‘The Natural’ by Laura-Blaise McDowell

Enormous fake plants obscure the view around every corner in the bar, reaching, for no good reason she can see, almost to the ceiling. Their dark, spreading leaves are stained, dappled with grease and dust, excluded totally from the perfunctory cleaning routine that doesn’t seem to be anybody’s job in particular. Dani plugs her phone in underneath the countertop and rests it on the humming fridge where they keep the cans of soda and the glasses of pre-chopped limes. She flicks through the channels on the flatscreen TV mounted above her until she finds one playing music. A couple of Long Islanders in the city for the day sip sugary cocktails down the other end of the bar and screech with laughter every few seconds. Why does anyone bother coming in here, she wonders. Despite being located near Wall Street, it must be the slowest Irish bar in New York City. The fake plants cut the place in half, the bar on one side, booths and tables for dining on the other. Sometimes men bring paid dates in, buy them big meals and watch them eat, the juices mixing with their lipstick, standing over them while they gather themselves to leave. Last week, a drunk girl gave her boyfriend a blowjob under the table, and the bartender, Tony, who noticed it happening mixed Dani a strong drink and suggested they go into the backroom to watch the CCTV footage.

‘I’m alright, Tony,’ she told him, and spent the rest of her shift polishing silverware on the other side of the room. But when Tony isn’t in, on weekday evenings when the kitchen is closed, she gets to bartend. She likes it better this way, the barrier between her and the customers; not having to worry about what might be happening beyond the fake plants. She glances down at the women from Long Island, pink drinks half finished, sugar crusting the rims of their glasses, fingers straining against wedding bands that fit them perfectly twenty years ago but now appear tight as tiny gold shackles. She walks down the dimly lit bar, catching herself fractured in the mirror; one eye looking back at her from between ageing bottles of brightly coloured concoctions.

‘Another drink, ladies?’

The women laugh as if it is an absurd question but then say yes, they’ll have one more, just one! They have to catch the train in half an hour. Dani mixes up the drinks and serves them along with the bill, then returns to her end. She picks up her phone, and out of habit, opens the app, starts swiping through the stream of faces that appear one after another.

Swipe left.

Left.

Left.

Swipe right? No, left. Definitely left.

‘Excuse me?’

She looks up from her phone, shoving it back in on top of the fridge. A man settles himself on the barstool before her.

‘What can I get you?’

He doesn’t answer straight away, forcing her to look at him looking at her, with his gummy smile and thin hair. He eventually lowers his eyes to the blotted menu taped to the wooden counter. She knows what he is doing. They come in all the time, men like this with nothing better to do.

‘Can I get a Quick Fuck?’ he asks, his eyebrows raised so high his forehead twitches.

She slams a shot glass on the counter and sloshes the drinks in one after another. She could spit in the glass and hand it to him, for all the difference it made. The fun part is over. This man does not care about coffee-flavoured liqueurs, he just wanted her to hear him say it.

‘Six dollars,’ she tells him. He slides his card onto the bar.

‘Start a tab,’ he says, and knocks back the shot, pushes the glass towards her.

The Long Islanders leave, but the man at the bar is soon joined by a couple of bankers who order Manhattans which Dani thinks is sort of hilarious. How oblivious they are as they sit here in the worst bar in the city, in their crisp suits, talking figures. She can only assume they’ve come in here because the drinks are overpriced and big numbers in any context are the call of their people. After a while, Quick Fuck begins to order normal drinks, and eventually passes out with his head on the bar. She can see a scar running the length of the base of his scalp: a failed hair transplant.

At the end of the night, the manager arrives to help her close up. She immediately flees to the bathroom, desperate to pee and to be out of sight for two minutes. Sitting in the sanctuary of the cubicle, she fishes her phone out of the pocket of her apron, checks her messages, then returns to the app. She tends to see quite a few profiles that are just pictures of bodies; couples looking for a third. Discreet fun. A unicorn. She usually swipes by them, thinking them sad or sleazy without really interrogating why she thinks this. The photo’s just the woman’s tits and the man’s abs, and so often not even those look real, clearly catfish images taken off the internet.

She has a friend who came here from Dublin a year before her and met an award-winning naturalist on the app. Now they live together in his Downtown Brooklyn brownstone among stuffed specimens and exotic, blooming flora. The naturalist is going to marry her friend to keep him in the States, and because they are in love. To be in love among all those flowers, she thinks, must be really fucking special.

Swipe. Swipe. Swipe.

