Eat My Heart Out Page 4

  The first sitting was nearly full and there was a lull at reception. The cloakroom was stuffed with mink. Umbrella tickets were scattered on the floor. I never would be able to figure it out. William emerged from the toilet looking jaundiced and told me to wipe the mirrored surface of the coffee-table and straighten the orchids. Instead, I read about Elizabeth Gilbert falling to her knees in the middle of the night while her soon to be ex-husband slept, unaware that his wife was praying to God for a divorce so she could embark on a mystical quest of self-exploration. I put the book down and exited the restaurant through the revolving doors.

  I was wearing the pussy bow and pencil skirt that I had bought with Freddie’s money. I stood in front of the paps and posed. I waited for their bulbs to start popping – would they pop? – but there was nothing.

  William came outside. ‘What the fuck do you think you’re doing?’ he shouted.

  ‘You said when I started here that it would be a good opportunity to network.’

  He hauled me back inside.

  He threw me in the cloakroom and shut the door.

  Now I was alone.

  I waited.

  There was a knock on the door. I opened it.

  An old man who looked like a toad was standing in reception. He was wearing a cravat. He handed me his cane and camel-hair coat.

  ‘Reservation for Douglas at nine,’ he said.

  ‘Certainly, sir.’

  The old man was looking at me with shameless hunger. I led him to table twenty-two in the far corner of the restaurant – set for one – and wished him a pleasant evening.

  ‘I hope it will be pleasant,’ he said.

  I saw a violently pink tongue dart over thin lips. He ordered the house apricot bellini.

  The pop star was crying on table twenty.

  I checked my phone. There was a text!

  Please call. Love Mum X.

  ‘Fuck.’ I threw the phone at the vase of orchids, but it landed on the leather banquette, and bounced.

  A man walked in and shouted: ‘Taxi!’

  All the lights in the restaurant went out.

  The taxi driver and I looked at each other in the darkness.

  One scented candle flickered.

  ‘Vic?’ I said.

  There was silence.

  Soon the guests started murmuring, and then screaming their complaints. William ordered waiters to get more candles, apologising, but then he got angry and threw at least three tables out.

  ‘It is my lot in life to search for black umbrellas in the dark,’ I told the taxi driver.

  ‘Taxi?’ he said again.

  ‘Oh my God!’ I said. ‘Vic had a poster of Taxi Driver on his wall. I left his room only this morning. This must be a sign.’ I hugged Eat, Pray, Love, then waved it at the taxi driver but he ignored me and banged out of the restaurant.

  Madeline appeared and told me that she didn’t know why the crying pop star had a reputation in the press for being a sweet girl-next-door because she was a fucking diva and didn’t even say thank you for the complimentary amuse-bouches that William had sent over.

  The lights came back on.

  Freddie and Jasper turned up at the restaurant at ten to ten, fucked. Samuel lagged behind. He was wearing a onesie with the words Please Snort Me emblazoned across it. The letters looked appliquéd on. He wasn’t wearing a coat and his thin, ginger arms were trembling. Freddie and Jasper were bundled up.

  ‘Go away,’ I told them. ‘I’m busy.’

  ‘No,’ said Jasper. His hair was slicked back Lost Generation style and he wore a white silk scarf around his throat, which added to the impression that he was Count Dracula, come to drink my blood. ‘We want a table for two.’

  ‘Three,’ said Samuel, glumly. ‘Freddie, I really don’t have any money.’

  ‘Nonsense,’ said Freddie. ‘We don’t need money.’

  ‘You do,’ I said.

  Jasper glided into the dining room. He pounced on table fourteen, which had yet to be reset. The tablecloth was a mess of rabbit juice and breadcrumbs.

  They sat down.

  I was returning to reception, when the toad gentleman on table twenty-two said: ‘Miss. Miss. If you please.’

  I went over and smiled my door bitch smile, explaining that only the waiters took orders, but he shook his head. He was looking very intently into my eyes. He held aloft a white wire which trailed somewhere under the table. I saw that he’d gone for the salmon: good choice. At least the salmon hadn’t been raped. I put the ear in and waited. Rising voices of some kind of choral music competed with the din in the restaurant.

  ‘Spem in Alium,’ said the man. ‘Thomas Tallis.’

