Sweetbitter (23 page)

“It takes a lot to amuse me.”

“How old were you when she died?”

“Eight.”

“How? Did she die, I mean.”

I reached out for him. I used my nails to trace his tattoos and his eyelids shut. I felt the bumps on his key tattoo and thought of Simone wrapped up in her sheets, alone in bed. I wondered what the funny story was, wondered why his tattoo looked like his skin had rejected it, and why hers looked like it had sunk in too far. His breathing deepened.

“That feels good,” he said. I don't know how much time passed before he said, “Simone told me my mother was a mermaid, and that it had always been her destiny to return to the ocean because it was her real home, and someday she and I would return too. My mother swam away. I think I knew better, even then. I got older, I found the newspapers, I learned what drowning is, I know. But when you asked me that, my first thought was, she swam away and went home. Funny, right? The way we can't unlearn things even when we know they aren't true.”

I rolled on top of him, torso on torso, stomachs breathing convex and concave into each other. I thought about saying a lot of grown-up things: I lost my mother too. I think it would have been harder if I'd ever had her, could remember her. I know that trust is impossible with other people, but mostly with yourself because nobody taught you how. I know that when you lose a parent a part of you is stuck there, in that moment of abandonment. I thought about saying, I know you're falling in love with me too. Instead I said, “I told someone you were my boyfriend.”

“Who?”

“Some guy who was hitting on me.”

“Who? Where?”

“Just some guy.” I had never seen him jealous, or even prickly, except for maybe when we talked about Simone and Howard's friendship. But his tone had gone from laconic to lucid. “He was like, a fancy rich guy at Grand Central Oyster Bar. He wanted to have oysters with me.”

“You went to Grand Central? Without me?”

“Are you mad or impressed?”

“Annoyed and intrigued. How did it feel?”

“It was totally magic in there, I was thinking we should go back—”

“No, how did it feel telling that guy that you had a boyfriend?”

How did it feel? It felt—possibly, potentially—true. “I don't know. I mean, he left me alone after I said that. So that was…good.” We looked at each other. I kept resettling my head on the pillow. I was terrified. “How does that make you feel?”

“I'm not big on labels. You like labels?”

“I'm not trying to have a talk about labels.”

“But I will say…” His hands found me again. He traced underneath my breasts. He traced the round part of my stomach. He traced my ribs. I watched his rings. “I don't want you to eat oysters with anyone else.”

“Really?”

“Yes. I like it when you're mine.” He pushed me onto my back and my head banged against the wall, hollow. “Now, can I ask you a serious question?”

“Yes,” I said, breathless.

“What does a guy have to do to get a blow job in the morning?”

“It's the middle of the night.”

“I see three rays of sun over there on the wall.”

“That's the neon sign from across the street.”

He kept my wrists above my head. He rubbed his chin and lips over my breasts. “Let's see,” I said. “I got my eight and a half minutes of cuddling, I got the sensitive-man monologue, I got my bohemian ‘nonlabel,' so I guess I just need…”

“What else for fuck's sake?”

“A sign,” I said, catching his eyes. He made fun of my tendency to invoke fate. Simone made fun of me too, but said it was very old-world, which was a compliment when we talked about wine. Jake and I looked at each other, and I thought, How can you believe everything is accidental when we're together and it feels like this?

Suddenly, dozens of pigeons thrashed against the fire escape, their wings flashing the light, hammering the windows, and I said, I don't think it was out loud, Okay, I accept.

WILL CAME DOWN
from the mezz whistling, and stopped to drop off the last round of silver at the bar. Nicky and I were down to one guest, Lisa Phillips, who was on that precipice between tears and laughter. Nicky, in retrospect, probably shouldn't have let her have six glasses of wine, but she was a notoriously exceptional tipper, and her husband, she'd just found out, was leaving her.

“If we can't let her get drunk here tonight, what good are we to anyone? She came here 'cause it's a safe place,” Nicky said when I suggested that we should cut her off. So I watched. Her eyes grew unfocused, her mouth gaped, and even her cheekbones seemed to slump.

