Cal is a hustler. Maybe he’s a type, maybe he’s all over Chicago or Atlanta or some other bluesy black place like Memphis, where he’s from originally. But his stuff works in Dallas because there’s a lot more space around a black man striving here than in those other places. He was king at The Restaurant. First thing he ever said to me was What are you doing crossing the guest like that. Don’t ever cross the guest. I was new to The Restaurant and fine dining both, I was serving someone’s salad with the wrong hand on the wrong side. I cared about him from that instant. Wanted to please him, got Velcroed to his there’s a right way to do this. That was when The Restaurant was my life, when it was all I had, when I’d run away from her. I’d sleep till nine or ten, one big meal before the shift with the paper or a book. Alone, most always alone.
To do a good job at a table you have to care. Whatever show you’re doing, wherever else your mind is, you have to put a twist of real on the very end of it. The people are waiting for that and if you don’t pull it out they know and they don’t like it. Cal did care, or at least he did that show better than anyone. Something in the way he leaned over people, touched their backs even though you’re not supposed to do that, it was like they were in his home and he’d say Now what you want to do is put that first bite together with all of it, get you a little tomato, a little that purple onion, and the thing that brings it all together is get you a piece of that basil. Rub it around in that basalmic—mm! Mm. Tell me bout that.
He said a lot of words that way, slightly off. Mama gon kick me to the curve if we touch, he’d say to me as we messed around on my floor in the afternoon. He had a bank job in addition to The Restaurant, something one of his highrollers made up for him. What he did there was try to look lively in a beautiful suit. Something from Bachrach. He could wear any color and he could put stripes and checks and prints together and it would work because he was puffed up inside it like he was born to win. What I want to know is was that real.
In that restaurant all of us were off. Chipped. Everybody on the way to the curve. Maybe it’s the same in a law firm, a nail salon, whatever high or low. Maybe that’s just what it is to be alive, you’ve got that broken sooty piece of something lodged inside you making you veer left.
Calvin was profiled in a local newspaper when they did a piece on great Texas steakhouses. “Mr. Colson provides what he calls an ‘old-school’ dining experience, part service, part performance, and all professional. Ask for him at The Restaurant or you’ll miss out on what fine dining ought to be,” the reviewer said. Lissandri gave him a Rolex for that. If you read up on our level of service you’ll find all kinds of uptight lists about not engaging with the guests, don’t say your name, don’t try to get call parties, don’t push anything on the menu over anything else, be formal and anonymous and perfect. Cal broke all those rules and people tipped him outrageous sums for it.
One night one of his call parties didn’t come through for him, this German-American guy Konstantin who brought in big business clients and left Cal somewhere between fifty and eighty percent on tabs that were never less than five hundred and could push up on four grand depending on how many guys he had with him and what he wanted out of them. On this particular night Konstantin was distracted or drunk when he signed the credit card voucher and tipped Cal $300 on $1,620, a figure that any one of us would have called a good night. Cal called it cheap and called it to Konstantin’s face.
See, anybody else would have been fired for that. If a guest says to you Did we take care of you? after paying the bill the only possible answer is an effusive Yes, thank you for asking. Doesn’t matter if they didn’t. Like it doesn’t matter if they’ve been sitting there for two hours after the dishwasher left for the night, if they say Are we keeping you? the only possible answer is Oh no, sir, the place is yours.
Cal went up to Konstantin in the lobby where he was still working these Japanese guys, trying to get them all in cabs to the strip club, and made it clear he needed to talk to him immediately, and when Konstantin said What’s up, my brother? Cal pulled him aside and opened the check presenter like he found a turd in it and showed it to Konstantin and said What is this?
Konstantin went all meek and said Oh did I fuck up? And Cal said I don’t know Kon you tell me, but usually I see something closer to what I’m worth on this line. Is that what you think I was worth tonight? Something you weren’t happy with? Because it seemed like all your guys had a great time and it seemed like they was going the way you wanted em to.
I’m not sure how he got Konstantin to think that the multimillion-dollar deal he had just closed succeeded in part because of Cal’s excellent service but Konstantin rescribbled the tip in as $900 and said to Cal Is that more like it? I’m sorry, my man, I didn’t mean anything by it. You know you’re my guy here. And Cal had the audacity to shake his hand and say stiffly, still trying to be cold, That’s what I thought but I was about to have to let somebody else be your guy here and Konstantin said I feel you, we straight?
