Three Women, page 5
Even so, this night felt different. She felt drawn, as though by a magnet. It had been several years since she’d waitressed. She was back in school and looking at theaters downtown, thinking she might be good at producing shows. She knew how to talk to people, how to get the rich and boring interested in something new. Like her father’s friends, for example. She looked them in the eyes and told them they would be remiss not to get involved in this person’s art show, or that person’s golf wear. She used her hair and her smile and who she was in the world. She was not someone to overlook.
And now she was with Keith, the boss’s son. This was utterly what her father would have wanted. Her mother, too. Monogrammed sheets. Picnic baskets in the trunk of a Range Rover. Twins with Peter Pan collars. The word ecru. Saint John. Christmas in Aspen. Telluride.
If I ever worked in a restaurant again, it would be a place like this.
She may have said it loud enough for the manager to hear her.
The following week the manager called and offered Sloane a job, which she eagerly accepted. She hadn’t realized, until now, how much she’d missed the restaurant world, the thrum and noise and the relevance. It was nearly like politics.
Even though her position was at the front of the house, Sloane had to spend a day in the kitchen as part of her training. The idea was that all the employees should be well-rounded, so that a patron could ask a hostess how the sea bass was prepared and she would have intimate knowledge.
Normally the kitchen training involved the chef taking the new hire to each station—the cold station, the hot station, dessert prep, and so on. But on this occasion, the chef, Richard, was not interested in following the rubric.
He met her in the dining room. He was wiping his hands on a damp rag. He had a sharp, angular face and the sort of light eyes that could be warm or roguish.
Richard smiled and said, How about if we make matzoh balls?
Sloane laughed. Matzoh balls? She looked around at the French-Thai restaurant’s dining room. There was faint music in the background. She looked down at the rug, at its shapes and colors. It made her think of pyramids in sandy countries she’d never seen. Sometimes she felt that she was a nowhere girl, that whatever place she was in could be any other place. That nobody would miss her at home, at school. And yet she knew that she was often the life of a party. She knew that people would say, Where’s Sloane? if they had not see her by ten P.M., in a room she should have been in. She had a faint idea that one day other women would say, I wish Sloane were my mommy, after she threw a lavish soiree for a third grader’s birthday party. And yet, here she was, standing in this restaurant, feeling that she inhabited the body of someone she didn’t entirely understand. Partly this was born from a fear of not having an identity. Because she had never quite known who she was, she tried very hard to concentrate on, at the very least, not being boring. And sometimes she had done exciting, out-of-character things to ensure nobody would call her boring. But sometimes those things made her feel loveless, tainted, and cold.
And here was Richard. The chef of this restaurant, older than her but not in an older-man kind of way. He was neither rich nor insane. He didn’t have a jet or something corrupt about him. He was not any of the kind of men Sloane hung around. Especially during that time, when she was into bad boys, bassists, dark messy types who rode motor cycles. Richard, by contrast, was a clean-cut chef with his white toque, with his job that he went to, that he needed. At home, she’d heard, he had an infant daughter.
He led her into the kitchen. A long stainless-steel table shone and she could see her strong chin reflected. She had never been upset by a reflection of herself. She was somewhat aware of how lucky she was. In the sense that she had friends who didn’t like their reflection, who either stayed away from it or sought it out, obsessively. Sloane did neither. Catching sight of her reflection in a shopwindow, or in a steel tabletop, merely reinforced what she already knew. She had been told throughout her life how beautiful she was. As a child, it had begun. Aunts, strangers. People absently caressing her hair, as though she were a retriever on a lawn, part of the castle of good fortune.
Richard took out boxes of Streit matzoh. Another thing Sloane loved about restaurants was the quantity of items. Boxes and boxes of utilitarian items, anonymous and neat. Tomato sauce, in particular. She liked how you could line the perimeter of a room with the same can of sauce, repeated in perpetuity.
They crushed the matzohs to make meal. He had already brought out the garlic, the salt, the baking powder. He put these ingredients into a large bowl. In another he began to mix the eggs and the schmaltz. He had already minced the dill. She realized he had not expected her to say no to making matzoh balls, and she liked that. In general, Sloane respected decision-making. She liked it when decisions were made for her. She wore an apron he’d given her, something standard-issue and beautiful.
He poured the wet mixture into the dry mix bowl, instructing her to use the fork to blend the ingredients, but not to overmix them. Next, he showed her how to form the balls using a cold spoon. Their hands and arms brushed against one another. Sloane felt the heat of his attraction. But she also felt something new. She’d felt lust and explosion before. She’d been thrown over beds and felt she was in church and in hell at once. But this was a new feeling.
They placed the balls on a tray and slid them into the refrigerator to set. While they waited, they talked. They moved around his kitchen and told each other their stories. There was nobody else, in the sense that other employees walked in and out but none of them registered. Richard told her about his Jewish heritage. Offhandedly she realized that the matzoh balls might have been his way of saying, This is who I am, where I come from. He told her about his daughter, Lila. Like most young women her age, Sloane could not imagine having a child at that time. Whenever she had pregnancy scares she would look around whichever room she was in, a dorm, or an apartment she was sharing with a girlfriend or a boyfriend, and she would try to envision where the crib might go. She would glance past holiday bottles of Grey Goose and stacks of Vogue, and feel airless and dark. She was not even an aunt.
