Eyes Closed

by Alexis MacIsaac

Within my line of sight are deafening tableaus of couples and friends, all seated at lacquered tables with mismatched glassware. Strangers who will have ingratiated themselves into my memory by the time the night is over. Their voices strained and boisterous, anxious with alcohol. Bodies feigning ease where there’s none to be had.           

Jade sits before me in the booth, a model poised for painting. Behind her, gilt wallpaper glistens beneath a row of tiny lights. Golden lion tamarins perched on floating leaves against a backdrop of pistachio green as if they’re soaring, not falling. Her collarbone razored and eyes tinseled. Blackest hair crowning flawless skin. The tempura she finished only minutes ago has left a shine on her lips that only seems to enhance her beauty, as if she oiled her mouth on purpose to make her appear more accessible to the average as well as to the unattractive. She arches one of her brows, a party trick she pulls out too often for it to be charming. But still, everything about this particular scene is Instagram-worthy. She’s in the middle of a speech, and I’m rapt.

“Olivia’s problem is that she cares about the male gaze too much,” she says. “The trick is not giving a fuck.”

Jade is in a “going out” mood that strikes her when she’s feeling most sad. And it’s when she’s sad that she’s oddly the most beautiful. She pours soy sauce onto her plate with her navy-tipped fingers and then swirls a dollop of wasabi in it with her chopsticks before aiming them toward my face like a disciplinary tool. Pontificating.

“Olivia,” she continues, “will never be happy. Olivia is destined for servitude to some bullish mid-wit failure. She’s already thirty-three. She needed a ring like three years ago.”

Jade is speaking about a friend we both don’t really like, and who we think probably doesn’t really like us, but we hang out with her because she reassures us that everything she wants is everything we don’t: marriage, kids, a house in Connecticut. Stability.

“But you like the male gaze, too,” I counter. “All straight women do. It’s evolutionary.”

“There’s a difference between wanting to look good and being a ‘pick me.’ And look at you.” She lifts a dynamite roll to her mouth; it’s too big, but she eats it anyway, her mouth opening and closing like a gasping fish.

“What do you mean?” But I know what she’s about to say. She’s said it in so many ways before. She chews. I wait.

“You like men, but you don’t go out of your way to get them to look at you.”

“I thought women always get attention. Unless you’re old.”

She smiles, unnaturally, like she’s posing for a picture.

“It’s not an insult, Becca. I love that you don’t wear makeup or do Botox. You’re authentic.”

She’s pleased with herself now. She thinks she’s made my ordinariness seem extraordinary. I do not begrudge her. Only the very beautiful could be so stupid as to try and convince others that their lack of attraction holds value.

“Anyway, who cares?” she continues. “Men will fuck anything if desperate.”

“Then why bother?”

“It’s unrealistic to be a separatist. It’s wise to be particular.”

Jade picked the restaurant, of course. A trendy sushi place that opened a few months ago. Servers wear sky-blue jeans and taciturn expressions, because being overly nice is cringe. Jade sips her lychee martini, the one she convinced me to order, too. We’re finishing up our second, but a third is imminent and needed.

“Olivia needs to delete her apps,” she says. “That’s her only shot at success. I was listening to a podcast about online dating. How it’s mostly shit for women and for men, except the guys who are high value.”

“The tall guys?”

“Tall. Rich. Moneyed. Hinge is like an ice cream shop where those ones get to pick out a new flavour every day.”

“Tall men are overrated.”

Jade laughs, her eyes floating to the ceiling.

“It’s easy to be lax about height when you’re only 5’1.”

“Being short has many virtues.” I take the last sip from my martini. “Maybe we should get off the apps.”

I glance at my purse on the floor. I’ve swiped right and left more times than I care to admit. No success.

Jade scoffs.

“Off the apps? How else would we entertain ourselves?”

“With hobbies. Like normal people.”

“Neither of us are normal. I’m not an Olivia. I’m just looking for a good time. Remember that guy I was with first year? The one with the top knot. I don’t know why I thought of him the other day, but I can’t believe I stooped that low. He absolutely reeked. It must have been his genes or something. Even after a shower he smelled like absolute garbage.”

His name was Greg, and he was a physicist of average talent who was gifted at cryptic crosswords. And when Jade ghosted him by snubbing him at meal hall the day after he’d last gone down on her, he’d knocked timidly at my dorm room later that day and proceeded to dry sob into my shoulder that he’d never been with a woman before, and he’d thought it was love until it wasn’t. Jade has repressed all of this. Greg is nameless now, all of his other traits buried beneath a heap of contempt. Now, he is simply the guy who reeked.

“I remember him. I kind of liked him. Did he really smell that bad?”

“Not if you mouth breathed. You can get past anything when you’re twenty.”

I feel the weight of someone beside me. Our server, tall with lean fingers who smells like lemony soap and stale pot. He sets down my martini and then Jade’s. Some of Jade’s drink sloshes onto the table. She swipes the table with her index finger and licks it off. He runs his hands through his hair, and I don’t mind any of this even though it’s all objectively a bit gross.

“Need anything else?” he asks.

Jade leans forward and says, “Do you have any dessert recommendations?”

