Hi Friends,

On a hiatus from my novel, I accidentally started a new longform thing I’m calling “The Pay Is Good”.

It’s in the first person, the content close to my heart, but the genre is not memoir. The structural parameters are the hours of a double shift a hostess works in a Manhattan restaurant, the excerpt below chronicling her hour from 3 to 4pm.

A chunk of the excerpt plus an audio recording of it I’ve put behind a paywall because I didn’t offer my paid subscribers anything extra last time. 🙏

I was really inspired by Jamaica Kincaid’s 1981 short story, “What I Have Been Doing Lately” (at 35:20 is a reading by the author). Also Ben Lerner’s prose poem, “The Media”, published by the New Yorker on 4/20/20. I listened to “The Media” many times and each time something different jumped out for me.

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Never closer do I get to bending time than in the slump between lunch and dinner, before the other hostess arrives. Just me and my thoughts make it almost go backwards. And then it does, or I go back in it. Staring out the big front window as I do at this hour, through that of the building across the street, the scene seems suddenly to refresh before my eyes, and I see it as one I have visited from the inside before, meaning I was once one of those little figures in that lobby. I was once gazing up at that red-brown tapestry hanging behind the front desk, the one that might’ve hung in the Medieval galleries of the Met. I had been sent to ascend to the very top floor, where an elite private equity firm operated its silent invisible machinery, turning money into only more money. Working in the Investment Management Group of a very large law firm, fresh-faced, I was what one of my colleagues called, “a lawyer’s bitch,” not a year out of college, on an errand to fetch a bundle of subscription documents signing up investors to a fund for a minimum one easy mil a pop. My job was to go collect “the originals,” the documents stained with the fine black ink used to inscribe a high-net-worth-individual’s signature. Then bring them, while the ink was still wet, back to the lawyers so they could get to work doing what they did to make it all legal, that pooling of money that would at the end of the day seep into their pockets as well. I rode in the elevator up until I could go up no further. Then the elevator doors opened, directly onto a space that needed no introduction by way of a hallway, because it did not have to share with any other spaces that prime real estate it kept all to itself. I approached a desk with a woman behind it, so beautiful it was hard not to imagine her beauty at the front of a line of other traits, rather than just mixed in among them. She told me where to wait for the one I was there to see. That one arrived soon enough. I already liked her, just for being a woman in charge of all that money she was in charge of. Everything about her was intelligent and sharply defined. She had on a skirt suit that seemed to know just what to hide and what to accentuate. Her hair gathered in a claw so it pulled all of the slack out of her face, leaving the features there chiseled-looking. She led me to a conference room where on a table sat an open box, inside it a cake celebrating one more year gone from a life creating wealth. “Help yourself to a piece,” she said. There was no one else in the room, but I could tell where others had just been, by the way the cake looked freshly torn into. I felt brought into the fold. The cake had a smooth buttercream surface and pastel scalloping all along its edges. It was a red velvet cake, the kind rumored to be German chocolate with food coloring to make it more decadent, the color of dried blood. Moist inside. The private equity maven left to go get the documents I’d come for. Left me alone with the cake. I cut off a big corner hunk that was mostly frosting. It threw a party in my mouth. It tasted like the high-octane glee that comes with a drop, a dash of dread—the stuff of amusement parks. If euphoria had a taste, that was it. Then the client returned, carrying the originals. She handed them to me like she was transferring something precious to my care, like she was saying, “Take good care of them for me.” I said goodbye, got back on the elevator and descended to the street where, I couldn’t tell you why, no company car awaited me. There I was, holding a bundle of documents whose symbolic weight measured in the millions, even billions of dollars, but with no ride, no way of getting back down to the law firm. But I didn’t even try hailing a cab. I just savored all that complex modern gilt in my arms, muscles aching all the twenty some-odd Park Avenue blocks I was completely unaccounted for.

