Privileged (28 page)

“Stoli?” I asked Earlobe Girl, pen poised over my order pad. Vadim had instructed his waitresses to always ask if the customers wanted the most expensive brand of alcohol. They never did.

Mohawk looked at me like I was crazy. “If we wanted Stoli, do you think we’d be eating
here
?”

“Bar pour,” I confirmed, writing it on my order pad. “I’ll have your drinks in a minute.”

“Bring extra pickles,” Mohawk added, then started to dig for gold in his left nostril.

I stifled the urge to puke. “Will do.”

I knew I was lucky to have the gig, since I’d applied without any experience. My shift ran from four P.M. to midnight, and it was almost always busy. Being one of the few places left in the East Village where you could have dinner and drink for under twenty bucks, Tver was very popular. Over the general noise and the vintage Blondie blaring from the sound system, I had to shout my drink order to Vitaly, who was Vadim’s eldest son. Then I went to the kitchen and put in my food order with Sergei, the owner’s cousin. Tver was very much a family affair.

I held a glass under the Diet Coke dispenser, half-filled it, and drained it quickly before I hit the floor again. My feet pulsed with pain, and I felt as if someone were applying a hot poker to my lower back. Who knew waitressing was such hard work? I rued my decision not to work out while I’d been in Palm Beach; I was probably carrying around ten extra pounds.

I placed my palm on my lower back and pushed, then bent over to touch the floor with my palms. Boris gave me a dirty look. He was only ever nice to the Russian waitresses who worked three times as fast and four times as efficiently as I did.

So, back to it. This would probably be my last table before James arrived. I’d called him earlier in the day and asked him to meet me in the bar at twelve-thirty. Though my shift ended at midnight, I was responsible for refilling the pickle bowls, salt, pepper, ketchup, and mustard containers, as well as restocking the bar with lemon and lime slices and olives before I left. Usually, I was in a hurry to get through all of this so I could go home and collapse.

Tonight, though, I’d see James, whom I’d neither seen nor even talked to since coming back to New York four days ago. I’d called him at his office. And to be honest, he hadn’t sounded thrilled to hear from me. I had a sneaking suspicion that James-and-Megan had run its course, and not just from my side of the equation. I didn’t have many regrets about it. He’d been good for me, and I hoped I’d been good for him, at a certain time and place in our lives. It’s hard to move on, though, even when you know it’s the right thing to do.

I brought Mohawk and Earlobe Girl their shots and their pickles, followed by their food. Then I took a slice of poppy-seed cake and coffee to a leather-clad elderly gay couple who’d apparently gotten lost on the way uptown from West Street. They had matching foreheads frozen in the perpetual surprise that I now knew, thanks to Marco, was the sign of a bad brow lift.

As I moved into my side work, I kept one eye out for James. Life is so funny. A year earlier, I would have been watching for him with excitement—joy, even. Now all I felt was trepidation.

I was finishing with the olives at the bar when James stepped through the front door. He was dressed for the weather—hat, gloves, heavy cashmere topcoat. For a moment I felt the rush of loving him. But it was like pain in a phantom limb, something that was no longer there.

“Damn, it’s freezing out there,” he greeted me.

“Hey. I just have to deliver checks on my last two tables and bring them their bills,” I told him. “It won’t take long.”

He went to the bar, ordered a Scotch on the rocks, and watched me finish my work. Okay, so I have an ego—I hated that I was wearing the god-awful uniform. Even if I was no longer in love with him, I still wanted his last image of me to be “Damn, she looks good,” and not, “Damn, she’s got way too much junk in that trunk.”

Finally, I was done, and I slipped onto the bar stool next to James’s. Vitaly glanced my way. “Usual, Megan?” he asked.

I nodded. At the end of my shift on my first night of work, I’d asked for a flirtini, and Vitaly had looked at me blankly. Not only was his English still dicey after just two years in America, but no one in the history of the restaurant had ever ordered a flirtini, and probably—barring me—no one else ever would. I’d told him the ingredients, and he’d made an extra-big one, pouring some of the overflow into a second cocktail glass. He’d taken a sip and decided it was something that sounded like
taxi-bien,
which, I would learn the next day, means
so-so
in Russian. In Russian,
so-so
is quite a compliment.

