“That’s a problem,” he said. He took the beer from me. “I don’t flirt with girls who read.”
He smiled, knowing he had me. Something expert and sadistic in him, wrapping and unwrapping me. I looked away, I looked back. I started to say something, stopped. I moved toward the bathroom but didn’t move. He passed the beer back to me and I took a gulp.
“You’re confused,” he said. “I can see it all over your face.”
What to say? Duh? “I’m just trying to do a good job.”
“In life?”
“Yes, in life.”
He took the beer back and finished it in a long pull, looking me up and down. Was it my ripped jeans and gray T-shirt? My Converse? Where was everyone else?
“I want…I mean, I want more than to do a good job. I want to take each experience on the pulse.”
“Ha!” He slammed the wall above me. “She’s quoting Keats to you? You’re too malleable to be around her.”
“I’m not a child,” I said, but felt cheated.
“You’re not a child,” he repeated. “Do you know the difference between wanting experiences and having them?”
“You don’t know me,” I said. But I wanted him to. I tried to drink the beer but there was nothing there. My hairline prickled in sweat. I pulled my scarf off, choking myself for a second. With the air on my neck I felt careless. I pushed my chin up, dropped my head back, and blinked at him.
“Your eyes. It’s unmistakable,” he said. He thumbed my cheekbone. “Veiled melancholy has her sovereign shrine.”
His hand moved up my cheek, flushing me, into my hair, where he tugged, his fingers dry, nonchalant. His other hand pressed into the bruise on my thigh, as if he could intuit the blood below the skin.
When he kissed me I said, Oh my god into his mouth but that, like everything else, was swallowed up.
—
AT THAT MOMENT there was no Jake, no restaurant, no city. Just my desires running flagrantly, power-drunk, through the streets. Merciless, all of them. Was I a monster or was this what it felt like to be a person? He didn’t just use those absurd, softly sketched lips, but his teeth, his tongue, his jaw, his hands pressing me down, eventually grabbing my wrists, compressing me. I fought back. I grunted. I hissed.
I don’t think it was pretty kissing. When it was over I felt like I had been beaten. Dazed, angry, still itching. He went into the humid crowd to get a beer and didn’t come back. I stood there staring at the boxers in the painting for I don’t know how long, until Scott asked if I was hungry and I said, “Starving.”
—
WE STREAMED THROUGH the door of the Sichuan place in lower Midtown. I looked for a clock on the wall and luckily couldn’t find one. Nothing to bear down on the plastic tablecloths, nothing to remind me that this night would end.
The restaurant was fairly full, a mixed crowd for so late in the night, some of them looking respectable, some of them looking like us, used up and nervy. None of the diners met each other’s eyes, following a law of anonymity built into brightly lit, late-night places.
Yes, we were starving. Scott waved the menus away and we got the waiter’s attention—he proceeded to order an obscene amount of food off the “real menu,” which wasn’t printed.
Two-dollar beers that tasted like barely fermented, yeasty water. We salivated. There was no coursing—in ten minutes plates started pounding the spinning tray at the center of the table and we fought among ourselves. Conch in a hallucinatory Sichuan oil, a nest of cold sesame noodles, a wild, red stew that Scott called ma po tofu, cold tripe (“Just eat it,” Scott said, and I did), crackling duck, dry-sautéed green beans, skinny molten eggplants, cucumbers in scallion oil…
We sweat, we breathed harder, our eyes ran. More napkins. The sauces ran. More rice. I touched my lips, numb and electrified. My stomach bloated out, a hard alien ball. I thought about throwing up so that I could eat another round.
“What would your last meal be?” I asked suddenly. That was a night when I thought it would be all right if my life ended.
“A really long omakase. Like at least thirty-four courses. I want Yesuda to cook them himself. He puts the soy sauce on with a paintbrush.”
“Salmon pastrami from Russ and Daughters. A ton of bagels. Like three bagels.”
“In-N-Out double double.”
“I’m thinking about a Barolo, something really ripe and dirty, like from the eighties.”
“ShackBurger and a milk shake.”
“My mom’s was veal scallopini and a Diet Coke.”
“Nonna’s Bolognese—it takes eight hours. She makes the pappardelle by hand.”
“A roast chicken—I would eat the entire thing by hand. And I guess a DRC. When else would I taste that kind of Burgundy?”
“Blinis, caviar, and crème fra?che. Done and done. Some impossible Champagne, Krug, or a culty one like the Selosse, drunk out of the bottle.”
“Toast,” I said, when my turn came. I tried to think of something more glamorous, but toast was the truth. I expected to be mocked. My suburban-ness, my stupidity, my blankness.
“What on top?”
“Um. Peanut butter. The raw kind you get from the health-food stores. I salt it myself.”
My clumsiness. My dullness. Instead they all nodded. They treated my toast reverentially. Which was exactly how I thought of it when I made it in the morning. I ate it standing up in the narrow kitchen, which had one pan, paper plates, and a toaster. A small window at the end where I could scan the buildings and watch pigeons on telephone wires. Sometimes I had two pieces. Sometimes I ate it naked, leaning up against the window.
“I’m going to throw up.”
We all agreed.
“Nightcap?”
We all agreed.
The bill was nothing and the table was destroyed. We left a pile of cash on the spinning tray and rolled ourselves into the ample night.
VI
JAKE ACTED LIKE nothing had happened, so I acted like nothing had happened harder. One evening we were alone in the glass-and-cardboard labyrinth of the wine cellar. I could hear him moving behind a stack of boxes higher than my head. I heard an unconcerned grunt. His knife tore into the tape. Scrape of cardboard on cement. Taps of glass on glass.
How easy it would be to say, Hi. To say, Hi, do you remember me? To say, Can you help me find the Bricco Manzoni? To say, Oh geez, this place is a mess. To say, Kiss me again like that, right now.
Footsteps above us loosening dust from the ceiling. I stopped doing everything and listened to him. He left carrying six bottles of wine in his hands, ducking at the low door. Beware of Sediment, I would have said, if he had looked at me.
I woke in the mornings inwardly hysterical at the possibility of seeing him. I took great pleasure in subduing it. I practiced composure. He was teaching me a previously unknown patience. It was about him, but it was also not him. I longed for satiation but was terrified of it. I wanted to live in this queasy moment of fantasy for as long as possible. My body was agitated and possessed, but I found the Bricco, I broke down the case. I held it in my body—the precarious balance between the quotidian and Technicolor madness.
—