Sweetbitter(87)

I saw “Simone,” I saw “Jake,” I saw “sabbatical,” “France,” and “month of June.”

I absorbed the words but not their meaning. I picked up the paper. It slipped out of my hands. My finger pads couldn’t grip it, my nails couldn’t get the edges up. I heard breathing but I couldn’t get any air. Valves shut in me, first behind my eyes, then in my throat, then in my chest, then in my stomach.

This is what happens when the body anticipates a wound. It steels itself. A pliable mind twists vainly to avoid logic, all judgments, all conclusions, if only for a few seconds longer.

It was a Vacation Request Form, the kind of dreary printout that Zoe spent all her hours creating and filing. It was in the handbook: all vacation requests had to be approved by Howard at least a month out. The restaurant was so carefully staffed that it couldn’t accommodate spontaneous absences—every service was designed around all the servers’ strengths and weaknesses. To take an extended vacation required a radical reworking of the schedule. But Howard liked to retain his staff and hold their jobs for them. He encouraged us to take what he called sabbaticals.

My mind caught up: Simone was requesting a sabbatical to France for the entire month of June and she was requesting it for her and Jake. It had been given to Howard three days before my birthday dinner. I saw the tendrils of smoke off the candles when I blew them out, I saw dozens of burning plates in the pass, rushed drinks on the bar, subway rides, Jake’s sleeping face, Simone’s satisfied face—the weeks since that night reeled in front of me. I sat down in Howard’s chair. The request had been approved two days ago. When I tried to remember what I was doing two days ago it was like running my face into a wall.

—

I TOLD MYSELF to be calm, gather my information, hold very still. Maybe it was a mistake. Maybe I had misunderstood.

“Hey,” I said, touching Simone on the shoulder as I passed to my locker. “Can I talk to you?”

“I’m changing,” she said distantly. Her mascara leached into the lines around her eyes. The changing room was crowded, the whole herd of us in there at once. People were talking about going to Old Town for burgers since it was still early. Then everyone would head to Park Bar. My sense of hearing was off, I heard the overlapping tenors of voices I knew so well, but at a dim, fuzzy volume. Overriding all of it was the ringing of the lightbulbs. I looked at Simone. She was holding her stripes to her chest over her bra and I inadvertently looked for her tattoo, like it was going to explain something, like it was a message written to me that I had missed. And it was. They were marked, weren’t they? I reached for my locker to steady myself.

Whenever I’d asked him about that key: “It’s nothing, it’s not the key to anything, a tattoo is just a tattoo, only as permanent as the body.” How I swooned when he spoke to me in that vaguely Buddhist, vaguely nihilist accent. In reality it was a shitty tattoo that was a warning to anyone who looked at them that they were not available.

I kept blinking, my lashes sticking together, my eyes dusty. “Simone, can I borrow your makeup? I forgot my things.”

I stood in line behind Heather in the mirror, thinking about setting fire to the restaurant. So what? I asked my reflection. It’s just a month in France. It’s just matching tattoos. It’s just that they grew up together. How many times had I used the word just to explain away something that so clearly needed my attention? My eyes said, Stop. This is something.

Everything I had ever learned about the two of them bound them more securely, squeezing out all the air, all the light. Why was I the last one to learn anything, and why when I thought I learned something did the bottom drop out of it?

Simone observed me in the mirror. She was attuned to my shifts in mood. No, she was never blind. I put on mascara. I took out her lipstick and it smelled like roses and plastic and was cold when I dragged it into place. My reflection said to her reflection, Yes, I make you look old.

I handed her the cosmetics bag.

“Can I talk to you?” I asked again.

“Can it wait?” She walked away without waiting for my response.

“No,” I whispered.

The key, the key, a month, a month. Some white-trash tattoo parlor. He had probably been underage and she had probably been his consenting adult. I wondered how she covered her breasts while the needle hit her, whether she and Jake had locked eyes or if he’d turned politely away. A series of men touching it on her and asking, What’s this about? She would say, It’s nothing. And a series of women all over his body, ending with my idiotic face, asking, Why a key? Never an answer, never a clue.

When was that? Where were you? The questions they didn’t tolerate. The two of them imprecise and evasive. I saw him living in her apartment, hitting his head on the ceiling when he rose from the bed in that lofted space, reworking the electrical wires. I saw her Miami mug and his Miami magnet, this phantom Morocco they both mentioned, the two of them in every corner of this restaurant, watching me with reserve, which isn’t something, Tess, some things are nothing, but suddenly not these things.

And now this: the two of them sitting next to each other on a plane, the way she would drowsily drop her head onto his shoulder when the plane took off, thirty cafés au lait and croissants, thirty bistros, thirty languorous afternoons, thirty caves du vin, and Simone’s French smothering the rooms they would stay in. My visions of our June vanished. I would long for the two of them to give the days significance, to show me how far I’d come, to reflect my progress, and they would be gone. I would wake on his birthday, and on my anniversary of arriving, alone. These weren’t masochistic daydreams, this was the reality I would have to live through.