Simone’s voice came back to me, but now it also sounded like my voice, a maxim she had pronounced during my endless, deranged training: “You need to do more than keep an eye out for incongruity. You have a blind spot for the unraveling whole.”
—
THE DINING ROOM WAS wrong, misshapen, crude. Howard was texting in the corner where the tables were unmade and pushed together. The restaurant would sit, an empty space anchored in me no matter where I went or what I did.
Jake was at the bar in street clothes. He and Nicky were counting out the drawers for Howard to put in the safe. Nicky said something and Jake laughed. Nonchalantly. And didn’t he do everything nonchalantly—he mixed a drink, he kept his sunglasses on indoors, he flipped a knife out of his pocket, he got his stripes wet when he cleaned the sinks, he put on a record, he ordered for you, he ordered you, took down his guitar, held your lips between his teeth like he had been doing it for years, with no effort, with nothing at stake.
“Jake.” I leaned on the bar, my voice sedate. “Are you going to Old Town? I heard that’s where everyone is going.”
“I’ll meet up with you later.” He didn’t turn around. He didn’t even stop counting.
“Okay. But I might be busy later. Do you want to make a plan?”
Nicky looked between us. The bills flew through Jake’s hands.
“I’ll meet you at Park Bar.”
“When? Aren’t you going to eat? Everyone is going to eat.”
“I’m walking Simone home. I’ll probably eat with her. I’ll meet up with you later?” He didn’t even glance backward. I wadded up a bar napkin and threw it at the back of his head.
“You can at least turn around when you speak to me.”
“What the fuck is wrong with you?” His eyes had gone lethal.
“Hey, hey,” Nicky said. I was ready to climb on the bar and slap him. “Jake, you wanna step outside for a minute? Fluff, be quick, we’ve still got shit to do.”
Outside the air had lost its potential. I crossed my arms over myself defensively.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “But you were being rude.”
His nostrils flared. The wind battered us. I tried again.
“I’m sorry I threw that. But I need to talk to you.”
“Tess, I will see you at Park Bar. I’ve got to walk Simone home. You don’t know her like I do.”
“No one knows her like you do!”
“What’s wrong with you?”
“Me? No, it’s what’s wrong with you guys. Simone is a grown woman, Jake. Maybe she could occasionally walk herself home, or cope with some difficulty without you.”
“Do you not notice that Simone is…” He grunted hesitantly. “Overinvested in this restaurant?”
“She’s overinvested in a lot of things, Jake.”
“I don’t have time for this shit, this is a real situation.”
“A real situation? It’s like free vacation! You love vacation right? We’re going to take a vacation? You and me, no parents, no chaperones?”
“You’re a fucking child. You know the Owner closed down one of his spaces in Madison Square Park? Do you have any awareness of the industry you work in, of how your paychecks work? You think this is great for business? What do you think Simone will do if this place really shuts down? Where would she go?”
“Where would I go, Jake?” Simone could go anywhere, I wanted to say. Then I thought of her being trained in some generic, tableclothed space and I knew what he meant. She had overqualified herself for her own line of work. The thought of her in another uniform was offensive.
“Simone and I can’t just put on a skirt and work at Blue Water, Balthazar, Babbo. Make half the money for double the hours, let a bunch of slimy dudes press up against us in the hutch. I know you’ll be all right with that. Or maybe you’ll finally become a Bedford Avenue barista, your dream—”
“Fuck you!” I screamed. “Your cruelty doesn’t turn me on anymore.” Suddenly he had me by my shoulders squeezing me, crushing me. I pushed him away and yelled, “I know you’re going to France with her.”
“So?” he said. He did not miss a fucking beat. He even shrugged his shoulders.
So. It all came down to this insulting, one-word question.
I had been holding on to the hope that Simone was delusional. After all, it wasn’t his handwriting. But it was me: I was delusional.
At least he was consistent—his enunciation, his expression said that it was nothing. I was too sensitive, dramatic, hysterical. His certainty always disabled my thoughts, like in this moment when I searched for my words, for my anger, and found a void where my reason had been. Something about how Simone was trying to separate us? Something about how he should be going to Europe with me? The only thing that came to me was, “It’s not right.”
