Sweetbitter (19 page)

“I'm buying you a burka,” I told him, and he laughed again.

Initially, I didn't bring her up. It was as if I were protecting his feelings, wanting him to think that I thought only of him when we were together. But whenever I saw a new twist in his body, a new tilt to his brows, it felt like I was being shown something that was Simone's. It was a perverse pleasure, but the bonds between them and me were so new I just wanted to reinforce them. And eventually, one of those nights, he sat next to me and said Simone had been driving him fucking crazy, nagging him about his close. He was testing me out, and I said, “Your close is the least of your problems. Do you think Howard knows you've been late for every shift for six years?” He laughed. Then she was with us, invisible, benign.

“And then she tells me, ‘All you need is a knack for understanding light and shade.' Um, what?”

“Keats again!” He shoved a pierogi into his mouth. “She can't help it, you know. She spent so many years with these poets, she doesn't know what's hers anymore.”

“Her what?”

“Her words. Her thoughts. She was a poet—is a poet. I don't know. She graduated high school at sixteen. Had a full ride to Columbia.”

“She went to Columbia?”

“She didn't.”

“Where did she go?”

“Cape Cod Community.”

My food stuck in my throat. “No. Fucking. Way.”

“Yes, you little elitist bitch. Swallow your food.”

I swallowed. “You're being serious.” Simone at community college, collecting her straight As, bored, silent, serious. “But why?”

“Not everyone gets the privilege of running away.” He glanced at me and relented. “Besides, she had to take care of me.”

“Simone turned down Columbia to take care of you?”

“I've given up plenty for her. It goes both ways. I take care of her too.”

“What if one of you wants to take care of someone else?” The words came out before I could stop them, and I thought, Please don't answer that. He ignored me. “What are her parents like?”

He leaned back in his chair. “They're nothing like her.”

“How did she get like that?”

“She likes to think she sprang from the head of Zeus fully formed.”

“But in fact…”

“Her dad owned a bar. And her mom was an elementary school teacher with a ditzy, girlish obsession with France, but she never even owned a passport.”

I realized that I had my spoon full and lifted halfway to my face. I would have sooner believed that Simone had sprung from a skull in full armor than believed a woman who had never left the country raised her. I put my spoon down, laughing uncomfortably.

“How old is she?” It was something I had been curious about since the first day. I had no idea about the gradation of years, what thirty or thirty-three or forty-two looked like.

“She's thirty-seven. How old are you?”

“Twenty-two. You knew that,” I said. I smiled at him but I was doing numbers in my head. “That's kind of old, right? It doesn't make sense. Didn't she start at the restaurant when she was twenty-two? I thought she said she's only been there twelve years, that makes her thirty-four, right? When was she in France? What did you do when she left?”

“I call those my wilderness years.”

“How long were you guys apart?”

“A few years, Jesus, I'm bored with this.”

“Do you think she's happy? Just working at the restaurant? She seems happy, right? Her life is so full.”

“You're really smitten, huh?” Jake tackled crusts of rye toast. “What do you think happiness is? It's a mode of consumption. It's not a fixed state, somewhere you can take a cab to. Simone's dad had a brain aneurysm at one a.m. while he was counting the drop. He wasn't unhappy. Simone has been bar-backing since she was nine years old. I don't think she has any illusions about happiness.”

I tried to see her as a little girl, busing glasses, watchful. When I was nine the most palpable interactions I had were with my dolls. I played Family with them, but the games always turned out badly, ended violently. Those dolls had to accept the full gamut of my fledgling emotions. They were stuck with me, and they always forgave me when we started over the next day. Which from what I saw of other families wasn't an inaccurate representation. But I was fully isolated from the adult world. I wasn't seen, heard, or acknowledged. It made sense that Simone had been born into it, adapting to the adult rules for conduct, how to be sincere and duplicitous, how to evade, before she realized that technically she wasn't one of them.

I tried to see Jake as a little boy, catching up to her in height, then surpassing her. It was the first time I imagined him as a child. I looked at him across the table and he and Simone—with their history, their run-down parents, their northeastern chilliness, their hardness—felt like the only real people I had ever met.

“What about me?” I said seriously. “Do you think I have illusions?”

