubs fluffed out, the junkyard ugly duckling was transformed into the proverbial backyard swan.
For Flores Street, George had found some discarded cast-iron half-pipes on an East River building site and arranged for Ralph, a young friend of his great-nephew, and two of his buddies to help haul them up to 5B.
Sugar had tried to foist some money on Ralph for payment but he would not hear of it.
“Any friend of Mr. Wainwright is a friend of ours,” he said. “My mom always says he saved her bacon when we were kids. I don’t know how but I think it had something to do with my dad moving back home. Whatever, he’s a pretty cool dude. And he really likes your door.”
“And it likes him,” Sugar said, sending him away with two jars of North Idaho clover.
Perched up on salvaged bricks, the half-pipes made perfect planters with an industrial edge that oddly complemented Sugar’s pretty favorites: pansies, lantana, verbena and heliotrope.
She laid two of them by the long wall of the taller building next door and planted a clematis vine at one end and a moonflower vine at the other: the clematis because the variety she picked had the prettiest purple bloom and the moonflower because it opened in the early evening and emanated a heavenly scent just when a person most felt like smelling one.
She made gingham covers in different colors for her eclectic collection of patio furniture and bought Chinese lanterns and a strand of bistro lights at the Hester Street flea market, then a couple of oversized outdoor candle holders with matching cracks from a closing-down sale on Essex Street. She even found a jardiniere for sale on a Chinatown corner for twenty dollars plus two jars of propolis. She planted a miniature magnolia tree that did not remind her of the ones in the garden at home at all because her mama took great pride in her magnolias being the biggest in the street and this little specimen was as petite as could be.
It took a few weeks, but with all her hard work and the city providing its own staggering backdrop, her rooftop garden was taking shape.
In the days after she slugged back her half-pints of dark and light ales at McSorley’s, she had worked even harder. There was nothing like lugging twenty-pound bags of potting mix up four flights of stairs to keep a person’s mind off anything so vexing as having a perfect stranger . . . Well, she wasn’t sure what Theo had done, but it was wrong.
Still, she dreamed of him. Some mornings she could almost taste him, a sensation that seemed exquisite in her half-sleepy state, excruciating when fully awake. He was salty, with intense caramel notes that echoed in her taste buds well past breakfast.
“I need to get Theo Fitzgerald out of my head,” she told Elizabeth the Sixth one morning, patting mulch around the base of the mini-magnolia to keep the moisture in. “He has no place there. Or anywhere else in my life for that matter.”
Her gardening was interrupted by a knock on the door: it was Ruby, pale and tired-looking, clutching her scrapbook.
Sugar had been keeping an eye on her frail downstairs neighbor, dropping in on her every few days since the brunch, and while Ruby never slammed the door in her face the way Mr. McNally still liked to do, or threw her the stink eye the way Mrs. Keschl did, or pushed past her in the stairs like Lola, her reception was often closer to frosty than anything else. She generally thawed out soon enough but Sugar always felt like she was starting their friendship back at square one, so she was tickled that she’d taken it upon herself to drop by.
“I’ve go
t some new ones,” Ruby said, holding up the scrapbook in her spindly arms. “Real creepy.”
Weddings were the last thing on Sugar’s mind. “I was just about to check my queen,” she said, by way of a diversion. “Would you care to join me?”
Ruby screwed up her face. “What?”
“Excuse me?”
“I said ‘What?’”
Sugar decided she’d work her gentle magic on Ruby’s manners another day. “I was just about to look in on Elizabeth the Sixth,” she said. “If you come on over here I’ll introduce you.”
Ruby moved closer and watched suspiciously as Sugar took the lid off the hive. “Aren’t you supposed to wear a suit and smoke them all out or something?”
“I do have a suit inside if you’d like to wear it, but these bees are pretty tame,” Sugar explained. “The smoking is just to calm them down but they’re a pretty relaxed crowd to begin with so I don’t bother. It can’t be nice having your house all filled with smoke is what I think. If it happens to us we call the Fire Department. But you can stand inside and watch from there if you’d rather.”
