Sweetbitter (16 page)

“No specials?”

Jake studied the menu. When she came back he ordered us both black coffees and Coors Lights.

“Steak and eggs,” he said. He waited for me. I hadn't even looked.

“What's good?” I asked her.

“Nothing,” she said and smiled. She was firmly into her fifties, pillowy, and had drawn Egyptian cat eyes with black eyeliner through her wrinkles.

“A turkey club, I guess,” I said. “Is that a good choice?”

She took our menus. Jake didn't look at me, like he thought he'd made a mistake. I told myself to just be normal, casual, two friends at a diner, totally cool.

“She was enthusiastic. How was home?” I asked, not meeting his eyes.

“Home?”

“For Thanksgiving?”

“Fucking brutal per usual. There's a reason there's so many suicides out there during the winter.”

“But you got to see your family?”

“I don't have any family. I go to Simone's.”

I had a dozen questions to ask: What does that mean? What happened to your family? What is Simone's family? Why didn't you stay here? I finally said, “I don't have any family either.”

“Should I believe that? A little Jane Eyre alone in the world?”

“I thought you didn't flirt with girls who read.”

He coughed and said, “I'm not.”

A month ago I had seen Jake eat a steak topped with foie gras. The cooks made fun of him behind his back because he was thin, and made him disgustingly decadent food as a dare. He ate nonstop while he worked, but I held a certain regard for his palate because of Simone. Then I watched him wolf down a cindery steak and eggs at midnight and I realized he was a brute who was always hungry. He was the master of indifference and she was the master of attention.

“So,” I said, grinding the cardboard sandwich down into the plate. “When did you move here?”

“Seven, eight years ago? I don't know, I can't remember.”

“And you've been at the restaurant the whole time?”

“About five years too long.”

“You don't like it.”

“These places have a shelf life.”

“But no one leaves.”

He shook his head rather sadly. “No one leaves.”

He pushed my coffee toward me and I sipped—weak, watery.

“Cinnamon—am I right, Nancy?” he said to the waitress. She ignored him. “They put cinnamon in the blend.”

“I don't think her name is Nancy.” I pushed the coffee away.

“A snob already? That was quick.”

“No.”

I picked the white bread out of the sandwich, dipped it in the mayonnaise, and crumbled up bacon with my fingers. Inedible, but I probably couldn't have touched it anyway. So many times I imagined this, and now that I was living it, I couldn't fit myself into the scene. I glanced at Flower-Crown and Lumberjack as they got ready to leave. I tried to see us through her eyes. I tried to see us as a couple that always ate at these stools, us inside an Edward Hopper painting.

“So,” I said. His eyes were on his rapidly disappearing food. “What neighborhood do you live in? Do you like it?”

“Are you interviewing me?”

“Um, I wasn't trying—”

“No, it's fine, I get it. Just let me put on my suit if you want to play.” He tucked his hair behind his ears and cleared his throat. “The time in my life that best exemplifies my totalitarian—I mean,
hospitalitarian
—attitude was when I carried drunk old Neely—”

“Okay, I get it. You don't want to tell me where you live.” He went back to his food. “You carried Mrs. Neely?”

“Many a time, many a time. She's as light as a feather.” He cleaned his plate completely, pushed it away. He burped and turned to me. Finally. “Chinatown.”

“That's cool. I hear it's really cool down there.”

“Cool?”

“I don't know. Is that not the right word? Is that like, what a hipster would say?”

“No, cool is fine,” he said. “Yes, it's a cool place. It was much
cooler
seven years ago, and it was actually cool ten years ago, before I even got to the city. You see, what those kids over there”—he pointed at the empty booth—“don't realize is that cool is always past tense. The people who lived it, who set the standards they emulate, there was no cool for them. There was just the present tense: there were bills, friendships, messy fucking, fucking boredom, a million trite decisions on how to pass the time. Self-awareness destroys it. You call something
cool
and you brand it. Then—poof—it's gone. It's just nostalgia.”

“I see,” I said, though I don't know that I did.

“Those two—to go back to our apt illustrations—they want to play dropouts, want to live ‘La Vie Bohème.' They want to eat at blue-collar diners, ride their bikes like fucking apes, tear their clothes, discourse on anarchy. And they want to shop at J.Crew. They want dinner parties with organic artisanal chickens and they want their fucking Southeast Asia sojourns, and their jobs at American Express. They come here, but they can't finish their plates.”

I took another leaden bite. “You can't have all those things?”

