“So you’re sassy, huh?”
“Sassy?” He was still looking at me, jocular, so fucking arrogant. “I have a boyfriend,” I said finally.
The waitress came and poured me a heaping glass of Chablis. It was flabby but acceptable and I thanked her. When I looked back at him he was pulling out his wallet and signaling for his check. Did I believe that? That I was available to everyone unless I invoked Jake? By the time I finished my first dozen and ordered another, I was blissed out. I did wonder though, if people would ever start listening to me.
—
“YEAH, it’s your karaoke song, but I thought it was ironic.”
“Ari, everything can’t be ironic all the time or it would lose its luster.”
“But you can’t be sincerely into Britney Spears. Or I guess you can, but you shouldn’t admit it.”
I was curved on my bar stool, my posture long forgotten, my feet thrumming with the Saturday night-ness of it, the three discordant turns of it, and now a big stunning glass of Pouilly-Fuissé was sliding like glycerin down my throat. Ariel was closing up the coffee station, Will had just joined me, and the rest of the staff was trickling in, beaten up. Ariel was annoyed because she had fucked up too many times and Jake yelled at her.
“Can’t my sincerity count for something? Isn’t it a by-product of honesty? Of course, I’m not like, holding her up as a paragon of virtue.”
“It’s criminal that they let her reproduce.”
“But, late at night, a little drunk, a little sentimental, I watch her old music videos online. The ones from the millennium. And I cry.”
“Did you see the photos of her when she shaved her head?” Will asked. He had his shot of Fernet and a beer, it should have been normal, but he looked so much older than the last time we all sat at the bar for shift drink. I hadn’t looked at him, really looked at him, in a long time. “She looked like a fucking demon.”
“You cry to ‘Hit Me Baby One More Time’?”
“Okay,” I said, pulling up the Pouilly-Fuissé bottle from behind the bar and refilling my glass. “I can’t explain it when everyone’s attacking me. But she’s around my age. And when I was growing up I thought, That’s what a teenager is. I wanted my body to do whatever her body did. She’s so common right? Attainable. She’s not that beautiful, not that talented, but you can’t stop watching her. That’s why it’s always the videos, she’s not something to listen to, she’s something to look at. She’s so powerful, knowing you can’t look away, and then this glint in her eye that she’s just playing. That she’s still a child and she’s played this fantastic joke on you. And then, it’s like, those eyes went vacant. She wasn’t in on the joke anymore. Does that make sense? She was the joke—she didn’t know.”
“Oh my god, this is a tragedy for you? That this bajillionaire, white-trash, drug-addict fuckup with zero moral compass has vacant eyes? She had choices, she’s a grown woman now.”
“But Ari,” I said, straightening my spine, feeling angry and energized by the wine. “I don’t feel like she let me down, I feel like I let her down. Like I was a part of this mob that cannibalized her. And you’re right Will, she looks like a monster in those photos. I’m totally repulsed. And I feel nothing but guilt.”
“I can’t,” Ariel said. She put her hands up. “This is what intelligent women think suffering is? I don’t even know you.”
“So fucking dramatic, Ari, I’m not crafting a rational argument for ‘Why Britney Matters.’ I’m telling you how I feel. Are you pissed at me about something?”
“ ‘Why Britney Matters’ would make a great T-shirt.”
“I’m just questioning your moral fiber—”
“My moral fiber? Because I grew up practicing Britney choreography in the mirror?”
“You know what she represents—”
“Stop.” I finished my glass and when I put it on the bar the stem snapped in my hand. I felt a splinter of glass in my index finger and brushed it away. Everyone down the bar looked at me.
“Come on, Fluff,” said Nick, and glanced at Jake, who kept his eyes on the sink he was cleaning.
“Sorry,” I said. I held the stemless bowl in my hand and lowered my voice. “She doesn’t represent anything. That. Is. My. Point. She was a little girl. A human. It could have been any one of us.”