“I’m not scared of bees,” Ruby said as Sugar pulled out a frame crawling with the insects.
“See they’ve covered all these little cubbyholes with wax,” Sugar pointed out. “There’s a little baby bee in each one.”
“Where’s the honey?”
“Well, they haven’t made a whole lot yet. They’re just getting up and running. When Elizabeth the Sixth, or Betty as I sometimes call her, has laid a few more eggs and they’ve all hatched and grown up, they’ll start to fill the cubbyholes on the next floor up with nectar. Then they dry it out by beating their wings and, next thing you know, you have honey!”
But Ruby was not really interested in honey; she was checking out Nate’s window boxes. “So, do you know him: the gingerhaired guy who’s always red in the face?”
“He just blushes because he’s shy, is all.”
Ruby shrugged. “What’s he got growing in these little garden things?”
“He’s got just about everything,” Sugar said. “And as soon as it’s ready, he picks it and makes something delicious with it. He made this Moroccan lamb stew the other night—oh my goodness, just the smell of it drove me so crazy I had to knock on the window and find out what it was. He cooked it in the cutest little dish with a funnel that came up out of the middle, served it with couscous, and was kind enough to share it with me. I had to go and look Morocco up on the map afterward just so I could be sure where such a heavenly thing came from.”
“Are you, like, dating him or something?” Ruby asked.
“Heavens, no! He’s too young for me. And I’ve only just met him.”
“You don’t have to know someone for long for them to be a boyfriend. Sometimes it’s instant. It happens all the time in my scrapbook.”
Sugar cleared her throat. “Well, I can hardly be considered an expert in that field because boyfriends and I don’t traditionally work out real well.”
Ruby looked at her. “Boyfriends and I don’t traditionally work out real well either,” she said. Indeed, she’d never had one. Not even come close.
“I’ve found bees to be far less complicated,” said Sugar. “Now, where’s my queen?” She pulled out another frame, this one laden with even more bees, and carefully turned it around in her hands, looking for Elizabeth the Sixth.
“How can you tell her from the other ones?”
“She’s bigger than them, and she has an extra touch of class, just like a real queen. I usually have no trouble spotting her anyway but—oh, look, here she is.” She pointed out Elizabeth the Sixth, who was perched half in and half out of a brood cell. “See, she’s longer than the rest although it’s hard to tell because of where she’s sitting.” She waited for Betty to lay her egg and move to the next cell, but Betty did not.
“Hm, that’s strange,” said Sugar. “She’s taking a while on this one. Best I stop disturbing her, I suppose.”
She slid the frame back into the hive and put the lid back on.
Ruby perched herself on one of the gingham cushions, holding her scrapbook in her arms, a sad but hopeful look on her face, like she wished she didn’t want what she wanted. Bees were obviously not the tonic for her that they were for Sugar, and if Ruby needed anything, Sugar thought, it was a tonic. In the interests of being helpful, she was going to have to suck up some more marital bliss.
“Now what say I make us an iced tea,” she suggested, “and you read me some of those stories of yours?”
“What’s in iced tea?”
“Just tea and lemon, there’s probably not even half a calorie in a whole jug.”
“OK,” Ruby said.
“Just OK?”
“What else would there be?”
“Sometimes it’s nice to add a little sweetener.”
“I’m not interested in sweetening anything,” said Ruby.
Sugar left it at that, but when she made the tea, she put half a teaspoon of Jacksonville ocher in it because if Ruby needed anything it was sweetening. The honey was subtle yet slightly tart and Sugar knew the tannin from the tea and the spike of the lemon would camouflage its taste.
She was sure she saw Ruby’s cheeks pick up a bit of color as she drank. It was like watching a wilted flower start to straighten and bloom after a summer rain shower.
17TH
The next time she saw Theo, Sugar was selling ice cream at the Ronnybrook Farm stand at Tompkins Square greenmarket. She’d volunteered at the market information booth three weeks in a row and the market manager had then recommended she spend a while working at someone else’s stand before setting up her own.