  I pulled the ear out. ‘That’s lovely. Thanks. I hope you enjoyed the salmon.’

  He looked disappointed.

  I overheard Jasper ordering the most expensive bottle of wine on the menu. ‘And a cloudy lemonade for the child,’ he said, nodding to Samuel.

  Jasper and Freddie laughed.

  A woman was waiting at reception with a girl, aged about thirteen.

  ‘Marge Perez,’ she said. She was American. Her hair was red and spiralled in massive whorls around her head.

  The girl looked like a ballerina. Her hair was done up in a chignon. She yawned: ‘Mommy, but I’m not hungry.’

  ‘Quiet, honey,’ said Marge. ‘I’m sorry the sitter got sick, but you know Auntie Steph will be so pleased to see you.’

  I led them to table eight.

  Auntie Steph appeared. Auntie Steph was in fact Stephanie Haight.

  I was speechless.

  She was wearing a long duffel coat and, beneath that, grey tracksuit bottoms. I led her to table eight. I couldn’t walk away. I wanted to tell her all about my botched sex with Vic the war criminal. I wanted to ask her how I could put that in a social and political context. But instead I said: ‘Why are men such fucking bastards?’

  The ballerina looked at me with contempt. So did her mother. Stephanie didn’t seem abashed at all. After a moment she smiled. Her eyes remained sad. Her face seemed burdened with wisdom. She was undeniably beautiful.

  Stephanie and I continued to stare at each other.

  I felt an acute sense of recognition. Maybe this was the coup de foudre?

  Finally she said: ‘It’s not the men’s fault. It’s The Symbolic.’

  ‘Capital S,’ said Marge, with bitterness.

  The scent of Madeline’s perfume engulfed me from behind and I had to leave.

  ‘Kill the pig! Kill the pig!’

  Freddie and Jasper were banging their forks on the table. Russian linen serviettes were tucked into their collars. The restaurant’s signature dish sat at the centre. It was plagiarised from St John: a whole pig’s head, sawn in half and braised, the brain transformed into beige glue. The pig grinned.

  Samuel was trying to talk: ‘Yeah cos there are five ways of saying getting money from your parents in Williamsburg because it’s like an informal economy. Because it’s based on love not money.’

  ‘Do you mean privilege?’ said Freddie.

  ‘It’s a privilege to be loved,’ said Samuel, confused.

  ‘I’m not sure you know what your value system is,’ said Jasper, slurping up the head cheese. A gland spilled down his shirt. ‘I know what mine is. Do you know what yours is, Fred?’

  ‘Naturally,’ said Freddie. ‘It’s zero. Zero degree. Start from nothing. Nihilism.’

  ‘You know,’ said Jasper, his mouth full. ‘Baudrillard said dandyism is an aesthetic form of nihilism. That must be why you’re such an effortless dandy, Fred.’

  Freddie put down his knife and fork. ‘Jasp. Dandies are painful.’

  Samuel was ticking the terms off on his fingers. He wasn’t eating the pig. ‘Getting the cush, picking the berries, waxing Oedipal, getting the patrimony, changing the diaper.’ He paused. ‘I’m not sure about the last one because surely it’s like your parents are changing your diaper if you’re getting their money?’

>   The pop star was still crying when I was called upon to get her out of the restaurant via the kitchen slave exit. She wanted to avoid the cameras.

  ‘They are monsters,’ said her boyfriend’s mother.

  I was reminded of one of the pop star’s early videos, in which she had cried non-stop for the duration of the song. In a twist on the miracle of the saint crying milk, her neo-goth eye make-up had made her look as though she were crying black crude oil. She had been done up in a saint’s outfit, sitting on an oil rig. The North Sea had raged in the background.

  The kitchen slaves sodomised the pop star with their eyes when we went downstairs. The pile of skinned rabbits had diminished almost to nothing.

  The reception was quiet.

  Stephanie Haight was eating a lemon posset. The ballerina was eating a chocolate fondant. The Marge woman was saying: ‘I’m not getting mad. I’m not getting mad. I just don’t know how you can defend that woman.’

  Madeline was eating rabbit scraps off guests’ plates in the cloakroom.

  I moved closer to Stephanie.

