Sweetbitter (22 page)

“I'm getting you new stripes. What's your combo?”

She wasn't catatonic—she tracked my words, they just didn't puncture. The adrenalized immediacy of service, the force that kept the restaurant running, had completely drained from her person.

“06-08-76.”

I repeated the numbers as I ran up the stairs. Only when I started to input them did I think it might be a birthday. It was the 06—I remembered that Jake was a Gemini. I did not remember how I'd come to possess that knowledge. It seemed to have passed to me in the leaky drunken hours when information entered but didn't adhere. Maybe this was Jake's birthday—the 76 was a more accurate indicator than my half remembering that he was a Gemini.

I thought of him waking up last June 8, thirty years old, and not knowing that I was weeks away. Neither of them had known I was coming. This June would be a culmination. I'd watch the English peas and sugar snaps come in, maybe I would get a bike and he could teach me how to ride in the city. And his birthday. Simone and I would plan a dinner, and he would be uncomfortable but happy. When I ran back into the cellar Simone was sitting stormily, glaring at the label on a bottle of Saint-Émilion.

“Quick, quick.” I barreled past any formality left between us and unbuttoned her shirt. She let me. I forced it off her shoulders. As I did her arms went up and back and I saw a mark under her bra strap. “What's that?”

She lifted the band of her bra, dreamily, still unhurried.

It was a tattoo of a key. Matching. Identical. It was in better condition than Jake's and looked branded into her pale skin. Of course, I thought as I balled up her dirty stripes.

“I didn't take you for the type.” It looked ridiculous on her, like an accident. But it wasn't. I wished it had been anything else. A butterfly, a star, a quote from Keats, a flippant tattoo. Now her body was an echo of Jake's. No—his was an echo of hers. It was the first tattoo I had seen on him, back when he pulled me into the walk-in and opened oysters for me, before that body became familiar, before I could find all his tattoos in the dark. Would Jake and I ever have private moments, just the two of us?

If I left her here in the basement the restaurant would be thrown into a tailspin. One bad night wouldn't ruin her, but the staff would talk. It would be a fissure in her power. I ripped the dry cleaner's plastic off the new shirt, hoping to feel capable again, craving order.

“It's a funny story actually.”

“I can't wait to hear it. Another time.” I threw the light-blue stripes at her. “You're fucked up there, Simone. One more bite of bread, please.”

The fresh shirt hadn't revived her like I thought it would. She smelled stale, or maybe it was the wine room.

“So 11 is mid-entrée, we're running way behind for apps on 14 but drinks are down, I sold a Quintarelli, only the Valpolicella Classico, but not the worst sale, I know it's Italy, but they insisted, maybe if you talk to Chef he can rush the food, I would go straight to 15, Heather was dropping the check for me.” I pulled her hand. She was breathing deeply. They were rough, lachrymal breaths that I knew all too well. “Hey. When are the asparagus coming?”

Her eyes bounced to me.

“With this weather?” she asked, consulting the ceiling. “Three weeks. Minimum.”

“Oh yeah? You think it's going to snow again?”

I kept asking her questions she knew the answers to. Once she got on the floor she went straight to 15, smiled compulsorily, and snatched up the check.

“We thought you went home,” Heather said. “In the future can I get some warning before you cleanse your spirit, darlin'? I'll just plan on taking the whole dining room.” Simone didn't acknowledge, apologize to, or thank her. I watched over Simone all night, but she was fine. Her tattoo faded from my mind as service beat on, relegated to the neglected file of weird, annoying shit about Jake and Simone. She got her normal tip average, an unfluctuating twenty-seven percent. The mechanics never failed.

“I THOUGHT YOU
guys were such good friends,” Ariel said later that night. She was still halfheartedly punishing me for my absence from Park Bar. I told myself to be patient with her and Will, but I was willing to push it with her tonight.

“Wasn't Simone like the maid of honor?” Will asked. Vivian was pouring out tequila shots. “You wanna shot?”

