She laid out a few crayfish tails from her own stores, a bottle of white truffle oil, turned to stir the rice, poured in a little stock when Lenny finally managed to extract some from his crowded refrigerator, stirred the risotto with the wooden spoon. Judging the fish ready to turn, she flipped it with a pair of tongs, put the whole pan in the oven and casually kicked the oven door closed with the side of a food-encrusted clog.
"Damn!" said Lenny, seemingly appalled. "You making the man truffle risotto?"
Nikki just turned wordlessly back to her cutting board, reached down once again into Lenny's box to retrieve some arugula, turned, stirred the risotto again, added a little more stock and stirred again — then lowered the heat, looking satisfied, lost, seemingly in thought. Bobby saw she was chewing her lower lip.
"How do you like your fish?" she asked Bobby.
"Uh . . . I don't know . . . Whatever . . .' said Bobby. Noticing that she seemed to shake her head slightly at this, he corrected himself. "Okay . . . uh . . . medium rare." This seemed to please her.
"Good. You didn't look like a well-done." As she turned back to the stove to once again give the risotto a stir, she said "Good" again, softly this time.
In went the crayfish tails, the mushrooms and the truffle peelings. She reached down into the oven, a side towel protecting her hand, and removed the fish. Bobby watched as in a small saucepan she heated a little sauce from a cooling crock a few stations down, whisked in a little knob of whole butter, lowered the flame. Pulling the risotto off the stove, she folded in some arugula, then carefully piled a neat mound in the center of a plate, spun back to the stove and gingerly transferred the fish from pan to plate, resting it at an angle atop the risotto. When the sauce seemed reduced to her liking, she drizzled some around the plate with a large spoon, then stepped back to examine her work, head tilted, seemingly unsatisfied with something. She reached for a bottle of truffle oil over Lenny's station, reconsidered, and then, looking both ways, quickly dodged back into Lenny's lowboy and removed a single, fresh white truffle from inside a moist towel. She was shaving a few paper thin slices over the plate with a small grater when Eric looked up from his cocktail and his stack of dinner dupes.
"White truffle!? White fucking truffles you're giving the guy?" he spluttered, speaking as if Bobby weren't sitting right there. "Fresh fucking white fucking truffles? Why don't you just yank down his fucking pants? Give him a nice sloppy fucking blow job?"
"I'm thinking about it," said Nikki, squaring off, giving him a hard, confrontational look.
Bobby turned crimson. Ordinarily, in such circumstances — not that there had been any circumstances like this in recent memory — his first instinct would have been to stand up, walk over to this Eric guy and squeeze his carotid for him, maybe lift him up off the ground by his throat, give him a few smacks, a few pointed words. But this wasn't about him at all. Nobody was watching him. All the cooks were paying attention to a contest of wills between Nikki and the sous-chef, anxious to see how things were going to turn out. There was something else going on here, too, Bobby saw. All kinds of history — beyond a simple struggle for control. The other cooks looked worried, protective, defensive; Lenny and Billy actually moved closer to the lone woman behind the line, defending her — lonely, but also, somehow . . . hurt.
Eric threw down the stack of dupes with a look of disgust and a "Fuck it," and stalked back to the locker area.
"This okay?" said Nikki, bringing Bobby his meal.
"It looks . . . wonderful," said Bobby. "I hope I didn't get you in trouble." He was trying to get the blow job comment, and Nikki's response, out of his mind.
"Fuck him."
Bobby took a bite of fish with his fork. "It's amazing," he said.
Nikki hopped up onto the stainless-steel worktable and watched him as he chewed, a look of almost clinical detachment on her face. After he took another bite, she leaned forward, reached over and tore off a little piece with her fingers, popped it in her mouth and tasted, pleased with herself. Leaning forward the way she was, Bobby got a good look straight down the valley between her breasts, every tiny bead of sweat coming suddenly, vividly, into focus, Bobby wanting suddenly, and in the most terrible way, to lick them off. Instead, he took a bite of fish, a little risotto. It truly was amazing.
"Really, really good. Thanks. So much," he said, trying desperately not to stare at her tits anymore, focussing intently on her eyes.
