Sweetbitter (15 page)

“I'm putting on your favorite song, Skip.”

Ariel was aggressive about music. She had made me a few CD mixes, the depths of my ignorance presented in sixteen tracks. It never ended well. For her, the enjoyment of music was contingent on its obscurity. Once people knew about it, she discarded it, moved on. And yet she was always trying to educate me. Every time I told her I liked a song she had shown me, she put on a disappointed smirk and said, “You
would.
” Which I thought had been the point.

“You don't know my favorite song,” I said. When I caught her eyes they were like rain-washed windows I couldn't see inside. Worry fluttered through me and I took another drink.

“No LCD,” Terry said, hitting his hand on the bar for emphasis.

“I will shoot myself, Ari,” said Will.

“Fuck you, fuck your mothers, if you talk shit on James Murphy I will fucking kill you.”

The song came on. “Heartbeats.” I clapped my hands.

“Oh, I
do
like this song!”

“Why you squeal like a piggy?”

“Sasha, come on, it's
my
song.” I moved my shoulders and shut my eyes, dizzy, white cloudbursts inside my lids. I pulled Sasha off the stool. I swung my hair in front of my face like Ariel taught me, my body dilated under the water of the synthetic bass. It was an apathy dance. I heard Ariel singing, and when Will took my hand and spun me, I smiled, lip-synching.

To call for hands of above, to lean on…wouldn't be good enough for me, oh.

All the movement stopped and I looked toward the door. Vivian stood, wobbling, cautious. I waved and looked at Ariel, who had a glass in her hand. It went flying by my face and into the wall next to Vivian.

The sound came seconds later. I had already watched it explode and shower the floor, no snapping, nothing clean, full disintegration. During the delay in sound I covered my eyes.

“Where the fuck have you been?”

“You're out, Ari,” Terry yelled. “God fucking damn it.”

Vivian looked bored. Ariel grabbed a handful of straws and threw them before Will grabbed her by the shoulders.

“I'm sorry, I'm sorry,” I heard someone call out above the music. The song ended and I realized it was me. Vivian walked to the bar, not looking at Ariel, and sighed as she brought up the hand broom.

“Sorry, Terry,” she said.

“Oh, she's sorry,
Terry
?” Ariel wrestled as Will held her arms down.

“Let's go, string bean, party's over.” Sasha grabbed her purse and Will picked her up and went to the door. Sasha waved to someone out the window. “Oh and look, Victor-baby is here.”

“I know you,” Ariel yelled at Vivian, her voice shot and guttural, “I know everything about you.”

NEARLY FIVE A.M.
in the park. A frigid night that should have been blown over by sleep. Empty bottles rattled in the gutters, darkness lay thick as wax in the trees. We couldn't get Ariel to do anything but pace and rage and smoke. Sasha and Victor took off immediately. I thought, What's stopping me from leaving? Why can't I grab a taxi too? Do all the single people have to wait it out together?

Vivian was a sex addict—undiagnosed, but Ariel was familiar with the signs. Vivian was illiterate. She was tits and ass, barely queer. Ariel was embarrassed to be seen with her. Vivian had used her. For what was unclear.

“Take the down pill, babe,” I said. I smoked with her for solidarity, but I was sick, sweaty, shivering, coming down hard.

“She's right, Ari, where's the Xanax?”

Ariel took two pills without stopping her tirade. She lit another cigarette before the first was finished. And just when I thought I was going to freeze to death on a bench in Union Square, her drugs kicked in.

She stumbled. Will grabbed her and her head dropped down to her chest.

“She took too much,” he said. Ariel slapped him and started laughing.

“Like
too much
too much? Like we're going to the hospital?”

“No, just difficult-to-handle too much.”

He put her down on the bench and we sat on either side of her. Her eyes were closed, her head cocked to the side. I put her hood on her and Will and I looked at each other. I remembered how delicately he'd touched my face when we kissed and felt repulsed and then sad.

“Thank you for being nice to me,” I said.

He lit a cigarette and looked across the park, not taking the bait.

“Does this happen?” I asked.

“It has happened. It doesn't happen all the time. She has all these meds. It gets complicated.”

“I see that. You think Vivian is cheating?”

“No,” he said loudly into Ariel's ear. But then he met my eyes and shrugged.

“Sucks.”

We looked at her, looked at each other, then out at the park. I lifted my feet when I heard the rats. Neither of us wanted to deal with it. But I owed Will for getting me home safely more than once. We all owed Will, really. He never stopped watching over us.

“I'll take her. My place is closer to her place, she can walk in the morning.”

“Aren't you like fifth-floor walk-up?”

“She's going to have to walk.” I tapped her and she didn't move. “You're going to walk, Ari.”