Once, one of the attorneys I used to work for came into the restaurant. I was surprised to see her. Surprised that her work ethic would allow for lunch. Some of the attorneys I used to work for acted like they could not afford to take an hour out of the middle of the day to eat, even though we all knew they made buckets of money. It seemed for them, work was a child forever tugging on the sleeve, never letting go. Work took all of their time and then some. For what exactly? An alibi? To exculpate them from what? An image is burned into my memory, that of a woman during the dark overtime hours, in the law firm cafeteria. Skulking, skeletal, plucking a single floret of raw broccoli from the lavish buffet. It is the image of a lawyer gone off the deep end, refusing herself lunch one too many times. Illustrating what the one who came in to take her lunch at the restaurant was apparently not. That one had been so easy to work with, I’d figured she was hardest on herself. It has to go somewhere. When she came in, I thought maybe she wouldn’t recognize me in my hostess uniform of short, tight, black. Or it would throw her; she would recognize me but without knowing from where. Or maybe she would not have seen my email announcing my departure from the law firm, and seeing me here would confuse her. After I sent out that mass email, only one attorney I could not even remember meeting replied, supposing I must be on to “bigger and better” things. I thought maybe he’d mistaken me for somebody else. But even so, I dreaded the scrutiny of his female colleague when she came in, dreaded her eyes asking, what happened to the bigger and better things?, that is, if her eyes didn’t dart away first, to avoid the sight of me wasting my time, throwing away my future. I had been a very good copy editor.

But she only beamed at me, the yellow walls of the restaurant like a buttercup put to the underside of her chin, melting the starch from her white collar.

No matter how gray it gets outside, there are always the yellow walls to make things warmer. The light is changing, which makes things interesting, though I can’t imagine standing here a minute longer. I notice a couple of old ladies at the door, so little they had slipped under my gaze. The one in front struggles with the door as if it opened by some complicated mechanism. She struggles in this way that is easy not to notice, because noticing it is noticing that everything gets harder with age. Everything takes twice as much effort for the old who are only old because they were once as young as me. Though perhaps there is less and less to lose, so one can live more freely. Some people would assume we are not even open at this in-between hour, or have no use for a place where their presence is not validated by others’, even when they could have that place all to themselves. That’s how some people think. But not these ladies. They are inside now and hobbling up to me in their own time, until the one in front stands before me, two knobby fingers outstretched like bunny ears on a ghost. Her eyes are hooded. Marbled blue-green like little Earths captured by satellites, looking at me from a long distance. “Right this way,” I say, picking up two menus I don’t expect them to need. They are too little and old to have appetites and will have come at this dead hour to avoid the awkwardness of not ordering any food. They’ll have come at this dead hour to avoid having to compete with others to be heard or understood, if they even feel the need to flap their lips to enjoy each other’s company. I move as if according to a script, as if I am an actress performing the role of a hostess, in a scene set in an empty restaurant on the picturesque Upper East Side. I lead them to the coveted front corner, place the menus on a table I pull out for them to arrange themselves on a banquette behind. From here they will have a view of what is happening out the window, even if they don’t need any fodder for conversation. I push the table in, go back to my place and pretend to forget they are there. In time, I hear one of them slurp her affogato. I imagine they are old friends with nothing left to say to each other. I imagine they have buried their husbands.

I go to the bathroom and pop, from a foil blister pack, my last vitamin, to kick in for the dinner shift. I place it on my tongue, think, I need more. Then, I try to run away from my need, but it chases me. I look back and see. It is a dark void inside of a pair of wobbly cartoon parentheses that get longer as they are redrawn, farther and farther apart to define new outer limits. It is featureless, and yet produces an echo that does not follow the rules of an ordinary echo, but gets only more pronounced, gnawing as it finds no sustenance and so only grows. My need dogs me back to my place, the vitamin still dissolving on my tongue, as I look up to see none other than Stefan, vitamin supplier.

He is just standing there. Like a man about to pee on something, not doing anything in particular, and yet rousing suspicion. A mind reader. He has on glasses with frames like bold black Sharpie lines around his eyes. A tracksuit that looks dry-clean-only, meant for conjuring associations of running track—not actually for breaking a sweat in. Because Stefan is a personal trainer, selling, before anything else, the idea of working out, and with him. He does not exist merely to supply me vitamins.

