Sweetbitter (21 page)

“Jura!” I said. “I've been dying to try this!”

“He's the pope of Arbois. That's the Trousseau.”

“Moni, where did you find that?” Jake asked, skeptically, grabbing the bottle from me.
Moni?

“I have a friend at Rosenthal,” she said.

“So many fucking friends!” he said and then to me, “This is delicious.”

“Have you been there, Simone? The Jura?”

“Of course.”

“I want to go,” I said, inspecting the bottles clustered on the counter. It was a modest collection but I assumed she had more in the fridge.

“Where the fuck do you think you're going?” Jake said into my neck. He rested his chin on my shoulder and I never wanted to move.

“I don't know. The Jura? I spend all this time studying these maps and I want to see the land.”

“You're done with New York already? On to Europe?”

“I'm a quick study,” I said. I moved to lean against him but he was gone.

“You absolutely should go,” Simone said.

“I couldn't go alone,” I said and looked at them. Jake was kneeling, looking into the oven, pressing buttons, and she hovered above him.

“Moni, the light's broken in here again.”

“Darling, what do you want me to say? I am not blessed with your amateur electrician skills.”

“I'll do it tomorrow,” he said.

“Where's your wine key?” I asked, waving the bottle.

“Oh no, you're not performing tonight. Jake will open it for us.”

I sat and Jake laid a dish towel over his arm and came up to me.

“Mademoiselle, the Puffeney Arbois, 2003.” He opened it roughly, in a manner I could never get away with, a bartender opening cheap bottles on the fly. He and Nicky could get a bottle open in seconds.

He poured a taste and I swirled it. The wine was the color of cloudy rubies, washing up the sides of the glass, audaciously fragrant and crystalline.

“So pretty when it's unfiltered….It's perfect,” I said. Disintegrating outlines all around, the glass, my skin, the walls, a blur of satisfaction that was totally foreign to me. I felt like I had arrived in a room that had been waiting for me my whole life, and a voice in my head whispered, This is what family feels like.

“A toast,” said Simone, holding her glass aloft. “The way of life is wonderful; it is by abandonment.”

“Emerson,” Jake whispered to me, but he was playing too, his glass held up in the air.

“This is to our little Tess. Thank you for joining us.”

I laughed at her use of restaurant jargon, the phrase we used as a welcome and a farewell. I always wondered who this ceaselessly festive “us” was, why exactly we were thanking the guests, as if they had provided a service, a contribution. I wondered how it felt for them to be sent back into the embittered, poorly lit outside world.

“Thank you for having me.”

We were quiet, passing the plates around. Part of me had expected that they would entertain me. But coming into her home this time, I wasn't spit back out onto the street. I was becoming necessary.

“I had a strange feeling today,” I said, tentatively, wondering how people started conversations. Would it always feel like I was intruding with nonsense?

“Did you? Regarding what?”

“I was walking around Williamsburg…and it felt…ominous.”

“Was it the condos?” Simone said, concerned.

“I can't even go over there anymore,” he said, mouth full, holding a chicken leg in his hand. He was going to finish his plate before I had my first bite.

“It's happening so much faster than I anticipated,” said Simone. “When they changed the zoning laws in 2005, we knew that the end was coming. Friends lost their lofts left and right, but the speed with which it all disappeared…”

“2005. So I just missed it,” I said. “I thought so.”

“We always just miss New York. I watched it with this neighborhood. When I moved here everyone was mourning the SoHo of the seventies, Tribeca of the eighties, and already ringing the death knell for the East Village. Now people romanticize the Alphabet City of Jonathan Larson. We all walk in a cloud of mourning for the New York that just disappeared.”

“Okay, okay, but I love
Rent,
is that terrible?”

“I'm going to ignore that comment forever,” Jake said.

“Treacherous,” said Simone. “That kind of singsong nostalgia.”

“But I guess I was wondering if it will ever stop.”

“Stop?”

“I don't know, the city?” I said. “Changing? Like will it ever rest?”

“No,” they said in unison and then laughed.

“So then we just dance ourselves to death?” I asked.

“Ha!” Simone smiled at me and Jake smiled looking at his plate.

“This is so good, Simone.”

