With or Without You

by Alison Tyler

  I simply got stuck in a rut. A rut called Byron. I thought that true love meant bending myself to fit his mould. I hadn’t realised he was looking outside of the box until he came right out and said so. I lowered my head into my hands, feeling the scream of the hangover wail from ear to ear. Work would be good for me. I couldn’t lie around all day thinking about Byron, hating him. Truth was that I felt conflicted. I was more upset at what I’d done to myself than anything he’d done to me.

  I’d compromised. That was the feeling that came back over and over. I’d transformed into someone he wanted. Someone I thought he wanted, anyway. And in doing so, I’d lost sight of what I wanted for myself.

  Or had I ever really known?

  Softly, I made my way down the hall to Nora’s shower. I knew she’d be sleeping in – as she always does on nights she works at the club. I didn’t want to disturb her as I got ready for work.

  Still, as I was about to close the door to her apartment, I heard the unmistakable sounds of lovemaking coming from down the hall. So even though we’d driven home together, she hadn’t stayed alone. Typical Nora. I shut the door with a click and headed to my car, wondering which boy she was greeting the day with – Dean or Travis?

  Nora started her first official nightclub right after college. Well, right after she left college. She never actually graduated, never actually was able to declare a major. Too many subjects captivated her attention, although none held her interest long enough for her to pass many of her classes. She was too busy experiencing life to study a book – that’s what she claimed, anyway.

  She started club Phon-E on her twenty-first birthday. It was a perfect spot for hip Los Angelenos, down in the dark heart of Hollywood where everything is a façade, nothing what it seems.

  Club Phon-E was decked out entirely in 1920s décor, nearly all of it snagged from local thrift stores and garage sales. Nora’s always had an eye for style. She can enter a store filled with incredibly ugly furniture and find the one prize lurking within. I have the same ability at art auctions. I can always locate the treasure among the trash. Nora brought me along with her when she bought furnishings for her club, but she never bothered to ask my advice on anything. She had a vision, and she turned that vision into a reality. The low-ceilinged room was crowded with black leather club chairs and tiny round glass tables. On each table stood a heavy black lacquered phone outfitted with a number done in neon. Patrons could call each other up and talk. The club was an instant success.

  Nora reinvents herself on a daily basis. She’s never gotten over the concept of being an actual work in progress. I think she hopes someday to have her own art show, to blow up the daily Polaroids she takes of herself. To show the history of her different artistic looks. This chameleon-like ability assists her in the running of her clubs, as well. She likes to have different places to go to suit her moods. When she grew tired of hearing phones ringing all the time, she began to dream up club number two.

  Faux Pas was Nora’s second endeavour, even more successful than the first, with a narrow stage along one wall featuring live bands. Her concept was the belief that where there was live music, there were bound to be mistakes, and those were embraced at Faux Pas. Nora has always had a knack for finding local talent destined to explode. She opened her doors to bands nobody had ever heard of, and beamed as she watched her protégés make it big. I teased her that she only opened Faux Pas in order to maintain a steady line of musicians she wanted to fuck. She smirked in that classic way of hers but never told me I was wrong.

  The Pink Fedora was her third club – more of an old-fashioned dance hall than anything else. Had disco still been in demand, the floor would have been lit up and a mirrored ball would have dangled from the ceiling. Instead, the club has a kaleidoscope theme, with floor-to-ceiling mirrors on the walls, and a dance floor that actually rotates. When the lights get going, multi-hued ribbons and swirls of colour flash over the crowd, reverberating in the mirrors into infinity.

  Nora owns all three places, and she bounces from one to the other depending on who she’s with or what she’s in the mood for.

  As I drove to work in the recently refurbished down-town LA, I thought about Nora, about her nearly endless supply of self-confidence. I wished she had been up this morning before I left. I needed her advice as I considered talking to Anthony. I wanted to approach him about the manuscript. And I wanted to do nothing of the sort. The two opposite urges kept running through my mind as I parked the car, and continued to frustrate me as the morning progressed.

