—
THE OWNER CLOSED the restaurant on New Year’s Day. He rented out a bar and we all got to drink there with one giant, miraculous, unending tab. From the stories everyone had been rehashing, bad behavior abounded. Someone was going to get too drunk, and though Will and Ariel were both betting on me, I was determined to stay on the soberer side of wasted and had brought my own bag of coke to ensure it.
I had forgotten that there would be adults there. The Owner and his wife stood at the entrance, beaming down authority and warmth. Even they must have been hungover, but they were flawless. A small line had formed to greet them, and as he shook each person’s hand his eyes didn’t scan the room. His wife looked charitable and flashed a smile that drew you out of the ground.
I tiptoed around the line. I couldn’t say hello. What if he didn’t remember me? What if I started crying? I remembered orientation and I still couldn’t believe that they had chosen me.
—
IT WENT MORE or less according to plan. Baby blinis with caviar, foie gras crostini, broiled mussels in the shell, crab dip, oyster shooters—decadent and finger-sized from the Owner’s new catering company. We greeted each other tentatively, checking each other out, marveling at the transformations of dress-up. Ariel in a miniskirt and a sweater she had cut into a crop. Will in a lavender button-down. Sasha in all black and sunglasses. We clung to the bar nervously, trying to get a little tipsy, suddenly scared to talk to these strangers. An hour into it, the entire room relaxed and laughter rang out coarsely from all over the room and the DJ turned up the music. Then the Superlatives started.
Of course I had voted. Zoe made sure we all voted when she passed out the ballots at preshift. There were some usual suspects: Prettiest Eyes, Cutest Couple. And there were the industry-specific prizes, Most Likely to Start a Restaurant. I figured it was another code I had to break—every category had a natural winner. Starting a restaurant—it had to be Nicky, he talked about ditching us and opening up his own bar all the time. Person You Want to Wait on Your Mom was Heather because she looked and talked like a doll. As they announced the prizes I was the shallow spectator I had been in the beginning. Biggest Prankster was Parker—I had put Nicky for that one as well because I wasn’t sure Parker even knew how to speak. Apparently he had been pranking the people he liked for years. I had yet to fall into that category. Most Likely to Make It to Broadway was Ariel. She stuck her finger in her throat and retched. Will went and got the award for her. Then Howard, in a top hat no less, said, “And the Person You’d Most Like to Be Stuck in an Elevator With…is…Tess!”
A polite smattering of applause and a wolf whistle. I clapped too. Everyone stared at me. It dripped into my head, from some neglected faucet, thickly, painfully, that I was Tess.
I had chosen Simone, after a thorough consideration. This is your elevator person, I told myself. It’s not the person you made plans with, it’s not where you thought you’d end up, but bam—the elevator sticks. Your life, a luscious pause, dictated by chance. All the tasks of the day are tossed away. You can’t know when you’ll make it out, but unlike the desert-island scenario, with the elevator you can be assured of an eventual exit.
Of course, I’d thought about Jake. There he was, all to myself. I thought of him pinning the four corners of me to the wall with his body. But the flaming center of my fantasy wasn’t the sex. No, what I wanted to get to was after. We would still be trapped in the elevator. He would look at me. There would be no bar tickets, no crowds, no phone calls, no stripes. He would be forced to recognize me. I knew that if I could get him to see me, then both of us would stop being lonely.
But then I reconsidered. Chances are Jake would be in a mood. I had a sense of how he would react to feeling trapped. What if he fell silent? What if he was mean? Or worse, what if I bored him? The nakedness of the scenario scared me. So he was off my list.
With Simone, the mood in the elevator went from erotic to cerebral and I was relieved. Simone would recite Wordsworth, William Blake, or if I was feeling modern, Wallace Stevens, Frank O’Hara. Simone would explain how wines were made in the Jura in the 1800s and how it related to the cheeses. She would remember details of paintings she saw in Florence a decade ago, and the name of the trattoria where she took lunch afterward. She might even tell me a story about their salt-strewn, dune-grass-covered childhood.
