Songs for the End of the World - Saleema Nawaz Page 0,23

for her extra expenses. Living and studying in New York City is more expensive than going home to Boston, even with her scholarships. She dislikes waitressing, but it’s better than having to endure a whole summer with her parents and her little brother, and spending the break in Lansdowne, Massachusetts, her tiny college town, is scarcely more appealing. For some reason, the city feels twice as real to her as any place else. In New York, Ed skips lunch to pay for breakfast at Balthazar and to be anywhere she’s liable to catch sight of someone she’s seen on television. By the time she interviews with Mr. Fabbrini, her bank account is down to fifty dollars.

Fabbrini waves away her resumé until she tucks it back into her bag. “I go with the gut,” he says. “Not paper.” Then his gaze moves over the neckline of her sundress and her bare shoulders, and Ed tries not to flinch.

“We already hired a full staff for the summer,” he continues. “I can’t put you on the payroll until September.” His hands are small with dark hair on the backs, and his fingers worry the fabric of his pants across the knees.

“I’m happy to just cover the occasional shift until then,” says Ed. She will be gone by the last week of August, anyway, though there’s no need to mention that now. “Whatever you have.”

“You seem like a nice young lady.” His eyes are leering, but he has the beneficent smile of an old grandfather. “Okay, we’ll call you when we need you. Cash at the end of the night.” He asks for her phone number and copies it into a little notebook he keeps in his jacket. “Remind me what your name is, dear?”

Ed thinks about the protagonist in Owen’s second novel. Her fearlessness and calm virtue. “Naomi.”

When Fabbrini shakes her hand, he cups it between his palms and pulls her in close to kiss her on both cheeks. His skin is as soft and dry as a Kleenex.

* * *

—

So a few nights a week, Ed puts on eyeliner and a tight black dress and kitten heels to go to the restaurant. She lets down the hair that she usually wears pulled back, styling it into face-framing waves. Maybe she should have looked for another kind of job. Maybe being a waitress in New York City is a cliché almost as tired as a restauranteur hoping to make it big with a new word-of-mouth eatery on the Lower East Side. But Fabbrini’s restaurant, cipolla, has stayed at the top of the weekly rankings in New York magazine since its opening in May. It turns out that Fabbrini is the uncle of a trendy designer who came up with the concept (country Italian remix), floor plan (cozy urban bistro), and a decor that taps into the naturalistic yearnings of thirty-something hipsters who’ve grown up in the urban jungle. There are antlers in the entryway, wooden barrels in the restrooms, and antiquated farm tools embellishing the walls above the wainscotting. The niece has somehow even managed to make everything match the expensive rug and the reproduction Art Deco chandeliers that are evidently beloved by Fabbrini. And she has pinpointed the right fonts for the logo and the discreet, rusticated sign: small serifs, lower case, oblique. Ed has a pet theory that the importance of fonts in a restaurant’s success has been wildly underestimated, a view she airs to the talented niece, who thrills and vindicates her by agreeing, but then quickly surpasses her interest in the topic by enthusing about the benefits of manual kerning.

Fabbrini got lucky in the hire of his chef, too, who is coming off of a run at Enoteca Bella. In fact, if one didn’t know Fabbrini personally, you’d be forgiven for thinking he was a canny entrepreneur with a prescient eye for the next big thing. The downside is that Fabbrini believes the restaurant’s success is due to his own ingenious management, rather than—as far as Ed can tell—in spite of it. Fabbrini’s main gift seems to be in catering to his rich and influential patrons—the wealthy with no taste who will follow a trend off a cliff. Though he struggles with the hip power set under forty-five and the arts and media types with cultural capital who have put his restaurant on the map, they at least think him a charming throwback, with his musical accent and waxed moustache.

Still, cipolla started making an absurd amount of money