Merritt Tierce - Love Me Back

When Jamie started waiting on him he put the phone down. She was new, a yoga instructor from Woodstock, in town to save money by living with her folks so she could take a trip to India to develop her practice. Sal liked her — we all did, she radiated bliss and vigor. He flirted with her and told her she ought to come over to his restaurant, he’d set her up in the bar over there. She turned him down because she didn’t want to work nights.

One Sunday Sal came in with his sometime companion, Laura, at the peak of brunch service. The Dream Café was not a well-run restaurant and as the strongest server I often took six or seven tables at once. From ten a.m. till about one in the afternoon I’d feel like I was continuously on the precarious edge of a sheer food-service cliff. What heroics I performed to get people their fucking brunch. Sal and Laura sat down on the patio that morning — I had never seen him in on the weekend, or even during the volume part of any weekday. I already had a half dozen booths in the lanai going, but as I flew past them he said Can you take care of us here? I said Absolutely. I rang in his food and miraculously it was on the table five minutes later. That day he left me $20, a raise.

The following Tuesday I woke up and knew he’d be coming in. (My daughter and I have this slight ability to sense things — mostly insignificant things. Once I decided in the shower to wear this purple shirt — I visualized it and she heard me somehow. She came to me in the bathroom and said she wanted to pick out my shirt. I looked into her eyes, which are the pure glittering blue of a sky far removed from any inhabited place, and thought about my purple shirt. She went to my closet and I followed. She reached up above her head and grabbed its sleeve.)

That morning I woke up in my shithole apartment in the warren of Latino complexes near Park Lane and Greenville Avenue. Black mold on one wall and in six months I had never cooked a meal there because it would have seemed de facto contaminated. I woke up and knew Sal would be coming in, so with my Dream Café T-shirt I put on some makeup and my grandmother’s lapis bead necklace. I didn’t usually bother with makeup at six a.m., but I wanted a different life. I wanted to ask him soon, before the memory of my Sunday service dissipated.

When I dropped the check I said I have a question for you.

Okay, he said, and sat back. I said I was wondering if you had any openings in your restaurant. He said Sure, I’ll hire you. Come in on Friday, I’ll tell Danny to get you going.

Easy as that.

So after I had been there a month I guess he decided he wanted to try me out, and on a Saturday night he put his hand on my elbow and said I heard you were gonna buy me a drink at Cosimo. I said Oh? He said Come with me. I told the closing manager that Sal wanted me to go with him, and I was abruptly granted amnesty from sidework, which didn’t exactly do much for my standing with the rest of the waitstaff. I got into Sal’s car and he told me I had to take off my vest and tie before we went in, so I left them on the white leather seat, along with my phone. At the club he schmoozed Dallas’s most expensive, meticulously produced women, periodically coming back over to bump against me in my dirty dark gray button-down work shirt. When the lights went up at last call, he was gone, my phone and uniform with him. I don’t know if he ditched me because he found something better — likely — or because he saw me with Lou — also likely. That was several weeks before I ended up at his palatial Highland Park house.

While he was stroking the glamorous ones I was meeting Lou. He opened his fly in the middle of the dance floor and let his penis hang out underneath his shirt, which concealed it, though not completely. It was an interview. It was a question about me, which I answered by grabbing it. The music thrummed so loudly he had to say in my ear What are you doing later? I said What are you doing now?

We went out the back door and down the stairs. At the bottom of the stairs he held his beer in one hand and took mine with the other. I went down on him and got him off before two minutes had passed. We went back upstairs and he told me his phone number, which I remembered and borrowed a phone to call when I found myself stranded at two a.m.

I took a cab to his and Danny’s condo. Inside we did lines and fucked. Ambrogetti is the only guy I know who can fuck on coke. Everybody else it makes limp. The worst is, they’re horny and limp. They want you to work hard on it but it never responds. I stayed up all night with Lou and Danny and two other guys who took turns with me.