I would make fun of myself and make her laugh. I would tell her stories of demented middle America, and how after I first read The Catcher in the Rye when I was ten years old I packed a backpack and ran away from home but returned after neighbors found me sleeping in their toolshed. Simone would unravel the universe and tell me why it was so hard to find meaning in our technological age, why cities rise and fall, why we are doomed only to repeat ourselves. And after all this prolonged contact, I would come away changed, with more of her on me, the lessons would be permanent.
“Tess?” Howard waved a generic certificate that one of the hostesses had decorated with gold stars. I stood up uneasily in my heels. I turned to look for someone, turned to look for someone, turned to look for someone.
I said thank you and took my seat again. But not before I gave my coworkers a real once-over. I tried to meet as many eyes as possible and ask them, Me?
—
“SO DID YOU VOTE for me or what?” I slid myself down the bar to him, simmering, lacy, high. In my shoes I was closer to his eye line. Jake in a muted, worn-out flannel and wool slacks, his hair flat and greasy. Uncomfortable, hunched.
“I hate these things. Every year I say, never again.”
“What’s to hate? Free appetizers.” I looked around the room at the strange group of people who had been chosen by the restaurant. The cliques came magnetically back together after the initial shocks of being out of context. The porters and dishwashers were wearing sports coats and they sat with their heavily made-up, animated wives. The cooks had taken over a corner of the bar, where they sipped on añejo tequila and paused for shots of mezcal. The floor around them was wet from spillage. The hostesses and pastry girls hovered around them like a protective layer of atmosphere.
The real grown-ups were at a table together—Howard had brought an age-appropriate date who did everything at half speed. She chewed each bite to completion before setting her fork down, reaching into her lap, and pressing her napkin to her lips lightly, not enough to disrupt her lipstick. Definitely not a restaurant person. There was Chef and his rather beautiful wife, there was Nicky and Denise, who had her cell phone out on the table—it flashed with updates from the babysitter. Simone had joined the table to talk to Denise, their knees turned toward each other. I thought about them in their twenties, Denise with no kids, just dating a bartender, Simone lighter, more prone to laughter. Parker and Sasha played quarters at our table, Ariel and Will were probably in the bathroom, and Heather was trying to get Santos to dance.
It was so predictable and lovely, my heart struggled to hold it.
“As if I don’t see enough of these people,” he said darkly. “And to be here on my day off. Giant waste of time.”
“Why did you come?”
“It’s not worth the black mark for nonparticipation. Besides”—he shot back his whiskey and nodded to the bartender for another—“free drinks.”
Misha, the hostess we all still made fun of for her inflated breasts, walked by and stuck her arm out to me.
“Tess, congrats! The big win!” She giggled. I looked at my certificate. I had carried it over with me in case I wanted to brag to Jake. But next to him it looked childish.
“So embarrassing actually,” I said. I folded up the award. I nodded to the bartender. “A white? Not too oaky, please, no Chardonnay.”
“You earned it,” he said, taking another drink and looking away from me.
“It’s kind of nice, right?” I said. “People want to spend time with me. They aren’t trying to ditch me in diners. I’m not so terribly annoying.”
When he turned to me his eyes were
jagged, slivered, and I was scared. I thought he must be on something. He said, “That’s the biggest whore award. You know that right?”
“Whore?”
“Come on, new girl, don’t play dumb. Your kitchen boys always send it out to whoever they want to fuck. But, oh yeah, congrats! The big win!”
“Um…” I tried to laugh but it died in my throat. Scott saw me from the end of the bar and winked. After so much crying—in bathrooms sitting on toilets, hiding next to the air conditioner in the pastry station, behind the ice machine, into my pillow, into my hands, sometimes simply into my locker—this time I didn’t flee. I stayed and the tears came.