The wind came up again like a knife in my back and I was disoriented, Sixteenth Street felt foreign.
“We can talk,” he said, assessing me. “I will see you later.”
I wanted to say, No, I can’t wait, but I nodded. He kissed me, unexpectedly, on the lips. We had never touched at work. Never hugged, never held hands under the table at family meal. I was more affectionate with Papi the dishwasher than I was with Jake. He thought it would pacify me, but it was so pedestrian. A trinket offered in place of jewels. God, how many times I had accepted that.
“Jake,” I said. “You know that key tattoo you have?”
“Are you serious?”
“Okay, okay. Just please find me tonight?”
“I promise.” He held my shoulders and inspected my face. Make it easy, I begged him with my eyes. Fix it. He said, “Take that shit off your lips. You look like a clown.”
—
“WHERE YOU FROM?” Carlos asked me while I smoked outside Park Bar, all my joints soldered together, my body swaying in one monolithic piece. I had a blundering, lost feeling, as if I had been digging tunnels, not knowing if I was going up or down, only that I had no other option but to keep going. My night had gone terribly astray.
I checked my phone again. No texts, just the time. Six hours of drinking, the last four of them at Park Bar. I was accidentally too high, waiting for him, waiting for him. I was sore from the bolts of cocaine flexing my muscles, I was smoking, my nose, throat, and ears burning, he’s not coming, he’s not coming. Too high for talking, my thoughts elbowing each other out of the way, crowding to the front, to a spot on my forehead I kept touching to try and still them. I understood that the boxers in the painting were a metaphor for consciousness, the way the mind divides, combats, and destroys itself.
Carlos was in front of me, gleaming, his shoes shined, his hair slicked with pomade, his diamond earrings, which he insisted were real. They were his grandmother’s in the Dominican Republic, they were on loan because he was her favorite. He and I had grown closer since I’d sold him my car for $675. It was the exact amount I owed the city in overdue parking tickets. I was pretty sure he’d flipped the car for more money, but I got discounts on my bags so it seemed a fair deal.
“Where are you from again?” he asked.
“Have you seen Jake?”
“Which one is Jake?”
“The bartender. Always looks homeless. Crazy eyes.”
“Yeah, yeah, your bartender over there. The one that used to hook up with Vanessa.”
“Ha,” I said. “Yeah, yep, that’s Jake. Funny you say that because I was just thinking about the women Jake has fucked and I was thinking we should form a band or something, maybe a book club. Maybe all go on a vacation even.”
He held his hands up. “I know nothing. I don’t even know when that was.”
“Of course, no one knows anything, let’s not get involved, let’s not have a real conversation with dates and facts and names and places because we might be held accountable and that, that, would be a catastrophe for some of us, we would have to remove our sunglasses, or lipstick, whatever, the apparatus, and we would have a proper trial, with judges and evi
dence and verdicts, and some of us would be clean and some of us would be dirty.”
“You’re pretty up there, huh?” He whistled and it sounded like cuckoo.
“I’m done, I’m fine. I can wait it out.”
“You want something to help?”
“I don’t do hard stuff. Like heroin, I don’t do heroin.”
“Yeah, I know, none of you rich kids do heroin.” He winked at me.
“Why would we when you keep us up to our eyeballs in shitty coke? Don’t fucking wink at me.”
“Girl, you are mouthy tonight!” He smiled and handed me another cigarette. I hadn’t realized I was gripping the leftover filter, pinching it. “I like it, you got your teeth bared and shit. I was talking about Xanax, niña, shit your mama gave you when you got nervous about the SATs. I never seen you so tense.”
“My mother never did that,” I said. My bones were sharp, my skin wasn’t thick enough to hold them, but I enjoyed Carlos and his kitschy moves. Thank god for Carlos. “I will take a Xanax, actually. How much?”
“First time’s always free, niña.”