“Ugh,” I said. Jake was going to pick me up after he walked Simone home. I had no desire to get drunk, but it was the best shortcut to the reliable Park Bar intimacy. And, looking at them, I felt guilty. I was going to be a server. Howard had no idea how bad it was going to be for me. I couldn't even imagine asking Ariel to get me something “on the fly” in that harried, bossy way the servers did. She was going to beat the shit out of me. “Maybe in a minute?”

“All My Friends” came on, and Ariel made Terry turn it up. I thought she would grab me like she used to and pull me onto the floor to dance. It was our song when we were heading out into the night—the manic, dizzy piano introduction stretching us. The song was all promise—that this night would be different, or different enough.

“You swallow you cunt,” said Sasha putting a shot in front of me.

“But, hey guys, it's our song,” I said. No one acknowledged me. Simone's meltdown made me miss the simplicity of us getting fucked up together with no ulterior agenda. But I had an agenda now—a walk with Jake, a potential breakfast—things to stay sober for. I considered the shot. If I got too drunk I figured I could throw up before Jake got there. I took it and groaned.

“It's like Samantha represents the life she almost had with Mr. Bensen.”

“Now what if
he
came in,” Will said, “what if he and his
wife
came in? That would make tonight look like a nonevent.”

“Abandoning her section midrush—not exactly a nonevent.”

“No, wait, guys,” I said. “Slow down.”

“Oh, Bensen, the Silver Fox, I woulda done him, double shot.”

“And it was like, out in the open, and Simone was putting in her notice without putting it in, like a six-month notice, but still.”

“And what?”

Will shrugged. “How does that phrase go? Married men always leave their wives?”

“Oh,” I said. “That's not how the phrase goes.”

“Poof be gone,” Sasha said, and snapped his fingers. “You fuck the servant, you don't take her to Connecticut, 'kay?”

“I think Samantha lives in Connecticut.”

“Bravo, doll,” Will said. “So a few years later, along comes Samantha—she and Simone fall hard for each other, like schoolgirl style.”

“But Eugene and Samantha fall even harder. She wasn't even here long enough to get a voucher. She and Simone had some bizarre falling-out after the wedding. It just broke Simone for a minute.”

“Wait, Ari,” I said. “Simone doesn't get broken. Especially by shit like that. She's not like, looking to get married or get validated by a man. She's in her own circle.”

Ariel slammed her hand on the bar. “Are you fucking blind?”

“Baby Monster, you need a bathroom break.”

“It's like you fucking own me,” I said to Sasha, standing up automatically and getting in line with him. I waved to Scott who sat in his corner.

“Back at it?” he said. Mocking and cruel, as if he knew that I didn't want to be here again, in a cycle of nothing nights.

“Like riding a bike,” I said and turned to Sasha. “What about Jake?”

“What about my Baby Jakey? He picking up all the Simone pieces like always.”

“What about him and Samantha?”

“Why you ask that?” He grabbed my chin and looked in my eyes.

“She mentioned him,” I said. But that wasn't it. It was that Simone was so upset by Samantha I felt like there had to be more to the story. A black aura of heartbreak shrouded Simone now. Her poems that no one read, her apartment that she could never leave, her expertise so niche it was skeletal. She hadn't made a choice. Someone else had.

We locked ourselves in the bathroom and he took out his bag. “Sugar Face, you better off just assuming that Jake fucked everyone. Where's your key?”

“Sasha, when are you going to be happy for me? Also I don't have a key on me.”

“Oh look who all grown up!” He pulled out his wine key and took a bump and handed it to me. “You know, you the worst kind, you want to marry the artist and live like squalor, but you wait, in five years you be like, Baby Jake why we eat ramen noodles every night? You a hustler, don't blind me, I see.”

The cocaine was an illumination, the bathroom florid, filtered. When I looked at our reflection in the mirror we looked like a photograph. I could see that we were just playing. The degree to which I took myself seriously was laughable. “God, Sasha, it's so dark here. You guys are so fucking dark. Do you not see that?”

“Oh, Baby Monster, please show me the light!”

“I'm just saying it doesn't have to be like this.” I checked his nose and teeth for him and lifted my head for him to do the same. He flicked something off my nose and I grabbed his face and kissed him on both cheeks. “This isn't Mother Russia. It's America. We believe in happy endings.”

