The restaurant, Yuzu, was a Japanese place located in an apocalyptic shopping mall on the edge of Koreatown. It was four half-abandoned, dimly lit levels connected by ancient escalators.
Every store that was still open had signs in Korean out front.
I liked coming here because the food was good, but also because it felt like a place that you couldn’t just use the Internet to find. You had to use something real. And you had to actually and truly not give a damn about what other people told you.
We rode an escalator up. I was wearing a lace top, and Cole’s hand had snuck under the edge of it to rest on my bare lower back. I returned the favor. His back felt smooth and cool beneath his proud to be canadian T-shirt. He was distracted, though. His eyes were narrowed as his gaze flicked from the stores to me. A little muscle moved in his jaw.
“What?” I asked. “Just say it.”
He said, “I think I’ve been here before.”
“Think? Seems pretty memorable to me.”
“I might not have been in a remembering mood.”
I didn’t like to think about Cole coming here to score while on tour, so I didn’t say anything else. We rode up the escalator in silence, then took two steps to the next escalator, and rode that one up in silence. I walked him to the front of Yuzu. Cole pointed to the sign out front, which read: we reserve the right to refuse service or admittance to anyone.
Inside, we were led past a translucent screen into a surprisingly intimate seating area. We were early, because I was always punctual or better. Baby wasn’t there yet. I slid into one side of a dim booth, and Cole threw himself into the other. He leaned across the table on his elbows, invading my personal space, knocking the paper lantern askew and sending the menus sprawling.
“Just say it,” he said. I lifted my hand. Say what?
At the head of the table, the host cleared his throat. He looked very unamused by Cole. “Something to drink?”
“Water,” Cole said. “And Coke. And more water.”
I cut my eyes to the host’s. “Water for me, please. Don’t bring him a Coke.”
Cole protested, “Hey,” but the host seemed to agree with me that Cole didn’t need any more sugar or caffeine in him, because he nodded at me curtly and swept away.
“Oh, hey,” Cole hissed to me, leaning forward, hitting his head on the light. “Go time. Is that a phrase still? Because it is.
Go. Time.”
“Hi, kids,” Baby said. She had manifested at the head of our table, her smile wide and dimpled as always. I kept imagining that she should loom and look like an evil genius, and she kept . . . not. “Where do you want me?”
Cole leaped up and slid into the booth beside me, crashing our shoulders together. He gestured to where he had just been.
“There. Take everything that was mine.”
She sat down. She still wore the private, amused smile, like life entertained her. “I haven’t been here before.”
“We’ll get you a menu. A guide to the food in this place. A description of all the . . .” Cole lost interest in his own sentence.
He drummed his fingers across the table; I put my hand over his hand, pressing it still.
Baby didn’t have Cole’s manic energy, but somehow her gaze kept subtly shifting so that I got the idea that she was taking in the entire restaurant. Mostly the people. Her eyes stuck on little interactions: one of the sushi chefs lifting his hand to gesture at another chef. The delivery boy at the door raising his eyebrows at the hostess. My hand on Cole’s hand.
I wondered if she saw us all as players.
Cole’s leg was jiggling beneath the table. I pressed my thigh up against his and it stilled.
A neatly dressed young woman with a red streak dyed in the front of her black hair came to the end of our table. She peered closely at us.
“Oh, we’re not ready,” I told her.
Her nostrils flared. “I am not coming for order. Masaki asked me to check on you.”
Something about her tone was enough that if it had not been my favorite sushi restaurant and if I had not been in front of Baby, I would have offered to give her something better to check on. But instead, I just said, “We’re okay. Thanks.” I couldn’t keep all of the chill out of the thanks, but I defrosted most of it.
The girl’s lips tightened, and then she left us alone.
“Weird,” Cole said.
“Interesting,” clarified Baby. “What’s good here?”
I flipped over the menu. There was an unsaturated and unappealing-looking photo of a California roll on the front. “All of the sashimi,” I said.
Cole ran a finger down the menu like a kid learning how to read.
“Have you ever had sushi before?” Baby asked him.
He shook his head. To me, he said, “You’ll have to show me how to use these. The pencils.” He’d removed the chopsticks from the paper sleeve and now he walked them toward me. I resisted the temptation to snatch them from him.
“Nice job on the filming today,” Baby said. “Mostly.”
Cole’s fingers stilled completely. “The Saturn ran out of gas on the way to the gig.”
“How inconvenient,” Baby said.
“I know it had three-quarters of a tank,” Cole said. It was strange to see him when he stripped away the performer and the humor.
Baby didn’t look sorry, though. She tapped a line on the menu and then she said, “It made excellent TV.”
“So did our wedding gig,” Cole said.
“No,” Baby replied. “That made fine TV. Everything has to be turned up really loud to make good TV.”
Icily, I said, “Like hiring some topless girls to bust into his apartment?”
Baby looked genuinely shocked. “I didn’t hire them!”
“Oh, come on,” Cole said. “Enough with the playing pretend.”
“Why do you think I wanted you, Cole?” Baby asked.
He regarded her, chin tilted arrogantly. I felt his leg still quivering beside mine, a bare fraction of the jiggling he wanted to do with it.
I answered for him, “Because you think you can destroy him on TV. For good TV.”
Her eyes widened. “You don’t believe that, do you, Cole?”
He just kept looking at her.
“You ruined the rest of them,” I said. I knew it would hurt Cole’s feelings, but I went on, “You want Cole because you think he’s an easy mark.”
Baby’s expression never stopped being shocked. “I wanted Cole because he was a performer. Because he knows how to work a crowd. Look, do you get it? He was a mess. But look at him now. He’s pretty again. Pretty makes good TV.”