“Sweetheart, you can't make a set of aesthetic decisions without making an ethical one. That's what makes them fake people.”

I forced my sandwich down.

“Don't worry. You're not like them.”

“I know.” It sounded defensive.

“None of us are. Even if you grew up in a country club—which I can tell you did—you're in the struggle now. That's authentic. And whatever your story is, I don't see mommy-and-daddy all over you.”

“You think I grew up in a country club?”

“I know you did.”

He drained me. “You don't know me.”

“Maybe I don't. And you don't know me. And none of us know anything about each other.”

“Well, I don't think that's useful. Sometimes people…I don't know…go out to dinner or get coffee or whatever the fuck…and get to know each other.”

“And then what happens? They live happily ever after?”

“I don't know, Jake. I'm trying to find out.” My head hurt, I propped it on my arm and took a big drink of flat beer.

“Don't get drunk.”

“Excuse me?”

“You're sloppy when you drink.”

Enough. I opened my throat and chugged my awful beer all the way down. It leaked out of the corners of my mouth and ran down my neck. When I finished I said, “Fuck you and good night.”

“Hey, firecracker, give me a second.”

A normal man, in this rough pantomime of a date, would put his hand on my hand and apologize. He would reveal just enough vulnerability to convince me to stay and keep digging. Jake of Chinatown, Jake of greasy diners, Jake of exuberant hair in an umbrella-less city—he put his hand under my shirt, right on my ribs, and pushed me onto the stool. He took his hand off me, his fingers had been freezing but I felt branded.

“You're incandescent when you drink. That too.”

I exhaled. “A consolation.”

“It's the truth. You can take it.”

“It's something.”

I had my purse in my lap but when the waitress came back I ordered another beer. My ribs, my life, my train.

“You read too much Henry Miller,” I said to him. “That's why you think you can treat girls like this.”

“You're a decade off, but yeah, I used to read too much Henry Miller.”

“Who do you read too much of now?”

“I don't read anymore.”

“Seriously?”

“You could call it a crisis of faith. I haven't read a book or even a newspaper in two years.”

“Is that why you quit your doctorate?”

“Who told you that?”

“I don't know. Simone?”

“Simone did not tell you that.”

“Yeah, she did.” She hadn't. But I could tell by his sudden attention that it was true.

“But then you're the Anaïs Nin type, right?”

“Not really.” I was, or had been, or always would be.

“We're both a couple of imperfect types.” He smiled, and it was soft.

“You missed me,” I said, not quite believing it as I said it, but knowing it.

“You want me to tell you that I missed you?”

“No, I want you to be nice to me, actually.”

“I'm mean because you're young and need discipline.”

“I'm sick of that,” I said. “Young, young, young, that's what I get, all day every day. But I know your secret.” I lowered my voice and pushed myself toward him. “You're all terrified of young people. We remind you of what it was like to have ideals, faith, freedom. We remind you of the losses you've taken as you've grown cynical, numb, disenchanted, compromising the life you imagined.
I
don't have to compromise yet. I don't have to do a single thing I don't want to do. That's why you hate me.”

He looked at me and I knew he was thinking about disciplining me.

“Do people tend to underestimate you?”

“I have no idea. I'm too busy trying not to fuck up.”

He was still looking at me, my shoulders, my breasts, into my lap. To be turned over by his eyes was like being paralyzed.

“You know,” he said, and leaned forward. Our knees touched. I could see his pores, the tiny blackheads around his nose and I remembered his up-close face. “I get this sense that you are extremely…powerful. I felt it when we kissed, I felt it when you were speaking just then. Like I had tapped into an electrical current. But then I watch you and you spend most of your sober hours holding it back. Maybe you don't have to compromise yet, but you're going to have to choose between your mind and your looks. If you don't, the choices will become narrower and narrower, until they are hardly even choices and you'll have to take what you can get. At some point you decided it was safer to be pretty. You sit on men's laps and listen to their idiotic jokes and giggle. You let them give you back rubs, let them buy your drugs and your drinks, let them make you special meals in the kitchen. Don't you see when you do that, all the while you're…” He reached out and wrapped his hand around my throat. I stopped breathing. “…choking.”

I held my head as still as a vase, something breakable that had a crack, and the crack was spreading. I said, “I felt it too. When we…”

His phone rang. It was the most intrusive sound I could imagine. Even Jake looked annoyed, but he looked at the number and jumped off his stool and walked to the bathroom and I continued to hold perfectly still.