You should have seen Nic Martinez doing his impression of Konstantin later in the parking lot. A Mexican doing a German trying to be black. Nic took a puff of Cal’s one-hitter and passed it to Cal and then put his hand on Cal’s biceps and said I feel you Cal my man my brotha my nigg we straight? You my homey right? You vant a couple more bills? You vant me to lick your nuts? and then he was laughing so hard, so crazy, he was leaning over in front of Cal, still holding on to his arm and coughing from the big hit he was trying to hold in and say at the same time Teach me how to get my own German, massa! Teach me!
Cal was holding up straight, letting a smile stay in his cheeks but looking at his pipe all serious, knocking the cache out, reloading. I know he knew his muscle was popping out strong with Nic hanging on him like that and he took pride in that and pride in his balls-out way with “his people,” as he called his call parties. Ain’t nothing to teach, he said to Nic, just got to be you and bring it.
He looked bronze with the streetlight shining on him, reflecting off his white undershirt. He looked the same color as Nic but he was really a goldish cinnamon. He said he was ochre, terra-cotta, and sepia, colors a former girlfriend, a painter, gave him. He liked that. He was always painting himself for me.
I mean did he really feel that way about himself though—the way he made it look in the bank suit, the way he made it look with Nic hanging on him. Where was the nugget you couldn’t massage or change or put a pinstripe on and was it that confident. Was that kernel whole and well or was it sad, smacked out, lost. I don’t know but I think a showman is all show. There’s no secret—or there is, and that’s it. Like when I asked Danny if that scotch rep Alyssa’s tits were real and he said Yeah they’re real—real fake.
Cal would have a little taste, as he called it, near the end of the shift when nobody was looking, a taste of Grand Marnier neat. Danny didn’t care as long as the guests didn’t see and Danny was usually drinking with him anyway. Cal’s taste would become two or three tastes and then he would get so frisky, he would start touching all the women—servers, guests, the pastry chef—like you trail your hand through cattails out on a skiff. Pleased, enjoying the weather, nature.
One night after a few tastes he sat down with Doc Melton’s woman—Doc wasn’t there, and Doc was one of his big men, the ones who kept him on a sick and regular payroll of inflated gratuities at The Restaurant and threw in extras like Mavs tickets. Cal sat down with Cassandra Melton and he told me all about how he felt her up under the table, his fingers on her pussy lips, how fluffed and slick they were and how she sat into it delicately. He did this and after she and her girlfriends left, after he kissed her on each cheek, he came over to me and Danny where we were doing tequila shots at the corner of the bar. He was flying. Oh my Gawd, he said touching his fingers to his lips, that pussy. I can’t believe I haven’t been getting none of that. Why don’t you Cal, I asked, why don’t you just take it, always complaining about how long it’s been since somebody took care of you at home. Fuck knows it’s on offer for you everywhere you go.
No, he said. Can’t do that. I’ll touch me some titties and some pussy but I won’t do that. Cal, that is such bullshit, I said, and he said You just say that because you want me to cross over. I do want you to cross over, I said, but it’s still bull.
That was the summer Cal would come over to my apartment after he got off from the bank, before we had to be in at The Restaurant. Those were warm afternoons, my apartment toasting the Texas sun through big old perfect windows. I moved into that place when I saw the money I was making at The Restaurant. I bought that car too. You can make good money—high fives if you really push, low sixes if you’re Cal—but you never lose the feeling that it’s fragile, your connection to the money. That place I lived in after I first got that connection, it was small and expensive but it was clean and bright and everything was nice. The carpet was thick and new and Cal and I would scuffle on it every afternoon. His kisses. His face—so soft—Your face! I’d say—I take care of myself, Mami, it’s what you got to do he’d murmur—his lips hot, fresh.
That much he allowed. But even if he was stripped down, his suit draped carefully across the back of the loveseat, his white V-neck undershirt tucked into his white boxer briefs, he wouldn’t allow me to touch him. I reached and he said No, don’t do that. We can’t. Mama gon kick me to the curve, I might as well move in.
Okay, I said, move in. I’m ready.
You not ready. You don’t know. Why you always want more.
You want it too.
I do. No doubt. But you think we ought to touch outside of our want?
He was forty-four and I was twenty-two but he was in better shape. His waist as trim as mine, his pecs tortoiseshells, his quads modeling those boxer briefs. Before The Restaurant he used to train the Highland Park moms at Gold’s. He still got up at four every day to do his reps—pushups, crunches, curls—before his daughter woke, then he’d make breakfast and take her to school. That was his time with her. Home late, never to bed before two or three in the morning, the office afternoon would fall on him like a tree. Him in that bank chair, sleeping upright in that suit.
