Love Me Back (20 page)

On the nights that Cal and I were both at The Restaurant it was agreed between us that we couldn’t leave without tracking down the other to say good night. I did it once, just finished my shit and left, and he called me the next day. Said What you think you doin walking out without saying good night to me? I couldn’t find you, I said. Lame, he said, that’s a weak-ass excuse. You got any more weak-ass excuses for me today? No sir, I said. Good, he said, you can walk out whenever you want I’m not there, and I don’t care who else you don’t say good night to but don’t be like that with me. Okay, I said. All right missy, I got to run back into this bank, will I see you tonight? Yes, I said, love you. Love you back, he said. I always knew I was good with him if he said I love you back, not I love you too. If he ever said I love you too it meant I’m unhappy with you, I don’t feel it, it meant I’m just talking to you, meant My mouth is making some meaningless sounds. I love you too meant nothing so much it almost meant I don’t love you.

I didn’t even try to speak to him as I walked out that day. If I’d said Bye Cal, love you see you later he probably
wouldn’t have even said I love you too. He would have said Mm-hmm. Or just Mm.

Fuck him. Fuck him back and fuck him too and fuck him, I thought. I called my friend Clark, a beautiful specimen of a man who used to be a licensed chemical dependency counselor before he left that behind to deal the most divine hydro. I wanted to come down as fast as possible and I wanted someone to take care of me. I wanted to hide my self somewhere where I couldn’t get to it. I wanted someone to take it from me, let me think it was safe. How dumb. He got me stoned but it didn’t put my face back together at all. I still felt razed. I almost latched on to a Shirley Horn album but missed. I sat in the bottom of the shower forever, water running over me and taking nothing with it. He left for a previously arranged dinner with a friend and I felt abandoned. My teeth sang.

I did not sleep. I stared at the ceiling in Clark’s place, to which was affixed a tapestry with a giant embroidered
om
character. Clark came home from the dinner around three a.m. and I begged him to get me some narcotics so I could have eyelids again. He said he didn’t know where to get any. I was lying naked on the bed, covered partly by a towel and partly by the clothes I was clutching but hadn’t been able to put on. He asked me what happened here, where CDC was illegible for blisters I knew would deflate and turn to pus the next day, from having branded myself with lesser, simpler marks in other places. I said Calvin D. Colson, Calvin D. Colson, ochre, terra-cotta, golden Colson.

He said Shh, he said I can’t get you any narcotics but I would like to make love to you. I don’t know if that would
have any palliative effect but I would really like to. I said All right, but I’m having trouble controlling my face. He said that was fine, he laughed, he kissed me tenderly, his long hair fell over me. Clark was slender, he had a white man’s no-ass, not those two baby heads in a sack like Cal. He had a large thick straight penis and any time we did it he was in it all the way, studying it like a lepidopterist, admiring every intricate pattern up close with gravity and joy. His intensity pulled me down and down and down until I came and slept.

Cal would bring Max and Elena into the restaurant so they could all have dinner there once in a while, on special occasions like when he finished his cleansing. The cleansing was an annual thing, Christmas through April or something like that, and he cut out meat, cheese, alcohol, sugar, and weed. I teased him after he first delivered that list—And I know you’re still not getting any so what you got left for yourself my friend?—and he said Yes ma’am you have a point there but it’s about purification. And let me tell you how good that long bone cowboy tastes come April.

When he brought in the family I steered clear. Everybody else would go by the table to coo over his baby and be kind to the wife but I knew I couldn’t. Avoiding her had never been hard until one Valentine’s Day long after Cal’s summer with me. By then they’d made him a manager and I was seeing the hateful man, unhappily. I came into work later than everyone that day because Danny had asked me to pick up his suits and some razor blades on my way in, so I missed the introduction of Max in the shift meeting. Valentine’s
Day meant twice as many covers, the dining room converted into a sea of deuces, people jammed into three square feet of space to wait forever for their steak and stare into each other’s eyes drumming up some juice for whatever came next. So they brought in some extra hands to run food and polish glasses, but I didn’t know Cal had conscripted Max until sometime around what would be the sixth or seventh second of a bull ride, time to hold on tight to that shift or give up, fall off. I had a station far from provisions so every time someone dropped a napkin or a spoon or needed more sauce, more ice, more butter, I was hauling myself to go get, go get, go get, but I was hanging on, that’s why Cal put me back there, because it would have been a disaster with some of the baby servers or fuckups in that station.

I had my hands full of some dishes I had cleared, and a bottle of wine and a check presenter tucked under one arm, when this lady at one of my tables asked if I could please get her some creamy horseradish. Certainly, I said, right away, attempting to hold the stack of dishes away from her but unable to do anything more than gesture at that without putting the gristly remains of a ribeye in the face of the large man at my other elbow. As I twisted, I saw a woman in a sort-of uniform behind me—the same white shirt and apron as me, without the vest and tie—so I assumed she was one of the add-ons they’d brought in for the night and before I took a good look at her face I asked her if she could take the plates please. Then I was looking into her pretty brown eyes and I knew from Cal’s wallet exactly who she was, and she was looking at me thinking she knew who I must be just from process of elimination—there weren’t that many girls who
worked at The Restaurant—and from the kind of questions a wife asks a man about the other, in those moments when she’s thinking she can deal with it: What does she look like? Is she white? Trying to find out if she’s hot or young or has big tits. And the husband will answer with thin lips. He’s fucked so he’ll say things like Why you got to know all this, what’s it matter, instead of answering, and she’ll say things like I just want to know why I’m not enough for you.

