The Professional Lover
“Over seven hundred hives,” she said, “in this stretch alone.”
I stood silent, sweating. Bees flitted from orange blossoms to hives, from atop the petals to the gaping mouths of their hives, from the bees bouncing around like rubber clouds and back again to their hives. Then, suddenly, Aster stepped out from beneath the veil, placed the crown atop my head, and held out her arms. I watched, unable to look away as the bees came to her, alighted on her bare face and neck and shoulders. “They think they’re feeding,” she said, “but we know better, don’t we. It took us a long time to figure out that they weren’t going to hurt me. It didn’t take that long to figure out you can’t go out in public covered in bees. Damned tourists think I’m an attraction, want me to pose for pictures. That veil you got there, put it somewhere. Now that Lily’s gone and you’re here to take over Grande’s Groves, I have no intention of setting foot out that front door ever again. You hear me, girlie?”
I nodded.
“What?”
“Yes,” I said. “I’ll put it somewhere.”
#
Some say the land beckoned them, that the beauty of the scenery whooshing by compelled them to jump from the first train to pass through this region. It did not. They jumped, truth be told, to escape their male chaperones headed for Klondike gold. In the following months they charmed the natives, Big River Indians, to rip up the tracks again and again until the midnight train was a thing of the past. Most locals refer to them as “the thirteen original colonizers,” a gross misrepresentation if you ask me. They are our founding mothers, and we ought not reduce them to an unlucky number that in no way corresponds to their unique contributions to Green City’s development; neither are they the mere opposite of unoriginal, which is a most uninspiring thing to think; and how they’d hate to be remembered as people, as men, who would impose their rule on an existing way of life. Our founding mothers they once were and our founding mothers they shall remain—as long as I’m alive, anyway.
We Green Cityitizens imagine ourselves to be seasonal help, though due to the facts that Green City boasts all four seasons on any given day, and our flowers are always in bloom, our tourist season never ends and so we have settled for the duration. Spellbound by the enchanting effects of snow-capped mountains and forests of evergreens and tamaracks and palm trees and pink desert sands and red rock canyons and natural hot springs in one panoramic sweep of the eyes—a 360-degree spin on a heel—so many like me have given up past lives to work here.
For those of us who do not wish to cater to tourists and prefer instead to serve our own, one option is to become a professional lover as I have been for forty years. I began as a temp and offered my services where love was needed, whether for an hour, a day, a week. Simple jobs like these came in the form of providing comfort to children whose goldfish died, teenagers getting over first heartbreaks. Sometimes I slept beside those whose husbands never returned from the war, my body taking up the otherwise empty space that grew to seem, in the onslaught of sudden loneliness, more significant than the reality of death truly called for. Death was death. To survive the dead was to be lonely, but only for a time. It took me a long time to learn this, and even longer to learn that it did not mean that empty space could not be filled.
The morning Aster died, tourists woke and learned they would have to entertain themselves. Only three businesses operated as usual: Green City General, Floyd’s Funeral Home, and Mama Lox-Bleu’s House of Love. Employees at the House of Love did not need to go to work but were expected, after the wake, to lead the procession. It is customary when someone dies here that as many professional lovers as are able attend the proceedings. After the burning of the body we offer condolences; we shed tears, recite love poems, sing songs; we prepare meals for the survivors of our friends and neighbors, whether they are strangers to us or not; we clean their homes, tend their gardens, offer our bodies if that is what will heal their pain. Off the clock, of course, for we may be professionals but we are still human beings, and we know that when it is our turn to die we will appreciate this kindness. Our families, if we had them, would appreciate it even more. But most of us choose not to have them because we have each other, and because we have our city’s family members to love, and because they always, always come first. Why else would we be paid to do what anyone can do but what we do best?