“Oh, Lisa,” Will said to me. “Who's gonna pour her into a cab?”

“I think Nick is on it. It's really sad though. He left her, and the new one is like, my age. She won't even look at me.”

“Yeah, it's always about you, huh.”

“Hey!”

“Joking,” he said, his hands up. Lisa's head dropped onto her arms, and Nicky pulled away the bread basket, then her silverware, then her balled-up napkin. She didn't move.

“Are you going for one?” Will asked.

“Are you cut already? Nick hasn't even gotten me the list yet.”

“You want a quick treat for the close?” He touched the tip of his nose with two fingers.

“It's a bit early,” I said. I polished the glasses and looked at him. “You're into it during your shift now too?”

“Tonight was an exception. Heather, Simone, Walter—it was diva night on the floor, they ran me fucking ragged.”

“Isn't it always diva night?” I asked. “You look tired, babe.”

He nodded. I thought of how selfish I had been with him, but couldn't summon the appropriate guilt. It was another instance of something that failed to hold its prescribed meaning. He was just a boy.

“I'll go for one. Save me a stool?”

Mrs. Glass, one of our elderly regulars, approached us. It wasn't my job, but she reached out with a coat check ticket. The hostess stand was empty.

I never had much use for the coat check room. Occasionally I pulled high chairs from there. The door was already ajar.

For a split second I didn't see them. I saw empty hangers, a vacuum cleaner, the mop bucket. But sitting in the corner was Misha, with her fake breasts affixed to her bird-boned Ukrainian thinness, and Howard, as dense and secure as another piece of furniture. Misha was perched on his lap sideways, her skirt fanning out over his knees and to the floor. She had her hand over her mouth, like she was afraid of making a noise, and he had one of his hands on the small of her back like he was a ventriloquist.

“Yes?” Howard asked calmly, quizzical eyes. Neither of them moved.

“Sorry,” I said and ran out, shutting the door behind me. My head twitched around in a circle, trying to sense signs of movement in the restaurant, but I was unseen. I remembered Mrs. Glass.

I knocked on the coat check door. There was no sound inside.

“Misha,” I whispered into the door. “I need Mrs. Glass's coat. I'm sliding the ticket under the door. She's waiting.”

I ran back to the barista station.

Mrs. Glass was just perceptibly rocking. She inhabited another parallel time, where all faces, all places had been assimilated. Her days were on repeat. Nothing shocked her.

“People are so stupid,” I said under my breath. She turned her ear toward me. “Your coat will be right out.”

I mixed Cafiza with scalding water and threw the portafilters in. I grabbed the micro-wrench and very carefully unbolted the hot mesh screens from the group head. I dunked them. I kept my hands moving, but a jittery, unstable giggle hung around me.

“What the fuck, Fluff? You didn't last call. Maybe Lisa wanted one.”

“Nicky,” I said, my voice loaded, “it's too late for espresso.”

Misha came out carrying a short fur coat and Mrs. Glass clapped her hands. They walked in tandem to the door and Mrs. Glass was off into the night. Nick came around the bar and took Lisa by the elbow. She tried to protest.

“Does he
know
what he did?” was all I could hear her say, and I shook my head, trying to get it out of my ears.

“I know,” Nicky said, helping her off the stool, standing her up. He put on her coat so gently, and did the button at her neck. There were no tears, but her face was contorted, confused, as if someone were trying to wake her up. I thought about how her life didn't belong to her anymore. I thought of Simone. Nicky kept saying, “
I
know.”

Howard came out. I wiped my face clean of expression. He walked behind the bar and pulled down two rocks glasses and grabbed a bottle of Macallan 18. I watched him pour it out, more intrigued than ever. He wore his power so lightly most days, as if he wasn't attached to it, but in fact, it informed every step he took. Highly, highly off-limits, this scotch. He slid it to me and I caught it. It burned my entire mouth.

Howard watched the street where Nicky was hailing a cab in his stripes and apron. He sighed. “It's a dangerous game, isn't it? The stories we tell ourselves.”

“P
ICK UP!”

