The Professional Lover
When she brought him to me in the maternity ward, his tiny eyes closed, I reached for her instead and said, “It’s all right, Helen. It was an accident,” and then I left her there holding him, and ran as fast as I could to Twohearted Mountain, which seemed so high and huge and far away. In the days I stayed up there, I made my peace with God.
A few months later I went to work for Aster Grande, who walked into the House of Love demanding a lover: “A womban,” she said, “who’ll take over Grande’s Groves and live with me in my home until the day I die.” She stood in the doorway, leaning against the wooden panel, though what I saw was a person sheathed head to foot in dingy tulle. I could not make out her face, but I knew she was suffering. I recognized despair when I saw it, and forgot the morning’s news of General Eisenhower’s announcement that Italy had been surrendered to the allies.
Clinging to Aster’s veil in clumps and hovering above her head were bees larger than I’d ever seen. They made no sound. “Lily’s dead,” she said, her voice controlled but audibly enraged. She grasped her veil in her fists. “She’s dead. They pulled her out of the lake less than an hour ago. I don’t know why I’m here.” She sagged, her whole body appearing to go limp, although she did not fall. “I don’t know where else to go.”
“Aster Grande?” Mama Lox-Bleu said, rising from her chair. “Is that you?”
Aster straightened and turned toward me. “Is she always this stupid?”
I shook my head. Mama Lox-Bleu sat back down.
“Cat got your tongue, girlie? Speak up when someone asks you a question.”
I looked at Mama Lox-Bleu, who shuffled some papers and said, in a much higher voice than I was used to, “Jade here’s new and needs a permanent assign—”
“Jade here’s new, my foot,” Aster said. “Go diddle yourselves.” She turned and tried to slam the door, but her veil got in the way.
“She’ll be back,” Mama Lox-Bleu said. “They always come back.”
#
Once the paperwork was filled out and my bags repacked and my rickshaw ride completed, I found myself at the end of Aster’s driveway. I thought her house was shuddering in the fierce southeast humidity, but no, every inch was covered in bees. She threw open the front door, and thousands of them flew in my direction.
“Come on, girlie, shake a leg!” She slammed the door behind me, and a decapitated bee dropped to the floor. It was the size of my thumbnail. She smacked at the bees that had slipped in. “To hell with that,” she hollered as I trapped them between my palms, “they know better than to come inside where they don’t belong.”
I batted them to the ground and smashed them under my feet, and when I saw the first smears of blood, I fainted.