“Get me the phone, lemme me call my mama, Jesus fucking Christ, 'cause now I really fucking heard everything.”

T
HE HUNGRY GAP
appeared, spreading like a rattled plane in front of us. We extended our use of the word
local,
bringing up soft-shell crab and asparagus from Virginia, blood oranges from Florida. The guests, the cooks, all of us anxious, still shell-shocked from winter and bucking against the restraints. It wasn't spring fever, not yet. We didn't fully have faith that it was coming but we had no choice but to move forward into the protracted promises.

The sun came out for a moment. I stopped and stared at the ends of the branches, willing them to bud. I had just left the Guggenheim and clouds blindfolded the sun again as I walked toward the train. I felt like a stranger again, like I could disappear into any intractable diner or bodega or train station.

I got out at Grand Central, hallowed ground of anonymity and flux, and followed signs for the Oyster Bar. It was a strange impulse—he had been saying that he was going to take me, it was one of his favorites. I don't know whether it was a Kandinsky or a Klee that gave me a curious detachment from my life, but I decided not to wait for him. Simone assured me it was an old wives' tale, but someone said that you were only supposed to eat oysters during months with an
r
in it. So maybe it was the impending warmth, the loss of the chilly
r
months, but I knew I should take myself to lunch.

I got the last seat at the low counter, under a vaulted dome of tiles. I was prepared with my book but I stared at the ceiling instead, inhaled the velvet scent of shellfish and butter, watched the servers and busboys, then looked at the guests, slowly realizing that I was singular in the room. I had nothing in common with the suits and their lunch breaks and BlackBerrys. I belonged, but not because of my age or my clothes. I belonged because I spoke the restaurant language.

“Excuse me,” said the man sitting next to me. He was midway through a bowl of clam chowder. He was broad shouldered and fine featured, and I did a double take because he had blue eyes. I raised my eyebrows at him.

“I know you from somewhere.”

“Oh yeah?” I put my eyes back on my menu.

“Pardon me, I thought you were someone I know, a French friend.”

“You have a friend who looks like me?”

The waitress came up and stood in front of me silently, pen and notepad ready.

“Can I get six Beausoleil, six Fanny Bay to start, and I'll move on from there. Um”—I flipped the menu around, scanning, not wanting to waste her time—“you have a Chablis by the glass, yes? You can pick.”

She nodded and walked away, and I fished into my purse for my book.

“You're an actress then. I know I've seen you somewhere.”

“I'm a waitress. You've seen me everywhere.”

“You're going to eat all those oysters alone?” he asked, smiling.

“And then some.” I sighed. It was a hazard of my job—or maybe it was my nature, maybe that's what they'd hired me for—that I was too hospitable to strangers. On street corners, in bars, in line, I felt a duty to entertain, as if I were clocked in. I didn't know how to be uninviting. I put my book up.

“What are you reading?”

“Okay.” I folded my hands. “I know it's quiet at your job. You sit in silence at your computer and when you do talk nobody listens to you, so I understand the need to impose yourself on whatever docile-looking female you find yourself in front of, but let me tell you about my job. It's loud. I lose my voice I talk so much. And people look at me, and they stop me, pretending they know me, they say, Let me guess, are you French, and I shake my head and smile and they say, Are you Swedish? And I shake my head and smile and so on. But this is my day off. I just want quiet. If you want someone to put up with you, may I suggest your waitress because that is
li-ter-ally
what you're paying her to do right now.”

“So you're sassy, huh?”

“Sassy?” He was still looking at me, jocular, so fucking arrogant. “I have a boyfriend,” I said finally.

The waitress came and poured me a heaping glass of Chablis. It was flabby but acceptable and I thanked her. When I looked back at him he was pulling out his wallet and signaling for his check. Did I believe that? That I was available to everyone unless I invoked Jake? By the time I finished my first dozen and ordered another, I was blissed out. I did wonder though, if people would ever start listening to me.

“YEAH,
it's your karaoke song, but I thought it was ironic.”

“Ari, everything can't be ironic all the time or it would lose its luster.”