  ‘Oh, but I do,’ Marge went on. ‘I do know how you can defend her. You defend Gabriella because you created Gabriella. How many times, Stephanie, are you going to root out a fine young thing and turn her into a whatever you want and then cry yourself to sleep at night when she takes what you taught her and turns her back on you?’

  ‘She hasn’t turned her back.’ Stephanie halted. ‘She always picks up the phone when I call her. Sometimes. Her work is very demanding.’

  ‘Yes, I imagine that ritualistic self-harming is quite demanding.’

  ‘And Gabriella was not fine,’ said Stephanie. ‘She had a natural body, sure. She had a supple, a Rabelaisian body. A body of excess. Oh, the monstrous feminine excess!’ She laughed. ‘But she was just a life model. She would have been a life model all her life if I hadn’t pulled her out of that phallocentric head space and turned her into an artist in her own right.’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Marge. ‘I remember. You were writing that piece on life models – right?’

  ‘Right.’ Stephanie ate another spoonful of posset. ‘For the LRB. Or was it Spare Rib?’

  Marge shrugged.

  ‘Gabriella stood out right away,’ said Stephanie. ‘She looked so sorrowful, the standing female nude. And when she opened her mouth and I heard that she was common like me, I couldn’t resist. I couldn’t resist any single one of my prodigies, Marge. Like you, Marge.’

  Marge smiled. ‘Yes, I remember when I first walked into your class on feminist rereadings of the Hegelian unhappy consciousness at Harvard. You looked so beautiful in that African robe. I was so impressed by you – we all were. When was that?’

  ‘’78. Must have been. I was in my third year of grad school. And the Kappa Alpha Theta initiations – such fun!’ Stephanie finished her posset.

  ‘Gabriella’s from a later world,’ said Marge. ‘She’s from a later, more disenchanted world. She’s Third Wave.’ She bent her fingers in parentheses. ‘If that is a thing at all.’

  ‘Maybe she doesn’t wanna be part of any wave, Marge,’ said Steph, expressively. ‘Have you ever considered that? Maybe she’s not into waves. Listen. Gabriella’s just doing what we did. She’s just using what she’s got. Her own experience.’

  ‘Bullshit.’ Marge put her fork down. ‘She’s using her cunt.’

  The ballerina looked at Marge, who said: ‘Don’t worry, honey. It’s not a pejorative.’ Marge went on: ‘Gabriella wants a new cunt. And new eyes – better to see out of. Better to see herself out of. She’s just like a … She’s a paradigm of selfish fucking neo-liberal individualism, Stephanie.’

  ‘We all wanted to be individuals, Marge, remember? We all wanted to be ourselves. That’s why we got involved. We didn’t want to be what our mothers—’

  ‘Yes, but we sought solidarity!’

  ‘But Gabriella is a visual artist,’ said Stephanie. ‘She’s not a sociologist like you—’

  ‘Do artists have the right to disavow their foremothers? To pretend that Second Wave feminism never happened? That they owe us nothing?’

  Stephanie sat back and laughed. ‘Oh, I get it. So you want her to defer to us. The great wall of us. You want her to pay homage to our grand narrative—’

  ‘Grand narrative?!’ spat Marge. ‘You’re the one constructing the big, macho, monolithic grand narrative, lady. Going around on your book tour. With your fancy agent—’

  ‘Not all of us wanted to stay in the academy, Marge.’

  ‘I entered the academy because of you, Stephanie. I became an academic because you inspired me. You told me that that was my path.’

  ‘Well,’ said Stephanie. ‘It’s not my path. The academy is not necessarily the best way to communicate—’

  ‘Communicate what exactly?!’ Marge grabbed her glass of wine and glugged it. ‘That romantic love is structurally akin to the subliminal power dynamics of sadomasochistic relationships? That domination and submission inform the way we treat each other? Ha! Shulie Firestone, Jess Benjamin were talking about that thirty, forty years ago.’ Marge closed her eyes and became still.

  ‘Mommy?’ said the ballerina.

  Marge opened her eyes. ‘You’re a populist, Stephanie.’

  There was silence.

  ‘Bite me,’ said Stephanie.

  An alarm started across the street.

  Stephanie grabbed her handbag.

  The alarm got louder until guests were covering their ears and lowering their heads as though intending to hide under the tables from the noise.