“It's always the simple things, well executed, that are memorable. I don't concern myself with complexity when I have guests.”

“What was it like when you moved here?” I asked her.

“What was it like? The city?”

“No, I don't know.” I turned to Jake. “What was she like at twenty-two?”

She groaned. “He doesn't remember, he was a child.”

“She was a heartbreaker,” Jake said, “and I was not a child anymore. You had your long hair back then.” He was watching her and I wondered if I was going to be the kind of woman about whom they said, She was a heartbreaker.

“Oh god, Jake, don't start. When Jake was a baby he would never let me put my hair up. Hysterical tears, panic. God forbid I cut it.”

“Tears?”

“I was very particular about women, even back then,” he said, and he nodded toward my hair, which was down. “I still think it's too short.”

“Me?” I asked, but he was looking at Simone again.

“Long hair like that is for girls, Jake,” Simone said, touching hers, which sat at her shoulders. Mine was much longer.

“I knew you were a girl once! You must remember.”

“Yeah, Moni, tell her.”

“I remember much forgetfulness.”

“Come on,” I said.

“The city in the early nineties was rampant with crime. Everyone was still reeling from AIDS, entire communities had been wiped out, and all the neighborhoods were being rezoned for development. Gentrification has always been with us, but these were massive, government-subsidized overhauls, not just a new coffee shop or a block of renovations. Was it so much better then? Do I miss not being able to walk this block in the dark? I can't say. But, as trite as this sounds, it was a very free time. And by free I mean that I felt free to pursue the life I wanted, and I could afford to. There were still dark spots in the city, fringes, margins, and I believed—still believe—that those areas are what make cities thrive. But being twenty-two…that was confusing.”

“Confusing?” I asked. “Is that the word I would use?”

“Seems to be the age that ladies run away from home,” he said. “I never got to see twenty-three.”

I hadn't put that together, that Simone and I came to the city at the same time in our lives. Our first escapes.

“You survived,” Simone said to him, and to me: “It was confusing because I didn't know what I was yet.”

“Does it get better?” I asked. Can it? was what I really wanted to ask.

“Aging is peculiar,” she said, moving a piece of parsnip around the plate with her fork. “I don't think you should be lied to about it. You have a moment of relevancy—when the books, clothes, bars, technology—when everything is speaking directly to you, expressing you exactly. You move toward the edge of the circle and then you're abruptly outside the circle. Now what to do with that? Do you stay, peering backward? Or do you walk away?”

“Aren't you in a new circle?”

“Of course. But that circle for a woman is tricky.”

“Tricky?”

“It's a circle of marriage, children, acquisitions, retirement funds. That's the culture you're asked to participate in. Now…if you decline?”

“You're in your own circle,” I said. It sounded lonely, but also fearless.

“It's not so bad.” She smiled. “There's a settling of the mind. Think of it as trading bursts of inspiration for a steady, prolonged focus.”

“Don't you think you were a bit reckless?” Jake asked sharply. I didn't know which one of us he was talking to.

Simone was quiet for a moment and said to him, “I think I did the best I could.”

“Isn't that part of it? Being reckless?” I asked.

They didn't answer. They were staring at each other. The record had gone off and I got up to flip it, and Simone stood and started clearing the plates. When I went to take the bottle of wine, Jake grabbed my hand.

“Come here,” he said. He pulled me onto his lap. I looked at Simone in the kitchen, but then put my face into his hair, held his face on my chest. No one had ever reached for me like that, like they just needed me close.

“We never get tired of talking about love, do we?” She was looking at us with a dishcloth over her shoulder. She smiled.

“Sex and food and death,” Jake said. “The only subjects.” He released me and I stood up, tipsy, confused.

“She said ‘love,' not ‘sex'—you're such a boy.” I turned. “Simone, that was so good, thank you.”

She pulled out another bottle of wine, and I realized we were going to get drunk. I wondered if I would ever go back to my apartment.

“Let's try the Poulsard now.”

“Liquid dessert, perfect,” I said.

“That's not all.”

“Oh no, I'm totally stuffed.”

“Shut your eyes,” Jake said. He pushed me away from the kitchen, toward the windows in the front.

“What?”

