“It’s empowering,” Gabby corrected, kicking out her legs and leaning her face toward the sky, where the sun was becoming visible.
“I don’t know what to do.” Alice mimicked her friend’s posture, face aimed at the sun. It offered an ambient warmth, comforting if a little thin.
“You write stories for them,” Gabby said like it was obvious. “Well, not for everyone, not for Mr. Bust and Waist, but everyone you want to help. You should write for them and charge aggressively for it.”
Alice nodded, not quite convinced. She glanced around the lawn. At this early hour, it was sparsely populated. Everywhere around her, she saw inspiration—the couple seated on the bench on the tiny island at the center of the pond, the tall skinny palm tree that loomed above them, a rabbit that hopped among the daffodils. Now that she’d opened her world up to the stories, symbols were everywhere. She wondered if she’d ever see life the same way again.
“First things first,” Gabby said, interrupting the moment with a dose of reality. “We need to come up with a business model and get you incorporated.”
“Incorporated?”
“An LLC or better yet, for your situation, an S Corp.” Gabby was an accountant at the largest firm in Santa Barbara. She loved numbers the way chefs loved chanterelles.
“But it’s not really a business. I mean, I’ve made a few months’ rent, only because Rebecca and her friends insisted on paying me, which was more like a tip. I didn’t charge them. What do you charge for love?”
“A lot,” Gabby said.
“What if people can’t afford to pay? Is love just for those with big wallets?”
“Certain kinds of love,” Gabby said seriously. “You mentioned college, right? Think of it that way. Some people pay full price. Others get scholarships or loans. Maybe we should set you up as a nonprofit.”
“A love scholarship,” Alice said, pleased by her cleverness.
Gabby smirked and reached into her attaché for her tablet. She typed, clicked, and scrolled, then tilted the screen toward Alice. It showed a picture of a bride and groom kissing in front of a wall of bougainvillea.Elite Matchmakerswas scrawled over the background of pink flowers in bold sans serif. Beneath the picture were several photographs of buxom women in red tank tops looking longingly at men in wire rim glasses. Beside the photos were testimonials about money well spent and lines likeYour time is too valuable to waste on bad dates. Let us take care of the lemons so you meet the gems.
“Do people actually pay for this BS?”
Gabby clicked on a button that saidPackages, which led them to a pricing list for consultations, image construction, and mixers. One thousand dollars for every face-to-face date. Five hundred for a pre-date makeover.
“That’s highway robbery,” Alice said. “It’s predatory.”
“It’s smart business. It says, ‘We know our services work.’ It says, ‘You won’t regret spending money on us. In fact, you’ll feel better about it because we’re so expensive.’ It’s like a luxury car or luxury designers. Luxury dating.”
Alice bought her clothes from the clearance racks at department stores. Her car was thirty years old and not a classic. The only jewelry she wore was a thin gold chain with a small swallow charm her father had given her. Nothing about her wasluxury.
“This all feels dirty. It’s so not me.”
“Alice, it’s beautiful what you can do. I’d drain my bank account for it. In fact, for the rest of our lives, I’m never letting you pay for another drink again. Seriously, you’ve given me something priceless.”
It was true, something intangible yet obvious had changed in Gabby in the three months since she’d met Oliver. With the others before him, she would veer the conversation toward them whenever she got together with Alice, as if trying to convince herself the relationship was real, incessantly checking her phone in case they called, too jittery to do anything other than pick at her food. Now she ate greedily and left her phone in her bag because she trusted that Oliver would still be there after she and Alice were finished hanging out. In the past, she’d pursued kayaking, swing dancing, poetry, even fishing, abandoning her own interests. With Oliver, she had gone to one stand-up show and declared it not for her, letting him have that part of his life for himself. In fact, she’d never even seen him perform. It wasn’t like she expected him to be into taxes orThe Bachelor. Yes, Alice had given Gabby something priceless, a love that allowed her to be herself.
In addition to how he treated Gabby, Alice liked Oliver. They’d met for dinner at a Mediterranean restaurant with little fires at the center of every table. When Oliver sat down, he remarked, so quietly that Alice almost didn’t hear him, that he was relieved he’d decided against his polyester suit. Alice laughed reflexively before she decided whether she found the joke funny. In fact, she wasn’t sure it was funny, but his deadpan delivery made it so. For his part, he looked relieved that Alice had laughed, as though he was as surprised that he’d made a joke as she was. Through her stories, Alice was finding herself to be a good judge of character. Oliver was reserved, bordering on shy, something she would not have expected from a performer. While he didn’t speak a lot, what he did say was thoughtful and curious. He asked Alice questions. He rubbed Gabby’s back as she spoke, making sure she was warm enough. He was polite to the people who served them. It all added up to someone who was interested in those around him. If anything, Alice wished he’d talk more. She found herself curious what he thought, when in the past she’d wished she’d known less about Gabby’s boyfriends’ opinions.
“Everyone will feel the way I do when they meet their person,” Gabby continued. “Don’t feel bad for asking people to compensate you in return. You don’t have to be selfless to help people, not with something as important as love.”
The conversation was starting to give Alice that itching sensation on the inside of her elbows.
“As long as I don’t have to create a website or a social media presence.” Alice had tried to be on Instagram. She liked taking videos of the waves crashing onto the beach, photographs of cacti in bloom, but everything about comments and likes made her uneasy. What did it mean when college friends whom she hadn’t spoken to in ten years tapped the heart icon on her photograph of the Pacific lapping at her toes? What did it mean when an old flame wrote,Wish I was there!on a photograph of Alice eating tacos on the train tracks in the Funk Zone? It was too intimate and too insincere at once, exposing these fragments of herself. It required its own set of social mores that made her overanalyze everything in an unpleasant way.
Gabby tapped a manicured finger against her pink lips. “Actually, it’s better if you don’t. Creates that air of exclusivity, of having to be in the know. Plus, you’ve already got forty-seven people who emailed you—”
“Plus twenty voicemails,” Alice added.
“Right, and that’s just from eleven clients. That’s—” Gabby’s eyes drifted toward the sky as she calculated “—that’s a six-hundred-percent increase. At that rate, these sixty-seven people will produce four hundred more clients, which will produce twenty-four hundred clients—how long will it take you to write a story?”
“I think we’re getting ahead of ourselves.”
“We should get ahead of ourselves. Alice, my love, you’re sitting on a gold mine.”
