Sweetbitter(35)

IV


FIGS IN MY LOCKER. Four of them, in a small brown basket. They were gilded like an offering. A slap from another sun-soaked world. I pushed them to the back and laid an old New Yorker over them. I knew that no one was supposed to see them.

When my shift was over I put them gently in my purse. I felt like I had stolen something. I paused at the service bar and looked at him. He was talking to Flower-Girl at the entrance, where she was replacing branches that weren’t going to last the weekend. Normally she bothered me—she was girlish, her bicycle had a basket, she always wore dresses and a beribboned headband. I had no doubt she had been in a sorority. But I had figs and an entire evening. No, I had a secret.

“You. Want a drink?” he asked, tucking a bar mop into his belt loop. I searched his face for anything—amusement, annoyance, affinity.

“What goes well with…?” I almost said it. What goes well with figs? I suddenly understood how saying something out loud could murder it. That the privacy was what made it voluptuous. That the silence was a test.

“The sunshine,” I said. “I want to take it to go.”

He nodded with barely raised eyebrows and reached for a bottle of sparkling and I knew the figs were from him.

“In my personal opinion, the wine should never get in the way.” He poured the Crémant Rosé into a to-go coffee cup. “Of the sunshine.”

“I think Simone would say that a wine that isn’t in the way isn’t really a wine.”

“Who cares what Simone would say?”

“Um…” I searched his face. “Me?”

“What would you say?”

“I don’t know.” I sipped the wine through the plastic lid. It tasted like sparkling Capri Sun. “This is delicious. It will be perfect with the sun. Thank you.”

Look at me, I thought. Parker came up and started asking him about beers and he was gone. But we had a secret. As I walked out, Flower-Girl was gazing up at her arrangement.

“I’m glad you fixed that,” I said to her. I put my sunglasses on. “They looked terrible.”

—

I ENDED UP walking home. That to-go cup. The ambrosial twilight tumbled off the cliff-sides of buildings, pooling on sidewalks. Every face I met, hypnotized, facing west. When I got to the park I found a bench and held my figs. Each one with a firm density that reminded me of flesh, of my own breasts. There was a teardrop at one end and I put it on my tongue. I felt undressed.

I tore them apart. They were soft, the pink interior lazily revealing itself. I ate them too quickly, rapaciously. I got up, tossed the empty cup and basket in the trash can. At that moment a chubby little girl and her mother came up the subway steps into Union Square. The girl put her hand to her mouth.

“Oh mama, oh mama!” she yelled and pointed to the sky.

“What do you see?”

“I see a city!”

I decided to walk.

Dreadlocked men playing chess and nodding to themselves, dogs slumped against dead-eyed kids with tears tattooed on their faces, the bursts of commuters up from the subways, dilating into the streets, the garbage cans overflowing with plastic water bottles and trashed New York dailies, a woman screaming into a cell phone while adjusting her bra, three blond men on a corner holding a map between them, speaking German, the sidewalk quaking as the N, Q, R trains ran in and out of the station underneath, a smoky, acrid cloud next to a gyro cart, tables laid with paperbacks, cheap leather, bulk T-shirts, the leftovers of lives, and then dehydrated carnations, left in the middle of the sidewalk, fossilized in plastic, irradiated with light. Everyone stepped around them, tenderly. I moved out of their way as well.

As I walked, I repeated the street names like they had the permanence of numerals: Bond, Bleecker, Houston, Prince, Spring. Lust rubied my blood, gave me the gait of an uncaught criminal, and I felt like I could walk forever.

—

“MAYBE I’LL STAY HERE,” Jake said. I heard him from around the corner of the hutch and his tone was barbed so I stopped.

“Well of course you’re not staying,” Simone said.

“You don’t listen to me—”

“That’s because Thanksgiving is not optional.”

I thought about circling back, but they were silent and I had the impression that they were mouthing words to each other, or they had stopped talking because they knew I was there.

I entered and put my water pitcher down. I looked between them. Heather came in right behind me and went to the silver.

“Everything okay in here?”

“I’m good,” I said cheerfully, keeping my back to Jake. “Simone, I have a question. Will you show me who eats here?”

“Ooooh, she’s hunting,” said Heather. She handed me her lip gloss and I put it on, confused.

“She’s not hunting.” Simone stared at me.

“Hunting for what?”

“You’re too young for that,” said Jake.

“Youth is a prereq for wife-number-two, Jakey. She’s going to peak real soon,” Heather said, rubbing her lips. “You wouldn’t be the first to marry up.”

“You’re just trying to get fucked by an old guy?” Jake asked.

“You guys are terrible,” I said, getting hot and wondering what I had walked into. “Never fucking mind.”