So his excuse for coming over was he needed a nap. Only once did we actually nap—or he did, sleeping clean and gentle in his whites. I lay behind him, my hand on his thigh, breathing in the warm buttery smell of his neck, afraid to move, afraid to sleep and miss his sleeping in my arms, as if he were a comet, an eclipse, a papal visit. Not just a man pausing on me, a bead in his rosary.
But usually we rolled around on the floor, I listened to him talk, I begged for it, then I’d give up and go take a shower and he’d watch me start to finish, hand me the towel. Once he said You got a body too. Baby Rie-rie, lil M, look at those big nipples she got. Ugh. I could work with those big gumdrops and that bush. Real woman got a bushy bush like that, don’t know what all this mess with some naked pussy lips is for.
Don’t talk about it if you don’t want it, I said. You’re not for real. I’m for real. I’m ready.
You sure not ready for work, he said, looking at his watch, changing the subject. Looking at his fingernails. He got them buffed every Saturday, they were always shiny. His shoes too. He’d drop off one pair and pick up another. He had some military standards. He believed in the power of systems and order to manifest success. He believed in every clichéd thing about the power of belief. He believed in believing in belief. I tell my baby she not allowed to use the word can’t, he said. And he said I don’t get sick cause I just refuse to. You tell yourself Oh I’m sick—he said this in a whiny puny voice, screwing up his face—you sure enough will be.
That swaggering, who knew it wasn’t his belief in himself that made it all go. That it did work if you worked it. I was never that certain about anything. That’s your problem, he said, you doubt yourself. You got to want it. I do want it, I said. Nah you don’t. Not if you don’t know you want it. What’s that big dark thing behind you? he said, and I said I don’t know, what, showing him I was impatient with whatever lesson was coming. That’s the shadow of a doubt and you best deal with it right here right now.
What I wanted was some jack. Make that jack, baby, make that jack. Another of his mantras. I got to get out there and make that jack, he said in the back station at The Restaurant, taking a long draw of his protein-ginseng-vitamin smoothie before heading out into the dining room with purpose. I wanted to know how to do what he did. Conjury. Turning dinner into livelihood, wealth, stability. My girl lived in a one-bedroom apartment with her dad, she slept on a futon in the living room. Cal’s daughter lived in a giant suburban house with both her parents and took ballet. It’s not that I even wanted a giant suburban house for her. I just wanted her to have something from me, anything better than absence.
Cal’s daughter Elena, he got her in with this modeling agency. That was him—that belief in the most pressing uniqueness of his own life. No question. My daughter was beautiful too, at three she had flossy red hair down to her waist and strangers would use adult beauty words to describe her, like gorgeous. But I was always thinking something like Nothing is really all that special.
Cal was always thinking the opposite. And his daughter was what modeling agencies look for these days, a mixed-race child with fluffy hair and skin that one caramel Polynesian shade. She was tall, five feet when she was eight, with long delicate bones. Like Cal’s having her in ballet and modeling from the time she was small made her that way or something. Like he willed it. He said Man, Maxine will not have that talk with her and I keep getting on to her, telling her it should be a young lady’s mother has that talk. She’s dangerous, she looks too old, boys gonna be after her in a minute and she so young inside still. I told Max she don’t talk to her by her next birthday I’m gonna do it my own self, he said.
Max was Mexican, from Laredo. Cal said After my first marriage I knew the next one would be outside my race, but he never explained that or how he knew. His first wife Tamara was a black woman; they had a baby that was stillborn and took the marriage with it. Angeline, tattooed on his heart, scroll, script.
I was always moving the furniture around in that apartment. Couldn’t get situated. There was a beige velvet loveseat from 1974, which my parents bought the year they married and kept for thirty more. With that kind of example you’d think I wouldn’t have turned out so transient, you’d think I’d have been more like Cal, rooted, a straight line from point of origin up. There wasn’t anything wrong with the couch when I got it and it seemed like I should have had that kind of unblemished momentum too, considering who I came from. I put it in the dining room until I made enough jack to get a tiny bistro table at a restaurant supply store. By then I felt like I had been living in restaurants forever and would never escape so I don’t know why I wanted to feel restaurant at home too. I had thick ceramic café mugs and those standard restaurant highballs and pint glasses. I had those bar towels, white with the single red stripe. The aesthetics of high volume are usually durable and plain I suppose. Plain itself is durable and that appealed to me, so I didn’t deploy the theater that Calvin unfurled on his tables. I didn’t even give them my card at the end of the meal. I never said Ask for me next time. Cal was pushy about that, made them feel like they’d be dumb if they didn’t.