"Bon apetit," she said, hopping down off the table and removing her apron. She crumpled the food-smeared cotton/poly object into a tight ball and hurled it casually across the kitchen, where it dropped neatly - all air - into a laundry bin. "Three points," she muttered.
The other cooks were melting away one by one. Bobby and Nikki were almost alone in the large kitchen, when, looking like she was getting ready to leave, she turned back to him and asked, "What are you doing later?"
Flustered, Bobby found himself saying that he was working — which was patently obvious.
"Until three," he finally managed to say.
"You got a girlfriend or something?"
"Uh. No," said Bobby, no phrase book available for this conversation. Totally at sea.
"So. You want to meet me later for a drink?" she asked. Just like that.
Bobby hadn't had a "date" since before prison. "After work?" he asked, feeling terribly tongue-tied. "I uh . . . okay. Sure. That would be nice."
There. He'd said it.
"Sooo . . . I'll go home. Shower all this fish jiz off, change — and I'll see you back here at three . . . Meet you out front." With that she turned her back and was gone.
She had a drink at the mezz bar on the way out. The bartender there never denied her anything. She'd fucked him in the dry goods area at the last Christmas party - an experience she was unlikely to repeat. His cock, she remembered dimly, leaned noticeably to the left. And he'd smelled of patchouli. The glass in her hand suddenly empty, she had another one, as she felt, strangely enough, nervous about her imminent meeting with the mostly silent and (they said in the kitchen) dangerous Bobby Gold.
"You know what that guy does?" Lenny had said in the locker room, his voice lowered to an insistent whisper. "He's like a bone man! He busts people up for Eddie Fish! He's a fucking gangster, Nick! I heard that he maybe even kills people!" Lenny had been waiting for her in there when she arrived to peel off her soggy, reeking whites.
"Bullshit," said Eric, unseen on the other side of a row of graffiti-covered lockers.
"He's a fucking faggot. What's with the all-black clothes? Who does he think he is? He's all talk. Another punchy-ass doorman been sprinkling steroids on his fucking Froot Loops. Probably got balls the size a cashews."
Nikki, in her underwear, peeked around the corner. Eric was cutting a few lines of coke on the lid of a plastic fish tub, a shaker glass of Long Island Iced Tea sitting on the floor next to him.
"Think so?" she said. "I'll let you know."
"I'm tellin' you, man. He's into some serious shit," said Lenny. "I know . . . I heard from reliable sources. He's been to prison — for like a long time. For murder or some shit."
"Bullshit," said Eric, unwilling to believe anything so interesting about the quiet security man who his number-one line cook was clearly planning on fucking. "All those muscle guys are faggots," he sneered. "They all take it in the twins."
Seeing that Eric was too high and drunk to talk to — and not caring what he said anyway - Nikki struggled into her jeans, pullover and leather jacket, slung her knife roll over her shoulder and prepared to leave. Lenny looked stricken.
"It'll be fine," she told the chubby little line cook, pinching his cheek. "I'm just having a drink with him."
She left him in the locker room looking dejected, shaking his head.
They all wanted to get in her pants. That was the problem.
Back at the mezz bar — another drink. This one the last. She was worried. All the tall, thin women around her, with their carefully applied
makeup, their club clothes. Nikki caught sight of herself in the mirror above the bar and didn't like what she saw, an outcast, a line cook, a guy with a cunt. She watched herself drain yet another drink, looking like nothing more than the kitchen slut — stringy brown hair, a pullover shirt from the fish company, baggy jeans and sneakers. The scent of smoked salmon still lingered on her fingers.
"What the fuck am I doing?" she asked herself, more than once, as she walked somewhat unsteadily over to her 11th Avenue apartment. She hauled herself up four flights of narrow stairs, the hallway smelling of cabbage and boiled corned beef, unlocked her door and, after peeling off her clothes, poured herself another drink and headed for the shower.
Bobby Gold at three-thirty in the morning. Standing outside NiteKlub. Feeling bad.
Nikki woke up fully dressed, sunlight blinding her.
"I can't believe it!!" she wailed, her eyes filling.
Her shoes were still on. A black Danskin top, tiny black leather skirt. "I can't believe it! I can't fucking believe it!! I am such an . . . asshole!"