“Oh Jesus, you’re really going to make me feel filthy about this aren’t you? What is that? It doesn’t look the same.”
“It’s a Xanibar. Just take a small piece. Should last you a few days depending on what kind of fiesta you’re on.”
“I’m not on a fucking fiesta, I’m in fucking hell.”
“Still works the same.”
“My friends will kill you if I die.”
I broke off a piece and chewed it up. I grabbed someone else’s fairly full beer from inside the open window and chased it. We looked back through the windows. Will, Ariel, Sasha, Parker, Heather, Terry, Vivian—all listening to Nicky hold court on one of his rare forays to Park Bar. I couldn’t face him like this, with my clenched, throbbing molars, my twitching hands. Everyone was there—except Jake and Simone, of course—telling and retelling the story of the inspection, speculating about what had really happened, what would happen. Normally I excelled in that gratifying, circular talk, hours slipping by while we filled space with drinking and reinforcing the same stories, never coming up with different endings.
“I think your friends forgot about you,” Carlos said.
“You think that. But I’m their pet. Their puppy. They need me to follow them around.” I ran my tongue over my lips and they were serrated. I tasted blood, I thought of him. “Actually we don’t even have to call them my friends. Let’s call them the people I spend time with. Or actually—this is funny—let’s call them my coworkers. It’s just dinner!”
“I heard about your place. That’s really fucking crazy. If we got shut down—”
“We didn’t, we voluntarily closed to perform repairs—”
“Steve would have our throats. I mean it, I would be sprinting out the door, never look back.”
“The Owner came by.”
“Oh shit—who got fired?”
“No one.” I thought back to the reverence, the hush, and it was as if I saw him pulling his hands together to calm us and I calmed. “He thinks we’re wonderful.”
Carlos shook his head. “You drank the Kool-Aid, huh?”
I nodded. Everything. Felt. Better. “I love the Kool-Aid.”
I leaned against the windowsill and sipped my beer. The weather was schizophrenic, appealing one minute, aggressive the next, frenetic, like water breaking from a dam.
“Ohio,” I said. “Thank you for asking.”
“I got cousins there.”
“You don’t.”
“Ay, niña, I got cousins everywhere. Speaking of, one of them is picking me up, we got errands. But he’s holding some grade-A shit.”
“Enticing. But I think I’m finally becoming happy. I think I mastered life, right here on this windowsill. I don’t want to move too much.”
“You sure? Where you meeting your man? We could drop you.”
“My man?”
Jake was quicksand. Hours ago my plan had been to talk to him rationally, he had promised. Maybe he hadn’t bought the tickets yet, maybe he wouldn’t go for the whole month, maybe I could meet them. But at that moment I didn’t want him. The man I was totally and completely devoted to was going away with another woman, and I was so fucking blind and tolerant that they thought I wouldn’t have a shred of feeling about it. Or perhaps they simply didn’t care. Finally—facts not colored by the weather or the voices and visions in my head. I didn’t want anything: not a drink, not a line, not a snack, I didn’t even want to fidget. It was the freest I’d felt in months.
The city does sleep, the windows darken and the streets vacate. New York dreams us. Wild, somnambulistic creatures, we move unhurried toward our own disappearance at dawn.
“Tess, that’s not your beer.” Will’s voice was far away. He was inside the plush noise of the bar and holding a spotless beer in his hand.
“I can’t hear you,” I said. I reached my hand out to touch the glass between us. I touched his face instead.
“Are you okay?” He grabbed my hand. The day rushed back to me. I fell backward, slapping the ground.
“I’m fine.” Will’s hands, Carlos’s hands, lifting me. “No more man hands.”
“Come inside,” Will said. I squirmed but his hand was stuck on my back.
“Carlos, are you going east?”
“You’re not going with him,” Will said, and now his hand was stuck to my shoulder. “Are you crazy? You can’t get into a car with a drug dealer.”
“Don’t be racist Will, now please leave me alone. I’m going east.”
“Donde, niña?”