“Picking up,” Ariel sang out. I giggled in line behind her. Will elbowed me to shut up and I laughed harder. We were playing Go Fish. Do you have any gin? Go Fish! Do you have any Hitachino White Ale? Go Fish! The person who was without had to find and deliver it—stealthily—to the others. I had just fished Sancerre from the white wine bucket. It was still early in the night, the first tickets rolling lazily through the printer, the servers dawdling in the hutch, all waters topped off. Chef demonstrated the specials on the line, while Scott set up the expediting station. A tipsy, languorous night with my friends stretched out in front of me.

“Order in—soigné, it's Sid's table,” Scott yelled out. “So 23, order fire two tartares, order fire sformato, order fire foie.” He inspected plates in the window. “Pick up, 13, asparagus, 1, Gruyère 2, I'll take a follow on the oysters.”

“Hubba, hubba,” I said. “Picking up.”

A new ticket printed and Scott glanced at it while holding out the asparagus special toward me. The poached egg on top jiggled. He kept staring at the ticket.

“Piiiiiicking up,” I said again, and reached my arms out farther to grab the plate. He dropped it to the counter and the egg slipped off. Chef looked up sharply.

Scott, drained of color, said, “The health department's here.”

Chef set down his knife and in the quietest and most controlled of voices said, “Nobody. Touch. The. Fridges.”

The kitchen detonated. People ran. Chef flew up the stairs. From all over the kitchen things went soaring into the garbage: half a leg of prosciutto and the ropes of sausages hanging by the butcher station. Bar mops dropped into the trash like streamers. Anything that had been out, in the process of being chopped or even salted, went into the trash. Potatoes that were being sliced for fries, breakfast radishes that were being cleaned, sauces that were being divided into labeled quarts. Interns ran up from the basement with brooms and swept madly from the corners, porters tied off the trash bags, the line cooks pulled down pint containers from shelves above their stations—inside were kits with bandanas, thermometers, pencil-thin flashlights.

I had never seen such precise chaos in my life, the fear animating everyone. Zoe talked about a two-minute drill, but nobody had trained me on it. I assumed it was above my pay grade. Ariel pulled all the cutting boards off the tables and I grabbed her.

“What the fuck do I do?”

She looked me up and down and pulled the bar mops hanging from my apron string and threw them away. She held my hands and said, “You're going to run the food. Just like you were doing a minute ago. And when you get in the dining room, you smile extra hard, and when you see a man holding a flashlight and a clipboard, you make sure he sees how pretty and happy you are. Don't open the fridges, we need stable temperatures. Don't touch any food, not even a lemon or a straw at the bar. That's it.”

I nodded. She threw the cutting boards into the dish station and pulled all of the servers' water glasses. Whatever hair-tingling exhilaration I'd been on my way to churned in my stomach. I thought about hiding in the bathroom. Pretending I had to pee and it couldn't wait, and I would sit in there until the whole inspection was over, and I would at least know I didn't fuck anything up. But I couldn't. My adrenaline kicked into overdrive but then something else did too. My training.

“Picking up,” I yelled. Scott was on his knees shining a flashlight under a lowboy and sweeping with a hand broom. When he heard me he stood up and looked at the pass. All the plates were still there. He looked at me, then at the plates again. He moved the poached egg to the top of the asparagus. It had been barely two minutes.

“Pick up?” he asked.

“Picking up,” I sang out, my hands unwrapped, open like I was receiving a blessing.

WHAT WAS
the Owner banking on? His reputation? The endurance of tacit understandings from the nineties, a sort of honor among thieves? It was hard to believe that this plebeian man in a dusty jacket had any sort of power over us, that he could cause panic in the kitchen or halt anyone from getting their calamari. He went to the bar first, and I smiled to myself as Jake stubbornly stood his ground, the inspector too large to move effortlessly back there, saying, Excuse me, and turning the cold-water faucet on, saying, Excuse me, turning the hot-water faucet on.

Will said, “That's the essence of his evil. See how quiet he is?”

