—
“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 be
en 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.”
She never dealt in pity. I didn’t know what to say.
“Your mother must be pretty,” I said eventually. “You’re pretty.”
“You think so?” She looked at me from the mirror, unimpressed.
“Why don’t you want a boyfriend?” I had made two assumptions before I knew what was happening, first, that she didn’t have a boyfriend, second, that it was because she didn’t want one.
“A boyfriend? That’s a sweet word. I’m afraid I am in retirement from love, little one.”
She barely but definitely softened.
“In Marseille you could walk down to the docks in the mornings. They had urchins, still alive. An offhand exchange, a few francs for this delicacy. The rocks are littered with debris: empty shells opened with a knife, rinsed by salt water, and sucked dry on the spot. Men taking lunch with bottles of their hard house wine, watching the boats move in and out. It’s the ovaries—the coral ovaries. They are supposed to transfer a great power when you consume them. Absolutely voluptuous, the texture, absolutely permanent, the taste. It stays with you for the rest of your life.”
She went toward the door, pulling her hair back. She looked at me thoughtfully. “There are so many things to be blasé about: your youth, your health, your employment. But real food—gifts from the ocean, no less—is not one of them. It’s one of the only things that can immerse you safely in pleasure in this degraded, miserable place.”
—
“IT’S EXHAUSTING,” Howard said as he put on a slate-wool overcoat, a fedora, and leather gloves. He looked like he’d walked in from the 1940s. He gazed toward the exit and smiled at me. “You really have to love it.”
“Yes,” I said. I swirled the milk and splashed it on the espresso. I knew exactly how to make his macchiatos. “It’s like, physically tiring. But there is something else that really flattens me every night. I can’t put my finger on it.”
“Entropy,” he said. Like I was the sixth person to ask him. He raised his eyebrows at me to see if I knew what it meant, and I raised my eyebrows back to say I was skeptical of his usage.
“Rather it’s a case of mismatched desires. The restaurant, an entity separate from us, but composed of us, has a set of desires, which we call service. What is service?”
“It’s exhausting?”
“It’s order. Service is a structure that controls chaos. But the guests, the servers, have desires as well. Unfortunately we want to disrupt that order. We produce chaos, through our randomness, through our unpredictability. Now”—he sipped and I nodded that I was still with him—“we are humans, aren’t we? You are, I am. But we are also the restaurant. So we are in constant correction. We are always straining to retain control.”
“But can you control entropy?”
“No.”
“No?”
“We just try. And yes, it is tiring.”
I saw the restaurant as a ruin. I imagined the Owner closing the place, locking the door many decades from now and the dust and the fruit flies and the grease accumulating, no one working around the clock to clean the dishes and linens, the restaurant returning to its primitive, nonfunctional elements.
“Thank you,” he said and put the cup down.
“You’re a free man now?”
“That I am. I have some manly Christmas decorating to do.”
I nodded. It had surprised me, the holiday erupting in the park, in Flower-Girl’s ridiculous bar arrangement. It was hung with actual cookies from the pastry department. Even Clem’s had strung up lights. I remembered how warm New York had looked in Christmas movies, how benevolent and rich the shop windows were, how everyone’s humanity broke through just in time for redemption, just in time for faith. It didn’t feel like that when I walked to work. It felt cold and forced.
“I guess I should go see that tree or something.”
“Will you be around for the holidays?” he asked.
I thought, Um, you scheduled me the day before and the day after, where the fuck do you think I’m going to go, but I said, “Yeah. I’m here. Just relaxing. I hear it’s very quiet.”
“Well, if you find yourself restless, I host an orphans’ Christmas every year. Don’t worry, Simone does most of the cooking, I wouldn’t subject anyone to mine. But it’s a tradition. You are heartily invited. And it’s not as boring as I’ve made it sound.”
“Are you an orphan?”
“Ah.” He smiled at me. “We are all orphans eventually. That’s if we’re lucky.” He waved to someone at the bar who had spotted him and winked at me before releasing himself from our grip and into the free fall of the evening.
—
“WAIT UNTIL the truffles hit the dining room—absolute sex,” said Scott.
When the truffles arrived the paintings leaned off the walls toward them. They were the grand trumpets of winter, heralding excess against the poverty of the landscape. The black ones came first and the cooks packed them up in plastic quart containers with Arborio rice to keep them dry. They promised to make us risotto with the infused rice once the truffles were gone.
The white ones came later, looking like galactic fungus. They immediately went into the safe in Chef’s office.
“In a safe? Really?”
