Page 31 of Bad at Love
He shrugs. “I’ve always loved it.”
“Wait a minute,” I tell him as we approach his car. “You’re not supposed to know what I do.”
He opens the door for me. “It says so on your Tinder profile.”
“I wouldn’t put that on my Tinder profile.”
“Yes, it’s right below the part where you talk about your inspirations of being a comic,” he says, his eyes begging me to play along.
This is dumb, I want to say but I bite my tongue for once and take in a deep breath, trying to get in the game.
“Oh that’s right,” I say and then thank him as I get in the passenger seat and he shuts the door after me, like the perfect gentleman he usually is with me.
Laz is a pretty clean guy, but even so, I can tell he tidied up in his car. It smells like his spicy scent. I have to wonderif Laz has always smelled so good and this is the first time I’m really noticing it.
“Nice car,” I comment. “I didn’t know you were a car guy.”
“There’s a lot you don’t know about Carl McNaughty,” he says, starting the engine.
“Are you Irish? McNaughty sounds Irish.”
“Yeah, completely,” he says, faking an extremely believable Irish accent. “I come from a long line of McNaughtys just outside of Cork.”
I lean my head back against the seat. “I’d love to go to Ireland one day,” I say dreamily.
“Why don’t you?” he asks with such concern that I’m not sure if it’s Laz asking or Carl.
I shrug. “I don’t have the money really. Or the time. Every extra buck I get I’m putting it into my business. I don’t take days off. And that’s okay, because I’m young,ish, and I know that this is the time I need to burn the midnight oil. This is the time to work my ass off, to try and establish myself. Work hard while I can because who knows what the future brings.”
A beat passes in the air as we cruise down the street and turn onto Coldwater Canyon. “I feel the same way,” he says. “What’s worse is that no one takes what I do seriously, so when I’m working all the time, they just don’t see it as work.”
“And you think people take me seriously when I tell them I’m a beekeeper? Especially a full-time one?”
We’re both in the same boat when it comes to that one. The poet and the beekeeper.
“Be honest, Marina, is this what you’d talk about on a first date?” he asks after a few beats, studying my face before turning his attention back to the road.
I have to think on that. Though I don’t mention my job on my online profiles, it does come up during the first date. Naturally, I mean, “what do you do?” is a classic conversation starter. But I never go into the specifics of the job when it comes to anything remotely emotional or personal. I try and keep the conversation as shallow as possible, though I always try to educate them while I can. I like facts and will share them as often as I can. Who doesn’t like to learn?
“Did you know,” I say, twisting in my seat to face Laz, “that every bee in the hive has its own role and that role is entirely dependent on the age of the bee?”
“You’re starting to sound like Scooby.”
“I don’t know who this Scooby is but for example, when they are first born, they clean and polish the cells, starting with their own cell they just crawled out of. A few weeks go by and they move on from cleaning duties to feeding the brood, caring for the queen. They remove debris, handle incoming nectar, build beeswax combs, guard the entrance, and air-condition and ventilate the hive.” I pause to check if he’s listening. He is. “They don’t leave the hive until their final phase of life. They only have a few weeks after that, either acting as guards or scouts or collecting nectar, before they die.”
“So then the bees that you see flying around, pollinating flowers…”
“They’ve earned it. They’ve worked their little bee bottoms off their whole lives to have that privilege of smelling the flowers.”
He bursts out laughing.
“What?” I ask.
“You are so fucking cute, you know that? Little bee bottoms? I swear to god, I don’t know what to do with you.”
I’m beaming inside from that. “I guess it’s just a goodmetaphor. For life. You know, people see these bees flying around and assume that’s just what they do. People don’t realize all the jobs they’ve had, where they started from and the relentless work they’ve had to put in to get to that stage.”
He nods, rubbing his lips together. “You’re right. I didn’t realize.”
