Sweetbitter(16)

“No, it’s very admirable, a week of sculpting clay to get the right look of boredom—”

“Ariel, I can’t be offended that you don’t understand anything about art. I blame first, your gender, second, the system—”

“Honestly though, Will, tell us the truth. You’re just masturbating, right? In that little dark room with your clay Jean Seberg?”

Will sighed. “I will admit, it’s hard not to.” He turned to me. “I actually am working on something else. I’m writing a feature—”

“The comic-book one? The hero’s journey? The exploration and reaffirmation of the patriarchal narrative?”

“Ariel, do you ever shut the fuck up?”

She smiled and rested a hand on his shoulder. She picked up her glass of wine and was about to sip when she said, “Oops,” and turned to us.

“Cheers,” she said gravely.

“Cheers.”

“No, in the eyes, new girl.”

“Look her in the eyes,” Will said, “or she’ll put a hex on your family.”

I looked in her blackened eyes and said cheers like it was an incantation. Our three glasses touched and I pulled a mouthful of wine. The joints in my spine softened, like butter going to room temperature.

—

THEN THREE THINGS HAPPENED, seemingly at once.

First, the music changed. Lou Reed came over the speakers like a mumbling, beloved poet-uncle.

“You know I saw him once at the Gramercy Park Hotel—have you seen what they fucking did over there? That, my friends, is a rotten omen if ever there was one. So anyway, I’m sitting there and it’s like, Lou-fucking-Reed, and I’m thinking, Thank you for teaching me how to be human, you know?”

I tried to keep listening. I nodded when Ariel looked at me. But the song was as intimate as a faucet dripping in the night.

Next, the bar stools filled. The cooks, the closing servers, the dishwashers, all out of their uniforms now, commandeered them. Everyone looked sloppy and criminal without their stripes. To see the scarred hands of the cooks against rumpled polos or old heavy-metal T-shirts, you wondered what it would be like to see one of them on a subway, without knowing they had a secret authoritative life in whites.

Simone walked down the line, her hair untied. I tried to catch her eye but she went to the far end of the bar with Heather, and who I now understood to be Heather’s boyfriend, Parker, the man who’d initiated me on the coffee machine. Simone didn’t look like a statue of herself anymore. She wore plain leather sandals and she swung one off her foot once she crossed her legs.

And finally, Chef banged out of the kitchen with a baseball cap and a backpack on. All his rage had melted away, leaving a man who looked like a dad on his way to a minivan. Everyone said, Good night, Chef, in a forceful singsong. He waved without looking. He barreled through and exited the building.

—

A CURTAIN CAME DOWN as Nicky reappeared behind the bar in a white undershirt and turned the lights up. The restaurant where I worked turned into a social club after hours. The bartenders weren’t performing bartender anymore. They were mixing drinks with playful proportions. The cooks weren’t looking over their shoulders for Chef, or walking numbly into hot pan handles. They were rolling joints, giggling, punching each other. The servers were stretching their arms and shoulders, comparing knots in their necks, stirring drinks with a finger, while complaining in one long, loving torrent about Howard, Zoe, dissecting the guests with a tone of passive contempt. I started to be able to tell when they were talking about regulars, because they would all want to outdo each other, demonstrating that they were the favorite.

Too dazzled to contribute, I watched them. It was the duality of everyone that floored me. Simone with her simple softness, her tired eyes. Will and Ariel snipping at each other. The talking got louder as the drinks receded. I kept looking at the open door, thinking a stranger would walk in and want a drink, or that the Owner would decide to pass down Sixteenth Street on his way home from an event and catch us and call the police. I’m new, I’m blameless, I would say with hands up. No one else seemed concerned. It made me wonder who really owned the restaurant.

“Black Bear?” Scott yelled down the bar to Ariel.

“No, Park Bar. Sasha just texted, he has a corner.”

“No más Park Bar,” he said. Jared and Jeff, two of his line cooks, started laughing.

“No you did not fuck the new one—Vivian?”

“Vivian!” they shouted. They raised their glasses.

“Full of shit,” Ariel yelled. She turned to me and said, “Fuck. I thought she was gay.”

“Too slow, Ari,” said Will.

“Oh we’ll see about that.” She put her hand on top of mine and said into my eyes, “They always start off straight. That’s part of the fun.”

I laughed. Petrified.

“What time is it?” I asked. A wall of exhaustion hit me with the drinks. It seemed to be a good moment to excuse myself. I didn’t know who was going to clean this all up so the restaurant would be blank and sterile for the morning. When I looked down the line I saw Simone. She was texting and I thought, It’s too late for her to be texting. That was when I first realized she was older. An image of him hit me in the back of my throat, just from habit. Who did Jake turn into when they turned the lights up? The shift drink—the first liminal space between work and my apartment, a space that I could project onto for hours, a space of inevitability where I would catch up with him eventually.