When the matzoh balls were ready they brought them out of the fridge and began to lower them into the boiling broth. It was a taupe, bready smell. Sloane liked it. It smelled of home. A home she’d never known, but home all the same.
She felt Richard look at her, peeking, through the twist of their arms by the boiling pot. She felt sure that he would not let her get burned, that if the pot were to suddenly tip over, he would swipe it like a ninja in another direction, or even assume the burn himself, let the broth wash through his thin black pants, scalding his legs the hurt color of raw pork.
When the balls were cooked they added them to the rest of the soup and the staff ate it for family meal. Sloane looked around the table at the servers and hosts and the manager, all of them less experienced, it seemed, in both the highs and the lows of life, than she was. Or at least she felt that way at the time. She felt like a small, red god. Unique in that she could not be sorted. Benevolent and cruel at once. Beautiful and tawdry. Rich and poor, religious and godless. She was a balance of contradictions, like all subversive girls with rich, cool daddies and crisp, scarved mothers. She was nowhere she was wanted and yet she was everywhere she was desired. For most of her two decades she’d been a ghost in light linen, drinking orange juice at elegant tables, being exquisite on Easter. But for the first time she felt that if she left this room, she would be plainly missed. This was where she should be, she felt it in her knees. She ate the soup, which warmed her wholly.
After that day in the kitchen with the matzoh balls, Sloane settled into her role at the restaurant. It became her, and she became the position. It took over her whole life. All jobs do, to an extent, but when one works in a restaurant, because of the nature of the work, because of the hours, because it consumes the evenings and weekends, it becomes one’s social life. It became the fulcrum on which the rest of her life pivoted. She spent the most time on her hair when she had the longest shift at the restaurant, so that it would be clean and straight for ten solid hours.
Around sunset one evening she felt that she was being watched. She looked up and saw Richard in the kitchen. She was wearing mod checked pants. They were very tight. She felt long and pretty and useful. Moving slowly, she crossed the floor to refill the jars along the restaurant’s railing with votive candles. She knew it would give Richard the best view of her rear. She bent over the railing in such a way. She didn’t look back to see if he was watching but her skin tingled with the heat from his eyes.
Sloane also had a morning gig running a coffee shop—Housing Works Bookstore Cafe. It was not so much that she needed the money but that she felt more capable when she was diffusing her energy. She enjoyed learning different business models. She liked having tentacles. College kids would come in between classes at NYU. They would eat granola and yogurt and Salvadoran corn cakes. They would be hungover and moody or bright. She would listen to them and watch them and scan the room. It felt better to manage their experiences than it had to sit beside them in classes and wonder at how they were absorbing all that information.
Someday, Sloane wanted to run her own place. There was a colleague at the bookstore with whom she talked of buying a space they might turn into a restaurant and club. It was her dream, at the time, to combine food with music at a cutting-edge venue. A one-stop location for a group’s entire evening. After eating steak frites and stuffed artichokes, a table of friends would stay to drink and dance and watch a band play.
She was looking at West Broadway below Canal, which back then was parking lots, smoke shops, thick shakes, Rollerblades. Now that part of the city is doorman buildings with rooftop gardens, boutique markets selling hydroponic butter lettuce, and boys in Ray-Bans taking selfies in front of Hook and Ladder Number 8. It was typical of Sloane to see the promise of something before everyone else did.
In the slender strips of time when she was not working, Sloane would go and see an ex named Judd, or a young woman named Erika. Judd had dark eyes, pale skin, and a motorcycle. Sloane liked how her hair felt dirty in the morning, after she’d been with him. He didn’t always call her back as quickly as she’d have liked. With Erika, it was a little more predictable. Even when there is tumult with women, there is a baseline of certainty. They call more, respond more quickly. Erika wasn’t Sloane’s first woman. There’d been a girl at Hampshire named Lia. They dated, as much as one can date in college. On a winter evening, Lia said she needed a penis. They called up a young man they had each seen, individually, in the past. As a trio, they did more laughing than anything else. It was a blur of messing around. She was turned on by the multiple trails of saliva on her thighs. With Erika, in New York, it was more serious; plus, Erika wasn’t at all into men. Sometimes, Sloane saw, there could be an imbalance in a relationship between two women, when one also likes to sleep with men and the other doesn’t. Sometimes the one who doesn’t can feel that the other woman is a betrayer. She might worry that the other woman wants more, not just the penis, not something a dildo can’t sate, but the idea of a man, the idea of someone who is larger, the idea of being ecstatically subjugated by masculine energy.
Sloane didn’t want or need a man in that way. But she did want more from life than what it seemed one person could give her. She wanted bigger experiences. She always wanted an evening to evolve into something more complex. She brought Erika over to Vong to work as a server. Sloane had always mixed her worlds. She didn’t fear contamination; if anything, the potential chaos was exciting. After work they would all get together and drink and go over the failures and successes and, being in thrall to the energy of the place, they would discuss how to make the experience better for the patrons the next evening. There was a sexual vim involved. Table-setting a world made Sloane feel alive.