The bed was barely disturbed. She'd come home last night, best as she could reconstruct it, showered, washed her hair, done her fucking nails (toenails too, she noticed). She'd brushed. She'd combed. She'd dressed. Jesus fucking Christ — she'd even waxed! Eau de toilette . . . lipstick . . . mascara — even rolled a joint for her three o'clock meeting with the moody security chief. Then she'd rested her head on her pillow for, what? . . . One fucking second? And promptly fallen asleep.
She'd jilted him. The tall, morose Bobby Gold would have been disappointed. She knew that. She could tell he could be hurt. Something about the way he wore his hair long, the way his long forelocks hung down over his face, concealing his feelings.
"Shit!!" she rasped, kicking her best knock-me-down-and-fuck-me shoes onto the floor petulantly, wondering how long he'd waited. Standing there in the dark and the cold outside NiteKlub.
Story of my life, she thought. More questions to which she'd never know the answer. Another road not traveled. Another missed chance. Now she'd never look inside, past those dead shark eyes, past that look — of resignation, acceptance — she'd never know what the other thing was in there, that thing she'd seen for a second or two outside the bathroom that day, the whatever it was that she'd glimpsed somewhere at the sea bottom.
If she'd gotten him in the sack, she'd have known. Another vain, body-worshiping jerk, in love with his own reflection? She didn't think so. He wasn't a cook. There wouldn't have been the bluster, the cynicism. The false bravado, the endless talk about dick dick dick. No smell of garlic and seafood, no corn starch caked under his balls - none of that towel-snapping, jock-like, locker room mindset that Nikki now lived and breathed, it felt sometimes, with every pore and atom.
For the first time in six months, she thought, I put on a skirt. Do my nails. Wax my fucking pussy - and then I pass out.
She wriggled out of her clothes and lay face down on the bed for a while. She had to be at work in three hours. In three hours, she'd have to put on those scratchy poly-blend kitchen whites again, the damp, food-spattered clogs, she'd pick up her knife roll and walk down the long flight of steps to the kitchen and the noise and the boys who loved her but would never understand her . . . the endless, relentless flow of incoming orders, the soul destroying . . . stupidity of it all.
What would Bobby say when he saw her again? What would she say?
She had to get out of this someday. She needed a plan. She thought, for the first time, about what Lenny had been talking about a few days ago in the walk-in. His latest, knuckleheaded get-rich-quick scheme. For a few seconds, Nikki pictured herself on a Caribbean beach, in a bathing suit. A tall umbrella drink in her hand. No burn marks on her wrists. Where would she live in such a place? And with whom? She couldn't picture a house. Or a person.
When she found she was wearing earrings, she hurled them against the wall and started crying again.
Then she did something she'd never done even once in her entire career.
She picked up the phone and called in sick.
BOBBY GETS BLUE
Bobby Gold, in a blue funk, sat slouched back deep in the stained couch, one leg slung over a torn armrest, drinking vodka. Timmy Moon, behind the stick, washed glasses and hummed along to Junior Walker on the jukebox, ignoring the sole customer at the bar — a fastidiously dressed old man in an ancient suit, currently snoring into a puddle of beer. There were two gum-ball machines in the corner, leased, Bobby knew, from Metro Vending — Eddie's company. A joker-poker machine blipped and clicked and beeped against the far wall under the chain-link-fenced piece of glass that had once been a picture window. No one had been able to see through the grime-encrusted square for decades. The poker machine, occupied at this moment by a pencil-necked building super named George, was also Eddie's (Magic Carpet Entertainment Inc.) as was the cigarette machine near Bobby, and the condom machine in the bathroom. Bobby had once joked with Eddie about the condom machine, pointing out that "no one at Timmy's has had an erection for years." The beer in the taps was from a distrubutor associated with Tommy Victory (dba Zenith Distributors), and the vodka Bobby was drinking — what was it — his sixth, seventh? — was from Xanadu Beverage Inc. — also Eddie's - in partnership with Tommy, of course.