“But you can't be
sincerely
into Britney Spears. Or I guess you can, but you shouldn't admit it.”

I was curved on my bar stool, my posture long forgotten, my feet thrumming with the Saturday night-ness of it, the three discordant turns of it, and now a big stunning glass of Pouilly-Fuissé was sliding like glycerin down my throat. Ariel was closing up the coffee station, Will had just joined me, and the rest of the staff was trickling in, beaten up. Ariel was annoyed because she had fucked up too many times and Jake yelled at her.

“Can't my sincerity count for something? Isn't it a by-product of honesty? Of course, I'm not like, holding her up as a paragon of virtue.”

“It's criminal that they let her reproduce.”

“But, late at night, a little drunk, a little sentimental, I watch her old music videos online. The ones from the millennium. And I cry.”

“Did you see the photos of her when she shaved her head?” Will asked. He had his shot of Fernet and a beer, it should have been normal, but he looked so much older than the last time we all sat at the bar for shift drink. I hadn't looked at him, really looked at him, in a long time. “She looked like a fucking demon.”

“You cry to ‘Hit Me Baby One More Time'?”

“Okay,” I said, pulling up the Pouilly-Fuissé bottle from behind the bar and refilling my glass. “I can't explain it when everyone's attacking me. But she's around my age. And when I was growing up I thought, That's what a teenager is. I wanted my body to do whatever her body did. She's so common right? Attainable. She's not that beautiful, not that talented, but you can't stop watching her. That's why it's always the videos, she's not something to listen to, she's something to look at. She's so powerful, knowing you can't look away, and then this glint in her eye that she's just playing. That she's still a child and she's played this fantastic joke on you. And then, it's like, those eyes went vacant. She wasn't in on the joke anymore. Does that make sense? She
was
the joke—she didn't know.”

“Oh my god, this is a tragedy for you? That this bajillionaire, white-trash, drug-addict fuckup with zero moral compass has vacant eyes? She had choices, she's a grown woman now.”

“But Ari,” I said, straightening my spine, feeling angry and energized by the wine. “I don't feel like she let me down, I feel like I let her down. Like I was a part of this mob that cannibalized her. And you're right Will, she looks like a monster in those photos. I'm totally repulsed. And I feel nothing but guilt.”

“I can't,” Ariel said. She put her hands up. “This is what intelligent women think suffering is? I don't even know you.”

“So fucking dramatic, Ari, I'm not crafting a rational argument for ‘Why Britney Matters.' I'm telling you how I feel. Are you pissed at me about something?”

“ ‘Why Britney Matters' would make a great T-shirt.”

“I'm just questioning your moral fiber—”

“My moral fiber? Because I grew up practicing Britney choreography in the mirror?”

“You know what she represents—”

“Stop.” I finished my glass and when I put it on the bar the stem snapped in my hand. I felt a splinter of glass in my index finger and brushed it away. Everyone down the bar looked at me.

“Come on, Fluff,” said Nick, and glanced at Jake, who kept his eyes on the sink he was cleaning.

“Sorry,” I said. I held the stemless bowl in my hand and lowered my voice. “She doesn't
represent
anything. That. Is. My. Point. She was a little girl. A human. It could have been any one of us.”

“I call bullshit, Skip,” Ariel said, “but that's a nice fairy tale.” She grabbed an empty crate to stock and walked away. Will looked at me.

“I'm tired of her shit,” I said. I collected the pieces of broken glass into the bowl.

“I still like Dave Matthews Band,” he said. “That's kind of embarrassing.”

“No,” I said. “Nothing you do is ever embarrassing. You're not a girl.”

I put on my coat, picked up my purse, the broken glass, and pushed off from the bar.

HIS ROOM IN
a converted loft was painted a pithy blue and felt like a cave on a cold northern ocean. He had one roommate, a street artist called Swan whom I only ever saw in his robe as we passed each other on the way to the bathroom. He looked through me. In contrast to the rugs that covered the living space, the floors were bare in Jake's room. Tarnished linoleum and a mattress in the center.

He had a wall of windows that got only patches of daylight and looked out onto a fire escape and a boarded-up building.