Then he’ll sigh and say She has short hair and she could never give me what you do. There. Is that all?

In the dark dining room I guess she couldn’t see my face cook up to a warm red medium-rare, something a white girl can’t hide. Not that I regretted any second I’d spent with Cal. What I regretted was having just asked her to do me a favor when I hadn’t done her any, but there was no time to think about that if I was going to stay on the bull, no time to do anything but try to get that woman her creamy horseradish while she still had a bite or two of filet mignon to enjoy with it.

Men will toy with you, I don’t care how much they talk about a woman being a tease. Married men will. Single men rarely hesitate past a certain point. But married men will toy, treat you like you’re plastic, like whatever grip you have on whatever kind of heart you have is your business, like maybe you don’t even have anything that could be offended. I think that’s the same scared-boy coin though—single man on the one side taking what he can, married man on the other afraid to mess up what he took.

So I’d let Cal do what he would, I’d left him alone. What I wanted was his want and that’s not something you can
force. But after I dropped off that sauce I went to put back the bottle of wine and he was at the POS there, sweating. Past four hundred covers and he’d be moving so fast and holding so much in his brain and taking so much shit from guests that his ochre forehead would start to run. A gentleman, he patted, with a folded linen that matched his suit. Think you’re hot! I said to him, Guess who I just met in the dining room? Fucking give a sister a tip, you know?

I wasn’t slowing down to hear his piece, just gliding behind him to put that pinot in its bin and get back out to my corner, but I’d picked the wrong place in his night to be tough, I was probably the latest of nineteen people to yell at him and I wasn’t in line to spend a couple bills on dinner so I didn’t merit any deference. I was just supposed to do my job and not cause trouble. Hey! he said, like he’d say to a dog that was in his bushes or a hood trying to steal his kid’s bike, that Hey! full of strange to cut me, You better get back here and pump that, I don’t care how busy you are!

That was how he knew to get to me, ignore what I said and go for my work, imply that I was lazy, that I didn’t have standards as good as his. I went back. I took the bottle out of the bin and put the white plastic pump on the rubber stopper and pumped the air out of it and said to him Cal, I swear to God you did not pump your wine on a night like this when you were a server and if you tell me you did I’m going back out there to find her and I’m going to tell her I sucked every drop out of you every day and I’m going to tell her I’m still doing it and you’re a fucking liar and I’ll explain to her that that’s because you fuck me and you lie to her.

He was quiet. Then What in hell is up with you? he
said, aware that the situation suddenly required more than a power play. Nic walked up needing something from Cal then but Cal didn’t turn to him, and looked at me long as I walked away. Come talk to me later he said, putting some suspicion in there for a buffer but some respect too, to tempt me.

Once I did get one lick. I surprised him and I got there before he could block me. I got one lick on the underside of his big vitiligoed head and he pushed me away instantly, strongly, said The fuck you doing! just the way he’d said Hey! trying to squash me so I’d never do that again. Then seeing the look on my face, both the want and the apology, he’d said Mami, don’t do that. I’ll spill. As if to say If I promise I want you more than anything will you accept nothing.

You get tired of being a fixture in a restaurant every night, even if like me you somehow love the job. Something about the word waitress too that always bothered me, made my lower belly quiver in that bad way, like when you walk through a nursing home. I quit The Restaurant the day I waited on Carter Wells and he asked me what I would do if I could do anything right this second, if money were no object. I said as I poured the taste, a swirl of the $800 Lafite Rothschild he’d ordered even though he was alone, Sir money is an object and could never be else but if money were no
obstacle
I’d live in a place where my little girl could go to a good school. Or maybe I wouldn’t even make her go to school, maybe we’d just see the world together from your side of the table.

With this I raised the glass with its swirl as if to toast the
imaginary gift of an imaginary life and I put my whole small face inside the bowl and inhaled and then I drank that wine and said You enjoy your evening and I walked out of The Restaurant, holding the glass in my hand.

No. I would never do that.

But believe me that move is not original in the business. I knew a guy who did that in Morton’s one night, they have a spiel with a cart and all these props, and there’s a part where you have to hold up a potato and talk about what they can do with it. He held up the potato and—I can’t do this, he said, and put the potato down and left. He told me After you do it it feels like the stupidest thing because most likely you just end up in some other restaurant holding some other potato but way behind on your rent.

I did think about it though. Especially late at night when I was so hungry. Around ten thirty or eleven when I’d been at work for hours and hadn’t eaten since lunch, and the place was still brutally busy so I knew I wouldn’t eat until one or two in the morning. Then I would be running some steaming potatoes au gratin to some table and I’d think If I ever walk out this is how: Step up to the table with that bowl and instead of serving them stand there spooning the hot buttery crumbly cheesy potatoes into my mouth. We all became scavengers late at night. The law may require a lunch break but how are you going to take a lunch break at the height of service? At midnight I’d see a half-eaten dish of potatoes on the edge of a deuce in the bar and I’d catch their server’s eye. She knew what I wanted because she wanted it too. She’d start bussing the table in that ungodly sexy way she had, leaning over with her luscious tits in their nose, asking if
they wanted dessert and laughing when they said As long as it’s you, like she didn’t hear that every night. I’d meet her in the back and we’d hide behind the glass polisher, scarfing. If Danny came into the back the glass polisher would yell Hola jefe and one of us would turn nonchalantly to the sink to wash our hands while the other began carefully creating an upside-down bouquet of stemware to carry back into the bar. We’d leave the last bites of the potatoes for the glass polisher.