Love Me Back

by Merritt Tierce

He said Shh, he said I can’t get you any narcotics but I would like to make love to you. I don’t know if that would have any palliative effect but I would really like to. I said All right, but I’m having trouble controlling my face. He said that was fine, he laughed, he kissed me tenderly, his long hair fell over me. Clark was slender, he had a white man’s no-ass, not those two baby heads in a sack like Cal. He had a large thick straight penis and any time we did it he was in it all the way, studying it like a lepidopterist, admiring every intricate pattern up close with gravity and joy. His intensity pulled me down and down and down until I came and slept.

  Cal would bring Max and Elena into the restaurant so they could all have dinner there once in a while, on special occasions like when he finished his cleansing. The cleansing was an annual thing, Christmas through April or something like that, and he cut out meat, cheese, alcohol, sugar, and weed. I teased him after he first delivered that list—And I know you’re still not getting any so what you got left for yourself my friend?—and he said Yes ma’am you have a point there but it’s about purification. And let me tell you how good that long bone cowboy tastes come April.

  When he brought in the family I steered clear. Everybody else would go by the table to coo over his baby and be kind to the wife but I knew I couldn’t. Avoiding her had never been hard until one Valentine’s Day long after Cal’s summer with me. By then they’d made him a manager and I was seeing the hateful man, unhappily. I came into work later than everyone that day because Danny had asked me to pick up his suits and some razor blades on my way in, so I missed the introduction of Max in the shift meeting. Valentine’s Day meant twice as many covers, the dining room converted into a sea of deuces, people jammed into three square feet of space to wait forever for their steak and stare into each other’s eyes drumming up some juice for whatever came next. So they brought in some extra hands to run food and polish glasses, but I didn’t know Cal had conscripted Max until sometime around what would be the sixth or seventh second of a bull ride, time to hold on tight to that shift or give up, fall off. I had a station far from provisions so every time someone dropped a napkin or a spoon or needed more sauce, more ice, more butter, I was hauling myself to go get, go get, go get, but I was hanging on, that’s why Cal put me back there, because it would have been a disaster with some of the baby servers or fuckups in that station.

  I had my hands full of some dishes I had cleared, and a bottle of wine and a check presenter tucked under one arm, when this lady at one of my tables asked if I could please get her some creamy horseradish. Certainly, I said, right away, attempting to hold the stack of dishes away from her but unable to do anything more than gesture at that without putting the gristly remains of a ribeye in the face of the large man at my other elbow. As I twisted, I saw a woman in a sort-of uniform behind me—the same white shirt and apron as me, without the vest and tie—so I assumed she was one of the add-ons they’d brought in for the night and before I took a good look at her face I asked her if she could take the plates please. Then I was looking into her pretty brown eyes and I knew from Cal’s wallet exactly who she was, and she was looking at me thinking she knew who I must be just from process of elimination—there weren’t that many girls who worked at The Restaurant—and from the kind of questions a wife asks a man about the other, in those moments when she’s thinking she can deal with it: What does she look like? Is she white? Trying to find out if she’s hot or young or has big tits. And the husband will answer with thin lips. He’s fucked so he’ll say things like Why you got to know all this, what’s it matter, instead of answering, and she’ll say things like I just want to know why I’m not enough for you.

  Then he’ll sigh and say She has short hair and she could never give me what you do. There. Is that all?

  In the dark dining room I guess she couldn’t see my face cook up to a warm red medium-rare, something a white girl can’t hide. Not that I regretted any second I’d spent with Cal. What I regretted was having just asked her to do me a favor when I hadn’t done her any, but there was no time to think about that if I was going to stay on the bull, no time to do anything but try to get that woman her creamy horseradish while she still had a bite or two of filet mignon to enjoy with it.

  Men will toy with you, I don’t care how much they talk about a woman being a tease. Married men will. Single men rarely hesitate past a certain point. But married men will toy, treat you like you’re plastic, like whatever grip you have on whatever kind of heart you have is your business, like maybe you don’t even have anything that could be offended. I think that’s the same scared-boy coin though—single man on the one side taking what he can, married man on the other afraid to mess up what he took.