He smiles, but not in a way that suggests he’s amused. He blinks slowly.

“If you like sweets, the black sesame ice cream is very popular.”

“I can’t do dairy.”

I think the server sighs, but it’s hard to tell, because his mouth forms a line before he opens it by saying, “You could always order another martini.”

“Hemingway used to say if you’re having dessert, you’re not drinking enough,” I blurt out.

Neither of them know what to say, because I’ve said something antiquated and absurd.

“Smart,” the server finally says. “I think I like Hemingway because we share the same name.”

“Are you related?” I ask.

He shakes his head.

“The same first name. Ernest.”

Jade interjects, and I know then that I’ve annoyed her. “We’ll take Hemingway’s advice and have two more martinis in about fifteen minutes,” she says. Ernest walks away and he doesn’t glance back.

“Do you like him?” she asks me. Her fingers drum the surface of the table.

“Too soon to tell.”

“I like him. But Ernest is just such a terrible name. It takes the sex right out of everything.”

A sob to our right. Two women sit near enough that we can hear they’re in a lover’s quarrel. Their hands entwined; marked by thick greenish veins and golden rings. But one woman sits still, a steady stream of tears on her cheeks. The other woman seems to say sorry. Her eyes cast downward and her lower lip juts, until she pulls her hand away and tosses her dinner napkin carelessly on the table. She stands up and walks away, without ever looking back.

I look back at Jade, and she shakes her head before saying, “That’s why I will never be a political lesbian.”

We’ve settled our bill. Ernest split it evenly, even though Jade ordered more expensive dishes. I don’t want to go back to my apartment, because my apartment means I’m alone with no one available to refract my thoughts into something approaching the tolerable. Most of the patrons have left, and Jade and I are finishing our fifth drink, but the conversation has dulled and we know goodbye is looming as the seconds crawl forward. Jade looks even more desperate than me to hold onto the night, and I think of Olivia, if Olivia is just more honest about her fears than us, and it’s her honesty that we find repellant.

“We should go,” I finally say.

“Want one more? There’s a bar across the way.”

“It’s a worknight. Don’t think I can.”

Jade excuses herself to go to the washroom. She is walking slowly, purposefully, because she’s now quite drunk. So am I.

“Plans tonight?”

I look up. Ernest is smiling and I see that his teeth are faintly discoloured. His eyes are almost black in the light.

“Just my apartment.”

He clears his throat.

“No one’s ever connected me to Hemingway before.”

“Great writer, bad man.”

Ernest laughs and then I laugh too, even though what I said wasn’t very funny. Wasn’t even clever.

“No chance you want to grab a drink sometime?” he asks.

He’s barely smiling and his eye twitches and then he wipes a hand on his pants, and I say, “I’d love to.” He takes a pen from his shirt pocket and scribbles down a number on a piece of paper he must have ripped from a receipt roll.

I smell peach and cassis. Jade’s perfume. She’s suddenly beside Ernest, very close, and slowly glances from me to him and back to me again, before she smiles angrily.

“What did I miss?” she asks.

Someone has turned the music off, so that we’re left with bleak silence.

“Ernest just wants to talk Hemingway someday,” I say. “Excuse me. I just need to use the washroom.”

I don’t look back. I open a door to a black-painted room and enter a stall; there’s a tiny spot of blood on the toilet seat, but I don’t need to pee so I don’t mind. I take the crumpled paper out of my purse and type the scrawled number into my phone, and then I do something that surprises me. Hey, I text. It’s Becca. The girl who didn’t eat dessert.

When I leave the bathroom after a few minutes, I see that a few servers have congregated around the bar. They slump, defeated before their drinks. A few of them turn their heads to me, but they don’t smile or nod. They return to each other, cloistered in the safety of shared experience. Jade isn’t waiting for me, and I half-expected this, because she hates losing. I glance around the restaurant one more time, half-sad, half-triumphant, but Ernest is gone, and there is no one familiar, so I step out into a pulsed wind and begin my walk home, with a headache looming at my temples.

Within seconds, I’m caught by a wordless sound in the near-distance. I stop and open my purse to check my phone. A stranger bumps into me and yells, “fuck,” but its impact is the same as if he had said “excuse me.” No texts. No unanswered calls. But that sound again, like a woman trapped. From nearby in an alley slotted between two crumbling brick buildings. I see now. A figure braces herself with her back pressed to the wall. A flash of dark hair. Jade turns her head toward me, caught. The truth culminates in one accidental moment and confusion dissipates. I am, for a brief moment, curious and disgusted. Jade’s eyes go limp before she looks away. Ernest holds her hips between his hands. He grunts with each awkward thrust.

Eyes closed.

BIO: Alexis MacIsaac was shortlisted for Ireland’s RTÉ Short Story Competition 2024 in honour of Francis MacManus. Her writing has also been featured in Masks Literary Magazine (2023 story award winner), Leon Literary Review, The Bookends Review, Agnes and True, RTÉ’s Sunday Miscellany, Rock Salt Journal, and elsewhere. In a past life, she was a professional violinist (Riverdance, The High Kings, MacIsaac and MacKenzie). She lives in Ottawa with her husband and two sons.