Stephanie Danler - Sweetbitter

THEN ONE DAY I learned that there was an invisible ravine running up the city, as deep as the Grand Canyon, narrower at the top. You could walk in tandem with a stranger on the sidewalk and not realize that he or she was not on the same cliff-side as you.

On one side, there were the people who lived there, and on the other side, terminally distanced, were the people who had made homes there.

The first time I saw a home was on an Indian summer day when I took up Simone’s offer to let me borrow her World Atlas of Wine and a few other books she thought might be helpful in my ongoing quest to speak of New World versus Old World; to identify when Brettanomyces is to be encouraged or when it is to be abhorred. She lived in the East Village, on Ninth between First and A.

I had been in New York long enough to know that servers, even the senior ones, didn’t make enough to live alone in the East Village. Simone had been in the same apartment for over twelve years. I didn’t understand exactly how rent control worked, but I gathered that if you stayed in the ghetto long enough, eventually you would be living for free, or something like that.

An old, ornately fire-escaped and charred building. Four flights of stairs. I clocked details like I was assessing it to move in, imagining taking the garbage out, or my laundry. I thought that Simone and I might be making the essential transition — daytime, both of our days off — and I imagined the invitations she would bestow on me: Let’s go to the Russian baths together and gossip. Or we can get a pedicure and read trashy magazines. Or, best of all, she would ask if I had eaten — I hadn’t on purpose — and she would say, Let’s grab lunch, and take me to a hole in the wall in Alphabet City where they spoke French and she would order couscous and we would drink cheap white wine, and she would explain the difference between the crus in Beaujolais again but when she did she would be telling me about her life, thinly veiled, and I would respond, constructing stories of my own terroir for her, all my experiences clicking into order around her words.

“Oh hello you,” she said softly. She seemed surprised to see me, as if I were unexpected. She wore a short, patterned robe over men’s briefs and a wifebeater. Simone’s legs. Simone’s loose, low breasts. It always surprised me how small she was when she wasn’t at work. Simone’s smells: coffee, powdery night-blooming flowers, unwashed hair, and the barest trace of cigarettes. I moved minutely past the doorway, afraid to breathe.

I could take it all in from the threshold. It was a tiny studio with a wall of windows onto Ninth Street, which light had already passed over by midday. In front of the windows was her living space, although study would be a more appropriate term. There was no couch, no television, no coffee table. There were bookshelves halfway up the walls and then books horizontally stacked on top. Dominating the center of that area, framed between the windows, was a massive round wood table. More books stacked on that table, empty wineglasses, vases of flowers in various states of bloom and decay. A mortar and pestle amid white pillar candles. A motley mix of chairs surrounded it and in the corner a cracked leather club chair that had two blankets, one in a Native American pattern, one the loose cotton weave found in Amish shops. There were collections of papers in portfolios next to the chair, metal filing tins filled with papers torn out from magazines and newspapers. The walls were painted a light gray and covered in framed prints, the most notable a nude woman reclining. I moved instinctively toward the woman, wondering if it was her, though I knew at the same time Simone wasn’t the kind to put herself on the wall. She dropped a record-player needle into place, and jazz startled the room into the present tense.

“Did you run here?” she asked, gesturing toward my blouse. My shirt was soaked through.

“Kind of. I walked.”

“That’s lovely.” I wanted her to recognize that I had walked over the bridge, that I lived just across the river from her. I wanted her to ask me about my house, which now had to exist in relation to her house. “Water? Coffee?”

“Both please. No couch?”

“Couches make people lazy. I’m sure if I had one I would never get anything accomplished.”

Just what is it that people got accomplished on their days off? She seemed like a writer — her apartment had the worn aura of a writer’s apartment or a painter’s if I could find some canvases, but she never spoke of specific projects. And she never spoke of writing, of sitting down with pen to paper. While she was at work that was where she existed completely, never half in her head. She spoke often of art, she spoke often of food, she spoke often of books.

“Are you a writer?”

“Hmm. A writer. I try to engage in the task of setting something true on paper. But if you take art too seriously you wind up killing yourself. Do you know what I mean?”

I love you I wanted to say. I grunted. She padded into the kitchen, which was miniature. The ceiling was lower because of a lofted, hidden bed, and everything seemed shrunken to accommodate it. The refrigerator was diminutive as well. Next to it, a row of hanging tarnished copper pans.

“Wow. You really have it,” I said. I walked past her to a large cast-iron tub that sat on the far side of the kitchen, against a window into the air shaft. The air turned humid although Simone didn’t seem damp at all. There was a clothesline of lingerie drying, and bottles of detergent mixed with her shampoo and Dr. Bronner’s soap. The tub had two curtains that were pulled back and a handheld showerhead that had been mounted to the wall. I remembered him. I looked at the clever but amateurish way the shower had been constructed and I knew he had been there. I wished his handprints would show themselves, develop all over the apartment.

“Ah. I must admit I still love it. When I saw the place the landlord was telling me he could enclose it all, make it into a proper bathroom, tear out the tub. And I insisted on keeping it. I was very romantic back then. I thought I would drink wine in the tub, drink coffee in the tub, hold court in the tub. I knew I had to have the place. It’s the only one left in the building that’s still like this. The landlord apologizes every time he sees me.” She laughed and handed me a glass of water. “It’s maybe a little sad that it still gives me so much pleasure?”

“You really drink wine in the bath?”

“I’ve had many wild nights in that tub. Wild nights, wild nights, my luxury.”

“Isn’t that dangerous? What if you passed out?”

“I don’t think I drink as much as you, my love.”

“Ha ha,” I said and I felt an echo of our work selves, our banter. I knew she was magic. I had known from the first time she spoke to me. I was right, her lips were still quite red though she was unmade.

“You look so excited, little one — do you want to get in it?”

I’m not sure what she meant but I jumped in the empty tub under a garland of lace underwear. I lay back and surveyed the scene. Simone was filling the kettle, absorbed in whatever coffee ritual she had.

“This place is amazing. You can’t ever leave,” I said. It felt like nothing in the apartment had ever been transient — it had all been born here. The gray walls were a curtain, and the city felt remote, like a city in Europe, not the one where I did trivial, daily battle. My mind stilled. All at once I was exhausted, every switch in me went to Off. My eyelids flickered, then dropped.

—

I OPENED THEM after what I assumed was a few seconds but a pot of coffee sat on the counter in a Chemex and I could hear her talking softly on the phone, sitting on her windowsill. I sat up, my head pounding, and felt like I might pass out. She got off the phone. I saw a mug had been poured for me. Next to it sat a small pitcher of milk and a bowl of brown sugar with a spoon. The mug was garish turquoise and said Miami.