by Alison Tyler
‘Your book,’ Nora said, then caught herself, obviously realising that maybe this wasn’t the most tactful concept to bring up. For the past four years I’ve been writing a book about art versus artefact. I’m not sure if my studies will interest anyone else, but the work lets me think in English instead of Latin, and that has to be good for my psyche.
‘On CD, of course,’ I told her. ‘I was out of my head, but not insane. I have the CD in the case,’ I explained. ‘But that doesn’t matter either. This matters. Finding out what’s in them. I don’t know why, but it does.’ I put my hand protectively on the computer bag, then looked at my friend. I can trust Nora with every feeling I have. She’ll never let me down. Now I said, ‘I know you’re thinking that I’m simply transferring my anger into something else, right? But that’s not it. I can’t explain it any better.’
I looked at Nora and my eyes must have pleaded. And Nora, who has been my best friend for a decade, who knows me better than anyone in the world, was kind enough to say, ‘All right. I understand.’ Seeing those imminent tears in my eyes, she added, ‘It’s OK, Eli –’ using that pet name once more, a nickname that only she can get away with ‘– Don’t worry. It’s OK.’
The Pink Fedora closes at two. Officially, anyway. Best friends can stay on longer. Besides, where else would I go? Not to Nora’s without her. Not home, because the beachfront apartment wasn’t my home any more. Had it ever been my home? Byron had decorated it to look like the living space of a TV lawyer. I’d never liked anything in it other than the prints on the walls, and I’d never had the guts to voice my opinion.
I hung around while Nora did all the little after-hours housekeeping she likes to engage in. Just because the club is shut for the night, doesn’t mean it’s time for her to rest. She tends to be wired for hours after closing, and I know that she gets a thrill in being in this space that she’s created herself.
Nora has confessed to me that she doesn’t have to put nearly as much effort into the club now as she did when she first started. But that doesn’t mean she’s slacked off. She likes control. More than that – she revels in it.
While I watched, Nora flicked on the overhead lights from a hidden panel by the rear door, instantly bathing the room in a glow that felt far too bright. This was a place both destined and designed for the dark. Seeing the tables so well lit was disconcerting, like learning the trick behind the magic show. Who really wants to know that the magician’s hat has a faux bottom? Doesn’t everyone, down deep inside, hope that the glossy white rabbit appeared there by magic?
Travis helped her put things back in order. They didn’t bother with the glasses or the litter on the tables. Those would be picked up later by the cleaning crew. Instead, the two worked to blow out the candles. To snag any left-behind jackets, scarves and cellphones and bring these to their Lucite lost-and-found box behind the bar.
I watched them through tired eyes and then finally I set my head on my crossed arms, my vision fading away to darkness.
In my dreams, I was making love to Byron, pressed against the window once more, my body chilled by the cold plate glass, my eyes focused on the faded denim-blue of the ocean below. In my dreams, I was moving with him, our bodies joined. Music played in the background, softly. ‘With or Without You’ on endless loop.
‘You give up your power so easily.’ That was Nora speaking. Was she in the room with us? No, the scene had changed in that watery way of dreams. We were all in the Cinéma Vérité room. Nora, Byron and me. I was the one clad in vinyl. Nora had on a pinstriped suit with a matching fedora. She looked like a gangster. What did a pinstriped fedora mean in ‘Nora code’? I couldn’t remember.
‘You hand it over,’ she said, watching as Byron slid my form-fitting dress up my body and began to fuck me from behind. ‘Don’t do that. What do you really think? That you can’t live – with or without him? That’s imbecilic. Of course, you can. You can live plenty well. Better than that. Better than with him. That’s for sure. Didn’t you learn anything from being with Dean?’
I looked in the mirror and suddenly saw not my reflection, but Nora’s. My hair was short like hers, and frosted blue at the tips. My eyes were her ever-changing shade of green, not the normal hazel I see when I look in the bathroom mirror. Was she fucking Byron? Was she fucking me?
