“Oh.”
Simone must have spoken to him. Besides our lessons deepening, I had been studying in my off time. I had a ritual—and having any ritual sounded so mature that I told everyone about it, even the regulars. On my days off I woke up late and went to the coffee shop and had a cappuccino and read. Then around five p.m., when the light was failing, I would take out a bottle of dry sherry and pour myself a glass, take out a jar of green olives, put on Miles Davis, and read the wine atlas. I didn’t know why it felt so luxurious, but one day I realized that ritual was why I had moved to New York—to eat olives and get tipsy and read about Nebbiolo while the sun set. I had created a life that was bent in service to all my personal cravings. Looking at Howard now, I wondered if I was becoming the woman with the shopping bags that I had imagined in my interview. If Howard—with his watchful, unapologetic eyes—had seen what I wanted before I did, and had hired me because he knew this job could give it to me.
“The Manzanilla, I think. La Gitana.” I said.
“Ha!” He clapped his hands, genuinely surprised. “The Manzanilla, where on earth did you pick that up?”
“Mrs. Neely, actually. She’s always asking for sherry for her soup and I thought it was sherry vinegar, but then I saw Simone getting it from the bar and I thought it was a sweet wine—at first.”
“And?”
“It’s not sweet.”
“No, it’s not. It’s one of the oldest, most complex and undervalued wines in the world.”
I nodded, too excited suddenly. “I agree! I’ve never tasted anything like it. It’s like nutty and rich, but so light, bone dry, actually, salty.”
“It’s the ocean air—that area of Spain is where the Atlantic, the Mediterranean, and the river all converge. You can’t make sherry anywhere else, but I’m sure Simone told you that. It’s like Champagne in that manner, especially with the chalk content in the soil. They have a name for it…”
“Albariza. That’s the soil.” I liked having answers. And of course he understood about sherry. Maybe that was what unsettled me, the way he spoke in decrees, like Simone, but I was always aware that he was a man. There were no shared sympathies between us. He didn’t ever seem to have a question, and I don’t mean curiosity, but a throbbing, existential, why-is-it-like-this question. He had already mastered the answer to that Why?
He was the only one who had seen me before the sheer terror of my training, before I had become mute and emerged with a different voice. He was the only one who knew. And always this feeling that he was not just in charge of the mechanics of the restaurant, but that he was puppeting us by cords tied to our unnameable aspirations and fears.
“You were smart to ingratiate yourself with her,” he said. He walked around the bar and pulled out the La Gitana from the fridge and poured two small glasses. “She’s not like this with new employees. The opposite, actually. I can’t tell you how many potential servers she’s failed on their trails and we’ve had to let them go.”
I shrugged and smelled the wine. It was as addictive as old books. “I didn’t do anything. She picked me.”
“Why do you think she did that?”
I thought about those first few times I saw her, how she was so remote and sculptural. I wanted to say that I charmed her except for so long I’d hardly spoken.
“We have a thing,” I said finally, inarticulately. It wasn’t Jake, but I wasn’t about to say that to Howard. “We have something in common, I don’t know that I can explain it.”
“I think I first met her when she was just a few years older than you.”
“Was there even a Park Bar then?”
“There wasn’t much. God, Simone and I used to go to this place, Art Bar? Is that still around?”
“It’s so far west! What was she like?”
“Yes, we had to travel in those days. Barefoot in the snow, uphill both ways.” Howard drank his sherry with his back to the door, and I saw the first guests come in for dinner. I watched as they agitatedly unwrapped themselves from their coats, and I thought I should set up but I wasn’t about to stop our little happy hour.
“Would you believe me if I said she was mostly the same?” he continued. “The Owner had her training people twice her age within six months. Everyone was shocked when she didn’t take the GM role. Lucky for me, of course.”
“Why wouldn’t she take it?”
“I know I make it look effortless.” He pulled on his cuff links. “But it’s a massive job. It’s a different kind of commitment. If I remember correctly, she was thinking of going back to school. And then it was adieu, off to France, her first escape.”
“You guys all run so deep,” I said. “It’s amazing, right? I mean, everyone has been here so long.”
“Are you happy here?” he asked. Nicky came up behind me, straightening his bow tie, gave a raised eyebrow at my glass of sherry, and headed into the bar. He carefully dimmed the lights.
“Yes,” I said. Howard couldn’t see what I was seeing. The bar beginning to glow under the low lamps, the music ascending, Nicky opening the house red, jaunty, people shuffling in, the magic of the restaurant emerging as if from a more perfect world of forms.
“Curtain up, kids,” Nicky called out and the servers came out of their hiding places, arms clasped behind their backs. Did Howard mean happy here, like the restaurant, or here in my life?
“I’m deeply happy here,” I said.
“Have you given any thought to the future?”
Had I given any thought to the future? Sure. I wanted next year to look like the life I was leading right now. I knew I was drinking too much, and it wasn’t without second thoughts that I made the transition from taking bumps of other people’s drugs to buying my own, but I figured that couldn’t possibly sustain itself, that it was part of an evolution from which I would emerge honed and sharp like an arrow from a bow. And besides, I drank less, snorted less, and fucked less than eighty percent of the people I encountered, though those things tended to affect me a bit more vulgarly.
Did he want to know my goals? Sometimes I made lists that said: explore Manhattan above Twenty-Third Street, buy a membership to MoMA, invest in a bookcase and/or curtains, go to yoga, learn to cook, buy a toothbrush that vibrates. I thought eventually I’d make more friends: urbane, talented, tattooed friends and we would have dinner parties, to which I could contribute because I would have developed a talent for coq au vin, and all the hysterical winds of possibility that buffeted me along the L train would have died down.
I had just started to think about travel. Sometimes I lined my life up against Simone’s. I thought that my “escape,” my adventure abroad, the one that would make me contemplative and sensual, was still coming for me. I had never been to Europe. Maybe Jake and I…maybe Jake and I would become a “we.” I had never let myself have that thought in full before—two months ago I couldn’t get him to say hello to me—but now, I believed the words as I thought them, that we were moving somewhere together, and it was toward a real “we.” A “we” that held hands in the street and became regulars at Les Enfants Terribles around the corner from his apartment. It seemed a little odd that the two of us had never been out to dinner at a normal time, like anytime before midnight, but now that we’d had breakfast, the rest was a matter of time. A “we” that took weekends away, a “we” that went to Europe together, without Simone, continuous days to ourselves, we could fly into Paris, rent a car, travel the Loire River until we hit the Atlantic. I saw the way he looked at me sometimes. Other times it was like I wasn’t there, but sometimes…