With or Without You (11 page)

It was too late to ponder such thoughts, so I looked around the room instead.

Nora’s house is an extension of the wildness of her clubs. One bathroom is done entirely in Kit-Kat clocks, their eyes swinging back and forth in time with the motion of their tails. She has the famous original clocks, black ones with simple white bow ties, as well as assorted colours: turquoise, lemon yellow, plum. Some have been decked out in rhinestones. All tick-tock like mad.

In her dining room, the only lighting is lava lamps. She’s positioned them in rows around the room, hundreds of lava lamps. Dinner parties in this room are like acid dreams come true. You can’t take your eyes off the colourful alienlike objects slithering up and down in the liquid.

As I looked at the forks and spoons over my head, I wondered when people decide that it’s time to grow up. Nora never has. Is that why she’s still able to stay out late, to fuck all night, to cruise through life on caffeine? When do most people decide the dance clubs are for the kids. Is it about the same time they start worrying about middle-aged spread and condo payments? Is it when they lose their lust for life or decide that no such thing exists?

Sure I’ve always tended to dress like a school marm, but hadn’t I been more alive when I was younger? More vibrant, somehow? Was 28 going to be the end of the road for me? No, it couldn’t be. Just look at me. I’d been in my first ever threesome this very night.

I gazed around the room, still lost in my thoughts. Nora’s house is small for someone as wealthy as she is. I’ve read interviews in which people have asked her why she doesn’t have one of the mansions in Holmby Hills or Bel Air. She claims that she prefers this small stucco house in Venice Beach. It’s not shabby by any means, but Nora could upgrade, and she knows it. ‘I like to be able to clean my house myself,’ she told one interviewer. ‘I don’t want to have people I don’t know underfoot.’

How different from Byron. His whole goal in life was
to move up. Move from the apartment we were currently renting to the penthouse at the top floor of our building. Trade up the Audi he owned for a BMW convertible. Trade in his girlfriend for a shiny new model. One with all the bells and whistles.

Was that the real reason why we broke up? Did he look to Gwen to put more excitement back into his life? Or had he simply traded up? I wondered whether Gwen would take Byron out for picnics at their lunch break, the way he and I had gone out when we first started dating. Did she rekindle some lost sense of fun for him? Or was it all about the sex?

Thoughts like those would have kept me up, if I hadn’t been so drunk. At some point, my mind spun out, and I fell asleep. Hard.

In the morning, I could barely find my way out from under the comforter Nora had thrown over me the night before. Unfortunately, the world didn’t become much less blurry when I stuck my head out from under the blanket. Why had I let Nora take me out? Because ‘let’ wasn’t the correct word.

Nora had made me actually want to go out. By the time she’d had me dressed, I’d been looking forward to a night of not thinking. That’s how it always is with Nora. Not only can she get you to do what she wants, she can make you think you want it, too. If that’s not a skill, then I don’t know what one is.

Sighing, I lay back against the plush cushions of my best friend’s black sofa.

I didn’t have to go to work today. I could call in sick – take a few personal days off – if ever there was a reason, right? Besides, my work isn’t the life or death sort. I’m not a doctor in charge of a wing of patients who need my expertise in order to survive. I’m a researcher, focused on poring through antique tomes. My assignments stretch out for months, occasionally for years. And as one might expect, I’m intensely focused when it comes to
projects, always ahead of schedule. Missing even a week or two would do nothing to put me off my routine.

But my mind suddenly turned to Anthony, and I imagined him looking over the manuscript I’d discovered. Quite honestly, I imagined him doing all sorts of other things as well. Things that only happened in places like Nora’s club. Or in her bedroom, I corrected myself, thinking of playing with her and Dean the day before. How unlike me to do something like that. Was this the start of a new era for me? One in which I would find myself much more in tune to Nora’s way of life.

I settled back into the sofa, lost in an instant daydream. Would Anthony go into that room with me, the Cinéma Vérité room? And if I could talk him into tripping down that hallway by my side, would he be the sort to baulk at public displays of affection, as Byron always had? Or would the concept turn him on?

I thought of the recent split between two A-list movie stars. One had immediately paired up with a dark-haired minx, a femme fatale who had once happily proclaimed that she and her then-husband had fucked on the way to the Oscars. This full-lipped beauty reminded me of Nora, and I appreciated her candour when it came to all things sexual. Would Anthony go for someone like that? Because I’ve always been the more reserved type. Not that I don’t like sex – I do.

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 collar 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
un
dressed, wished he was undressing me. ‘Can I help you?’