Stephanie Danler - Sweetbitter

“I’ve given up plenty for her. It goes both ways. I take care of her too.”

“What if one of you wants to take care of someone else?” The words came out before I could stop them, and I thought, Please don’t answer that. He ignored me. “What are her parents like?”

He leaned back in his chair. “They’re nothing like her.”

“How did she get like that?”

“She likes to think she sprang from the head of Zeus fully formed.”

“But in fact…”

“Her dad owned a bar. And her mom was an elementary school teacher with a ditzy, girlish obsession with France, but she never even owned a passport.”

I realized that I had my spoon full and lifted halfway to my face. I would have sooner believed that Simone had sprung from a skull in full armor than believed a woman who had never left the country raised her. I put my spoon down, laughing uncomfortably.

“How old is she?” It was something I had been curious about since the first day. I had no idea about the gradation of years, what thirty or thirty-three or forty-two looked like.

“She’s thirty-seven. How old are you?”

“Twenty-two. You knew that,” I said. I smiled at him but I was doing numbers in my head. “That’s kind of old, right? It doesn’t make sense. Didn’t she start at the restaurant when she was twenty-two? I thought she said she’s only been there twelve years, that makes her thirty-four, right? When was she in France? What did you do when she left?”

“I call those my wilderness years.”

“How long were you guys apart?”

“A few years, Jesus, I’m bored with this.”

“Do you think she’s happy? Just working at the restaurant? She seems happy, right? Her life is so full.”

“You’re really smitten, huh?” Jake tackled crusts of rye toast. “What do you think happiness is? It’s a mode of consumption. It’s not a fixed state, somewhere you can take a cab to. Simone’s dad had a brain aneurysm at one a.m. while he was counting the drop. He wasn’t unhappy. Simone has been bar-backing since she was nine years old. I don’t think she has any illusions about happiness.”

I tried to see her as a little girl, busing glasses, watchful. When I was nine the most palpable interactions I had were with my dolls. I played Family with them, but the games always turned out badly, ended violently. Those dolls had to accept the full gamut of my fledgling emotions. They were stuck with me, and they always forgave me when we started over the next day. Which from what I saw of other families wasn’t an inaccurate representation. But I was fully isolated from the adult world. I wasn’t seen, heard, or acknowledged. It made sense that Simone had been born into it, adapting to the adult rules for conduct, how to be sincere and duplicitous, how to evade, before she realized that technically she wasn’t one of them.

I tried to see Jake as a little boy, catching up to her in height, then surpassing her. It was the first time I imagined him as a child. I looked at him across the table and he and Simone — with their history, their run-down parents, their northeastern chilliness, their hardness — felt like the only real people I had ever met.

“What about me?” I said seriously. “Do you think I have illusions?”

“I think you are the illusion.” He slid his chair over so he was next to me. Yes, it was a switch in him, radical flips in energy — I could never rest. He pressed his fork into my lips. “Whose lips are these?”

“These lips?” I kissed the fork. “My lips?”

He didn’t hesitate, he bit my bottom lip, pulled it, stretched it out. Both our eyes were open, my face padlocked, he bit harder and I breathed harder. He gave my lip a soft kiss after releasing it, and I felt blood, I tasted iodine.

“My lips,” he said. “Mine.”

—

HE MET my gravity with apathy and so began a free fall.

“You love to fuck,” he would say, out of breath.

“Doesn’t everyone? What does that even mean?” Although I knew exactly what he meant, my thighs were still shaking.

“No, women in New York, they’re all up here.” He tapped my skull. Then he thrust his hand between my thighs. “They can’t be here. They can’t be present.”

“You’ve had lots of experience, huh?” I was stuck on the way he said women in New York as if I was a woman in New York. “I’m not like a nymphomaniac or something.”

“No.” He moved his hand higher up and pressed on me. “Don’t be embarrassed. Say, I love to fuck.”

“No,” I said, shrinking away. His eyes shimmered like water about to boil.

“Say it,” he said, and grabbed my neck from the side, thumb on my windpipe. The first rush of vertigo. At the fulcrum point of coming with Jake, I wasn’t falling, the world was rising. He hurt me sometimes. He could smell my fear and he would say, Let go. If I pushed myself into the fear, like pushing my face into a pillow, I could come harder, and I did. The steel grates being rolled up by the Chinese guys, their rapid conversations while they dragged the fish trash out, the trucks bleating as they reversed. My body, boneless.

“I love to fuck.”

“You’re insatiable.”

“You’re carnivorous.”

“You’re a tart-lette.”

“A wolf.”

“A rose.”

“A steak, bloody and rare.”

“You’re inoperable.”

“You’re terminal.”

If he was imperfect it was never in his blue room, never with words, he played them so smoothly, he played me so smoothly. The shit that came out of our mouths was utter nonsense, but. But what? It was a privileged language. If I tried to transcribe it, it would be filthy.

Wait, does cliché mean it’s true or not true?

Everyone has a price.

I caught your yawn.

Yeah, mine is anything above twenty percent.

Why can’t I smell anything anymore?

They’ve turned into monsters now.

Snow all the time now.

So I said, I’m not paying rent until I have some fucking heat.

When does it stop?

It’s funny racist, but is it racist racist?

He’s absolutely jaundiced.

It’s the prawns tonight.

’Tis the bourbon season, my friend.

Do you know if Venice is an island?

But it smells like garbage and Fernet in there.

They’re saying beer is the new wine.

You missed the second glass on 19.

I never see the daylight anymore.

You didn’t card them?

That’s quite a cough.

Prawns are not shrimp.

And she’s not exactly young anymore.

But I never sleep anymore.

Should we call his wife? He’s asleep at the table.

Yes, you suck on the heads.

He never runs out of excuses.

The little vampires?

It’s all fucking homogenized and pasteurized.

There aren’t any secrets here.

Disgusting.

No, sherry is the new wine.

I need a Kleenex.

I need steak knives.

Like bruises under her eyes.

My rule is that I don’t buy it.

And then they asked if we had Yellow Tail.

They froze on my cheeks, just from here to the train.

Where’s the line?

Be nice.

Happy hunting.

Eighty-six the shrimp.

It’s an island if it’s surrounded by water.

How long until we freeze to death?

How about wine is the new wine.

Fucking geniuses.

Another storm coming, even bigger.

Again?

And then I threw up.

—

IT’S NOT HARD to like these foods once you open your mouth to them: the anchovies, the trotters, the pig’s head terrines, the sardines, the mackerel, the uni, the liver mousses and confits. Once you admit that you want things to taste like more or better versions of themselves — once you commit to flavor as your god — the rest follows. I started adding salt to everything. My tongue grew calloused, overworked. You want the fish to taste like fish, but fish times a thousand. Times a million. Fish on crack. I was lucky I never tried crack.