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Back in the room I’m clearing the hors d’oeuvres and getting everybody cleaned up and ready for the salad course when the boss stands and starts telling jokes. The boss is the one DeMarcus spoke to at the beginning about the wine, the one who ordered the vegetables—he’ll be paying the tab and apparently the reason for this fête is some deal he signed with Lushie. I’d lent them my pen earlier when they set the contract down in front of him and he started patting his pockets. So two doctors are banging this nurse, he says. She gets pregnant but she doesn’t tell them till she’s seven months gone, so they send her to Florida to have the baby. They’re gonna figure out how to raise it and do right, and of course she’ll come back to work at a much higher salary than before because they both have wives and kids. So she delivers and one doc calls the other and says he has bad news. What’s that, says the other doc. Well, she had twins, says the first doc, and mine died!
Grinning, he lets the laughter die down and then he goes, Okay, how bout this one. So one doctor says to the other, Are you fucking the nurse? The other doctor says No, why? And the first doctor says, Good! You fire her!
Now he rides the laughter, shouting How do you know your wife is dead? Sex is the same but the dishes start to pile up!
They’re all finishing their desserts so we’re clearing the last of the plates but they’re still drinking hard. Lushie is on his seventh or eighth whiskey and he’s guzzling the wine too. The goal seems to be not so much pleasure as obliteration. Somebody puts his arm around my waist, a liberty taken with me fairly often because I’m small and just the right height. You sign up for a certain kind of life and shell out the dough for it, you expect the waitresses to permit you. I turn toward the guy to see what he wants. He’s so drunk he’s beaming but he’s been here before, he keeps his words standing up as he asks, Sunshine, can we smoke our cigars in here?
Do I smell like fries? I ask, trying to act like I am keeping it together, trying to pretend I didn’t just say something incomprehensible. The Restaurant is Zagat-rated and our party spent over four grand on one dinner that involved compotes, reductions, infusions, compound butters, a coulis, a pan jus, but somehow the smell of French fries is what I always carry home on me. He puts his nose in my neck and inhales tenderly. We’re still standing right there in the living room in front of his dad. Crème brûlée, he says. Come on, I’ll show you to the ladies’.
This is the thing about the service industry, you can get trained to be slick and hospitable in any situation and it serves you well the rest of your life. Once you figure out that everything is performance and you bow to that, learn to modulate, you can dissociate from the mothership of yourself like an astronaut floating in space. That’s how you can show a fucked-in-your-truck girl down the hall to the ladies’ and tell her her neck smells like crème brûlée in front of a zombie dad while some freebased flesh you’re related to waits for you to carry it inside. That’s how the crunked girl can get in the shower like she’s told and stand over the drain and pee and not think about what might happen next.
I eat a piece of vegetarian sausage while I stand in the kitchen drinking my perfect coffee and reading over the hand-sells. I look lean and I wear a digital sport watch on my left wrist so sometimes my guests will ask me if I run. I don’t say No I’m just snorting a lot of coke right now. I say that I do run and they say I bet you don’t eat much meat do you and I say No actually I’m vegetarian and they laugh at this because I have just shown them a tray of ten pounds of raw beef carved into the different cuts of steak we offer. I hype it, the tiny mystique of my being vegetarian and working there. I say Meat is my profession, which often leads someone at the table to say Well you’re certainly a professional. I don’t say I know, because I’ve made a hundred people before you say that same thing in this same situation, I’ve made you remember your charming professional vegetarian server when it’s time for you to put a number on the tip line, and I don’t say, I’m not vegetarian because of the animals; I’m vegetarian because I hate the way meat feels in my mouth.