“I would just be careful what you tell her. She and Howard have this weird thing where she reports on all the servers. Everyone thinks they’re fucking. Once Ariel told Simone something about Sasha and then Sasha got written up. And she has these creepy relationships with Howard’s girls, and then they disappear in the middle of the night. I don’t know, she’s fine, but she’s been there too long, she gets bored, makes trouble.”
“I don’t believe that. I get the feeling that she’s genuinely interested in helping me.” It’s not that I expected Will to get her. She probably barely tolerated him. But the rest of it disoriented me. “What are Howard’s girls? What do you mean they disappear?”
“Never mind, doll,” he said. He finished his beer, and I knew I had to decide if we were staying for another round. It felt like a mistake to get drunk before four p.m., but it would be worth it if I could get him to keep talking.
“Maybe you softened her up,” he said and his eyes went past me. “Speak of the devil. I forgot this was her neighborhood.”
I turned and there she was, in a black shift dress, looking so petite I would have looked right past her. I flipped back into the booth, chafing. This wasn’t Park Bar; this was my day off. I wanted Simone to think I was nude modeling for painters or drinking absinthe with musicians, or at the Guggenheim, where she’d told me to go, or even that I was alone at a bar with a book being sophisticated. How could I have been stupid enough to be drinking with Will?
“Do you think she heard us?” I whispered. “We should go.”
“What? You were just saying—”
“I’m sick,” I said. “I mean, I don’t feel well. This beer isn’t sitting well. I have to go home.”
“Are you okay?”
“Will, I’m sorry, we can do this again, but I—” I could feel her eyes on us, there was no way to miss us in the four hundred square feet. I took a breath and felt a hand on my shoulder.
“Aren’t you two a lovely pair.” She held a paperback book with a French title in her hand and smelled like gardenias. I wished Will would die.
“We’re not. We were just talking about work stuff,” I said. “Sorry, hi Simone. I like that dress. Lovely to see you too.”
“So you’re off today, huh?” Will said, a little coolly, I thought.
“Yes, I’m just meeting a friend. And I think Jake will be by later.”
I finished my beer. “I—”
“I finally got her outside of work,” Will said, showing me off.
“Oh, is she so elusive?” Simone said with a derisive smile.
“I’m not.” I stood up. “I’m just, upset, I have an upset stomach, I mean.” I pulled up my purse and put five dollars on the table. “Will, I’m sorry, next time.”
I did not look back. Once I hit Second Avenue, I threw my arm up. I understood why taxis were so essential to life in the city, even with those of us who couldn’t afford them. Desperation.
—
AS I STARTED up the stairs to find more straws, Jake was coming down. He brushed the back of his hand against my hand. I stared at it, but my hand looked the same. There had been an explosion, but no collapse. I spent the next five hours sleepwalking, wondering whether he had touched me with intention.
—
EVERYTHING WAS over my head. The senior servers, the bartenders especially, had doctorates in talking shit to guests. They could skim any topic. You couldn’t stump them. The briefness of these interactions meant their casual expertise was never exposed as groundless.
As I overheard it, to be good at this job you needed to know the city, but also how to leave the city. Which was hard for me to imagine, since I found the idea of traveling to the Upper West Side daunting. Everyone had a cursory knowledge of the East Coast weekend retreats: not just upstate and Connecticut, but unlisted antiques stores in the Hudson Valley, small towns in the Berkshires, lakes in the Northeast Kingdom. Beaches were their own category, divided mainly between the Hamptons and the Cape, and again, the specific towns were identity badges.
You knew which shows were at which galleries, and it was a given that you attended the museums regularly. When asked whether you had seen Manet’s execution paintings (and you were going to be asked by someone taking a late lunch after visiting MoMA), you were either on your way or had already seen them in Paris. You had opinions about opera. If you didn’t, you politely implied it was too bourgeois. You knew what was playing at Film Forum, and you corrected anyone who lumped Godard and Truffaut together.
You knew trivia from the guests’ lives: where couples got married, where men traveled for business, what kinds of projects they were working on and the deadlines. You knew where they’d gone for undergrad and what they’d dreamed of doing while they were there. You knew names of the towns where they kept their mothers in Florida. You asked about the absent colleague/husband/wife.
You knew the players on the Yankees and Mets, you knew the weather, more about predicting the weather than any meteorologist. You were a compendium of disposable information that people burned up while they drank and escaped their lives.
And the most peculiar part was how none of it mattered to them. One push through the kitchen doors and they were back to food, sex, drinking, drugs, what bar had opened, what band was playing where, and who had been drunkest the night before. Once I saw someone throw a rag in Scott’s face over a spaghetti carbonara dispute, but I don’t know if anyone held a political belief.
They were so well versed in that upper-middle-class culture—no, in the tastes of upper-middle-class culture—they could all pass. Even most of the cooks had gotten an Ivy League education at Cornell before they spent a second fortune at CIA. They were fluent in rich people. That was the fifty-one percent of it.
—
SCOTT AND HIS COOKS sat on a lowboy postshift, drinking beer. Scott was bitching about Chef: how threatened Chef was by his food, how out of touch Chef was with what was happening in Spain, how Chef had dried up a decade ago. Chef called Scott’s food “subversive” and it was clear that Scott wanted us to see that as a compliment. Jeff and Jared nodded, worshipping. As I eavesdropped I felt an unexpected swing of loyalty toward Chef, toward his food and the restaurant he’d built, even if was “hopelessly out of date.”
The back of house had separate kitchen beer, which sat all night in an iced-down bus tub. One of the interns drained and refilled the ice during service—that task was actually in his job description, I asked him. The beer was genius. The boys could be cut, burned, or crying, but within their line of vision was a bucket of beer that was just theirs.
“New girl, come here, Santos likes you.” They had the newest prep guy that I hadn’t met yet. His skin was stretched and skinny, like a child in a growth spurt’s. He didn’t look much past fifteen.
“Be nice, guys,” I said. I jumped up on the lowboy.
Jared put his arm around Santos and said, “I love Santos. He’s our new friend. Show the new girl that dance we taught you. The dance like a pollo.”
Santos smiled but looked at the floor and didn’t move.
“Ah he’s being shy now. Want a beer?”
Santos took one and they gave one to me as well. I swung my heels against the door. I saw Santos slipping under a fence at the border. Making himself as thin as a coin and rolling through a crack in the wall. They had told me it was so expensive they could only pick one to go. And that once that one landed, it was too dangerous to ever go back.
“Cuántos a?os tiene?” I asked.
“Dieciocho,” he said defensively.
“No es verdad? Eres un ni?o. De dónde eres?”
“Mexico,” said Scott. He finished his beer in three gulps and opened another. “You know I’m not hiring any more filthy Dominicans. Right, Papi?”
Papi was the troll-like man who had spit at me the first day. He nodded with hooded eyes and a vacant smile.
Santos said timidly, “Hablas espa?ol?”
“Sólo un poco. Puedo entender mejor que hablar. Hablas inglés?”
He looked at the kitchen boys to see their reaction.
“Not impressive,” said Scott. “Everyone speaks Spanish here. Bueno, yes?”
They opened new beers and Jared said, “Papi, do the pollo dance.”
Papi knocked out his elbows and flapped them like a chicken and yodeled. He spun in a circle and the boys clapped.