The waitress came to clear the plates. She stacked them in the most disordered, haphazard stack I'd ever seen. Even I could do better. She threw them roughly in the bus tub. The plates landed with a crack and the silverware slipped with a slight splash into the juices that lived in the bottom of bus tubs. I had pitied her when we came in, but now I realized that we had the same job.

“Debbie,” he called out to the waitress. “Nancy? Sandra?” He didn't sit back down on the stool, he was leaning against the counter now, and I knew our night was over. “I have to go,” he said, “I was supposed to meet someone twenty minutes ago.”

I nodded, perfunctorily. But I heard this: It wasn't some undeclared rule that kept him from taking me home all those nights I was practically begging for it. He was interested. It was that I wasn't living up to my potential.

“This is my treat. A belated holiday dinner. I heard you had a wild Thanksgiving. I'm sorry I missed it.”

He pulled cash out of his wallet. He sent off a text while he drank his beer. I spun around on my stool, watched people duck into doorways out of the fluorescent rain.

“I'm different,” I said, not caring about how simpleminded I sounded. I knew how he saw me—grasping, lost. I didn't know yet in which ways he was right or wrong.

But what he didn't know was that I had escaped. That I had gotten myself here. I helped myself to his beer. “I don't have to choose between my looks or whatever. I'm going to have everything. Didn't you say that the aesthetic and the ethical must coexist?”

I hit him with my knees. “Now. Where the fuck am I and how do I get home?”

“D
ID YOU KNOW
fish have a four-second memory?” Terry asked me. I was pretending to read an old
New Yorker
in the candlelight, my eyes scanning the same lines of a poem over and over again—
what will unleash itself in you when your storm comes
—but really thinking about the coke in my purse, how there was a nice weight to it there, with an entire evening ahead. I thought briefly about leaving before everyone got there, but the night was muddy and I couldn't see past it or through it or even to the next five minutes. The bar was empty so it meant that Terry was talking to me.

“Huh?”

“I always think of that when you guys come in here after your shift. Get it?”

“Yeah, Terry, I get it. We are the fish. And this is the fucking water.”

THIS ONE HAD BEEN
Mrs. Neely's mother's: it was a wine-purple velvet cloche, with gold embroidery that was nearly worn away. It hugged her tiny skull and lifted slightly so she could bat her eyes at me. Her mother, she told us, had been a legendary beauty. She attended all the art salons, held her own in conversation with W.E.B. DuBois and Langston Hughes. Quite progressive. She didn't have time to make art, supporting her children as a seamstress after her husband died, but she had an artistic flair for living.

“I don't understand it now,” she said, taking both my hands in hers emphatically. “You didn't leave the house without a hat. We were not fancy people, my mother made dresses out of curtains, but I would have been indecent without my hats. My mama would have slapped a girl like you silly, the way you dress.”

“I know,” I said. I encouraged her to admonish me, and she loved to dole it out. “Girls now, they wear leggings. As pants. It's embarrassing.”

“Just parading their coochies around town.”

“Jesus! But yes. They actually do that.”

“Where are the standards? How is a man going to know what to do with you?” She slapped the back of my hand. “You dressing like a boy, hiding your figure. You still hitting them on the playground so they'll look at you.”

I nodded, totally unmasked.

“You know, style isn't frivolous. In my day it was a sign of your integrity, a sign that you knew who you were.” I nodded, but she was looking beyond me. “Oh, there's my prince.”

Sasha sauntered toward us like he was on a runway. Mrs. Neely applauded, her eyes watering.

“Neely darling, you are a vision, now why you talking to this trash?”

“Give me a kiss for goodness' sake.” She offered up her cheek shyly and he kissed her on both sides.

“That's how they used to do it in Paris,” she said.

“How's the lamb, my love?”

“Terrible, it was absolutely terrible.” She looked troubled and gestured for us to come closer. “I swear, every time, worse and worse.”

“Marvelous,” said Sasha, shining his teeth on her.

“Sasha, will you take this beautiful young lady out on a date? She needs a real gentleman in her life.”

“Yes, Sasha.” I turned to him. A few weeks ago he'd dropped his pizza on the ground and offered me fifty dollars to eat it. I did, and he paid me. Like a gentleman. “When are you going to take me out?”

We were both shaking with restrained laughter. Mrs. Neely laughed too, settled into her chair, regal.