Wind came through the park and I could hear the trees bending, creaking.

“I haven't heard that in so long,” I said, hushed, looking up. “They are speaking like real trees.”

Ariel walked but her eyes were closed. I guided her by our hooked arms. A cab materialized going south on Union Square West, a beacon of hope. The driver saw us and rolled down his window.

“No puke,” he said. He had a drooping, ashen face, as if he'd been sleeping. I tried to open the doors but they were locked.

“Come on, she's fine.”

He looked her up and down and Ariel said, “Fuck you.”

“See, she's fine!” I said. “Please, I have cash, extra tip, por favor.”

Ariel took up the far two seats. As soon as we settled in her head was on my shoulder. I held her hand and kissed it. The lit store windows turned SoHo into a lunar landscape, nothing human for miles. I watched each block present itself to me, and I thought, Who lives here?

When we turned onto Delancey, Ariel's head fell onto my breast. When I picked her head up, she kissed me. She was so soft. Kissing her felt like trying to stand on a mossy stone in a river, our lips ran over each other with no traction. Her hair drifted up as if we were underwater. After a minute I became aware of it, and I started trying to kiss her back, performing, asking myself if I liked it. But for the first few seconds all I knew was her mouth.

I couldn't lose myself in it again. I let it go over the bridge. There was no groping, just the fine edges of teeth and a feathery tongue, so yielding. I tilted my face down and told the driver to take the first exit. His eyes were locked on us in the rearview mirror.

“You have beautiful lips,” I said, pulling a few strands of her hair from my mouth. She didn't open her eyes.

“Yes, yours are a shame too.”

The driver took the turn too fast and her head smashed into the window on the other side. She moaned the rest of the way. I was patient with her on the stairs. I couldn't make her brush her teeth. She was asleep before I finished brushing mine, taking up the entire bed, her black hair splayed like spider legs on my pillow.
Who lives here?

I
HEARD THE RAIN
while I slept, heard the cars moving, like scissors shearing paper. It was my day off. I woke up out of breath, inflamed from the radiator. Someone was playing Édith Piaf out their window. It washed through the rain, the claustrophobic sky, and shot in my open window. It hit me in the chest right where old Édith intended it to land. I couldn't imagine another life.

They were both on today, their first shift back. He would be in at three p.m., although I imagined him coming in closer to three thirty. I couldn't find a rational reason to show up at work, but I felt calm for the first time in weeks, the wasted nights of their absence firmly behind me.

I masturbated, thinking of him on top of me, suffocating me, and every time I got close to coming he grabbed my face and said, Pay attention. Then my own body felt like a bag filled with sand and I fell back asleep.

When I finally got out of bed most of the shops were closing. The pavement was slick as I ran down Bedford and into the vintage shop. I bought the first one I tried on—the girl sized me up perfectly. It was mint condition, a black leather motorcycle jacket. When I saw myself in it, I thought, I want to be friends with her. I zipped it to my throat when a wind from the river shook rain from the branches. As I walked—I swear it—strangers looked at me differently.

WHO KNEW WINTER
meant vegetables? Chef. No asparagus shipped in from Peru, no avocados from Mexico, no eggplants from Asia. What I assumed would be a season of root vegetables and onions was actually the season of chicories. Chef had his sources, which he guarded. Scott walked through the restaurant in the morning with unmarked brown paper bags, sometimes crates.

He told me that the chicories would really brighten when the first freezes came. It sweetened their natural bitterness. I could barely keep track of them. The curly tangle of frisée didn't seem the same species as the heliotrope balls of radicchio, or the whitened lobes of endive. Their familial trait was a bite—I thought of them as lettuces that bit back. Scott agreed. He said we should be hard on them. Eggs, anchovies, cream, a streak of citrus.

“Don't trust the French with your vegetables,” Scott said. “The Italians know how to let something breathe.” I helped him wash frisée, my hands stiff and frozen. The salad spinner was an appliance nearly my size, and Scott let me sit on top of it while it ricocheted around. I was nearly positive we had made out, but he seemed uninterested in reliving it. My pride was stunned, but I was relieved to have a friendship with a man. I knew he was dating a bartender in Williamsburg, had just broken something off with a hostess, and had his eye on the new Asian pastry girl.

“What's this one?”

“The best one.” He peeled off battered dark-green outer leaves and gave me a leaf from the inside. I used it as a scoop for the tapenade.

“Escarole,” he said.

“And those outside leaves.”

“Soup. Just wait.”

Her distracted, concerned expression inspecting the server kit behind the bar. Those red lips. She seemed surprised to see me when I ran out to family meal. I hugged her.

I wanted to say, I missed you. Instead I said, “Hi.”