  William emerged from the toilets, his eyes googly like a cartoon. He demanded that I check what the fuck and what the fuck was I doing here anyway loitering near people trying to eat—

  I went outside.

  The townhouse across the street was on fire. Its roof burned against the black night, smoking out the stars. Great gusts of red were rising, getting bigger and bigger. I saw arms reaching out of three top floor windows. The paps had started taking pictures. There were sirens. Fire engines screeched around the corner of Frith Street and firemen leapt out and operated their neon machinery as the smoke curled higher still. Despite the fact that I knew he was nowhere near at all, I wanted to run into the building and save Vic’s life.

  William was telling the guests to leave their minks behind.

  Marge was gripping the hand of her child ballerina, who looked excited. Her eyes were gleaming in a satanic way. Stephanie had disappeared. Samuel, Jasper, and Freddie had disappeared. There was the sound of glass shattering; glass rained down, shattering more on the pavement. From a door on the right of the burning building, people were sprinting into the frozen air, holding hands and pushing each other out of the way. They were men, well-heeled and mostly middleaged, some younger, mostly bankers and lawyers, slick, cleanshaven, too terrified to look guilty. There were women too, all young, pretty, or at least women who had cemented a mask that could pass for prettiness over their plain or ageing faces. Women in short red skirts and patent-leather thigh-high boots, women with topknots out of which sprouted synthetic hair, women who were accustomed to being tired. The men and their prostitutes shared neon blankets tossed over their shoulders by firemen.

  Soon the power of the hoses had beaten the fire into submission and the area was cordoned off. The guests filed back inside to pay their bills.

  The toad gentleman remained seated at table twenty-two while I matched guest to mink. There was a lot of shouting about lost items; William was called, but the fire seemed to have endowed him with an ancient kind of Zen and even his verbal abuse was tranquil.

  The toad gentleman caught my eye as I said thank you so much for coming, we do apologise for the disruption – a thousand times or more. He was holding up his iPad for me to see. I squinted at it. He beckoned me closer.

  On the screen, a mauve heart was efflorescing with digital emotion: it was spurting something. His tongue darted out again; it was the same colour as the he
art.

  ‘Your fucking friends have left without paying again,’ said Madeline, bulldozing into reception. ‘It’s coming out of your pay cheque.’ She looked at the receipt. ‘£790.’

  I tried to call Freddie, but he didn’t answer.

  Reluctantly, I called Jasper.

  ‘Come and play,’ he giggled. ‘We’re playing.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Upstairs. Up.’

  I went back through the restaurant towards the slanting stairs that spiralled up the interior of the building.

  The toad man shot out a toad hand as I passed. He held my wrist. He was wearing red and gold cufflinks. ‘Please,’ he said in a gentle voice.

  I stopped.

  His pond eyes looked up into mine.

  ‘The restaurant’s closed now, sir. If you wouldn’t—’

  ‘Sit with me for just one moment.’

  I did.

  We were alone, side by side, on the leather banquette. He plucked the single white orchid out of the vase on the table and gave it to me.

  ‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘But that’s restaurant property. They get put in the fridge overnight. There are CCTV cameras everywhere.’

  His comb-over fell into his face. His scalp was slick. There were brown speckles on his forehead and veiny networks on his cheeks.

  ‘My wife died last year,’ he said. ‘Breast cancer.’

  I frowned.

  ‘Yes, it was a terrible, irreplaceable loss. We’d been married for thirty years.’ He looked down. ‘I’ve been waiting for a woman like you. I’ve been waiting to impart jouissance to a woman like you. Do you know what jouissance is?’

  I shook my head.

  ‘It is the extreme of pleasure,’ he said. ‘Where pleasure meets non-pleasure and life, existence, the cosmos becomes a black hole. It is the threshold of pleasure and pain, of sanity and insanity.’ He paused. ‘Of Eros and Thanatos.’

  I stood up and gave a sunny, American smile. ‘I do hope you enjoyed the salmon.’

  ‘Where are you from?’ he asked me.

  ‘France,’ I lied. ‘Paris.’

  That tongue again. It was actually the colour of beetroot. He extended it to maximum length, as though trying to catch a fly. He waggled it around. Then he put it back in his mouth. ‘Please come to the ASH Hotel bar after your shift.’ He slid a business card towards me. ‘I will be waiting for you from midnight onwards. I will wait all night.’