Sweetbitter(71)

I had just started to think about travel. Sometimes I lined my life up against Simone’s. I thought that my “escape,” my adventure abroad, the one that would make me contemplative and sensual, was still coming for me. I had never been to Europe. Maybe Jake and I…maybe Jake and I would become a “we.” I had never let myself have that thought in full before—two months ago I couldn’t get him to say hello to me—but now, I believed the words as I thought them, that we were moving somewhere together, and it was toward a real “we.” A “we” that held hands in the street and became regulars at Les Enfants Terribles around the corner from his apartment. It seemed a little odd that the two of us had never been out to dinner at a normal time, like anytime before midnight, but now that we’d had breakfast, the rest was a matter of time. A “we” that took weekends away, a “we” that went to Europe together, without Simone, continuous days to ourselves, we could fly into Paris, rent a car, travel the Loire River until we hit the Atlantic. I saw the way he looked at me sometimes. Other times it was like I wasn’t there, but sometimes…

“There are times in life when it’s good to live without knowing,” Howard said, interrupting what must have been a look of unruffled idiocy. “I mean that we can allow ourselves to live and not really know what it is that we’re doing. That’s all right. It’s an accumulation stage.”

My eyes welled up. He took my empty glass from me and slid it into the dish rack.

“I’d like you to be a server here. The Owner would like it as well. You will bypass your coworkers in line for the next position, so you won’t be the most popular for a moment. But is that something you would be interested in?”

I nodded.

“Wonderful. I will look for an opening in the coming months and you will begin training. Thank you for your strong work.”

I looked at my hands, which weren’t terribly clean, thinking they had autonomously produced this strong work. I remembered how scared I had been on that first L train ride to Union Square, and I’d said to my reflection words that had been a mantra all my life: I. Don’t. Care. I don’t know when exactly it happened, but Howard had changed that when he gave me this life: I cared.

—

I BECAME OBSESSED by a pair of tennis shoes, the laces spun in the spindles of a tree outside my building. One day while I was watching the lights come on in the construction sites by the river, I looked down and there they were. I had not noticed them until every last leaf fell away, the tree shedding like a balding head, and there emerged these rotten, brown sneakers. It felt like they had been stuck there a long time. They looked ancient. My thoughts about it didn’t go very far, but I was concerned. What happened to the person who lost their shoes? How did they get home? Who on earth was going to get them down? The thought that they would stay there for decades, rotting, gave me an apocalyptic feeling in my stomach.





Spring





I


YOU WILL SEE it coming. Not you actually because you don’t see for yourself yet, everyone is busy seeing for you, days filled with unsolicited advice you don’t take and trite warnings you can’t hear and the whitewashing of all your excitement. Yes, they definitely saw it coming, exactly the way it came.

When you’re older you will know that at some unconscious level not only did you see it coming, but you created it, in your own blind, stumbling way. You will console yourself with the fact that it wouldn’t have mattered, seeing it or not seeing it. You were a sponge for incident. Maybe everyone is when they’re young. They don’t remember, nobody remembers what it feels like to be so recklessly absorbent.

When you can’t see in front of you life is nothing but surprises. Looking back, there were truly so few of them.

—

WE TOOK WALKS after work because the winter was relinquishing its fascist hold on the weather. Jake’s sense of ownership of his surroundings incrementally increased as we left Union Square. By the time we passed Houston to the south, or A to the east, he was fully in possession.

He took me to his bars. He grew patient, sentimental, nervous. He hated places where the bartenders were young. All the bartenders he knew had names like Buddy, Buster, or Charlie—anything you would want to name a loyal dog. He hated bars where they bought tables or light fixtures to look antique. He liked bars that were actually old, the gloss completely worn off, peeling paint, chipped tile. No DJs. No cocktail lists. He could visit those other bars, but never inhabit them.

At Milady’s Jake called the bartender Grace, and stools always appeared for us. At Milano’s on Houston, a pit bull asleep under the table, pomaded pro skaters and their model girlfriends lined up by the door. At Mars Bar, the walls were saturated with urine and I was the only girl and no one paid any attention to me. A delicate ecosystem of old men, death metal, drinking, and the most contented kind of anarchy.

At Sophie’s on East Fifth his friend Brett ran things on Tuesday, a friend of Jake’s from “way back,” which I took to mean they were either petty criminals together or in rehab together because neither one of them would talk about it. Brett drank, tamely and grumpily, keeping one eye on The Simpsons episode that played on the TV above the bar. Jake kept giving me quarters to go to the jukebox and every time I chose a song he put his hands on his head and moaned.