“Hello, little one.” Reserved, but a satisfaction somewhere. I felt it. She missed me too. “Did you hold down the fort while I was gone?”

“Oh, Simone, it was awful, there are fruit flies and Zoe didn't listen to me and everyone got so drunk.”

“Brown food, winter food, peasant food,” she said, eyeing the soup. She only took one bowl—I knew he wasn't coming. I was watching her like she knew more than the schedule. “A soup made with the bitter scraps and bits, where the sum is always greater than the parts.”

“Yes, whatever you say,” I said. White beans, escarole, chicken stock skimmed until it was velvet, studded with sausage. I went back for seconds, then thirds.

I BECAME TERRIFIED
of drains. I skipped my eyes over them in the dishwashing station, I wouldn't look down in my own bathroom, I didn't even want to see the pipes. I thought I would see a break in them, an air gap, where everything from the underworld would crawl up into the open air, where they could teem, thrive.

IT WASN'T EASY
to catch Ariel outside of work. She seemed to have an expansive network within the city that went beyond the restaurant, probably because she was an NYU kid who'd never left. I often asked her about college in the city—when I tried to imagine it, I thought, But wait, where do you move when school is over?

When she said I could maybe, one day, come with her to a show, I didn't get my hopes up. When she said, Do you want to come to a show this Thursday? I corralled my excitement.

But I found myself in a closed-up office building on the West Side below Fourteenth Street and from the bleak gray exterior I was ready to be underwhelmed. Ariel and I doused in green and red light, making our way into a basement, where the drums tapped like a switch, echoes and duplicates colliding with the walls. A ragged-looking middle-aged guy with gray hair paced the stage. He took lines of coke off a record that a little pixie held in the air like a serving platter. Whenever I heard electronic music I thought of a man locked up in a room with computers, never of musicians—but I was watching it, with instruments, with a band that traded chemistry between themselves and the crowd. They released a song like a tidal wave.

New York in the seventies it was not. No disco decadence, drag queens, nudity, or androgyny. But even with this basement's lack of glamour, I was aware of being truly relevant—within my time and of my time. Plain-faced kids with outsized glasses, girls in gritty fur vests and boots, deep, unmovable veins of apathy and inattention that made them care more about the next ten minutes than the next ten years. They—I guess it was “we” now—wanted dance music with a knife's edge, ironic lyrics that crossed accidentally into sincere, like they crossed into the sincere, accidentally but every so often. Everyone was stripped down in the awkward peridot light, unself-conscious as they pogo-ed around.

Ariel wore a tiny crop top under her sweater, highlighting her pale ribs. It read Disco for Assholes, and I wondered if I could wear something like that. She was confetti, all over the room. People kept coming up to her, kissing her and screaming. A waifish, anemic blond girl kissed her on the lips and Ariel bit her and hissed. She smiled at me and I yelled, “That's not how you kissed me.”

“ 'Cause you're a baby, baby!” She spun. “Amazing?”

“Amazing!” I yelled back. Self-deprecating, sentimental, sarcastic music and I felt like I was breaking out of a corset. I was going to dance all night.

The crowd diffused my sixth sense for Jake. He was there, next to me, he was the person Ariel jumped on, the person holding her hair off her neck while they spoke. This intimacy was surprising, but not as surprising as just him. Jake in the real world. He was supposed to be tethered to the restaurant where I imagined him when I wasn't at work. Ariel cupped her hands over her mouth and tunneled words into his ear. Jake had his eyes on me and he nodded. I stopped dancing. She took his hand and pulled him away, but not before he gave me a tiny, condescending wave with his fingers. He was back.

And I knew he wouldn't leave, not like the other nights at the restaurant or Park Bar when I turned my back and he was vacuumed out by the night. No.

Unplanned, unmediated, this was a regular Thursday night, with no shift at the restaurant behind or ahead of me, and Jake and I were at the same place. A cool place, where cool people went—the pressure was lifting, I started dancing again—and I screamed for the band because I knew this song, it was
my
song, and I felt the source of the city's adrenalized, fatal energy. It was me.

“You're really sweating,” he said when I came up to the bar. “You're kind of a crazy dancer.”

“I am,” I said, flatly. I meant to say coquettishly,
I am?

“You're into them?” he asked. He gestured toward the band. I nodded and shrugged, a subtle look that meant either (a) they're so overrated or (b) they are like God. The look depended a lot on what Jake thought.

“What are you doing here?” He gave me back that same amorphous shrug and nod. As if to say, I go places. I wanted to ask, What places?

“Did you work today?” Banal. I couldn't think of anything else to say. A song started and I turned toward the stage.

“Let's go.”

“What?”

“Let's
go.
Come on, if you keep dancing you're going to hurt someone. Or yourself.”