*

She gets home at one a.m. and climbs into bed, feeling the springs settling beneath her. The mattress objects to even the slightest of movements; if she breathes particularly deeply, it begins to plink and pop and she imagines she is in a pot of boiling stew. She cannot relax. The room is so hot and the mundane horror of the night and the people in it has electrified her. She stinks of alcohol, her hands of citrus fruits, so she gets up and takes her threadbare towel to the bathroom. She turns on the shower, drops her pyjama shorts and vest onto the floor, and steps in, breathing in the steam. One of her housemates keeps a hanging basket in the bathroom, and its trailing leaves in the shape of hearts spill out and curl around the shower curtain, which Dani has only pulled shut part of the way. The tendrils are long and beautiful in the shadows, the small lamp above the mirror barely illuminating the room. She nudges the curtain, allowing the plant to move gently towards the water, and angles herself so that the leaves press against her back. In the half-light, the touch of something living feels almost holy.

Back in bed, she listens to sirens, shouts, laughter. The prisms and woven decorations that hang in her window cast alien shapes across the room. She is past the stage where sweat beads, and can instead feel her body flushing with heat every few minutes, like a wave breaking. She looks at the app again. Almost everyone is beautiful here, but sometimes she cannot tell the difference between people who are attractive and people she is attracted to. She tries not to be so objective. Yes, this person is hot but has she ever actually had feelings for anyone with muscles like those, or hair like that? Yes, that person could be a model, but does that turn her on? Not really. She wonders what people on the app think of her, when they see her photos. Petite? Or short, not enough? Slender or scrawny? Brunette or boring? Maybe she should get an unusual haircut. Some more tattoos.

A profile catches her eye. Another couple, but their pictures are different. Their faces don’t feature but the images, always from the neck down, look professionally shot, their bodies at galas in front of step-and-repeats patterned with corporate logos. And their bodies look good. Well, they look rich. Toned. Well dressed. It’s as if they are dolls made to clip together but sold separately, of course, for maximum profit. The name on the profile is Julia. Age 35. The bio is simple.

Julia and Justin. Professional couple seeking someone for conversation and exploration.

Let’s meet for dinner.

‘Conversation and exploration’ as a phrase is cringe, she thinks, but still. It’s less psychotic than so many bios she’s seen, less explicit. Classier. And the very idea of a dinner makes her mouth water. Those bodies would, at the very least, buy her an expensive meal. She has eaten one-minute noodles every day for the past four days and is going to get scurvy. She imagines the sort of restaurant they might take her to and swipes right. It is unlikely, she tells herself, that anything will actually come of saying yes to Julia and Justin.

It’s four a.m. and she still hasn’t managed to sleep. She imagines the sounds of the city as a gradient. Intense colour during the day, fading slightly at night, picking up around dawn when the early risers start to pigment the city once more. She hasn’t the concentration to put on a show on her laptop, or try to entertain herself beyond the immediate distraction of her phone. Her friends at home in Dublin, five hours ahead, are posting about their mornings. It is a bright day there, and there are lots of nice shots of the city as people walk to work, Spotify tracks by Irish bands play over photos of the Liffey glistening in the morning sun. She misses it, in moments like this. She hasn’t been home in two years. A notification drops down from the top of her phone screen, the little orange icon. You’ve got a match! She wonders what sad bastard is swiping at this hour.

*

She wakes a little after noon. Something about the match with Julia had settled her. Probably the promise of dinner, in itself so dreamy it allowed her to drift off. She checks her phone.

Hi Dani, thanks for matching. You look like fun. What do you do?

She showers again before replying, this time washing her hair, shaving her whole body, dowsing herself in lavender body wash. After, sitting on her bed, draped in her towel, she writes back the truth, that she’s a bartender, but she doesn’t want to be; that she’s been in the city two years. Then she returns the question – what do they do? Who are they?

I’m a lawyer. I love reading and films. Justin is a producer. We’ve lived in New York together the last fifteen years. We’d love to meet you.

Fifteen years ago, Dani was ten. Fourth class. Her parents split up that year, and she lived with her grandmother for most of it. She didn’t have to change schools or anything, her grandmother lived close by, but she remembers a knot in her stomach, not being able to concentrate on sums, her teacher strumming Beatles songs on an acoustic guitar. She imagines Julia and Justin aged twenty in front of the New York skyline, the world at their feet while she ate biscuits and watched Nickelodeon crouched in front of Nanny’s space heater.

I’d love to meet you too, she writes.

