Sweetbitter (6 page)

I thought, Is that even true? But instead I said, “At least they had something to fight for.”

He shrugged. “I may have made some bad life choices. Who can tell?”

A dagger of morning prowled outside the open windows. The air revived itself, my bones braced like something new was coming. We reentered the line for the bathroom, passing the bag between our back pockets, our hands lingering longer, a feeling of clouds, ominous, pads of melancholy on our fingertips, impending headaches….Mundane, yes, but thrilling to me, all of it.

“ALL RIGHT.
What is Sancerre?” Simone's brown eyes, serpentine.

“Sauvignon Blanc,” I answered, my hands crossed in front of me on the table.

“What is
Sancerre
?”

“Sancerre…” I shut my eyes.

“Look at France,” she whispered. “Wine starts with the map.”

“It's an appellation in the Loire Valley. They are famous for Sauvignon Blanc.”

“More. Put the pieces together. What is it?”

“It's misunderstood.”

“Why?”

“Because people think Sauvignon Blanc is fruity.”

“It is not fruity?”

“No, it is. It's fruity, right? But it's also not? And people think you can grow it anywhere, but you can't. Popularity is a mixed blessing?”

“Continue.”

“The Loire is at the top. It's colder.” She nodded and I continued. “And Sauvignon Blanc likes that it's cold.”

“Colder climates mean a longer growing season. When the grape takes a longer time to ripen.”

“It is more delicate. And has more minerality. It's like Sancerre is the grape's true home?”

I waited for affirmation or correction. I did not know half of what I'd said. I think she pitied me, but I received a grim smile and, finally, a half glass of Sancerre.

AFTER SERVICE
the dishwashers rolled up the sticky bar mats and the smell of rot rose from the blackened grout in the tiles. The kitchen was a hollow amphitheater of stainless steel, still, but holding the aftereffects of the fires and banging and shouting.

The kitchen boys were scrubbing every surface, rubbing out the night. Two servers sat on the lowboy, eating pickled red onions from a metal tin. Leftover ice cream sat on the bread station, turning to soup.

“Hey, new girl, I'm in here.”

Me? Jake was in the doorway of a walk-in. He had a cup full of lemon wedges in his hand. His apron was streaked with wine, his shirtsleeves were rolled high and I could see his veins.

“Are you allowed to be in there?” What I meant is, Do you ever think about me the way I think about you?

“Did you like them? The oysters?”

When he said the word
oysters,
their flavor flamed on my tongue, as if it had been lying dormant.

“Yes. I think I do.”

“Come in here.” His tattoos showed themselves as he pressed the door open wider. I passed under his arm, looking back to make sure Simone wasn't watching. I had never been in any space alone with him.

“Are we going to get locked in?” What I meant is, I'm scared.

Inside there were two open beers, the Schneider Weisse Aventinus, a bottle I'd pulled for the bar but never tasted. The beers were propped against a cardboard box labeled Greens but filled with littleneck clams. We were in the seafood closet. Crimson tuna fillets, marbled salmon sides, snowy cod. The air nipped at my skin, smelling like the barest trace of the sea.

“What's that tattoo?” I asked, pointing to his biceps. He pulled his sleeve down.

Jake dug through a wooden crate labeled with masking tape, Kumamotos. He pulled out two tiny rocks, discarded the debris that clung to the outside. A strand of seaweed stuck to his pants.

“They look so filthy,” I whispered.

“They're a secret. Quite a leap of faith.” His voice was quiet with the motor of the fridge, and I involuntarily shivered and moved toward him. He pulled a blunt knife out of his pocket and wedged the tip into an invisible crack. Two switches of his wrist and it was open.

“Where did you learn to do that?”

He pinched a lemon over it and said, “Take it quickly.”

I flipped the shell back. I was prepared for the brininess. For the softness of it. For the rigidity and strangeness of the ritual. Adrenalized, fiercely private. I panted slightly and opened my eyes. Jake was looking at me and said, “They're perfect.”

He handed me the beer. It was nearly black, persuasive as chocolate, weighty. The finish was cream, it matched the oyster's creaminess. The sensory conspiracy made the blood rush to my head, made my skin break out in goose bumps. Ignore him. Look away. I looked at him.

“Can I have another?”