He was right. The inspector didn't exclaim, didn't interact. He seemed to have the most boring job I could imagine—his weapon was a digital thermometer. He opened a refrigerator door, marked a temperature. He poked into our plastic-wrapped items, and marked another temperature. He fondled the gaskets on the fridges and prodded the cracks in the ones that hadn't been replaced yet. He lumbered down to the floor with a flashlight, nodded as he got back up. He checked the expiration dates on every single gallon of milk, every stick of butter. Looked inside every bulk dry-goods container. He went through his faucet drill at every sink, pumped all the soaps, which were full. He seemed to be moving on an invisible grid, and so I kept forgetting about him. I saw him come out of the walk-in and I thought, That guy's still here?

I had seen my share of disgusting shit, but I was also positive we were the cleanest restaurant near the park. There were stories about the house-pet-sized rats at the places around us, or the restaurants where raw sewage backed up from the street when it rained. Sure, I cut some corners on my side work, but I watched the porters bleach out the darkest corners of the kitchen, and I watched the overnight guys arrive as I was leaving every night. Chef put the fear of God into his crew. I would have eaten off the floor without a moment's hesitation. If the inspector had paused at any table, our virtue would have been self-evident: we put out beautiful food.

We were turning, moving delicately on tiptoe. Will, Ariel, and I weren't getting drunk anymore, and Scott didn't stop sweating, but it was just another service. Howard and Chef took the inspector up to the mezz and sat him at a table, where he wrote a report.

I was dropping off a rack of glasses at the service bar and batting my eyes at Jake when I saw him look past me, which he didn't really do anymore. I turned. Howard was coming down the stairs on his cell phone. It was a fracture—managers never had phones on the floor. No one did. Howard went straight to Simone and pulled her into the back hutch. They spoke with their heads bowed. Her hand went to her chest and she nodded. When I went back into the kitchen it was silent, not like a church, like a graveyard.

Howard came in behind me and announced, “We are ending service for this evening.”

“Now?” I asked. No one responded.

“If anyone has questions be vague but firm. We are voluntarily closing for repairs. We will see them all in a few days. I will touch all the tables. Mandatory all-staff meeting in one hour.”

WE WERE IN
a very old building: it was the foundation, the layout, pipes, ceilings, and walls that weren't completely up to the new codes. It felt fundamentally wrong that we could be operative one second and closed the next because of architecture. No one mentioned pests, or rodents, or hygiene—only I seemed to be thinking of the fruit flies, the cockroaches, the foreboding empty mousetraps, infestation humming in the walls, down in the sewers, behind every plaster and asphalt coating of the city. Architecture was definitely an easier—cleaner—problem, but I wondered if the inspector had found the drain under the bar sink, or if he knew that I was too scared to fully clean the espresso machine.

The hostesses were on the phone with our sister restaurants, securing tables for the remaining reservations and the people who had barely started eating. All checks were comp'ed. Pastry made to-go boxes of cookies and I delivered them in little stamped paper bags. Simone and Jake stood at the service bar, whispering, not looking at each other, but holding each other in that magnetic exclusivity. I kept waiting for an outburst from anyone—one of the guests, a server, but everyone moved mutely around the room.

Most of the guests had assumptions about what was happening—they were the regulars, who knew what the Department of Health was, and being New Yorkers, operated on a communal subtext that let them observe life unsurprised. They were put out but flexible. It was the tourists who seemed most perplexed. Howard guided them each step of the way.

The inspector sat at bar 1 as the guests shuffled past. He stared placidly at a midpoint on the wall. Mr. Clausen, old enough to be the inspector's father, rapped on the bar until the inspector met his eyes and said, “This is appalling. You're as punitive and pointless as the damn meter maid.”

We held the door open and the air was supple. It may have been the first true day of spring.

WE SAT
in the empty dining room, streetlight laminating the windows. An oxidized edge in light that came from routine being disrupted beyond repair. The Owner was all smooth surfaces when he strode in and shook the inspector's hand. I was still waiting for the explosion—a punch, a copper pan flying, a gasp. When the Owner looked out at us, I knew that would never happen.

