“Oh look who all grown up!” He pulled out his wine key and took a bump and handed it to me. “You know, you the worst kind, you want to marry the artist and live like squalor, but you wait, in five years you be like, Baby Jake why we eat ramen noodles every night? You a hustler, don’t blind me, I see.”
The cocaine was an illumination, the bathroom florid, filtered. When I looked at our reflection in the mirror we looked like a photograph. I could see that we were just playing. The degree to which I took myself seriously was laughable. “God, Sasha, it’s so dark here. You guys are so fucking dark. Do you not see that?”
“Oh, Baby Monster, please show me the light!”
“I’m just saying it doesn’t have to be like this.” I checked his nose and teeth for him and lifted my head for him to do the same. He flicked something off my nose and I grabbed his face and kissed him on both cheeks. “This isn’t Mother Russia. It’s America. We believe in happy endings.”
“Get me the phone, lemme me call my mama, Jesus fucking Christ, ’cause now I really fucking heard everything.”
III
THE HUNGRY GAP appeared, spreading like a rattled plane in front of us. We extended our use of the word local, bringing up soft-shell crab and asparagus from Virginia, blood oranges from Florida. The guests, the cooks, all of us anxious, still shell-shocked from winter and bucking against the restraints. It wasn’t spring fever, not yet. We didn’t fully have faith that it was coming but we had no choice but to move forward into the protracted promises.
The sun came out for a moment. I stopped and stared at the ends of the branches, willing them to bud. I had just left the Guggenheim and clouds blindfolded the sun again as I walked toward the train. I felt like a stranger again, like I could disappear into any intractable diner or bodega or train station.
I got out at Grand Central, hallowed ground of anonymity and flux, and followed signs for the Oyster Bar. It was a strange impulse—he had been saying that he was going to take me, it was one of his favorites. I don’t know whether it was a Kandinsky or a Klee that gave me a curious detachment from my life, but I decided not to wait for him. Simone assured me it was an old wives’ tale, but someone said that you were only supposed to eat oysters during months with an r in it. So maybe it was the impending warmth, the loss of the chilly r months, but I knew I should take myself to lunch.
I got the last seat at the low counter, under a vaulted dome of tiles. I was prepared with my book but I stared at the ceiling instead, inhaled the velvet scent of shellfish and butter, watched the servers and busboys, then looked at the guests, slowly realizing that I was singular in the room. I had nothing in common with the suits and their lunch breaks and BlackBerrys. I belonged, but not because of my age or my clothes. I belonged because I spoke the restaurant language.
“Excuse me,” said the man sitting next to me. He was midway through a bowl of clam chowder. He was broad shouldered and fine featured, and I did a double take because he had blue eyes. I raised my eyebrows at him.
“I know you from somewhere.”
“Oh yeah?” I put my eyes back on my menu.
“Pardon me, I thought you were someone I know, a French friend.”
“You have a friend who looks like me?”
The waitress came up and stood in front of me silently, pen and notepad ready.
“Can I get six Beausoleil, six Fanny Bay to start, and I’ll move on from there. Um”—I flipped the menu around, scanning, not wanting to waste her time—“you have a Chablis by the glass, yes? You can pick.”
She nodded and walked away, and I fished into my purse for my book.
“You’re an actress then. I know I’ve seen you somewhere.”
“I’m a waitress. You’ve seen me everywhere.”
“You’re going to eat all those oysters alone?” he asked, smiling.
“And then some.” I sighed. It was a hazard of my job—or maybe it was my nature, maybe that’s what they’d hired me for—that I was too hospitable to strangers. On street corners, in bars, in line, I felt a duty to entertain, as if I were clocked in. I didn’t know how to be uninviting. I put my book up.
“What are you reading?”
“Okay.” I folded my hands. “I know it’s quiet at your job. You sit in silence at your computer and when you do talk nobody listens to you, so I understand the need to impose yourself on whatever docile-looking female you find yourself in front of, but let me tell you about my job. It’s loud. I lose my voice I talk so much. And people look at me, and they stop me, pretending they know me, they say, Let me guess, are you French, and I shake my head and smile and they say, Are you Swedish? And I shake my head and smile and so on. But this is my day off. I just want quiet. If you want someone to put up with you, may I suggest your waitress because that is li-ter-ally what you’re paying her to do right now.”
“So you’re sassy, huh?”
“Sassy?” He was still looking at me, jocular, so fucking arrogant. “I have a boyfriend,” I said finally.
The waitress came and poured me a heaping glass of Chablis. It was flabby but acceptable and I thanked her. When I looked back at him he was pulling out his wallet and signaling for his check. Did I believe that? That I was available to everyone unless I invoked Jake? By the time I finished my first dozen and ordered another, I was blissed out. I did wonder though, if people would ever start listening to me.
—
“YEAH, it’s your karaoke song, but I thought it was ironic.”
“Ari, everything can’t be ironic all the time or it would lose its luster.”
“But you can’t be sincerely into Britney Spears. Or I guess you can, but you shouldn’t admit it.”
I was curved on my bar stool, my posture long forgotten, my feet thrumming with the Saturday night-ness of it, the three discordant turns of it, and now a big stunning glass of Pouilly-Fuissé was sliding like glycerin down my throat. Ariel was closing up the coffee station, Will had just joined me, and the rest of the staff was trickling in, beaten up. Ariel was annoyed because she had fucked up too many times and Jake yelled at her.
“Can’t my sincerity count for something? Isn’t it a by-product of honesty? Of course, I’m not like, holding her up as a paragon of virtue.”
“It’s criminal that they let her reproduce.”
“But, late at night, a little drunk, a little sentimental, I watch her old music videos online. The ones from the millennium. And I cry.”
“Did you see the photos of her when she shaved her head?” Will asked. He had his shot of Fernet and a beer, it should have been normal, but he looked so much older than the last time we all sat at the bar for shift drink. I hadn’t looked at him, really looked at him, in a long time. “She looked like a fucking demon.”
“You cry to ‘Hit Me Baby One More Time’?”
“Okay,” I said, pulling up the Pouilly-Fuissé bottle from behind the bar and refilling my glass. “I can’t explain it when everyone’s attacking me. But she’s around my age. And when I was growing up I thought, That’s what a teenager is. I wanted my body to do whatever her body did. She’s so common right? Attainable. She’s not that beautiful, not that talented, but you can’t stop watching her. That’s why it’s always the videos, she’s not something to listen to, she’s something to look at. She’s so powerful, knowing you can’t look away, and then this glint in her eye that she’s just playing. That she’s still a child and she’s played this fantastic joke on you. And then, it’s like, those eyes went vacant. She wasn’t in on the joke anymore. Does that make sense? She was the joke—she didn’t know.”
“Oh my god, this is a tragedy for you? That this bajillionaire, white-trash, drug-addict fuckup with zero moral compass has vacant eyes? She had choices, she’s a grown woman now.”
“But Ari,” I said, straightening my spine, feeling angry and energized by the wine. “I don’t feel like she let me down, I feel like I let her down. Like I was a part of this mob that cannibalized her. And you’re right Will, she looks like a monster in those photos. I’m totally repulsed. And I feel nothing but guilt.”