I KNEW
he was down there. He had just told Nicky he was going down to find a bottle of scotch, even though I had told him, for over a week, that we were out. I'd even asked Howard about it, and he'd told me it was back-ordered at the distributor. And yet Jake refused to believe it. I wondered if he was looking because he didn't trust my information or because he wanted to draw out this small duel between us.

So when Simone asked if someone could pull the Opus 2002 from the cellar for her, she had just been double sat, I said absolutely, tightened my ponytail, and ran. He didn't turn when I came in.

“It's not here,” I said, walking purposefully to the California reds section.

“Those who would believe the words of women would be fools.”

“Charming.” I scanned the wall, but I already knew where the Opus was. I wished that I knew nothing, that I was wrong about the scotch, that we were out of Opus and we had to spend the rest of service in the cellar looking for bottles that didn't exist.

He grunted. I pulled the wine and went to peer over his shoulder at the mess of stray bottles I had already been through a thousand times.

“Hey,” I said. “You're bleeding.”

He had a cut on his forearm. He looked down, confused, and I reached out, instinctively, and brought his forearm to my mouth and licked the cut. My tongue metallic, salty, a spark. When I realized what I had done I pushed his arm back to him. I exhaled and he inhaled, his nostrils flared. My eyes said, I dare you. I felt tears, I felt bottomless, I felt liquid.

“Excuse me,” she said. Simone stood in the doorway. I blinked at her, wondering what I was seeing. “The Opus?”

I looked at my hand and walked the bottle over to her. I waited for some sarcastic comment. “Well I would have just done it myself,” is what Heather would say. Ariel would say, “What the fuck Skip, you fucking cunt.” Either of those would have been acceptable. Simone said nothing but looked at us. She was silent and I knew I'd fucked up.

“YOU WANNA
peach treat?”

I looked at Heather dumbly. I had properly fucked up, so when the rest of the night took a turn toward chaos, I knew it was my fault. Tables ran over their turn times, they sat sipping water contentedly while the waiting parties tapped their feet and impatience, anxiety, frustration gathered in a prickly cloud. The most desired tables were refused. They were too close to the hutch, too close to the bathroom, too small, too isolated, too noisy. Servers were mishearing orders. They stood nervously outside the kitchen, avoiding telling Chef for as long as possible, making up circuitous stories of how it wasn't their fault. Chef slammed food into the trash dramatically until Howard stopped him and started gifting the mistakes around the room.

That Opus? I wanted to blame him but couldn't.
Somehow
I pulled the 1995, not the 2002.
Somehow
Simone presented it, opened it, and tasted them on it.
Somehow
Howard spotted it while making the rounds in the dining room. He said, “Ah, the '95, what an incredible bottle. How is it drinking this evening?”

The robust man at the table laughed darkly. “Better than the 2002 I ordered. Thanks for that.”

“Did you hear?” Ariel asked, swinging past me with plates. She came back a moment later with empty hands and said, “Simone fucked up for real.”

I saw Howard and her in the hutch. His voice calm with none of his usual inquisitiveness, just sharp. “Highly allocated…massive loss…not like you.”

No, I wanted to say, it wasn't like her, it was like me. But I watched Simone nodding, her lipstick worn through in the center of her lips where she was biting them. I felt sick. Heather came to pick up coffee and I confessed.

“Happens,” she said, waving me off.

“But Simone—”

“It's her fault. She presented it, she said the vintage out loud, she pointed to it. She should have noticed. That's why she's a server and you're a backwaiter.”

I was unconvinced.

“You wanna peach treat?”

“What's that?”

“Just a Xanax.” She pulled out a peach-colored pill.

“You think I can do my job on that?”

“Pumpkin, a monkey could do your job on Xanax. And probably not fuck up as much. It's not a real drug.”

Or a real job, I thought as I took it. Simone came up to the service bar.

“My cappuccinos on 43?”

“Already went,” I said eagerly. I delivered them myself less than five minutes after she put the order in, putting it ahead of the five other tickets.

She turned to Heather. “Do you have another?”

She popped the pill in her mouth and swallowed without water.

“Simone,” I said, “I'm sorry.”

“Don't,” she said cordially. “Heather, eighty-six the '95 Opus. That was the last bottle.”

The pill was lodged in my throat. I kept swallowing, but it dissolved there, and it tasted like Jake's sour blood. He didn't speak to me for the rest of the night.

THE ESPRESSO MACHINE
had always been a hot zone for us. The beverage runners were to clean it extra diligently. And I assumed the other backwaiters did. But after a cockroach crawled out of a portafilter I had just picked up, after I threw the whole thing at the wall, spraying coffee grinds everywhere, leaving a dent, after the bug walked away unharmed—well, I stopped taking my cleaning of the espresso machine so seriously.

