Sweetbitter (26 page)

She turned back to me and said, immaculately, “Oh, little one, I don't want him.”

I pressed my hands into my eyes. Of course. She wanted a Mr. Bensen, Eugene, someone to deliver her to the rarefied world that she had always been entitled to but never able to access permanently. Not Jake, who wore the same underwear for days on end without noticing. She had been seducing and rejecting him since he was a child, and
of course
she didn't actually want him. And yet, I realized, looking at her—she swiped her lips, she swiped, and swiped, and I still saw her immovable, sad eyes—those men were gone, and he was all she had.

“I pity you,” I said. My voice had lost its conviction.

“
You
pity
me
?” When she turned to me she wore the most antagonizing smile.

“You can have your diligence. And your self-control, and your cynicism disguised as professionalism, and your stunted ambition. I mean, honestly Simone, what the fuck are you going to do? Are you going to get it through your head and leave or are they going to have to retire you? I guess we'll never know, all of us will be gone.”

Venom rose in her, colliding with mine. I loved it, I could feel her enjoying me, and I was ready for it, for whatever she threw at me because I would have time to revise. She couldn't really hurt me, I was young, buoyant—

Jake opened the door. We both turned to him. He was winded.

“Well, here we are,” I said.

He looked back and forth between us. Simone walked out, the door slammed. I could tell he had just woken up. His eyes were unadjusted to light and had a patina on them that could have been feelings, could have been pills, could have been sleep. He reached for me and I went unthinkingly.

“I looked for you,” he said.

I laid my head on his chest. He smelled like a deeper layer of earth, a secret blue room I kept in Chinatown. He kissed my forehead.

“No,” I said, inhaling him. “No, you didn't.”

I ACCEPTED
his invitation to Clandestino for a nightcap and an overdue conversation. I left immediately after my lunch shift, skipping my shift drink for perhaps the first time since I'd learned of its existence. When I got home I poured myself a big glass of sherry and waited. The Shabbat sirens shot out over Williamsburg. I watched the sun set and the pigeons loop and swerve and reunite with their coops on the rooftops. I sat and waited while the night attached to the corners of buildings. Drums beat steadily. I ate canned sardines on toast and half a jar of cornichons and waited. He needed me. I hadn't mistaken that. I thought maybe we could survive without her blessing.

I wanted to see Jake repentant. The ugly truth was that I could forgive him anything as long as he still desired me. And, I thought as I walked into Clandestino, that wasn't all of it—the need, the desire. Not anymore. When Jake and I had been fucking these past months, our binges on each other were constructing something behind our backs: the stubborn stains of intimacy marked our hands. I had to see if that could hold us on our own.

“Oh, it's Tessie,” said Georgie. “What brings a real lady this far downtown?”

“Meeting my friend,” I said. “How's it going tonight?”

“Dead.” He shrugged. “First nice night, people are too happy for drinking.”

“New Yorkers are never too happy for drinking.” I pulled up a stool. “I'll just take a lager, whatever is up there.”

“You guys like the Brooklyn, right?”

“Yes, we do.” I wanted to cry but batted my lashes instead. “Brooklyn would be lovely.”

I realized that “Fake Plastic Trees” was playing over the speakers. I hadn't listened to it in years and when I had, on repeat, in the bathtub, I hadn't really understood what it meant to be worn out. I couldn't shrug the song off. So I sighed and said to Georgie, with my face in my hands, “Misery. Will you just turn it up?”

I didn't even notice when Jake was next to me.

“Hey,” he said. There were lilacs in his hand. He apologized for being late. Jake's crooked teeth, the stubble hiding the sharpness of his chin, those otherworldly eyes, the lilacs and their melancholy, narcissism, mystery. He touched my cheek, but I was still in the song. His touch felt like a faded reproduction of something that had once knocked me off my feet. “You're so skinny.”

“I was sick.”

“That sucks.” He nudged the flowers toward me. “Don't you like lilacs?”

“You know they're my favorite,” I said. “You want a prize for paying attention?”

I moved them to the side, and Jake put his helmet up on the bar. Georgie set down Jake's beer and retreated from our silence. Jake sipped and I matched him.

“I saw your bike. At her house. One of the few things I remember from that night.”

He didn't say anything.

“Because I blacked out.” It sounded accusatory because it was.