“I think you are the illusion.” He slid his chair over so he was next to me. Yes, it was a switch in him, radical flips in energy—I could never rest. He pressed his fork into my lips. “Whose lips are these?”

“These lips?” I kissed the fork. “My lips?”

He didn't hesitate, he bit my bottom lip, pulled it, stretched it out. Both our eyes were open, my face padlocked, he bit harder and I breathed harder. He gave my lip a soft kiss after releasing it, and I felt blood, I tasted iodine.

“My lips,” he said. “Mine.”

HE MET
my gravity with apathy and so began a free fall.

“You love to fuck,” he would say, out of breath.

“Doesn't everyone? What does that even mean?” Although I knew exactly what he meant, my thighs were still shaking.

“No, women in New York, they're all up here.” He tapped my skull. Then he thrust his hand between my thighs. “They can't be here. They can't be present.”

“You've had lots of experience, huh?” I was stuck on the way he said
women
in New York as if I was a woman in New York. “I'm not like a nymphomaniac or something.”

“No.” He moved his hand higher up and pressed on me. “Don't be embarrassed. Say, I love to fuck.”

“No,” I said, shrinking away. His eyes shimmered like water about to boil.

“Say it,” he said, and grabbed my neck from the side, thumb on my windpipe. The first rush of vertigo. At the fulcrum point of coming with Jake, I wasn't falling, the world was rising. He hurt me sometimes. He could smell my fear and he would say, Let go. If I pushed myself into the fear, like pushing my face into a pillow, I could come harder, and I did. The steel grates being rolled up by the Chinese guys, their rapid conversations while they dragged the fish trash out, the trucks bleating as they reversed. My body, boneless.

“I love to fuck.”

“You're insatiable.”

“You're carnivorous.”

“You're a tart-lette.”

“A wolf.”

“A rose.”

“A steak, bloody and rare.”

“You're inoperable.”

“You're terminal.”

If he was imperfect it was never in his blue room, never with words, he played them so smoothly, he played me so smoothly. The shit that came out of our mouths was utter nonsense, but. But what? It was a privileged language. If I tried to transcribe it, it would be filthy.

IT'S NOT HARD
to like these foods once you open your mouth to them: the anchovies, the trotters, the pig's head terrines, the sardines, the mackerel, the uni, the liver mousses and confits. Once you admit that you want things to taste like
more
or
better
versions of themselves—once you commit to flavor as your god—the rest follows. I started adding salt to everything. My tongue grew calloused, overworked. You want the fish to taste like fish, but fish times a thousand. Times a million. Fish on crack. I was lucky I never tried crack.

“VEE-OWN-YAY.”

I didn't mean to correct her. I was only refilling waters on table 30 and I heard Heather stumbling. It was a classic trick, to keep talking while you opened a bottle of wine. No matter the skill level, it was a necessarily slow time in the momentum of service, which usually revolved around a series of quick entrances and quippy exits. But when you tussled with the wine bottle, all eyes were on you, bored, expectant. The only natural thing was to talk through the lapse.

Heather had swayed the guests—rather ingeniously, I thought—from the California Chardonnay they'd requested to a white from the Rhône Valley. It would have similar viscosity and heft, with all the honeyed stone fruit, but without the dominant vanilla and butter of an over-oaked Chardonnay.

The maneuver had the makings of an ideal service experience. They trusted Heather and she rewarded that trust with an education, opening an undiscovered pocket of taste to them. They could spend the rest of the week asking their friends if they knew that the Rhône produced a small amount of white wine. White wine from the Rhône? their buttoned-up friends would say. Yes, had they heard of a Châteauneuf-du-Pape Blanc? No? Then the guests would repeat to their friends verbatim what Heather had said to them: “This wine is fairly obscure, something of a secret…”

We gave a similar speech about whites from Bordeaux, Rioja, anywhere that had prestigious red-wine real estate. And we nodded the composed nod of wisdom when they were surprised. A bonus that the wines were pricey and built a nice check, but it was all true—the whites were bold, rich, and a bargain.

