“What’s that tattoo?” I asked, pointing to his biceps. He pulled his sleeve down.
Jake dug through a wooden crate labeled with masking tape, Kumamotos. He pulled out two tiny rocks, discarded the debris that clung to the outside. A strand of seaweed stuck to his pants.
“They look so filthy,” I whispered.
“They’re a secret. Quite a leap of faith.” His voice was quiet with the motor of the fridge, and I involuntarily shivered and moved toward him. He pulled a blunt knife out of his pocket and wedged the tip into an invisible crack. Two switches of his wrist and it was open.
“Where did you learn to do that?”
He pinched a lemon over it and said, “Take it quickly.”
I flipped the shell back. I was prepared for the brininess. For the softness of it. For the rigidity and strangeness of the ritual. Adrenalized, fiercely private. I panted slightly and opened my eyes. Jake was looking at me and said, “They’re perfect.”
He handed me the beer. It was nearly black, persuasive as chocolate, weighty. The finish was cream, it matched the oyster’s creaminess. The sensory conspiracy made the blood rush to my head, made my skin break out in goose bumps. Ignore him. Look away. I looked at him.
“Can I have another?”
—
IN BED I could feel the pain in my back diffusing into the mattress. I touched my neck, my shoulder, my biceps. I could feel where my body had changed. I clicked on my cell phone: 4:47 a.m. The black air wouldn’t move, it wouldn’t shift in or out the window. The heat was an adhesive—even the fan couldn’t disrupt it.
I went to the bathroom and saw my shirtless roommate passed out on the couch. His chest was slick with sweat and he was snoring. He had an air conditioner blasting away in his room. Some people were morons.
The bathroom was a narrow room of tiny brown tiles, brown grout and brown, moldy ceiling corners. I turned the shower on to cold and stepped in and out of it, gasping and sighing, until my skin was stiff. I put my towel on top of my sheets and lay down sopping wet. The heat landed again like tiny gnats on my skin.
I touched my abdomen, my thighs. I was getting stronger. I touched myself and I felt like stone. I saw Jake in the locker room dropping his pants, his tattered boxers, his pale legs. I thought about the sweat on his arms, of how violently he shook the cocktail shaker, of the sweat adhering his white T-shirt to him the day I first saw him. And when I tried to picture his face it was blank. It had no features except eyes. It didn’t matter. I came abruptly and gratefully.
My body shone in the distressed streetlight. I was used to being alone. But I’d never been aware of so many other people, also alone. I knew that all over the south side of Williamsburg people were staring at their ceilings, praying for a breeze to come and cure them, and like that I lost myself. I evaporated.
VI
YOU BURNED YOURSELF. You burned yourself by participating.
On the wineglasses that came out in gushes of steam, on the espresso machine’s milk-scum-covered steamer wand, on the leaky hot-water faucet of the bar sink, on the china plates searing themselves in the heat lamps at the pass.
On the webbings of hands, on your fingertips, on your wrists, your inner elbows, strangely right above your outer elbow. You were restocking printer tape and had to move behind Chef, but caught your skin on the handle of a copper saucepan. You yelled, it spun and fell to the floor. Chef sent you out of the kitchen and you reset tables for the rest of lunch.
The burns healed and your skin was boiled.
Knicks in your knuckles from tearing the foil unprofessionally from wine bottles.
Scott said, “The skin gets so tough, even a knife won’t scratch it.” He grabbed a plate out of the salamander with his hands to really illustrate the point.
—
BY THE TIME we waddled up to the bar it was well past midnight and we were as tattered as the dining room floor. It had been a hard one. The dishwasher broke in the middle of service and two of us were pulled to hand wash the glasses in scalding water. Then the air conditioners, usually mediocre at best, bottomed out. The technicians arrived as we sat down for our shift drinks. They propped open the door and we all looked wistfully at the street. No change in temperature arrived.
Nicky let the backwaiters have gin and tonics as rewards. My fingers were thoroughly poached, the muscle between my thumb and index finger throbbing from polishing. I didn’t even have the energy to contemplate sitting next to Jake and Simone. I took my stool next to Will wearily. An empty bottle of Hendrick’s stood on the bar like a mascot.
Walter sat on the other side of me. We had never overlapped. He was a large, elegant man in his fifties with a chic gap between his front teeth. He looked as tired as I felt, the lines around his eyes amplifying with each exhale. He asked how I was settling in and we made small talk. But when I told him I lived in Williamsburg, he grunted.
“I lived there,” he said.
“You? With all the dead-eyed slouchers?”
“In the late eighties—were you born then? Six years. God it was appalling. And look at it now. The trains used to stop running. Some nights we walked the tracks.”
“Ha!” Nicky slapped the bar. “I forgot about that.”
“It was a straight shot, the quickest way.” Walter finished his drink and pushed it toward Nicky. “Can I get a scooch for this story?”
“We had the whole building,” Walter said as Nicky emptied out a bottle of Montepulciano into his glass. “Three floors. My share was $550, which was not a little bit of money. I was with Walden…Walden and Walter of Williamsburg. We thought that was cute. Walden needed space for his paintings, they—well.” He looked at me. “Even you have probably seen them. The canvas itself took up a wall. He built them indoors and we broke them down to get them back out. And then his collage phase began in earnest. One of the floors we kept as a junk shop. Car fenders, defunct lamps, chicken coop wiring, boxes of photographs.” Walter chuckled softly into his wine. “This was so long ago, before his, what do they call it?”
Everyone at the bar was listening with their heads down, except Simone, who watched him patiently.
“His materialist phase,” she said.
“Ah, Simone remembers! If you ever forget something about your story, Simone will remember.” They looked at each other, not unkindly. “They called it his coup d’état. The beginning of his love affair with Larry Gagosian. Me-te-or-ic. And all the Williamsburg stuff, now I suppose it’s technically his juvenilia, worth millions. He dicked around with garbage and I sang opera in the bathtub.”
“I miss your singing,” Simone said.
“The third-floor skylight was missing. When it rained it was like the Pantheon, a column of water and light in the middle of the room. The floor rotted in this glorious black circle. It grew moss in the spring. They tried to sell it to us for $30,000. I am not kidding. We thought, Jesus, who would buy a place on Grand Street and Wythe? I assumed the river would swallow it up.”
He stopped. I took a tiny sip of my gin and tonic, which was too strong for me though I would never admit it.
“There are condos there now,” I said. I didn’t know what else to say. My head was getting difficult to prop up. “All these half-finished, empty buildings. They’ll never fill them. There are no people.”
“You are condos, new girl,” Sasha said.
Walter stared into the bottom of his glass. “Fucking holes in the ceiling. Frozen pipes all winter, showering at the Y. We tossed crackheads out of the entryway weekly—weekly. One of them tried to stab Walden with a steak knife—our steak knife. And sometimes I wish we would have stayed.”
—