In a flash, Byron disintegrated into a cloud of dust, a pile of broken shards of clay, decorating the floor around my feet. But there were still three of us in the room: Nora and Dean were on either side of me, Dean moving his body against mine, Nora watching. It had been sexy, hadn’t it? The three of us entwined. Nora had shown me what Dean liked best, and we’d taken turns pleasuring him, suckling from him until he collapsed back against the pillows, one of his hands on each of our backs, his body wracked with spasms of pleasure.
And the dream changed again. Dean was gone and Gwen stood in his place. Nora was still there, commenting, critiquing. ‘So what do you think?’ she was asking Gwen. ‘Armenian or Oriental? You can tell me. I promise I won’t tell anyone else.’
I opened my eyes and looked up at the wall behind the dance floor. There were Nora and blond-haired Travis, in a clinch. He had his hands supporting her, and she had wrapped her long lean legs around his body. It took me a moment to realise that this was reality. That Nora was capable of having sex with Dean solo, then engaging in two ménages à trois before hooking up with another man all in a matter of hours. I kept my head resting on my arms, but I knew they couldn’t see me. They were back there in the movie room, making their own sexual cinema.
Music was playing, but it wasn’t U2.
It was Def Leppard’s ‘Pour Some Sugar on Me’.
And my dream was over.
Chapter Six
After college, Nora and I decided to travel abroad together. It was my belief that this would be the last time in our lives to do something on a whim. Of course, I was wrong. Maybe the trip was like that for me. But Nora continues to live her life whim by whim, fantasy to fantasy. And I never really have done anything on a whim, before college, or after. Even this trip was planned meticulously.
We travelled the old-fashioned way, moving through the different countries on our agenda by overnight train. This was my choice. I think Nora would have preferred to have rented a bright-scarlet sports car and venture at a hundred miles per hour along the circuitous highways. But I had always dreamed of taking a train throughout Europe. It seemed to me the way people were meant to see Europe, out of the windows of a swiftly moving train. Since I was paying for the trip, and Nora was bunking for free, the mode of transportation was my choice. I’d been saving for this trip for years. Nora swore she would pay me back – but it didn’t matter to me. I would have gotten a sleeping car whether I was with her or by myself.
I’m lying.
I can’t imagine having gone on the trip without her.
All through Europe, we shared a sleeping car, and even though the space was tiny, we never got on each other’s nerves. At least, we shared the car whenever Nora hadn’t found someone else she wanted to sleep with. Then I had the sleeping car to myself, and Nora disappeared with her conquest for the evening, always returning to me in the morning with stories of romance that were as exciting as any of the steamy paperbacks I’d taken with me to help pass the time. Nora loved to divulge her sexy secrets over coffee in the café car, licking her lips seductively if her most recent lover happened to pass us by.
While Nora was out in the real world, I’d be snuggled in the tiny berth, reading late into the night about people who were just like Nora. Free spirits. Embracers of lust. The irony wasn’t lost on me, yet I didn’t have the ability to change the scene, didn’t have any idea of how to become a heroine in a novel of my own.
But nobody really behaves like those pulp novel characters, do they?
No one but Nora.
In the month that we travelled, she bedded an Italian conductor, a French physicist and a Spanish soldier. She met two graduate students fro
m Australia and slept between them for two nights in a row. ‘I was like the Vegemite,’ she joked afterwards, the coffee cup warming her hands as she spoke. ‘You know, like in that Men at Work song? I was the Vegemite in a Vegemite sandwich.’
‘What’s Vegemite?’ I asked, curious.
‘No idea,’ she said, grinning, ‘but I think it’s some sort of a spread.’
When we did alight at various stops, she’d stage a ‘hostel takeover’, creating the same sort of ambience in whichever youth hostel we chose that she had maintained in her dorm room. Nora has always been the life of every party. That’s the one constant about her.