  It’s amazing how much work you can get done when you’re procrastinating from doing something else. I organised the top two drawers of my file cabinets. Truthfully, they were already fairly neat. But now I made sure that all of the file folders were the same colour – a vibrant chartreuse – and that the font on the little tabs matched precisely.

  Once I completed my reorganisation of files A through Z, I turned my attention to my cellphone. It took only the push of a button to delete Byron from my electronic phone address book. He’d left me two additional voicemail messages since the night before, which I erased without listening to.

  I’ll admit that I didn’t actually erase them right away. I stared at my phone, saw the phone number of the person who’d left the voicemail and felt torn. We’d been together four years. Shouldn’t I at least listen to what he had to say? Then I envisioned what Nora would do in a similar situation. ‘Look, Eli,’ she’d snarl in her attempt to protect me, ‘what could he possibly have to say that would interest you? That he and Gwen love each other? That you were wrong about that? Trust me, you’ve heard enough of that bullshit already.’

  She was right. I didn’t even need her in the room to know what I had to do. I deleted all messages, and then set the phone in my purse, where I wouldn’t be bothered by the vibrations.

  Finally, when I could amuse myself no longer, I took a deep breath and headed down the hall to Anthony Ginsburg’s office. Nora and I still might look a lot like one another, but our shared resemblance is skin deep. I tried my very best to channel her charm as I held my manuscript and prepared to knock on my crush’s office door. I remembered what Dean had said the day before. That his nervousness only lasted until he played the first note. I prayed this concept would work for me, as well.

  The door to Anthony’s office is emblazoned with train paraphernalia. Colour photographs of engines, ticket stubs and train stickers make up a collage dedicated to the railroad. It looks like the bedroom door of a five-year-old boy, rather than the office door of a forty-year-old man.

  I’d passed by Anthony’s office often enough, rarely having a reason to go inside, but peeking through his doorway whenever possible. I knew that there were awards hanging on his walls, that his desk was as messy as mine was clean, and that every so often he had one of our patrons in for a drink, pouring some amber liquid from a crystal decanter kept on his bookshelf.

  This time, the door was shut, and I knocked as hard as I dared and then waited, shifting back and forth from one foot to another. I thought about how Nora had teased me the previous evening, naming off Anthony’s many attributes. What was I doing here? Was I simply looking for a new boyfriend? Was this just a pipe dream I’d conjured up, this need to have the manuscript translated? Did all I really want was a new model, same as Byron?

  I hoped not.

  I’d been in one relationship after another for the past eight years. Maybe I wasn’t able to be on my own for more than 24 hours. That was a sobering thought, and not one that I wanted to look at too deeply. At least, not now, with Anthony calling out to me in his crisp British accent: ‘Enter!’

  Inside, as I recalled from my peeks into his office, any resemblance to the world of a five-year old boy ended abruptly. There sat Anthony, behind his cluttered mahogany desk, reading something obviously mesmerising in a thick black book, his aristocratic fingers following along with a line of prose. His dark curly hair was pulled back into a ponytail that hung past the col
lar of his blue Oxford-cloth shirt. I gazed at his face, his stark cheekbones, strong chin. In a cartoon, I would have licked my lips. Instead, I continued to stare at him, knowing that I would have to look away quickly once he put down the book.

  ‘One moment,’ he said when I stepped into the doorway, not offering me even the merest courtesy of a curious glance. While he finished reading, I took in the tiny model trains along the edge of his desk, the ‘genuine’ train whistle carved from wood, the advertisement for a Lionel train set framed on the wall behind him. So there was a bit of the boy still in the room.

  Finally, Anthony closed the book and looked at me. With a bit of surprise in his voice, he said, ‘Eleanor, I’m so sorry.’ His smooth accent caressed the words. There was something in the way Anthony simply said my name that made it difficult for me to breathe. ‘If I had known it was you, I would have stopped sooner. But when I’m reading another language, it’s always hard to pull myself out of it.’ He grinned. ‘You know how that is, I’m sure. I’ve seen you working on those illuminated manuscripts.’ He paused again, looking me up and down. Immediately, I felt underdressed, and then just as swiftly wished I was actually undressed, wished he was undressing me. ‘Can I help you?’