As Heather poured for the man in position 1, a woman shaped like a risen soufflé asked Heather just exactly what the grapes were. Heather started strong with Roussanne, Marsanne, but they were the easy ones. She paused. She looked at the ceiling. The guests' trust hovered in the air like a threatening cloud.

“Viognier,” I said. Vee-Own-Yay. That's how I remembered it in my head when Simone taught it to me. The room blinked at me, the lights brightened.

“You know,” I said, taking a breath, “back in the sixties it wasn't a grape worth mentioning. No one in France wanted to replant it after phylloxera in the nineteenth century. It's such a…” I rubbed my fingers together for the right word, “…
fickle
grape.”

The imagined buzzing of tickets being printed, a clang of glasses at the bar. I didn't want to keep going but I was feeling it now, the ownership that came when the guests entirely submitted to you.

“But they started planting it in California, all along the central coast, and then everyone was like, Wait, what is that incredibly aromatic wine? And then the French said, It's ours, obviously. You know how the French are.”

They chuckled. Position 2 stuck her nose into the glass and jiggled the wine. I leaned to her and said, “I always get jasmine. That's how I remember it.”

“I can smell jasmine!” she said to the woman at position 3. I recognized that—the thrill of receiving revelations.

I fielded Heather's look with a shrug. Like it had been a lucky guess. I went to refill the pitcher but I was thinking, What the fuck? I studied. Keep up.

THE GRAYEST, BLURRIEST,
most miserable weather. Slush congregating in the gutters, lakes welling up in drains, snot and tears mingling on faces, the air like a drill into the head, When will it end? What next?

It happened like this: he asked, rather awkwardly and for the first time, if I wanted breakfast. Neither of us had to go to work that day and I always wanted breakfast. It was too cold to talk as we walked, my lips like slabs of marble.

He led me to Cup & Saucer on Eldridge and Canal, a tiny lunch counter camped out among the mute Chinese signs. It had faded cursive advertising Coca-Cola on the outside, a layer of bacon grease and fryer oil on the windows inside, and he knew everyone. We had horrid, caustic coffee and I put ketchup on my eggs and I saw the etchings of his wrinkles and they were gray, his golden eyes were flinty, gray, and my hair in the reflection of the window was dishwater colored and gray, the circles under my eyes a lavender gray, and he kissed me, graying daylight fraying and coarse, and he was eggish, lined in tobacco and salt and I thought, Oh lord, oh fuck, is my life becoming one unstoppable banquet? A month of gray and the happiest days of my life.

“YOU'RE REALLY DEVELOPING
quite nicely,” Howard said to me. His navy suit shone. His tone was light but too direct; I compulsively caved in my chest.

“Developing what?”

“What's your favorite right now?” He eyed the leather-bound wine lists I was wiping down.

“My favorite what?”

“What excites you?” He paused. “On the list.”

“Oh.”

Simone must have spoken to him. Besides our lessons deepening, I had been studying in my off time. I had a ritual—and having any ritual sounded so mature that I told everyone about it, even the regulars. On my days off I woke up late and went to the coffee shop and had a cappuccino and read. Then around five p.m., when the light was failing, I would take out a bottle of dry sherry and pour myself a glass, take out a jar of green olives, put on Miles Davis, and read the wine atlas. I didn't know why it felt so luxurious, but one day I realized that ritual was why I had moved to New York—to eat olives and get tipsy and read about Nebbiolo while the sun set. I had created a life that was bent in service to all my personal cravings. Looking at Howard now, I wondered if I was becoming the woman with the shopping bags that I had imagined in my interview. If Howard—with his watchful, unapologetic eyes—had seen what I wanted before I did, and had hired me because he knew this job could give it to me.

“The Manzanilla, I think. La Gitana.” I said.

“Ha!” He clapped his hands, genuinely surprised. “The Manzanilla, where on earth did you pick that up?”

“Mrs. Neely, actually. She's always asking for sherry for her soup and I thought it was sherry vinegar, but then I saw Simone getting it from the bar and I thought it was a sweet wine—at first.”

“And?”

“It's not sweet.”

“No, it's not. It's one of the oldest, most complex and undervalued wines in the world.”

I nodded, too excited suddenly. “I agree! I've never tasted anything like it. It's like nutty and rich, but so light, bone dry, actually, salty.”

