Perfect Tunes - Emily Gould Page 0,7
makeup, but it was weird to see her without it. She looked pink and unfinished. “Well, he’ll remember you next time, for sure!”
“As the girl who barfed. Great.”
“So you’re into him! That’s good. We’re going to a party tonight that he’ll probably be at.”
“Except I have to work.”
“Come by after.”
“It’ll be late, though.”
“Well, still come, you’ll be sober and you’ll be able to swoop in for the coup de grace with all your wits about you.”
Laura rolled her eyes. “That’s me, swooping in. Always very slick.”
* * *
Laura waded through the crowded darkness at Bar Lafitte, leading people to their tables, smiling and leaving them there, then strolling slowly back to the podium by the door. Whenever she was bored, Laura thought about the album she had been slowly assembling in her mind over the course of the past couple of years. She had a handful of tunes that needed words, and this was why she’d moved to New York—to live the kind of life that she could write songs about, instead of a life in an apartment above a music store that she rented at a discount rate from her mother. Aside from “I Want My Tapes Back,” she hadn’t mined great material from her utility boyfriends. Inspiration had to come from somewhere else—New York, she hoped. She wanted to be like the artists who’d enshrined her new neighborhood as a place for the dissolute and beautiful and doomed.
But the East Village wasn’t turning out to be like the mythic version of itself that existed in her mind. Rents were higher, people died far less often, and there were stores that specialized only in Japanese toys and hookah bars that catered to NYU undergraduates. There were also the internet cafés. There was something about an internet café that could never be glamorous, only grubby and desperate. On Avenue A, across from the park, there was a real café, where everyone languidly sipped their coffees, eyed each other, watched the street outside, chain-smoked at the sidewalk tables, and wrote in little notebooks or pretended to. In the internet café next door everyone just stared at the screens. They had bought their little bit of time, and now they had to use it wisely.
There were still fascinating and glamorous people around, though. The beautiful waitress at the BYOB cheap Italian restaurant on Ninth Street, the one with the giant eyes and acne-scarred cheeks. Yulia, whom Bar Lafitte had hired at the same time as they’d hired Laura, who only ever spoke to say, “Please, your table.” The guitarist Dylan. She wanted to write a song about Dylan. She wanted to do all kind of clichéd things, and she was just self-aware enough to know they were clichés but still young enough to think that things would be different for her.
She didn’t really like smoking, but there wasn’t anything else to do, so she took a cigarette break in the alley behind the bar, where a waitress was also smoking. It was almost sunset and there was a golden light on the stones of the building across the street, and they stood smoking in the fading light, silently finding some kind of comradeship in just standing next to each other. The waitress broke the silence by introducing herself, strategically waiting till both their cigarettes were almost to the filter. “Hey, I’m Alexis, I’m section five tonight.”
Laura turned to look at her more closely. The waitresses primarily distinguished themselves from the hostesses by their little black aprons, but there was also something else different about them. The hostesses were softer, newer—they all clearly had ended up there by accident—while the waitresses were professionals. Their eye makeup was dark and deliberate, calibrated to be visible in low light. Their cleavage pushed out of their tight black tank tops, not as if they were shoving their tits in your face but as if they couldn’t be bothered to conceal them. Alexis had a short brown ponytail and a dark even tan and perfectly globular breasts. She was intimidating, but there was also something about her that Laura trusted implicitly.
“Do you want to get promoted to server?” she asked as if it were an offhand question, but Laura could tell that she was being evaluated.
“Should I want to?”
Alexis laughed, and her globular boobs jiggled slightly, perfectly. “I’ll ask you again after you’ve had your first shift drink with Stefan.”
Stefan was the manager who’d hired Laura. “Oh, because he’s a perv?” She could hear herself trying to