First the loveseat was in the dining room, that’s where Cal told me about Angeline and I told him about how I’d married my daughter’s dad when I was seventeen because my own dad hit me for the first and only time. Whacked the side of my head and said we needed to plan a wedding before I started showing. I went along but when she was three I left. Her dad’s a good guy and I love her like nothing. Neither of those changed the fact that I’d felt crazy since she was born, like I wasn’t meant for it. I just woke up one day and said I can’t do this. This isn’t real. I’m in the wrong life. It was that abrupt, overnight, like a snake molting out of a skin. Leaving it behind, slithering away cold-blooded.
When I got the table for the dining room I moved the loveseat into the living room, canted to face the corner. But after Ryan Doak broke my bed frame trying to fuck Iraq out of himself I moved the mattress into the living room as if the place were a loft and put the loveseat in my bedroom. The bed that broke I got from my parents too, and it was an antique mahogany four-poster, even older than the loveseat. I’d been staring at the geometric inlay on that headboard since I could remember.
It was when the mattress was there in the living room, its last stop, that I had to talk to Max on the phone. Cal called me and said Listen I need you to talk to Max. He said it in such a way that I knew she was right there and it was over. I talked to her on my back on the mattress and I’m afraid I sounded like a junkie. Laconic. In a call center you’re not supposed to lean back in your chair if you’re trying to sell something, you’re supposed to sit up straight and pretend the person can see you. It affects how you talk. I should have sat up. I think I said what I was supposed to say to her but my rebellion was lying down so she’d hear some other thing in my voice, hear some tip tap of the truth.
I was supposed to say and did say Nothing is going on with me and your husband even though he had a $600 cell phone bill last month, and it was all calls to me. The thing I shake my head over now is how for probably $589 worth of that $600 I couldn’t understand what he was saying, I was just listening. He would talk, he would fall into a chant, and something about his mellow voice and his way of speaking and the connection combined to make him unintelligible. I just said Uh huh and Oh yeah? or whatever was called for by the tone. But I didn’t think it would make sense if I said to Max I’m sorry the phone bill was so high but trust me I don’t even know what he said to me. And I couldn’t say Yes—your instincts—what you cannot think on has most definitely occurred, I have been heavily petted by Calvin D. Colson every day for three months, and your husband was in his underwear, but he wouldn’t let me touch his cock. I didn’t figure that last would give any comfort. And I knew Cal would kill me if I said anything real.
That was the contradiction, that’s what I’m trying to get at. He took it for granted that you would do some things that just weren’t straight, and he took it for granted that that was justified. I guess that’s corruption. Riding those actions like a boss. One afternoon before the afternoons ended he brought me a twenty-bag. He knew I’d gone back to coke even if I wasn’t giving it up to everybody anymore. He couldn’t believe I hadn’t gotten pregnant or caught something during all that. Young lady, you got some kind of angel looking out for you, he said. But the main reason I was keeping it to myself was so I could have a chance with him, because I knew he would never go there with me if he caught the scent of anybody else. I let him think I was learning how to be a woman, as he put it, instead of just trying to get what I wanted from him.
He said the coke was from the Baron. The Baron was this Turkish guy who pretended to be Italian and dropped by The Restaurant once or twice a year. He’d show up like we’d been waiting for him and no one else through all that intervening time, each of us frozen in uniform, in place, until his presence disseminated some magic dust to make us come alive again so we could fulfill our destinies of serving him. The magic dust was some green and some white and all handshook. I’m sure Cal got the don’s share of both and he told me he kept the bags to pass on to his people, just like he kept cigarettes and disposable cameras in his locker for when they ran out of smokes or got engaged. Once I even saw him fix a lady’s dress with a safety pin he had in his pocket.
I never knew anybody who kept coke though, which is the main fissure in my Cal wall. It’s a terrible habit but I tend to believe what people tell me, so when he told me the story of how years ago he quit using crack and coke I believed it. Then he gives me that twenty-bag and tells me he got it from the Baron and he’s been keeping it under the floor mat in his BMW. I looked at him and thought You don’t make your daughter breakfast and you’re fucking Cassandra Melton and you didn’t quit partying and you’re not going to make it. I looked at him and looked away and I cut it into lines on top of a drawing my daughter made, the two of us portrayed as lean and grinning neighbors in one of those stick-figure sketches that seemed more a demand for normalcy than a depiction of the actual. This is the kind of obstinate I was. I thought it was bad form to lay it out on her little picture like that, like it seemed too obvious a send-up of my failings, like I ought to keep her effort sacred if only out of superstition. But that’s what I wanted to face down—mine was an inversion of Cal’s just got to be you and bring it. I wouldn’t let myself look away from what I was doing and to punish myself for seeing it I wouldn’t let myself fix it. Sometimes I would get home from work and I would get stuck in the car, just sitting there in the carport looking out over the steering wheel. An hour could pass as I watched the security light come on and go off as the bars let out, flushing cars up Greenville Avenue.
