“It’s exhausting?”
“It’s order. Service is a structure that controls chaos. But the guests, the servers, have desires as well. Unfortunately we want to disrupt that order. We produce chaos, through our randomness, through our unpredictability. Now”—he sipped and I nodded that I was still with him—“we are humans, aren’t we? You are, I am. But we are also the restaurant. So we are in constant correction. We are always straining to retain control.”
“But can you control entropy?”
“No.”
“No?”
“We just try. And yes, it is tiring.”
I saw the restaurant as a ruin. I imagined the Owner closing the place, locking the door many decades from now and the dust and the fruit flies and the grease accumulating, no one working around the clock to clean the dishes and linens, the restaurant returning to its primitive, nonfunctional elements.
“Thank you,” he said and put the cup down.
“You’re a free man now?”
“That I am. I have some manly Christmas decorating to do.”
I nodded. It had surprised me, the holiday erupting in the park, in Flower-Girl’s ridiculous bar arrangement. It was hung with actual cookies from the pastry department. Even Clem’s had strung up lights. I remembered how warm New York had looked in Christmas movies, how benevolent and rich the shop windows were, how everyone’s humanity broke through just in time for redemption, just in time for faith. It didn’t feel like that when I walked to work. It felt cold and forced.
“I guess I should go see that tree or something.”
“Will you be around for the holidays?” he asked.
I thought, Um, you scheduled me the day before and the day after, where the fuck do you think I’m going to go, but I said, “Yeah. I’m here. Just relaxing. I hear it’s very quiet.”
“Well, if you find yourself restless, I host an orphans’ Christmas every year. Don’t worry, Simone does most of the cooking, I wouldn’t subject anyone to mine. But it’s a tradition. You are heartily invited. And it’s not as boring as I’ve made it sound.”
“Are you an orphan?”
“Ah.” He smiled at me. “We are all orphans eventually. That’s if we’re lucky.” He waved to someone at the bar who had spotted him and winked at me before releasing himself from our grip and into the free fall of the evening.
—
“WAIT UNTIL the truffles hit the dining room—absolute sex,” said Scott.
When the truffles arrived the paintings leaned off the walls toward them. They were the grand trumpets of winter, heralding excess against the poverty of the landscape. The black ones came first and the cooks packed them up in plastic quart containers with Arborio rice to keep them dry. They promised to make us risotto with the infused rice once the truffles were gone.
The white ones came later, looking like galactic fungus. They immediately went into the safe in Chef’s office.
“In a safe? Really?”
“The trouble we take is in direct proportion to the trouble they take. They are impossible,” Simone said under her breath while Chef went over the specials.
“They can’t be that impossible if they are on restaurant menus all over town.” I caught her eye. “I’m kidding.”
“You can’t cultivate them. The farmers used to take female pigs out into the countryside, lead them to the oaks, and pray. They don’t use pigs anymore, they use well-behaved dogs. But they still walk and hope.”
“What happened to the female pigs?”
Simone smiled. “The scent smells like testosterone to them. It drives them wild. They destroyed the land and the truffles because they would get so frenzied.”
I waited at the service bar for drinks and Sasha came up beside me with a small wooden box. He opened it and there sat the blanched, malignant-looking tuber and a small razor designed specifically for it. The scent infiltrated every corner of the room, heady as opium smoke, drowsing us. Nicky picked up the truffle in his bare hand and delivered it to bar 11. He shaved it from high above the guest’s plate.
Freshly tilled earth, fields of manure, the forest floor after a rain. I smelled berries, upheaval, mold, sheets sweated through a thousand times. Absolute sex.
That was why it took me some time to see the snow falling in the window at the end of the bar. Whispers rose among the guests, they pointed to the street. Their heads turned in a reverent row. Thin shards of truffle drifted down and disappeared into the tagliatelle.
“Finally,” said Nicky, and replaced the truffle. He leaned back on the bar, wearing a handsome, self-satisfied smile. “You never forget your first snow in New York.”
The first flakes lingered in the window, framed. For a second, I believed they would fly back up to the streetlights.
—
I CAME TO LOVE the Williamsburg Bridge, once I learned how to walk it. I was mostly alone, a few all-weather bikers, a few heavily bundled Hasidic women. I walked either in some dusky circumference of gray light or some blotchy, cottoned afternoon. It never failed to move me. I paused in the middle of the filthy river. I stared at the trash eddying in currents and clinging to docks like wine dregs cling to a glass. Simone had mentioned the orphans’ dinner at Howard’s to me. I thought of them all up there at Howard’s on the Upper West Side. I thought of Jake in a Christmas sweater. I told them I was busy. Remember this, I told myself. Remember how quiet today is. I had the newspaper, which I would keep for years, and I was on my way to lunch in Chinatown by myself. As I contemplated the skyline this double feeling came to me as one thought, pressing in from either side of the bridge, impossible for me to reconcile: It is ludicrous for anyone to live here and I can never leave.
IV
SOMETIMES I SAW all of service condensed, as if I had only worked one night that stretched out over the months.
I kicked the kitchen doors open with the toe of my clog, I came up the stairs and Jake and I met eyes. I looped the dining room in sweeping, elongated arcs, both my biceps and wrists tense. I saw myself without a time lapse, the images still and laid on top of each other. All the plates of filet mignon of tuna streamlined into its essential form: the filet mignon of tuna, lapidary. All the napkins I ever folded in a totemic monument. And running through these still lifes, an unmistakable straight line, was the gaze with which I watched them, a gaze in which sometimes Jake or Simone would join me. That’s all I remembered—these few images and watching them all from afar, a huge stillness, a giant pause. When I felt like this it was the easiest and most beautiful job in the world. But I knew it was never still, that it was always flawed and straying from the ideal. To romanticize it was to lie.
I heard it turn midnight from the wine room. A beckoning din came through the ceiling. Thumping on the floorboards, whistling. I ran up the stairs and there was a crowd at the service bar, where flutes were lined up. The regulars had left their stools to cheer with us. Simone brought me a glass of the Cuvée Elisabeth Salmon Rosé Champagne. I shut my eyes: peaches, almonds, marzipan, rose petals, a whiff of gunpowder and I had started a new year in New York City.
—
“YOU. In a dress.”
That’s what I wanted him to say. He didn’t end up saying it, but I said it to myself many times as I greeted my reflection in the buildings going up Broadway. My high heels rocked me like roller skates, my hair that I had spent time blow-drying was whipped up, I was suddenly vulnerable to the weather, to uneven sidewalks. I nodded to the iron wedge of the Flatiron like a prestigious acquaintance. The dress was half a paycheck. A short, black silk tunic. I was still confused about the power of clothes—nobody had taught me how to dress myself. When I tried it on and looked in the mirror, I was meeting myself decades from now, when I had grown unconquerable. All in a dress. I nearly returned it twice. I saw myself in the dark-green glass of a closed bank. I turned to my reflection: You. In a dress.