He turned on me. “You think it impresses me that you know how to hurt yourself?”

I leveled his gaze back at him. “Yes. I do.”

He wanted to bite me. He wanted to pull my hair out. I could see it churning in him, his eyes, his chest, his fingers. It was unavoidable: the ignition when he reached for me, how I would strain against my clothes to get closer to him, how his breathing would turn ragged, a sound that made my body liquefy, and we would stop thinking.

“I'm pissed,” I said, leaning back from him. That was the first time I didn't throw myself on top of the fire he laid before me. The restraint made me feel old.

“I'm sorry,” he said, as if he'd just remembered the protocol. “Seriously, I wanted to meet you, I was going to. I fully intended to—”

“This is the part where you give me the excuse.”

“I fell asleep over there.”

I tore off tiny shreds of my napkin.

“You fell asleep in her bed is what you meant to say.”

“Come on, you know it's not—”

“Like that. Yes, I know it's not like that. Not everything is something.”

He coughed.

“Here's something: She's bad for you. She would abandon you without a moment's notice.”

It was like he hadn't heard me. “I know how she gets, but she comes around. You will too. We're all a little off from the restaurant being closed.”

“No,” I said. “You're not hearing me. I will not be placated, Jake. You two have never let anyone close because you would have to look at how fucked up it is, whatever it is. You would have to explain why a grown man and woman who are
not
together still share a bed, vacation together, or why you've
never
had a real relationship with another woman. You're thirty years old, Jake. Don't you want a real life?”

“There's no such thing as a real life, princess. This is it, take it or leave it.”

“Enough with the life-is-short-and-painful-and-you-die-alone bullshit. What a fucking scam that is, you never have to take any risks. You deserve better.”

His knee was bouncing; I watched the anxiety tense him, like when he got restless behind the bar. I rested my hand on his thigh and it stilled.

“You shouldn't go to France for a month. You hate the French and their smug, racist version of socialism.” I elicited a smile. All my reliable tricks. I had a new one to try on him tonight. It was directness. It was truly my last one.

“I want you to quit with me. Or we can transfer. You need a change and I want to be a server.”

He cleared his throat. We kept drinking. I felt alone like I hadn't since before I moved to the city, like I would never connect with another person for as long as I lived.

“Just think about it,” I said. My voice was desperate; I heard it but couldn't control it.

“I have.” He blinked rapidly. He looked up at the lights. I kissed his hands and filthy fingernails. So many things he never said. I wondered who Jake would be if he said all the things.

“Say it.”

“I remember the first time I saw you.”

“That's all I get?”

“You surprised me.” That was all I was going to get. I said, “I remember the first time I saw you too.”

Barbs of nostalgia sank in me, bringing a terrible weight, ringing with distance that I resisted. I had vowed to myself—since that first day of this new life—to stay in the present tense, to keep my eyes forward. I think his hands were on my neck, in my hair.

“I can't leave,” he said.

“You can. This is still good between us.”

“I can't.”

“You mean you won't.”

“All right, Tess.”

“You're a coward,” I said. A cripple and a coward. Wine-Woman and Sweaty-Boy. Simone had been right. Our senses are never inaccurate, just our interpretations. This wasn't on them. It was on me.

“Do you remember that morning you let me pick the record?”

His routine had never strayed: a cigarette, the stove-top espresso, a second cigarette, and the day's record. That morning he had woken himself up hiccupping. He had been so scared, he clutched at me, still asleep, and I kissed his temple. I teased him about his hiccup phobia. He laughed. As a reward I got to pick the record. I put on
Astral Weeks
and when “Sweet Thing” came on he said, This one deserves a dance. We danced, him bare chested in stretched-out underwear, me in his shirt with no pants on, moving in circles on the carpets under the gauze of cigarette smoke. That was the morning I committed the first sin of love, which was to confuse beauty and a good sound track with knowledge.

He should have asked me, What morning? What record? But he said, with clarion eyes, “Van Morrison?”

I nodded, shook my head, nodded. “I know you were happy. I felt it. I
know.
”

God, how I loved him. Not him exactly, let me try again: I loved his ghost. What had he said to me about his mother? How impossible it is to forget the stories we tell ourselves, even when the truth should supersede them. That was why he adored me for a minute. Because I saw a beautiful, tormented hero. Rescue and redemption. I never saw him. All promise—the new girl.