I did one line and Cal told me not to touch the rest till I saw what happened, said it was real shit and all I’d ever had was baby laxative because he knew I got it from the Mexicans at work. I don’t know why I listened to him, that wasn’t my practice usually, but within about thirty seconds my brain had melted. Why did you just do that to me, I said, sounding to myself like the gigantic demented rabbit in Donnie Darko. Why did you do that why did you do that why did you do that, I said. My face was falling apart. My face is falling off, I said to him, my face is falling falling you fucking cunt. You did that to me on purpose.
I didn’t do shit, he said, you the one did the line just now when you know you got to be at work! How you gonna work now? How you gonna drive?
What is all your talk about coming through for yourself, showing up, flying right if you’re gonna sabotage me like this?
You sabotaged yourself! Coulda waited till after work or done anything in the world with that. I asked you if you wanted it and you coulda said no! Don’t blame this on me. You do gotta show up and fly right in your own life or you gonna lose everything.
How can somebody who rubs his fingers all over every woman he passes and wonders why his wife won’t put out talk to me about fly right?
This contorted exchange continued until Cal said Look I got to go, I got to get ready myself. You better get it together. You shouldn’t be doin that stuff you don’t know how to snap out.
Get the fuck out with your goddamned I can be sober if I want cause I’m such a badass voodoo! I said.
He left. I went into the kitchen and turned on a burner. I had slipped into such synesthesia that the clicking of the pilot made me have an orgasm. Propped on the back of the stove was a piece of a broken mirror, a mirror I broke when I moved into that apartment. In the piece of mirror, which was shaped like Tennessee, my irises were gone. All-pupil looks vacant and deadly. And my movements had contrails as I looked away from the mirror and opened a drawer to find a steak knife. I heated the blade over the flame and then raised my cocktail dress—this was back when I still worked mostly in the bar at The Restaurant—and pulled down my panty hose to get to my abdomen. I burned Cal’s initials into the skin to the right of my navel, each about one inch square and made of straight lines, like letters carved into a tree. I felt and did not feel the pain. Skin melts like wax. I cut a big hole in the waist of the pantyhose so I could pull them back up and they wouldn’t stick to the wound.
I don’t know how I drove to work, all I remember is I had to sit down with Danny in the office and explain to him why I couldn’t close my mouth or stop crying. I said something about my daughter. What I said was true, in the sense that it’s true that that kind of coke will napalm your emotional synapses and whatever you care about most will suddenly be getting a sky’s worth of air.
Why isn’t she with you? Cal had asked me on one of the first afternoons when we were getting to know each other. I don’t know what to give her, I said. Bullshit, he said, you give her love, you give her time, you give her attention. Is that what you give Elena, I asked. Much as I can, he said. I want to do it right, I said, not much as I can right, just right.
You got to do it some kinda way to start, he said.
Danny let me go home the day I did the Baron’s line—it wasn’t the first time he granted me some clemency when he knew what was up, I don’t know why. He’d fire anybody for nothing. I guess he could keep people around on the same capriciousness but he said to me once that I was golden there. I was worried because we fucked up Doc Melton’s sea bass and his mom’s pork loin all in one night. Neither was my fault but that never mattered. Honey, you’re golden here, Danny said to me, don’t worry about it. We could have served that old bitch cat meat and she probably would have loved it.
Cal wouldn’t look at me as I passed him on my way out the day I went home blitzed. He pulled this junk where we’d be cuddling and playing and necking and laughing at three p.m. upstairs on the corner of Morningside and Greenville and at six p.m. under the domed ceiling of The Restaurant suddenly he was tired, he was busy, he was clipped and distant. I think it was even worse that day because he didn’t want to acknowledge any connection to the wreck of me. He did not shift his gaze to look at me as I left; he was looking up at the specials board dutifully copying down the features and counts. Made that look like the most important thing a body could be doing. I saw his fingers roll the pen slightly and that was what said I see you but I want you to know I’m not looking at you. I imagined slapping his waiter book from his hand on my way out. It would fly down on the floor, he’d suck his teeth and bend over like a man who’d been working in restaurants for three decades, because he had. Mindful of the back, a slow careful squat of the legs. He’d give me a disgusted look over his shoulder, a shake of his head, eternal dismissal. I would never be loved again. At least until tomorrow afternoon. I knew his routine by then, but I didn’t whack the book because I thought I might fall down.