“It's the ocean air—that area of Spain is where the Atlantic, the Mediterranean, and the river all converge. You can't make sherry anywhere else, but I'm sure Simone told you that. It's like Champagne in that manner, especially with the chalk content in the soil. They have a name for it…”

“Albariza. That's the soil.” I liked having answers. And of course he understood about sherry. Maybe that was what unsettled me, the way he spoke in decrees, like Simone, but I was always aware that he was a man. There were no shared sympathies between us. He didn't ever seem to have a question, and I don't mean curiosity, but a throbbing, existential, why-is-it-like-this question. He had already mastered the answer to that Why?

He was the only one who had seen me before the sheer terror of my training, before I had become mute and emerged with a different voice. He was the only one who knew. And always this feeling that he was not just in charge of the mechanics of the restaurant, but that he was puppeting us by cords tied to our unnameable aspirations and fears.

“You were smart to ingratiate yourself with her,” he said. He walked around the bar and pulled out the La Gitana from the fridge and poured two small glasses. “She's not like this with new employees. The opposite, actually. I can't tell you how many potential servers she's failed on their trails and we've had to let them go.”

I shrugged and smelled the wine. It was as addictive as old books. “I didn't do anything. She picked me.”

“Why do you think she did that?”

I thought about those first few times I saw her, how she was so remote and sculptural. I wanted to say that I charmed her except for so long I'd hardly spoken.

“We have a thing,” I said finally, inarticulately. It wasn't Jake, but I wasn't about to say that to Howard. “We have something in common, I don't know that I can explain it.”

“I think I first met her when she was just a few years older than you.”

“Was there even a Park Bar then?”

“There wasn't much. God, Simone and I used to go to this place, Art Bar? Is that still around?”

“It's so far west! What was she like?”

“Yes, we had to travel in those days. Barefoot in the snow, uphill both ways.” Howard drank his sherry with his back to the door, and I saw the first guests come in for dinner. I watched as they agitatedly unwrapped themselves from their coats, and I thought I should set up but I wasn't about to stop our little happy hour.

“Would you believe me if I said she was mostly the same?” he continued. “The Owner had her training people twice her age within six months. Everyone was shocked when she didn't take the GM role. Lucky for me, of course.”

“Why wouldn't she take it?”

“I know I make it look effortless.” He pulled on his cuff links. “But it's a massive job. It's a different kind of commitment. If I remember correctly, she was thinking of going back to school. And then it was adieu, off to France, her first escape.”

“You guys all run so deep,” I said. “It's amazing, right? I mean, everyone has been here so long.”

“Are you happy here?” he asked. Nicky came up behind me, straightening his bow tie, gave a raised eyebrow at my glass of sherry, and headed into the bar. He carefully dimmed the lights.

“Yes,” I said. Howard couldn't see what I was seeing. The bar beginning to glow under the low lamps, the music ascending, Nicky opening the house red, jaunty, people shuffling in, the magic of the restaurant emerging as if from a more perfect world of forms.

“Curtain up, kids,” Nicky called out and the servers came out of their hiding places, arms clasped behind their backs. Did Howard mean happy
here,
like the restaurant, or
here
in my life?

“I'm deeply happy here,” I said.

“Have you given any thought to the future?”

Had I given any thought to the future? Sure. I wanted next year to look like the life I was leading right now. I knew I was drinking too much, and it wasn't without second thoughts that I made the transition from taking bumps of other people's drugs to buying my own, but I figured that couldn't possibly sustain itself, that it was part of an evolution from which I would emerge honed and sharp like an arrow from a bow. And besides, I drank less, snorted less, and fucked less than eighty percent of the people I encountered, though those things tended to affect me a bit more vulgarly.

Did he want to know my goals? Sometimes I made lists that said: explore Manhattan above Twenty-Third Street, buy a membership to MoMA, invest in a bookcase and/or curtains, go to yoga, learn to cook, buy a toothbrush that vibrates. I thought eventually I'd make more friends: urbane, talented, tattooed friends and we would have dinner parties, to which I could contribute because I would have developed a talent for coq au vin, and all the hysterical winds of possibility that buffeted me along the L train would have died down.