Sweetbitter

by Stephanie Danler

  When I climbed on top of him I momentarily thought of the taxi driver. How far into his shift was he? I wanted to tell him: I work long nights too. Sometimes people treat me terribly. I imagined the taxi driver had a small daughter who called him while he worked. He put her voice on speakerphone and it lit up the car. A glamour shot of his wife hung off the rearview mirror. I assumed it was his wife. She had her hand behind her ear and her head tilted, holding a rose in the other hand. Her lipstick matched the flower. I wondered if the money was good New Year’s Day. I wondered if he had seen everything. He slammed the partition shut and turned up the music and Jake pulled up my skirt and I forgot the taxi driver was a person.

  I was gnawing on his lips, his ears, his chin, trying to extend the tremor in my stomach, I’m close, I wanted to say, colored lights smudging the windows, it’s very close.

  Jake grabbed my face and said, “Do you know what you taste like?” and pulled his fingers out of me and jammed them into my mouth.

  I didn’t gag. I was too stunned to feel anything at first. I’m salty, I thought. I don’t taste bad. But I moaned, I ground into him harder. I was completely turned on, switched on, not by my taste, but by Jake’s certainty. There were so few moments I had been certain in my life. I was constant revision, constant doubt. What I learned, as he slipped his fingers out of my mouth and back inside me, is that in New York City there are absolutely no rules. I didn’t understand that monstrous freedom until Jake said into my mouth, Come for me, and I came in the back of a cab. There were people who did whatever the fuck they wanted and their city was terrifying, barbaric, and breathless.

  V

  SOME MEN TAKE to vinegar with relish. They delight in the sparkling traces of fermentation. His fingers in the pickles, in the sour cherries we imported from Italy and spooned into Manhattans, his olive-juice-soaked knuckles, one dirty martini after another, his fingers in me, syrupy, astringent, and wait, wait, there it is: briny.

  —

  A BLUE-BLACK WINTRY DAWN crept up the squat roofs of Brooklyn when I left for my apartment. I was in the cab, the car was flying over the East River, the bridge woozy, the car weightless.

  I had a small mirror in my bathroom, but it was high and I couldn’t see below my chin. I climbed up and curled myself into the sink bowl.

  There were marks. A bruise on my chest, above my breast, a nebulous thumbprint. Some chafing on my neck and chin. A red, hivelike oval on the inside of my arm. A cast of blue peeled down my bottom lip. Red dashes on the inside. My underwear felt wet and I looked down—there was my period, days early, like he had pulled a trigger.

  My eyes cloudy from wine. The skin under my nose flaking from the radiator. I couldn’t stop touching my face, the blank screen that everyone projected onto. Whatever beauty I had, it wasn’t self-generated, wasn’t rooted. It was permeable. But underneath that, I could just make it out: the face of a woman.

  It was my mouth that was changing. This bleak, purplish, inflated mouth. And my left eye perpetually smaller now, swollen, it didn’t open as wide as it used to. Tired is what a friend would say. I didn’t look new anymore.

  I would get tattoos of the bruises. He would be surprised. What did he call his tattoos? A commitment to a moment? Look, Jake, my body is committed. I lay on my mattress, counting heartbeats. I knew it would never be repeated, that night. Never exactly like that again, never as surprising and powerful again. And so I held it, without reviewing it, I held it perfectly still. The walls of my room turned milky with light. I listened to the last of the Puerto Ricans rowdily clamoring home.

  —

  VARIOUS SNOWSTORMS PILED UP like traffic, snowbanks grinding into sidewalks and rising like new buildings. And indoors the soups kept coming—cure-alls. Santos surreptitiously made menudo on Sunday mornings with the cast-off cow parts. The tripe was sweet and the broth was oily, it tasted like iron, oregano, and limes. Sriracha on everything, even in emergency soups of chicken broth and scallions. Knots in our necks, flus, sinus infections, we passed the ailments between us.

  Will, Ariel, and I sat bowed over our bowls in silence while the beginnings of a storm hit Sixteenth Street. Scott made pho for family meal, a recipe he got from an old man in a market stall in Hanoi. It was a gift, steaming, fragrant with star anise, rich.

  “You disappeared after the party,” Will said to me. Ariel twirled her noodles. I slurped with my eyes down.

  “I just went home.”

  “That’s funny. You never usually just go home.”

  “I was tired,” I said.

  “How was home?” He sat back in his chair, arms crossed. “Was it nice?”

  “Yes, it was glorious.” I went back to my bowl. When I looked up he was injured and I was ashamed. “Will, can you act like my friend?”

  He looked into his bowl. “I don’t know.”

  He got up and left. I turned to Ariel, hoping for some sympathy. She was also absorbed in her soup.