On the nights that Cal and I were both at The Restaurant it was agreed between us that we couldn’t leave without tracking down the other to say good night. I did it once, just finished my shit and left, and he called me the next day. Said What you think you doin walking out without saying good night to me? I couldn’t find you, I said. Lame, he said, that’s a weak-ass excuse. You got any more weak-ass excuses for me today? No sir, I said. Good, he said, you can walk out whenever you want I’m not there, and I don’t care who else you don’t say good night to but don’t be like that with me. Okay, I said. All right missy, I got to run back into this bank, will I see you tonight? Yes, I said, love you. Love you back, he said. I always knew I was good with him if he said I love you back, not I love you too. If he ever said I love you too it meant I’m unhappy with you, I don’t feel it, it meant I’m just talking to you, meant My mouth is making some meaningless sounds. I love you too meant nothing so much it almost meant I don’t love you.
I didn’t even try to speak to him as I walked out that day. If I’d said Bye Cal, love you see you later he probably wouldn’t have even said I love you too. He would have said Mm-hmm. Or just Mm.
Fuck him. Fuck him back and fuck him too and fuck him, I thought. I called my friend Clark, a beautiful specimen of a man who used to be a licensed chemical dependency counselor before he left that behind to deal the most divine hydro. I wanted to come down as fast as possible and I wanted someone to take care of me. I wanted to hide my self somewhere where I couldn’t get to it. I wanted someone to take it from me, let me think it was safe. How dumb. He got me stoned but it didn’t put my face back together at all. I still felt razed. I almost latched on to a Shirley Horn album but missed. I sat in the bottom of the shower forever, water running over me and taking nothing with it. He left for a previously arranged dinner with a friend and I felt abandoned. My teeth sang.
I did not sleep. I stared at the ceiling in Clark’s place, to which was affixed a tapestry with a giant embroidered om character. Clark came home from the dinner around three a.m. and I begged him to get me some narcotics so I could have eyelids again. He said he didn’t know where to get any. I was lying naked on the bed, covered partly by a towel and partly by the clothes I was clutching but hadn’t been able to put on. He asked me what happened here, where CDC was illegible for blisters I knew would deflate and turn to pus the next day, from having branded myself with lesser, simpler marks in other places. I said Calvin D. Colson, Calvin D. Colson, ochre, terra-cotta, golden Colson.
He said Shh, he said I can’t get you any narcotics but I would like to make love to you. I don’t know if that would have any palliative effect but I would really like to. I said All right, but I’m having trouble controlling my face. He said that was fine, he laughed, he kissed me tenderly, his long hair fell over me. Clark was slender, he had a white man’s no-ass, not those two baby heads in a sack like Cal. He had a large thick straight penis and any time we did it he was in it all the way, studying it like a lepidopterist, admiring every intricate pattern up close with gravity and joy. His intensity pulled me down and down and down until I came and slept.
Cal would bring Max and Elena into the restaurant so they could all have dinner there once in a while, on special occasions like when he finished his cleansing. The cleansing was an annual thing, Christmas through April or something like that, and he cut out meat, cheese, alcohol, sugar, and weed. I teased him after he first delivered that list—And I know you’re still not getting any so what you got left for yourself my friend?—and he said Yes ma’am you have a point there but it’s about purification. And let me tell you how good that long bone cowboy tastes come April.
When he brought in the family I steered clear. Everybody else would go by the table to coo over his baby and be kind to the wife but I knew I couldn’t. Avoiding her had never been hard until one Valentine’s Day long after Cal’s summer with me. By then they’d made him a manager and I was seeing the hateful man, unhappily. I came into work later than everyone that day because Danny had asked me to pick up his suits and some razor blades on my way in, so I missed the introduction of Max in the shift meeting. Valentine’s Day meant twice as many covers, the dining room converted into a sea of deuces, people jammed into three square feet of space to wait forever for their steak and stare into each other’s eyes drumming up some juice for whatever came next. So they brought in some extra hands to run food and polish glasses, but I didn’t know Cal had conscripted Max until sometime around what would be the sixth or seventh second of a bull ride, time to hold on tight to that shift or give up, fall off. I had a station far from provisions so every time someone dropped a napkin or a spoon or needed more sauce, more ice, more butter, I was hauling myself to go get, go get, go get, but I was hanging on, that’s why Cal put me back there, because it would have been a disaster with some of the baby servers or fuckups in that station.