“I call bullshit, Skip,” Ariel said, “but that’s a nice fairy tale.” She grabbed an empty crate to stock and walked away. Will looked at me.
“I’m tired of her shit,” I said. I collected the pieces of broken glass into the bowl.
“I still like Dave Matthews Band,” he said. “That’s kind of embarrassing.”
“No,” I said. “Nothing you do is ever embarrassing. You’re not a girl.”
I put on my coat, picked up my purse, the broken glass, and pushed off from the bar.
—
HIS ROOM IN a converted loft was painted a pithy blue and felt like a cave on a cold northern ocean. He had one roommate, a street artist called Swan whom I only ever saw in his robe as we passed each other on the way to the bathroom. He looked through me. In contrast to the rugs that covered the living space, the floors were bare in Jake’s room. Tarnished linoleum and a mattress in the center.
He had a wall of windows that got only patches of daylight and looked out onto a fire escape and a boarded-up building.
Touches of an aesthete: the mattress was a Tempur-Pedic and covered in spotless linen sheets. He had collected wooden wine crates and built them into bookshelves. It was an entire wall of books. But unlike Simone, who had everything—sections of poetry, religion, psychology, gastronomy, rare editions of all the capital L literature, and a column of art books that cost more than a year of my rent—Jake had mystery novels and philosophy. That’s it. Pulpy, sooty paperbacks and leather-bound collections of Nietzsche, Heidegger, Aquinas. Mutilated copies of Kierkegaard in their own stack. Some unreturned NYU library books: William James, Aristotle’s Metaphysics, The Odyssey. A black book on anatomy that was large enough to be used as a side table. He’d planted an elegant lamp on the floor next to the bed. It was three feet high and had two hinges in the arm, the bulb set in a dome of cracked, wavy glass.
The walls were blank except for a small area above the shelves where he had stuck pins into black-and-white Polaroids. I saw the camera collection when I came in, hung on hooks in the main room with guitars and two bicycles. It took a while before I asked about the photos. There was a mountain range (“The Atlas,” he said, “that’s in Morocco”). Some grass on a beach (“Wellfleet,” he said, “it’s called beach heather”). A pile of broken bicycles stacked in a pyramid on a cobblestone street (“Berlin”) and her: her hand, actually, blocking the camera, a huge starfish of a hand. The simplistic camera had flattened the image, capturing every line of her hand like it was an engraving. In the underexposed background, I could see—only if I unpinned it and put it under the light while he wasn’t in the room—an exposed, stunning smile.
He was asleep and I was crouched on the floor next to the bed, touching the spines of the books. I reached and unpinned the photo. When I asked him about his tattoos, he rolled his eyes. When I asked him about those photos, he barely tolerated me. But the longer I knew him, the more I saw a system of symbols that must have had some sentimental value. If I asked him to tell me about Morocco or Berlin or Wellfleet, he would digress into the Berbers, or this German artist he knew who grew sculptures out of salt, and stories of gruesome deaths in whaling lore. It reminded me, the way he skirted around those photos, of something Simone had told me during one of our lessons: try not to have ideas about things, always aim for the thing itself. I still did not understand these four photographs, the why of them.
“How’s the investigation going?” he said, startling me. His chest was bare, sheets covering his torso, and he lit a cigarette. I could barely make out his eyes. He didn’t sound mad.
“When was this?” I asked. I took the photo of Simone into bed and lay down o
n my side, leaving inches between us. Still I was too shy to reach out to him first.
“I don’t remember,” he said. He reached out and pulled a piece of my hair, twisting it around his finger and I thought that we were sinking into the blue, the mercurial hours between night and morning.
“Why do you have it up?”
“It’s a good photograph,” he said. Ash fell into the bed and he brushed it away.
“Is it because you love her?”
“Of course I love her. But that’s not a reason to hang a photograph.”
“I think it’s the reason to do a lot of things,” I said carefully.
