“Yeah, I’ll meet you there.”
I took my time with closing, trying to find an opening when Fang wasn’t lording over the kitchen. But he didn’t leave once, not even to take a piss. It was as if he were deliberately obstructing me. I wanted to shove him out of my way.
Finally, I gave up, drove to my studio apartment to shower and change, then met up with Melissa at Wine Bar, which was owned by a friend of ours we used to work with. He’d saved up his tip money to open it, and we threw him whatever business we could. High-end restaurants were a dime a dozen in the Grove and the competition was fierce, so even though his wines were overpriced, we went.
“You’re awfully quiet tonight, Martian,” Melissa said. It was the name she used for me when I was off in my own world, which was pretty often. “Still mad about table twenty-two?”
Table twenty-two stiffed me. One of them was the bassist from some washed-up rock band from the nineties. I didn’t know their music, even though he insisted they were famous. He was definitely a cokehead. He and his entourage drank Patron like it was Perrier, racked up a $500 bill, and left me 5 percent. Classy.
“Yeah, that was shitty.” She wouldn’t want to hear that I was really thinking about the dishwasher, the seeminglyunderagedishwasher, and the sense that I’d known him before, intimately.
“You’re still the hottest piece of Cuban ass east of Dixie,” she said and rubbed my back. Sometimes when customers stiffed me, I took it personally, like maybe I hadn’t performed well enough, or my appearance wasn’t pleasing. Melissa was always building me up. For whatever reason she indulged my vanity. “Speaking of which….” She arched one eyebrow, an invitation to come back to her place. Melissa and I hooked up from time to time, whenever one of us was lonely. I didn’t normally go for women, but she intrigued me. I’d painted her many times, but she was like a phantom. The light wouldn’t stick to her.
“I can’t tonight.” I dropped a few bills onto the table and said good night to our company, the servers of some of the other swanky restaurants in the Grove. You’d think after working all night long in a restaurant, we wouldn’t want to blow all our money on expensive drinks in yet another restaurant, but it’s what we did. I kissed Melissa’s cheek.
“Sleep well, Martian,” she said.
“I’ll try.”
But I rarely did.
2. Nightmares
THAT NIGHTI dreamed of fire.
I had a recurring nightmare that had plagued me for as long as I could remember, even before I had my own studio. I was in a red room, surrounded by paintings, and the whole room was on fire. It always began with the smell of turpentine fumes, then the heat from the flames lashing at my skin, smoke, like hands, dragging me under. All around, paintings were burning, canvases eaten up by fire moths, flames licking the easels, smoke filling my lungs.
The dream was so vivid and occurred so frequently that I’d installed several smoke detectors throughout my studio, which meant there was always at least one in need of the battery being replaced, causing an incessant beeping. I kept spare batteries on hand. I’d even quit smoking because I was afraid the nightmare was a premonition and I was going to accidentally start a fire one night in my sleep. I only cleaned my brushes outside, taking care to cap the bottles of turpentine and hose down whatever remained to dilute it. Melissa thought I was being paranoid and irrational, but the dream was so real.
I sat up in my bed, a king-size mattress on a sturdy frame. I’d splurged on it thinking it might help with the nightmares, but it hadn’t. My chest was slick with sweat and the sheets clung to me like grubby hands. I went downstairs and circled my studio, making the rounds. Moonlight from the industrial windows bathed everything in a velvet-blue glow. Most studios I’d visited resembled art galleries where the artist had their favorite pieces on display, but I found the clutter of past works to be distracting at best and debilitating at worst, so my finished canvases faced the wall and only the blank ones stared back at me, like stories waiting to be written.
I thought of the new dishwasher: his face burned in the back of my mind, except that instead of the blue bandana, he had long curly hair, like a mermaid. I’d seen him before, but I couldn’t place him, which unnerved me, since my memory for faces was better than most.
I made sure nothing was burning or even had the potential to catch flame. Melissa found this place for me about two years ago, when my apartment was beginning to look like an episode ofHoarders, with canvases stacked to the ceiling, paints and brushes on every surface, and drop cloths cluttering up the floor.
This studio was expansive, one of several buildings in an old boatyard. The property’s owner was waiting for the market to improve before selling it to developers. In the meantime he rented out the boatsheds to artists, carpenters, mechanics, and the like.
The space was perfect and the rent was decent, but what had sold me on it was the lantern out front, a rainbow of stained-glass shards soldered together by a clever hand. I thought perhaps it was emblematic of the neighborhood, which boasted the highest concentration of gays in Miami outside of South Beach, but something about the lantern seemed almost… inevitable.
I couldn’t shake the image of the dishwasher’s face from my mind. Perhaps it was the artist in me, but I’d always felt the need to observe everything more closely, because if I missed even the slightest detail, then something important—something essential—might pass me by.
The sun was beginning to rise, and I knew I wouldn’t go back to sleep that night. I put on my tennis shoes and went for a run.
3. Andre
MY NEXTfew shifts, I didn’t see Andre, and I worried he was another on a long list of shiftless dishwashers. I was desperate to see him again, irrationally so, and was even tempted to ask Fang about him, when suddenly he was there, hanging clean wineglasses on the wooden rack above the wine cellar. Each time he reached up, the back of his shirt caught on his apron strap, exposing the top of his boxers, the dip in his lower back, and a strip of honeyed brown skin. Fang was elsewhere. I decided to approach him.
“Hi, there, I’m Martian.” I kicked myself for the slip. Damn Melissa and her nicknames. “I mean, Martin.”
“Andre.” He offered his hand. I shook it.
“Have we met before?” The sensation was unshakable.
He smiled, bashfully so, and lowered his gaze. His lashes were long and curled at the ends. I caught just the hint of his dimples. “No, sir. I don’t think so.”
“You’re sure?”
He shook his head. His upper lip curled down over his front teeth, and he bit it, talking out the side of his mouth. “I just got here a week ago, and if I’d seen you in Alabama, I’d remember.”