“Ninth between First and A.” As I said it a black car with tinted windows pulled up. The front window rolled down when Carlos approached. I pulled my purse out of the bar through the window and put my beer inside it.
“Hi Carlos’s cousin,” I yelled out. “Simone’s house, please.” I opened the door and climbed over the seats with astonishing grace.
V
THROWING UP mostly water. Throwing up curds in mostly water. Throwing up in your lap. Throwing up in your purse. Men yelling. Red and green blistered lights out the window. Gravitational forces on you instead of a seat belt. Your face smashing into the seat back. You tried to hold on but you were thrown like a doll.
—
TO THEIR CREDIT, I was dropped off exactly where I asked to be and given a bump of grade-A shit. The front of my shirt was slick. The sidewalk felt dented. When I tried to stand up out of the car, my knees caved.
“Don’t blame yourself, Carlos,” I said. I felt in control as I consoled him. “I made some bad choices, you are not to blame.”
Carlos and his cousin sped off sharply, squealing, and I leaned against a wall. I watched a couple walk out of their way to distance themselves from me and I laughed at how bad my shirt smelled. I dug into my purse and it was soaking wet. I shook beer off my phone and it miraculously clicked on.
Hi, Simone, I texted. It’s Tess.
Hi!!!
You said we could talk.
I’m outside actually. If that’s ok.
I am going to ring the bell probably cause you’re not responding.
Oh look whose bike I see!
Hi Jake!!!
Maybe you can just ask him to talk to me, cause I know he’s there.
I’m sorry. I know it’s late for you. You’re old.
I’m not mad about France. No big d.
We got in a stupid fight, but it wasn’t that much.
Simone!!!
I’m going to ring the bell again, I’m warning you.
Ok, no one is answering, I’m going home.
Tell Jake I’m sorry and I hate him, whatever order you want.
I’m sorry that was me again, I know you’re home.
I see his motherfucking bike.
France hurts my feelings.
I’m leaving.
Also, I’m sorry the restaurant closed. I care a lot. Too.
Simone
, if you’re good at this job, what exactly are you good at?
—
I REMEMBER the sickly green Heineken light in the window of Sophie’s. I remember the bathroom, my hand slipping every time I tried to cut a line. I remember my eyes in the mirror. I remember the coke spilling into the sink. I remember the back of my thigh being pinched between the trash can and the wall when I was pushed against it. I remember someone’s tongue, not being able to breathe. I remember my cheek on exfoliated concrete. The rest is a blessed darkness.
—
THE FIRST TIME I woke up was a false alarm. My skin registered clothing, and I reached into my jeans pocket where I kept pills and broke off another piece of the Xanibar and swallowed it. There was a glass of water next to the bed, but I didn’t surface enough to reach for it.
When I woke up again it was to a sunset I didn’t deserve. Not just me, no one could deserve it except newborns, the untarnished, the language-less. I stayed perfectly still and the ceiling was violet. I searched myself for signs of pain, for the inevitable headache. All seemed calm. I took a bigger breath, preparing my body to sit up. My ceiling pinked and blushed. The windows were wide open. The wind had wrecked every book, shirt, or slip of paper. It was freezing.
I moved my neck first, craned it, looking down. My jeans were on. My Converse were off, but my ankle socks were on, evidence of an outside presence. I didn’t remember getting to my bed or to my apartment. I sat up a bit more.
From my tailbone the shame started and with it came prongs of pain up my spine until it hit the base of my skull. I looked reluctantly at my shirt and moaned. The vomit had dried but the blood was still damp in spots on my breasts and at the collar. It had already dried and rusted out on the pillowcases. I touched my nose and flakes of blood came back on my fingers. There was a note safety-pinned to my shirt: “Please text me so I know you’re alive, Your Roommate, Jesse.” I patted the bed for my phone. It was dead and there were beer droplets inside the screen. Movement made me ill. I ran to the bathroom, turned on the shower, and threw up. There wasn’t much of anything left. Just extraordinarily gratifying dry heaves. My first real thought was, Shit, what time am I in today?
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