“No,” I said, shrinking away. His eyes shimmered like water about to boil.
“Say it,” he said, and grabbed my neck from the side, thumb on my windpipe. The first rush of vertigo. At the fulcrum point of coming with Jake, I wasn’t falling, the world was rising. He hurt me sometimes. He could smell my fear and he would say, Let go. If I pushed myself into the fear, like pushing my face into a pillow, I could come harder, and I did. The steel grates being rolled up by the Chinese guys, their rapid conversations while they dragged the fish trash out, the trucks bleating as they reversed. My body, boneless.
“I love to fuck.”
“You’re insatiable.”
“You’re carnivorous.”
“You’re a tart-lette.”
“A wolf.”
“A rose.”
“A steak, bloody and rare.”
“You’re inoperable.”
“You’re terminal.”
If he was imperfect it was never in his blue room, never with words, he played them so smoothly, he played me so smoothly. The shit that came out of our mouths was utter nonsense, but. But what? It was a privileged language. If I tried to transcribe it, it would be filthy.
VI
Wait, does cliché mean it’s true or not true?
Everyone has a price.
I caught your yawn.
Yeah, mine is anything above twenty percent.
Why can’t I smell anything anymore?
They’ve turned into monsters now.
Snow all the time now.
So I said, I’m not paying rent until I have some fucking heat.
When does it stop?
It’s funny racist, but is it racist racist?
He’s absolutely jaundiced.
It’s the prawns tonight.
’Tis the bourbon season, my friend.
Do you know if Venice is an island?
But it smells like garbage and Fernet in there.
They’re saying beer is the new wine.
You missed the second glass on 19.
I never see the daylight anymore.
You didn’t card them?
That’s quite a cough.
Prawns are not shrimp.
And she’s not exactly young anymore.
But I never sleep anymore.
Should we call his wife? He’s asleep at the table.
Yes, you suck on the heads.
He never runs out of excuses.
The little vampires?
It’s all fucking homogenized and pasteurized.
There aren’t any secrets here.
Disgusting.
No, sherry is the new wine.
I need a Kleenex.
I need steak knives.
Like bruises under her eyes.
My rule is that I don’t buy it.
And then they asked if we had Yellow Tail.
They froze on my cheeks, just from here to the train.
Where’s the line?
Be nice.
Happy hunting.
Eighty-six the shrimp.
It’s an island if it’s surrounded by water.
How long until we freeze to death?
How about wine is the new wine.
Fucking geniuses.
Another storm coming, even bigger.
Again?
And then I threw up.
—
IT’S NOT HARD to like these foods once you open your mouth to them: the anchovies, the trotters, the pig’s head terrines, the sardines, the mackerel, the uni, the liver mousses and confits. Once you admit that you want things to taste like more or better versions of themselves—once you commit to flavor as your god—the rest follows. I started adding salt to everything. My tongue grew calloused, overworked. You want the fish to taste like fish, but fish times a thousand. Times a million. Fish on crack. I was lucky I never tried crack.
—
“VEE-OWN-YAY.”
I didn’t mean to correct her. I was only refilling waters on table 30 and I heard Heather stumbling. It was a classic trick, to keep talking while you opened a bottle of wine. No matter the skill level, it was a necessarily slow time in the momentum of service, which usually revolved around a series of quick entrances and quippy exits. But when you tussled with the wine bottle, all eyes were on you, bored, expectant. The only natural thing was to talk through the lapse.
Heather had swayed the guests—rather ingeniously, I thought—from the California Chardonnay they’d requested to a white from the Rh?ne Valley. It would have similar viscosity and heft, with all the honeyed stone fruit, but without the dominant vanilla and butter of an over-oaked Chardonnay.
The maneuver had the makings of an ideal service experience. They trusted Heather and she rewarded that trust with an education, opening an undiscovered pocket of taste to them. They could spend the rest of the week asking their friends if they knew that the Rh?ne produced a small amount of white wine. White wine from the Rh?ne? their buttoned-up friends would say. Yes, had they heard of a Chateauneuf-du-Pape Blanc? No? Then the guests would repeat to their friends verbatim what Heather had said to them: “This wine is fairly obscure, something of a secret…”
We gave a similar speech about whites from Bordeaux, Rioja, anywhere that had prestigious red-wine real estate. And we nodded the composed nod of wisdom when they were surprised. A bonus that the wines were pricey and built a nice check, but it was all true—the whites were bold, rich, and a bargain.
As Heather poured for the man in position 1, a woman shaped like a risen soufflé asked Heather just exactly what the grapes were. Heather started strong with Roussanne, Marsanne, but they were the easy ones. She paused. She looked at the ceiling. The guests’ trust hovered in the air like a threatening cloud.
“Viognier,” I said. Vee-Own-Yay. That’s how I remembered it in my head when Simone taught it to me. The room blinked at me, the lights brightened.
“You know,” I said, taking a breath, “back in the sixties it wasn’t a grape worth mentioning. No one in France wanted to replant it after phylloxera in the nineteenth century. It’s such a…” I rubbed my fingers together for the right word, “…fickle grape.”
The imagined buzzing of tickets being printed, a clang of glasses at the bar. I didn’t want to keep going but I was feeling it now, the ownership that came when the guests entirely submitted to you.
“But they started planting it in California, all along the central coast, and then everyone was like, Wait, what is that incredibly aromatic wine? And then the French said, It’s ours, obviously. You know how the French are.”
They chuckled. Position 2 stuck her nose into the glass and jiggled the wine. I leaned to her and said, “I always get jasmine. That’s how I remember it.”
“I can smell jasmine!” she said to the woman at position 3. I recognized that—the thrill of receiving revelations.
I fielded Heather’s look with a shrug. Like it had been a lucky guess. I went to refill the pitcher but I was thinking, What the fuck? I studied. Keep up.
—
THE GRAYEST, BLURRIEST, most miserable weather. Slush congregating in the gutters, lakes welling up in drains, snot and tears mingling on faces, the air like a drill into the head, When will it end? What next?
It happened like this: he asked, rather awkwardly and for the first time, if I wanted breakfast. Neither of us had to go to work that day and I always wanted breakfast. It was too cold to talk as we walked, my lips like slabs of marble.
He led me to Cup & Saucer on Eldridge and Canal, a tiny lunch counter camped out among the mute Chinese signs. It had faded cursive advertising Coca-Cola on the outside, a layer of bacon grease and fryer oil on the windows inside, and he knew everyone. We had horrid, caustic coffee and I put ketchup on my eggs and I saw the etchings of his wrinkles and they were gray, his golden eyes were flinty, gray, and my hair in the reflection of the window was dishwater colored and gray, the circles under my eyes a lavender gray, and he kissed me, graying daylight fraying and coarse, and he was eggish, lined in tobacco and salt and I thought, Oh lord, oh fuck, is my life becoming one unstoppable banquet? A month of gray and the happiest days of my life.
—
“YOU’RE REALLY DEVELOPING quite nicely,” Howard said to me. His navy suit shone. His tone was light but too direct; I compulsively caved in my chest.
“Developing what?”
“What’s your favorite right now?” He eyed the leather-bound wine lists I was wiping down.
“My favorite what?”
“What excites you?” He paused. “On the list.”