Sweetbitter (20 page)

I had just started to think about travel. Sometimes I lined my life up against Simone's. I thought that my “escape,” my adventure abroad, the one that would make me contemplative and sensual, was still coming for me. I had never been to Europe. Maybe Jake and I…maybe Jake and I would become a “we.” I had never let myself have that thought in full before—two months ago I couldn't get him to say hello to me—but now, I believed the words as I thought them, that we were moving somewhere together, and it was toward a real “we.” A “we” that held hands in the street and became regulars at Les Enfants Terribles around the corner from his apartment. It seemed a little odd that the two of us had never been out to dinner at a normal time, like anytime before midnight, but now that we'd had breakfast, the rest was a matter of time. A “we” that took weekends away, a “we” that went to Europe together, without Simone, continuous days to ourselves, we could fly into Paris, rent a car, travel the Loire River until we hit the Atlantic. I saw the way he looked at me sometimes. Other times it was like I wasn't there, but sometimes…

“There are times in life when it's good to live without knowing,” Howard said, interrupting what must have been a look of unruffled idiocy. “I mean that we can allow ourselves to live and not really know what it is that we're doing. That's all right. It's an accumulation stage.”

My eyes welled up. He took my empty glass from me and slid it into the dish rack.

“I'd like you to be a server here. The Owner would like it as well. You will bypass your coworkers in line for the next position, so you won't be the most popular for a moment. But is that something you would be interested in?”

I nodded.

“Wonderful. I will look for an opening in the coming months and you will begin training. Thank you for your strong work.”

I looked at my hands, which weren't terribly clean, thinking they had autonomously produced this strong work. I remembered how scared I had been on that first L train ride to Union Square, and I'd said to my reflection words that had been a mantra all my life: I. Don't. Care. I don't know when exactly it happened, but Howard had changed that when he gave me this life: I cared.

I BECAME OBSESSED
by a pair of tennis shoes, the laces spun in the spindles of a tree outside my building. One day while I was watching the lights come on in the construction sites by the river, I looked down and there they were. I had not noticed them until every last leaf fell away, the tree shedding like a balding head, and there emerged these rotten, brown sneakers. It felt like they had been stuck there a long time. They looked ancient. My thoughts about it didn't go very far, but I was concerned. What happened to the person who lost their shoes? How did they get home? Who on earth was going to get them down? The thought that they would stay there for decades, rotting, gave me an apocalyptic feeling in my stomach.

Y
OU WILL SEE
it coming. Not
you
actually because you don't see for yourself yet, everyone is busy seeing for you, days filled with unsolicited advice you don't take and trite warnings you can't hear and the whitewashing of all your excitement. Yes, they definitely saw it coming, exactly the way it came.

When you're older you will know that at some unconscious level not only did you see it coming, but you created it, in your own blind, stumbling way. You will console yourself with the fact that it wouldn't have mattered, seeing it or not seeing it. You were a sponge for incident. Maybe everyone is when they're young. They don't remember, nobody remembers what it feels like to be so recklessly absorbent.

When you can't see in front of you life is nothing but surprises. Looking back, there were truly so few of them.

WE TOOK WALKS
after work because the winter was relinquishing its fascist hold on the weather. Jake's sense of ownership of his surroundings incrementally increased as we left Union Square. By the time we passed Houston to the south, or A to the east, he was fully in possession.

He took me to his bars. He grew patient, sentimental, nervous. He hated places where the bartenders were young. All the bartenders he knew had names like Buddy, Buster, or Charlie—anything you would want to name a loyal dog. He hated bars where they bought tables or light fixtures to look antique. He liked bars that were actually old, the gloss completely worn off, peeling paint, chipped tile. No DJs. No cocktail lists. He could visit those other bars, but never inhabit them.

At Milady's Jake called the bartender Grace, and stools always appeared for us. At Milano's on Houston, a pit bull asleep under the table, pomaded pro skaters and their model girlfriends lined up by the door. At Mars Bar, the walls were saturated with urine and I was the only girl and no one paid any attention to me. A delicate ecosystem of old men, death metal, drinking, and the most contented kind of anarchy.

At Sophie's on East Fifth his friend Brett ran things on Tuesday, a friend of Jake's from “way back,” which I took to mean they were either petty criminals together or in rehab together because neither one of them would talk about it. Brett drank, tamely and grumpily, keeping one eye on
The Simpsons
episode that played on the TV above the bar. Jake kept giving me quarters to go to the jukebox and every time I chose a song he put his hands on his head and moaned.

“Is it genetic? Can women just not understand music? This is shit, absolute shit, you like this?”

“This is a good song. You could walk down the aisle to this song.” The aisle and Jake. He covered his ears.

“You're fucking insane, you're making me want to die.”