*

They arrange to have dinner that evening. Julia asks whereabouts she lives, and Dani tells her, though doubts these people can be prevailed upon to come to Brooklyn, and what use is it for them to come to her, anyway? Even if, for some perverse reason, they wanted to see her apartment, she could barely fit them in her room, which is a mess and smells like a nightclub, and there is no real living area to speak of. One of her housemates has left trays of dried mango all around the kitchen. Then Julia tells her they have a reservation at eight at a restaurant in SoHo, right on Dani’s train line. A nice compromise. She Googles the name. The restaurant is strange, part furniture boutique, part eatery, with large windows and lots of shelves. It has multiple awards, a four out of five dollar signs expense rating. She does not allow herself to look at the menu.

She has the day off, hours to get ready. She wonders what they will want from her. She’s never had a threesome but always imagined the politics of such an encounter to be confusing and awkward. How does one person not feel left out at any given time? Even in porn, there is always someone moaning extra loud without being touched, just to stifle their own embarrassment. She intends to eat a lot at dinner, and she’ll have to drink a good bit to chill herself out enough to go home with these people. She hopes she does not feel sick. She hopes she is what they want. She opens the windows and listens to music. In the late afternoon, she has a bowl of one-minute noodles. She curls her hair but thinks it makes her look like a ram, so she straightens it, but it will only straighten halfway, leaving her with shapeless waves. She decides to wear the black dress, because it makes her feel mature. She puts on nude lipstick, afraid a darker colour might get spoiled by her food, spread across her face as the night goes on.

She leaves at quarter past seven, afraid of being late. It’s too hot for a coat but she wears one anyway. Men in a decked-out silver jeep catcall her from on high, but it would be worse without something to cover up with. The train is air-conditioned, and she powders away the sweat on her upper lip. She wonders if she ought to have brought anything – condoms, mints, cocaine – but she figures those sorts of things are Julia and Justin’s responsibility. She only promised to bring herself, and here she is. She looks at her reflection in the opposite window. If she was a rich New Yorker, she would buy that girl dinner. No question.

She realizes she has let no one know where she is going, not having mentioned the date in any of the idle conversations she’d had with friends on social media throughout the day. Usually, if she has a date of any kind, it’s the first thing she brings up, texting friends pictures of the person and the name of wherever they’re going, but this feels different. She wonders if she is ashamed. Perhaps as an Irish person, shame is so much a part of her that she cannot distinguish it, and honestly, she thinks, it’s probably just as well. Either way, she should let someone know where she’s going, so she sends a quick text to her friend Anna who lives in Ridgewood.

Have a date tonight woops forgot to tell you! V fancy place in Soho with some rich freak$. Will update you!

Sending the text with a link to the restaurant makes her feel more confident. Now the whole thing is a funny story, some gas adventure Dani’s off on, to be recounted in a voice note in the morning. And she doesn’t even have to go home with Julia and Justin if she doesn’t want to. It’ll be a good story either way. Anna texts back.

BANSHEE 113

!!! intriguing?! Does that dollar sign imply multiple freak$ involved?

It’s a couple, Dani responds. Wish me luck! Then she sends the sunglasses emoji and stops replying.

She realizes, as she walks up cacophonous Canal Street, that she doesn’t have Julia’s last name, so won’t be able to say what the reservation is under. From the website, it didn’t look like the type of place that would have a bar she could wait at. But as she turns off Canal and onto the cross street where the restaurant is, she sees she needn’t have worried. She recognizes Julia and Justin from their bodies alone as they sweep up the sidewalk from the opposite direction, almost as though from thin air, arriving at the same moment she does. The pair are exactly as she’d imagined them; tall, faces painted with money. Julia wears a shimmering midnight dress. The perfect stitching of Justin’s suit makes him look almost pixelated, like an animation. Dani realizes she is surprised, that she hadn’t actually expected them to appear at all.

‘Dani,’ says Julia, bending to kiss Dani’s cheek. She smells like rose water. Justin is holding a bouquet of tangerine flowers across his arm. Without saying anything, he hands them to Dani, then leans in and kisses her too. Dani thanks him.

‘Oh my god,’ she says. ‘These are beautiful. You didn’t have to do that!’ She feels a little embarrassed, but she’s not sure if it’s for herself or for them. Normally, if she turned up to a date with someone sight unseen and they brought her a bouquet, she’d think it was over the top, insincere. But the flowers smell wonderful, and holding them, she feels radiant, as if some of their colour has transferred to her. Julia and Justin usher her through the entrance ahead of them, and in the rush of air from the opening door, she feels their lingering kisses, one on either cheek.

The maître d’ knows them, or Dani gets the impression he does, from the way he eyes them, how he does not ask for a name.

