My heart stopped. I thought those oysters were ours. But Simone betrayed nothing. She wore the same satisfied face she had when she accepted compliments from guests at the end of the meal. He was fearless with her. I couldn’t imagine anyone else in the restaurant teasing her to her face.
“I don’t need protection,” I said suddenly. Stupidly. They turned on me, and I shrank.
The same thin-lipped, austere smiles. But through Simone’s eyes, as she appraised him as having the potential to be related to her, I saw a streak of adoration pass and land on him—it was so unmistakable it was almost hued.
“Sometimes I feel like you guys are related or something.”
“Once upon a time,” he said.
“Our families were close,” she explained.
“She was the girl next door—”
“Oh Jesus, Jake—”
“Now she’s my warden—”
“I’m quite benevolent—”
“And omniscient, omnipotent—”
“Yes, it’s quite a burden—”
“And now I’ve got a classic case of Stockholm syndrome.”
Their laughter was closed, held back from me, laughter that ran along a private line. He left abruptly and Simone looked at me.
“Where were we?”
“You’re the girl next door?”
Any lingering lightheartedness faded. That was reserved for him.
“We’re from the Cape. We grew up together in a way.”
“Okay,” I said. “Do you like his girlfriend?”
“Jake’s girlfriend.” She smiled.
“Yeah, that Vanessa or something.”
“I do not know a Vanessa or something. Jake’s a private man. Perhaps you should ask him.”
I reddened and put my hands in my apron, mortified. “I just thought it must matter. If you thought she was cool or whatever. ’Cause you guys are close.”
“Have you thought about what you want from your life?”
“Um. I don’t know. I mean, honestly…”
“Do you hear yourself?”
“What?”
“?‘Cool or whatever,’ ‘Um, I don’t know,’ ‘I mean, honestly.’ Is that any way to speak?”
God, I was melting. “I know. It’s a problem when I’m nervous.”
“It’s an epidemic with women your age. A gross disparity between the way that they speak and the quality of thoughts that they’re having about the world. They are taught to express themselves in slang, in clichés, sarcasm—all of which is weak language. The superficiality of the language colors the experiences, rendering them disposable instead of assimilated. And then to top it all, you call yourselves ‘girls.’?”
“Um…I don’t know what to say now.”
“I’m not attacking you, just calling your attention to it. Isn’t that what we are discussing? Paying attention?”
“Yes.”
“Did I scare you?”
“Yes.”
She laughed and ate a grape.
“You,” she said. She grabbed my wrist and pressed two fingers onto me as if taking my pulse and I stopped breathing. “I know you. I remember you from my youth. You contain multitudes. There is a crush of experience coursing by you. And you want to take every experience on the pulse.”
I didn’t say anything. That was in fact a very eloquent expression of what I wanted.
“I’m giving you permission to take yourself seriously. To take the stuff of this world seriously. And to start having. That’s abundance.”
I waited for her to go on. Nobody had ever spoken to me like that in my life. She cut me a piece of the cheese and handed it to me—“The Dorset,” she said—and it tasted like butter but dirtier, and maybe like the chanterelles she kept touching. She handed me a grape and when I bit it I found the seeds with my tongue and moved them to the side, spit them into my hand. I saw purple vines fattening in the sun.
“It’s like the seasons, but in my mouth,” I said. She humored me. She cracked whole walnuts with a pair of silver nutcrackers. The skins on the nuts felt like gossamer wrappings. She brushed the scattered shells onto the floor, with the grape seeds, the pink cheese rinds.
—
LET’S BE GENEROUS and say that I understood about seventy percent of what Simone said to me. What I didn’t misunderstand was the attention that she gave me. Or that by being close to her, I was always in proximity to him. There was an aura that came from being under her wing, with its exclusive wine tastings and cheese courses—the aura of promised meaning.
When she touched my pulse I felt so vulnerable, like she could stop it if she wanted to. I had an awareness that I would die. I hid from that thought, as I had trained myself to do, but it came back to me when I was walking home from the train late that night. The silent purples of the warehouses and oily black of the river seemed to be watching me. The streets seemed to be breathing, then they seemed to be disappearing. I could see them being erased. I had that feeling of never having existed at all, which I could only call my sense of mortality. It inflamed me. More. That was the result: more got into my bloodstream and ran rampant.
—
“HEY, FLUFFER, come get the list,” Nicky said. Some nights that man came in here to play, his hair newly shorn, his ears sticking out, looking like an eight-year-old wanting to be chased. And some nights he clocked in looking so tired he was gray. “Never have kids” was all he said to me when I asked if he was feeling okay. But tonight he had run around with an impish smirk on his face as if he’d just gotten laid.
“What did you call me?”
“Fluffer. That’s your name. You look like a Fluffer.”
“My name is Fluffer.” I stated it, confused.
“It fits.”
I took the list from him. “Like a fluffer in a porno? The girl that sucks dick in between takes to keep the guys hard?”
“There she is!” He clapped his hands. “See, you’re not so new after all. So let’s go, Fluff, I don’t wanna be stuck here all night.”
I put my head down. I was about to walk away, but I had a sensation I hadn’t felt in weeks. I started laughing. Really laughing. It came up from my feet.
“You’re saying I make you hard, Nick?”
He pulled his glasses down his nose and regarded me.
“Nah, you’re not my type. But you kept me going all night, that’s for sure.” He winked at me. “You did all right tonight.”
I ducked into the cellar with the milk crate. The sign above the door said Beware of Sediment and I started laughing again. It took me a long time to restock. I was still terribly inefficient. But I brought up bottles he hadn’t put on my list, things I’d seen him sell and knew he needed. I swept the room too, still grinning.
—
A LOT OF WHAT I couldn’t place about Simone was explained to me with the sentence, “She lived in Europe.”
I don’t know how a phrase so vague explained why Simone could drink without getting drunk. Why she had such an affected way of speaking, like a retired professor at her country estate, even in the midst of thirteen emergencies. Why she could wander into and out of conversations like a character in a Chekhov play who has been listening but hasn’t actually heard a thing. Why she was at once disheveled and precise. Her lips blinkering red lights.
She started at the restaurant when she was twenty-two. She had left before, more than once. I heard rumors: She had been engaged to the heir of a champagne dynasty…they moved to France…She left him and wandered the uncharted bulk-wine backwoods of the Languedoc and Roussillon, the lavender-soaked filthy roads to Marseille, a slow boat to Corsica…back to the city, back to the restaurant…references to hard-baked afternoons in lemon groves in Spain, to time in Morocco…How she was engaged a second time to a regular at the restaurant, a publishing scion, but again she had ended up staying and he’d never returned…
Hints of this from her, but mostly I heard it from others. The wreckage of powerful men added to her presence. I only knew that she was not of my world. She had barely a trace of the city, of the struggle, on her. Just the dust, which she shook off with a thoughtless dignity.
The sky was so blue.
It’s only been five years.
My skyline was never marked with an absence.
Remember that wine school? Windows on the World?
I had been underneath them, on the F train coming from Brooklyn, just one hour before.
I was late for high school but glued to the TV.
I had taught a class there—on Rioja—on the night of September tenth.
Chef made soup.