She gasped.
“That’s right,” he said, scanning the room as if the video cameras could move. “Trust me: it’s the closest you’ll come—in this lifetime, at least—to heaven.”
Jim nicknamed me Nice Boy. The others thought it was because I was a nice person, but in private, Jim said that it was because I was bad on the inside but nice to look at on the outside. The other waiters were jealous: he was giving me the best shifts, letting me go home early, and saving wine for me. Another month went by—Christmas came and went—and then came the New Year’s party, an annual event where Jim sucked up to his customers and gave them a thank-you, only the cream of the A-list was invited. The A-list had tabs at Shark Island and liked to party, like Whitey Smith. His Mercedes dealership lights up the sky like an airport—the cost of the wattage alone could pay off the debt of a third-world country. Whitey Smith was in Europe, but his son came in his place.
Tables were pulled together and spread with candles, plates, roses, fruit—like a feast for a king. Someone (I suspected a disgruntled waiter) had stolen the baby Jesus from the nativity scene, and Jim had swaddled a child’s doll and set it in Jesus’ place—twice as big as Mary and Joseph, its eyes at half-mast. Customers dropped generous tips in a drunken stupor, the glow of Christmas a lingering impetus. Jim spent most of the night doing lines in the bathroom with Whitey Smith’s son and the son’s girlfriend.
We brought trays of asparagus, toasted almond and Gruyère strudels, coconut shrimp, and filet of beef and red pepper skewers, but the customers were too drunk to really eat. What a waste, I thought, but later the dishwashers and busboys ransacked the leftovers. I stood back with a fat bottle of Veuve Clicquot champagne and filled and refilled glasses. The owner’s wife, a French woman that we were afraid of, stared irritably. Rumor had it that she was the one with all the money and that the owner lived off her; he hated to work, and that was why Jim ran the restaurant. He made bad use of his lack of hair with a weak ponytail, was loud and brash, and smacked his knife against his champagne glass, toasting customers over and over to much hollering and laughter.
By the time midnight came and went, I’d been dropped a couple of hundred-dollar tips, and Jim came over to remind me with his boozy breath that we needed to pool our tips. I nodded in agreement, knowing he’d be too high to enforce it: there was no way I was parting with my cash. I fingered the hundreds in my pocket—they weren’t going anywhere. I decided to use the bathroom to count my money in the privacy of a stall.
Hanging on the wall between the women’s and men’s bathrooms—among the displayed restaurant reviews and culinary awards—was a framed newspaper clipping, and since no one was there to bother me, I leaned up against the wall and read it for the first time. It explained that in the late 1800s, before canals were dredged, when the land was still considered uninhabitable, camps of entrepreneurial fishermen (Mexicans and outcasts mostly) went to sea in small boats and caught sharks by harpooning or shooting them as they rose to the surface to swallow bait, and then towed them to shore, where their carcasses were used in the business of manufacturing oil. Along with a malodorous and uncanny atmosphere, the shark remains lying on the sand in various states of rot—from mildly decayed to skeletal—gave Newport Beach the unofficial nickname of Shark Island.
When I left the bathroom, Annette was leaning on the bar with her hips shifted just enough to make men swoon, a white scarf draped on her shoulders. I stood next to her and breathed in her Allure.
Jim came over, his flamingo legs wobbling, teeth clenched from all the cocaine.
“Are you okay?” Annette asked.
“I’m going to get him,” he said, villainous in the dark candlelight, eyes sparkly and deceitful.
I didn’t know what he meant until I followed the direction of his gaze. He was talking about Whitey Smith’s son, sitting at the table with his girlfriend. She would hate my Chevy Impala, I thought, and I laughed. Jim and Annette believed I was laughing at Jim. Annette looked at me disapprovingly, and I felt a pang of hurt that she would protect him. She put her hand on his shoulder and kissed his cheek, leaving her kiss print, and I was jealous.
“Come with us,” he said, smacking his hand on the bar. “He invited me to his dad’s house. When his girlfriend passes out, pretend to pass out. I’ll prove it. You don’t think I can. Let me prove it.”