“You know,” he said, putting his cigarette out and pulling me onto his chest. “It’s not like that with me and her. You know that.”
He was distracting me, he knew his neck distracted me, his hands rolling over my hips distracted me.
“Was it ever like that?” I tried to see his eyes. “Simone’s not ugly.”
“Yeah, she’s not bad.”
“Jake…”
“No.”
“How come?”
He grunted. His knees cracked as he got up. He squinted at his bookshelves, and pulled out a copy of De Anima. An old color photograph fell out. He picked it up and threw it on my lap and jumped over me back into bed. A woman with feathered, golden hair was smiling, holding a baby that looked sternly at the camera.
“That was my mom.”
“Oh,” I said. “They look alike.”
“Tell me about it. Everyone has their shit. I have Simone. I know it’s hard for people outside. But it’s the way it is. She pretty much moved in when my mom died. She was only fifteen, but she raised me, in her fucking haphazard way.”
I didn’t react. I let it sink in and fit into the puzzle I had been putting together of Jake. Motherless. An entire city of orphans. I looked back at the photo of Simone. What would I have given for someone to come and take care of me? I touched the baby’s face in the photo. Those impenetrable, penetrating eyes. “You were unamused even then.”
“It takes a lot to amuse me.”
“How old were you when she died?”
“Eight.”
“How? Did she die, I mean.”
I reached out for him. I used my nails to trace his tattoos and his eyelids shut. I felt the bumps on his key tattoo and thought of Simone wrapped up in her sheets, alone in bed. I wondered what the funny story was, wondered why his tattoo looked like his skin had rejected it, and why hers looked like it had sunk in too far. His breathing deepened.
“That feels good,” he said. I don’t know how much time passed before he said, “Simone told me my mother was a mermaid, and that it had always been her destiny to return to the ocean because it was her real home, and someday she and I would return too. My mother swam away. I think I knew better, even then. I got older, I found the newspapers, I learned what drowning is, I know. But when you asked me that, my first thought was, she swam away and went home. Funny, right? The way we can’t unlearn things even when we know they aren’t true.”
I rolled on top of him, torso on torso, stomachs breathing convex and concave into each other. I thought about saying a lot of grown-up things: I lost my mother too. I think it would have been harder if I’d ever had her, could remember her. I know that trust is impossible with other people, but mostly with yourself because nobody taught you how. I know that when you lose a parent a part of you is stuck there, in that moment of abandonment. I thought about saying, I know you’re falling in love with me too. Instead I said, “I told someone you were my boyfriend.”
“Who?”
“Some guy who was hitting on me.”
“Who? Where?”
“Just some guy.” I had never seen him jealous, or even prickly, except for maybe when we talked about Simone and Howard’s friendship. But his tone had gone from laconic to lucid. “He was like, a fancy rich guy at Grand Central Oyster Bar. He wanted to have oysters with me.”
“You went to Grand Central? Without me?”
“Are you mad or impressed?”
“Annoyed and intrigued. How did it feel?”
“It was totally magic in there, I was thinking we should go back—”
“No, how did it feel telling that guy that you had a boyfriend?”
How did it feel? It felt—possibly, potentially—true. “I don’t know. I mean, he left me alone after I said that. So that was…good.” We looked at each other. I kept resettling my head on the pillow. I was terrified. “How does that make you feel?”
“I’m not big on labels. You like labels?”
“I’m not trying to have a talk about labels.”
“But I will say…” His hands found me again. He traced underneath my breasts. He traced the round part of my stomach. He traced my ribs. I watched his rings. “I don’t want you to eat oysters with anyone else.”
“Really?”
“Yes. I like it when you’re mine.” He pushed me onto my back and my head banged against the wall, hollow. “Now, can I ask you a serious question?”
“Yes,” I said, breathless.
“What does a guy have to do to get a blow job in the morning?”
“It’s the middle of the night.”
“I see three rays of sun over there on the wall.”
“That’s the neon sign from across the street.”