IN BED
I could feel the pain in my back diffusing into the mattress. I touched my neck, my shoulder, my biceps. I could feel where my body had changed. I clicked on my cell phone: 4:47 a.m. The black air wouldn't move, it wouldn't shift in or out the window. The heat was an adhesive—even the fan couldn't disrupt it.

I went to the bathroom and saw my shirtless roommate passed out on the couch. His chest was slick with sweat and he was snoring. He had an air conditioner blasting away in his room. Some people were morons.

The bathroom was a narrow room of tiny brown tiles, brown grout and brown, moldy ceiling corners. I turned the shower on to cold and stepped in and out of it, gasping and sighing, until my skin was stiff. I put my towel on top of my sheets and lay down sopping wet. The heat landed again like tiny gnats on my skin.

I touched my abdomen, my thighs. I was getting stronger. I touched myself and I felt like stone. I saw Jake in the locker room dropping his pants, his tattered boxers, his pale legs. I thought about the sweat on his arms, of how violently he shook the cocktail shaker, of the sweat adhering his white T-shirt to him the day I first saw him. And when I tried to picture his face it was blank. It had no features except eyes. It didn't matter. I came abruptly and gratefully.

My body shone in the distressed streetlight. I was used to being alone. But I'd never been aware of so many other people, also alone. I knew that all over the south side of Williamsburg people were staring at their ceilings, praying for a breeze to come and cure them, and like that I lost myself. I evaporated.

Y
OU BURNED YOURSELF.
You burned yourself by participating.

On the wineglasses that came out in gushes of steam, on the espresso machine's milk-scum-covered steamer wand, on the leaky hot-water faucet of the bar sink, on the china plates searing themselves in the heat lamps at the pass.

On the webbings of hands, on your fingertips, on your wrists, your inner elbows, strangely right above your outer elbow. You were restocking printer tape and had to move behind Chef, but caught your skin on the handle of a copper saucepan. You yelled, it spun and fell to the floor. Chef sent you out of the kitchen and you reset tables for the rest of lunch.

The burns healed and your skin was boiled.

Knicks in your knuckles from tearing the foil unprofessionally from wine bottles.

Scott said, “The skin gets so tough, even a knife won't scratch it.” He grabbed a plate out of the salamander with his hands to really illustrate the point.

BY THE TIME
we waddled up to the bar it was well past midnight and we were as tattered as the dining room floor. It had been a hard one. The dishwasher broke in the middle of service and two of us were pulled to hand wash the glasses in scalding water. Then the air conditioners, usually mediocre at best, bottomed out. The technicians arrived as we sat down for our shift drinks. They propped open the door and we all looked wistfully at the street. No change in temperature arrived.

Nicky let the backwaiters have gin and tonics as rewards. My fingers were thoroughly poached, the muscle between my thumb and index finger throbbing from polishing. I didn't even have the energy to contemplate sitting next to Jake and Simone. I took my stool next to Will wearily. An empty bottle of Hendrick's stood on the bar like a mascot.

Walter sat on the other side of me. We had never overlapped. He was a large, elegant man in his fifties with a chic gap between his front teeth. He looked as tired as I felt, the lines around his eyes amplifying with each exhale. He asked how I was settling in and we made small talk. But when I told him I lived in Williamsburg, he grunted.

“I lived there,” he said.

“You? With all the dead-eyed slouchers?”

“In the late eighties—were you born then? Six years. God it was appalling. And look at it now. The trains used to stop running. Some nights we walked the tracks.”

“Ha!” Nicky slapped the bar. “I forgot about that.”

“It was a straight shot, the quickest way.” Walter finished his drink and pushed it toward Nicky. “Can I get a scooch for this story?”

“We had the whole building,” Walter said as Nicky emptied out a bottle of Montepulciano into his glass. “Three floors. My share was $550, which was not a little bit of money. I was with Walden…Walden and Walter of Williamsburg. We thought that was cute. Walden needed space for his paintings, they—well.” He looked at me. “Even you have probably seen them. The canvas itself took up a wall. He built them indoors and we broke them down to get them back out. And then his collage phase began in earnest. One of the floors we kept as a junk shop. Car fenders, defunct lamps, chicken coop wiring, boxes of photographs.” Walter chuckled softly into his wine. “This was so long ago, before his, what do they call it?”

Everyone at the bar was listening with their heads down, except Simone, who watched him patiently.

“His materialist phase,” she said.

