Sweetbitter(31)

From Will: “The biggest mistake I made in my first year was to accept opera tickets from Emma Francon. I thought, This is awesome, I put on my suit. I know she looks good for her age, but there is a twenty-year gap there, I thought it was totally innocent. La Traviata, a hand job in the taxi, followed by two nights where she totally embarrassed herself at the bar. We never saw her again. Howard was not happy.”

From Jake: “They’re all better looking with a bar between you and them.”

—

“I FORGET your hand doesn’t naturally go that way,” said Will, catching me. He crossed his arms and watched.

I was in the server hutch by the handicapped bathroom, out of view, practicing my three-plate-carry. Some of the backwaiters could do four-plate-carries, three plates solidly fanned up one arm and one in the other. The plates were organized, so they could flick down the first plate to position one and use the now-free arm to arrange the other plates from open-armed swoops on the left side of each guest. The plates were always placed according to the way Chef designed the dish, like a painting hung properly on a wall.

I put the second plate on my wrist and it dipped.

“There are three prongs,” Will said. “Your pointer and middle together, the soft part right here,” and he touched the bottom of my palm where it went to my thumb, “and this—your steering wheel.” He pulled my pinkie up vertically.

It felt wrong. My pinkie deflated.

“Maybe my hands aren’t big enough.”

“It’s not optional. Chef is going to keep thrashing you until you can do it. It’s like you’re half a food runner right now. If the kitchen boys can do it, you can do it. It’s not a Mexican secret.”

—

“SHE’S SHRINKING AGAIN,” said Nicky. Will nodded gravely and we all stared at her.

Even I noticed that Rebecca was acting strange. She was a hostess and we had barely any overlap, but she was polite, deferential once she saw that I was aligned with Simone.

Overnight she developed the whiff of an unstable woman, something like plumeria body lotion from the drugstore. She scooped together compositions at family meal, then talked instead of ate. She hovered, hawkish, as we finished our food.

Simone said, “There’s a moment in every female’s career when her wit blackens.” I saw it with Rebecca. Instead of laughing she began to say, “Ha,” as if writing a message over a great distance.

I woke up past noon to two emails from her. They were addressed to everyone, the entire staff, the Owner, everyone at the corporate office. The first gave her notice. She had worked, gotten home, and written to tell us that it would be her last shift. No going-away party necessary. Thanks.

The second email went like this: “Hi guys! First of all, I can’t tell you how lucky I feel to have worked with you all. I’m going home to California for a while, but I’m going to miss everyone so much! But second of all, Howard and I have been sleeping together for four months. He is the reason I quit. Thanks for understanding and thanks for the memories! XO, Becky.”

My shock was total—I looked around my room for someone to reflect it back to me, but I was alone. I texted Will immediately: Howard’s girls? What the fuck happened?!

A text back from Will: I know! What a crazy bitch!

A text back from Ariel: Textbook insane anorexic, I hear she’s checking into a hospital in CA.

And that was the consensus. I felt that some gross, unignorable injustice had occurred. But I said her name to Simone and she began talking about Pinot Noir. There was a lot of: Can you fucking believe that? And then head shaking. I kept an eye on Howard all night. He worked the floor in a pink tie, weaving around like cursive.

“How’s it going?” I asked him while I made him his macchiato. “Weird night?”

“Did you know that the word weird pertains to fate? It’s Old English, and relates to having the ability to bend or turn fate? But the first popularized usage was Shakespeare—”

“Macbeth,” I said. “I remember now. The Witches. Right?”

“Very quick.” He smiled, threw back his espresso, and passed me the empty cup. “I wasn’t wrong about you.”

—

SASHA WAS a tough nut to crack. He loved watermelon-flavored Smirnoff, Jake, cocaine, and pop music. Those subjects provided just enough overlap between us for me to occasionally warrant his attention. He finally asked me to do a line with him one night at Park Bar and I was thrilled to cement the friendship. I’d heard that his father had died back in Moscow a few weeks before and that he couldn’t go back because he didn’t have a green card yet. He was married to a beautiful Asian girl with blue hair named Ginger, but he didn’t know where she was living and the paperwork had stalled. When we got into the bathroom I offered my condolences. He narrowed his eyes like a threatened animal. We snorted coke and I told him I wanted to visit Moscow and he said, “Oh you just a real idiot. That’s all.”

After that he started offering me his cheek to be kissed when he arrived at the restaurant. His favorite thing to say to me was, “What you think?” and then state something I had believed as if it were utter madness.

He caught me by the ice machine rubbing the bags under my eyes with ice cubes.

“You crying? Oh my god, angel-face, what you think, you’re supposed to be happy? Why you think that?”