“You…” It wouldn’t come to me. The vicious words I longed for were lost in the flotsam of being humiliated, yet again, like always. “You are mean, Jake. It’s too mean for me.”
His eyes flashed blue and then collapsed.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “Tess.”
I nodded. “Please excuse me.”
As I walked I forced my heels into the ground. My wineglass burned in my hand. Simone’s eyes brushed over me and went to the bar. Yes, I thought, go to him. Comfort him because the new girl with the biggest whore award called him mean.
—
“TESS?”
I picked my feet up off the bathroom floor to hide from her but I had just taken a line and sniffled. She knocked on the stall.
“You can only come in if you do drugs. Drugs-only zone.” I clicked it open. She came in. We were uncomfortably close. We could have stood by the sinks, but she locked the door behind her and sat on the toilet. She gave me her open palm and I put my bag in it. She poured a tiny bump out on the webbing between her pointer finger and her thumb. She inhaled it without taking her eyes off me.
“Please,” she said in response to my expression. “I was young once.”
She touched the end of her nose thoughtfully and I touched mine.
“I thought it was a good thing,” I said. My hands were shaking. “I really thought, oh, here I am, stuck in an elevator, I better pick someone I really…I…I picked you.”
“I’m flattered.”
I pressed toilet paper to my cheeks.
“It’s like we’re exchanging, going back and forth, just playing. And then he hits me too hard. It goes from play pain to real pain.”
“I know.”
“Simone, am I not doing this right? Everything feels like a punishment.”
“What are you being punished for?”
“I don’t fucking know—being stupid?”
“Stop it.” She grabbed my hands unsympathetically. “No one is interested in you playing the victim. Get out of your head. If you don’t you’ll always be disappointed. Pay attention.”
I pulled my hands away and she folded hers into her lap.
“Is it too late?” she asked.
“For what?”
“For you to let this flirtation go?”
“I think it’s more than a flirtation, Simone.”
“It’s not, it’s a fantasy. Jake knows it and you know it. Can you let it go?” She looked at me impassively.
“Okay…I mean…we work together…so.” I paused. “What do you mean Jake knows it?”
“I mean that Jake is aware of this crush.”
“You guys talk about me?” I thought I might vomit.
“We don’t talk about you. It has come up.”
“It? I thought we were friends. Am I just this big fucking joke to you?”
“You’re getting carried away.” The way she said it was so matter-of-fact that I nodded. “Now. Can you let it go?”
Fuck them, I thought, I’m going to quit. Then I saw that Simone was right. I wasn’t a victim. I hadn’t been led anywhere. I had chosen this overgrown, murky path where I couldn’t see five feet in front of me—the drugs, the drinking until black, the embarrassment, the confusion. But really I had chosen the two of them—they were the difficult terrain. I understood what she meant by “let it go.” I didn’t have to quit my job. There had been another route open to me this entire time—a well-lit, well-laid, honest path. I said to myself, Turn around. You do not have to take every experience on the pulse. It’s just dinner. I saw the silent elevator, just me. Another voice said, But then you’ll just be a backwaiter.
“I can’t,” I said. “Let it go. I mean, I don’t want to.”
She exhaled, frustrated with me.
“Don’t you remember what it’s like?”
She held her face as if it were made of granite. I saw a flicker, aqueous, vulnerable.
“No. I don’t,” she said. “I don’t remember and I don’t care to.”
“You must have felt like this before. Are you really made of stone like they all say? I don’t think you are, Simone. I see your heart.” I pointed to her chest, but she looked furious.
“All right, Tess. You want it all? You don’t care about consequences? Then it is too late. I could tell you to leave him alone. That he’s complicated, not in a sexy way, but in a damaged way. I could tell you damage isn’t sexy, it’s scary. You’re still young enough to think every experience will improve you in some long-term way, but it isn’t true. How do you suppose damage gets passed on?”
There was heat coming off her, and I felt the drugs. My blood ran like lighter fluid through my veins. “You sound a little bitter.”
