Through the window she could see the darkening treetops, mounded against one another like clouds, framed by the warm yellow rectangle of the window’s light. Back in September, when it all first happened, she sat at this window smoking a cigarette and watched the sun rise, many times. She stayed up late, just like she had on those mornings years and years ago, the summer she met Bob. When she was working at the club and getting home just before sunrise.
She never saw him on the nights she worked. She kept those for herself, alone. She’d take the cab home, have it let her off on York just before her corner so that she could duck into her favorite bodega, the Koreans rather than the Turkish man across the avenue. She’d buy snacks, because the girls weren’t allowed to eat during shifts at the club, but she didn’t choose her food like an actual hungry person. It was always scattered and indulgent, exotic and nonsensical. Copious amounts of string cheese and two cartons of sliced pineapple, or something really mismatched, like a carton of chocolate milk to wash down a plastic tub of kimchi. Even now, on those rare trips into the city when she might duck into a bodega, needing bottled water for the boys, the smell would remind her. That swirling mix of tortilla chips and cleaning fluids and sizzling peppers and onions at the sandwich station, it always reminded her of herself, those nights when the younger Isabel would emerge back out into the dawning street. Off the clock, her bare legs chicken flesh, knowing she was headed home to curl up in her own crappy apartment to eat her own bizarre food. There would always be a scrawled message from her roommate on the pad by the phone, her disapproval evident from the fact that the notes never mentioned Bob by name: call for you (from office) at eleven, told him you’re at work like you are every Thurs, ANOTHER call again at one am. Always, Bob would have called. He was always tracking her down, that summer.
But she’d been free, she thought now. Her father never ceased reminding her that he held the strings, but she got that hostess job for herself. Bob tried to tie her down right away, but she played around with him for fun.
The man who owned that bodega always laughed at her. She began to think of choosing her food as a performance for him, something he could rely on. He’d always know that at the end of the graveyard shift, the white girl from around the corner would stop in to buy a morning meal that would make him laugh, her fingers looped through the straps of the high heels she’d swapped for flip-flops in the cab. Her eating habits were the only things he knew about her.
Well, Isabel thought. Now, if he’s got a good memory for faces, if he still runs that store and stocks the Post, he knows another thing about me.
But it had all been only a performance, back then. Hadn’t it? If she hadn’t made her rent, at the end of that summer, nothing would have happened. She’d been in no real danger at all.
She’d had freedom and safety, and she’d been too idiotic and young to appreciate how rare it was that she had both. But Bob must have known. He’d brought her in with him, hadn’t he?
SHE’D TAKEN THE NIGHT SHIFT at the club, a few months after moving to the city, because she wanted to know for sure that she could pay for her own life. It was hard to say why she’d thought this was any way to prove anything to anyone, but that had been the reasoning. Her father found it hilarious.
She was working at a gallery uptown, and it barely paid enough to cover her rent, let alone utilities. And then her friend Binnie, from Smith, mentioned her new job as the coat check girl at a club near Isabel’s apartment. She claimed she’d made three hundred dollars that first night, folded bills the men would pass to her on their way out. They’re looking for a new hostess, Binnie said. You won’t actually have to carry a tray.
Isabel knew without question that she could easily spend her weekend nights flattering the type of man who pays to ensure that he’s got a beautiful woman near him from the second he steps into the club. At the coat check, as he’s walked to his table, when he orders the bottle. She’d been training for that job since childhood, hadn’t she?
And she hadn’t been wrong; it was easy. Other than having to stand on her feet all night, needing to soak them in salt baths after her first few shifts, it was a piece of cake.
She’d been most surprised by the waitresses, how tough they were and how glamorous. It wasn’t what her mother had taught her to think of as beauty, the makeup hadn’t exactly been applied so that it disappeared on your skin. You could get fired if you showed up without a manicure. But their targeted competence, those girls, the way they moved through the crowd on a Saturday at 2 A.M., holding the trays high above their heads, balanced on their fingertips. She loved to watch them. She knew she never could have waitressed there. She would have been fired after one shift. She could handle the straying hands, the sour breath in her face as some summer associate asked for her number and hiccupped in her ear. But hers was a different kind of steel. She would have looked tender and exposed out there on the floor, next to those girls.
Some of the men came in three or four times a week. The junior analysts from certain banks had the place designated as their last (or sometimes first) stop when clients were in town. They came in loud and cocky at midnight and left in the raw sunlight, six or eight hundred dollars lighter, smelling of scotch and sweat and, usually, vomit. She knew many of the waitresses were hoping to snag a fiancé here, had worked their way up to this place for that very reason, but that was another difference between them and her.
On the night Bob came in, he said nothing at first. His friends were much drunker. They all kept pulling at one another’s sleeves and howling. But he was the one who asked her to sit down, to join them for a glass of champagne.
“What do you want to bet they’ll allow it,” he said, when she reminded him she was on the clock. He had a nice smile; even at the very beginning, when she still thought all she wanted was to escape his table, she could give him that. And even now, it was still true, Isabel thought, staring at herself in the mirror, at the lines in her face that had been such a distant possibility when she was still the girl in this story. From that very first night, right up to now, she’d liked the way her husband looked. The broad cheekbones and the angular jaw, its severity even when he smiled.
“They’ll allow it,” he repeated. It was always this that she remembered most, when she thought about meeting her husband. He had wanted to keep her at that table. He hadn’t wanted her to leave.
“What do you want to bet that if we buy the most expensive bottle you’ve got, they let us kidnap the hostess.”
He used that word. Kidnap. And she saw him realize, almost as soon as he did, that he’d touched something beneath her skin, something that would react as surely as a reflex.
The club continued its eruptions all around them. She looked him right in the eye.