Sweetbitter(93)

“You are blessed with a rare sensitivity,” she said. “It’s what makes people artists, winemakers, poets—this porous nature. However.” She paused and blinked her mascara into place. “You lack self-control. Discipline. And that is what separates art from emotion. I do not think you have the intelligence yet to interpret your feelings. But I do not think you are stupid.”

“Jesus, that’s lovely.”

“It’s the truth. You can take it.”

“You both enjoy saying that. You love the truth as it applies to everyone else.”

“I never lied to you, Tess. I kept him away from you for as long as I could. I was explicit about what you were dealing with.”

“It’s not normal, Simone, you both going away like this, not even bothering to tell me. It’s not right.”

“Jake and I haven’t traveled together in ages, it’s overdue.”

“Was I really so threatening?”

“Don’t flatter yourself.”

“Why don’t you just take him?” I said. “Just take him, have him.”

She turned back to me and said, immaculately, “Oh, little one, I don’t want him.”

I pressed my hands into my eyes. Of course. She wanted a Mr. Bensen, Eugene, someone to deliver her to the rarefied world that she had always been entitled to but never able to access permanently. Not Jake, who wore the same underwear for days on end without noticing. She had been seducing and rejecting him since he was a child, and of course she didn’t actually want him. And yet, I realized, looking at her—she swiped her lips, she swiped, and swiped, and I still saw her immovable, sad eyes—those men were gone, and he was all she had.

“I pity you,” I said. My voice had lost its conviction.

“You pity me?” When she turned to me she wore the most antagonizing smile.

“You can have your diligence. And your self-control, and your cynicism disguised as professionalism, and your stunted ambition. I mean, honestly Simone, what the fuck are you going to do? Are you going to get it through your head and leave or are they going to have to retire you? I guess we’ll never know, all of us will be gone.”

Venom rose in her, colliding with mine. I loved it, I could feel her enjoying me, and I was ready for it, for whatever she threw at me because I would have time to revise. She couldn’t really hurt me, I was young, buoyant— Jake opened the door. We both turned to him. He was winded.

“Well, here we are,” I said.

He looked back and forth between us. Simone walked out, the door slammed. I could tell he had just woken up. His eyes were unadjusted to light and had a patina on them that could have been feelings, could have been pills, could have been sleep. He reached for me and I went unthinkingly.

“I looked for you,” he said.

I laid my head on his chest. He smelled like a deeper layer of earth, a secret blue room I kept in Chinatown. He kissed my forehead.

“No,” I said, inhaling him. “No, you didn’t.”

—

I ACCEPTED his invitation to Clandestino for a nightcap and an overdue conversation. I left immediately after my lunch shift, skipping my shift drink for perhaps the first time since I’d learned of its existence. When I got home I poured myself a big glass of sherry and waited. The Shabbat sirens shot out over Williamsburg. I watched the sun set and the pigeons loop and swerve and reunite with their coops on the rooftops. I sat and waited while the night attached to the corners of buildings. Drums beat steadily. I ate canned sardines on toast and half a jar of cornichons and waited. He needed me. I hadn’t mistaken that. I thought maybe we could survive without her blessing.

I wanted to see Jake repentant. The ugly truth was that I could forgive him anything as long as he still desired me. And, I thought as I walked into Clandestino, that wasn’t all of it—the need, the desire. Not anymore. When Jake and I had been fucking these past months, our binges on each other were constructing something behind our backs: the stubborn stains of intimacy marked our hands. I had to see if that could hold us on our own.

“Oh, it’s Tessie,” said Georgie. “What brings a real lady this far downtown?”

“Meeting my friend,” I said. “How’s it going tonight?”

“Dead.” He shrugged. “First nice night, people are too happy for drinking.”

“New Yorkers are never too happy for drinking.” I pulled up a stool. “I’ll just take a lager, whatever is up there.”

“You guys like the Brooklyn, right?”

“Yes, we do.” I wanted to cry but batted my lashes instead. “Brooklyn would be lovely.”

I realized that “Fake Plastic Trees” was playing over the speakers. I hadn’t listened to it in years and when I had, on repeat, in the bathtub, I hadn’t really understood what it meant to be worn out. I couldn’t shrug the song off. So I sighed and said to Georgie, with my face in my hands, “Misery. Will you just turn it up?”

I didn’t even notice when Jake was next to me.

“Hey,” he said. There were lilacs in his hand. He apologized for being late. Jake’s crooked teeth, the stubble hiding the sharpness of his chin, those otherworldly eyes, the lilacs and their melancholy, narcissism, mystery. He touched my cheek, but I was still in the song. His touch felt like a faded reproduction of something that had once knocked me off my feet. “You’re so skinny.”