Stephanie Danler - Sweetbitter

“Oh fuck,” I said. “Those fucking stairs.”

Later I was told I screamed it.

I tried to stand but my left side was completely numb. My breathing gave way to crying. I burrowed into it, like a child, self-pity and anger merging.

Surrounded: Heather, Parker, Zoe, Simone. Even Jake’s absence wasn’t a consolation. Hands on my back. Santos with the broom and dustpan. Questions flying at me, someone telling me to quiet down. When Simone pulled strands of linguine out of my hair, I got up and limped to the guest bathroom. I slammed the door and lay on the floor and I said while crying, Enough.

—

“TERROIR?” Simone repeated. She lifted her eyes sleepily from her glass to the wine bottles that lined the back bar. “Earth. Literally, it translates into land. ”

“But it’s something else, whenever I look it up it’s always like this magical designation.”

“There’s no word for it in English. Like tristesse, flâneur, or la douleur exquise, words full of gray. The French do ambiguity so much better than Americans. Our language relies on fixedness because that’s what the market demands. A commodity must always be identifiable.”

“We sell wine, Simone,” Nicky said. He seemed to think it his role to take her down a peg every now and then. “It qualifies.”

“Wine is an art, Nick. I know big words scare you, but that one only has three letters,” Simone replied. Of course, whenever he came at her, she swatted him away.

“Here we go,” he said. He burned the ice with boiling water and made a show of not listening.

“Okay, so what is it?”

“Nick, where is the Billecart? Let’s revisit it.” She inspected champagne flutes. She held them to the lamp and tossed them aside. By the fourth one she was satisfied. “Will, those need to be repolished.”

I looked at him sitting next to me. He didn’t move. I got up and grabbed fresh cheesecloth and started polishing.

“Champagne is the fulcrum of the terroir debate. It expresses two disparate positions. The first is that this is proof of terroir’s existence: the chalk content in the soil, the cold northern climate, the slow second fermentation. These wines can only come from one place in the world. You taste it”—she sipped—“and you know it’s Champagne.”

I stopped polishing and sipped the glass she poured for me. The wine surged like an electrical current. My lips like I kissed sparks. Jake came out of the kitchen in his street clothes and sat in my former seat next to Will, clapping him on the back. The wine, barbed, invigorating.

“And yet,” she continued, “what is it an expression of? It’s a multibillion-dollar corporation, you’re tasting a brand. There are no plots, no vintages. What is this wine doing to express the irregularities of the place, its complications, the difference in the topsoil between Reims and Aube? What are these wines doing to express the differences in the way the individual growers take care of their grapes?”

“Why don’t the growers make their own wine?”

“Exactly!” She looked proud of me. “There is a small movement, a contingency of farmers and growers that are making estate-bottled Champagne. It’s a very small production and they don’t have the funding to compete with Moët and Veuve. They are still hard to find here, but”—she poured us more—“it’s only a matter of time before the quality speaks for itself. Before the terroir speaks for itself.”

Jake, Will, Sasha, and Nick were looking at us. Simone smiled at Jake and said, “Champagne is a trick. You think you are tasting the essence of a place, but you’re being sold an exquisite lie.”

“What are you two talking? Whatsoever nobody gives a fuck,” said Sasha, blowing perfect Os of smoke. He said in a falsetto, “Hello, look at me, I’m the Queenie and the little Princess and we whisper terror in the corner.”

“You think people have terroir?” I asked. I was thinking of her and Jake and their Cape Cod and the oysters I had tasted. I heard a hiccup and turned.

“Oh dear,” she said.

“Stop,” Jake said and held his hand up. Had Jake hiccupped? Not possible, I thought. It was too human, too accidental. He stared at his beer in front of him, meanly, and the room turned sour. We all waited to see if he would do it again.

“Hey, I’ve got this method,” Will said, putting a hand on his shoulder. Jake shook it off immediately and kept looking at his beer.

“In Russia, there is only way—”

“No,” he said. I looked at Simone to see if it was a joke. It was the fucking hiccups. She was watching him. He hiccupped again and shut his eyes.

“No listen, dude, it’s easy. First you hold your breath.”

“I can handle this,” Jake said seriously.

“Is this a joke?” I asked.

“It’s just hiccups, Jake, my kid gets them all the time,” said Nick.

“I don’t like them.”

I turned to Simone and whispered, “He doesn’t like them?” and she shook her head and whispered back, “It’s from when he was a child. It’s about not being able to catch his breath.”

He was obviously having trouble holding his breath and we waited. Sasha reached behind the bar and said, “Hey, old man, get me the juices from the little pickles. My grandma taught me.”

“Just swallow three times.”

“No,” said Nick, pouring sugar onto a teaspoon. “Take this.”

“You drink a cup of water upside down,” I said inaudibly.

“Jake,” Simone said and he held his hand up to her again. He hiccupped and his whole chest shook. She bit her lip.

“Stop being a pussy,” Will said.

Jake hit his hand on the bar and we froze. Then he gripped the bar with both hands and shut his eyes, taking long breaths. Nicky walked away. He hiccupped again.

I took my flute and walked off like I was going to the kitchen. But I turned once I was past him. My reason fled, my sense of propriety. As I started creeping back I saw Simone shake her head at me. And I thought, Perhaps your way is not the best way. Maybe the two of you have grown too serious if he can’t handle the hiccups.

I moved with purpose, with stealth. I crouched down to a squat and inched behind his stool. Once I was close enough to see the hairs on his arms, I sprang.

“BOO!” I said, and slammed my hands onto his shoulders. I laughed. I stopped when he turned his face slightly. He was not laughing. He looked murderous.

“Sorry,” I said. I went back to the kitchen, busing my flute, growing more ashamed with each step. The only comfort I had as I changed my clothes was that someday I would be far, far away from the restaurant and I wouldn’t remember how I had acted like a child. He should be embarrassed, I said. The fucking hiccups, what a narcissistic little boy. He should be the one running away. But no, it was me, hiding in the locker room until I was calm.

When I came back down he and Simone were gone. Relief.

“Such a moody little bitch, right?” Sasha said, shaking his head.

“You want one more?” asked Will, turning the stool next to him.

“That was stupid,” I said.

“Let’s shut it down,” said Sasha, picking up the plates holding everyone’s ashes.

“Park Bar?”

I hesitated.

“Come on, Fluff, you won this round.” Nicky shut off the lights and said, “He didn’t have another one after that. You cured him.”

—

THE RAMIFICATIONS OF my fall down the stairs appeared on my left hip, my lower back, my cheek from where the entrée plate hit me. The bruises bubbled to the surface of my skin before they colored. My skin like that of a nearly liquefied nectarine, the pulp rolling around under the thin surface. If you bit it, the whole thing would burst.