Pleasure is Everything – Jay Graham

January 17, 2026

They would sit at the bar, she decided—a booth would be too intimate. She arrived before him, choosing the furthest in a series of chrome stools so that he’d have to sit on her left, facing her good side. He showed up eleven minutes late. The first thing she noticed about him was that he was pretty, prettier than his photos.

She’d dressed as she always did for dates, in austere asymmetrical cuts, which demonstrated her taste, and a neutral palette, which demonstrated her restraint. The articles of clothing he’d selected for himself quietly shocked her, and because she wasn’t used to being shocked by people, a second and more unsettling shock followed. His jeans, loose around his hips, were seemingly unwashed and soft-looking, his leather boots greasy. Every item seemed to not only suggest the body beneath, but to have an intricate, private relationship with that body, its oils and muscles, its habits and desires. By comparison, she felt architectural, like a building. She ordered a drink, specifying the liquor. He got well. Above the bar, the tubes of a large neon sign announced that Pleasure Is Everything.

They struggled to talk to each other, which was surprising. On the app, their messages had been witty and consistent. She liked that his messages seemed spontaneous, often arriving early in the morning or at times when otherwise nothing interesting ever happened, like 3pm. More than once, he double texted. Now she noticed he’d look at the walls when describing something about his life, and this put her in the position of looking at a face that was not looking back.

As they took turns pushing the conversation along—her kicking at it, him nudging it—she noticed him slowly and repeatedly pressing a nail into the malleable material of his phone case, making thin crescent-shaped indentations. She liked her right-side seat, where she could take in bits of information like this from a dominant position. She was listening only partially, because another part of her attention was devoted to accumulating first impressions and looking for details she could tell her roommate about later, so that if it went badly, which it already seemed to be, she’d at least have a story. She was scanning the perimeter of the bar for this purpose when she noticed, embedded in the shadowed contours of the corner booth, a couple leaning close to each other. One was petting the other’s head and saying something to them, and the other was looking up into their face and nodding. Their bodies expressed a clear and simple message of mutual devotion. She turned back to her date.

The next thing she noticed was that, when he went to the bathroom, he left his phone behind, face-up in its rubbery case. So this is the type of person he is, she thought. When she tapped the glass, the lock screen came alive, showing a heavily pixelated image of a snowy landscape, pristine apart from a dark red stain in the center: a white weasel poked out from the ribcage of a bloodied carcass. It stared back at her. So this is the type of person he is? she thought. She quickly shut the phone off, pulled out her own, and typed a message to her roommate: I hate my outfit. Then she replaced the word “my” with the word “his” and pressed send.

An hour passed painfully. Something between them had died in that time, she knew, or been killed. She covered this thought with another. As they stood to leave, she glanced back at the couple in the corner booth. They were no longer looking into each other’s faces. One’s head was lowered, their expression distorted with an emotion she couldn’t read, and the other’s hand was moving in slow circles around their back, twisting the fabric into a spiral. Her date had gone ahead of her and was now standing outside, flicking a spark into a cigarette. Passing out into the dark wet street, she felt fatigued by the prospect of inhabiting herself for the rest of the night. It was if she were dragging her personality behind her, in a sack. She wanted badly to go home. To speed up the goodbye process, she asked to exchange numbers, confident they would never see each other again. When he passed her his phone, the weasel looked out at her again from its grisly tableau, wearing the neutral expression of a creature possessing unreachable, untranslatable animal knowledge.