III
“DID YOU KNOW fish have a four-second memory?” Terry asked me. I was pretending to read an old New Yorker in the candlelight, my eyes scanning the same lines of a poem over and over again—what will unleash itself in you when your storm comes—but really thinking about the coke in my purse, how there was a nice weight to it there, with an entire evening ahead. I thought briefly about leaving before everyone got there, but the night was muddy and I couldn’t see past it or through it or even to the next five minutes. The bar was empty so it meant that Terry was talking to me.
“Huh?”
“I always think of that when you guys come in here after your shift. Get it?”
“Yeah, Terry, I get it. We are the fish. And this is the fucking water.”
—
THIS ONE HAD BEEN Mrs. Neely’s mother’s: it was a wine-purple velvet cloche, with gold embroidery that was nearly worn away. It hugged her tiny skull and lifted slightly so she could bat her eyes at me. Her mother, she told us, had been a legendary beauty. She attended all the art salons, held her own in conversation with W.E.B. DuBois and Langston Hughes. Quite progressive. She didn’t have time to make art, supporting her children as a seamstress after her husband died, but she had an artistic flair for living.
“I don’t understand it now,” she said, taking both my hands in hers emphatically. “You didn’t leave the house without a hat. We were not fancy people, my mother made dresses out of curtains, but I would have been indecent without my hats. My mama would have slapped a girl like you silly, the way you dress.”
“I know,” I said. I encouraged her to admonish me, and she loved to dole it out. “Girls now, they wear leggings. As pants. It’s embarrassing.”
“Just parading their coochies around town.”
“Jesus! But yes. They actually do that.”
“Where are the standards? How is a man going to know what to do with you?” She slapped the back of my hand. “You dressing like a boy, hiding your figure. You still hitting them on the playground so they’ll look at you.”
I nodded, totally unmasked.
“You know, style isn’t frivolous. In my day it was a sign of your integrity, a sign that you knew who you were.” I nodded, but she was looking beyond me. “Oh, there’s my prince.”
Sasha sauntered toward us like he was on a runway. Mrs. Neely applauded, her eyes watering.
“Neely darling, you are a vision, now why you talking to this trash?”
“Give me a kiss for goodness’ sake.” She offered up her cheek shyly and he kissed her on both sides.
“That’s how they used to do it in Paris,” she said.
“How’s the lamb, my love?”
“Terrible, it was absolutely terrible.” She looked troubled and gestured for us to come closer. “I swear, every time, worse and worse.”
“Marvelous,” said Sasha, shining his teeth on her.
“Sasha, will you take this beautiful young lady out on a date? She needs a real gentleman in her life.”
“Yes, Sasha.” I turned to him. A few weeks ago he’d dropped his pizza on the ground and offered me fifty dollars to eat it. I did, and he paid me. Like a gentleman. “When are you going to take me out?”
We were both shaking with restrained laughter. Mrs. Neely laughed too, settled into her chair, regal.
—
I KNEW he was down there. He had just told Nicky he was going down to find a bottle of scotch, even though I had told him, for over a week, that we were out. I’d even asked Howard about it, and he’d told me it was back-ordered at the distributor. And yet Jake refused to believe it. I wondered if he was looking because he didn’t trust my information or because he wanted to draw out this small duel between us.
So when Simone asked if someone could pull the Opus 2002 from the cellar for her, she had just been double sat, I said absolutely, tightened my ponytail, and ran. He didn’t turn when I came in.
“It’s not here,” I said, walking purposefully to the California reds section.
“Those who would believe the words of women would be fools.”
“Charming.” I scanned the wall, but I already knew where the Opus was. I wished that I knew nothing, that I was wrong about the scotch, that we were out of Opus and we had to spend the rest of service in the cellar looking for bottles that didn’t exist.
He grunted. I pulled the wine and went to peer over his shoulder at the mess of stray bottles I had already been through a thousand times.
“Hey,” I said. “You’re bleeding.”
He had a cut on his forearm. He looked down, confused, and I reached out, instinctively, and brought his forearm to my mouth and licked the cut. My tongue metallic, salty, a spark. When I realized what I had done I pushed his arm back to him. I exhaled and he inhaled, his nostrils flared. My eyes said, I dare you. I felt tears, I felt bottomless, I felt liquid.
“Excuse me,” she said. Simone stood in the doorway. I blinked at her, wondering what I was seeing. “The Opus?”
I looked at my hand and walked the bottle over to her. I waited for some sarcastic comment. “Well I would have just done it myself,” is what Heather would say. Ariel would say, “What the fuck Skip, you fucking cunt.” Either of those would have been acceptable. Simone said nothing but looked at us. She was silent and I knew I’d fucked up.
—
“YOU WANNA peach treat?”
I looked at Heather dumbly. I had properly fucked up, so when the rest of the night took a turn toward chaos, I knew it was my fault. Tables ran over their turn times, they sat sipping water contentedly while the waiting parties tapped their feet and impatience, anxiety, frustration gathered in a prickly cloud. The most desired tables were refused. They were too close to the hutch, too close to the bathroom, too small, too isolated, too noisy. Servers were mishearing orders. They stood nervously outside the kitchen, avoiding telling Chef for as long as possible, making up circuitous stories of how it wasn’t their fault. Chef slammed food into the trash dramatically until Howard stopped him and started gifting the mistakes around the room.
That Opus? I wanted to blame him but couldn’t. Somehow I pulled the 1995, not the 2002. Somehow Simone presented it, opened it, and tasted them on it. Somehow Howard spotted it while making the rounds in the dining room. He said, “Ah, the ’95, what an incredible bottle. How is it drinking this evening?”
The robust man at the table laughed darkly. “Better than the 2002 I ordered. Thanks for that.”
“Did you hear?” Ariel asked, swinging past me with plates. She came back a moment later with empty hands and said, “Simone fucked up for real.”
I saw Howard and her in the hutch. His voice calm with none of his usual inquisitiveness, just sharp. “Highly allocated…massive loss…not like you.”
No, I wanted to say, it wasn’t like her, it was like me. But I watched Simone nodding, her lipstick worn through in the center of her lips where she was biting them. I felt sick. Heather came to pick up coffee and I confessed.
“Happens,” she said, waving me off.
“But Simone—”
“It’s her fault. She presented it, she said the vintage out loud, she pointed to it. She should have noticed. That’s why she’s a server and you’re a backwaiter.”
I was unconvinced.
“You wanna peach treat?”
“What’s that?”
“Just a Xanax.” She pulled out a peach-colored pill.
“You think I can do my job on that?”
“Pumpkin, a monkey could do your job on Xanax. And probably not fuck up as much. It’s not a real drug.”
Or a real job, I thought as I took it. Simone came up to the service bar.
“My cappuccinos on 43?”
“Already went,” I said eagerly. I delivered them myself less than five minutes after she put the order in, putting it ahead of the five other tickets.
She turned to Heather. “Do you have another?”
She popped the pill in her mouth and swallowed without water.
“Simone,” I said, “I’m sorry.”