  So I’d let Cal do what he would, I’d left him alone. What I wanted was his want and that’s not something you can force. But after I dropped off that sauce I went to put back the bottle of wine and he was at the POS there, sweating. Past four hundred covers and he’d be moving so fast and holding so much in his brain and taking so much shit from guests that his ochre forehead would start to run. A gentleman, he patted, with a folded linen that matched his suit. Think you’re hot! I said to him, Guess who I just met in the dining room? Fucking give a sister a tip, you know?

  I wasn’t slowing down to hear his piece, just gliding behind him to put that pinot in its bin and get back out to my corner, but I’d picked the wrong place in his night to be tough, I was probably the latest of nineteen people to yell at him and I wasn’t in line to spend a couple bills on dinner so I didn’t merit any deference. I was just supposed to do my job and not cause trouble. Hey! he said, like he’d say to a dog that was in his bushes or a hood trying to steal his kid’s bike, that Hey! full of strange to cut me, You better get back here and pump that, I don’t care how busy you are!

  That was how he knew to get to me, ignore what I said and go for my work, imply that I was lazy, that I didn’t have standards as good as his. I went back. I took the bottle out of the bin and put the white plastic pump on the rubber stopper and pumped the air out of it and said to him Cal, I swear to God you did not pump your wine on a night like this when you were a server and if you tell me you did I’m going back out there to find her and I’m going to tell her I sucked every drop out of you every day and I’m going to tell her I’m still doing it and you’re a fucking liar and I’ll explain to her that that’s because you fuck me and you lie to her.

  He was quiet. Then What in hell is up with you? he said, aware that the situation suddenly required more than a power play. Nic walked up needing something from Cal then but Cal didn’t turn to him, and looked at me long as I walked away. Come talk to me later he said, putting some suspicion in there for a buffer but some respect too, to tempt me.

  Once I did get one lick. I surprised him and I got there before he could block me. I got one lick on the underside of his big vitiligoed head and he pushed me away instantly, strongly, said The fuck you doing! just the way he’d said Hey! trying to squash me so I’d never do that again. Then seeing the look on my face, both the want and the apology, he’d said Mami, don’t do that. I’ll spill. As if to say If I promise I want you more than anything will you accept nothing.

  You get tired of being a fixture in a restaurant every night, even if like me you somehow love the job. Something about the word waitress too that always bothered me, made my lower belly quiver in that bad way, like when you walk through a nursing home. I quit The Restaurant the day I waited on Carter Wells and he asked me what I would do if I could do anything right this second, if money were no object. I said as I poured the taste, a swirl of the $800 Lafite Rothschild he’d ordered even though he was alone, Sir money is an object and could never be else but if money were no obstacle I’d live in a place where my little girl could go to a good school. Or maybe I wouldn’t even make her go to school, maybe we’d just see the world together from your side of the table.

  With this I raised the glass with its swirl as if to toast the imaginary gift of an imagina
ry life and I put my whole small face inside the bowl and inhaled and then I drank that wine and said You enjoy your evening and I walked out of The Restaurant, holding the glass in my hand.

  No. I would never do that.

  But believe me that move is not original in the business. I knew a guy who did that in Morton’s one night, they have a spiel with a cart and all these props, and there’s a part where you have to hold up a potato and talk about what they can do with it. He held up the potato and—I can’t do this, he said, and put the potato down and left. He told me After you do it it feels like the stupidest thing because most likely you just end up in some other restaurant holding some other potato but way behind on your rent.

  I did think about it though. Especially late at night when I was so hungry. Around ten thirty or eleven when I’d been at work for hours and hadn’t eaten since lunch, and the place was still brutally busy so I knew I wouldn’t eat until one or two in the morning. Then I would be running some steaming potatoes au gratin to some table and I’d think If I ever walk out this is how: Step up to the table with that bowl and instead of serving them stand there spooning the hot buttery crumbly cheesy potatoes into my mouth. We all became scavengers late at night. The law may require a lunch break but how are you going to take a lunch break at the height of service? At midnight I’d see a half-eaten dish of potatoes on the edge of a deuce in the bar and I’d catch their server’s eye. She knew what I wanted because she wanted it too. She’d start bussing the table in that ungodly sexy way she had, leaning over with her luscious tits in their nose, asking if they wanted dessert and laughing when they said As long as it’s you, like she didn’t hear that every night. I’d meet her in the back and we’d hide behind the glass polisher, scarfing. If Danny came into the back the glass polisher would yell Hola jefe and one of us would turn nonchalantly to the sink to wash our hands while the other began carefully creating an upside-down bouquet of stemware to carry back into the bar. We’d leave the last bites of the potatoes for the glass polisher.

