Sweetbitter(65)

—

VARIOUS SNOWSTORMS PILED UP like traffic, snowbanks grinding into sidewalks and rising like new buildings. And indoors the soups kept coming—cure-alls. Santos surreptitiously made menudo on Sunday mornings with the cast-off cow parts. The tripe was sweet and the broth was oily, it tasted like iron, oregano, and limes. Sriracha on everything, even in emergency soups of chicken broth and scallions. Knots in our necks, flus, sinus infections, we passed the ailments between us.

Will, Ariel, and I sat bowed over our bowls in silence while the beginnings of a storm hit Sixteenth Street. Scott made pho for family meal, a recipe he got from an old man in a market stall in Hanoi. It was a gift, steaming, fragrant with star anise, rich.

“You disappeared after the party,” Will said to me. Ariel twirled her noodles. I slurped with my eyes down.

“I just went home.”

“That’s funny. You never usually just go home.”

“I was tired,” I said.

“How was home?” He sat back in his chair, arms crossed. “Was it nice?”

“Yes, it was glorious.” I went back to my bowl. When I looked up he was injured and I was ashamed. “Will, can you act like my friend?”

He looked into his bowl. “I don’t know.”

He got up and left. I turned to Ariel, hoping for some sympathy. She was also absorbed in her soup.

“It was amazing,” I said quietly.

“Gross.”

“I’ve never felt anything like it. I usually have trouble…”

“Coming?”

“Well, yes, I mean, it’s fine by myself. But hard. At other times. With people. But this time it wasn’t…difficult.”

“Well, great. He’s had a lot of practice.”

“Don’t be mean.”

“I’m not, but you want me to act like great sex is the end of the world.”

It is the end of the world, I thought. “No. But it feels big. I can’t explain it, I feel, womanly or something.”

“You think it’s womanly to get fucked?” She had her clawed tones out and I retreated.

“I don’t want to argue about gender theory. I just feel like something real happened. And I wanted someone to talk to about it. Like a friend.”

“Let me guess,” she said, tapping the spoon against the tablecloth. “He beat you up a little bit, called you a slut, and you thought that was really edgy, another spoiled white girl who wants to get slapped around because she always got everything she wanted.”

“Fuck, Ari.” I shook my head. “It must be hard. To have already sized up the world, to already have written it off completely. Is it just so fucking boring all the time?”

“Pretty much, Skip.”

“I would rather be called a slut by him than deal with the shit I get from the women here.” I picked up my bowl. “Also, you’re fucking white. By the way. And you don’t get a medal for being gay.”

“Listen,” she said, her voice calmer. She pouted out her bottom lip. “I am looking out for you. Don’t start measuring your life in sex, it’s dangerous. Great sex is not a big deal.”

I sat back down. “What is a big deal, then?”

“Intimacy. Trust.”

“Okay,” I said. Those words floated out above me, abstract, romantic, and I wondered what they looked like on the ground. Maybe they were already happening, maybe they were embedded in the sex. Years of wondering if there was something wrong with me. Wondering why sex drove people insane. Years of mimicking porn stars, trying to arch my back in the most flattering way. Years of sex that was empty, never held its shape.

“Isn’t sex something?”

She shrugged. I realized she had no idea what I was talking about. When we went to the dish station I put my bowl down and hugged her from behind. I wondered how there was any room for the guests, with all of our hopeful faces and our imposing loneliness.

—

LET ME TRY this again: it was changeover. He was coming in for the night and I was the beverage runner from the day. It had been snowing off and on, spidery flakes brushing the windows, salt rims on the sidewalks, a tinctured light from a weak sun. I was making macchiatos, but really I was watching Enrique as he stood outside in a huge parka wiping down the windows. His gloved hands held a squeegee and pulled long draws of soapy water up the windows and opalescent patterns slid down.

Jake stopped at the door to take off his cap and shake out his hair. When he touched his own cheeks from the cold it was humbling. All of the most thoughtless gestures were exotic on him. Pulling his keys from his pocket for his front door, hanging those keys—with precision—on a hook inside his house. He looked different today—it wasn’t as simple as us having been naked together—after all it had been two a.m. and dark in his room so I didn’t know if that counted as actually having seen each other naked. No, it was that he was amplified, each vision of him laid on top of another in translucent sheets. Like the collection of Oriental rugs in the lightless cave of his apartment, each rug overlapping another, an uneven terrain of rug on top of rug on top of rug, you only imagined touching the ground. Like his tattoos, none of them quite touching, his skin an image of white space between the images, the private mosaic of him, the sound of his breathing becoming harassed, his uneven teeth, his smells coming loose from skin. I could still smell him in my hair.