As soon as the song was over, he slid another quarter up next to my beer and I was determined—not for him to like a song I picked, that was impossible, but for him to say nothing.

“You know Ian wrote this for Joy Division before he died?”

“Who's Ian? This is a band called New Order.”

“Brett! Brett, are you hearing this? Who's Ian, she says! This is a band called New Order!”

Brett took his eyes off the screen for a second and sized me up. He was disappointed.

“Who's Joy Division?”

“Fuck!” said Jake. The whole bar up in arms, grown men slamming the wood, someone pointing a pool stick at me. When the song ended another quarter appeared next to my beer.

“You're torturing me?”

He leaned toward me and a lock of hair fell. I pushed it back. That's who I was now: the girl who got to fix Jake's hair. He was getting tipsy, loose, his teeth bared, I could feel him coming for me.

“I like it,” he said.

“You like humiliating me?”

“No.” He put his hand on my cheek and our foreheads touched. “I like how hard you concentrate when you're over there. You chew on your lips like it's life or death. I like the way you bop on your bar stool even when everyone is screaming at you.”

“You like my bopping?” I bounced and his hands found me and pulled me off the stool.

“You ready?” he asked and I nodded, biting his neck. I don't think anything gave me as much satisfaction as when he asked if I was ready to go home. To think that we left places together, that we got to leave all the people to their last calls.

“Brett, we'll settle,” he said, one hand pulling cash out of his wallet for a tip, his other hand crawling into my bra, pinching my nipple. Brett shrugged. It was like that all the time—no tab, no consequences.

“ARTISTS USED TO LIVE HERE” it said in graffiti on the plywood covering the chain-link fence around a giant hole in the ground. Demolition crews were inside, breaking up concrete, redistributing piles of dirt and wreckage. Also on the plywood were a series of building permits, and an ad for condos with a computer-illustrated woman in heels and a business suit relaxing, drinking a glass of wine, surveying the Manhattan skyline from her white box in the sky. She was a brunette with vaguely multicultural eyes. Maybe artists used to live here, but this woman was definitely not an artist. Though she was facing west, the ad said, The Dawn of Luxury in Williamsburg.

The wind frothed the river onto the rocks. The grass was brown and bare, the flower beds twiggy. I sat on a bench to look up at the bridge, and felt an acute anxiety. Who was going to buy the condos? Who was going to pay off our student loans? Would our sense of style protect us? And if the poor people used to live here and the rich people were going to live here, where would
we
go?

Two homeless men were asleep on picnic tables. I had become very good at not looking at unpleasant things. I could skip my eyes over any pool of vomit on the train platform, any broken junkie lurching toward the concrete, any woman who screamed at her crying baby, even the couples fighting at their tables at the restaurant, women crying into fettuccine, twirling their wedding bands—what being a fifty-one percenter had taught me was not to let any shock shake my composure. One of the homeless men, in the layers of colorless clothes, was faced away from me on his side. His pants were half down, a piece of shit-covered toilet paper sticking out of his ass crack like a surrender flag. One of his tennis shoes had fallen off and lay to the side of the table.

I looked at him until I couldn't anymore. The sun seemed pensive about setting, and instead of the usual transcendental buzz I got from a change of light, I noticed that the rats were shifting within the rocks. I'm beginning to worry, I said to the river. I checked my phone and walked back home.

WHEN THE INVITATION CAME
it was vague and I was cautious. I waited for her to follow up. But she meant it—she would love to host me for dinner, me and Jake, together. The three of us. I was to arrive at eight. When I looked through my books to see if there was something I could bring to surprise her, I pulled out the copy of Emily Dickinson she had lent me when I first went to her apartment. I had read it many times but holding it in my hand that whole afternoon tumbled back to me with a rush of embarrassment. Not at the memory, but at the ease with which whole afternoons were forgotten. The way thousands of wounds and triumphs were whittled down to only the sharpest moments, and even those failed to remain present. I had already forgotten about the men by the river. Already forgotten what the autumn felt like. My sadness that day when I left her—it only existed in that little book, and even there, it was just a relic.

So, I said to myself in the mirror as I circled my eyes in black liner, not only was I returning to Simone's apartment, but I was going back for dinner, and not only was I going, but I was going with Jake. I wore a cable-knit black sweater, tall black boots, black pants glued to my legs. I smudged up my eyeliner and wrapped my oversized gray scarf around my neck. Surprises in every corner.

“AND THEN SHE DANCES
herself to death. It's the only way to pacify the gods. It's extraordinary, I make a point to go whenever they put it on,” Simone said, pulling a roasted chicken out of the oven. I held a stack of books in my hands that I had cleared off the round table. There was nowhere to put them but the floor.

“Really? That sounds cool.”

“This one and her ‘cool,' ” Jake said, shaking his head. He was flipping through
Meditations in an Emergency,
watching us with a smile on his lips that made me feel gilded.