“The trouble we take is in direct proportion to the trouble they take. They are impossible,” Simone said under her breath while Chef went over the specials.
“They can’t be that impossible if they are on restaurant menus all over town.” I caught her eye. “I’m kidding.”
“You can’t cultivate them. The farmers used to take female pigs out into the countryside, lead them to the oaks, and pray. They don’t use pigs anymore, they use well-behaved dogs. But they still walk and hope.”
“What happened to the female pigs?”
Simone smiled. “The scent smells like testosterone to them. It drives them wild. They destroyed the land and the truffles because they would get so frenzied.”
I waited at the service bar for drinks and Sasha came up beside me with a small wooden box. He opened it and there sat the blanched, malignant-looking tuber and a small razor designed specifically for it. The scent infiltrated every corner of the room, heady as opium smoke, drowsing us. Nicky picked up the truffle in his bare hand and delivered it to bar 11. He shaved it from high above the guest’s plate.
Freshly tilled earth, fields of manure, the forest floor after a rain. I smelled berries, upheaval, mold, sheets sweated through a thousand times. Absolute sex.
That was why it took me some time to see the snow falling in the window at the end of the bar. Whispers rose among the guests, they pointed to the street. Their heads turned in a reverent row. Thin shards of truffle drifted down and disappeared into the tagliatelle.
“Finally,” said Nicky, and replaced the truffle. He leaned back on the bar, wearing a handsome, self-satisfied smile. “You never forget your first snow in New York.”
The first flakes lingered in the window, framed. For a second, I believed they would fly back up to the streetlights.
—
I CAME TO LOVE the Williamsburg Bridge, once I learned how to walk it. I was mostly alone, a few all-weather bikers, a few heavily bundled Hasidic women. I walked either in some dusky circumference of gray light or some blotchy, cottoned afternoon. It never failed to move me. I paused in the middle of the filthy river. I stared at the trash eddying in currents and clinging to docks like wine dregs cling to a glass. Simone had mentioned the orphans’ dinner at Howard’s to me. I thought of them all up there at Howard’s on the Upper West Side. I thought of Jake in a Christmas sweater. I told them I was busy. Remember this, I
told myself. Remember how quiet today is. I had the newspaper, which I would keep for years, and I was on my way to lunch in Chinatown by myself. As I contemplated the skyline this double feeling came to me as one thought, pressing in from either side of the bridge, impossible for me to reconcile: It is ludicrous for anyone to live here and I can never leave.
IV
SOMETIMES I SAW all of service condensed, as if I had only worked one night that stretched out over the months.
I kicked the kitchen doors open with the toe of my clog, I came up the stairs and Jake and I met eyes. I looped the dining room in sweeping, elongated arcs, both my biceps and wrists tense. I saw myself without a time lapse, the images still and laid on top of each other. All the plates of filet mignon of tuna streamlined into its essential form: the filet mignon of tuna, lapidary. All the napkins I ever folded in a totemic monument. And running through these still lifes, an unmistakable straight line, was the gaze with which I watched them, a gaze in which sometimes Jake or Simone would join me. That’s all I remembered—these few images and watching them all from afar, a huge stillness, a giant pause. When I felt like this it was the easiest and most beautiful job in the world. But I knew it was never still, that it was always flawed and straying from the ideal. To romanticize it was to lie.
I heard it turn midnight from the wine room. A beckoning din came through the ceiling. Thumping on the floorboards, whistling. I ran up the stairs and there was a crowd at the service bar, where flutes were lined up. The regulars had left their stools to cheer with us. Simone brought me a glass of the Cuvée Elisabeth Salmon Rosé Champagne. I shut my eyes: peaches, almonds, marzipan, rose petals, a whiff of gunpowder and I had started a new year in New York City.
—
“YOU. In a dress.”
That’s what I wanted him to say. He didn’t end up saying it, but I said it to myself many times as I greeted my reflection in the buildings going up Broadway. My high heels rocked me like roller skates, my hair that I had spent time blow-drying was whipped up, I was suddenly vulnerable to the weather, to uneven sidewalks. I nodded to the iron wedge of the Flatiron like a prestigious acquaintance. The dress was half a paycheck. A short, black silk tunic. I was still confused about the power of clothes—nobody had taught me how to dress myself. When I tried it on and looked in the mirror, I was meeting myself decades from now, when I had grown unconquerable. All in a dress. I nearly returned it twice. I saw myself in the dark-green glass of a closed bank. I turned to my reflection: You. In a dress.
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