Annette gave him an uneasy look, and he stuck his tongue out at her like a child. He waved at a matronly woman who’d set him up with her gay hairdresser. “I’d better say hi to that old bag,” he said, and he skipped away.
“I won’t go,” Annette said, peevish. “I want you to go and make sure he is okay.”
“Jim can take care of himself.”
“Do it for me,” she said, fixing my tie. “You’re a good man,” she said.
I sat in the back seat of Whitey Smith’s son’s Mercedes with his girlfriend. She wore a black halter-top cropped below her breasts, black leather pants, and a ring with a diamond the size of a dime, although not on her ring finger. When she got out of the car, I made out the beginnings of a sun tattoo on her lower back reaching down, I imagined, to her ass.
The dad’s house was modern and ugly, at the end of Narcissus along the ocean on the crest of a cliff, all metal and glass. The son buzzed a series of alarms, fingers tapping at the numbers of the final alarm, but it kept buzzing us out. Too high to remember the code, he pulled out his soft leather wallet—God, it was beautiful—and all the cards, scraps of paper, and money fluttered to the sidewalk. He found the piece of paper with his alarm code, and his girlfriend gave me a look like—What an ass, but do you see his house? That was the most she acknowledged me all night.
He was still working on getting us inside the house when a whooshing noise swept past us, and a chill ran up the back of my neck, tingling at my scalp, like it was a ghost or something. But it was only a skateboarder, crouched low, shirtless, his long hair flapping behind him; I wasn’t the only one he’d frightened because Whitey Smith’s son completely overreacted, yelling, “Watch it, fucking cunt!” But the skateboarder didn’t even flinch, like he was deaf or didn’t care, and we all watched him until he disappeared into the night.
We went for a Jacuzzi—the thing heated up fast, extended over the cliff like it was floating in the middle of the sky. Everyone stripped, but I kept my boxers on, the water bubbling through the material. I felt weightless looking up at the stars, waves crashing below. My toes moved against the domed surface of a light at the bottom of the Jacuzzi. And then Jim said, “Nice Boy’s hiding his cock because it’s so big it would blow us all away.” The truth: I didn’t want Jim to see me naked, as if my body would reveal my sexual ambivalence—I didn’t care about the others.
The girlfriend was getting bleary, her head knocking to one shoulder then bobbing up again only to knock to the other side. “I need to lie down,” she confessed, slurring, and we helped her inside, dripping water all over the floors since no one had thought to bring towels. I got a good look at her sun tattoo. Also, below her hipbones she had double cherry tattoos, as if between the cherries was a jackpot.
I found a bathroom, slapping my hand around the wall until I hit a light switch. It lit up a bank of mirrors, reminding me of a salon or a gym. I dried myself with a towel, leaving my wet boxers draped along the bathtub, and I gave myself the best smile I could summon, until I couldn’t stand it, which didn’t take long; then I wrapped a towel around my hips and took a stack of towels just in case the others needed them.
The girlfriend was passed out on a white leather couch. The only illumination came from a fire in the gas fireplace, flames throwing light on her body, one breast stacked upon the other since she lay on her side. I saw for certain what I had guessed: fakes, more like bricks in this position. One leg crossed the other at her ankle, and I saw the V of her vagina, her pubic hairs shaped like the number 1—a trimmed strip. I put a towel over her body, careful not to make noise; I was close enough to see goose bumps around
her erect pink nipples, and I suppressed the urge to press her nipple like a doorbell.
Jim was sitting cross-legged on the white shag rug, his penis semi-erect in a coil of pubic hair, and his hand was on the son’s knee; the son was leaned on his calves, almost like he was praying, his voice soft and solemn. Jim looked over the son’s shoulder and passed me a signal. I lay down behind the couch, gas flames making shadowy patterns along the wall, and the girlfriend snored, loud and steady. I closed my eyes, imagining red moths flying across my eyelids.
There were sucking noises and wet noises. And I kept my eyes closed because it could have been me.
The next night at work, Jim snapped orders at me, nervous and sulky. “What’s your problem?” I finally asked.