“Tess, shut your eyes,” Simone said. I looked out onto Ninth Street. People walked obliviously underneath me. Inside lit windows I saw people fulfilling their real lives, I saw minutes that counted. I was expanding, it wasn't just the job anymore, not just the restaurant, but I was finding a place in the world. Someone stopped the record, and it looked like the street was breathing. Then someone turned out the lights and I shut my eyes.

“You can turn around,” she said. When I did she stood with a chocolate cake in her hands, with a single candle burning on top. Jake stood next to her, holding a bouquet of white tulips. My hand flew to cover my mouth. I thought, No. I can't take it. I didn't know how they knew, how I didn't think to tell them. I didn't know how badly I had needed them and how I'd been waiting for them, but I endured it, my joy, don't ever forget this moment, and Simone said, “Happy birthday, little one.”

“O
H, WHAT YOU THINK,
you can get the pie in the sky and eat it too?” Sasha said serenely.

“Does that translate to you missed me?” I asked. I didn't know how long it had been since I'd gone to Park Bar after work. Nobody asked me where I'd disappeared to, as if they knew that talking about Jake would give me too much pleasure. Instead they kept a chilly distance when I walked in. Nothing had changed in there. Ariel and Vivian were back on and talking about moving in together, Will purposefully flirted with any woman under the age of forty, and Terry was a little fatter but still told bad jokes.

Once I could get each of them in the bathroom we would be in love again, but the only one interested that night was Sasha. I took a line. The coke rutted out my nose and I squinted my eyes. Had it always hurt before? Pain beyond the stinging heat?

“Oh, you got plenty-a time to talk now the cock outta your mouth? You think I care whatsoever you live or die?” He snorted the peace offering I laid out for him. “You looking very rosy though.” He pinched my cheeks and I knew he had forgiven me.

SIMONE'S “CLEANSES”
had a reputation among the staff—apparently she wasn't very nice while doing them. Jake said it was the most miserable time of the year, and Will asked to switch out of dining room backwaiter when she was senior on the floor. I was mostly impressed with how casually and often she said the word
colon.

“Spring cleaning,” she said. She didn't seem mean. She seemed really happy in fact, and her eyes did look brighter.

“Is it all right if I sit with you?” I held a plate of spaghetti and Chef's Sunday sauce and three pieces of garlic bread. Simone had a thermos in front of her.

“Of course. I don't have an appetite after the first day.”

“Did your eyes get bigger?”

“That's the wine. The puffiness disappears in the first three days. When was the last time you took time off from drinking?”

“Okay, okay, we aren't talking about me,” I said.

“Your metabolism at your age lets you get away with murder, but every now and then your body needs a break. All the dairy, all the sugars, all the acid—there's mucoid plaque that builds up along the walls of your intestines, it's black, you can actually see it when it comes out, so this is an opportunity to break it down, expel it.”

“Simone,” I said with my mouth full. “Jesus. Please. Twenty minutes before we do ‘mucoid' or ‘expel.' ”

She took a sip of her tonic.

“How long?” I asked between bites. “Also, aren't you going to make Jake a plate?”

“I'm starting with seven days. I've done thirteen.”

“Seven!”

“Tess,” she said, putting her hand on my shoulder, “your body doesn't always need to need. There is a still point in the center.”

“You. Are. Crazy,” I said. The thought of not eating for seven days made me ravenous even though I knew I shouldn't get seconds. Misha the hostess was announcing the soignés that were expected tonight, but I wasn't really listening, I was thinking about how much pasta was left and if I should save some for Jake, but I did hear her say that a Samantha and Eugene were coming in and had requested Simone, and I heard Simone say, “Absolutely not.”

We all turned to Simone. Misha glanced at Howard, who nodded at her to continue.

“So I need to move Simone to section 1 because Eugene only sits on 7….” She hesitated to see if that was allowed. “So…Simone…section 1.”

“Absolutely not,” Simone said again and picked up her thermos and walked into the kitchen. We all turned to Howard.

“Misha, finish the notes,” he said, heading after Simone and passing Jake, who was still unbuttoned, just getting to family meal. He looked at the table expectantly and I shrugged. No Simone, no plate for him. He looked confused as he put his own together.

“Who's Samantha?” I asked him when he sat down and started shoveling the food into his mouth.

