Stephanie Danler - Sweetbitter

“I call bullshit, Skip,” Ariel said, “but that’s a nice fairy tale.” She grabbed an empty crate to stock and walked away. Will looked at me.

“I’m tired of her shit,” I said. I collected the pieces of broken glass into the bowl.

“I still like Dave Matthews Band,” he said. “That’s kind of embarrassing.”

“No,” I said. “Nothing you do is ever embarrassing. You’re not a girl.”

I put on my coat, picked up my purse, the broken glass, and pushed off from the bar.

—

HIS ROOM IN a converted loft was painted a pithy blue and felt like a cave on a cold northern ocean. He had one roommate, a street artist called Swan whom I only ever saw in his robe as we passed each other on the way to the bathroom. He looked through me. In contrast to the rugs that covered the living space, the floors were bare in Jake’s room. Tarnished linoleum and a mattress in the center.

He had a wall of windows that got only patches of daylight and looked out onto a fire escape and a boarded-up building.

Touches of an aesthete: the mattress was a Tempur-Pedic and covered in spotless linen sheets. He had collected wooden wine crates and built them into bookshelves. It was an entire wall of books. But unlike Simone, who had everything — sections of poetry, religion, psychology, gastronomy, rare editions of all the capital L literature, and a column of art books that cost more than a year of my rent — Jake had mystery novels and philosophy. That’s it. Pulpy, sooty paperbacks and leather-bound collections of Nietzsche, Heidegger, Aquinas. Mutilated copies of Kierkegaard in their own stack. Some unreturned NYU library books: William James, Aristotle’s Metaphysics, The Odyssey. A black book on anatomy that was large enough to be used as a side table. He’d planted an elegant lamp on the floor next to the bed. It was three feet high and had two hinges in the arm, the bulb set in a dome of cracked, wavy glass.

The walls were blank except for a small area above the shelves where he had stuck pins into black-and-white Polaroids. I saw the camera collection when I came in, hung on hooks in the main room with guitars and two bicycles. It took a while before I asked about the photos. There was a mountain range (“The Atlas,” he said, “that’s in Morocco”). Some grass on a beach (“Wellfleet,” he said, “it’s called beach heather”). A pile of broken bicycles stacked in a pyramid on a cobblestone street (“Berlin”) and her: her hand, actually, blocking the camera, a huge starfish of a hand. The simplistic camera had flattened the image, capturing every line of her hand like it was an engraving. In the underexposed background, I could see — only if I unpinned it and put it under the light while he wasn’t in the room — an exposed, stunning smile.

He was asleep and I was crouched on the floor next to the bed, touching the spines of the books. I reached and unpinned the photo. When I asked him about his tattoos, he rolled his eyes. When I asked him about those photos, he barely tolerated me. But the longer I knew him, the more I saw a system of symbols that must have had some sentimental value. If I asked him to tell me about Morocco or Berlin or Wellfleet, he would digress into the Berbers, or this German artist he knew who grew sculptures out of salt, and stories of gruesome deaths in whaling lore. It reminded me, the way he skirted around those photos, of something Simone had told me during one of our lessons: try not to have ideas about things, always aim for the thing itself. I still did not understand these four photographs, the why of them.

“How’s the investigation going?” he said, startling me. His chest was bare, sheets covering his torso, and he lit a cigarette. I could barely make out his eyes. He didn’t sound mad.

“When was this?” I asked. I took the photo of Simone into bed and lay down on my side, leaving inches between us. Still I was too shy to reach out to him first.

“I don’t remember,” he said. He reached out and pulled a piece of my hair, twisting it around his finger and I thought that we were sinking into the blue, the mercurial hours between night and morning.

“Why do you have it up?”

“It’s a good photograph,” he said. Ash fell into the bed and he brushed it away.

“Is it because you love her?”

“Of course I love her. But that’s not a reason to hang a photograph.”

“I think it’s the reason to do a lot of things,” I said carefully.

“You know,” he said, putting his cigarette out and pulling me onto his chest. “It’s not like that with me and her. You know that.”

He was distracting me, he knew his neck distracted me, his hands rolling over my hips distracted me.

“Was it ever like that?” I tried to see his eyes. “Simone’s not ugly.”

“Yeah, she’s not bad.”

“Jake…”

“No.”

“How come?”

He grunted. His knees cracked as he got up. He squinted at his bookshelves, and pulled out a copy of De Anima. An old color photograph fell out. He picked it up and threw it on my lap and jumped over me back into bed. A woman with feathered, golden hair was smiling, holding a baby that looked sternly at the camera.

“That was my mom.”

“Oh,” I said. “They look alike.”

“Tell me about it. Everyone has their shit. I have Simone. I know it’s hard for people outside. But it’s the way it is. She pretty much moved in when my mom died. She was only fifteen, but she raised me, in her fucking haphazard way.”

I didn’t react. I let it sink in and fit into the puzzle I had been putting together of Jake. Motherless. An entire city of orphans. I looked back at the photo of Simone. What would I have given for someone to come and take care of me? I touched the baby’s face in the photo. Those impenetrable, penetrating eyes. “You were unamused even then.”

“It takes a lot to amuse me.”

“How old were you when she died?”

“Eight.”

“How? Did she die, I mean.”

I reached out for him. I used my nails to trace his tattoos and his eyelids shut. I felt the bumps on his key tattoo and thought of Simone wrapped up in her sheets, alone in bed. I wondered what the funny story was, wondered why his tattoo looked like his skin had rejected it, and why hers looked like it had sunk in too far. His breathing deepened.

“That feels good,” he said. I don’t know how much time passed before he said, “Simone told me my mother was a mermaid, and that it had always been her destiny to return to the ocean because it was her real home, and someday she and I would return too. My mother swam away. I think I knew better, even then. I got older, I found the newspapers, I learned what drowning is, I know. But when you asked me that, my first thought was, she swam away and went home. Funny, right? The way we can’t unlearn things even when we know they aren’t true.”

I rolled on top of him, torso on torso, stomachs breathing convex and concave into each other. I thought about saying a lot of grown-up things: I lost my mother too. I think it would have been harder if I’d ever had her, could remember her. I know that trust is impossible with other people, but mostly with yourself because nobody taught you how. I know that when you lose a parent a part of you is stuck there, in that moment of abandonment. I thought about saying, I know you’re falling in love with me too. Instead I said, “I told someone you were my boyfriend.”

“Who?”

“Some guy who was hitting on me.”

“Who? Where?”

“Just some guy.” I had never seen him jealous, or even prickly, except for maybe when we talked about Simone and Howard’s friendship. But his tone had gone from laconic to lucid. “He was like, a fancy rich guy at Grand Central Oyster Bar. He wanted to have oysters with me.”