  ‘Oh, yes.’ I wanted to say. ‘You can most definitely help me. You can help me obliterate any thoughts or emotions I still have left for my ex-boyfriend.’

  ‘How can I do that?’ he would ask.

  ‘Simple,’ I would tell him with a sexy half-smile stolen directly from Nora. ‘You can bend me over your beautiful messy desk and fuck the living daylights out of me. Touch me while you fuck me. Bring one hand between my legs and stroke my pussy for me, then pinch my clit hard. I’ll cry out when I come, calling your name over and over, and that will take you to your own limits. People on other floors will hear us, and they’ll come running to see what the problem is. But there won’t be any problem. There will just be you and me, locked together, our clothes dishevelled, our bodies as one.’

  Where in the hell had that come from? Had being part of a sexual sandwich with Nora and Dean turned me into a whole new person? Had seeing that threesome afterwards – and briefly a foursome once Nora had entered the party – done something to my brain?

  Thank God, I had a mission. If I’d been without one, I would have stood there like a total moron, gazing at him the way a teenybopper would look at one of her idols in the flesh. Unable to think, or speak, or breathe. Yes, I’d worked with Anthony in the past, had been in his presence often enough to consider him a solid acquaintance if not an actual friend. But I rarely ever spoke to him one on one, and never with him looking at me like that.

  With only a slight tremble to my voice, I told him what I wanted, handed him the papers, then waited for his answer. I forced myself to stare at him, and I stamped down on the urge to give myself over to another sexual fantasy. How easy it would be to lose myself in his eyes, daydreaming about what it might be like to be as sexually free spirited as Nora is.

  ‘Honestly, I’m not all that good at ancient Greek,’ Anthony said, still looking at me instead of the ancient pages. ‘Give me a few tablets of cuneiform and I’ll take you places you’ve never been, baby.’ He gave me an unexpectedly lounge lizard-like look, and I nearly giggled. Where was my self-confidence? Where was my poise? Standing in front of his desk, I felt like as nervous as an intern, useless and unsure of myself.

  Still, I was on a mission – my lovely, trusted mission – and I forced myself to explain to him what I needed. ‘Serina told me you’re a whiz at Greek.’

  Serina works in our ancient art department, dating objects. When we receive something from an archaeological dig, she studies the piece until she can place it in the correct time period. I knew that she was a friend of Anthony’s, and I had gone to her for help before walking down the hall and into this world of trains.

  ‘I studied it, sure,’ Anthony said, ‘but I never got higher than a solid C.’ He sounded as if he were teasing me, or lying to me, and I had no idea why.

  ‘I don’t have cuneiform,’ I told him matter-of-factly, thankfully sounding much more like myself and less like a fawning fan. ‘I don’t have hieroglyphics. I don’t have Sanskrit. I have this.’ I stared at Anthony, challenging him – Serina had told me that Anthony likes a challenge – and he stared right back at me through those sexy glasses in heavy tortoiseshell frames. Mmm, I liked the way he looked in those. At Nora’s insistence, I’d long ago traded my round frames for more chic European-style reading glasses. But on Anthony, the old-fashioned lenses made him look more appealing than ever.

  ‘You’re the only one here who can come close to translating this,’ I insisted. ‘And, besides –’ now, I realised why he was playing with me ‘– you just won some sort of award for a Greek translation. It was written up in the ARTSI in-house newspaper. And you majored in ancient literatures at Oxford right?’

  Anthony nodded, looking slightly embarrassed. I turned my head to check out the various diplomas on the walls. A plethora of awards and medals fought for room on the bookshelves. Anthony Ginsburg is a top-rate academic – modest, perhaps – but brilliant.

  While I took in my surroundings, I heard Anthony breathe in deeply and then exhale, almost longingly. I faced him again and gave him a curious look, and he quickly stared down at his cluttered desk, at the papers spread before him in the one clear section. With me watching him, forcing him to do something, he opened his top desk drawer, removed a pair of thin rubber gloves and slid them on. Instantly, I was captivated by the movements of his hands, fingers interlaced evenly to secure the gloves before he gingerly lifted the first piece of paper from the sheath. He looked so intent as he worked that I almost felt as if I’d disappeared, vanished entirely from the scene. With his eyes so focused on the papers, I let myself fade into a brand-new fantasy. This was an unusual sort for me, but I didn’t fight the vision, didn’t stop myself, didn’t say no.