“Samantha who?” he said defensively.

“Samantha and Eugene who requested Simone.”

“Samantha's coming?”

“That's what Misha just said.”

“Damn it.” He took my last piece of garlic bread, took a bite, and I grabbed it back. “Samantha and Simone were friends. She was a server here.”

“Okay.” Simone's “friends” were usually obliquely mentioned and none of them ever visited her at work so I had assumed they didn't exist.

“Okay…” I waited for him to go on. “So she quit and they weren't friends anymore? And it was super dramatic and Simone doesn't want to wait on her?”

He wiped his mouth and threw the napkin on my plate. “I'm going to go find her. Are you on the dining room tonight? She could use you on the floor.”

SAMANTHA WAS
meticulous,
that was the first word that came to mind. I didn't believe she had ever worked in a restaurant. Her hair was blown out at perfectly corresponding angles, her cheekbones shone. Her hands, with long, pale-pink ovals for fingernails, conducted their precious stones and platinum with ease. To top it all off, there was stark genetics—she was beautiful. And I was part of a cult that equated beauty with virtue.

“Those are new teeth,” Simone said, watching them from across the room. Samantha's teeth winked at us. Simone exhaled and began her approach. I followed with a water pitcher, though there were at least seven tables being sat throughout the restaurant that could have used some water. I took Jake's order seriously.

“I WOULD HARDLY
say we're fresh, maybe fresh off a plane, but I'm sure I look frightful.”

“Ah well, you've always been able to hide the damage.” Simone pulled her shoulders back. “Are you two still in Connecticut?”

“Back and forth,” said Eugene, waving his hands. In the genetics department, Eugene had been shortchanged. He had caterpillar eyebrows, a bulbous nose, and not much hair left. He had to be more than ten years Samantha's senior. I was familiar with older men and their younger wives. But Eugene seemed authentic. He had clever eyes and he narrowed them when he was listening.

“It will change when Tristan starts school, but we have so much freedom right now, I'm trying to enjoy it.”

“By enjoy it she means cart a two-year-old around Europe.”

“Be nice,” Samantha said, hitting his arm. “People make such a fuss about traveling with children. But you can't let them be in charge. Tristan can sit through a four-course meal.”

“How elegant, Sam,” Simone said. “Of course, Chef would like to cook for you both.”

“Oh.” Samantha looked at Eugene and pouted. “I'm afraid we can't accept. I couldn't stomach a full tasting, Simone, my jet lag and so on. But perhaps I can pop in and say hello if he's not busy later? And was that little Jake behind the bar? He's all grown up. Remember when you two were sharing that shoe box in the East Village? Eugene, Simone had this place, it didn't even have a proper bathroom, the tub was in the kitchen!”

“I'm still there.”

Simone smiled. She smiled so forcefully I could hear her molars grinding together.

“Well, it was adorable. We had a lot of fun there.” Samantha looked airily around the room. “Is Howard here as well?”

“We're all here, Sam. I will let Chef know you declined.” Simone was stoic.

Samantha pointed to something on the menu and Eugene laughed. “You just can't get rid of the filet mignon of tuna. Like it's not the twenty-first century. Adorable, I love it.”

Adorable.
I had never seen grown women attack each other so fluently. No one tossed out
adorable
at Simone. No one declined Chef's tasting menu. And yet Simone wasn't stunned—she was braced. I realized that they were women who knew dangerous things about each other.

I shouldn't have been surprised that Jake and Simone had lived together—I knew she brought him out to the city, it made sense within the narrative I had composed—but it was so directed, the way Samantha said Jake's name, probing.

“Eugene,” Simone said, turning her back to Samantha, like she had taught me never to do to a guest. “The Dauvissat? We have one bottle of the '93 hiding downstairs. Howard will be livid, but are you interested? If I can find it, of course.”

Eugene slapped the table, thrilled. “This woman—when was that dinner? Six years ago? She never forgets! Best server in New York City. Don't get mad, Samantha, you know you weren't cut out for serving. Bring it out, Simone, but make sure to bring yourself a glass.”

“With pleasure,” she said.