“So . . . Yale to waitressing,” James said, remarking on the obvious.

“And my back is killing me. Who knew downward mobility would be so painful?”

He didn’t laugh. He just looked sad.

I drank half my flirtini in one swallow. It reminded me of the first one I’d ever had, at the Red and White ball. “I know we parted badly in Palm Beach,” I began, “and I’ve been thinking a lot about—”

“Wait . . .” He finished his scotch. “I don’t know how to say this except to just say it. There’s someone else.”

Wait,
someone
else?
Heather
else? “Heather?” I asked, not even trying to hide my distaste at the thought. “I knew she was still after you—”

“It’s not Heather.” He smiled. “Although you’re right. After she got back from Turks and Caicos, she told me she thought there was something between you and that Will guy—that she had to tell me as a friend.”

I shrank back in my seat. It would have been so much easier if I could have worked up some self-righteous indignation.

“And then she tried to kiss me.”

Oh. I felt my indignation inflating. How dare she try to kiss my kind-of boyfriend!

“But I’d already met someone else. At the
East Coast
party on New Year’s Eve,” James explained.

“She’s a writer,” I said, and felt my body deflate again. A more accomplished writer than I and undoubtedly a Heather clone—tall, blond, athletic, and curvy, holding the PEN/Faulkner award. The kind of writer whose publisher hires Annie Leibovitz to do the jacket photo and then blows the photo up to the whole back cover of her novel. The kind of writer who would make James’s parents weep with joy to be rid of me.

“Actually, she was bartending at the New Year’s Eve party.”

Vitaly put another round of drinks in front of us. I took a serious swallow of flirtini number two.

“While she’s working on her very literary novel?” I asked.

“Shoe-Shoe isn’t a writer. She just graduated from massage therapy school.”

“Painter?” I guessed. “Actress? Musician?”

“No.”

James had fallen for a massage therapist. “What did you say her name was, again?”

“Shoe-Shoe.” He took a swallow of his second Scotch. “Spelled
X-I-U X-I-U.
Her real name is Emily, but she took the name after a really life-changing trip to Taiwan last year. It came to her in a dream. She’s so
authentic
, Megan.”

Just when you think you know a person. Merely picturing Xiu-Xiu, the authentic bartender-slash-massage-therapist, getting introduced to James’s snob of a mother filled me with a helium-light kind of joy.

Once, in a rare heart-to-heart, my own brilliant mother had told me that many—possibly most—men who are very smart give lip service to wanting a very smart woman. In the end, they choose someone less threatening. My father, she believed, was one of the rare brilliant guys who really did want a brilliant woman.

Possibly, James was not.

I smiled at him. “I wish you and Xiu-Xiu all the best.”

“Hey, thanks for being so great about this.” He squeezed my hand. “How about you?”

I shrugged. “I’m making it up as I go along.”

“No guy? Not that guy Will? Heather wasn’t on to something?” he joked.

I thought about Will way too often. It was like wiggling your tongue in a cavity when you couldn’t afford to go to the dentist. It hurt to do it, I knew I shouldn’t do it, and yet I kept doing it anyway. “Not a chance,” I told him.

“That’s too bad.” James finished his Scotch and wiped his lips with a cocktail napkin. “I hate to see you working in a place like this, though. You really should reconsider the article.”

“Oh, I have,” I assured him.

“You have?” He looked surprised and proud at the same time.

“It’s for
Rockit.
An editor wants to see it. I should have a draft done by the end of next week. Twelve thousand words.”

“Twelve thou?” He whistled softly. “That’s great. Hey, if you want me to give it a read before you send it in—”

“I got it covered.”

He smiled sadly, as if realizing that our reading and editing each other’s work was a thing of the past. “Walk me out?”

Vitaly told us the drinks were on the house. I thanked him, went into the kitchen to clock out, and then stuffed my arms into a puffy down jacket too small to zip that I’d borrowed from Charma. It made me look like the Pillsbury Doughboy. James and I walked together along Avenue A toward East Seventh Street and then to my building. I looked up at the fire escape and remembered how I’d flashed half the neighborhood only nine weeks before. It seemed like a lifetime ago.

“So. Your place is okay now?” he asked.

“All fixed up.”

“Well . . .” He opened his arms, and I went into them. Briefly, I wanted to stay there, in a place that had been good and safe for so long. But things change. I longed for that comfort, but I knew I didn’t belong there anymore.