I waited as long as I could for him to say something. He stared at the bar and scratched at his scalp under his hat, a gesture I had consumed and memorized. I grabbed bar napkins and patted them on my cheeks, wiped my nose. I kissed the corner of his lips. He tasted perfect: the salty, the bitter, the sweet. I felt him switch off. I knew I would be fucked for a long, long time. I grabbed the lilacs, said good-bye to Georgie, and slid off my stool.

THE LILACS SHED
as I walked the bridge. My phone buzzed twice and I turned it off. The city was radiant and I felt untouchable. I experienced the boundlessness that ships cut from their moorings must feel. I experienced again that feeling of having money, paying the tolls, of being allowed to enter the race. Yes, I felt the freedom again, even if I couldn't quite recapture the hope. I could have walked all night. All the times I'd been denied entrance, all the times I'd asked permission—but it was my city too.

S
O WHAT IF
the gold had rubbed off the feather pin she had in her periwinkle fedora? A lot of important people ate at our restaurant: former presidents and mayors, actors, writers who defined generations, financiers you could recognize by their hair. We had plenty of special-needs diners who weren't famous at all: a blind woman who had the specials read out loud to her, men with boyfriends on Fridays and wives on Sundays, eccentric art-collecting men who sat at the bar, ordered a martini, and then drank an entire bottle of red wine for their lunch. Why did I love Mrs. Neely so much?

She was fragile. A rare, endangered species of bird the way she fluttered in and out with her hats and stockings and kitten heels. Sometimes I would watch her from across the room and she would be staring at nothing. I wondered if I would be a woman content to stare into space remembering her misses and near misses, her history.

“Hey Nick, can I grab the Fleurie?”

“Don't top her off, Fluff.”

“Come on…”

“She's gonna pass out.”

I sighed. “So she passes out. Isn't that the privilege of old age? You can sleep whenever and wherever you want?”

He winked and passed the bottle.

“Thank you,” Mrs. Neely said, smoothing a pin curl next to her ear. “That bastard at the bar pours me short. He thinks I don't know, but I know.”

“Nicky's all right. He just takes some reminding every now and then. Are you enjoying the Fleurie? It's my favorite of all the crus right now.”

“Why?”

The only question Mrs. Neely had ever asked me before was why I didn't have a boyfriend. Her tawny apple cheeks were high in a smile and her eyes were lucid. This was a good day for her and I believed she would keep visiting us forever. I picked up her glass and smelled it.

“So Beaujolais is like this hybrid—a red that drinks like a white, we even put a chill on it. Maybe that's why it has trouble, it doesn't quite fit. No one takes Gamay seriously—too light, too simple, lacks structure. But…” I swirled the glass and it was so…optimistic. “I like to think it's pure. Fleurie sounds like flowers doesn't it?”

“Girls love flowers,” she said judiciously.

“They do.” I put her wine down, then moved it two inches closer to her, where I knew the field of her focus began. “None of that means anything. It just speaks to me. I feel invited to enjoy it. I get roses.”

“Child, what is wrong with you? There's no roses in the damn wine. Wine is wine and it makes you loose and helps you dance. That's it. The way you kids talk, like everything is life or death.”

“It's not?”

“You ain't even learned about living yet!”

I thought about buying wine. About how I would scan the different Beaujolais crus at the liquor store—the Morgon, the Côte de Brouilly, the Fleurie would be telling me a story. I would see different flowers when I looked at the labels. I thought about the wild strawberries dropped off from Mountain Sweet Berry Farm just that afternoon and how the cooks laid out paper towels and sheet trays in the kitchen, none of them touching, as if they would disintegrate, their fragrance euphoric. They were completely different from the strawberries in the grocery store, they were as puckered and pruned as my nipples the one time that Jake had made me come just from touching them. I thought about how I would never again buy tomatoes out of season.

“Can I call you a cab this evening, Mrs. Neely?”

“A cab? Goodness no, I will ride the bus as I have every day since I was old enough to walk.”

“But it's dark!”

She waved me off. She was peaceful, but I noticed that her lids were getting heavy, that her head dove slightly each time she blinked. “How will I know you got home okay?”

