Stephanie Danler - Sweetbitter

I had a dozen questions to ask: What does that mean? What happened to your family? What is Simone’s family? Why didn’t you stay here? I finally said, “I don’t have any family either.”

“Should I believe that? A little Jane Eyre alone in the world?”

“I thought you didn’t flirt with girls who read.”

He coughed and said, “I’m not.”

A month ago I had seen Jake eat a steak topped with foie gras. The cooks made fun of him behind his back because he was thin, and made him disgustingly decadent food as a dare. He ate nonstop while he worked, but I held a certain regard for his palate because of Simone. Then I watched him wolf down a cindery steak and eggs at midnight and I realized he was a brute who was always hungry. He was the master of indifference and she was the master of attention.

“So,” I said, grinding the cardboard sandwich down into the plate. “When did you move here?”

“Seven, eight years ago? I don’t know, I can’t remember.”

“And you’ve been at the restaurant the whole time?”

“About five years too long.”

“You don’t like it.”

“These places have a shelf life.”

“But no one leaves.”

He shook his head rather sadly. “No one leaves.”

He pushed my coffee toward me and I sipped — weak, watery.

“Cinnamon — am I right, Nancy?” he said to the waitress. She ignored him. “They put cinnamon in the blend.”

“I don’t think her name is Nancy.” I pushed the coffee away.

“A snob already? That was quick.”

“No.”

I picked the white bread out of the sandwich, dipped it in the mayonnaise, and crumbled up bacon with my fingers. Inedible, but I probably couldn’t have touched it anyway. So many times I imagined this, and now that I was living it, I couldn’t fit myself into the scene. I glanced at Flower-Crown and Lumberjack as they got ready to leave. I tried to see us through her eyes. I tried to see us as a couple that always ate at these stools, us inside an Edward Hopper painting.

“So,” I said. His eyes were on his rapidly disappearing food. “What neighborhood do you live in? Do you like it?”

“Are you interviewing me?”

“Um, I wasn’t trying—”

“No, it’s fine, I get it. Just let me put on my suit if you want to play.” He tucked his hair behind his ears and cleared his throat. “The time in my life that best exemplifies my totalitarian — I mean, hospitalitarian —attitude was when I carried drunk old Neely—”

“Okay, I get it. You don’t want to tell me where you live.” He went back to his food. “You carried Mrs. Neely?”

“Many a time, many a time. She’s as light as a feather.” He cleaned his plate completely, pushed it away. He burped and turned to me. Finally. “Chinatown.”

“That’s cool. I hear it’s really cool down there.”

“Cool?”

“I don’t know. Is that not the right word? Is that like, what a hipster would say?”

“No, cool is fine,” he said. “Yes, it’s a cool place. It was much cooler seven years ago, and it was actually cool ten years ago, before I even got to the city. You see, what those kids over there”—he pointed at the empty booth—“don’t realize is that cool is always past tense. The people who lived it, who set the standards they emulate, there was no cool for them. There was just the present tense: there were bills, friendships, messy fucking, fucking boredom, a million trite decisions on how to pass the time. Self-awareness destroys it. You call something cool and you brand it. Then — poof — it’s gone. It’s just nostalgia.”

“I see,” I said, though I don’t know that I did.

“Those two — to go back to our apt illustrations — they want to play dropouts, want to live ‘La Vie Bohème.’ They want to eat at blue-collar diners, ride their bikes like fucking apes, tear their clothes, discourse on anarchy. And they want to shop at J.Crew. They want dinner parties with organic artisanal chickens and they want their fucking Southeast Asia sojourns, and their jobs at American Express. They come here, but they can’t finish their plates.”

I took another leaden bite. “You can’t have all those things?”

“Sweetheart, you can’t make a set of aesthetic decisions without making an ethical one. That’s what makes them fake people.”

I forced my sandwich down.

“Don’t worry. You’re not like them.”

“I know.” It sounded defensive.

“None of us are. Even if you grew up in a country club — which I can tell you did — you’re in the struggle now. That’s authentic. And whatever your story is, I don’t see mommy-and-daddy all over you.”

“You think I grew up in a country club?”

“I know you did.”

He drained me. “You don’t know me.”

“Maybe I don’t. And you don’t know me. And none of us know anything about each other.”

“Well, I don’t think that’s useful. Sometimes people…I don’t know…go out to dinner or get coffee or whatever the fuck…and get to know each other.”

“And then what happens? They live happily ever after?”

“I don’t know, Jake. I’m trying to find out.” My head hurt, I propped it on my arm and took a big drink of flat beer.

“Don’t get drunk.”

“Excuse me?”

“You’re sloppy when you drink.”

Enough. I opened my throat and chugged my awful beer all the way down. It leaked out of the corners of my mouth and ran down my neck. When I finished I said, “Fuck you and good night.”

“Hey, firecracker, give me a second.”

A normal man, in this rough pantomime of a date, would put his hand on my hand and apologize. He would reveal just enough vulnerability to convince me to stay and keep digging. Jake of Chinatown, Jake of greasy diners, Jake of exuberant hair in an umbrella-less city — he put his hand under my shirt, right on my ribs, and pushed me onto the stool. He took his hand off me, his fingers had been freezing but I felt branded.

“You’re incandescent when you drink. That too.”

I exhaled. “A consolation.”

“It’s the truth. You can take it.”

“It’s something.”

I had my purse in my lap but when the waitress came back I ordered another beer. My ribs, my life, my train.

“You read too much Henry Miller,” I said to him. “That’s why you think you can treat girls like this.”

“You’re a decade off, but yeah, I used to read too much Henry Miller.”

“Who do you read too much of now?”

“I don’t read anymore.”

“Seriously?”

“You could call it a crisis of faith. I haven’t read a book or even a newspaper in two years.”

“Is that why you quit your doctorate?”

“Who told you that?”

“I don’t know. Simone?”

“Simone did not tell you that.”

“Yeah, she did.” She hadn’t. But I could tell by his sudden attention that it was true.

“But then you’re the Anaïs Nin type, right?”

“Not really.” I was, or had been, or always would be.

“We’re both a couple of imperfect types.” He smiled, and it was soft.

“You missed me,” I said, not quite believing it as I said it, but knowing it.

“You want me to tell you that I missed you?”

“No, I want you to be nice to me, actually.”

“I’m mean because you’re young and need discipline.”

“I’m sick of that,” I said. “Young, young, young, that’s what I get, all day every day. But I know your secret.” I lowered my voice and pushed myself toward him. “You’re all terrified of young people. We remind you of what it was like to have ideals, faith, freedom. We remind you of the losses you’ve taken as you’ve grown cynical, numb, disenchanted, compromising the life you imagined. I don’t have to compromise yet. I don’t have to do a single thing I don’t want to do. That’s why you hate me.”