“Good luck with Xiu-Xiu. With everything,” I told him, and meant it.

“You, too, Megan. I’ll be looking for your story in
Rockit
.”

I smiled. “So will I.”

It was cold, and it was dark. But I stood on the front stoop and watched him walk away.

Write an essay defending or critiquing the following statement:

Siblings are bound to argue. It is in their biological nature; they compete for the attention and affection of their parents. Family members should just let the arguments occur, as they are a common and understandable phenomenon.

Chapter Thirty-eight

T
he next day, in a brief but significant lapse in sanity, I agreed to meet my sister at her hot-shit gym on the Upper West Side. I had considered sending a postcard claiming a spiritual awakening and a sojourn at an ashram in Kathmandu, but what with the Manhattan postmark and our having the same parents and all, I felt certain she’d figure out that I was back in New York.

Where was I supposed to begin with her? “I got fired from my job in Palm Beach.” Now,
there’s
a conversation starter. Or how about: “Just curious, did that guy you met on New Year’s Eve kiss anything besides your lips?” I mean, I might as well settle down in my coffin and hand over the nails and the hammer.

In too many ways, it felt like the same-old, same-old. Lily had gotten acting and modeling work right out of Brown. She got whatever guy she wanted. And then there was me. Even with a Yale degree, the best job I’d been able to get was at
Scoop,
and I’d gotten fired from that. Job number two in Palm Beach? Fired from that. First guy whose kisses made my toes curl—that would be Will—essentially, I’d been fired from that, too.

Talk about exacerbating the old sister-rivalry thing.

Lily’s daily routine was to go to Power Play, a small but exceedingly hip gym on the Upper West Side, specifically designed for those who didn’t want to deal with the public during their morning workout. Then she’d have a late lunch with friends at a health food restaurant where mung beans were considered a main course. After that, she’d go either to acting class or to a movie; then there was her evening’s performance, often followed by drinks or a light meal with whichever famous person happened to come that night to witness her breathtaking performance.

Since my shift at Tver started at four, I figured an eleven A.M. rendezvous at her gym would give me sufficient time to bitch through twenty minutes of light torture and then take off to enjoy a lunch heavy on the two main food groups—fat and sugar—and don my Waitress Woman costume for my evening’s performance.

I beat Lily to Power Play and waited for her in the overpriced snack bar. Most people don’t make an effort when dressing for the gym. But hey, I was meeting Lily, so I’d found the perfect leave-in conditioner to tame and render glossy my long curls. I’d done the twins’ routine with my drugstore cosmetics. They weren’t Stila and NARS, but it turns out L’Oreal and Maybelline aren’t bad. I wore Ralph Lauren gray trousers that sat just below my waist (twelve bucks at Sacred Threads, due to an uneven thread in the right cuff) and a very fitted white T-shirt (men’s Fruit of the Loom) under a shrunken plaid wool jacket with oversize velvet buttons (designer tag ripped out but probably Chanel, eighteen bucks at Housing Works).

When Lily arrived, she looked at me strangely, then grinned and hugged me. She got me a guest pass, and we changed in the surprisingly Spartan locker room. She asked me about Palm Beach, of course. I didn’t offer much and left out the minor detail that I’d been fired. She wondered when the twins would know their SAT results. I said in a week. She said she was pulling for us.

Power Play was just two rooms—one for cardio, the other for weight training. No fancy step classes, no hatha yoga, no Billy Blanks kickboxing. In return, members got exclusivity, a nonexistent gawk factor, and no lines to use the machines. We started on a couple of treadmills. I watched Lily set hers so that the speed and the incline would increase gradually from a gentle warm-up to a really challenging workout.

If she could do it, I could do it.

Ten minutes later, she was beginning to hit her stride, and I was sucking wind like a beached blowfish.

“Slow it down a little,” she suggested over the techno-pop blaring through the sound system.

“I’m fine!” It was difficult to form actual words.

After about twelve minutes, the inclines kicked up to Mont Blanc height, while the rubber ripped under my sneakers at approximately the speed of Lance Armstrong doing a time trial. I grabbed the sidebars and held on for dear life. I felt like I was going one-on-one with a giant metal sumo wrestler.