DID I DARE
to compare them? Of course. My loyalty fierce but not blind. I struggled, wondering what categories they could justly compete in. The physical didn't seem fair. I wasn't mistaken, Simone shrank as soon as she greeted the table. And it wasn't just that Samantha was taller and had posture like a steel rod ran the length of her spine. Simone's shoulders had bowed like a stone had been hung around her neck. She was wearing her glasses, which gave her a slight but mean squint. The total effect was miserly, as if Samantha had sucked up all the grace in the room.

Simone's nails—I just noticed—were clean but dull and the edges were bitten. I could feel the jagged edges when they clamped onto my forearm and she said, “Watch my section, don't move from it, I will find the Dauvissat.”

Her bright eyes seemed peeled away from her head.

“Maybe you should eat something real quick. Just a bite.” She was on day four.

“I would appreciate it if you focused.”

“What if they need something?”

“They're just guests. Get them whatever the fuck they want.”

AS IF I COULD
stay away. Samantha took one sip of her full water glass and I materialized beside her to refill it. Heather was touching the table, she must have known them too, and she excused herself on my approach.

“Hello,” she said, putting her hand on my arm to stop me from pouring. Her fingers glittered. “I'm Samantha. You're a refreshing presence here. Heather says you're the new girl.”

“That's what they call me.”

“That's what we called Samantha once,” Eugene said. “Eugene Davies.”

“You worked here too?”

“No, no.” He smiled politely. “I was a regular. Standing lunch on Fridays, but twice a week toward the end, when I was trying to capture this one.”

Samantha smiled, putting all her buffed white teeth into it. Their pinkies were hooked around each other's.

“But,” Eugene continued, “when I asked Howard about her—I remember this perfectly—I said, ‘Who is that stunning brunette?' and he said, ‘The new girl?' And that's always how I thought of her.”

“So many years ago, stop!” They laughed, the way guests sometimes laughed or cried because they felt like there was a privacy curtain encircling their table. I was always watching this intimacy, these people revealing their petty, hopeful, or maybe in this case, genuine selves.

“Do you miss it?” I asked.

“The golden handcuffs? Besides the backbreaking labor and turning into a nocturnal zombie and the general cattiness.” She paused and appraised me as if I were about to go up for auction. “Of course I miss it. It's family.”

“Yes.” I felt a kinship with Samantha. I would with anyone who came in and announced that they had once worked at the restaurant. We shared—even if she had covered it up with jewelry and skin serums—a muscle memory. We had both broken down wine boxes in the cellar, we had both learned how to tell when Chef was heating up, we had the same aches in our necks and lower backs. “I feel really lucky.”

“You are. You'll never be luckier.” Her and Eugene's touching pinkies blossomed into holding hands, and I wondered what she thought being lucky was. Their eyes moved off me and I knew Simone was coming back. She had the Dauvissat but something was wrong. On her way back up from the cellar she must have reapplied her lipstick. Just slightly, but definitively, she had veered off the mark.

I backed away as she began presenting, something I had watched her do, wistfully, at all hours and from all angles. I looked at the Dauvissat, the yellowing label, its promise of history, of alchemy, of decadence, and the label was shaking in Simone's unmanicured hands.

WITHIN TEN MINUTES
of Samantha and Eugene bubbling out into a taxi Simone's section was in disarray and she was nowhere to be seen. I got Heather to help me establish order. As soon as I had a second I found her in the wine room, a bread basket at her feet, thermos in her lap, breathing hard and taking little sips.

“Simone, I need help in your section,” I said. “9 is pissed because they wanted the broccoli rabe and polenta sides and Chef doesn't have a ticket, and I didn't see it on hold, so maybe they didn't order it, or maybe you forgot?”

She stared at the wall and broke off a piece of flatbread. She crumbled it up. “It's funny. The people you become.”

I exhaled. “You need to get back upstairs.”

“You think you're making choices. But you're not. Choices are being made against you.”

“Should I get Jake?” It was like car alarms in my head, knowing that her section was falling to pieces, that guests were looking around the room for their server. I saw a red stain down the side of her shirt.

“Did you
spill wine
?” My tone exposed my disgust. She was obviously not well. It had to be the cleanse. “Eat that bread,” I said forcefully. “Now.”

She ate a square of focaccia, chewing timidly like a child trying a new food, like she might spit it out.