“So embarrassing actually,” I said. I folded up the award. I nodded to the bartender. “A white? Not too oaky, please, no Chardonnay.”
“You earned it,” he said, taking another drink and looking away from me.
“It’s kind of nice, right?” I said. “People want to spend time with me. They aren’t trying to ditch me in diners. I’m not so terribly annoying.”
When he turned to me his eyes were jagged, slivered, and I was scared. I thought he must be on something. He said, “That’s the biggest whore award. You know that right?”
“Whore?”
“Come on, new girl, don’t play dumb. Your kitchen boys always send it out to whoever they want to fuck. But, oh yeah, congrats! The big win!”
“Um…” I tried to laugh but it died in my throat. Scott saw me from the end of the bar and winked. After so much crying—in bathrooms sitting on toilets, hiding next to the air conditioner in the pastry station, behind the ice machine, into my pillow, into my hands, sometimes simply into my locker—this time I didn’t flee. I stayed and the tears came.
“You…” It wouldn’t come to me. The vicious words I longed for were lost in the flotsam of being humiliated, yet again, like always. “You are mean, Jake. It’s too mean for me.”
His eyes flashed blue and then collapsed.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “Tess.”
I nodded. “Please excuse me.”
As I walked I forced my heels into the ground. My wineglass burned in my hand. Simone’s eyes brushed over me and went to the bar. Yes, I thought, go to him. Comfort him because the new girl with the biggest whore award called him mean.
—
“TESS?”
I picked my feet up off the bathroom floor to hide from her but I had just taken a line and sniffled. She knocked on the stall.
“You can only come in if you do drugs. Drugs-only zone.” I clicked it open. She came in. We were uncomfortably close. We could have stood by the sinks, but she locked the door behind her and sat on the toilet. She gave me her open palm and I put my bag in it. She poured a tiny bump out on the webbing between her pointer finger and her thumb. She inhaled it without taking her eyes off me.
“Please,” she said in response to my expression. “I was young once.”
She touched the end of her nose thoughtfully and I touched mine.
“I thought it was a good thing,” I said. My hands were shaking. “I really thought, oh, here I am, stuck in an elevator, I better pick someone I really…I…I picked you.”
“I’m flattered.”
I pressed toilet paper to my cheeks.
“It’s like we’re exchanging, going back and forth, just playing. And then he hits me too hard. It goes from play pain to real pain.”
“I know.”
“Simone, am I not doing this right? Everything feels like a punishment.”
“What are you being punished for?”
“I don’t fucking know—being stupid?”
“Stop it.” She grabbed my hands unsympathetically. “No one is interested in you playing the victim. Get out of your head. If you don’t you’ll always be disappointed. Pay attention.”
I pulled my hands away and she folded hers into her lap.
“Is it too late?” she asked.
“For what?”
“For you to let this flirtation go?”
“I think it’s more than a flirtation, Simone.”
“It’s not, it’s a fantasy. Jake knows it and you know it. Can you let it go?” She looked at me impassively.
“Okay…I mean…we work together…so.” I paused. “What do you mean Jake knows it?”
“I mean that Jake is aware of this crush.”
“You guys talk about me?” I thought I might vomit.
“We don’t talk about you. It has come up.”
“It? I thought we were friends. Am I just this big fucking joke to you?”
“You’re getting carried away.” The way she said it was so matter-of-fact that I nodded. “Now. Can you let it go?”
Fuck them, I thought, I’m going to quit. Then I saw that Simone was right. I wasn’t a victim. I hadn’t been led anywhere. I had chosen this overgrown, murky path where I couldn’t see five feet in front of me—the drugs, the drinking until black, the embarrassment, the confusion. But really I had chosen the two of them—they were the difficult terrain. I understood what she meant by “let it go.” I didn’t have to quit my job. There had been another route open to me this entire time—a well-lit, well-laid, honest path. I said to myself, Turn around. You do not have to take every experience on the pulse. It’s just dinner. I saw the silent elevator, just me. Another voice said, But then you’ll just be a backwaiter.
“I can’t,” I said. “Let it go. I mean, I don’t want to.”
She exhaled, frustrated with me.
“Don’t you remember what it’s like?”
She held her face as if it were made of granite. I saw a flicker, aqueous, vulnerable.
“No. I don’t,” she said. “I don’t remember and I don’t care to.”
“You must have felt like this before. Are you really made of stone like they all say? I don’t think you are, Simone. I see your heart.” I pointed to her chest, but she looked furious.
“All right, Tess. You want it all? You don’t care about consequences? Then it is too late. I could tell you to leave him alone. That he’s complicated, not in a sexy way, but in a damaged way. I could tell you damage isn’t sexy, it’s scary. You’re still young enough to think every experience will improve you in some long-term way, but it isn’t true. How do you suppose damage gets passed on?”
There was heat coming off her, and I felt the drugs. My blood ran like lighter fluid through my veins. “You sound a little bitter.”
“Bitter.” She pulled the word through a clenched jaw. She pulled back her shoulders like she was on the floor, readjusting, and said, “We shall see. I’ll speak to him.”
“Don’t!” I said. Will’s warning came back to me faintly, about trusting Simone. I had already made myself her pupil, but I had an incision of fear about handing this over to her. Did Jake really need Simone’s blessing? Is that what had been missing this entire time? If those were the terms, then I accepted. Didn’t I?
“Or, I don’t know. Do whatever you want. It’s not even a big deal.”
“Little one, it is a big deal. You forget how important he is to me. I’m obviously quite invested in you too.”
“I know.” I looked at our feet and dragged my shoe back and forth across the tile. “I had a dream about you. Part of a dream. It was that we had a secret. You were my mother. And you let me show up late for work, and you came to my apartment and made my bed. But you told me that no one else would understand and if I told I would be punished.”
“Odd.” That was all she said.
“I don’t think you’re old enough to be my mother. That’s not what I meant. By dreaming that.”
“You should pass that along to Howard. He’s very good with dreams. Should have been an analyst in another life.” She stood and did a small back bend, stretching, cracking. “I wouldn’t mind being in an elevator with you. Roomier than a bathroom stall.” She handed me a piece of toilet paper. “No more crying at work.”
—
I WANTED TO ask her if that was love. The blindness, the careening falls, the invisible slow dancing, the longing for real pain, the fixedness. I wouldn’t have gotten an answer. She never spoke to me about love from personal experience. Love was a theory. Something that had been embalmed. “Love will do x to you if you let it,” or “Love is a necessary condition to y,” or “y is a particular brand of love you will encounter in places like z.”
Perhaps that’s why she was so untouched. She didn’t remember. She never got down on her knees on the asphalt like the rest of us, she couldn’t tell me about the unspeakably real stuff. What I learned came from the ground up.
—
HE YANKED on my wrist and pulled me back from the group I was leaving with. Will made a face that said, Coming? And I held up my hand to say, One minute.
“Text me?” Will yelled as the elevator doors closed in front of his face.
I turned to Jake.
“What? Simone told you to apologize?”
He stared at the carpet. Pensive.
“Pathetic,” I said. I pressed the button.