Sweetbitter

by Stephanie Danler

  —

  IF I AM QUALIFIED to give advice on anything, it is probably a hangover. Advil, marijuana, and greasy breakfast sandwiches from the bodegas do not work. Don’t listen to chefs—they will have you drinking five-day-old beef stock or reheated menudo or pickle brine or wolfing down bags of White Castle burgers at five a.m. Mistakes, all of them.

  Xanax, Vicodin, or their opiate/Benzedrine cousins, Gatorade, Tums, and beer do work. Dirty Dancing, The Princess Bride, Clueless. They work. Bagels sometimes work, but not with anything on them besides cream cheese. You think you want lox, but you don’t. You think you want bacon, but you don’t. Salt will promote your headache. You think you want Ritalin, Adderall, meth, any kind of speed. You don’t. You’re fucked for at least six hours, so the goal is to numb out.

  Toast works. Before you leave for your night out, leave yourself bread, a big bottle of your preferred color of Gatorade, a handful of prescription drugs, and a note with an emergency contact. I had none of these things.

  —

  SOMEWHERE IN the middle of the night, as I watched old DVDs of Sex and the City on my beaten-up laptop, my lids barely qualifying as open, my hangover transitioned into a fever. I was irritated that my computer screen was shaking, until I realized that it was on my stomach—I was so hot that I kept throwing off my sheets, my clothes, but the shaking was me, shivering.

  Initially my sheets were stiff, my skin brittle. I touched my forehead and the sweat released. My pillows were wet. Then the heat rose again, chasing me. I couldn’t catch my breath. I searched the apartment but there wasn’t anything, not even Advil.

  I put my winter coat over my pajamas and hid my head under a wool cap. I thought of Mrs. Neely when I was on the stairs, clutching the railing, talking to myself. It wasn’t that cold when I got outside. Sweat was running down my sides and from my hairline. The bodega was two doors away, but I couldn’t get there standing up straight.

  “It’s you!” the Pakistani owner said.

  “Hello.” I held myself in the door frame. He and I had developed a fondness for each other over the months.

  “You remember me last night?” He came out from behind the bulletproof glass.

  “No, sir, I do not.”

  “You need to be more careful. It’s not safe for young girls like you.”

  “I’m sick, sir.”

  “You’re all red in the face.”

  “Yes, I’m sick.” I rolled through a wave of nausea. “I need medicine.”

  “You need rest. You can’t live like this.”

  “I have no intention of living like this much longer.” He didn’t understand me. “I will rest, I promise, I promise.”

  My vision faded, browning. I got scared and sat down on a stack of New York Times. I heard myself making sounds like crying, but there were no tears on my face, just sweat at my temples, behind my ears. He had his hand on my back.

  “Can I call someone?”

  “Please, I just need medicine. I have a fever and I’m alone. I need stuff like what a mom would get.”

  He called out into the back and his wife came out. She looked at me like I was a criminal. He talked to her in another language and I took pauses between each breath, reassuring myself that I was still alive. The wife made her way around the store: Advil, water, a box of saltines, two apples, tea, a can of lentil soup. She pulled down a bottle of liquid NyQuil, assessed me, and put it back. She came over with the individually packaged capsules instead.

  “Only two,” she said.

  “Your girls are good girls. He’s so proud of them,” I said to her. He had shown me photos of them many times. The eldest was in high school in Queens, applying to Ivy League colleges. I couldn’t take her pity when she handed me the bag of items with no charge. I accepted because I hadn’t brought my wallet.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “There’s no excuse.”

  I don’t know how long it took me to get home. I thought about falling down and waiting for the police to come and take me to the hospital. I thought about screaming out, Someone please take care of me. I pressed against a rolled-down steel gate, spitting onto the concrete. The streets were empty. It was just me. So I said, Fuck, it’s just you. I climbed the stairs cursing, dry heaving. I made the mint tea they had given me. I wrapped an ice pack in paper towels and put it on my forehead and when it got warm I put it back in the freezer. I shook, I sweat, I cried, I held myself, I mumbled in and out of sleep. It went on like that, more or less, for two days.