I hate to admit that I often fantasised about taking her place, of slipping into her shoes, or her battered black leather motorcycle jacket with the white stripes on the back and down the sleeves, or her ripped red T-shirt with the word SWALLOWS written across the chest, flanked by two little blue birds. I dreamed about having the confidence to respond when some man paid me a compliment. Nora and I do occasionally pass for twins, we can look so much alike. But our resemblance is solely on the surface. And even after being her friend for so many years, I still am unable to channel even a tenth of the confidence that Nora possesses.
What I would have given to experience a railroad romance, like she did. But my mild flirtations never went further than a bat of my eyelashes, didn’t lead me to another passenger’s berth or a sojourn into anyone else’s sleeping car.
I told myself not to worry. That love would eventually find me even if excitement eluded me. Besides, the purpose of the trip for me wasn’t to have a summer romance. It was to visit all the artwork I’d studied over the past four years. The purpose for Nora was to gather information about the underground clubs she’d heard of. She was on a mission to visit as many as she could, to discover what made them popular. There were dozens out there, more than I would have thought. Nora listened to gossip in other languages, and she had an uncanny ability to find the right people who would give us a password that would enter us into worlds of debauchery.
By day, we went to the museums, using our soon-to-expire student IDs to get in cheaply. As students this was our last hurrah. All day long we spent viewing the ancient art and artefacts that made my world whole. We blended in with the other tourists: I looked like any other future historian; Nora resembled the gaggles of students who didn’t really want to be there, the ones who had a much better time in the cafeterias, or sprawled out in front of the museums, sunning themselves and sharing sodas.
By night, we went to the clubs, Nora falling into them, the way I fell into my favourite paintings. I’ve been known to get lost in a piece of artwork, to be able to stare at a picture for hours, hardly moving, barely even remembering to breathe. I have friends who speed-walk through museums, wanting to get their money’s worth, which means to them that they need to see every single piece a museum has to offer. I know other people who only wish to see the most famous works on display. Show them the Mona Lisa, and they’re finished. Point them towards Monet’s Waterlilies and they can call it a day.
I have never had any such desires. If I can find one painting that speaks to me, I am satisfied. It doesn’t need to be the most famous. It doesn’t even need to be well known. If a work lingers with me, in my thoughts, desires or dreams, then I feel fulfilled.
Nora’s the same way – with nightclubs rather than artwork. After hours, in tiny clubs, she comes to life. The place doesn’t have to be the coolest, the hippest, the one that’s written about in every gossip magazine from Hello! to OK. The environment simply has to sing to Nora. Some part of the atmosphere must call out to her, touch her in a way that’s unexpected.
Even after college, she continued to be a piece of work in progress, creating her looks carefully, naming and chronicling them. At night, during our journey, she became herself when dancing in the darkness. She lit up, her eyes aglow. I held back, as might have been expected, viewing from the sidelines, never judging because that’s not my style, only watching.
How funny that we worked together like that. Nora keeping me company from art show to art show, museum to museum, never complaining that her feet hurt, that we’d viewed too many sculptures to keep track of, that once you’d seen one Monet you’d seen them all. Then, to repay her, there I was as her date, her constant companion, entering worlds of sin I’d never even imagined existed.
In college, I’d focused every bit of myself on learning all about the art of the world. Nora had spent those same four years focused on learning about people. What they wanted. What they craved. She hadn’t been a bad student, simply a vague one. The only subjects aside from anthropology that truly captured her interest were the languages she took: French, Italian, Spanish. And I think she really only learned those languages so that she could communicate with the exotic foreign students who came to Santa Barbara for their semesters abroad. She quizzed them about all sorts of things, learning about their favourite music, the types of dance clubs they frequented, the trends from their native lands. Her love of language paid off during our travels – as did her friendships with the various students. Wherever we went, Nora knew people to take us out, people to put us up, so that our nights not spent on trains or in hostels were spent jammed in tiny apartments with six or seven roommates, all more than happy to share their space with us – and more than happy to share their beds with Nora, if she’d have them.
The only place we paid for a really nice hotel was in Paris. Here, we splurged – or, I splurged – because this was the best world for both of us. Paris boasted my favourite art, and it contained Nora’s favorite of all the clubs. We spent a week in the city, visiting the Louvre, the Pompidou, the Picasso Museum, the Musée D’Orsay and all of the tiny galleries lining the Seine.