“You’re my problem,” he said, giving my shoulder a little shove. “Don’t ever talk to me like that again.”
Annette brought him a glass of wine; he took it and skulked off. “What’s going on between you two?” she asked me.
“Why do you like him?” I countered.
She looked right at me, her expression defiant, lips the color of a bruise. “Jim taught me to dress nice and he gives me a job,” she said, her voice loud and protective. “He is a brave man.”
“He hired you so that men could look at you and feel good,” I said.
She looked at the floor and her dark hair swung down so that I couldn’t see her sad eyes. “I know why you are Nice Boy,” she said, lifting her head and meeting my gaze straight on. “It’s because you have a nice life. You don’t know what it’s like to be poor. You just get born with it.” She paused, as if trying to decide whether to say more.
“You don’t even know who you are,” she said, flipping hair over her shoulder with a hand. “You only know how to be Nice Boy.”
After our shifts, Annette and I walked to our cars parked in a nearby residential neighborhood. Jim didn’t let us park in the Shark Island parking lot, and the homeowners complained when we parked near their homes, our beat-up cars sullying their streets: it was a tricky thing, parking our cars.
The sky was dripping with stars. We were both a little high, having sampled a chi-chi, a lime rickey, and a vodka gimlet, gifted by our bartender and presented in coffee mugs, so we wouldn’t get caught. Annette reached for my hand, and I could smell her perfume. She’d pulled her hair into a loose ponytail, the angle of her collarbone exposed, and she swung our hands together like a happy little kid; I wondered if she was making up for the way she’d spoken to me earlier, but I didn’t care, just as long as she was with me.
On impulse, I pulled her body to mine, pressed my mouth on her mouth. Her lipstick felt like lotion and she tasted like vodka. Her tongue soft and pliant, she opened her mouth wider, and it surprised me so much, I opened my eyes. I saw the side of her face, the dark slope of her neck. I wanted to put my hands there, but she pulled away, her chest rising and falling.
For a moment, we just stared at each other, her eyes angry and unsettled—but I got the impression she wasn’t mad at me. She rubbed her hand along her arm as if she was cold, and I could make out the outline of her bra beneath her lace top. She leaned on one leg, jutting out her hip.
“Be my girlfriend,” I said.
She laughed. It was an uninhibited laugh, maybe a little bit cold. I had not heard it before. She looked more beautiful than ever.
“You do not have the spirit,” she said, her voice almost a whisper, “to be with me.”
Annette started taking pulls off Jim’s cigarettes; she believed it was a nasty habit, but her craving was stronger than her decorum, and she took to it quickly, smoking like a seasoned veteran: blowing rings, tapping ash with her forefinger, and mastering other mannerisms. Her wedding was two weeks away, and I didn’t understand her urgency to marry. But she said she couldn’t explain it, that for her, in her culture, a wedding and marriage meant everything. She said I might not understand, but she was marrying up in caste and her parents were pleased.
We’d been hanging out after work, and I’d gone shopping with her, helped her pick out a nightgown for her honeymoon. She’d tried on at least ten, sneaking me into her dressing room, slipping nightgowns over her slip, until we found a silky one that we both agreed on. She sat next to me—wearing that nightgown—on the bench in the dressing room, and when her knee touched mine, she tapped it there three times. “I like you,” she said. When we walked out of the dressing room, she was at least a foot behind me, but it was as if her body was pressed right against mine: there was a definite sexual charge, but I didn’t act on it. After all, she was getting married, and I needed to protect myself. And maybe I was a little bit scared of her, of what might happen. When I was with her, time passed quickly, and we laughed at stupid things—everything was funny and easy and pleasant.
“You are like a woman,” she said, “because you care all about clothes and movies and all the names of cheeses.”
“Thanks a lot,” I said. But I could tell she thought she had complimented me.
Then, with such conviction and sincerity, she said, “A man is not supposed to wear the pink, but then when he wears the pink, he is more a man than all the men that say to him, ‘Do not wear the pink!’”