Zoe was supposed to be our general in this war, which meant she kept ordering different cleaning supplies, and kept yelling at different exterminators on the phone. Each new arrival promised eradication in hours, each orange jug with its skull and crossbones promised death. Zoe labeled spray bottles with masking tape specifying where they were to be used: Espresso. Bar Sink 1. Bar Sink 2. Zoe modified side work checklists, ordered special rags to clean out the ice machine, special blue strips of paper that we had to wear gloves to handle and hang in the fruit-fly area.

What Zoe didn't do was get rid of the bugs. I learned that every single restaurant in New York City had bugs, from uptown to downtown. I still would have eaten off the ground in the kitchen—the place was spotless. Part of our job was to protect the ignorance of the guests, who couldn't handle the hard truths of the city. We said: “It's just winter.” “It's just the park.” “It's just construction down the block.” “It's the neighbors.” All of that was true.

And yet, when Will found a prehistoric-looking cockroach popsicle, even I gagged. It was exquisitely frozen inside an ice cube. He had scooped it from the ice bin. We passed it around until it started to melt, our mouths open in wonder.

To that we said, “Fuck-
Ing.
Dis-Gust-
Ing.
”

I did my part. I initialed Zoe's checklists that hung on clipboards above the stations. But one day I went to hang my apron on a hook and it dropped into a crack behind the freezer. When I looked down for it, the wall was covered.
Covered.
Families, generations of roaches breeding, feeding, dying, in the temperate exhaust from the freezer. I stopped fighting so hard. We were outnumbered.

“OURSINS!”
Simone exclaimed as she came into the kitchen. I kept doing my job, eyes down, scraping spent candles out of the votives. Somebody hadn't put enough water in them, they stuck to the sides even as I hacked away at them. I couldn't remember—it might have been me.

“What?” I asked, just in case she was talking to me. Our chats had tapered off lately.

“Chef, ils sont magnifiques,” she murmured. The two of them leaned over a crate, rapt at whatever golden object was in there. It grated on me when she slipped into French with Chef or Howard or Jake. She would drop her voice so I heard only the curl of a romance language and knew I was being left out. I had apologized to her about the Opus again. I confessed to Howard a day later, and he had already forgotten about it. I had no choice but to wait her out until she directed her attention back at me, when she looked at me like I was as exciting as whatever was in the crate.

At preshift Chef said, “Tonight we have Plat de Fruits de Mer. Very traditional. Oysters, mussels, cherrystone clams, prawns—head on—and the small snails. But what takes it over the top is some spanking-fresh uni, in the shell.”

Someone whistled, a few groans of desire.

“Seventeen orders. This is a hand sell, people; we're not printing it. $175 per tower.”

“Per tower?” I yelled out. Everyone looked at me.

Howard continued. “ 'Tis the season, my friends. People are celebrating. They have been waiting to dine with us. You are here because you're perceptive, so read your tables. See if this is what will make them rave about our restaurant. And do what you will, of course, but I highly recommend some Champagne, or perhaps a Chablis as an alternative…”

I followed her upstairs to the locker room, where she was digging through clean aprons with an obsessive tenacity to find the shorter ones she preferred. I was forcing a thaw, I knew it, but I was tired of waiting.

“Okay, so tell me.”

“Tell you what?”

“The uni…”

“Excuse me?”

“I mean,
please
tell me about the uni.”

“Uni is sea urchin roe, crowning the tower this evening.”

“But why is it special?” I motioned with my hands for her to get on with it.

“You're getting a bit spoiled aren't you?”

“No!” I stood up straighter. “I don't like having to beg for information. Are you upset with me or something?”

“Don't be dramatic. Shouldn't you be focusing on your work?”

“I'm trying to.”

She hitched a new apron high onto her waist, making her look momentarily maternal, pastoral. She re-marked her lips with her lipstick. I saw sprays of silver in her coarse hair. I saw inscriptions of her years around her mouth, a solid crease between her brows from a lifetime of cynicism. The posture of a woman who had stood in a casual spotlight in every room she'd ever been in, not for gloss or perfection, for self-possession. Everything she touched she added an apostrophe to.

“It's quite eerie,” she said, inspecting her face, pulling up her cheeks. “When you begin to see your mother in the mirror.”

“I won't know,” I said.

“No, you won't. You will always look like a stranger to yourself.”