Every evening, we headed to the student quarters, where we hung out at the open-air cafés, drinking glasses of dark-red wine and listening to the nearby patrons as they talked about where to buy the best hashish. Students are the same all over the world. They might have been speaking French, but they sounded exactly like the kids who hung out at Waxe Wod, trying to impress one another in spite of their total lack of knowledge.
Each night, Nora found us a different place to go dancing. She favoured the clubs that played synthetic dance music, heavy with techno beats. Nora liked to dance until her whole body ached, until the soles of her shoes gave out like the princesses in that famous fairy tale. But she wanted more. I could always tell when she was yearning for something new. She would have the same expectant look on her face that I get when I walk into an exhibition featuring an artist I’ve never heard of. My whole body attitude changes. I feel electrified, exhilarated.
In Paris, Nora decided that she wanted to go to a club that only allowed in couples.
‘What are we going to do?’ I asked her, betting on Nora to scrounge up two men for us to mate with. Or if not actually mate with, then dance with. Two men who would at first glance believe this was their lucky day – and for Nora’s, it probably would be. For mine, the date would be a bit of a dud. Unless the fellow liked to discuss art.
With Nora, she could practically snap her fingers and men would appear out of thin air. She’s magic that way. But for once, the idea of finding dates didn’t appeal to her. If we brought along two guys, we’d have to interact with them, and on this night, Nora was only after information. So rather than go as two couples, we became one.
‘What do you mean, we’re going to be the couple?’ I asked, as confused as if she’d started speaking to me in a foreign language.
‘Trust me,’ Nora insisted. She’s always said that to me, and I do trust her. Sometimes, begrudgingly, but I do.
Nora dressed in drag, which was easy for her with her short hair, her slim build. She bound her breasts and wore a crisp white shirt and black blazer, black tuxedo pants with a black satin stripe down the side and men’s Oxfords, all purchases from the flea market on the outskirts of Paris. With the help of her cosmetics, she added a rough five o’c
lock shadow to her cheeks. Her hair was blue-black and she fashioned it into a spiky rebel look. The end result was that she didn’t appear entirely masculine – there was too much beauty in her face to hide the girl there. But she didn’t look exactly feminine either. She possessed a totally androgynous look, which she understood would work for the night. If she paired herself with me, people would take it for granted that she was a man.
This wasn’t the first time Nora had dressed in drag. During her various experiments in how far she could push the limits of fashion, she’d occasionally ventured out on campus wearing her male friends’ clothing. She liked to see how many people she could fool, going as far as entering the men’s room while clad in her costume. Nobody ever stopped her, but I don’t know if that’s because she actually managed to fool them – like the author of Self-made Man, a different Nora, Norah Vincent – or simply because she stared them down. Nora’s known for her dead-eyed stare.
On this night in Paris, she pulled out all the tricks, including stuffing a rolled pair of nylons down the front of her slacks.
Was it wrong for me to think she was handsome? Was it wrong for me to want to fuck her?
I kept those feelings to myself, staying silent as she dressed me to look like her ultimate dream date, creating more cleavage than I actually own with the assistance of an under wire demi-cup, pulling a frilly red dress over my head – also purchased at the fabulous flea market that had taken an hour-long metro ride to get to – making me wear heels that I’d never have chosen on my own. One needs sensible shoes to log as many hours as I do walking through museums. Sensible isn’t a word that Nora puts much faith in.
‘I don’t know,’ I told her, staring at my reflection as if seeing myself for the first time. I couldn’t believe how sexy I looked. How did she do it? I wondered silently. How did she make me look so pretty? When I am left to my own skills, I definitely know how to use a mascara wand. But I am never able to win the same results that Nora achieves. She’s a magician with make-up. On this night, she outlined my eyes using a silvery pencil and suddenly they seemed as large and bright as her own. She used a rose hue on my cheeks and coloured in my lips with a dark merlot.