Her wedding invitations were in Armenian and Arabic, with a slip of paper typed in English to translate for the likes of people like me. On the front of the invite was a picture of Annette and Bill in matching white sweaters, a piece of gauze over it to impart a dreamlike quality.
A bouquet of red roses was delivered to her two days before her wedding, and she said that they weren’t from Bill. “Who are they from then?” I asked. And when she told me the flowers were from her uncle, I didn’t believe her and said so.
“You are Nice Boy with your nice easy life,” she said. “What do you know?” She’d been drinking Cuba libres (more rum than Coke), and I knew she was a bit drunk. “Boo hoo,” she said. “Nice Boy works to serve people food and make his money. He doesn’t like his rich daddy. He drives an old Chevrolet car that has rusty. Boo hoo hoo.”
I was so flooded with anger that I thought I might yell at her, but I didn’t say anything. “Boo hoo hoo,” she said, twisting her hands up and pretending to rub them against her eyes. And then she looked sorry and angry and unhappy all at once. When she went to the bathroom, she left the tiny card near the light on her hostess podium, and I opened it. The penmanship was slanted to the left, letters leaning on each other, as if for support, reminding me of the signature of a doctor or a psychiatrist, intentionally difficult. The signature was indecipherable, and the only part I could read: Opened like a flower to the sun, your heart—something-something—forever. I tucked the card back in its envelope, and when she returned from the bathroom, she placed the card in her black purse, and I wondered if she’d purposefully left it on the podium for me to read, a concession of sorts.
After we closed, I was still angry, but I decided to climb through the foliage anyway. She wobbled unsteadily as she passed through the leaves, and I put my hands at her waist to steady her. When she turned her head and smiled back at me, all of the sudden I wasn’t mad anymore. We heard Jim uncorking champagne, his Frank Sinatra CD playing in the background.
He poured us glasses, and Annette licked the bubbles before they slid down her flute. “We’re celebrating Annette’s wedding of convenience!” Jim said, raising his glass in a toast.
Annette held my hand. Her makeup was smeared but it only made her more attractive. We lifted our flutes and clinked them. She didn’t let go of my hand, leaning into me and whispering, “Will you be my husband in secret?”
I didn’t like Jim watching.
“That’s not funny,” I said. Half the time I wondered if she was teasing me, but could find no proof.
“No,” she said in a sincere voice, looking down at her hand in mine. “It isn’t funny. I must marry Bill. There is no choice, that is the way it must be. But you are my very best friend in the whole world.”
“Look at the lovebirds,
” Jim said. “Don’t worry”—he ran his fingers along his mouth like he was zipping it shut.
I decided not to go to the wedding. Annette said she understood, and she promised to think of me during her vows. I watched four Hitchcock movies and tried to forget about her. I regretted having agreed to be her secret husband.
At 2:47 A.M., Annette called. She told me right off she was drunk. At first, she wasn’t making sense, alternating between self-righteous indignation and self-pity.
“It is not right,” she said. “I am a good, good girl.” She started crying.
“Where are you?” I rubbed my eyes.
“I’m at the pay phone in the lobby. There was no blood. All this waiting and no blood. They will send me home.”
I got scared when she mentioned blood.
I tried to make my voice steady and calm. “What blood?”
“The parents give me a special cloth and I lay on it. They get to see it to prove that I am virtue.” She paused, taking a long breath. “I am good. I am a good, good girl. I was not lying when I say I have virtue.”
I kept my voice down so as not to wake my mom. “Let me get this straight: Your parents and his parents get to look at this cloth that you lay on when you had sex and it’s supposed to prove that you’re a virgin? Your hymen is pure?”
She cried so hard that her body made hiccup sounds.
“Where’s Bill?”
“He won’t wake up. He drinks lots of that alcohol his uncle gave.”
She blew her nose. I wondered if she wore her nightgown—the one we’d picked out. When she spoke again, her voice was serious.
“It is no one’s business. These things I have to do. That is why you are my husband in secret. You do not make me choose.” She breathed heavily into the phone. “I have a plan but I am scared and drunk.”
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