professional romance

 
I gave her most of the last of my pay, but I still had enough
for an hour’s worth of hotel room.

as we made like a honeymoon couple, her eyes engaged in a
remarkable Civil War, alternating hues between the blue & the gray.
I asked her name & she said Laura. ‘damn,’ I told her, ‘I always fall
in love with girls named Laura.’ I knew I was safe this time, she
wouldn’t have told me her real name.

it should have drawn a laugh or a smile out of her, but she looked
at me, stone serious, on the verge of making a revelation. the girls
were like that with me, like they could share things outside of ‘the
profession.’ maybe because I never called a whore a whore, like
other jokers did. it was her own business why she was in this walk
of life. I wanted what she sold, & we both got what we bargained for.

so I waited a minute, then she spoke. ‘no man ever told me he loved
me.’ she wasn’t fresh off the farm, she’d been working the streets for
awhile, so it kinda packed an extra cartridge in the cylinder. she
never had that singular affection in high school, or on moonlight
cruises in the park, before she came to the city. not at a carnival, or a
dance, or a drive-in.

there was nothing I could say that would throw a votive candle’s worth
of fire on her dim future. she got a little older & more obscure with
each passing sunset, each pretend lover she took between her legs.

in bed, we fell into our session of professional romance. she was an
exquisite paramour, & led me to Kismet as I drifted in my Gatsby
fantasy. after the excursion, she sat in the bathroom, re-applying
her makeup. I saw that she had her face in her hands, & asked,
‘are you crying?’

‘No!’ she said, with an anger that was not anger, but rather desolation.
so recently a whore conjuring far horizons under me, she was now
merely & beautifully a woman.

I left then, to afford her the privacy she needed,
in the sacrifice of her broken heart…


(Art: Corrine Michael West)