“Let's go?” I held my hand to my ear. All I heard was that he had been watching me dance.

“Ari's good, she met up with her people.”

“Her people?” I yelled.

He shook his head at me like I was a fucking idiot, which I was, a deaf bobblehead trying to hear him, trying to see the tattoo on his collarbone. He had his glasses pushed up on top of his head, his hair suspended, a scientist pulled out of the laboratory. He grabbed me by the back of the neck and moved me toward the exit.

It was pattering rain outside, translucent, needle rain, pricking my cheeks, collecting like quartz on my wrists where the light hit them, our two exhalations coming in cold clouds.

“Do you have an umbrella?”

“I don't believe in them,” he said. He walked over to his bike, chained against a tree. There was a plastic bag over the seat.

“But you believe in protecting your bike seat?”

Almost had him. Almost had a laugh.

“I didn't know it was a choice to believe in umbrellas.”

“All beliefs are a choice,” he said. He rolled his bike and I walked next to it.

“That's really deep, Jake.” I loaded it up with sarcasm, but what I thought was, You're romantic.

Raindrops perched on his eyebrows, on the lenses of his glasses, on his ears. I was suddenly very sober and scared.

“Are we going to Park Bar?”

“Is that the only bar you've been to?”

“Um, no.” Yes, more or less.

“I'm taking you to dinner.”

He's taking me to dinner. I watched my feet until my laughter made it impossible, and I covered my mouth.

“I am,” he said, “why are you laughing?”

“You're taking me to dinner?”

“Are you a fucking parrot? Stop repeating everything I say.” But he couldn't finish it. He laughed.

“Jake, I would looooove to go to dinner with you.” Heads down, frizzy rain, rocking with laughter. It wasn't funny but it took some time to stop appearing that way. When it ended we looked away from each other and I stared into ground-floor apartments. I bumped into the bike.

I wondered if we were going to the restaurant. All the servers got vouchers, monthly allowances that you could spend or accrue. I would get one too after I'd been there six months. It was such an incongruity to see your coworkers sit at the bar. They treated themselves like royalty with their fake money, ordering everything on the menu, rubbing elbows with the regulars, sharing their bottles of Burgundy. It scared me to think about—watching from the other side. Watching the bar tickets drag, knowing that Chef was screaming at someone about my entrée, watching Howard, or god forbid Simone, going over my order with the server, while I was drinking or talking with my mouth full.

But what if Jake opened the door for me? What if the hostess's eyes flashed when she saw him, and then settled on me? Her disappointment would be so satisfying. I would let Jake order. I watched the oyster plate drop down in front of us, Nicky bringing out two Negronis. Then that anchovy-and-escarole salad everyone talked about, Chef would probably send out the foie gras torchon with candied kumquats, Simone would want us to drink Sauternes with that, she always dropped off half glasses to her soigné tables. Every time I rose from my seat a backwaiter would come and refold and fan my napkin, and Jake would look marvelously unkempt without his stripes, like a wealthy degenerate and I would be—

“I have a thing about shitty diners,” he said. He stopped in front of the plate-glass windows and gaudy lights of a diner somewhere on Sixth Avenue. He pulled open a door and said, “I love them.”

A half-moon, radiating yellow, revolved above us, but the sign had so much sparkling plumage I couldn't read the name of the place. There were a few others inside, a nondescript trench coat at the bar, an older couple in a booth. Jake took me to the counter, to the corner, and jumped on the stool while I tried to flatten my hair. He pulled off his soaked green army jacket and his shirtsleeves were short enough that I could see tattoos. There was the key on the inside of his biceps, which I saw now was heavily scarred, the bottom of a buffalo that I assumed covered his shoulder. The tail fins of what I assumed was a mermaid descending down the back of his right biceps.

“That one doesn't look like the others,” I said, pointing to the key.

“Yeah, it fell out partially.” He pulled down his shirtsleeve.

“The key to your heart?” I asked playfully, stupidly.

“Sure, princess,” he said. He scanned the menu and I shut up.

To our right sat a couple not much older than me. She had long, ironed platinum hair, with sooty roots. She wore a fake flower crown. The guy was so hairy I couldn't make out his face. Bearded, long hair sticking out from under a woolen cap, wearing red-and-black flannel. They looked familiar to me, probably from my neighborhood.

“I think they were at the show,” I said.

Jake looked visibly pained. “They are everywhere.”

“Says the guy with American Spirit cigarettes and the bike.”

A terse smile. “Did someone learn what a hipster is? Very good, new girl.”

What I knew was that they lived in Williamsburg and the label was pejorative. And I knew that I would never be one. Even in my leather jacket, I couldn't blend in. I cared too much about the wrong things. The waitress behind the counter threw two giant menus at us and walked away.