“Pick up.”
“Picking up,” I said. I looked expectantly to the window but there were no plates lined up. Instead Scott, the young, tattooed sous chef, passed me a sliver of tomato. The insides were tie-dyed pink and red.
“A Marvel-Striped from Blooming Hill Farm,” he said, as if I had asked him a question.
I cupped it while it dripped. He pinched up flakes of sea salt from a plastic tub and flicked it on the slice.
“When they’re like this don’t fuck with them. Just a little salt.”
“Wow,” I said. And I meant it. I had never thought of a tomato as a fruit—the ones I had known were mostly white in the center and rock hard. But this was so luscious, so tart I thought it victorious. So—some tomatoes tasted like water, and some tasted like summer lightning.
—
“WHAT ARE HEIRLOOMS?” I asked Simone as I ran to get behind her in line for family meal. She had two white plates in her hand and I felt a shiver of expectation looking at that second plate. I noted how she made her own—a generous tongful of green salad and a cup of the vichyssoise.
“Exciting, isn’t it? The season? They’re rare or unique breeds of plants and animals. Once all our tomatoes were like that. Before preservatives and supermarkets and this commercial food production hell we’re living in. Breeds evolved in places based on one evolutionary principle: they tasted better. The point is not longevity or flawlessness. All of our vegetables were biologically diverse, pungent with the nuances of their breed. They reflected their specific time and space—their terroir.”
On the second plate she took the biggest pork chop on the bone, a scoop of the rice salad, and a wedge of gratin potatoes. She said, “Now everything tastes like nothing.”
—
THEY CONJOINED in my mind. It wasn’t that they were always together. Theirs was an oblique connection, not always direct. If I saw one, my eyes started to move, looking for the other. Simone was easy to find, ubiquitous, directing everyone—she seemed to have some sort of system where she divided her attention between the servers equally. But I had a harder time tracking him, his alliances, his rhythms.
If they were in the restaurant together they had one eye on each other and I had one eye on them, trying to understand what I was seeing. It wasn’t like they were the only fascinating people at the restaurant. But they were an island if the rest of us were the continent—distant, inaccessible, picking up stray light.
—
“PICK UP.”
My eyes snapped open but I was the barista today, the kitchen was far away. Howard looked at me from the Micros terminal. He was waiting for me to make him a macchiato but I was overthinking it. I threw the first two shots away.
“I’m hearing Chef scream, ‘Pick up’ in my sleep,” I said, swirling the warm milk. It was as glossy as new paint. “Punishing myself I guess.”
“Thanatos—the death drive,” Howard said. He laid a napkin over his arm and inspected a bottle of wine on the service bar. “We fantasize about traumatizing events to maintain our equilibrium. Lovely.” He took the macchiato and smelled it before taking a sip. He regarded me. The other managers wore suits but somehow everyone in the restaurant always knew that Howard was the man in charge—as if his suits were cut from a finer fabric.
“It’s compulsive but we actually find the painful repetition pleasurable.” He took another sip.
“It doesn’t sound pleasurable.”
“It’s how we self-soothe. How we maintain the illusion that we are in control of our lives. For example, you repeat ‘Pick up’ in hopes that the outcome each time will be different. And you are repeatedly embarrassed, are you not?” He waited for me to respond but I wouldn’t meet his eyes. “You are hoping to master the experience. The pain is what we know. It’s our barometer of reality. We never trust pleasure.”
Every time Howard looked at me I felt bare. A coffee ticket printed up and I used it as an excuse to turn around.
“Are you dreaming about work often?” he asked. It felt like he spoke it into my neck.
“No.” I slammed a portafilter to empty it and I could feel him walk away.
But I was. The dreams were tidal, consumptive, chaotic. Service played over in my head, but no one had faces. And I heard voices, layered on top of one another, a cacophony. Phrases would rise then evanesce: Behind You, Pick Up, To Your Right, To Your Left, Picking Up, Candles, Can You, Now, Toothpicks, Pick Up, Bar Mops, Now, Excuse Me, Picking Up.
In my dreams these words were a code. I was blind and the directives were all I had to pick my way through the blackness. The syllables quaked and separated. I woke up talking: I couldn’t remember what I had been saying, only that I was driven to keep saying it.
—
TERROIR. I looked it up in The World Atlas of Wine in the manager’s office. The definition was people talking around it without identifying it. It seemed a bit far-fetched. That food had character, composed of the soil, the climate, the time of year. That you could taste that character. But still. An idea mystical enough to be highly seductive.
—
IGNORE HIM. That’s what I did. When Jake came into family meal late and took his seat next to Simone, when he pulled up on his bike outside the front window, when he called harshly out for bar mops, I looked away.
But I started to hear things, all of it unverifiable and improbable. Jake was a musician, a poet, a carpenter. He had lived in Berlin, he had lived in Silver Lake, he had lived in Chinatown. He was halfway through a PhD on Kierkegaard. They called his apartment “the opium den.” He was bisexual, he slept with everyone, he slept with no one. He was an ex–heroin addict, he was sober, he was always a little drunk.
He and Simone were not a couple though their magnetic, unconscious way of tracking each other seemed to indicate otherwise. I knew they were very old friends, and that she had gotten him the job. Some nights a cherubic strawberry blonde that Sasha called Nessa-Baby came and sat in front of Jake at the bar as service was winding down.
He knew part of his job was to be looked at. He was a quiet bartender. There was a submissiveness to his beauty that was nearly feminine, a stillness that made one want to paint him. When he worked the bar he submitted. Women and men of all ages left business cards and phone numbers with their tips. Guests gave him gifts for no reason—that kind of beauty.
If he rolled up his shirtsleeves, you could see the edges of tattoos that spoke to another private body he kept. It was the sight of his arm resting on the beer tap that changed me. The beer was acting up. The kegs were probably too new, not cold enough. Just foam, no beer. Jake let the foam pour while he talked to a guest. The drain was full of foam, it ran over to his feet, a spreading white pool. His sleeve was rolled up, the tendons of his forearm tensed from shaking cocktails. I remembered that static shock when I touched him. I felt the shock in my mouth. His inappropriate forearm and the foam cascading, his manner too casual, too condescending.
“That’s a lot of beer to waste,” I said. My voice surprised me, ringing out over my vow of silence.
He looked at me. Perhaps it was raining that night, a stifling tropical storm. Perhaps someone struck a match and held it to my cheek. Perhaps someone cleaved my life into before and after. He looked at me. And then he laughed. From that moment on he became unbearable to me.
—
YOU WILL ENCOUNTER a fifth taste.
Umami: uni, or sea urchin, anchovies, Parmesan, dry-aged beef with a casing of mold. It’s glutamate. Nothing is a mystery anymore. They make MSG to mimic it. It’s the taste of ripeness that’s about to ferment. Initially, it serves as a warning. But after a familiarity develops, after you learn its name, that precipice of rot becomes the only flavor worth pursuing, the only line worth testing.
IV
The sardines are insane tonight.
It’s true, Chef called him a faggot.
HR is freaking out.