“When can we get you back in the gym?” Stefan asks, as if, by using the pronoun, we, he might speak to a mutual interest in getting me back to the gym.

It was when I felt Stefan’s hands on my bare ass, cold, sinking into me like wet sand he could make a castle out of, that I could no longer deny, people have needs, and Stefan, being a person, was out to get his met. I was lying facedown, forehead pressed against a padded horseshoe-shaped headrest, while he stood over me, his fingers probing, as if they could get beneath the top layer, inside of me that way. My eyes aimed at the floor, the muscles around them clenched, as if flinching at the scant light by which I might face the lens of self-denial I had worn but not seen through, so that it had denied the need in everything that entered my sight, as though that need were my own. “So much tension in the glutes,” Stefan rubbed, like a professional doing his job, offering his professional opinion. I did hold a lot of tension in the glutes. But that tension only seemed to spread, to bear down with more force, deeper, as he applied himself to it. I sensed the release of something pent-up in him flowing into me, my teeth like old friends fit into one another’s grooves, and I could only guess that it was Stefan’s turn not to see what he didn’t want to. I felt the confusion of having entered something reciprocal without knowing when, if ever I had opted into it. I felt the pleasure and disgust that must come when invisible boundaries are dissolved and the one you are left with is the skin.

I turn to get a menu. “Table for one?” I ask, if only to point out that Stefan has not come here to eat. Usually, men came in posing as customers with the readymade excuse of nourishment, even if what they were really looking for was comfort from me, with food on the side. The bankers, the lawyers, the businessmen. Separated, with marital status undisclosed. The man who blunts the force of the law for other high-powered men with reputations on the line. Who called, lonesome with nobody to share his bottle of velvety Burgundy with, wanting to know why I was on his mind in the middle of the night. Wanting me to tell him. Men come in asking for a table, looking for things I can’t help them with, solutions to life, death, that even the averaging of our ages can’t go toward providing. But Stefan doesn’t even bother with the pretence of customer, doesn’t even have the decency to hide behind such formality. The nerve. I want to put him on the spot for being so bold, for not even playing games about why he’s here. For coming here when he knows business will be slow and I won’t be able to avoid him. Really, I want to punish him for being halfway to openly admitting his need that I refused to see. I want to punish him for these conflicting feelings in me, making me resentful and secretly glad he is here.

I never have seen Stefan pretend to be a regular customer. He was always just around, already friends with the other hostesses. I can’t remember how I first became aware of him, if it was because of Claudia, if it was because Claudia takes the vitamins too. I can’t remember how I came to know that Claudia takes the vitamins too. Stefan must’ve told me. Or maybe it was Claudia, but it could only have been Claudia under the influence of the vitamins because they let her guard down, her guard she keeps otherwise up with me. Or maybe I just made an assumption about Claudia on the vitamins I mapped some explicit disclosure onto after the fact, retrospectively. I can’t even remember exactly how I myself came to be on the vitamins. They come from Stefan, is all I know. Sometimes life is a book you don’t know you’re skimming, until it comes to locating the plot points. Except that in life, you can’t just turn back a page or two to find them, typeset in black and white, if you lose track of the plot. The first time I ever got high on the vitamins, I thought, No wonder Claudia has so much energy, like I had been let in on a secret. My heart fluttered like a fluorescent nylon streamer catching a breeze. It all made sense from up there. Up there, above the chaos of the restaurant, I could live forever, never planting my feet firmly on the ground. I believed Bill Withers, whose voice came through the restaurant speakers mellifluous and prophetic rather than platitudinous and phony, And I know it’s gonna be…a lovely dayyy!!! “What’s it called?” I asked Stefan, and he told me, “NADH.” But I never have found any NADH in the vitamin stores rivaling Stefan’s.

When Stefan does not immediately reply, I am forced to turn back toward him. His palms are turned out, hands waving, motioning for me not to go to any trouble with a menu or whatnot. His palms are the color of a farm-raised salmon, pale, as if all of the pigment, the essence has drained into the lines like tributaries crossing them. I remember how they felt curled around my ankles, as I did some number of sit-ups he had me do, the veins visible, pushing up under the eggplant skin of his hands as they held me in place.