“Ah, Simone remembers! If you ever forget something about your story, Simone will remember.” They looked at each other, not unkindly. “They called it his coup d'état. The beginning of his love affair with Larry Gagosian. Me-te-or-ic. And all the Williamsburg stuff, now I suppose it's technically his juvenilia, worth millions. He dicked around with garbage and I sang opera in the bathtub.”

“I miss your singing,” Simone said.

“The third-floor skylight was missing. When it rained it was like the Pantheon, a column of water and light in the middle of the room. The floor rotted in this glorious black circle. It grew moss in the spring. They tried to sell it to us for $30,000. I am not kidding. We thought, Jesus, who would buy a place on Grand Street and Wythe? I assumed the river would swallow it up.”

He stopped. I took a tiny sip of my gin and tonic, which was too strong for me though I would never admit it.

“There are condos there now,” I said. I didn't know what else to say. My head was getting difficult to prop up. “All these half-finished, empty buildings. They'll never fill them. There are no people.”

“You are condos, new girl,” Sasha said.

Walter stared into the bottom of his glass. “Fucking holes in the ceiling. Frozen pipes all winter, showering at the Y. We tossed crackheads out of the entryway weekly—
weekly.
One of them tried to stab Walden with a steak knife—
our
steak knife. And sometimes I wish we would have stayed.”

I RODE
the L train, back and forth. Back and forth. In the beginning, I made eye contact with everyone. I applied mascara, I counted my cash tips on my lap, I wrote myself notes, ate bagels, redistributed the cream cheese with my fingers, moved my shoulders to music, stretched out on the seats, smiled at flashes of my reflection in the train windows.

“Your self-awareness is lacking,” Simone said to me one day as I was leaving. “Without an ability to see yourself, you can't protect yourself. Do you understand? It's crucial to your survival that you pause the imaginary sound track in your head. Don't isolate your senses—you're interacting with an environment.”

I learned how to sit still and look at nothing and no one. When someone next to me on the train started talking to themselves, I was embarrassed for them.

I WAS WORKING
the dining room the first day Mrs. Neely didn't have her wallet. I was replenishing the silver and I heard her exclaim. She threw her purse up on the table with her needle-thin arms and her knife fell to the floor. It sounded like an alarm. The surrounding tables turned. She pulled out slips of paper, crumpled Kleenex, several tubes of lipstick, her MetroCard.

Simone picked up the knife and put her hand on her shoulder. Mrs. Neely sat back down but her hands continued to flap in front of her face. “Well I…well I…Well.”

“You know, I believe we found it,” Simone said, catching one of Mrs. Neely's erratic hands. “You are all set. I noticed you didn't finish your lamb today, was it all right?”

“Oh it was underdone. I don't know what you pay that chef for if he's not able to cook a lamb. I attended a dinner with Julia Child once, and we had lamb. James Beard, he could cook a lamb, my dear.”

“Thank you for telling me. I will pass it along.” Simone picked up the check. I hadn't seen Zoe come up next to me. Simone approached us.

“There's no wallet,” she said and sighed. “I'll go ahead and comp it.”

“I should check with Howard first,” Zoe said carefully.

“Excuse me?” Simone turned to her. I backed up.

“The situation is entirely out of control. It deserves a conversation. Chef is completely fed up—double orders of soup, lamb sent back three times? It's getting worse.”

Simone stiffened, I felt it from a few feet away. Zoe kept her hands clasped behind her back, enforcing composure. A silence bubbled between them and I knew Zoe would break it first.

“You can't just comp entire meals every week, Simone. That's not your call. And it's gone beyond the restaurant's responsibility. Do you remember when she fell? That's on us. Where is the line? Where is her family?”

She engrossed me. She flickered.

“Every week, Zoe. For twenty
fucking
years. You're looking at her family. I'm taking care of the meal.”

There was now a small orbit of us around the hutch and when Simone turned we scattered. I ran into the kitchen and Ariel had wide eyes.

“Shit,” she said. “Queen Bee is getting written up for that. Picking up!”

WHEN I WOULD
finally get to taste the wine at the end of our lessons, I would say idiotic things like, Oh I get it now. Simone would shake her head.

“You're only beginning to learn what you don't know. First you must relearn your senses. Your senses are never inaccurate—it's your ideas that can be false.”