  —

  Do you know what I was, how I lived? That refrain ran through my head as I took the train into work. I was a gaunt reflection in the spotty windows, but possessed of a sparkling sense of clarity. That was a line from a poem I couldn’t remember. I don’t know when I’d started quoting poems. I don’t know when I’d started ignoring the flowers as I walked through the Greenmarket.

  I stopped in front of the large window on Sixteenth Street, wanting to see if it looked different. Flower-Girl was conducting her botanic orchestra and behind her they were pulling down the chairs. The servers were congregated at the end of the bar, where Parker was making espressos. How much I had taken for granted: being excited to walk through the door every day, making rounds to say hello to everyone, even in the days when no one responded. Flower-Girl singled out a branch of lilac. I had smelled them since I’d come up from the train: cloying, heavy, human—but unripe, like a cold-climate Sauvignon Blanc. That was the full circle, wasn’t it? Learn how to identify the flowers and the fruits so I could talk about the wine. Learn how to smell the wine so I could talk about the flowers. Had I learned anything besides endless reference points? What did I know about the thing itself? Wasn’t it spring? Hadn’t the trees shaken out their greens to applause? Isn’t this what you dreamed of, Tess, when you got in your car and drove? Didn’t you run away to find a world worth falling in love with, saying you wouldn’t care if it loved you back?

  The lilacs smelled like brevity. They knew how to arrive, and how to exit.

  —

  “EVERYONE WAS WORRIED,” Ariel said.

  “I came by and rang the buzzer,” Will said.

  “I told them we speed-dial police if you don’t show today,” Sasha said.

  Whatever changes they had made to the restaurant were barely noticeable. We did have new sinks behind the bar. It was a lunch shift and I didn’t talk much. My head was still in the isolation of my rancid bedroom. I was unshakable.

  They did not arrive together, though I suppose they never did. Simone came in first. I went to the locker room and sat on a chair in the corner. I had no plan, but when she came in she was not surprised to see me. We were following a script that I hadn’t seen yet.

  “I’m relieved you’re all right,” she said.

  “I’m alive.”

  She fiddled with her locker combination. I saw her go through it twice.

  “I did not receive your texts until much later,” she said, maybe the first time in her life she had been the one to break a silence. “I don’t check my phone at that hour.”

  “Of course.”

  “I was very worried.”

  “Of course. I could tell.”

  “I texted you back.”

  “My phone is broken.”

  “Tess.” She faced me. She buttoned up her stripes and slipped out of her jeans. She looked clownish in that giant shirt.

  “There is so much I don’t know. I accepted it. That’s life, right? I mean, what do you guys even really know about me? But I am an honest person. What you see is what you get.”

  “Do you think someone has been dishonest?”

  “I think you people are so far gone you don’t know what honest means.”

  “The idealism of my youth—”

  “Stop.” I stood up. “Stop. I see you.”

  “Do you?”

  “You’re a cripple.” I was surprised at how accurate it felt. “You don’t care about anyone but yourself. You certainly don’t care about
him.”

  She paused.

  “Perhaps,” she said. She went back to dressing.

  “Perhaps! You think I’m stupid. I’m not. I was just hopeful.”

  She moved to the mirror and took out her cosmetics bag. I watched the concealer go onto the dark circles under her eyes. She pressed the matte paste against her crow’s-feet. She dropped her chin while she put on mascara. How had I never seen how morose her eyes were? She wore the lipstick to distract from them.

  “You are blessed with a rare sensitivity,” she said. “It’s what makes people artists, winemakers, poets—this porous nature. However.” She paused and blinked her mascara into place. “You lack self-control. Discipline. And that is what separates art from emotion. I do not think you have the intelligence yet to interpret your feelings. But I do not think you are stupid.”

  “Jesus, that’s lovely.”