‘Please, this way,’ he says. The restaurant feels like the sort of hybrid space one sees in dreams. Trailing vines and terracotta, glazed pottery and glittering glasses of expensive wine. They are led through the crowded tables and shelves of ceramics to a staircase leading to a basement level. Dani feels a little self-conscious going first with the flowers in her arms, and wishes Julia and Justin were ahead of her. She wonders what they’re thinking, in the collective mind that she assumes they share, and if later in the night, she might become part of it, the three of them like the fates sharing one eye to see the future.

Downstairs is windowless, and arranged like a home. Several spaced-out bookshelves and glass cabinets surround low, grey couches and a wide, glass coffee table with sharp edges. Stalks of some type of succulent rise from an urn at its centre. Past this assemblage, the flooring changes from navy carpet to ashy wood. A triangular dining table sits under an elaborate lighting fixture, the curves and whirls of which remind Dani of an ice sculpture. Several staff appear, offering to take their coats, and pulling out their chairs. A waitress offers to take the flowers but Julia raises a hand to stop her.

‘Why don’t you get us a vase for these?’ She smiles at the waitress. ‘We can have them on the table. They’re so pretty to look at.’

Ordinarily Dani would be uncomfortable with such a request being made seemingly on her behalf. But down here, in this place with these people, it does not feel so unnatural. She notices that though the staff wear wide, welcoming expressions, none ever meet her eye, or the eyes of Julia or Justin, always looking away, just above or below them, in a strange display of deference that Dani is not used to.

‘Mad that we’re the only people down here,’ she says, once they are seated, their water poured. The orange flowers blaze at the table’s centre.

‘We booked specially,’ Julia replies. ‘It gets quite crowded upstairs. Down here we can get to know you better. Have a little peace.’

‘Well, it’s lovely,’ Dani says, almost laughing at herself. As if she has myriad other establishments of a similar standard with which to compare it. She sort of wishes she hadn’t told them she was an underpaid bartender. She opens the crisp menu.

‘Yes, we like it,’ Julia says. Only now is Dani able to get a proper look at them. Julia, definitely, is older than thirty-five, though her face is filled to perfection. Her dark hair is expensively cut and highlighted. But Justin, it’s hard to say. He is generically handsome, but he could be younger, maybe quite a lot younger. He has still yet to say a word.

‘What brought you to the city?’ Julia asks.

‘I needed a change, I suppose,’ Dani says. ‘Dublin is so small. Sometimes it’s like living in a board game.’

‘And do you like how big New York is? I’d say it’s certainly a change.’

‘It’s different, but you know sometimes it feels as compressed as somewhere smaller. When I first moved here I thought it was so huge and so anonymous. But now, I’ve started to see the same people, and it sort of feels like I’ve never been anywhere else. But I guess everywhere shrinks when you’ve spent time in it.’

‘A glove that takes the shape of your hand,’ Julia says, and places her manicured hand on Dani’s. The waiter comes to take their drinks order and Julia orders a bottle of wine that Dani doesn’t catch the name of.

‘You’ll drink red,’ Julia says. Dani nods, although she’s not sure it was a question.

‘Some people just click with New York and feel like they’ve been here their whole lives,’ Julia continues. ‘And some never fit in and feel lost and lonely the whole time. But it seems like you’re a natural.’

‘So I’m told,’ Dani says. ‘I think I’ve assimilated, to an extent. People are surprised I’m Irish, quite often. Not my accent, but I guess how I look, or something.’

Julia looks at her. ‘That’s interesting,’ she says.

‘So is your name actually Julia?’ Dani asks. ‘Are you really Justin? A lot of people use fake names, pseudonyms, on apps you know, when they’re using them like you guys do.’

Julia laughs. Justin looks at her and laughs a little too.

‘Don’t worry,’ Julia says. The waiter appears with the bottle, and Julia declines to taste it, waving him forward to proceed with pouring the three glasses, which he does with one arm dutifully behind his back. Julia raises her glass and Dani and Justin follow suit.

‘To Dani,’ Julia says. Dani feels herself blush. Justin opens his mouth for the first time all evening. ‘To Dani,’ he smiles.

Dani takes a long gulp of the wine, which is so smooth she can barely feel it running down her throat. As she lowers her glass, Julia reaches out to the bouquet, and plucks one of the flowers from its stalk. Dani watches her as she holds the flower out to Justin, who closes his eyes and takes it in his mouth. Then Julia takes another flower from the vase and turns to Dani, who opens her mouth, without hesitation.

From issue #15: spring/summer 2023

About the Author
Laura-Blaise McDowell holds an MA in Creative Writing from UCD. She was shortlisted for the 2019 Writing.ie Short Story of the Year Award and the 2020 Costa Short Story Award, among other prizes. Her fiction and poetry have appeared in various publications.