I DIDN'T KNOW
what a date was and I wasn't an anomaly. Most of the girls I knew didn't get asked out on dates. People got together through alcohol and a process of elimination. If they had anything in common beyond that they would go out and have a conversation. When Will asked me to get a drink in the late afternoon on my day off, I thought that placed us firmly in the friend arena, like getting coffee.

We met at a tiny space called Big Bar, four booths and a few stools doused in red light. When he opened the door for me and he put his hand on the small of my back I thought, Oh fucking fuck shit fuck, is this what a date is?

“Kansas,” he said. I smiled. It wasn't awful, being somewhere besides the restaurant and my room. To be talking to another human without doing fifteen other things at once. Not awful at all.

“It all makes sense.”

“Does it? You were getting the Midwest vibe?”

“I wasn't actually. My radar is all off—everyone seems like they were born and raised in the restaurant. But now it makes sense.”

“Because of my charm?”

“No, because of your manners.”

“Charming manners?”

“Utterly,” I said and drank my beer. It is a strange pressure to be across from a man who wants something that you don't want to give. It's like standing in a forceful current, which at first you think is not too strong, but the longer you stand, the more tired you become, the harder it is to stay upright.

“How long have you been here?”

“I came for film school like, god, five years ago? That's depressing. I promised my mom I would move back as soon as school was over, and I feel like I'm running against the clock. She's livid.”

“Is she? It's so impressive that you got out, that you're doing what you want.”

“She thinks family is impressive.”

I swallowed. “Maybe she's right.”

“Your parents know you're here?”

“What does that mean?”

“I don't know. You give off this runaway vibe, like you're all huddled up inside yourself.”

“I'm flattered. I'm pretty sure my dad knows.”

“Pretty sure? What about your mom? Her little baby girl in the big city?”

“My mom doesn't exist.”

“Doesn't exist? What does that mean?”

“That means I don't want to talk about it.”

Will's eyes became concerned and I thought, Don't do that. That's not why I told you. It's not something to fix.

“What happened to film school?” I asked.

“You come here for one thing, you end up absorbed by another. I have all these ideas, it's just…Well. It's hard to retain the original vision, which is usually the most pure, you know?”

“Yeah.” I didn't.

“You really came here for nothing?”

“I wouldn't say for nothing.”

“What did you do in school?”

“I read.”

“Any particular subjects? Are you always this difficult?”

I sighed. It wasn't as intense as Howard's interview. “I majored in Lit. And I came here to start my life.”

“How's it going? Your life?”

I paused. He seemed like he really wanted to know. I thought about it. “It's kind of fucking amazing.”

He laughed. “You remind me of the girls back home.”

“Oh yeah? I'm vaguely insulted.”

“Don't be. You're not jaded.”

I thought, You don't know me, but I smiled politely. “I'll catch up soon. Just let Chef scream at me a few more times and I will go completely numb.”

“He's got a hard job.”

“Really? The only thing I see him do is yell. I've never even seen him cook!”

“It's different at that level. He's not a line cook anymore, he's running the whole fucking business. I know he misses cooking every single day.”

“The other day he told me to stab my fucking tickets or he'd stab me. I mean, how is that allowed?”

“He didn't say that to you.”

“He did! I cried by the ice machines.”

“You're a little sensitive.”

“He's a monster.”

Will put his hands up, surrendering, smiling. I liked him. The truth was that he reminded me of people back home too—nice, open-book people. Thinking of Chef reminded me of the restaurant and that I could talk freely because I wasn't in it.

“You know, Simone is kind of helping me with wine.”

“Ugh.” He scrunched up his face. “I would be careful with Simone's help.”

“Why? She's so smart. She's so fucking good at her job. You ask her questions all the time.”

“Yeah, when I'm desperate. Owing Simone a favor is like being owned by the mafia. Her help is a double-edged sword.”

“Are you being serious right now?”

“I would just be careful what you tell her. She and Howard have this weird thing where she reports on all the servers. Everyone thinks they're fucking. Once Ariel told Simone something about Sasha and then Sasha got written up. And she has these creepy relationships with Howard's girls, and then they disappear in the middle of the night. I don't know, she's fine, but she's been there too long, she gets bored, makes trouble.”

“I don't believe that. I get the feeling that she's genuinely interested in helping me.” It's not that I expected Will to get her. She probably barely tolerated him. But the rest of it disoriented me. “What are Howard's girls? What do you mean they disappear?”