I had my hands full of some dishes I had cleared, and a bottle of wine and a check presenter tucked under one arm, when this lady at one of my tables asked if I could please get her some creamy horseradish. Certainly, I said, right away, attempting to hold the stack of dishes away from her but unable to do anything more than gesture at that without putting the gristly remains of a ribeye in the face of the large man at my other elbow. As I twisted, I saw a woman in a sort-of uniform behind me—the same white shirt and apron as me, without the vest and tie—so I assumed she was one of the add-ons they’d brought in for the night and before I took a good look at her face I asked her if she could take the plates please. Then I was looking into her pretty brown eyes and I knew from Cal’s wallet exactly who she was, and she was looking at me thinking she knew who I must be just from process of elimination—there weren’t that many girls who worked at The Restaurant—and from the kind of questions a wife asks a man about the other, in those moments when she’s thinking she can deal with it: What does she look like? Is she white? Trying to find out if she’s hot or young or has big tits. And the husband will answer with thin lips. He’s fucked so he’ll say things like Why you got to know all this, what’s it matter, instead of answering, and she’ll say things like I just want to know why I’m not enough for you.
Then he’ll sigh and say She has short hair and she could never give me what you do. There. Is that all?
In the dark dining room I guess she couldn’t see my face cook up to a warm red medium-rare, something a white girl can’t hide. Not that I regretted any second I’d spent with Cal. What I regretted was having just asked her to do me a favor when I hadn’t done her any, but there was no time to think about that if I was going to stay on the bull, no time to do anything but try to get that woman her creamy horseradish while she still had a bite or two of filet mignon to enjoy with it.
Men will toy with you, I don’t care how much they talk about a woman being a tease. Married men will. Single men rarely hesitate past a certain point. But married men will toy, treat you like you’re plastic, like whatever grip you have on whatever kind of heart you have is your business, like maybe you don’t even have anything that could be offended. I think that’s the same scared-boy coin though—single man on the one side taking what he can, married man on the other afraid to mess up what he took.
So I’d let Cal do what he would, I’d left him alone. What I wanted was his want and that’s not something you can force. But after I dropped off that sauce I went to put back the bottle of wine and he was at the POS there, sweating. Past four hundred covers and he’d be moving so fast and holding so much in his brain and taking so much shit from guests that his ochre forehead would start to run. A gentleman, he patted, with a folded linen that matched his suit. Think you’re hot! I said to him, Guess who I just met in the dining room? Fucking give a sister a tip, you know?
I wasn’t slowing down to hear his piece, just gliding behind him to put that pinot in its bin and get back out to my corner, but I’d picked the wrong place in his night to be tough, I was probably the latest of nineteen people to yell at him and I wasn’t in line to spend a couple bills on dinner so I didn’t merit any deference. I was just supposed to do my job and not cause trouble. Hey! he said, like he’d say to a dog that was in his bushes or a hood trying to steal his kid’s bike, that Hey! full of strange to cut me, You better get back here and pump that, I don’t care how busy you are!
That was how he knew to get to me, ignore what I said and go for my work, imply that I was lazy, that I didn’t have standards as good as his. I went back. I took the bottle out of the bin and put the white plastic pump on the rubber stopper and pumped the air out of it and said to him Cal, I swear to God you did not pump your wine on a night like this when you were a server and if you tell me you did I’m going back out there to find her and I’m going to tell her I sucked every drop out of you every day and I’m going to tell her I’m still doing it and you’re a fucking liar and I’ll explain to her that that’s because you fuck me and you lie to her.
He was quiet. Then What in hell is up with you? he said, aware that the situation suddenly required more than a power play. Nic walked up needing something from Cal then but Cal didn’t turn to him, and looked at me long as I walked away. Come talk to me later he said, putting some suspicion in there for a buffer but some respect too, to tempt me.
Once I did get one lick. I surprised him and I got there before he could block me. I got one lick on the underside of his big vitiligoed head and he pushed me away instantly, strongly, said The fuck you doing! just the way he’d said Hey! trying to squash me so I’d never do that again. Then seeing the look on my face, both the want and the apology, he’d said Mami, don’t do that. I’ll spill. As if to say If I promise I want you more than anything will you accept nothing.
You get tired of being a fixture in a restaurant every night, even if like me you somehow love the job. Something about the word waitress too that always bothered me, made my lower belly quiver in that bad way, like when you walk through a nursing home. I quit The Restaurant the day I waited on Carter Wells and he asked me what I would do if I could do anything right this second, if money were no object. I said as I poured the taste, a swirl of the $800 Lafite Rothschild he’d ordered even though he was alone, Sir money is an object and could never be else but if money were no obstacle I’d live in a place where my little girl could go to a good school. Or maybe I wouldn’t even make her go to school, maybe we’d just see the world together from your side of the table.
