Stephanie Danler - Sweetbitter

I shrugged and smelled the wine. It was as addictive as old books. “I didn’t do anything. She picked me.”

“Why do you think she did that?”

I thought about those first few times I saw her, how she was so remote and sculptural. I wanted to say that I charmed her except for so long I’d hardly spoken.

“We have a thing,” I said finally, inarticulately. It wasn’t Jake, but I wasn’t about to say that to Howard. “We have something in common, I don’t know that I can explain it.”

“I think I first met her when she was just a few years older than you.”

“Was there even a Park Bar then?”

“There wasn’t much. God, Simone and I used to go to this place, Art Bar? Is that still around?”

“It’s so far west! What was she like?”

“Yes, we had to travel in those days. Barefoot in the snow, uphill both ways.” Howard drank his sherry with his back to the door, and I saw the first guests come in for dinner. I watched as they agitatedly unwrapped themselves from their coats, and I thought I should set up but I wasn’t about to stop our little happy hour.

“Would you believe me if I said she was mostly the same?” he continued. “The Owner had her training people twice her age within six months. Everyone was shocked when she didn’t take the GM role. Lucky for me, of course.”

“Why wouldn’t she take it?”

“I know I make it look effortless.” He pulled on his cuff links. “But it’s a massive job. It’s a different kind of commitment. If I remember correctly, she was thinking of going back to school. And then it was adieu, off to France, her first escape.”

“You guys all run so deep,” I said. “It’s amazing, right? I mean, everyone has been here so long.”

“Are you happy here?” he asked. Nicky came up behind me, straightening his bow tie, gave a raised eyebrow at my glass of sherry, and headed into the bar. He carefully dimmed the lights.

“Yes,” I said. Howard couldn’t see what I was seeing. The bar beginning to glow under the low lamps, the music ascending, Nicky opening the house red, jaunty, people shuffling in, the magic of the restaurant emerging as if from a more perfect world of forms.

“Curtain up, kids,” Nicky called out and the servers came out of their hiding places, arms clasped behind their backs. Did Howard mean happy here, like the restaurant, or here in my life?

“I’m deeply happy here,” I said.

“Have you given any thought to the future?”

Had I given any thought to the future? Sure. I wanted next year to look like the life I was leading right now. I knew I was drinking too much, and it wasn’t without second thoughts that I made the transition from taking bumps of other people’s drugs to buying my own, but I figured that couldn’t possibly sustain itself, that it was part of an evolution from which I would emerge honed and sharp like an arrow from a bow. And besides, I drank less, snorted less, and fucked less than eighty percent of the people I encountered, though those things tended to affect me a bit more vulgarly.

Did he want to know my goals? Sometimes I made lists that said: explore Manhattan above Twenty-Third Street, buy a membership to MoMA, invest in a bookcase and/or curtains, go to yoga, learn to cook, buy a toothbrush that vibrates. I thought eventually I’d make more friends: urbane, talented, tattooed friends and we would have dinner parties, to which I could contribute because I would have developed a talent for coq au vin, and all the hysterical winds of possibility that buffeted me along the L train would have died down.

I had just started to think about travel. Sometimes I lined my life up against Simone’s. I thought that my “escape,” my adventure abroad, the one that would make me contemplative and sensual, was still coming for me. I had never been to Europe. Maybe Jake and I…maybe Jake and I would become a “we.” I had never let myself have that thought in full before — two months ago I couldn’t get him to say hello to me — but now, I believed the words as I thought them, that we were moving somewhere together, and it was toward a real “we.” A “we” that held hands in the street and became regulars at Les Enfants Terribles around the corner from his apartment. It seemed a little odd that the two of us had never been out to dinner at a normal time, like anytime before midnight, but now that we’d had breakfast, the rest was a matter of time. A “we” that took weekends away, a “we” that went to Europe together, without Simone, continuous days to ourselves, we could fly into Paris, rent a car, travel the Loire River until we hit the Atlantic. I saw the way he looked at me sometimes. Other times it was like I wasn’t there, but sometimes…

“There are times in life when it’s good to live without knowing,” Howard said, interrupting what must have been a look of unruffled idiocy. “I mean that we can allow ourselves to live and not really know what it is that we’re doing. That’s all right. It’s an accumulation stage.”

My eyes welled up. He took my empty glass from me and slid it into the dish rack.

“I’d like you to be a server here. The Owner would like it as well. You will bypass your coworkers in line for the next position, so you won’t be the most popular for a moment. But is that something you would be interested in?”

I nodded.

“Wonderful. I will look for an opening in the coming months and you will begin training. Thank you for your strong work.”

I looked at my hands, which weren’t terribly clean, thinking they had autonomously produced this strong work. I remembered how scared I had been on that first L train ride to Union Square, and I’d said to my reflection words that had been a mantra all my life: I. Don’t. Care. I don’t know when exactly it happened, but Howard had changed that when he gave me this life: I cared.

—

I BECAME OBSESSED by a pair of tennis shoes, the laces spun in the spindles of a tree outside my building. One day while I was watching the lights come on in the construction sites by the river, I looked down and there they were. I had not noticed them until every last leaf fell away, the tree shedding like a balding head, and there emerged these rotten, brown sneakers. It felt like they had been stuck there a long time. They looked ancient. My thoughts about it didn’t go very far, but I was concerned. What happened to the person who lost their shoes? How did they get home? Who on earth was going to get them down? The thought that they would stay there for decades, rotting, gave me an apocalyptic feeling in my stomach.

YOU WILL SEE it coming. Not you actually because you don’t see for yourself yet, everyone is busy seeing for you, days filled with unsolicited advice you don’t take and trite warnings you can’t hear and the whitewashing of all your excitement. Yes, they definitely saw it coming, exactly the way it came.

When you’re older you will know that at some unconscious level not only did you see it coming, but you created it, in your own blind, stumbling way. You will console yourself with the fact that it wouldn’t have mattered, seeing it or not seeing it. You were a sponge for incident. Maybe everyone is when they’re young. They don’t remember, nobody remembers what it feels like to be so recklessly absorbent.

When you can’t see in front of you life is nothing but surprises. Looking back, there were truly so few of them.

—

WE TOOK WALKS after work because the winter was relinquishing its fascist hold on the weather. Jake’s sense of ownership of his surroundings incrementally increased as we left Union Square. By the time we passed Houston to the south, or A to the east, he was fully in possession.