“Bitter.” She pulled the word through a clenched jaw. She pulled back her shoulders like she was on the floor, readjusting, and said, “We shall see. I’ll speak to him.”
“Don’t!” I said. Will’s warning came back to me faintly, about trusting Simone. I had already made myself her pupil, but I had an incision of fear about handing this over to her. Did Jake really need Simone’s blessing? Is that what had been missing this entire time? If those were the terms, then I accepted. Didn’t I?
“Or, I don’t know. Do whatever you want. It’s not even a big deal.”
“Little one, it is a big deal. You forget how important he is to me. I’m obviously quite invested in you too.”
“I know.” I looked at our feet and dragged my shoe back and forth across the tile. “I had a dream about you. Part of a dream. It was that we had a secret. You were my mother. And you let me show up late for work, and you came to my apartment and made my bed. But you told me that no one else would understand and if I told I would be punished.”
“Odd.” That was all she said.
“I don’t think you’re old enough to be my mother. That’s not what I meant. By dreaming that.”
“You should pass that along to Howard. He’s very good with dreams. Should have been an analyst in another life.” She stood and did a small back bend, stretching, cracking. “I wouldn’t mind being in an elevator with you. Roomier than a bathroom stall.” She handed me a piece of toilet paper. “No more crying at work.”
—
I WANTED TO ask her if that was love. The blindness, the careening falls, the invisible slow dancing, the longing for real pain, the fixedness. I wouldn’t have gotten an answer. She never spoke to me about love from personal experience. Love was a theory. Something that had been embalmed. “Love will do x to you if you let it,” or “Love is a necessary condition to y,” or “y is a particular brand of love you will encounter in places like z.”
Perhaps that’s why she was so untouched. She didn’t remember. She never got down on her knees on the asphalt like the rest of us, she couldn’t tell me about the unspeakably real stuff. What I learned came from the ground up.
—
HE YANKED on my wrist and pulled me back from the group I was leaving with. Will made a face that said, Coming? And I held up my hand to say, One minute.
“Text me?” Will yelled as the elevator doors closed in front of his face.
I turned to Jake.
“What? Simone told you to apologize?”
He stared at the carpet. Pensive.
“Pathetic,” I said. I pressed the button.
“I was sorry a
s soon as I said it.”
“You’re wearing me out. Honestly.” I pressed the button again and again. I saw that alternative route, path of peace, of light. I saw the bar, the beer, and the gentleness of being with friends, all of that obliterated when he came near me. I had given him permission to do that. A bell rang and the doors parted. Jake went into the back corner and I stood in front of him, holding the door as everyone crowded in.
“Going out for one, Denise?” I asked Nicky’s wife. Nicky told me that she was the first woman who ever talked back to him and he knew immediately he had to marry her. She was a sharp brunette, still pretty but her cheeks were gaunt now.
“No, no. We are heading home. Our best-case scenario is a five a.m. wake-up with the wee one.”
“Best-case!” Nicky clapped and turned toward me. “Fluff doesn’t get home till five a.m., isn’t that right?”
“What’s Fluff?” asked Denise.
“It’s an old nickname,” I said, and my breath shot out of me. Jake dragged his finger down my back. “From high school.”
My spine a burning candlestick, everywhere he touched dripping. Behind you.
“I did vote for you,” he said softly so only I heard it. And we were back at it: the night buoyant, time elastic, my body forgiving.
“Denise,” I said, stepping back closer to him, “remind me, how old is the youngest?”
—
I STRADDLED HIM in the backseat of a taxi, leather seats groaning, his fingers inside me, pumping, pressing into a white-hot spot in my stomach. I was struck through layers of intoxication that I might come suddenly. He shifted his thumb and I recoiled, sure I wouldn’t come at all. A passage of pushing and pulling, my hair, strands of it coming out in his hand, his shirt collar, him holding me down, forcing me harder onto his lap, the cab hit a pothole and I exhaled.
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