With this I raised the glass with its swirl as if to toast the imaginary gift of an imaginary life and I put my whole small face inside the bowl and inhaled and then I drank that wine and said You enjoy your evening and I walked out of The Restaurant, holding the glass in my hand.
No. I would never do that.
But believe me that move is not original in the business. I knew a guy who did that in Morton’s one night, they have a spiel with a cart and all these props, and there’s a part where you have to hold up a potato and talk about what they can do with it. He held up the potato and—I can’t do this, he said, and put the potato down and left. He told me After you do it it feels like the stupidest thing because most likely you just end up in some other restaurant holding some other potato but way behind on your rent.
I did think about it though. Especially late at night when I was so hungry. Around ten thirty or eleven when I’d been at work for hours and hadn’t eaten since lunch, and the place was still brutally busy so I knew I wouldn’t eat until one or two in the morning. Then I would be running some steaming potatoes au gratin to some table and I’d think If I ever walk out this is how: Step up to the table with that bowl and instead of serving them stand there spooning the hot buttery crumbly cheesy potatoes into my mouth. We all became scavengers late at night. The law may require a lunch break but how are you going to take a lunch break at the height of service? At midnight I’d see a half-eaten dish of potatoes on the edge of a deuce in the bar and I’d catch their server’s eye. She knew what I wanted because she wanted it too. She’d start bussing the table in that ungodly sexy way she had, leaning over with her luscious tits in their nose, asking if they wanted dessert and laughing when they said As long as it’s you, like she didn’t hear that every night. I’d meet her in the back and we’d hide behind the glass polisher, scarfing. If Danny came into the back the glass polisher would yell Hola jefe and one of us would turn nonchalantly to the sink to wash our hands while the other began carefully creating an upside-down bouquet of stemware to carry back into the bar. We’d leave the last bites of the potatoes for the glass polisher.
People had been punished and fired for eating in the restaurant, surrounded by food. So most nights I didn’t risk it. I just finished my work and went home and went to bed, too tired to eat but not too hungry to sleep.
When I walk across the stage as valedictorian six weeks after the mission trip I still don’t know. I didn’t track my cycle very closely and the end of high school is a busy time. My parents invite everyone from church to a backyard barbecue to celebrate my acceptance to Yale. I have visited New Haven and met some of my professors. I sat in Sterling Memorial Library and read from Shusaku Endo’s Silence and thought about your dad but I was about to do something no one I knew had done, and there was no way for him to come with me.
I also thought that what we had done was wrong.
The elders accept the youth minister’s resignation. In his letter to the congregation he says that he deeply regrets having failed to safeguard the children in his care, referring to me I suppose.
The elders meet with me privately, in the library. Nine of them and a seventeen-year-old girl. Well, you’re the last person we’d have expected this to happen to, one says. Now, I don’t know what the circumstances were, says another, and you don’t have to tell us. But we all know how young men are. Ultimately it’s you girls who have to decide, who have to make choices to stay in the straight and narrow when it comes to purity.
I am so ashamed, so mortified, that I leave myself there at the table. I make myself four inches tall and I wing over to a bookshelf in a far corner. I alight on the highest shelf and look down at the girl in the red tank top. Her hair obscures her face and she stares at the table, trembling. I don’t know her, and I don’t know these men in dark suits, and there is nothing I can do to help her. She is too small, and there are nine of them. I tiptoe behind a book and lie down. I turn away from the room and fall asleep.
I wake up in my room at home. I feel the thick woozy tiredness that is new to me because I have never been pregnant before.
I didn’t take personally anything The Restaurant ever had in store for me. I just did the next thing as well as I could and then the next. The fifth or sixth sous-chef I worked with was griping at Florida John one night over some mess that had gone down earlier in the evening, when I walked up to restock some plates. Why can’t you be like this one? said the sous-chef, putting his hand on my shoulder. Don’t matter what happens out there, she’s ice. What’s your secret? he asked. Enlighten this motherfucker.
Accept that shit is all fucked up and roll with it, I said. Don’t bitch. Just adapt. Nothing is going to go right and everything is going to be hard.
Jesus, Confucius, said the sous-chef.
You crawl in bed with me in the middle of the night. You put your little arm on my chest and say you are afraid I’m going to die while I’m sleeping. I say You’re not afraid I’m going to die while I’m awake?
When you’re awake I can keep an eye on you, you say.
No, that doesn’t make sense, I say. You mean that when you’re awake you can keep an eye on me.
No, when I’m sleeping and you’re awake I dream about what you’re doing, you explain. But when you’re sleeping I never know.
