Sweetbitter(72)

“Is it genetic? Can women just not understand music? This is shit, absolute shit, you like this?”

“This is a good song. You could walk down the aisle to this song.” The aisle and Jake. He covered his ears.

“You’re fucking insane, you’re making me want to die.”

As soon as the song was over, he slid another quarter up next to my beer and I was determined—not for him to like a song I picked, that was impossible, but for him to say nothing.

“You know Ian wrote this for Joy Division before he died?”

“Who’s Ian? This is a band called New Order.”

“Brett! Brett, are you hearing this? Who’s Ian, she says! This is a band called New Order!”

Brett took his eyes off the screen for a second and sized me up. He was disappointed.

“Who’s Joy Division?”

“Fuck!” said Jake. The whole bar up in arms, grown men slamming the wood, someone pointing a pool stick at me. When the song ended another quarter appeared next to my beer.

“You’re torturing me?”

He leaned toward me and a lock of hair fell. I pushed it back. That’s who I was now: the girl who got to fix Jake’s hair. He was getting tipsy, loose, his teeth bared, I could feel him coming for me.

“I like it,” he said.

“You like humiliating me?”

“No.” He put his hand on my cheek and our foreheads touched. “I like how hard you concentrate when you’re over there. You chew on your lips like it’s life or death. I like the way you bop on your bar stool even when everyone is screaming at you.”

“You like my bopping?” I bounced and his hands found me and pulled me off the stool.

“You ready?” he asked and I nodded, biting his neck. I don’t think anything gave me as much satisfaction as when he asked if I was ready to go home. To think that we left places together, that we got to leave all the people to their last calls.

“Brett, we’ll settle,” he said, one hand pulling cash out of his wallet for a tip, his other hand crawling into my bra, pinching my nipple. Brett shrugged. It was like that all the time—no tab, no consequences.

—

“ARTISTS USED TO LIVE HERE” it said in graffiti on the plywood covering the chain-link fence around a giant hole in the ground. Demolition crews were inside, breaking up concrete, redistributing piles of dirt and wreckage. Also on the plywood were a series of building permits, and an ad for condos with a computer-illustrated woman in heels and a business suit relaxing, drinking a glass of wine, surveying the Manhattan skyline from her white box in the sky. She was a brunette with vaguely multicultural eyes. Maybe artists used to live here, but this woman was definitely not an artist. Though she was facing west, the ad said, The Dawn of Luxury in Williamsburg.

The wind frothed the river onto the rocks. The grass was brown and bare, the flower beds twiggy. I sat on a bench to look up at the bridge, and felt an acute anxiety. Who was going to buy the condos? Who was going to pay off our student loans? Would our sense of style protect us? And if the poor people used to live here and the rich people were going to live here, where would we go?

Two homeless men were asleep on picnic tables. I had become very good at not looking at unpleasant things. I could skip my eyes over any pool of vomit on the train platform, any broken junkie lurching toward the concrete, any woman who screamed at her crying baby, even the couples fighting at their tables at the restaurant, women crying into fettuccine, twirling their wedding bands—what being a fifty-one percenter had taught me was not to let any shock shake my composure. One of the homeless men, in the layers of colorless clothes, was faced away from me on his side. His pants were half down, a piece of shit-covered toilet paper sticking out of his ass crack like a surrender flag. One of his tennis shoes had fallen off and lay to the side of the table.

I looked at him until I couldn’t anymore. The sun seemed pensive about setting, and instead of the usual transcendental buzz I got from a change of light, I noticed that the rats were shifting within the rocks. I’m beginning to worry, I said to the river. I checked my phone and walked back home.

—

WHEN THE INVITATION CAME it was vague and I was cautious. I waited for her to follow up. But she meant it—she would love to host me for dinner, me and Jake, together. The three of us. I was to arrive at eight. When I looked through my books to see if there was something I could bring to surprise her, I pulled out the copy of Emily Dickinson she had lent me when I first went to her apartment. I had read it many times but holding it in my hand that whole afternoon tumbled back to me with a rush of embarrassment. Not at the memory, but at the ease with which whole afternoons were forgotten. The way thousands of wounds and triumphs were whittled down to only the sharpest moments, and even those failed to remain present. I had already forgotten about the men by the river. Already forgotten what the autumn felt like. My sadness that day when I left her—it only existed in that little book, and even there, it was just a relic.

So, I said to myself in the mirror as I circled my eyes in black liner, not only was I returning to Simone’s apartment, but I was going back for dinner, and not only was I going, but I was going with Jake. I wore a cable-knit black sweater, tall black boots, black pants glued to my legs. I smudged up my eyeliner and wrapped my oversized gray scarf around my neck. Surprises in every corner.