  As I watched him work, I envisioned his gloved fingers on me, touching me as carefully as he touched the pages. I saw myself spread out on top of his desk, as if I were a piece of artwork, something valuable that needed classifying.

  The desk was different in my daydream. It was clean, for one thing, and covered with a red leather padding. Anthony spread me out and began probing and examining me.

  ‘You’re beautiful,’ he said. ‘A work of art.’

  I easily imagined the feel of the chilled rubber against my skin, the sensation of his rubber-tipped fingers sliding into my willing open pussy. I was dripping wet, and he noticed. There would have been no way for him not to. He gave me a fierce look as he slid his fingers in ever deeper, and then he brought the evidence of my arousal in front of my eyes, waiting for me to acknowledge how turned on I was.

  With my eyes lowered, I started to blush. Even in my fantasies, I’m shy.

  ‘So wet,’ he said, ‘you’re so fucking wet,’ bringing me closer to him as he spoke, pressing me up against the length of his still-clothed member. He was hard and ready, and I revelled in the sensation of impending pleasure. What would it take for him to fuck me? What would I have to do? ‘Do you see how wet you are?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Why are you so wet, Eleanor?’

  ‘Because …’ I stammered, unwilling, unable to continue.

  ‘Because why?’

  I was undone, my hair loose and falling in my face, my heart racing. Every uptight part of me vanished, and I was his to take, to mould, to do with as he desired, however he desired. I was like Nora for once. Someone willing to walk down an unknown road, or to chart a new path, discovering pleasure in untold ways.

  Where had that fantasy come from? In all the years I lived with Byron, I’d never had a similar thought. In all the times I’ve been to a doctor, I’d never once dreamed up a fantasy like this. Now, in less than five minutes of standing before Anthony, I’d envisioned one of the dirtiest scenarios I could think of. Sure, I knew that in Nora’s world a doctor/patient concept woul
d be positively G-rated on the scale of naughty thoughts. For me, however, this was unique.

  Anthony remained focused on the papers. I looked at him, and continued to fantasise. It felt deviously decadent, having sexual thoughts about him while he was so close. I could kiss him if I wanted to. I could lean forwards and brush all the papers off his desk – the old ones and the new ones – littering the floor of his office with a mess of manuscripts. I could put myself in front of him and make him notice me.

  I pictured myself wearing an outfit much more suitable to Masquerade Night at the Pink Fedora than for a day of work at ARTSI – something tight and white, short enough to show the tops of a pair of garters, complete with fishnets and clear high-heeled stripper shoes. Something Nora would have in the front of her closet for a Wednesday or Thursday, not for any special reason at all. I’d have my hair up and wear chandelier earrings, so long that they’d brush my collarbone. When we fucked, I’d leave on the earrings and the shoes. Nothing else. Anthony would like me this way. I knew it. He would want me to leave on the shoes, to use them as we made love, to leave marks on the backs of his legs from where I dug in with those heels.

  Christ, who did I think I was, having thoughts like this? What would Anthony say if he could read my mind the way he was reading the manuscript? What did I really want from him? Not for him to decipher this sheaf of ancient Greek papers, but to decipher me.

  I felt a world-class blush work from my jaw up to bloom in my cheeks.

  ‘It looks like Greek,’ Anthony said, ‘but how did you know that’s what it was?’

  Grateful that he was still looking at the pages instead of looking at me, I cleared my throat and explained, ‘The clay pot.’ I didn’t take offence at the question. There was no reason why I would have been able to tell it was Greek. It’s not my field. ‘I brought in several of the fragments to Serina this morning and she placed it for me. She says Athens, most likely, based on the types of designs. She couldn’t immediately give me a date, but she’s still working on it. Just from the few pieces I brought her, and from the quality of the workmanship, she thinks it’s about three hundred BC.’