Sweetbitter(95)
He should have asked me, What morning? What record? But he said, with clarion eyes, “Van Morrison?”
I nodded, shook my head, nodded. “I know you were happy. I felt it. I know.”
God, how I loved him. Not him exactly, let me try again: I loved his ghost. What had he said to me about his mother? How impossible it is to forget the stories we tell ourselves, even when the truth should supersede them. That was why he adored me for a minute. Because I saw a beautiful, tormented hero. Rescue and redemption. I never saw him. All promise—the new girl.
I waited as long as I could for him to say something. He stared at the bar and scratched at his scalp under his hat, a gesture I had consumed and memorized. I grabbed bar napkins and patted them on my cheeks, wiped my nose. I kissed the corner of his lips. He tasted perfect: the salty, the bitter, the sweet. I felt him switch off. I knew I would be fucked for a long, long time. I grabbed the lilacs, said good-bye to Georgie, and slid off my stool.
—
THE LILACS SHED as I walked the bridge. My phone buzzed twice and I turned it off. The city was radiant and I felt untouchable. I experienced the boundlessness that ships cut from their moorings must feel. I experienced again that feeling of having money, paying the tolls, of being allowed to enter the race. Yes, I felt the freedom again, even if I couldn’t quite recapture the hope. I could have walked all night. All the times I’d been denied entrance, all the times I’d asked permission—but it was my city too.
VI
SO WHAT IF the gold had rubbed off the feather pin she had in her periwinkle fedora? A lot of important people ate at our restaurant: former presidents and mayors, actors, writers who defined generations, financiers you could recognize by their hair. We had plenty of special-needs diners who weren’t famous at all: a blind woman who had the specials read out loud to her, men with boyfriends on Fridays and wives on Sundays, eccentric art-collecting men who sat at the bar, ordered a martini, and then drank an entire bottle of red wine for their lunch. Why did I love Mrs. Neely so much?
She was fragile. A rare, endangered species of bird the way she fluttered in and out with her hats and stockings and kitten heels. Sometimes I would watch her from across the room and she would be staring at nothing. I wondered if I would be a woman content to stare into space remembering her misses and near misses, her history.
“Hey Nick, can I grab the Fleurie?”
“Don’t top her off, Fluff.”
“Come on…”
“She’s gonna pass out.”
I sighed. “So she passes out. Isn’t that the privilege of old age? You can sleep whenever and wherever you want?”
He winked and passed the bottle.
“Thank you,” Mrs. Neely said, smoothing a pin curl next to her ear. “That bastard at the bar pours me short. He thinks I don’t know, but I know.”
“Nicky’s all right. He just takes some reminding every now and then. Are you enjoying the Fleurie? It’s my favorite of all the crus right now.”
“Why?”
The only question Mrs. Neely had ever asked me before was why I didn’t have a boyfriend. Her tawny apple cheeks were high in a smile and her eyes were lucid. This was a good day for her and I believed she would keep visiting us forever. I picked up her glass and smelled it.
“So Beaujolais is like this hybrid—a red that drinks like a white, we even put a chill on it. Maybe that’s why it has trouble, it doesn’t quite fit. No one takes Gamay seriously—too light, too simple, lacks structure. But…” I swirled the glass and it was so…optimistic. “I like to think it’s pure. Fleurie sounds like flowers doesn’t it?”
“Girls love flowers,” she said judiciously.
“They do.” I put her wine down, then moved it two inches closer to her, where I knew the field of her focus began. “None of that means anything. It just speaks to me. I feel invited to enjoy it. I get roses.”
“Child, what is wrong with you? There’s no roses in the damn wine. Wine is wine and it makes you loose and helps you dance. That’s it. The way you kids talk, like everything is life or death.”
“It’s not?”
“You ain’t even learned about living yet!”
I thought about buying wine. About how I would scan the different Beaujolais crus at the liquor store—the Morgon, the C?te de Brouilly, the Fleurie would be telling me a story. I would see different flowers when I looked at the labels. I thought about the wild strawberries dropped off from Mountain Sweet Berry Farm just that afternoon and how the cooks laid out paper towels and sheet trays in the kitchen, none of them touching, as if they would disintegrate, their fragrance euphoric. They were completely different from the strawberries in the grocery store, they were as puckered and pruned as my nipples the one time that Jake had made me come just from touching them. I thought about how I would never again buy tomatoes out of season.
“Can I call you a cab this evening, Mrs. Neely?”
“A cab? Goodness no, I will ride the bus as I have every day since I was old enough to walk.”
“But it’s dark!”
She waved me off. She was peaceful, but I noticed that her lids were getting heavy, that her head dove slightly each time she blinked. “How will I know you got home okay?”
Something in my voice gave it away, that I was scared I would never see her again. What if she stopped coming? No alarms would go off in the restaurant. How many Sundays would it take before we noticed?