  “It was amazing,” I said quietly.

  “Gross.”

  “I’ve never felt anything like it. I usually have trouble…”

  “Coming?”

  “Well, yes, I mean, it’s fine by myself. But hard. At other times. With people. But this time it wasn’t…difficult.”

  “Well, great. He’s had a lot of practice.”

  “Don’t be mean.”

  “I’m not, but you want me to act like great sex is the end of the world.”

  It is the end of the world, I thought. “No. But it feels big. I can’t explain it, I feel, womanly or something.”

  “You think it’s womanly to get fucked?” She had her clawed tones out and I retreated.

  “I don’t want to argue about gender theory. I just feel like something real happened. And I wanted someone to talk to about it. Like a friend.”

  “Let me guess,” she said, tapping the spoon against the tablecloth. “He beat you up a little bit, called you a slut, and you thought that was really edgy, another spoiled white girl who wants to get slapped around because she always got everything she wanted.”

  “Fuck, Ari.” I shook my head. “It must be hard. To have already sized up the world, to already have written it off completely. Is it just so fucking boring all the time?”

  “Pretty much, Skip.”

  “I would rather be called a slut by him than deal with the shit I get from the women here.” I picked up my bowl. “Also, you’re fucking white. By the way. And you don’t get a medal for being gay.”

  “Listen,” she said, her voice calmer. She pouted out her bottom lip. “I am looking out for you. Don’t start measuring your life in sex, it’s dangerous. Great sex is not a big deal.”

  I sat back down. “What is a big deal, then?”

  “Intimacy. Trust.”

  “Okay,” I said. Those words floated out above me, abstract, romantic, and I wondered what they looked like on the ground. Maybe they were already happening, maybe they were embedded in the sex. Years of wondering if there was something wrong with me. Wondering why sex drove people insane. Years of mimicking porn stars, trying to arch my back in the most flattering way. Years of sex that was empty, never held its shape.

  “Isn’t sex something?”

  She shrugged. I realized she had no idea what I was talking about. When we went to the dish station I put my bowl down and hugged her from behind. I wondered how there was any room for the guests, with all of our hopeful faces and our imposing loneliness.

  —

  LET ME TRY this again: it was changeover. He was coming in for the night and I was the beverage runner from the day. It had been snowing off and on, spidery flakes brushing the windows, salt rims on the sidewalks, a tinctured light from a weak sun. I was making macchiatos, but really I was watching Enrique as he stood outside in a huge parka wiping down the windows. His gloved hands held a squeegee and pulled long draws of soapy water up the windows and opalescent patterns slid down.

  Jake stopped at the door to take off his cap and shake ou
t his hair. When he touched his own cheeks from the cold it was humbling. All of the most thoughtless gestures were exotic on him. Pulling his keys from his pocket for his front door, hanging those keys—with precision—on a hook inside his house. He looked different today—it wasn’t as simple as us having been naked together—after all it had been two a.m. and dark in his room so I didn’t know if that counted as actually having seen each other naked. No, it was that he was amplified, each vision of him laid on top of another in translucent sheets. Like the collection of Oriental rugs in the lightless cave of his apartment, each rug overlapping another, an uneven terrain of rug on top of rug on top of rug, you only imagined touching the ground. Like his tattoos, none of them quite touching, his skin an image of white space between the images, the private mosaic of him, the sound of his breathing becoming harassed, his uneven teeth, his smells coming loose from skin. I could still smell him in my hair.

  I made him an espresso. He stopped to talk to Howard, standing directly in front of me, not looking at me, but when he finished he turned.

  “For me?”

  “Yes.”

  He shot it back and walked away. Contentment filled me and I watched Enrique as he scraped the windows into total invisibility.

  —

  SIX-MONTH REVIEW: I bought a dresser from the Salvation Army on North Seventh and Bedford. I had to pay two big kids from the corner to carry it up my stairs. I unpacked my suitcases. I found a Laundromat with two old Korean ladies and an obese orange cat. I tipped them. I got the Saturday night beverage-running shift, with Jake and Nicky on the bar.

  We sat down in restaurants after midnight. We went to karaoke in Koreatown when Ariel wanted to sing. Ariel sang them all but her true calling was Alanis Morissette’s “Ironic.” Will sang “China Girl.” One time Jake came and I was sure he was just going to sit in the corner and break my brain, but then he stood and in a low mumble he sang “Born to Run” and I screamed like a teenager.

  I could place an order at SriPraPhai with my eyes closed. Nicky knew to pour me a big glass of Pouilly-Fuissé as my first shift drink. Simone said I had a palate for “broader” whites, which to me meant they stretched across the width of my tongue. I bought myself a cashmere scarf. I was on track to making $60,000 in a year. I took a lot of cabs.