When occasionally the biosphere of the restaurant felt small and stifling, when she felt Erika pulling closer, Sloane would disappear for a few nights to go to Judd’s. With Judd, she drank a lot, did drugs, fucked in the pitch black. Judd was like a loft apartment, stark and cool. Often the Sid and Nancy of it was appealing. She never knew if he was her boyfriend, or if she wanted him to be, but she liked the way she worried about whether or not he was going to call her. She liked getting ready to go and meet him. Mascara, straws in clear liquid. For several months it was a whirlwind; they broke up and got back together and lived together and left each other and came back. He was crazy and she acted crazy around him.
And eventually there came a third relationship, with Richard the chef, even though at first it didn’t feel like one. There was no grand fuck, no night of Scotch and weirdness that kicked it off. The chemistry between Richard and Sloane was hot but it was also clear. He was not a child. He had an eight-month-old daughter at home, by a woman with whom he was still close but no longer romantically involved. And though he was a father, Sloane did not really think of him that way. Mostly he seemed like something healthy. Sloane felt she needed to grow up. Or rather, she knew that she needed to grow up. Though she didn’t entirely know who she wanted to be, she had always known the benchmarks she needed to hit. It was a by-product of coming from her type of family.
She never actually told Judd it was over. They sort of fell away from each other, in tiny increments. The trick, she’d learned, was never to be honest, and also never to actually lie. She began to stay later at the restaurant, drinking at the bar while Richard brought out experimental dishes for Sloane and the lingering servers. Beggar’s purses filled with piquant pork and cinched with strips of scallion. Then the night came when she didn’t go to see Judd at all, and he called and he called, as much as and more than she’d ever wanted him to call. Then the next night came, when she went home with the chef.
The following morning, Sloane opened her eyes and his were already open and looking at her and it felt utterly distinctive and contained and so she said, somewhat jokingly, Do you think that we should be exclusive?
There were a number of children’s toys neatly placed on bookshelves. In the kitchen there was rice cereal in the pantry, Medela bottles with mushroom nipples drying on a rack.
Richard had his head propped up with the heel of his hand. A wide bar of sunshine lit up the dust on the floor.
I thought, he said, that we already were.
The beginning of their relationship was not dramatic, as almost all of Sloane’s previous connections had been. Right away it felt like something she had under control. She didn’t have to chase after the portion inside Richard that in other men, like Judd, had seemed under lock and key. It wasn’t love, that portion, but stasis. It was the core of another person, staying still long enough for her to match her own parts against his. He was confident and strong and powerful. He was never jealous or mean. He was talented and self-assured and gave orders to his staff in a manner both kind and resolute. On top of all that, he wanted her so much, he wanted her all the time. She wanted him back, of course, but his near-rabid insatiability for her made her feel like the most coveted woman in the world.
They also shared the same life goals. They both wanted to open a restaurant but, even better, he was kitchen and she was front of the house. It was too good to be true. Seven months later, in July, Sloane brought Richard to Newport, to her parents’ summerhouse on the water. Richard was impressed in the way that all newcomers were. The crowds in the town and on the beaches fell away when you drove down gravel driveways to brilliant white homes on private rocky shores. You could buy eggs and fiddlehead ferns from little farm stands, leaving money in an honor box. But it was also off-putting in the way that overloved spots could be. It was the height of the season and they couldn’t get in anywhere to eat. Chefs and waiters were overworked as tourists crowded into the best restaurants on the water.
When they finally got a table, they found that the tablecloth was stained, the linens not having been changed in between patrons. Over a bowl of linguine swimming in a thin clam sauce the color of beach water, Sloane looked at Richard and he looked back at her, and a decision was made in the middle of that gaze.
By September, they had a purchase and sale on a lovely spearmint house in the center of town, with a restaurant attached. It was reckless, perhaps, she agreed with some friends, but she insisted that it wasn’t stupid. She knew there was no better chef than Richard. She’d known as much since the black bass he prepared that first night. She wasn’t quite sure there was no better partner, but she was willing to find out.
This is how you deal with watching your husband with another woman. You need to have a buzz but you cannot be drunk. If you are too drunk, then you will get irrationally jealous. You will stop making sense of things. You will not have the part of your brain that says, No, he loves you, he is just doing this for fun.
Your husband must concentrate on you. Yes, something is happening for him, but that is a physical sensation and he needs to feel it, experience it, enjoy it, but in his brain he must be concentrating on where you are. Where you are in the room, and where you are in your brain.
As for the girl, she can do what she wants. You can’t control the girl. She has to be very attractive—but not as attractive as you, in either your eyes or your husband’s.
It cannot be a porn scene. This is something you’re choosing to experience together, as one lobe of your loving relationship. You have to check in with each other, you have to be aware.
Awareness. You may think you understand the word, but you have to absorb the word. Your husband must be aware of you as though he is in your brain. This is about turning you on, and not the other woman. So even if he is fucking this other woman, he needs to be fucking you, in his mind. Each pump is going through this woman, and into you.
