The Professional Lover
My pain, it’s true, is Helen’s pain, too, and as I look at her now I know that to share it is to heal. Each in our own way, we grieve. I remember Aster, and Helen, I know, remembers Lily. My thoughts, inevitably, turn to Joseph, and I trace the outline of Helen’s thick ribs through the fabric of her dress, recalling how she quit nursing and became an administrator at the House of Love. Over the years, technology became available that would have made her work much easier, but back then there were no incubators, no rockerboxes; there was only Helen and the limits of her exhaustion. I rest my head on her soft chest. I remember the way she held me, just like this but so many years ago on Twohearted Mountain. I remember thinking the view from so high would offer a new perspective. At the top of the mountain I felt worse, more alone than ever. I missed Frank, who should have been with me as he would have enjoyed the view. I knew as much from the way he had so often told me about it. Instead, Helen enjoyed it for him. She sat with me in silence, held my hand as I watched a rainbow form in the northwest sky, and then she said something that changed the course of my life forever: “You need a job, Jade. You can’t live in Green City unless you work for Green City.”
“All right,” I said.
She put her arm around my shoulder and squeezed. “Come on. Let’s get down from this mountain. I’m ghastly afraid of heights, if you didn’t know.”
“The things you won’t do in the name of professionalism,” I said. The things we tell ourselves, I think now, the nonsense we nod our heads over, none of it really helps, but this is where our bodies provide comfort in the meaninglessness of words.
As the sun rises and begins to light up my room, I look to the window and realize that for the first time in forty years it is not covered in bees. I see small particles hanging in the air, and I think, how tiny, how beautiful, how gorgeous this moment, the singularity of this morning. Helen pulls her hands from mine; she reaches up and detaches an onyx-encrusted pin from her hat and holds it in her teeth as her fingers disappear beneath the hat’s dome and reappear holding a white rose.
She plucks the petals one by one and lets them fall. As they brush my face and ears and neck, I imagine them dripping from my eyes and filling the room until we’re aloft and drifting on a soft, white sea. She wipes my face with her gloved fingertip; when it becomes waterlogged she raises it to her lips and sucks. She swallows, then pulls off her glove, finger by finger, and cups her bare hand against my cheekbone, catching the petals until they spill over and slip from the mattress to the floor. Somewhere beyond the window, the celebration of Aster’s life continues without us and will not stop until the last of her food is eaten, her mead enjoyed. I wonder: Is it possible for memories to serve as buffers against the expanse of loneliness we will feel now, alone in our city and without a founding mother? Will Aster Grande, in the span of a night, have become as meaningless as the train tracks that no longer exist? Is she nothing more than yesterday’s news? The first to jump, the last to die? Aster, if you can hear me, you are remembered and you are loved. Frank and Joseph and Lily, too—as long as I’m alive, anyway.