Touches of an aesthete: the mattress was a Tempur-Pedic and covered in spotless linen sheets. He had collected wooden wine crates and built them into bookshelves. It was an entire wall of books. But unlike Simone, who had everything—sections of poetry, religion, psychology, gastronomy, rare editions of all the capital
L
literature, and a column of art books that cost more than a year of my rent—Jake had mystery novels and philosophy. That's it. Pulpy, sooty paperbacks and leather-bound collections of Nietzsche, Heidegger, Aquinas. Mutilated copies of Kierkegaard in their own stack. Some unreturned NYU library books: William James, Aristotle's
Metaphysics, The Odyssey.
A black book on anatomy that was large enough to be used as a side table. He'd planted an elegant lamp on the floor next to the bed. It was three feet high and had two hinges in the arm, the bulb set in a dome of cracked, wavy glass.

The walls were blank except for a small area above the shelves where he had stuck pins into black-and-white Polaroids. I saw the camera collection when I came in, hung on hooks in the main room with guitars and two bicycles. It took a while before I asked about the photos. There was a mountain range (“The Atlas,” he said, “that's in Morocco”). Some grass on a beach (“Wellfleet,” he said, “it's called beach heather”). A pile of broken bicycles stacked in a pyramid on a cobblestone street (“Berlin”) and her: her hand, actually, blocking the camera, a huge starfish of a hand. The simplistic camera had flattened the image, capturing every line of her hand like it was an engraving. In the underexposed background, I could see—only if I unpinned it and put it under the light while he wasn't in the room—an exposed, stunning smile.

He was asleep and I was crouched on the floor next to the bed, touching the spines of the books. I reached and unpinned the photo. When I asked him about his tattoos, he rolled his eyes. When I asked him about those photos, he barely tolerated me. But the longer I knew him, the more I saw a system of symbols that must have had some sentimental value. If I asked him to tell me about Morocco or Berlin or Wellfleet, he would digress into the Berbers, or this German artist he knew who grew sculptures out of salt, and stories of gruesome deaths in whaling lore. It reminded me, the way he skirted around those photos, of something Simone had told me during one of our lessons: try not to have ideas about things, always aim for the thing itself. I still did not understand these four photographs, the
why
of them.

“How's the investigation going?” he said, startling me. His chest was bare, sheets covering his torso, and he lit a cigarette. I could barely make out his eyes. He didn't sound mad.

“When was this?” I asked. I took the photo of Simone into bed and lay down on my side, leaving inches between us. Still I was too shy to reach out to him first.

“I don't remember,” he said. He reached out and pulled a piece of my hair, twisting it around his finger and I thought that we were sinking into the blue, the mercurial hours between night and morning.

“Why do you have it up?”

“It's a good photograph,” he said. Ash fell into the bed and he brushed it away.

“Is it because you love her?”

“Of course I love her. But that's not a reason to hang a photograph.”

“I think it's the reason to do a lot of things,” I said carefully.

“You know,” he said, putting his cigarette out and pulling me onto his chest. “It's not like that with me and her. You know that.”

He was distracting me, he knew his neck distracted me, his hands rolling over my hips distracted me.

“Was it ever like that?” I tried to see his eyes. “Simone's not ugly.”

“Yeah, she's not bad.”

“Jake…”

“No.”

“How come?”

He grunted. His knees cracked as he got up. He squinted at his bookshelves, and pulled out a copy of
De Anima.
An old color photograph fell out. He picked it up and threw it on my lap and jumped over me back into bed. A woman with feathered, golden hair was smiling, holding a baby that looked sternly at the camera.

“That was my mom.”

“Oh,” I said. “They look alike.”

“Tell me about it. Everyone has their shit. I have Simone. I know it's hard for people outside. But it's the way it is. She pretty much moved in when my mom died. She was only fifteen, but she raised me, in her fucking haphazard way.”

I didn't react. I let it sink in and fit into the puzzle I had been putting together of Jake. Motherless. An entire city of orphans. I looked back at the photo of Simone. What would I have given for someone to come and take care of me? I touched the baby's face in the photo. Those impenetrable, penetrating eyes. “You were unamused even then.”