  People had been punished and fired for eating in the restaurant, surrounded by food. So most nights I didn’t risk it. I just finished my work and went home and went to bed, too tired to eat but not too hungry to sleep.

  When I walk across the stage as valedictorian six weeks after the mission trip I still don’t know. I didn’t track my cycle very closely and the end of high school is a busy time. My parents invite everyone from church to a backyard barbecue to celebrate my acceptance to Yale. I have visited New Haven and met some of my professors. I sat in Sterling Memorial Library and read from Shusaku Endo’s Silence and thought about your dad but I was about to do something no one I knew had done, and there was no way for him to come with me.

  I also thought that what we had done was wrong.

  The elders accept the youth minister’s resignation. In his letter to the congregation he says that he deeply regrets having failed to safeguard the children in his care, referring to me I suppose.

  The elders meet with me privately, in the library. Nine of them and a seventeen-year-old girl. Well, you’re the last person we’d have expected this to happen to, one says. Now, I don’t know what the circumstances were, says another, and you don’t have to tell us. But we all know how young men are. Ultimately it’s you girls who have to decide, who have to make choices to stay in the straight and narrow when it comes to purity.

  I am so ashamed, so mortified, that I leave myself there at the table. I make myself four inches tall and I wing over to a bookshelf in a far corner. I alight on the highest shelf and look down at the girl in the red tank top. Her hair obscures her face and she stares at the table, trembling. I don’t know her, and I don’t know these men in dark suits, and there is nothing I can do to help her. She is too small, and there are nine of them. I tiptoe behind a book and lie down. I turn away from the room and fall asleep.

  I wake up in my room at home. I feel the thick woozy tiredness that is new to me because I have never been pregnant before.

  I didn’t take personally anything The Restaurant ever had in store for me. I just did the next thing as well as I could and then the next. The fifth or sixth sous-chef I worked with was griping at Florida John one night over some mess that had gone down earlier in the evening, when I walked up to restock some plates. Why can’t you be like this one? said the sous-chef, putting his hand on my shoulder. Don’t matter what happens out there, she’s ice. What’s your secret? he asked. Enlighten this motherfucker.

  Accept that shit is all fucked up and roll with it, I said. Don’t bitch. Just adapt. Nothing is going to go right and everything is going to be hard.

  Jesus, Confucius, said the sous-chef.

  You crawl in bed with me in the middle of the night. You put your little arm on my chest and say you are afraid I’m going to die while I’m sleeping. I say You’re not afraid I’m going to die while I’m awake?

  When you’re awake I can keep an eye on you, you say.

  No, that doesn’t make sense, I say. You mean that when you’re awake you can keep an eye on me.

  No, when I’m sleeping and you’re awake I dream about what you’re doing, you explain. But when you’re sleeping I never know.

  The Private Room

  Tonight they’ve put me on thirty men in The Private Room. The men are all white, fat, and over fifty. Sometimes parties like this will show up all at once on a hotel bus or in a drove of limos, if they’re in town for a convention and everything is organized. But these guys trickle in, and by the time the last few arrive some of them have already been drinking for two hours. DeMarcus, my partner on the party, got everything started—introduced us, went over the set menu, helped them pick out their wine.

  I wonder if it’s a good thing that DeMarcus will be the face and I’ll be backwaiting. You get to know the look of new money and the look of old; you can call on sight, with near-perfect accuracy, whether a person is a martini, a red wine, a Stella, a Just water no ice extra lemon and a straw did I say no ice?; you know that certain European accents doom your take. You have an entire catalogue of these things in your head but still there will come that table, they’re wearing jeans and when you ask them what they want to drink they say two Diet Cokes and an iced tea and you think you know what you’re in for—an appetizer as an entrée, split three ways, ten percent on a tab that’s missing a couple digits. They’re making out at the table, he looks twice her age, you can’t figure out why the other one is with them. Low-class, you think, guess it’s not my night. Then you walk up with the second basket of bread they asked for and they say to bring out a bottle of Dom Rosé. After that they drink the 2000 Harlan Estate and order the big lobster tail. You start moving like you’ve got somewhere to be and when the bartender tries to play around with you instead of handing over the decanter you snap at him because if they come through you stand to make $500 off a three-top.

