Sweetbitter(38)

“No,” he said. I looked at Simone to see if it was a joke. It was the fucking hiccups. She was watching him. He hiccupped again and shut his eyes.

“No listen, dude, it’s easy. First you hold your breath.”

“I can handle this,” Jake said seriously.

“Is this a joke?” I asked.

“It’s just hiccups, Jake, my kid gets them all the time,” said Nick.

“I don’t like them.”

I turned to Simone and whispered, “He doesn’t like them?” and she shook her head and whispered back, “It’s from when he was a child. It’s about not being able to catch his breath.”

He was obviously having trouble holding his breath and we waited. Sasha reached behind the bar and said, “Hey, old man, get me the juices from the little pickles. My grandma taught me.”

“Just swallow three times.”

“No,” said Nick, pouring sugar onto a teaspoon. “Take this.”

“You drink a cup of water upside down,” I said inaudibly.

“Jake,” Simone said and he held his hand up to her again. He hiccupped and his whole chest shook. She bit her lip.

“Stop being a pussy,” Will said.

Jake hit his hand on the bar and we froze. Then he gripped the bar with both hands and shut his eyes, taking long breaths. Nicky walked away. He hiccupped again.

I took my flute and walked off like I was going to the kitchen. But I turned once I was past him. My reason fled, my sense of propriety. As I started creeping back I saw Simone shake her head at me. And I thought, Perhaps your way is not the best way. Maybe the two of you have grown too serious if he can’t handle the hiccups.

I moved with purpose, with stealth. I crouched down to a squat and inched behind his stool. Once I was close enough to see the hairs on his arms, I sprang.

“BOO!” I said, and slammed my hands onto his shoulders. I laughed. I stopped when he turned his face slightly. He was not laughing. He looked murderous.

“Sorry,” I said. I went back to the kitchen, busing my flute, growing more ashamed with each step. The only comfort I had as I changed my clothes was that someday I would be far, far away from the restaurant and I wouldn’t remember how I had acted like a child. He should be embarrassed, I said. The fucking hiccups, what a narcissistic little boy. He should be the one running away. But no, it was me, hiding in the locker room until I was calm.

When I came back down he and Simone were gone. Relief.

“Such a moody little bitch, right?” Sasha said, shaking his head.

“You want one more?” asked Will, turning the stool next to him.

“That was stupid,” I said.

“Let’s shut it down,” said Sasha, picking up the plates holding everyone’s ashes.

“Park Bar?”

I hesitated.

“Come on, Fluff, you won this round.” Nicky shut off the lights and said, “He didn’t have another one after that. You cured him.”

—

THE RAMIFICATIONS OF my fall down the stairs appeared on my left hip, my lower back, my cheek from where the entrée plate hit me. The bruises bubbled to the surface of my skin before they colored. My skin like that of a nearly liquefied nectarine, the pulp rolling around under the thin surface. If you bit it, the whole thing would burst.





V


THEN ONE DAY I learned that there was an invisible ravine running up the city, as deep as the Grand Canyon, narrower at the top. You could walk in tandem with a stranger on the sidewalk and not realize that he or she was not on the same cliff-side as you.

On one side, there were the people who lived there, and on the other side, terminally distanced, were the people who had made homes there.

The first time I saw a home was on an Indian summer day when I took up Simone’s offer to let me borrow her World Atlas of Wine and a few other books she thought might be helpful in my ongoing quest to speak of New World versus Old World; to identify when Brettanomyces is to be encouraged or when it is to be abhorred. She lived in the East Village, on Ninth between First and A.

I had been in New York long enough to know that servers, even the senior ones, didn’t make enough to live alone in the East Village. Simone had been in the same apartment for over twelve years. I didn’t understand exactly how rent control worked, but I gathered that if you stayed in the ghetto long enough, eventually you would be living for free, or something like that.

An old, ornately fire-escaped and charred building. Four flights of stairs. I clocked details like I was assessing it to move in, imagining taking the garbage out, or my laundry. I thought that Simone and I might be making the essential transition—daytime, both of our days off—and I imagined the invitations she would bestow on me: Let’s go to the Russian baths together and gossip. Or we can get a pedicure and read trashy magazines. Or, best of all, she would ask if I had eaten—I hadn’t on purpose—and she would say, Let’s grab lunch, and take me to a hole in the wall in Alphabet City where they spoke French and she would order couscous and we would drink cheap white wine, and she would explain the difference between the crus in Beaujolais again but when she did she would be telling me about her life, thinly veiled, and I would respond, constructing stories of my own terroir for her, all my experiences clicking into order around her words.

“Oh hello you,” she said softly. She seemed surprised to see me, as if I were unexpected. She wore a short, patterned robe over men’s briefs and a wifebeater. Simone’s legs. Simone’s loose, low breasts. It always surprised me how small she was when she wasn’t at work. Simone’s smells: coffee, powdery night-blooming flowers, unwashed hair, and the barest trace of cigarettes. I moved minutely past the doorway, afraid to breathe.