Timmy, now lighting another Parliament from the end of its predecessor, did the occasional work for Tommy V — as he had for Tommy's father before him. Part of a long and glorious tradition of murder-for-hire going back three generations of Moons. Timmy's son, James, Bobby had recently heard, had been arrested for menacing and possession of a handgun. Bobby remembered seeing James, only a few years earlier, hanging out with his friends on the corner, skateboards and baggy pants and new, white sneakers, wool caps pulled down low over their eyes, in conscious emulation of Latino prison gangs Bobby knew only too well.
The music changed to U2, a development as predictable as the over-aerated Guinness in Timmy's taps, or the wet mass of toilet paper clogging Timmy's toilets, or the inescapable outcome of an evening spent drinking at Timmy's: a hangover, a nose clogged with undissolved mannitol and unexplained cuts and bruises. The place smelled of vomit and Lysol, something one got used to after a while, and the sweat of the old men who drank up their social security checks there in the afternoons. It was nighttime now, late night, the high-end crowd. Soon, the place would be crowded with bartenders and waiters and cooks, come over after last-call had been announced at more legitimate establishments.
Bobby was punishing himself. He was feeling bad — angry that he'd allowed his hopes to rise, something he'd been very careful not to do since being upstate. This was the price, he thought glumly, of allowing yourself to believe in other people. This is what happens.
All day and into the evening, he'd tried, really tried, not to look in the kitchen — or anywhere in the direction of the kitchen. He'd convinced himself he wasn't hovering by the door at four o'clock when Nikki was scheduled to come in —and he'd pretended to himself that he neither cared nor wondered when she hadn't shown up for her shift. There'd been a short stab of pain every time the door opened and it wasn't her. And when it was clear that she wasn't coming it only made things worse, because now, not only was he wondering why she'd led him on and then not shown up as promised, but where she could be right now — and what she might be doing.
He felt sick. And the vodka wasn't making things better. Bobby lay his head back on the couch and stared up at the painted-over tin ceiling, Sam Cooke on the box now, angry, angry about how all this had snuck up on him unasked for.
Two hairy bastards in leather jackets and work boots came into the bar holding a car radio, slapped it on the bar in front of Timmy and demanded to know how much he'd pay for it.
"Not interested, gentlemen," said Timmy, not inquiring if the two would care for a drink.
"How 'bout you, buddy? You want a radio? It's a Blaupunkt. Get fifty bucks for it. Sell it to you for twenny, my man."
"Fuck
off," said Bobby, not bothering to even look.
"What you say to me?" said the larger of the two - a bearded asshole with a much broken nose and dried blood caked under one eye.
"He tole you to fuck off," said the other one.
"Get the fuck outta my bar," said Timmy, holding a cut-down 10-gauge now, what was left of the barrel resting on the bar. A few inches away the sleeping man continued to snore, undisturbed, such was the relaxed, even mellifluous tone of Timmy's request.
"What's the matter with you?" said Timmy after the two had left. "Why are you provokin' a pair a cunts like that?"
Bobby held up his glass, motioning for more vodka, but Timmy shook his head and came around the bar. "You ain't drinkin' here tonight, Bobby Gold," he said. "You're stinkin'. . . and you're lookin' to get yourself jammed up for no good reason that I can see. So be a good guy and fuck off home. Don't you got a cat or somethin' to look after? You ain't doin' nobody any good being here tonight."
He began wiping down the cable-spool table in front of Bobby with a wet bar rag. It was the nicest Bobby had ever seen him. Even drunk, he could see that.
See? He did have friends, he thought to himself, as he picked his way to the door. Timmy Moon. Greatest guy on earth. A man who cared. Looking after him like that, making sure no harm came to him. Concerned. Fuck everybody else.
Bobby careened out the door and walked right into Nikki.
"Who a there, cowboy," she said. "I've been looking for you."
The Apex Coffee Shop was off the lobby of a run-down tourist hotel on 48th Street. Bobby drank burnt coffee and tried to focus on the plate of eggs in front of him.
"Eat it," said Nikki, across from him. "You'll feel better. Jesus, you were drunk. I've never seen you that way."
Bobby said nothing, just poked at his eggs with his fork. He hadn't said anything at all since she'd found him, just let her lead him like a trained camel a few blocks away to the overlit coffee shop, watched as she'd ordered for him, sat there until the food arrived, looking at her.