He kept my wrists above my head. He rubbed his chin and lips over my breasts. “Let’s see,” I said. “I got my eight and a half minutes of cuddling, I got the sensitive-man monologue, I got my bohemian ‘nonlabel,’ so I guess I just need…”
“What else for fuck’s sake?”
“A sign,” I said, catching his eyes. He made fun of my tendency to invoke fate. Simone made fun of me too, but said it was very old-world, which was a compliment when we talked about wine. Jake and I looked at each other, and I thought, How can you believe everything is accidental when we’re together and it feels like this?
Suddenly, dozens of pigeons thrashed against the fire escape, their wings flashing the light, hammering the windows, and I said, I don’t think it was out loud, Okay, I accept.
—
WILL CAME DOWN from the mezz whistling, and stopped to drop off the last round of silver at the bar. Nicky and I were down to one guest, Lisa Phillips, who was on that precipice between tears and laughter. Nicky, in retrospect, probably shouldn’t have let her have six glasses of wine, but she was a notoriously exceptional tipper, and her husband, she’d just found out, was leaving her.
“If we can’t let her get drunk here tonight, what good are we to anyone? She came here ’cause it’s a safe place,” Nicky said when I suggested that we should cut her off. So I watched. Her eyes grew unfocused, her mouth gaped, and even her cheekbones seemed to slump.
“Oh, Lisa,” Will said to me. “Who’s gonna pour her into a cab?”
“I think Nick is on it. It’s really sad though. He left her, and the new one is like, my age. She won’t even look at me.”
“Yeah, it’s always about you, huh.”
“Hey!”
“Joking,” he said, his hands up. Lisa’s head dropped onto her arms, and Nicky pulled away the bread basket, then her silverware, then her balled-up napkin. She didn’t move.
“Are you going for one?” Will asked.
“Are you cut already? Nick hasn’t even gotten me the list yet.”
“You want a quick treat for the close?” He touched the tip of his nose with two fingers.
“It’s a bit early,” I said. I polished the glasses and looked at him. “You’re into it during your shift now too?”
“Tonight was an exception. Heather, Simone, Walter—it was diva night on the floor, they ran me fucking ragged.”
“Isn’t it always diva night?” I asked. “You look tired, babe.”
He nodded. I thought of how selfish I had been with him, but couldn’t summon the appropriate guilt. It was another instance of something that failed to hold its prescribed meaning
. He was just a boy.
“I’ll go for one. Save me a stool?”
Mrs. Glass, one of our elderly regulars, approached us. It wasn’t my job, but she reached out with a coat check ticket. The hostess stand was empty.
I never had much use for the coat check room. Occasionally I pulled high chairs from there. The door was already ajar.
For a split second I didn’t see them. I saw empty hangers, a vacuum cleaner, the mop bucket. But sitting in the corner was Misha, with her fake breasts affixed to her bird-boned Ukrainian thinness, and Howard, as dense and secure as another piece of furniture. Misha was perched on his lap sideways, her skirt fanning out over his knees and to the floor. She had her hand over her mouth, like she was afraid of making a noise, and he had one of his hands on the small of her back like he was a ventriloquist.
“Yes?” Howard asked calmly, quizzical eyes. Neither of them moved.
“Sorry,” I said and ran out, shutting the door behind me. My head twitched around in a circle, trying to sense signs of movement in the restaurant, but I was unseen. I remembered Mrs. Glass.
I knocked on the coat check door. There was no sound inside.
“Misha,” I whispered into the door. “I need Mrs. Glass’s coat. I’m sliding the ticket under the door. She’s waiting.”
I ran back to the barista station.
Mrs. Glass was just perceptibly rocking. She inhabited another parallel time, where all faces, all places had been assimilated. Her days were on repeat. Nothing shocked her.
“People are so stupid,” I said under my breath. She turned her ear toward me. “Your coat will be right out.”
Sweetbitter Page 25