Stephanie Danler - Sweetbitter

He grunted. I pulled the wine and went to peer over his shoulder at the mess of stray bottles I had already been through a thousand times.

“Hey,” I said. “You’re bleeding.”

He had a cut on his forearm. He looked down, confused, and I reached out, instinctively, and brought his forearm to my mouth and licked the cut. My tongue metallic, salty, a spark. When I realized what I had done I pushed his arm back to him. I exhaled and he inhaled, his nostrils flared. My eyes said, I dare you. I felt tears, I felt bottomless, I felt liquid.

“Excuse me,” she said. Simone stood in the doorway. I blinked at her, wondering what I was seeing. “The Opus?”

I looked at my hand and walked the bottle over to her. I waited for some sarcastic comment. “Well I would have just done it myself,” is what Heather would say. Ariel would say, “What the fuck Skip, you fucking cunt.” Either of those would have been acceptable. Simone said nothing but looked at us. She was silent and I knew I’d fucked up.

—

“YOU WANNA peach treat?”

I looked at Heather dumbly. I had properly fucked up, so when the rest of the night took a turn toward chaos, I knew it was my fault. Tables ran over their turn times, they sat sipping water contentedly while the waiting parties tapped their feet and impatience, anxiety, frustration gathered in a prickly cloud. The most desired tables were refused. They were too close to the hutch, too close to the bathroom, too small, too isolated, too noisy. Servers were mishearing orders. They stood nervously outside the kitchen, avoiding telling Chef for as long as possible, making up circuitous stories of how it wasn’t their fault. Chef slammed food into the trash dramatically until Howard stopped him and started gifting the mistakes around the room.

That Opus? I wanted to blame him but couldn’t. Somehow I pulled the 1995, not the 2002. Somehow Simone presented it, opened it, and tasted them on it. Somehow Howard spotted it while making the rounds in the dining room. He said, “Ah, the ’95, what an incredible bottle. How is it drinking this evening?”

The robust man at the table laughed darkly. “Better than the 2002 I ordered. Thanks for that.”

“Did you hear?” Ariel asked, swinging past me with plates. She came back a moment later with empty hands and said, “Simone fucked up for real.”

I saw Howard and her in the hutch. His voice calm with none of his usual inquisitiveness, just sharp. “Highly allocated…massive loss…not like you.”

No, I wanted to say, it wasn’t like her, it was like me. But I watched Simone nodding, her lipstick worn through in the center of her lips where she was biting them. I felt sick. Heather came to pick up coffee and I confessed.

“Happens,” she said, waving me off.

“But Simone—”

“It’s her fault. She presented it, she said the vintage out loud, she pointed to it. She should have noticed. That’s why she’s a server and you’re a backwaiter.”

I was unconvinced.

“You wanna peach treat?”

“What’s that?”

“Just a Xanax.” She pulled out a peach-colored pill.

“You think I can do my job on that?”

“Pumpkin, a monkey could do your job on Xanax. And probably not fuck up as much. It’s not a real drug.”

Or a real job, I thought as I took it. Simone came up to the service bar.

“My cappuccinos on 43?”

“Already went,” I said eagerly. I delivered them myself less than five minutes after she put the order in, putting it ahead of the five other tickets.

She turned to Heather. “Do you have another?”

She popped the pill in her mouth and swallowed without water.

“Simone,” I said, “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t,” she said cordially. “Heather, eighty-six the ’95 Opus. That was the last bottle.”

The pill was lodged in my throat. I kept swallowing, but it dissolved there, and it tasted like Jake’s sour blood. He didn’t speak to me for the rest of the night.

—

THE ESPRESSO MACHINE had always been a hot zone for us. The beverage runners were to clean it extra diligently. And I assumed the other backwaiters did. But after a cockroach crawled out of a portafilter I had just picked up, after I threw the whole thing at the wall, spraying coffee grinds everywhere, leaving a dent, after the bug walked away unharmed — well, I stopped taking my cleaning of the espresso machine so seriously.

Zoe was supposed to be our general in this war, which meant she kept ordering different cleaning supplies, and kept yelling at different exterminators on the phone. Each new arrival promised eradication in hours, each orange jug with its skull and crossbones promised death. Zoe labeled spray bottles with masking tape specifying where they were to be used: Espresso. Bar Sink 1. Bar Sink 2. Zoe modified side work checklists, ordered special rags to clean out the ice machine, special blue strips of paper that we had to wear gloves to handle and hang in the fruit-fly area.

What Zoe didn’t do was get rid of the bugs. I learned that every single restaurant in New York City had bugs, from uptown to downtown. I still would have eaten off the ground in the kitchen — the place was spotless. Part of our job was to protect the ignorance of the guests, who couldn’t handle the hard truths of the city. We said: “It’s just winter.” “It’s just the park.” “It’s just construction down the block.” “It’s the neighbors.” All of that was true.

And yet, when Will found a prehistoric-looking cockroach popsicle, even I gagged. It was exquisitely frozen inside an ice cube. He had scooped it from the ice bin. We passed it around until it started to melt, our mouths open in wonder.

To that we said, “Fuck- Ing. Dis-Gust- Ing. ”

I did my part. I initialed Zoe’s checklists that hung on clipboards above the stations. But one day I went to hang my apron on a hook and it dropped into a crack behind the freezer. When I looked down for it, the wall was covered. Covered. Families, generations of roaches breeding, feeding, dying, in the temperate exhaust from the freezer. I stopped fighting so hard. We were outnumbered.

—

“OURSINS!” Simone exclaimed as she came into the kitchen. I kept doing my job, eyes down, scraping spent candles out of the votives. Somebody hadn’t put enough water in them, they stuck to the sides even as I hacked away at them. I couldn’t remember — it might have been me.

“What?” I asked, just in case she was talking to me. Our chats had tapered off lately.

“Chef, ils sont magnifiques,” she murmured. The two of them leaned over a crate, rapt at whatever golden object was in there. It grated on me when she slipped into French with Chef or Howard or Jake. She would drop her voice so I heard only the curl of a romance language and knew I was being left out. I had apologized to her about the Opus again. I confessed to Howard a day later, and he had already forgotten about it. I had no choice but to wait her out until she directed her attention back at me, when she looked at me like I was as exciting as whatever was in the crate.

At preshift Chef said, “Tonight we have Plat de Fruits de Mer. Very traditional. Oysters, mussels, cherrystone clams, prawns — head on — and the small snails. But what takes it over the top is some spanking-fresh uni, in the shell.”

Someone whistled, a few groans of desire.

“Seventeen orders. This is a hand sell, people; we’re not printing it. $175 per tower.”

“Per tower?” I yelled out. Everyone looked at me.

Howard continued. “ ’Tis the season, my friends. People are celebrating. They have been waiting to dine with us. You are here because you’re perceptive, so read your tables. See if this is what will make them rave about our restaurant. And do what you will, of course, but I highly recommend some Champagne, or perhaps a Chablis as an alternative…”