  “It’s the truth. You can take it.”

  “You both enjoy saying that. You love the truth as it applies to everyone else.”

  “I never lied to you, Tess. I kept him away from you for as long as I could. I was explicit about what you were dealing with.”

  “It’s not normal, Simone, you both going away like this, not even bothering to tell me. It’s not right.”

  “Jake and I haven’t traveled together in ages, it’s overdue.”

  “Was I really so threatening?”

  “Don’t flatter yourself.”

  “Why don’t you just take him?” I said. “Just take him, have him.”

  She turned back to me and said, immaculately, “Oh, little one, I don’t want him.”

  I pressed my hands into my eyes. Of course. She wanted a Mr. Bensen, Eugene, someone to deliver her to the rarefied world that she had always been entitled to but never able to access permanently. Not Jake, who wore the same underwear for days on end without noticing. She had been seducing and rejecting him since he was a child, and of course she didn’t actually want him. And yet, I realized, looking at her—she swiped her lips, she swiped, and swiped, and I still saw her immovable, sad eyes—those men were gone, and he was all she had.

  “I pity you,” I said. My voice had lost its conviction.

  “You pity me?” When she turned to me she wore the most antagonizing smile.

  “You can have your diligence. And your self-control, and your cynicism disguised as professionalism, and your stunted ambition. I mean, honestly Simone, what the fuck are you going to do? Are you going to get it through your head and leave or are they going to have to retire you? I guess we’ll never know, all of us will be gone.”

  Venom rose in her, colliding with mine. I loved it, I could feel her enjoying me, and I was ready for it, for whatever she threw at me because I would have time to revise. She couldn’t really hurt me, I was young, buoyant—

  Jake opened the door. We both turned to him. He was winded.

  “Well, here we are,” I said.

  He looked back and forth between us. Simone walked out, the door slammed. I could tell he had just woken up. His eyes were unadjusted to light and had a patina on them that could have been feelings, could have been pills, could have been sleep. He reached for me and I went unthinkingly.

  “I looked for you,” he said.

  I laid my head on his chest. He smelled like a deeper layer of earth, a secret blue room I kept in Chinatown. He kissed my forehead.

  “No,” I said, inhaling him. “No, you didn’t.”

  —

  I ACCEPTED his invitation to Clandestino for a nightcap and an overdue conversation. I left immediately after my lunch shift, skipping my shift drink for perhaps the first time since I’d learned of its existence. When I got home I poured myself a big glass of sherry and waited. The Shabbat sirens shot out over Williamsburg. I watched the sun set and the pigeons loop and swerve and reunite with their coops on the rooftops. I sat and waited while the night attached to the corners of buildings. Drums beat steadily. I ate canned sardines on toast and half a jar of cornichons and waited. He needed me. I hadn’t mistaken that. I thought maybe we could survive without her blessing.

  I wanted to see Jake repentant. The ugly truth was that I could forgive him anything as long as he still desired me. And, I thought as I walked into Clandestino, that wasn’t all of it—the need, the desire. Not anymore. When Jake and I had been fucking these past months, our binges on each other were constructing something behind our backs: the stubborn stains of intimacy marked our hands. I had to see if that could hold us on our own.

  “Oh, it’s Tessie,” said Georgie. “What brings a real lady this far downtown?”

  “Meeting my friend,” I said. “How’s it going tonight?”

  “Dead.” He shrugged. “First nice night, people are too happy for drinking.”

  “New Yorkers are never too happy for drinking.” I pulled up a stool. “I’ll just take a lager, whatever is up there.”

  “You guys like the Brooklyn, right?”

  “Yes, we do.” I wanted to cry but batted my lashes instead. “Brooklyn would be lovely.”

  I realized that “Fake Plastic Trees” was playing over the speakers. I hadn’t listened to it in years and when I had, on repeat, in the bathtub, I hadn’t really understood what it meant to be worn out. I couldn’t shrug the song off. So I sighed and said to Georgie, with my face in my hands, “Misery. Will you just turn it up?”

