she wanted to go was always on the tip of her tongue.
That’s funny, Keith said, my best friend is the manager there.
Sloane wore an olive turtleneck, velvety cigarette pants, and a pair of boots. They were seated at the best table, a banquette in an alcove. It sat six, but that night it was reserved for the two of them. Sloane was used to being a special guest. She had on small earrings. The restaurant was buzzing with the energy of being the spot of the moment. Servers were walking quickly, seamlessly weaving around one another like half of them were ghosts. Plates were artful—white and gray rectangles of fish cresting atop pyramids of vegetables, glazed in something slick and sweet and tanned. The smell of acid and heat. Radiators warm with sparing no expense.
The manager, Keith’s best friend, came by to let them know the chef would be sending out a special tasting menu. Before dinner, Keith and Sloane had smoked weed. Sloane always did the perfect amount of every drug. Sometimes the perfect amount meant overdoing it, and so that was what she’d do. Alcohol, for example. Sometimes, she knew, it was appropriate to be a little too drunk.
Five courses were sent out, each more interesting than the last. But it was the final one before dessert that impressed Sloane the most. A whole black sea bass with Chinese long beans in a viscous black bean sauce. She kept saying to Keith, This is fucking amazing. And Keith would smile and alternately gaze at her and at the servers going by. He seemed amused by the rapid flow of the world. Sloane knew that inside the mind of boys like these was the casual appreciation of another nice dinner out with another pretty girl. One day he would have a billiards table in a downstairs room, cigar smoke, and sons. This sea bass would become halibut or seared tuna. Sloane would become Christina or Caitlin. But Sloane, in that moment, in most moments, was not like the water that waved around her. This sea bass, she said, touching Keith’s wrist. This fucking fish! There was something about food—there always had been—that connected Sloane to a different world, one where she didn’t have to be pretty and poised. A world where juices could run down her chin.
The chef came out at the end, when Sloane and Keith were nearly through with the bass. The bones lay picked clean on the plate. They were giggling and full. Sloane told the chef his food was wonderful, but she wasn’t enormously gregarious. Mostly, she was stoned. She didn’t tell him, for example, how the fish had warmed her. Her eyes sparkled at him, but she didn’t connect to him with her eyes the way she knew she could if she wanted to.
He didn’t make a huge impression on her, in his white toque. But he was smiling and friendly and she’d enjoyed his food. The whole experience had been ideal and being with Keith felt very much like exactly what she should be doing with her life.
Back in the kitchen, the chef sent a dessert out. Chocolate mousse and gingersnap cookies, with a sake berry sauce. Keith and Sloane drank coffee and digestifs. Sloane was conscious of eating food that most girls her age did not eat, would not eat, in fact, until they were in their late twenties or early thirties and getting engaged.
On their way out the door, Sloane turned to her date and said, If I ever worked in a restaurant again, it would be a place like this.
Keith had just learned at dinner about Sloane’s restaurant past. The word past, of course, was silly; using that word was like lending credence to the idea that, for a young woman like Sloane, it could almost be seen as a curiosity, the fact she’d worked in restaurants. She’d come from an upper-class family in a suburb of New York City, been schooled at Horace Mann, where future governors and attorney generals go. But even though she didn’t need money for things like clothes and lip gloss, she’d nonetheless taken a job as a waitress when she was fifteen. She filled out the one-page application and for previous work experience she wrote about the hours she’d spent filing papers at her father’s office, and the evenings of babysitting for neighbors’ children.
She’d been drawn to restaurants because she liked the atmosphere. She liked serving people. She liked wearing black pants and white