Something in my voice gave it away, that I was scared I would never see her again. What if she stopped coming? No alarms would go off in the restaurant. How many Sundays would it take before we noticed?

“Tess, don't you worry about old Mrs. Neely. If you ever reach my age you'll find that death becomes a need, just like sleep.”

I KNOCKED ON
his office door at ten p.m. after tracking his movements all night. Howard was such a minor element of service for me but I had unconsciously memorized his habits. I realized that he always came to the coffee station at seven and then spent two hours on the floor and then by nine, barring any emergencies, went back up to his office in order to get out by eleven. Two hours on the floor felt like nothing, a cushy job by our standards, but then I thought about all my lunch shifts, and how he was always here before we got in, and nine a.m. to eleven p.m. on a good night sounded awful. It never showed on him.

“Come in,” he said. Howard was settled back in his chair, reading glasses on his head, a stack of papers in front of a desktop computer from the Paleolithic era.

“Tess!” He sat up. “What a surprise.”

“I know I should have made an appointment, I'm sorry, I just saw that you were still here—”

“My door is always open.”

I took a seat and I looked at him. I didn't know exactly what I wanted, but I knew that I had exhausted my resources downstairs. The phase in which I had existed so happily was over. Howard had put me in stripes, and I needed him to tell me what was next.

“I'm curious. About opportunities. In the company.” I was hesitating. With the door closed I felt oddly vulnerable even though the dinner crew was still finishing up. “I'm sorry, I didn't plan a speech.” I saw a bottle of Four Roses on his bookshelf. “Can I have some of that?”

He took his glasses off his head and retrieved the bottle without standing up. His eyes never left me. On his desk were random samples of glassware, some of them quite dusty. He picked up a rocks glass and used his blue-checkered tie to wipe it out.

“I don't have ice,” he said as he passed it to me. He didn't pour himself one.

“No need,” I said, and took a big sip. “You said that I could be a server.”

He nodded.

“So. I want to be one. I'm really good at this job. I'm better than all the other backwaiters, and most of the servers.”

“You are gifted. That's why I have you first in line.” He hedged, not sure where I was going. I wasn't sure where I was going. “Tess, we are totally transparent at this company. You see the server schedule, you know how it works. There's no space available right now.”

“Okay,” I said. I drained my drink. “Maybe you can make space. Or maybe you can place me.”

He raised his eyebrows and reopened the Four Roses. He poured more for me and some for himself.

“I've made a considerable investment in you. I'd like to see you grow with us.”

“I would too. Honestly, I don't want to leave, even when I am so fucking sick of this place I could die. It's my home. But I also know that you don't really run this place. Simone does. And she would never allow me to be on her level.”

“Don't pass that along to the Owner.” He wasn't insulted. He was interested. “You and Simone…don't tell me this is a story about a boy.”

“It's not. It is, but it's not. It's about me. Come on, Howard,” I said, leaning back, trying it out. “I know you don't like Jake or he doesn't like you or whatever. And I know you and Simone are whatever, friends. But I should be a server here. I know plenty of people doing things that they could be fired for immediately. It's not even the drinking and the drugs and the theft. It says in the handbook that if you're more than fifteen minutes late three times then you are to be fired. No one would blame you. Certain people who have been showing up thirty minutes late for years…”

“Tess!” He laughed. “You're out for blood.”

“I'm not. I know you won't do it. Firing him would be firing two people. But let me tell you, Howard, from the inside, that stagnant water stinks. It's just a fact. And this restaurant isn't getting any younger. We have real problems, the walls are crumbling, the food is stale, and yes, people still come, but because of nostalgia. They aren't excited to eat here. Now some fresh blood—some unjaded servers who actually fucking care—wouldn't hurt the atmosphere, the reputation, or the bottom line.” I finished my drink again. “But you know all this.”

“I like to hear you say it.” He refilled me.

“You might be the only restaurant manager who has leather-bound Freud in his office.”

“I consider it an instruction manual.”

We were silent while I scanned his books.

“You wanted to be something else? An analyst? Anthropologist? Architect?”

“Why do you ask?”

“The same reason everyone asks. You couldn't possibly choose this job, you must have fallen into it accidentally.”

“And yet here you are.”

“Here we are.”