  —

  I WALKED ACROSS the park in numbed, clipped steps. I was going to wait for Jake at the kitschy Irish pub that none of us went to. Jake and I went there now. Paulie, the bartender, was beginning to know us. I was always cut earlier than Jake, and if I didn’t want to get dragged to Park Bar I had to leave immediately. Then I sat with Paulie and nursed a beer until Jake came. We were usually still there when the cockroaches crawled out by the beer taps. We batted them away and Paulie swung towels at them like a matador.

  That night was the coldest I’d had in New York—Nicky told me he dropped his coffee on the sidewalk and it froze. He said it looked like glass. I wasn’t taking my time across the park, but I stopped when I saw Robert Raffles sleeping on a bench. Will used to buy beer and chips at the bodega to hand them off to Robert when we got on the train.

  At first I didn’t think it was a person on the bench. And though I tried not to look too closely, as I walked I got the vibration of something human, and then I saw Robert’s shoes, or the duct-taped and shredded coverings on his feet that passed for shoes. I thought of the coffee on the sidewalk.

  So I went and roused him. I gave him fifty dollars. I walked him to a shelter.

  No. I didn’t.

  I sped up to a confused shuffle and stepped past him. I told myself he was sleeping. I told myself if he was still there when I came out, I would call the police. But what would they do? Put him in a hospital? A shelter? If I gave him money, would he use it to get warm? Will said Robert had been living in the park for thirty years. He must be aware of the options, the emergency rooms, the subway stations.

  I hit the far end of the park and stopped. My toes were numb, as if I were standing on ice. He was obscured by a trash can, if he was still there, or had ever been there. I ran the rest of the way to Paulie’s, my breath in frozen puffs behind me. I ran into the flat yellow light like I had been chased.

  “I don’t know,” I said, “if he’s still there when I leave, I’ll do something. Maybe…actually, do you guys have any blankets? Maybe there are some blankets at the restaurant. But it’s like, on a night like tonight…” I shrugged. “It’s not a blanket kind of night, do you know what I mean?”

  Paulie nodded, a small, friendly man well into middle age, light on his feet, a charming Irish accent. Exactly what you wanted in a place where shamrocks hung above the booths.

  “It’s a jungle out there,” he said, filling a small beer for himself. “Kitchen’s closing—you want anything?”

  “Can I get some fries? Just the basket thing.”

  I wasn’t hungry. But I had cramps in my stomach, like small alarms. The fries came out damp, and took two extra doses of salt, but they were reassuring.

  “Fuck,” Jake said, slamming the door behind him. “Fucking shit fuck it’s cold.”

  We nodded. He pulled the stool out next to me and I felt guilty about Robert Raffles. But willingly so. It was a jungle. I had to protect my life, my bank account, my commute, my bar stool, some were cold so others could be warm, I didn’t create this system, I said, or did I every time I made those little running steps?

  “Did you see Robert Raffles in the park?”

  “Who?”

  “Robert Raffles, the homeless guy that Will is friends with.”

  “Fucking Will.” Jake grabbed two of my fries and ate them automatically. He saw that I was still looking at him, and he pressed his fingers into my temples. “No one was in the park.”

  Jake slid his cold fingers down the side of my face and started to unwrap my scarf.

  “I like to see your throat,” he said simply.

  No one was in the park. Problem solved. I tilted my chin up when I took a sip of my beer, elongating my neck. What’s happening to me? I asked, but not out loud. He got a beer and fed me cold French fries from cold fingers until both of our cheeks turned pink.

  —

  SERVICE SLOWED. At the restaurant, all our affinities waxed and waned, a definite period of waning as the holidays died away and we faced an interminable amount of deaf winter. We were mean, our tones short, we developed strategies against one another, plotted downfalls, worked ourselves up over small triumphs. You could have safely assumed we hated each other.

  —

  VESELKA, three a.m. I was slowly but surely falling in love with the food of the Eastern Bloc, partly because I finally awoke to the fact that I was living in a city that once housed immigrants from non-Asian countries, countries of endless cold. Mostly though because the food was cheap and Jake hated spending money on food.

  Bowls of borscht in front of us, nothing thin about them, a muscular, magenta soup, sticking to the spoon. Pierogi, boiled, piled with sour cream and horseradish, stuffed cabbage leaking juice into tomato broth. That was how the winter soul was fed.

  When I called Jake a Marxist he said I didn’t understand the word. When I called him a proletariat, he laughed. When I fingered the holes in his wool coat that hung shapelessly to his ankles, when I pointed to the peeling soles of his boots, he laughed. Hours of my life I never got back, in the most acerbic, unsweetened days of winter, trying to make him laugh.

  “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 tes
ting 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.