Sweetbitter(64)

He stared at the carpet. Pensive.

“Pathetic,” I said. I pressed the button.

“I was sorry as soon as I said it.”

“You’re wearing me out. Honestly.” I pressed the button again and again. I saw that alternative route, path of peace, of light. I saw the bar, the beer, and the gentleness of being with friends, all of that obliterated when he came near me. I had given him permission to do that. A bell rang and the doors parted. Jake went into the back corner and I stood in front of him, holding the door as everyone crowded in.

“Going out for one, Denise?” I asked Nicky’s wife. Nicky told me that she was the first woman who ever talked back to him and he knew immediately he had to marry her. She was a sharp brunette, still pretty but her cheeks were gaunt now.

“No, no. We are heading home. Our best-case scenario is a five a.m. wake-up with the wee one.”

“Best-case!” Nicky clapped and turned toward me. “Fluff doesn’t get home till five a.m., isn’t that right?”

“What’s Fluff?” asked Denise.

“It’s an old nickname,” I said, and my breath shot out of me. Jake dragged his finger down my back. “From high school.”

My spine a burning candlestick, everywhere he touched dripping. Behind you.

“I did vote for you,” he said softly so only I heard it. And we were back at it: the night buoyant, time elastic, my body forgiving.

“Denise,” I said, stepping back closer to him, “remind me, how old is the youngest?”

—

I STRADDLED HIM in the backseat of a taxi, leather seats groaning, his fingers inside me, pumping, pressing into a white-hot spot in my stomach. I was struck through layers of intoxication that I might come suddenly. He shifted his thumb and I recoiled, sure I wouldn’t come at all. A passage of pushing and pulling, my hair, strands of it coming out in his hand, his shirt collar, him holding me down, forcing me harder onto his lap, the cab hit a pothole and I exhaled.

When I climbed on top of him I momentarily thought of the taxi driver. How far into his shift was he? I wanted to tell him: I work long nights too. Sometimes people treat me terribly. I imagined the taxi driver had a small daughter who called him while he worked. He put her voice on speakerphone and it lit up the car. A glamour shot of his wife hung off the rearview mirror. I assumed it was his wife. She had her hand behind her ear and her head tilted, holding a rose in the other hand. Her lipstick matched the flower. I wondered if the money was good New Year’s Day. I wondered if he had seen everything. He slammed the partition shut and turned up the music and Jake pulled up my skirt and I forgot the taxi driver was a person.

I was gnawing on his lips, his ears, his chin, trying to extend the tremor in my stomach, I’m close, I wanted to say, colored lights smudging the windows, it’s very close.

Jake grabbed my face and said, “Do you know what you taste like?” and pulled his fingers out of me and jammed them into my mouth.

I didn’t gag. I was too stunned to feel anything at first. I’m salty, I thought. I don’t taste bad. But I moaned, I ground into him harder. I was completely turned on, switched on, not by my taste, but by Jake’s certainty. There were so few moments I had been certain in my life. I was constant revision, constant doubt. What I learned, as he slipped his fingers out of my mouth and back inside me, is that in New York City there are absolutely no rules. I didn’t understand that monstrous freedom until Jake said into my mouth, Come for me, and I came in the back of a cab. There were people who did whatever the fuck they wanted and their city was terrifying, barbaric, and breathless.





V


SOME MEN TAKE to vinegar with relish. They delight in the sparkling traces of fermentation. His fingers in the pickles, in the sour cherries we imported from Italy and spooned into Manhattans, his olive-juice-soaked knuckles, one dirty martini after another, his fingers in me, syrupy, astringent, and wait, wait, there it is: briny.

—

A BLUE-BLACK WINTRY DAWN crept up the squat roofs of Brooklyn when I left for my apartment. I was in the cab, the car was flying over the East River, the bridge woozy, the car weightless.

I had a small mirror in my bathroom, but it was high and I couldn’t see below my chin. I climbed up and curled myself into the sink bowl.

There were marks. A bruise on my chest, above my breast, a nebulous thumbprint. Some chafing on my neck and chin. A red, hivelike oval on the inside of my arm. A cast of blue peeled down my bottom lip. Red dashes on the inside. My underwear felt wet and I looked down—there was my period, days early, like he had pulled a trigger.

My eyes cloudy from wine. The skin under my nose flaking from the radiator. I couldn’t stop touching my face, the blank screen that everyone projected onto. Whatever beauty I had, it wasn’t self-generated, wasn’t rooted. It was permeable. But underneath that, I could just make it out: the face of a woman.

It was my mouth that was changing. This bleak, purplish, inflated mouth. And my left eye perpetually smaller now, swollen, it didn’t open as wide as it used to. Tired is what a friend would say. I didn’t look new anymore.

I would get tattoos of the bruises. He would be surprised. What did he call his tattoos? A commitment to a moment? Look, Jake, my body is committed. I lay on my mattress, counting heartbeats. I knew it would never be repeated, that night. Never exactly like that again, never as surprising and powerful again. And so I held it, without reviewing it, I held it perfectly still. The walls of my room turned milky with light. I listened to the last of the Puerto Ricans rowdily clamoring home.