Dec 24, 2024
Nov 16,2024
About The Rehearsal, Alexis says: "This story is meant to be read as a kind of Rorschach test. In particular, I wanted to explore how men and women can sometimes view the world very differently... "
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It's dark now. The blackout happened while I was waiting for my accompanist to arrive for rehearsal – another elderly limb must have thrown itself against a power line when it dislocated from its trunk. Twenty minutes later, my door swings open with a sigh and an expected voice calls out from my entryway, "Hello, I’m here."
I follow the gravelly sound; it’s Josef. My guitarist. He’s thrust his hulking body into my alcove and is so close that I can smell his livid sweat and his parched breath. I take a step back, but he takes a step closer. Josef is a man accustomed to filling up space, as if others should contort themselves to accommodate him, an arrogance innate to large men who look down upon the rest of us.
"The whole block is out," he says. "Trees uprooted. Your neighbours are going to be pissed about their dented Teslas."
"Some people like being pissed. It gives them a sense of purpose."
He rests his guitar case against my wall. I cannot tell if he’s smiling. All I can see is the rough outline of his body in my narrow hallway and the edges of his hair grown askew from the savage wind. He hands me a bottle. I grip the glass tightly. It feels like wine. Josef has brought expensive French wine to all three of our past rehearsals with the expectation that we will finish the bottle, and we do, but only because he drinks more than me.
"It’s a good thing we only really need our ears tonight," he says. "I like a blackout. Helps sharpen the senses."
He moves past me with his heavy feet and sits in the chair across from my coffee table lined with the half-dead candles I lit after the blackness fell. We don’t really know each other, but his movements in my house suggest familiarity. With the neck of the wine still in hand, I sit across from him on my loveseat. At our last rehearsal, we assumed these same positions. I had sat explaining the harmonies I wished for him to play during the finale. While I spoke, he had twisted his index finger in his ear and flicked whatever he found onto the floor and glanced out the window to the empty street outside. And at that time, I found this repulsive gesture somewhat endearing, perhaps because it signalled his comfort with me. It is true too that he had almost seemed handsome in the dim afternoon light with his long limbs and earthy eyes and expansive shoulders, and I imagined what it might feel like for his hands to brush my back, if he would have been able to elicit a shiver from skin that hadn’t been touched by another person in so long.
Tonight, though, there is something that bothers me about Josef, but it must be that I cannot really see him, and it’s disorienting to be in a room with someone I understand only vaguely, such that I find myself searching for my bearings. Though he, this guest of mine, seems completely at ease. I pour us two glasses of jammy wine and hand him one. He grabs the glass and swallows greedily.
"I needed this," he says. "I had the shittiest day at work."
"A good day at work is rare. That’s why they call it work." I want to have some wine too, to calm these peculiar nerves of mine, but I resist taking a sip.
"Practising is work too, I suppose. But I like it enough when it takes my mind off things."
"Have you worked on the other pieces we practised last week?" I ask, aware that I’m unable to keep a trace of impatience from my voice.
"I know them well enough. The magic happens with spontaneity. Happy accidents."
He leans back, his head cradled in one of his hands, and then I think he smiles, because even though he doesn’t know much about me, he knows I disagree. I believe in rehearsals and arrangements, in order and detail and rules. I have taken care with these pieces of music and arranged them lovingly like a mother who bathes her child and cleans the dirt from under each tiny fingernail.
"Classical music is different," I say. "There isn’t much room for accidents." I am stating something that will have no effect. Josef hates classical music for precisely that reason – that there is no room for error.
"Not my thing," he says. "I’ve been really into Cuban salsa lately. Did I tell you I went to Cuba recently?"
"You never mentioned it, no." I sit forward and finally take a sip of wine. Josef is going to tell me about it even though I don’t really care.
"It was just last month. I wasn’t expecting much. I’d been told the food sucked and there wasn’t much to look at off resort. It’s true that everything seemed stuck in time, the cars, the houses. You know, very poor. Extremely poor. But man, I went to the dance clubs, and there it was. Life. Real life. The music was just so fucking good."
I feel him staring at me, though there isn’t much I imagine he can see. Cuba: I imagine air thick with tobacco leaf and sugarcane and a heavy, sizzling heat. A salt-laden sea against a sorbet-coloured sky.
I think he smiles again, but in the dull candlelight it seems like a facsimile of what he intended.
"There’s nothing like live music," I say.
"There’s nothing like dancing to that live music. It pulses. People are so free with their bodies there too. That was the other thing. Lots of sex workers going about their business and no judgment from anyone."
"Sex workers?"
"Yeah."
He takes a long drink of wine. It’s as if he’s told me an interesting, innocuous fact about Cuba. A curiosity that I might find charming. I offer him more wine and our fingers accidentally touch. I am unprepared for the erotic, odious shock of his skin, and I ask a question I never should have asked.