“I must have heard Stravinsky before,” I lied.

“Of course.”

“But I can't quite recall it.”

“Well,” she said, taking off the oven mitts. “I would recommend the ballet—the music is moving, fine, but Nijinsky's choreography, the brutality of it, that was what really antagonized the crowd in 1913. That was the scandal. Will you pull the Chenin out of the fridge?”

She was the artistic director of her apartment. When I came in Jake was already there, there were candles burning, Bessie Smith on the record player, and the fortuitous smell of rendered chicken fat and potatoes. She opened the front windows because the oven made the place steamy, and the mild noises crept in, a swaying spot marking our inclusion and exclusion. She poured me a glass of fino sherry as soon as I walked in the door, and had me sit at the table while she fussed around in the kitchen.

Olives and Marcona almonds sat in patterned dishes (“Tangier,” she said when I asked her where they came from) in the center of the table, but she hadn't cleared anything away. Books, halves of grapefruits, swiped-out casings of avocados, pens, receipts, kaleidoscopes of candle wax stuck to the table. And there he was, stalking around like a delinquent in a museum, picking up objects, books, papers, and moving them. When I came in, I got an up-and-down scan that told me he noticed my ten extra minutes of makeup. He was at ease in her home in a way I had never seen him in his own.

“The story has pagan origins…but what's always interested me is that the myth of its opening night mirrors the arc of the ballet, which is a descent into the brutal and the primitive. Her fervor creates the same fervor in the viewer. I mean, honestly, can you imagine a riot at the ballet?”

“Who'd you go with?”

“Hmm?” she sang out, distracted. An apron high on her hips, just like she was at work, but her hair was down, elegant, a white T-shirt tucked into washed-out baggy jeans—and I thought, How brave she is, cooking in a white T-shirt. Her face was bare except for her lipstick, which I wanted to think she had applied just for me.

“Who did you go to the ballet with?”

“A friend,” she said.

“Howard,” Jake said at the same time.

“I'd rather not talk about our coworkers,” she said to Jake.

“Not a coworker,
boss,
Simone.”

“All right, Jake, will you turn the record over or are you just expecting us to wait on you hand and foot? Your fantasy, right?”

“You and Howard went to the ballet?” I pulled out pewter-handled knives. “These are beautiful.”

“Well, I haven't been able to make Jake go to the ballet since the millennium, so Howard is kind enough.”

“Was it a date?”

“What a silly question. Of course not.”

“They're good friends,” said Jake, flipping an hourglass.

“We all have our good friends, don't we, Jake?” she said swiftly. “Now, Tess, I need you to dress the salad, Jake can finish the table.”

He instead picked up a sterling silver jewelry box and opened it. He picked up a white pill. “The seven-fifties?”

“Yes, dearest,” she said without looking. He popped it in his mouth and took a gulp of his wine. He and Simone had moved onto a Chenin Blanc from the Loire. I couldn't remember if I had ever seen him take a line or a pill, but it seemed so natural, so absolutely charming, that I wanted one too without knowing what it was.

“Are those treats?”

“It's for my back,” he said. He picked up a small bust from her bookshelves. He put the face—blandly Grecian and aristocratic—on the counter next to me. “Simone thinks she's going to die reading Aristotle, she had a dream about it once.”

“One of Jake's better gifts. You're welcome to a ‘treat' as you call it,” she said, shifting a tray of root vegetables in the oven.

“It's Simone's perverted candy dish.”

“Be sweet,” she warned.

“I can't,” I said, taking a sip of my sherry responsibly. “I won't be able to drink if I do.” I used two forks to turn the leaves in the salad bowl, but they kept falling out onto the counter.

“Don't be timid,” she demanded. “Use your hands.” She reached into the bowl and started to move the lettuce leaves into the vinaigrette, soothingly.

“Escarole?” I asked.

“Your favorite,” she said and I pulled a leaf out of the bowl and popped it in my mouth.

“True, but I like everything,” I said.

“That means you like nothing.” Jake dropped the silverware into a pile in the center of the table.

“Anchovies?” I asked, tasting the vinaigrette.

“Perhaps you didn't develop a palate, little one,” Simone said. “Perhaps you recovered it.”

We moved the plates onto the table and Simone pulled the fourth chair, covered in scarves, books, junk mail, and old
New Yorker
s to the side. Jake put on a new record and propped the cover up—Charlie Parker's sax ran into the room. Someone had told me that when he soloed he referred to the melody only by omission—he implied it. It sounded exactly like New York was supposed to sound.

“Tess.” Simone snapped with her fingers toward a bottle of wine on the counter. I had already been eyeing it, the Puffeney Arbois, an eccentric wine on our list, and one of her favorite recommendations for her more intellectually inclined guests. She said it was a wine that stuck in the mind.