We fell into silence again and I felt like I was running out of time. All my wants crowded forward. I wanted an ally. I wanted my job. I wanted to hurt them. Someone knocked—Misha poked her head in.

“I'm leaving,” she said awkwardly, looking at me.

“Okay,” I said.

“Excuse me one moment, Tess,” Howard said, straightening his tie.

When he left I stood up over his desk, scanning the papers for any edges of her script. It was just a few days ago that I'd found the vacation request. What if I hadn't found it? No fight with Jake, no night of self-abuse, no fever, no truth. I would be downstairs right now revisiting the Pouilly Fumé. When were they going to tell me?

I heard the door handle and I took my seat again.

“Are you going to place Misha?” It was a card I was unsure about playing, but I couldn't take it back.

“Misha?” he asked without concern. “As far as I know, she's content where she is.”

“Oh, I just thought I read in the handbook about like, sexual congress between management and staff not being allowed, blah blah. I don't know.”

“I believe that is how the rule goes.” He glanced at a clock on his desk. “Do you mind if we pause this meeting? I still have a few hours of work, but I'd like to come to a satisfactory conclusion about your prospects, maybe even a plan for the upcoming months.”

“Um, okay.” I felt like a failure. “I'm the three p.m. tomorrow.”

“You can meet me back here at one.”

“One a.m.?” I exhaled. “Okay.” My mind spiraled. “I mean they might still be closing—”

“You can ring at the back door and we can meet in the other office. No need to disturb the nightly staff party.” He put the cork in the bottle of whiskey. “I'll bring ice.”

“All right.”

“All right,” he said. He smiled and tapped the computer mouse, dismissing me. The screen saver dissolved. It was just business after all.

EVEN AT THE TIME
I
understood that Park Bar was unremarkable unless you worked in those five square blocks. One of those bars that survives because of its location. Nobody ever went out of their way to go there. It was somewhere you ended up, an oasis for the stranded.

But it was a rarity in the city—not quite a dive, and not quite a nice place. Decent wines by the glass. They were smart painting everything black—you could never tell how dirty it was. The bathrooms let you know that people behaved badly, but when you walked by the open windows and saw people sipping unpretentiously in the twilight, you envied them.

It was nearly empty when I got there, at first I couldn't make out anyone I knew. I had a vision that they'd all stopped going there, that they had a new place and hadn't told me about it. Then my eyes adjusted. Sasha was blinking brilliantly at me. I sat down next to him. Terry gestured toward the bottles.

“I don't know,” I said to him. “I'm so tired of drinking. Just pick for me.”

Sasha pulled something out of his pocket and slid it over to me. I thought it was going to be a bag of coke, but it was a small jewelry box.

“What you think?”

I opened it to find a pair of earrings, opals set in gold.

“I send them out tomorrow. A surprise for my mama. She's gonna flip the moon when she sees them.”

I closed the box. “You miss her?”

“Yeah. She an old cunt, more fucked up than even me, but I love her.”

I started crying. Sasha was skeptical.

“You got your health, Baby Monster.”

“Do I?”

“Let me tell you about self-respect, okay? When you do the things, you fucking do them, and when the consequences come you take them up the ass too, 'kay?”

“Trust me, I am.”

“Now, in the beginning, I think, this girl, not so smart, we throw in the garbage in two weeks, but all right, you a Baby Monster, you a little cunt, you gonna make it, and I say, I'm gonna talk straight to her 'cause everyone else trying to stick the dick in her pants or make her over like little dolls, but okay, I tell her straight. And what you do?”

“I didn't listen.” I wiped under my eyes. “You know they're going away for a month? To France?”

Sasha pursed his lips at me. “This my shock face.”

“It's fucked up.”

“Yeah, they fucked up. You know Simone start fucking and sucking him when Jakey was a Jakey Baby, not like the elevator going up from there.”

“Wait, like literally or metaphorically?”

“Whatever the fuck that mean? Oh please, you know all that. I don't kiss and tell. Jakey had looser lips when we used to snort it all and scrape up the table for seconds, you know how I'm saying? Who keeping track of this shit?”

“When Jake was a baby?”

“Whatsoever, who is knowing anything? He was too young when they start fucking each other all up, and Simone not such a sweet-as-pie face like you. But why you liking the past so much, Pop Tart? That shit goes dark then it nobody business, and none matters the least bit.”