Sweetbitter(98)

Apathy blanketed me in the middle of a life I had constructed never for an instant to be dull. It was an unexpected comfort. I didn’t even want the cocaine that Will and Ariel offered me when they came out of the bathroom. We talked shit to each other for a while. Good songs came on, then forgettable songs.

Terry was from Jersey, the pretty part. Will came from Kansas. Ariel came from Berkeley, Sasha came from outside of Moscow. What did I know about them? We would occasionally remember each other, laugh thinking about how fucked up we used to get. I saw it all, how we had failed to penetrate each other’s hearts. I couldn’t blame the drugs. I blamed the job, how it made everything feel temporary and unpredictable. We never had the time to say anything that mattered. The Owner had said, “You can’t train a fifty-one percenter, you were born that way. Our job is to recognize it.”

The jargon, the tenets, the manifestos—it wasn’t just to make the guest feel better about spending their money. It was for us. To make us feel noble, called, necessary. They would miss me for a week. At most. Perhaps the biggest fallacy I subscribed to was that I was—that we were—irreplaceable.

—

IT WASN’T UNTIL I walked into Howard’s other office later that night that I recognized—and I mean knew with my whole body—that I had been operating my entire life upon the assumption that most men wanted to fuck me. Not only had I known it and encouraged it, I had depended on it. That did not mean I understood the actual transaction of sex. I only knew how to control it until the point of penetration. After that, I treated my body like a sieve—it all passed through me. With Jake, I wasn’t a sieve but a bowl. Whatever he gave me, I could hold. When he filled me, I expanded.

It was said that Howard was a great lover. I didn’t know what “great lover” meant. But he was not embarrassed by his age. He did not turn off the lights. We had a drink and he put his hand on my thigh at the end of an innocuous sentence. When he started a new one I slid my thigh toward him. His hand went higher. That was all. A sentence, a hand, a sentence, a thigh. These are the axes upon which we are balanced.

He only unbuttoned his shirt. His chest was covered in dark hair. He stripped me with authority. He seemed less impressed than charmed by my breasts, my thighs, my ass, my shoulders. A plaything. He spent a good amount of time warming up my body before he had me face away from him and toward the bookshelves in the auxiliary office with my jeans around my ankles. Jancis Robinson’s World Atlas of Wine, The Wine Bible, A Cheesemonger’s Guide to France. The novelty was valid, his clean, soft hands, the arrogance with which he positioned me. My only thoughts were: I could come if it was a different position, or a different room, or different lighting, a different night, a different man.

It was quick and he didn’t ask me if I’d finished. I didn’t think about a condom until he pulled out and I wondered if men were supposed to ask before they came inside you. I remembered when Jake gave me Plan B after that first night, how he passed it to me without comment. I had saved it because I had gotten my period. At the time I had thought Jake was considerate, responsible. Howard handed me a Kleenex that was hidden behind a stack of books and I thought, Why hide the Kleenex?

They would find out. I would never tell anyone, but I was acquainted with the way information trickled down at the restaurant. No one saw me enter and no one would see us exit but someone, somehow, would know. Simone would be furious, irrationally so, unable to explain to herself why. Everyone would sense it and avoid her during service. Jake would be shocked. Not because I was with another man. But because I had hurt myself, humiliated myself beyond the ways in which he had humiliated me. And he would understand how terrible it was that he hurt me. I had wanted to take some power away from him, but—my chest tightened as I threw the Kleenex away—I had made myself so small to do it that I was unrecognizable.

“I was like you,” he said, zipping up his pants.

“In what way, Howard?”

“When Simone first started, she used to tell the filthiest jokes. Old fisherman jokes, absolutely unrepeatable, they made me blush. She wouldn’t flinch while she told them but then you would see her shoulders start to twitch with laughter.” He looked at me while he spoke, but he wasn’t seeing me. “I was very serious about her. And I didn’t understand the two of them. They repulsed me.”

“And?” I clipped my bra.

“Well, it hurt. It hurts, doesn’t it? When Fred Bensen came into the picture I suffered terribly. Jake and I had something in common that day when she announced she was leaving us. I often wonder if we didn’t drive him away. He really just…vanished. She never told me what happened. I thought it might soften her.” He shook his head.

“I get it. Now you fuck young girls to punish her?”

“No, Tess. I fuck young women because they taste better. I don’t need to punish her. She built her own elaborate prison here. All I have to do is not fire her.”

“Jesus.” I had been holding on to the idea that Howard was not one of us. That he was impervious to our schemes and pettiness. I think at that moment I knew I had lost, completely.

“Time passed,” he said, finishing the buttons on his shirt, folding up his tie and tucking it into his pocket. “And I realized she did me a great favor. I think you will feel the same way.”

“You know what I dislike? When people use the future as a consolation for the present. I don’t know if there is anything less helpful.”