Marcus Morretti from Ronnybrook had begrudgingly let her help him although he’d had volunteers offer to help out before and generally they went for coffee about nine A.M. and never came back. Tompkins Square did not have the glitz and glamour of Union Square greenmarket in the Flatiron District, where hordes of well-heeled Manhattanites picked over fresh courgette flowers as tourists snapped photos of golden raspberries stacked like boxed jewels next to plump strawberries and glistening blackberries. Crowds did not block Tompkins Square mulling over plump eggplants and vegan cookies or queuing for Quaker pretzels and vegetarian wraps. It was unlikely to feature in glossy magazines or popular guide books.
Instead an eclectic mixture of East Village locals ambled up to the half a dozen or so stallholders, who were a butcher, a baker, two vegetable producers, an apple farmer, a lavender grower, plus Marcus and his organic ice cream.
The vibe was laid-back, and most of the stallholders knew most of the shoppers. Further adding to the Alphabet City flavor was the colorful collection of homeless and addicted, who mostly minded their own businesses but, Sugar had been warned, had been known to spend an entire Sunday shouting—or worse, singing—at stallholders and passersby.
On this particular morning, however, no one was shouting at anyone. The daffodils were out in full force beneath the park’s famous elms, sprinkled across the ground like gold dust. A group of ancient musicians played gypsy jazz on the benches over by the children’s park, while mothers watched their kids and chatted to each other, feet tapping.
It was the sort of day that promised a perfect summer and, in such premium conditions, it took less than an hour for Marcus to work out that Sugar was a natural-born saleswoman. After two hours he did a quick count and realized he had doubled his normal profit. He decided she was just exactly the sort of person you wanted to buy an ice cream from first thing on a sunny morning: refreshingly lacking in tattoos or piercings but with a smile that suggested she could mix a little mischief in with her wholesomeness if she felt like it.
When it dawned on him that the customers were actually waiting for her to serve them even though he stood right there next to her, he gave Sugar full responsibility for the stall and ran off to meet his girlfriend for an early lunch. His girlfriend did not have a wholesome bone in her body, which was pretty much wh
y he liked her.
Once Marcus left, Sugar hardly got to lift her head out of the ice-cream tubs, she was so busy serving people. They crowded in front of her, calling out their flavors, but when someone called out an order for ginger crème supreme in a certain sort of singsong voice, she felt the hairs on the back of her neck stand to attention. She looked up to see Theo standing there.
“Oh, it’s you,” she said, her hand suddenly sweaty on the scoop. “Hello.” There was still no point in being rude. There never was. And besides, she could hardly go anywhere.
Theo’s eyes had nearly fallen out of his head when he had mooched around the corner and seen Sugar standing there in her pretty blue dress, doling out ice cream.
He’d spent the weeks since he’d scared her away from McSorley’s patrolling East Seventh Street at every possible chance, lurking around all its corners in the hope he could find her again, explain himself, repair the damage he had done. He’d even rehearsed a little speech but now wished he had written it down because all he could think about was that faint sweet lime scent that lingered in the air, the curl of her fingers around a half-pint of beer, her teeth biting into her plump lower lip.
“Yes, it’s me,” he said.
“Would you like that ginger crème supreme in a cone?” she asked. “Or a tub to take home? Or perhaps you would prefer if I just hung on to it for forty years and gave it to you for our anniversary.”
“Hey, join the queue, buster,” snapped a young mom standing in front of him, jiggling her kid on her hip. “I’ll take a pint of vanilla.”
“Coming right up, ma’am,” Sugar said to her, handing her the ice cream. The mom stalked off and Theo moved closer to the counter.
“I know that pretty much everything that comes out of my mouth,” he said, “would appear to be the ravings of a complete and utter lunatic—”
“Yes, it would,” Sugar said, taking another order from behind him, riled that he was forcing her to consider that perhaps sometimes in special circumstances there was a point in being rude which went against everything in which she had long believed. “I’m sorry, but it would.”
The Wedding Bees Page 8
