Review by Kwame Eff
*This review contains spoilers. Consider reading the story here first on the author’s Substack, “The Conversation Club”.
“You’ll never know what you can learn about a person unless you go out and talk to them,”
…says the tagline to A Night Out by Jonathan R. Rose.
Jeremy is a single man out on the town, hoping to meet a single woman in the bar. He spots an attractive woman, Michelle, having a drink on her own. Eye contact is established. Moves are made. A common enough premise, you’ll agree.
What is not common is Rose’s ability to add so much interesting texture and depth to a scene that’s been done a million times.
Jeremy and Michelle are breaking the ice normally, as we do, until Michelle says something slightly weird.
When asked to explain why it had been a long time since her last visit to this bar (a detail she mentioned), Michelle answers cryptically that “(she) was counting.”
Confounded, Jeremy asks a few follow up questions and Michelle reveals that she had been counting [up to 25 million] for “pleasure”. Her answer clarifies nothing and Jeremy begins to get slightly creeped out.
But Rose knows something about the thought pattern of single men seeking womanly companionship that saves the night for the two protagonists. Specifically: that straight men will overlook quite a lot of eccentric or odd behaviour from women when they are in pursuit mode. The perfect woman to meet at the bar is often any woman who is at the bar and this can lead to a habitual behaviour known as womanizing. It’s pleasing until it isn’t like so many other habits.
“He wasn’t all that interested in the counting but she was too pretty to let go.”
Hooked on the pursuit of Michelle, Jeremy listens as she relays the odd story of her seemingly compulsive counting. Michelle explains that she started counting one day to relieve stress. Realizing she enjoyed counting, she just continued doing it throughout each day. The practice was not without its downside though. Michelle relates that she was no longer able to speak with people, use a computer, or watch television. Jonathan Rose here shows us that there are always potential downsides to our habitual behaviours.
“I liked how I felt when I was doing it, so I figured why stop?” Michelle says. “I kept telling myself that the moment I stopped enjoying it, I would stop.”
The moment I stopped enjoying it, I would stop.
This line hit hard, because as a reader one is suddenly forced to consider our own habitual behaviours–habitual behaviours that in many cases we aren’t even enjoying anymore.
We stay in mediocre or even bad jobs where we don’t even like the tasks and the commute sucks. We stay in shitty relationships that stopped working years ago. We maintain unhealthy addictions…But Michelle, crazy as she is for spending a year of her life in isolation, counting, was the author of her own life’s story. Her behaviour was odd, sure, but what makes her such a remarkable individual, and an attractive woman beyond the superficiality of her looks, is her powerful self-awareness and discipline.
“I thought about counting to a billion,” she says. “But it didn’t take me long to realize that was impossible. So I scaled it down to one-hundred million, but that would have meant at least another year or more. So I went down to fifty million, and that’s when I realized it was time to stop: The moment I was not only planning for the finish line, but was trying to draw it closer.”
Time to stop. What a concept. Many of us lack the insight to know when to quit that which stops serving.
We don’t know anything about Michelle beyond the limits of the contained world Rose has skillfully crafted for us. But in that world, we see a woman with a kind of mastery of herself that makes her attractive to men who respect women. Her ability to identify what serves and what doesn’t and to take appropriate corresponding action is what makes her such a magnetic force in the story.
It’s why I knew that if I were Jeremy, my sole focus would be on securing Michelle’s phone number and a second date! It’s why when I read the part where Jeremy is following after the departing Michelle, I felt myself moving with him, hoping he’d land that second date or phone number.
In his writing of Jeremy’s slow developing infatuation with Michelle, Jonathan Rose has imagined the kind of connection that makes men stop going to bars looking for women because they’ve found “The One” and not just the one who happened to be there.
10/10. Thoughtful & romantic.
Jonathan R. Rose is the author of After the Flames: A Burn Victim’s Struggle With Celebrity published by Dundurn Press, a Canadian owned and operated publisher.
Kwame Eff is the publisher and a contributor to t.a.l.e.zine.