“First of all,” he said, putting his hands together, pulling our focus to him, “I want to thank you all for your dedication and patience tonight. What has happened here is not a reflection of how hard you work, but a reflection of an outdated system, a reflection of an outdated structure. This is an old building, an old restaurant. And we are proud of that. But in keeping up with the DOH, we have a lot working against us. We
still
keep the cleanest restaurant below Twenty-Third Street. And that's a testament to you—to Chef, to Howard. I want to apologize for this upheaval. A lot of you don't know what exactly I do. I sit at a desk in corporate across the street, I give interviews, my photo is in the paper, I open new restaurants. But my only real function here—and this has been from day one—is to make sure that you guys can do your jobs perfectly. That's all I do. I put structures in place so that you—the blood and guts and heart of this restaurant—can shine. So you can excel. Today I've let you down and I'm sorry.”

He put his head down. When he raised his head again, he acknowledged each of us as his equals. “We expect to be closed for three days tops while we do some restructuring in the basement and behind the bar. We will reach out to the regulars and explain. Each of you will be compensated if you were scheduled to work….”

He went on. I felt pinned to my chair. So it was true. I glanced at Simone and her cheeks were wet, Jake standing guard behind her. For the first time in twenty-some years, the restaurant was closing.

I HAVE FORGOTTEN
exactly what Howard sent me up there to retrieve. I want to say a blue binder containing checklists, phone numbers, policies.

I remember climbing the mezz stairs with a sense of purpose and privilege. I remember that I had on my gold hoop earrings. I remember pushing papers to one side of the desk. And I remember her handwriting. I had seen it nightly—on her dupe pad when she took orders, on the whiteboards marking the counts on specials and wine, in the margins of the wine notes we kept in a folder behind the bar. The extravagant script, cursive that looked engraved, slanting deeply to the left as if it had been lured across the page.

I saw “Simone,” I saw “Jake,” I saw “sabbatical,” “France,” and “month of June.”

I absorbed the words but not their meaning. I picked up the paper. It slipped out of my hands. My finger pads couldn't grip it, my nails couldn't get the edges up. I heard breathing but I couldn't get any air. Valves shut in me, first behind my eyes, then in my throat, then in my chest, then in my stomach.

This is what happens when the body anticipates a wound. It steels itself. A pliable mind twists vainly to avoid logic, all judgments, all conclusions, if only for a few seconds longer.

It was a Vacation Request Form, the kind of dreary printout that Zoe spent all her hours creating and filing. It was in the handbook: all vacation requests had to be approved by Howard at least a month out. The restaurant was so carefully staffed that it couldn't accommodate spontaneous absences—every service was designed around all the servers' strengths and weaknesses. To take an extended vacation required a radical reworking of the schedule. But Howard liked to retain his staff and hold their jobs for them. He encouraged us to take what he called sabbaticals.

My mind caught up: Simone was requesting a sabbatical to France for the entire month of June and she was requesting it for her and Jake. It had been given to Howard three days before my birthday dinner. I saw the tendrils of smoke off the candles when I blew them out, I saw dozens of burning plates in the pass, rushed drinks on the bar, subway rides, Jake's sleeping face, Simone's satisfied face—the weeks since that night reeled in front of me. I sat down in Howard's chair. The request had been approved two days ago. When I tried to remember what I was doing two days ago it was like running my face into a wall.

I TOLD MYSELF
to be calm, gather my information, hold very still. Maybe it was a mistake. Maybe I had misunderstood.

“Hey,” I said, touching Simone on the shoulder as I passed to my locker. “Can I talk to you?”

“I'm changing,” she said distantly. Her mascara leached into the lines around her eyes. The changing room was crowded, the whole herd of us in there at once. People were talking about going to Old Town for burgers since it was still early. Then everyone would head to Park Bar. My sense of hearing was off, I heard the overlapping tenors of voices I knew so well, but at a dim, fuzzy volume. Overriding all of it was the ringing of the lightbulbs. I looked at Simone. She was holding her stripes to her chest over her bra and I inadvertently looked for her tattoo, like it was going to explain something, like it was a message written to me that I had missed. And it was. They were marked, weren't they? I reached for my locker to steady myself.