  Same thing with these types in The Private Room, the unpredictability. Sometimes they want a girl with their steak—a rival establishment across town employs only women—and sometimes they don’t think a girl can do the job, or they seem embarrassed for you.

  I won’t be talking much from here on out, and with the look of them I’m glad of that even if it might have worked out better for us with me up front. I fill their wineglasses and pick up the cocktail napkins they’ve brought with them from the bar. Are you ready for another, sir? I say. One of them has already downed three Jack ’n’ waters and the hors d’oeuvres haven’t even arrived. His nose is red and his eyes are pushed deep into a big waxy face. I ring up another for him and when I head into the well to pick it up DeMarcus is there, loading some other cocktails onto a tray. I point at the Jack and ask him if he’ll take it with him so I can prep some mise en place. Who’s it goin to? he asks. You know, I say, Lushie. Ah, he says, big fella? They’re all big, I say. Well, they’re all lushies too, he says.

  Back in the room Lushie is standing, whiskey in hand, inviting everyone else to sit. He starts talking a
bout their colleague who passed recently, due to an aortal aneurism. You can tell the others think this is a downer. They just got going on their buzz and they have to tell it to hold on a minute because it’s making them want to laugh when they should be serious, so they start playing with their forks and staring at the tablecloth and they start drinking even harder. You look down the table and the arms and glasses are going up and down quietly but nonstop like derricks. Lushie is using long medical terms with the somber educated air of a preacher bringing the word. The word is—what? I think. Heartsick? Moderation? Death? Quit it all right now?

  Finally he drains his glass and sits all in one motion and the chatter folds back in around us and I can tell some of them feel like they barely made it out. Now they’re talking merger, due diligence, cash flow, liquidity, execute, and the deadly amortization. I have my language too, so though I think about asking Lushie if he wants me to mainline it for him I put it the nice way and say with a prompting lilt in my voice, Would you like me to keep those coming for you sir? and I start making them double-talls to slow him down, something Cal taught me. He wants to drink let him drink, and make him pay for it too—he feels that second or third double hit his ass and he don’t slow down, more power to him. But you don’t got to be running around for him like his goddamn lil bitch.

  We take the order, DeMarcus on one side of the table and I on the other. We have an unspoken rivalry about who can get from position one to position fifteen the fastest. The pros get the order taking down to a call-and-response that reads each guest’s mind and draws out his selections for three courses with all pertinent temperatures and modifications in forty-five seconds or less, without letting him feel the slightest bit rushed. You expand your intake words, like Certainly and Absolutely and That won’t be a problem, sir, you let them hang rich and pillowy in a smile and the guest thinks only of how accommodating and efficient you are, he doesn’t hear the ticking of the giant railroad clock in your head that is Chef, waiting on the line for this order because a big party will affect the cook times for everything in the house. I’m one position behind DeMarcus, since one of my guys takes forever to acknowledge me, even though I’m standing there next to him saying Sir? Sir? Have you had a chance to decide? At some point you have to give up and wait for the friends he’s talking to to advocate for you, give him a sign with their eyes that he’s being rude to you. I hear DeMarcus talking to his seat eight about what vegetables he wants on the table for the party. This guy calls him Mark—DeMarcus is sensitive about his name, at least in the restaurant, and I don’t blame him. He’ll truncate it like that if he feels he needs to, though I think his name sounds regal and hip in the parking lot late at night when his brother swings by to get him and they ask me to climb in for a puff. On my side, on Lushie’s right, there’s one black guy. Guess he’s their EEOC compliance. He’s the only one of the lot who doesn’t order a steak—he asks for the salmon, well-done, and wants to make sure some greens will be on the table. Then I bend over by Lushie’s ear to get his order, and he does that thing fat people do where they sit facing forward but they tilt their head back and up toward you like a flower looking for the sun. He says he’ll have the ribeye. Maybe he’s thinking the same thing I am about that because when I ask him what he’ll have for dessert he pauses piously and says, I don’t believe I’ll have dessert tonight. I’ll pass. You’ll pass, okay, I say seriously while making notes like a doctor.