Balthazar, 1997

Earlier this year, I read I Regret Almost Everything: A Memoir by Keith McNally, in which he recounts a life spent opening and running restaurants, the famed Balthazar among them. That’s why I was drawn to Heather Bursch’s Paris Review essay on working as a server there, just after the restaurant opened in the fall of 1997. Bursch admits to lying on her résumé to get the job. After being discovered, a “higher-up” confronts Bursch to reveal that she’d be kept on because the customers liked her, because they believed her demeanor toward them was genuine—just a hint of the “restaurant theater” on display in a spot known for catering to the rich, famous, and powerful in the late ’90s.

Writing this now, in bed, almost thirty years later, I can still feel the waiterly poses in my body. I can feel my weight shift, my head tilt. I pause when I hit a mark and wait for the customer to absorb its shape and meaning. Shift, land. Shift, land. In another of my former lives, I’m a model in Japan. On a catalogue shoot, there’s a rhythm of moving and pausing, too. The list of prescribed poses forms an outline, and I glide between them, learning to improvise. Hand on hip, shift weight, flash. Arms clasped behind back, tilted head, flash. Turn away and snap back with freshly opened eyes, flash. A photographer calls out, “Act natural.” What a crazy phrase. It’s an oxymoron, isn’t it? What he means is they want ballet feet and wide eyes. “Yes, yes, good,” I hear from the blackness behind the bright lights. A tiny stylist comes forward and teaches me to cup my face with a hand and stare off into the middle distance. She does it to demonstrate. The hand on the face thing. Who does that while standing? Nobody. But it’s the eighties and you see a hand on the face in every catalog, including American ones. I imitate what I see, and something extra spills out of me. That extra is the reason I keep getting hired in Japan. Later, it will be why they keep me on at Balthazar.