And so on. In about three months’ time I had sex with approximately thirty different men who worked for or patronized my steakhouse, the bar next door, Il Castello, and Cosimo. Three managers, one owner, two sous-chefs, one busser, one bartender, a dozen servers and as many customers, the latter group including Danny’s father and a preponderance of surgeons and athletes. They began to say about me She don’t play and She’s for real. Once I was turning in my cashout, getting ready to leave for the night, and a server I hadn’t yet been with asked me if he could buy me a beer next door. I said Do you want to fuck? He chuckled, taken aback, and said No, I just want to buy you a beer. You know, hang out and talk and stuff, that’s all. I said Oh. No, that’s okay. Thanks, though. In the days afterward I heard this story repeated while people were folding napkins or polishing silverware, and it became a totemic tale about me that people distributed to new servers.

Calvin was my confessor — every afternoon I’d tell him about the new ones and spare no detail, be it of ugliness or danger. He would call me out, question my judgment, show me a worry I wanted to feel for myself. I didn’t hide from Calvin how much I pretended. Pretended to like it, pretended to want it, pretended to have orgasms. He didn’t understand and I couldn’t explain. It had something to do with love and something to do with grief. It was just this: I’d be down on the floor sometimes, picking up fallen chunks of crab cake near some diamond broker’s shoe, with my apron and my crumber and my Yes, sir, certainly, right away , and I’d feel impaled by the sight and feel of the half-eaten crabmeat because it wasn’t her sparkly laugh and it wasn’t that place on her shoulder, right up against her neck, that smells like sunlight. I am not a mother , I’d think as I walked to the trash can. You can fuck a lot of people, Calvin would say to me, and still enjoy yourself. Make it about you, about pleasure. At least make it safe. But it wasn’t about pleasure; it was about how some kinds of pain make fine antidotes to others. So when they gave me their numbers and they were old and I’d seen them with hookers, I said yes.

And so on. There was the night with Casey and Florida John. They got me high and then played Call of Duty while taking turns with me. I stayed in the bedroom on the bed. I would do a line and then a bong hit and one of them would fuck me. Then that one would go back out to the living room to play and I would do another line and another bong hit while I waited for the other one. I don’t know how many times this repeated.

There was the night with Casey and Howard, and the night with Greg and Howard, and the night with Greg and Casey. There was the night I sat next to Greg on the sidewalk outside his apartment while he talked to his girlfriend on the phone. What are you wearing? he asked her. Then we went inside and I got down on the floor in a sandwich between him and Gray. I faced Greg because I didn’t want to look at Gray, who was small and dour. Gray ground on me while Greg fucked me. Greg came fast and then Gray pushed into me but there was no rhythm or confidence in his motions and he couldn’t climax. Greg laughed. Come on, Gray, you can do it, man! Let’s take a break, I said to Gray. I went into the living room to find drugs or a drink. Someone who looked like a full-size, better, happier version of Gray was sitting on the couch. Who are you? I asked. I’m Gray’s brother Blake, he said. He didn’t say anything about whatever he had heard from the other room. Hey will you help me get on that thing? he asked me, pointing to an inversion table in the corner of the room. If I can have the rest of that, I said, holding my hand out for his drink. He gave it to me and I drank it. It was a screwdriver. We went to the inversion table and got him strapped in. I wasn’t much help. Then he closed his eyes and flipped it and he was hanging upside down in front of me. He was wearing sweatpants. I knelt in front of him and grabbed the waistbands of his sweatpants and his boxers and pulled them away from his body and up over his cock. Whoa! he said. What are you doing? I don’t know, I said, I’ve never done this before. Then I sucked on him and he said Okay, you can do that. His pelvis was directly level with my mouth. When I felt him getting close I put my hands on either side of the table and rocked it back and forth. It was a lot easier on my neck that way. Behind the table I saw Gray come into the room and stand there watching us. When Blake started to orgasm I saw Gray leave.