  I didn’t even notice when Jake was next to me.

  “Hey,” he said. There were lilacs in his hand. He apologized for being late. Jake’s crooked teeth, the stubble hiding the sharpness of his chin, those otherworldly eyes, the lilacs and their melancholy, narcissism, mystery. He touched my cheek, but I was still in the song. His touch felt like a faded reproduction of something that had once knocked me off my feet. “You’re so skinny.”

  “I was sick.”

  “That sucks.” He nudged the flowers toward me. “Don’t you like lilacs?”

  “You know they’re my favorite,” I said. “You want a prize for paying attention?”

  I moved them to the side, and Jake put his helmet up on the bar. Georgie set down Jake’s beer and retreated from our silence. Jake sipped and I matched him.

  “I saw your bike. At her house. One of the few things I remember from that night.”

  He didn’t say anything.

  “Because I blacked out.” It sounded accusatory because it was.

  He turned on me. “You think it impresses me that you know how to hurt yourself?”

  I leveled his gaze back at him. “Yes. I do.”

  He wanted to bite me. He wanted to pull my hair out. I could see it churning in him, his eyes, his chest, his fingers. It was unavoidable: the ignition when he reached for me, how I would strain against my clothes to get closer to him, how his breathing would turn ragged, a sound that made my body liquefy, and we would stop thinking.

  “I’m pissed,” I said, leaning back from him. That was the first time I didn’t throw myself on top of the fire he laid before me. The restraint made me feel old.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, as if he’d just remembered the protocol. “Seriously, I wanted to meet you, I was going to. I fully intended to—”

  “This is the part where you give me the excuse.”

  “I fell asleep over there.”

  I tore off tiny shreds of my napkin.

  “You fell asleep in her bed is what you meant to say.”

  “Come on, you know it’s not—”

  “Like that. Yes, I know it’s not like that. Not everything is something.”

  He coughed.

  “Here’s something: She’s bad for you. She would abandon you without a moment’s notice.”

  It was like he hadn’t heard me. “I know how she gets, but she comes around. You will too. We’re all a little off from the restaurant being closed.”

  “No,” I said. “You’re not hearing me. I will not be placated, Jake. You two have never let anyone close because you would have to look at how fuck
ed up it is, whatever it is. You would have to explain why a grown man and woman who are not together still share a bed, vacation together, or why you’ve never had a real relationship with another woman. You’re thirty years old, Jake. Don’t you want a real life?”

  “There’s no such thing as a real life, princess. This is it, take it or leave it.”

  “Enough with the life-is-short-and-painful-and-you-die-alone bullshit. What a fucking scam that is, you never have to take any risks. You deserve better.”

  His knee was bouncing; I watched the anxiety tense him, like when he got restless behind the bar. I rested my hand on his thigh and it stilled.

  “You shouldn’t go to France for a month. You hate the French and their smug, racist version of socialism.” I elicited a smile. All my reliable tricks. I had a new one to try on him tonight. It was directness. It was truly my last one.

  “I want you to quit with me. Or we can transfer. You need a change and I want to be a server.”

  He cleared his throat. We kept drinking. I felt alone like I hadn’t since before I moved to the city, like I would never connect with another person for as long as I lived.

  “Just think about it,” I said. My voice was desperate; I heard it but couldn’t control it.

  “I have.” He blinked rapidly. He looked up at the lights. I kissed his hands and filthy fingernails. So many things he never said. I wondered who Jake would be if he said all the things.

  “Say it.”

  “I remember the first time I saw you.”

  “That’s all I get?”

  “You surprised me.” That was all I was going to get. I said, “I remember the first time I saw you too.”

  Barbs of nostalgia sank in me, bringing a terrible weight, ringing with distance that I resisted. I had vowed to myself—since that first day of this new life—to stay in the present tense, to keep my eyes forward. I think his hands were on my neck, in my hair.