Emily said.
“Another one? Wait, how many is this now?”
“Three, I think. Things are getting biblical-level bad around here.” She made her voice deep and somber. “By water also the world of that time was deluged and destroyed. By the same word the present heavens and earth are reserved for fire, being kept for the day of judgment and destruction of ungodly men.”
“Uh. Yikes.”
“You wouldn’t believe how much of that shit is still rattling around in my brain.”
“I guess so.”
There had been a series of blazes in the city—empty houses, mostly. A boathouse that had been abandoned on one of the creeks after Hurricane Sandy. A stretch of dry brush near the entrance to the Revel. The police and the fire department suspected it was arson, but they didn’t have any leads yet. I’d driven past one of the sites on my way home from work: a two-story house near the bus depot, its façade charred black, its roof collapsed. I thought of the wildfires in California, the way that sometimes they would burn to reset the soil, to restore nutrients to the forest. I knew it wasn’t the same, but I wondered if these fires might have been like that—the city’s way of restoring itself, of regenerating through destruction. It was a nice alternative to the reality—that someone was setting fires just because they liked having something to ruin.
The plant guy came in, rustling his garbage bags, ready to take away the month’s orchids and swap them out for new ones. I watched him lift the flower from the pot on the desk and drop it into the mouth of the bag, the delicate white petals swallowed in darkness, though when he saw Luis he straightened, gestured to the bag. Luis smiled at him and crouched at the man’s feet, removed the orchid, and placed it into an empty Windex bottle that he had cut in half.
“Luis does that sometimes,” Emily said. “If he’s on shift when it’s plant day. He likes to rescue them. Otherwise they just get thrown away.”
Luis retreated, cradling his orchid in the crook of his arm, and the man bent to his little wagon for another plant, dropped a new orchid, identical to the last, in the other one’s place. He left a small crumble of soil on the counter, and the earthy, damp smell of it briefly filled the air. Wild and dirty but real.
After he left, Emily and I restocked lipsticks and pans of blush from the late summer color collection, Indian Summer Dreams. As I emptied my second box, I looked up at the photo of the spa’s founder, Geraldine Austin, that was mounted above the vanity mirrors in the boutique. That severe sheen on her leather riding boots, the gloss on the horse’s coat. The grim set of her mouth, as though she knew that, in sixty years, two young women would sit on the floor of an establishment bearing her name and we would let her down in a way too beneath her to even articulate.
“Do you think that we are doing any good here?” I asked Emily.
“What’s that supposed to mean? Are we good at our jobs? Customer service jobs are practically designed for failure. We have to depend on other people being patient, reasonable, sane, in order to serve them well. Or do you mean good good. Like morally? Because for starters, I’m pretty sure these lipsticks aren’t cruelty-free.”
“I don’t know. Do we ever have the opportunity to help people? Do people really come here thinking that we can make them the better versions of themselves? Do we give them that in any way? Or are we just trading on their insecurities?”
Emily lifted a stack of eye shadow palettes out of the box. “I don’t know. People confuse better and better looking all the time. I read that humans ascribe morality to people who are attractive, and they are suspicious of people who aren’t. Even from the time you’re a baby. We are preprogrammed to. Pretty equals good. Ugly equals bad.”
“Great. So basically we’re helping perpetuate that bias?” If all beautiful people were good, Matthew would have been a saint. The high forehead and the hair that was always falling into his eyes. The arcs of his shoulder blades. The dainty divot in the middle of his bottom lip that I stared at while he slept. In a strange way, to think that my trust in him had been hardwired comforted me. But what a mistake. So much