ELEVEN
As I waited to hear if I would receive another invitation, I looked for meaning in my everyday routines. I swam so long each morning at the YMCA that my skin pruned, and my ears clogged so badly that I had to buy special drops to dry them out.
I finalized the sale of my mother’s house. Twenty-five years ago, when my mom and dad bought the place—a small brick row house on a street of small row houses—the neighborhood was so far out from Manhattan that a working-class family could afford to own a home there (with the help of a mortgage, and then maybe a second mortgage). The house, though unassuming, was supposed to be an investment for the future. Thanks to my dad taking off along with his salary and to my mother’s piles of medical bills, it hadn’t worked out that way, even though property values had gone way up. The couple who’d bought the house were yuppies—my age, more than comfortable. They’d picked up on my current status and had told me (kindly but condescendingly) that I didn’t need to move out right away. After all, they needed to take measurements and figure out all the necessary renovations to make the house “their perfect nest” and “inhabitable.” They came over at night sometimes after work and walked through the rooms, frowning at the cracks in the ceiling, pointing to the blue, flowered wallpaper my mother had loved and saying, “Well obviously this has to go.”
I picked up more and more bartending shifts. The place was a dive that catered mostly to old Irishmen. Hardly any women patronized it—occasionally a passerby would duck her head in, see the clientele, and turn right around. But the regular patrons were harmless and at times even endearing, and they usually got just drunk enough to leave me generous tips and not so drunk that they forgot to pay up entirely. All in all, it was a kind of benevolent morass of testosterone through which I could weave and serve and make a living.
Raf took me up on my offer for free drinks, and he came by the bar on nights after work when he needed to unwind. The people that he worked with at the restaurant were into hard partying—staying up until four a.m. doing coke, dragging themselves in the next morning to open for brunch. But Raf had tried the hard partying. He’d told me harrowing stories of cooking hungover, sending out bland, watered-down dishes because the regular spices he used threatened to turn his stomach. Now he preferred to have his wits about him. So while the others went elsewhere, he’d come nurse one or two whiskey sodas on a barstool across from my station and let the old regulars regale him with tales of their youth, and we’d talk whenever orders were slow. “Get any more mysterious kitchen visits?” I’d ask him each night, and he would tell me stories about how yes, actually, random women kept showing up. It wasn’t because of me, though, but because one of the restaurant’s busboys was a magnet for romantic drama.
“Another one came today,” he said one night as I poured a stream of soda into his glass. With any other master restauranteur, I’d be on edge about serving them, worried they’d order some fancy drink and then scoff at my poor excuse for bartending skills, but Raf never ordered anything with more than two ingredients, and he didn’t care if I got the proportions wrong. “She started crying right next to the oven. I tried to give her love advice but that made things worse. So I gave her free plantains and that made things better. It’s rough out there for a single person.”
“Thank God we’re off the market,” I teased, and he laughed. I leaned over the bar toward him and said, in a lower voice, “Don’t worry, I think we’re close to being able to quit the charade.”
“It’s okay,” he said. “It’s not like I have time to date now, anyway.”
“You are very kind,” I said, then poured myself a whiskey soda to drink along with him. “It’s interesting, part of me wants this assignment to go on forever, because it’s so much more exciting than anything else I’ve done recently. But also, it’s fucking stressful. I get through the day all right, but I’m grinding my teeth at night so hard that my jaw hurts in the morning.”
“Hey, me too!” he said. “That happened to me with the restaurant opening.”
“Really? Here’s to repressing your anxiety so that it has no choice but to screw you up when you’re asleep!” I said, and we clinked our glasses across the bar. “Please tell me it eventually went away on its own?”
“No,” he said. “I had to start wearing a mouthguard to bed.”
I burst into laughter. “Like in middle school?”
“Yup,” he said. “Maybe that’s another reason it’s better if I don’t date right now.”
I kept laughing and he smiled, pleased, until I collected myself. The party of men sitting to Raf’s right took the last swigs of their beers and threw down twenty-dollar bills, slinging their arms around one another as they stumbled to the door. I waved good-bye and began clearing off their section. It was just after midnight, and only a few customers remained, talking rowdily all the way down at the other end of the bar. No way to tell if they’d stay for another two minutes or another two hours.
Raf cleared his throat. “No, actually,” he said. “It’s been okay to take a break from . . . you know.”
I raised an eyebrow. “The masses of women throwing themselves at you?”
He blushed. “It’s not masses, but yeah. I think it was starting to screw with my head.”
“Why?”
“Just . . .” He spoke haltingly, stirring the straw around in his drink. “It’s weird knowing that a lot of
