Sweetbitter(42)

Yes, we were starving. Scott waved the menus away and we got the waiter’s attention—he proceeded to order an obscene amount of food off the “real menu,” which wasn’t printed.

Two-dollar beers that tasted like barely fermented, yeasty water. We salivated. There was no coursing—in ten minutes plates started pounding the spinning tray at the center of the table and we fought among ourselves. Conch in a hallucinatory Sichuan oil, a nest of cold sesame noodles, a wild, red stew that Scott called ma po tofu, cold tripe (“Just eat it,” Scott said, and I did), crackling duck, dry-sautéed green beans, skinny molten eggplants, cucumbers in scallion oil…

We sweat, we breathed harder, our eyes ran. More napkins. The sauces ran. More rice. I touched my lips, numb and electrified. My stomach bloated out, a hard alien ball. I thought about throwing up so that I could eat another round.

“What would your last meal be?” I asked suddenly. That was a night when I thought it would be all right if my life ended.

“A really long omakase. Like at least thirty-four courses. I want Yesuda to cook them himself. He puts the soy sauce on with a paintbrush.”

“Salmon pastrami from Russ and Daughters. A ton of bagels. Like three bagels.”

“In-N-Out double double.”

“I’m thinking about a Barolo, something really ripe and dirty, like from the eighties.”

“ShackBurger and a milk shake.”

“My mom’s was veal scallopini and a Diet Coke.”

“Nonna’s Bolognese—it takes eight hours. She makes the pappardelle by hand.”

“A roast chicken—I would eat the entire thing by hand. And I guess a DRC. When else would I taste that kind of Burgundy?”

“Blinis, caviar, and crème fra?che. Done and done. Some impossible Champagne, Krug, or a culty one like the Selosse, drunk out of the bottle.”

“Toast,” I said, when my turn came. I tried to think of something more glamorous, but toast was the truth. I expected to be mocked. My suburban-ness, my stupidity, my blankness.

“What on top?”

“Um. Peanut butter. The raw kind you get from the health-food stores. I salt it myself.”

My clumsiness. My dullness. Instead they all nodded. They treated my toast reverentially. Which was exactly how I thought of it when I made it in the morning. I ate it standing up in the narrow kitchen, which had one pan, paper plates, and a toaster. A small window at the end where I could scan the buildings and watch pigeons on telephone wires. Sometimes I had two pieces. Sometimes I ate it naked, leaning up against the window.

“I’m going to throw up.”

We all agreed.

“Nightcap?”

We all agreed.

The bill was nothing and the table was destroyed. We left a pile of cash on the spinning tray and rolled ourselves into the ample night.





VI


JAKE ACTED LIKE nothing had happened, so I acted like nothing had happened harder. One evening we were alone in the glass-and-cardboard labyrinth of the wine cellar. I could hear him moving behind a stack of boxes higher than my head. I heard an unconcerned grunt. His knife tore into the tape. Scrape of cardboard on cement. Taps of glass on glass.

How easy it would be to say, Hi. To say, Hi, do you remember me? To say, Can you help me find the Bricco Manzoni? To say, Oh geez, this place is a mess. To say, Kiss me again like that, right now.

Footsteps above us loosening dust from the ceiling. I stopped doing everything and listened to him. He left carrying six bottles of wine in his hands, ducking at the low door. Beware of Sediment, I would have said, if he had looked at me.

I woke in the mornings inwardly hysterical at the possibility of seeing him. I took great pleasure in subduing it. I practiced composure. He was teaching me a previously unknown patience. It was about him, but it was also not him. I longed for satiation but was terrified of it. I wanted to live in this queasy moment of fantasy for as long as possible. My body was agitated and possessed, but I found the Bricco, I broke down the case. I held it in my body—the precarious balance between the quotidian and Technicolor madness.

—

“AMATEUR NIGHT,” Ariel yelled. Park Bar was filled with lumpy women strapped into flammable dresses, grown men in faded face paint. A pair of vampire fangs in an empty glass with lime rinds. A gold-chained, clown-shoed pimp sat in a corner, around him all the usual tarnished whores. Will, our own Peter Parker, had morphed into Spider-Man. He asked me to cover his Halloween shift, saying that it was his favorite holiday, and I thought he was being sarcastic. Not only had I not participated in Halloween as a child, I found adults who clung to it especially odd. But he owned a full costume and had been drinking with his friends Batman, Robin, and Wolverine since the early afternoon. He crouched on a bar stool and shot webbing at me, ignorant of how the red fabric clung to his beer belly.

Vivian was indecent. I had spent many nights appraising her with Ariel, who was critical by default, but also smitten. Sometimes I forgot Vivian was like me—a person, perhaps soulful, ambitious, or something. Tonight she was “tit soup”—that’s what she called it. She overflowed everywhere, the waistband of her fishnets cutting into her hips above little black shorts.

“What are you, sweet pea?” she asked over the bar.

“I’m inoffensive,” I yelled back. She didn’t hear me but pretended like she did and said, “Cool.”