“Don’t,” she said cordially. “Heather, eighty-six the ’95 Opus. That was the last bottle.”
The pill was lodged in my throat. I kept swallowing, but it dissolved there, and it tasted like Jake’s sour blood. He didn’t speak to me for the rest of the night.
—
THE ESPRESSO MACHINE had always been a hot zone for us. The beverage runners were to clean it extra diligently. And I assumed the other backwaiters did. But after a cockroach crawled out of a portafilter I had just picked up, after I threw the whole thing at the wall, spraying coffee grinds everywhere, leaving a dent, after the bug walked away unharmed—well, I stopped taking my cleaning of the espresso machine so seriously.
Zoe was supposed to be our general in this war, which meant she kept ordering different cleaning supplies, and kept yelling at different exterminators on the phone. Each new arrival promised eradication in hours, each orange jug with its skull and crossbones promised death. Zoe labeled spray bottles with masking tape specifying where they were to be used: Espresso. Bar Sink 1. Bar Sink 2. Zoe modified side work checklists, ordered special rags to clean out the ice machine, special blue strips of paper that we had to wear gloves to handle and hang in the fruit-fly area.
What Zoe didn’t do was get rid of the bugs. I learned that every single restaurant in New York City had bugs, from uptown to downtown. I still would have eaten off the ground in the kitchen—the place was spotless. Part of our job was to protect the ignorance of the guests, who couldn’t handle the hard truths of the city. We said: “It’s just winter.” “It’s just the park.” “It’s just construction down the block.” “It’s the neighbors.” All of that was true.
And yet, when Will found a prehistoric-looking cockroach popsicle, even I gagged. It was exquisitely frozen inside an ice cube. He had scooped it from the ice bin. We passed it around until it started to melt, our mouths open in wonder.
To that we said, “Fuck-Ing. Dis-Gust-Ing.”
I did my part. I initialed Zoe’s checklists that hung on clipboards above the stations. But one day I went to hang my apron on a hook and it dropped into a crack behind the freezer. When I looked down for it, the wall was covered. Covered. Families, generations of roaches breeding, feeding, dying, in the temperate exhaust from the freezer. I stopped fighting so hard. We were outnumbered.
—
“OURSINS!” Simone exclaimed as she came into the kitchen. I kept doing my job, eyes down, scraping spent candles out of the votives. Somebody hadn’t put enough water in them, they stuck to the sides even as I hacked away at them. I couldn’t remember—it might have been me.
“What?” I asked, just in case she was talking to me. Our chats had tapered off lately.
“Chef, ils sont magnifiques,” she murmured. The two of them leaned over a crate, rapt at whatever golden object was in there. It grated on me when she slipped into French with Chef or Howard or Jake. She would drop her voice so I heard only the curl of a romance language and knew I was being left out. I had apologized to her about the Opus again. I confessed to Howard a day later, and he had already forgotten about it. I had no choice but to wait her out until she directed her attention back at me, when she looked at me like I was as exciting as whatever was in the crate.
At preshift Chef said, “Tonight we have Plat de Fruits de Mer. Very traditional. Oysters, mussels, cherrystone clams, prawns—head on—and the small snails. But what takes it over the top is some spanking-fresh uni, in the shell.”
Someone whistled, a few groans of desire.
“Seventeen orders. This is a hand sell, people; we’re not printing it. $175 per tower.”
“Per tower?” I yelled out. Everyone looked at me.
Howard continued. “?’Tis the season, my friends. People are celebrating. They have been waiting to dine with us. You are here because you’re perceptive, so read your tables. See if this is what will make them rave about our restaurant. And do what you will, of course, but I highly recommend some Champagne, or perhaps a Chablis as an alternative…”
I followed her upstairs to the locker room, where she was digging through clean aprons with an obsessive tenacity to find the shorter ones she preferred. I was forcing a thaw, I knew it, but I was tired of waiting.
“Okay, so tell me.”
“Tell you what?”
“The uni…”
“Excuse me?”
“I mean, please tell me about the uni.”
“Uni is sea urchin roe, crowning the tower this evening.”
“But why is it special?” I motioned with my hands for her to get on with it.
“You’re getting a bit spoiled aren’t you?”
“No!” I stood up straighter. “I don’t like having to beg for information. Are you upset with me or something?”
“Don’t be dramatic. Shouldn’t you be focusing on your work?”
“I’m trying to.”
She hitched a new apron high onto her waist, making her look momentarily maternal, pastoral. She re-marked her lips with her lipstick. I saw sprays of silver in her coarse hair. I saw inscriptions of her years around her mouth, a solid crease between her brows from a lifetime of cynicism. The posture of a woman who had stood in a casual spotlight in every room she’d ever been in, not for gloss or perfection, for self-possession. Everything she touched she added an apostrophe to.
“It’s quite eerie,” she said, inspecting her face, pulling up her cheeks. “When you begin to see your mother in the mirror.”
“I won’t know,” I said.
“No, you won’t. You will always look like a stranger to yourself.”
She never dealt in pity. I didn’t know what to say.
“Your mother must be pretty,” I said eventually. “You’re pretty.”
“You think so?” She looked at me from the mirror, unimpressed.
“Why don’t you want a boyfriend?” I had made two assumptions before I knew what was happening, first, that she didn’t have a boyfriend, second, that it was because she didn’t want one.
“A boyfriend? That’s a sweet word. I’m afraid I am in retirement from love, little one.”
She barely but definitely softened.
“In Marseille you could walk down to the docks in the mornings. They had urchins, still alive. An offhand exchange, a few francs for this delicacy. The rocks are littered with debris: empty shells opened with a knife, rinsed by salt water, and sucked dry on the spot. Men taking lunch with bottles of their hard house wine, watching the boats move in and out. It’s the ovaries—the coral ovaries. They are supposed to transfer a great power when you consume them. Absolutely voluptuous, the texture, absolutely permanent, the taste. It stays with you for the rest of your life.”
She went toward the door, pulling her hair back. She looked at me thoughtfully. “There are so many things to be blasé about: your youth, your health, your employment. But real food—gifts from the ocean, no less—is not one of them. It’s one of the only things that can immerse you safely in pleasure in this degraded, miserable place.”
—
“IT’S EXHAUSTING,” Howard said as he put on a slate-wool overcoat, a fedora, and leather gloves. He looked like he’d walked in from the 1940s. He gazed toward the exit and smiled at me. “You really have to love it.”
“Yes,” I said. I swirled the milk and splashed it on the espresso. I knew exactly how to make his macchiatos. “It’s like, physically tiring. But there is something else that really flattens me every night. I can’t put my finger on it.”
“Entropy,” he said. Like I was the sixth person to ask him. He raised his eyebrows at me to see if I knew what it meant, and I raised my eyebrows back to say I was skeptical of his usage.
“Rather it’s a case of mismatched desires. The restaurant, an entity separate from us, but composed of us, has a set of desires, which we call service. What is service?”