Stephanie Danler - Sweetbitter

“We don’t talk about you. It has come up.”

“ It? I thought we were friends. Am I just this big fucking joke to you?”

“You’re getting carried away.” The way she said it was so matter-of-fact that I nodded. “Now. Can you let it go?”

Fuck them, I thought, I’m going to quit. Then I saw that Simone was right. I wasn’t a victim. I hadn’t been led anywhere. I had chosen this overgrown, murky path where I couldn’t see five feet in front of me — the drugs, the drinking until black, the embarrassment, the confusion. But really I had chosen the two of them — they were the difficult terrain. I understood what she meant by “let it go.” I didn’t have to quit my job. There had been another route open to me this entire time — a well-lit, well-laid, honest path. I said to myself, Turn around. You do not have to take every experience on the pulse. It’s just dinner. I saw the silent elevator, just me. Another voice said, But then you’ll just be a backwaiter.

“I can’t,” I said. “Let it go. I mean, I don’t want to.”

She exhaled, frustrated with me.

“Don’t you remember what it’s like?”

She held her face as if it were made of granite. I saw a flicker, aqueous, vulnerable.

“No. I don’t,” she said. “I don’t remember and I don’t care to.”

“You must have felt like this before. Are you really made of stone like they all say? I don’t think you are, Simone. I see your heart.” I pointed to her chest, but she looked furious.

“All right, Tess. You want it all? You don’t care about consequences? Then it is too late. I could tell you to leave him alone. That he’s complicated, not in a sexy way, but in a damaged way. I could tell you damage isn’t sexy, it’s scary. You’re still young enough to think every experience will improve you in some long-term way, but it isn’t true. How do you suppose damage gets passed on?”

There was heat coming off her, and I felt the drugs. My blood ran like lighter fluid through my veins. “You sound a little bitter.”

“Bitter.” She pulled the word through a clenched jaw. She pulled back her shoulders like she was on the floor, readjusting, and said, “We shall see. I’ll speak to him.”

“Don’t!” I said. Will’s warning came back to me faintly, about trusting Simone. I had already made myself her pupil, but I had an incision of fear about handing this over to her. Did Jake really need Simone’s blessing? Is that what had been missing this entire time? If those were the terms, then I accepted. Didn’t I?

“Or, I don’t know. Do whatever you want. It’s not even a big deal.”

“Little one, it is a big deal. You forget how important he is to me. I’m obviously quite invested in you too.”

“I know.” I looked at our feet and dragged my shoe back and forth across the tile. “I had a dream about you. Part of a dream. It was that we had a secret. You were my mother. And you let me show up late for work, and you came to my apartment and made my bed. But you told me that no one else would understand and if I told I would be punished.”

“Odd.” That was all she said.

“I don’t think you’re old enough to be my mother. That’s not what I meant. By dreaming that.”

“You should pass that along to Howard. He’s very good with dreams. Should have been an analyst in another life.” She stood and did a small back bend, stretching, cracking. “I wouldn’t mind being in an elevator with you. Roomier than a bathroom stall.” She handed me a piece of toilet paper. “No more crying at work.”

—

I WANTED TO ask her if that was love. The blindness, the careening falls, the invisible slow dancing, the longing for real pain, the fixedness. I wouldn’t have gotten an answer. She never spoke to me about love from personal experience. Love was a theory. Something that had been embalmed. “Love will do x to you if you let it,” or “Love is a necessary condition to y, ” or “ y is a particular brand of love you will encounter in places like z. ”

Perhaps that’s why she was so untouched. She didn’t remember. She never got down on her knees on the asphalt like the rest of us, she couldn’t tell me about the unspeakably real stuff. What I learned came from the ground up.

—

HE YANKED on my wrist and pulled me back from the group I was leaving with. Will made a face that said, Coming? And I held up my hand to say, One minute.

“Text me?” Will yelled as the elevator doors closed in front of his face.

I turned to Jake.

“What? Simone told you to apologize?”

He stared at the carpet. Pensive.

“Pathetic,” I said. I pressed the button.

“I was sorry as soon as I said it.”

“You’re wearing me out. Honestly.” I pressed the button again and again. I saw that alternative route, path of peace, of light. I saw the bar, the beer, and the gentleness of being with friends, all of that obliterated when he came near me. I had given him permission to do that. A bell rang and the doors parted. Jake went into the back corner and I stood in front of him, holding the door as everyone crowded in.

“Going out for one, Denise?” I asked Nicky’s wife. Nicky told me that she was the first woman who ever talked back to him and he knew immediately he had to marry her. She was a sharp brunette, still pretty but her cheeks were gaunt now.

“No, no. We are heading home. Our best-case scenario is a five a.m. wake-up with the wee one.”

“Best-case!” Nicky clapped and turned toward me. “Fluff doesn’t get home till five a.m., isn’t that right?”

“What’s Fluff?” asked Denise.

“It’s an old nickname,” I said, and my breath shot out of me. Jake dragged his finger down my back. “From high school.”

My spine a burning candlestick, everywhere he touched dripping. Behind you.

“I did vote for you,” he said softly so only I heard it. And we were back at it: the night buoyant, time elastic, my body forgiving.

“Denise,” I said, stepping back closer to him, “remind me, how old is the youngest?”

—

I STRADDLED HIM in the backseat of a taxi, leather seats groaning, his fingers inside me, pumping, pressing into a white-hot spot in my stomach. I was struck through layers of intoxication that I might come suddenly. He shifted his thumb and I recoiled, sure I wouldn’t come at all. A passage of pushing and pulling, my hair, strands of it coming out in his hand, his shirt collar, him holding me down, forcing me harder onto his lap, the cab hit a pothole and I exhaled.

When I climbed on top of him I momentarily thought of the taxi driver. How far into his shift was he? I wanted to tell him: I work long nights too. Sometimes people treat me terribly. I imagined the taxi driver had a small daughter who called him while he worked. He put her voice on speakerphone and it lit up the car. A glamour shot of his wife hung off the rearview mirror. I assumed it was his wife. She had her hand behind her ear and her head tilted, holding a rose in the other hand. Her lipstick matched the flower. I wondered if the money was good New Year’s Day. I wondered if he had seen everything. He slammed the partition shut and turned up the music and Jake pulled up my skirt and I forgot the taxi driver was a person.

I was gnawing on his lips, his ears, his chin, trying to extend the tremor in my stomach, I’m close, I wanted to say, colored lights smudging the windows, it’s very close.

Jake grabbed my face and said, “Do you know what you taste like?” and pulled his fingers out of me and jammed them into my mouth.

I didn’t gag. I was too stunned to feel anything at first. I’m salty, I thought. I don’t taste bad. But I moaned, I ground into him harder. I was completely turned on, switched on, not by my taste, but by Jake’s certainty. There were so few moments I had been certain in my life. I was constant revision, constant doubt. What I learned, as he slipped his fingers out of my mouth and back inside me, is that in New York City there are absolutely no rules. I didn’t understand that monstrous freedom until Jake said into my mouth, Come for me, and I came in the back of a cab. There were people who did whatever the fuck they wanted and their city was terrifying, barbaric, and breathless.