Writers & Lovers(25)
‘Why on God’s green earth would you ever think about a desk job?’
‘Financial security. Health insurance. Fingers that doesn’t smell like aioli.’
He bunches my fingers in his hands like a bouquet. ‘But I love the smell of your aioli-scented digits,’ he says in his wife’s Brazilian accent, then, in his best Bard: ‘ “Universal plodding poisons up the nimble spirits in the arteries.” ’ Then back in his own voice: ‘You know they have a health plan here.’
‘What?’
‘It’s not bad. We use it. Bia’s plan at Polaroid is crap.’
‘Are you serious?’
‘Would I lie to your wounded fawn face?’ He goes off with his two pots of tea in long strides.
‘He has kind of an asexual writer thing for you, doesn’t he?’
‘Is that what it is?’
I go to see Marcus about the health insurance. It’s a Cambridge Pilgrim plan, and the deduction is manageable.
‘Why didn’t you tell me about this when you hired me?’
‘I don’t know. Maybe it was because you looked like Mommy and Daddy took care of all those messy details.’
‘Screw you. My mother’s dead, and my father’s a perv. Put me on that fucking plan.’
Iris is a crude place, but it was better than writing thank-you letters to rich people in Weston.
Three mornings later, after the dog walk but before my cereal and cup of tea, in the middle of my writing morning, in what I believe is the middle of a paragraph, I finish a sentence. I lift my pencil a few inches from the page and read it. It’s the last sentence of the book. I can’t think of another. That’s it. I have my underpainting.
Brunch that Sunday is a zoo. It’s raining, the deck is closed, and we have to haul a few extra tables downstairs and cram them in the club bar. We’re worn out before we open. Harry met a Harvard design student that week, and they’ve gone off to the deCordova museum for the day. The Twisted Sister is hungover and storms up and down the stairs barking orders as if they are the only people lifting a finger, while Mary Hand and I quietly cloth, set, and flower every table. Yasmin is sick, and Stefano, the on-call, isn’t picking up. We keep returning to the reservation book, hoping that the numbers have gone down since we last looked.
People arrive all at once, hungry and cranky. Our clientele are people who don’t deny themselves much of anything, but on Sunday mornings they’ve often foregone all pleasures, and not just the Catholics who can’t eat before receiving the host. Sometimes they have even waited to have their first cup of coffee. They arrive at Iris ravenous and jonesing for caffeine.
Brunch also means working with Clark, the brunch chef. For my first few shifts with him I thought he was kind like Thomas. He gave me the extra Romanesco my customer wanted for her crab cakes and replaced an overcooked sirloin without complaint. He said my long neck reminded him of the Road Runner and beep-beeped at me when I came in for my orders. At the end of a bad brunch last month, when I’d dropped a benedict and forgotten a ni?oise and my body was buzzing like a hive, he found me on a milk crate in the walk-in and when I got up to leave he blocked my way. He touched my hair and breathed all over me. He reeked of the tequila in his Mexican coffees.
‘You probably suck dick better than you wait tables.’ He grinned, and I could tell this line had actually worked in the past.
‘Nope,’ I said. ‘I don’t,’ and I ducked under his arm and shoved up the big handle to get out of there.
I came in early the next day to tell Marcus what happened.
He laughed. ‘Jesus, Casey. You came in here so fucking serious I thought you were going to tell me you killed someone. He was teasing you. Clark has no trouble getting his dick sucked, believe me.’
Later I heard him and Clark laughing hard in the kitchen.
Clark has been punishing me ever since.
I’m slammed out of the gate. Three families of five within fifteen minutes downstairs and two deuces up top, while Dana and Tony share a party of twelve.
Fabiana seats me another three-top. ‘You’re a sadist,’ I whisper to her as I pass by with a tray of samosas and Bloody Marys.
‘The rest of us are still wasted from last night. You’re taking one for the team.’
Two small boys at the new three-top are looking right at me. Children suffer the most at brunch. Their faces could be used for UNICEF posters. I can’t get to them, though. I have to drop the main courses at one of my five-tops downstairs. We aren’t allowed to use trays for food, only the small red lacquered ones for drinks. The plates have been sitting in the window under the heat lamp long enough to get hot, but I don’t have time to find a cloth. I load up four along one arm and grab the last in my left hand, kick open the kitchen door, and run directly into one of the little boys. Two omelets slide across their plates but stop right at the edge.
‘’Scuse me, miss,’ he says. He’s wearing a red bow tie and an orange-and-white-checked shirt. His burly hair has been combed down and is still damp. He’s six, maybe seven. ‘It’s my dad’s birthday.’ He thrusts out a wad of cash at me. ‘Can I pay for our food?’
‘You may. But after I take your order. After we know how much it will cost.’ The plates are burning the inside of my right arm.