"Did you do it?"
"Do what?"
"Buy sex?"
He shakes his head but doesn’t answer. He unlatches his guitar case with a neat snap and picks up his instrument and begins to tune. It sounds like it hasn’t been played in days.
"Like I said. It’s different there. Buying sex seems to be just like buying a beer," he says.
I stand up abruptly and then I sing a scale. My soprano carries a suite of notes in the stiff air. I am lost in the sheer physicality of producing music with my mouth and for a moment, I’ve forgotten about what it was I wanted to learn and then forget.
"Good enough warm-up?" he asks.
"Good enough for now."
"Just a moment. My guitar’s being a bit finicky."
He plucks at his strings and everything sounds sharp. Outside, the rain has stopped but the street is still blanketed in a fist of darkness. The power will be restored soon. Josef turns his pegs, but each time he plays a chord, it still sounds dissonant. As he plays those ugly notes, I try not to focus on what he’s just said. Sex work. Work. Sex.
I remember a story I listened to once on the radio, about women who sold themselves. One woman lived in the raw Nevadan desert in a rooming house. Her body had been used by many men over the years, but as she spoke in her shaky, nicotine-stained drawl, she insisted she didn’t mind her line of work. She came into naturally after she left the porn industry. All the men she saw were kind to her. All of them smelled nice. The interviewer asked if her family knew where she was, and the woman had responded that she didn’t have any family except for her son who had just turned seven-years-old. Later, it was revealed that the woman kept her son’s framed picture under lock and key in her dresser drawer. I thought about why she might do that, if it was more than just the comforting efficiency of compartmentalization. I felt the truth was that she did not want to poison the person she loved most. The woman could lie to herself about her own body and its exploitation, but she couldn’t extend that dishonesty to her child. Her child was the true test of how she really felt about it all.
Now, Josef’s guitar is sounding more and more in tune, the notes less discordant, closer to a pleasurable sweetness.
I say, "It’s strange to me, the notion of buying someone’s body. To use a woman knowing she wouldn’t have otherwise been willing had there been no money involved."
Josef is looking at me, but I can’t tell what it is he’s thinking. His mouth is closed, his eyes vacant. His instrument is tuned, finally, and he begins to strum a benign chord progression on his guitar.
"They say prostitution is the oldest profession," he says.
"The oldest profession is midwifery."
He closes his eyes and begins to play more forcefully, so that I can hear the snarl of his fingers against the strings. It is a melody I don’t recognize, but it sounds like timba; he’s started off slow and now has broken into a rhythmic thrusting salsa. Two ghostly bodies appear in my mind, negotiating in a pattern of feet and arms. I understand what he likes about the music and its evocation of sex. I imagine him at the bar filled with the musk of bodies and alcoholic fumes. A woman brushing up against him while he purchased his gin and tonic. He would have offered her a drink, and she would have accepted. He would have taken her hand and led her to his room. After it was done, though, he would have been regretful, because he would have forgotten about the demanding aftermath, the small talk punctuating the thick silence, the fastening of a belt and rustle of a shirt, the embarrassing flush of a toilet, the need to say something to dissolve the strain.
Josef flattens his palm suddenly against the sound hole of the guitar, killing any reverberation.
He says, "I thought about going through with it. I was close to saying yes. You probably won’t believe this, but I felt like it was even expected of me. But that kind of sex always has consequences. Even when you’re paying for it to be easy. So no, I didn’t go through with it."
Josef looks at me as if expecting me to agree with him, but I can’t stand the look of him right now. His lanky, limby body. His fuzzy head and smarmy smile. The way he splays himself. I begin to sing another scale to warm up. I want the rehearsal done and over. As I sing, Josef accompanies me with simple chords, and when I finish that scale and begin another, he plays with me for the first few notes, and then he loses interest and puts his guitar at rest before pulling out his phone. The flat blue light sharpens his thin lips and slightly crooked nose so that he resembles a caricature of himself.
Then, the lights in my house blinker and they’re on, full force. Everything in my house suddenly vibrant and alive.
And Josef too is clear to me now; the stamp of crows-feet, his liny forehead, and his dry, hard fingernails. His stubble dirty against his unshaven face. He stares at me for a moment and then he swings his hand forward, as if he’s lunging for me, but instead he picks up his instrument.
"I’m ready for real now," he says. "Let’s play."
Alexis MacIsaac is a dual Irish-Canadian citizen whose writing has been featured in Masks Literary Magazine (2023 story award winner), The Bookends Review, and Agnes and True, among others. She previously toured as a musician with Irish shows Riverdance and The High Kings. Now, she works in the civil service in Domestic Oceans Policy and lives in Ottawa with her husband, Calum, and two sons, Cillian and Rafferty. She is currently working on her first novel.
