With or Without You (5 page)

After him, I dated a student my own age, and then there was Byron. But never had I played the way Nora does. Never had I been with another girl, just to see what
it was like, or visited a sex party, or tried bondage. After spending four years with the same man, doing the same things every Thursday night, I felt rusty.

Dean’s hands stroked me, and when I looked up at him, he gave me a wink. ‘It doesn’t have be so serious,’ he murmured. ‘You can have fun, you know.’

I wished for Nora’s grace. I wished for her confidence. And then, Dean leaned in and kissed the hollow of my neck.

Fun, I thought. I can have fun. But this all seemed desperately serious to me. An initiation. A rite of passage. I closed my eyes as Dean moved slowly up until he kissed my lips. I could feel Nora watching, sense her drinking us in. I was the centre of attention, and I basked in the sensation. But when Dean started to kiss lower down my body, I felt a wave of fear crash over me. I turned my head to look at Nora, begging her silently, and she understood.

‘Let me,’ Nora said, pushing Dean down onto the bed and moving to the other side.

‘Let you what?’ he teased her.

‘Let me show Eli what you like.’

Dean crossed his arms under his head and shot her a look that was more of a dare than anything else. Nora immediately went to work, bobbing her head on him, her lips locked around the head of his cock. She worked expertly, her fist around the shaft, pumping. I stared, in awe, as my best friend pleased her man, and then I found an urge building within me to take over. I put one hand out, touching the silk of her open robe and pushing her aside. It was now or never. That’s how I felt. Nora licked her lips and moved out of the way, and then I was taking her place, my mouth on Dean’s hardness, swallowing him up.

He put one hand down on my hair, stroking me as I pleased him. A warm beat of excitement pounded through me as Nora and I took turns – she’d kiss him, and then I would echo her movements. She’d suckle from
him, and then I would follow. By the time I climbed astride Dean’s powerful body, I was so wet I could hardly stand it. And for once, I led. It was me who took the first ride, while Dean put his hands on my waist and helped me, letting me buck against him, letting me …

I realised that I understood what he meant about being shy.

The music was playing. I was up on stage. Fear faded away.

Nora was the only person in the world who could have talked me into going out that evening. But she did it. With only a few mild threats, and another glass and a half-glass of Glenfiddich, she dressed me in one of her more subdued numbers: a tasteful black cashmere sweater, a pair of sleek black pants sporting a lizard pattern embossed in velvet and footwear that actually matched.

‘I don’t wanna,’ I’d told her as she laced up the boots for me. I kept running my hands over the velvety pants, finding tactile comfort in the raised pattern. Nora and I have always been about the same size, but we don’t share clothes. It showed what my current state of mind was that I let her pour me into her favoured attire. ‘Really, Nora, I don’t want to go.’

‘I don’t care,’ she replied, sounding an awful lot like Tommy Lee Jones in
The Fugitive
. I didn’t have a precipice to jump off of, like Harrison Ford had. I was forced to give in to Nora’s whims, and go along with what she claimed was the very best medicine for me. At least, she didn’t expect me to drive. As Dean headed off towards a gig, Nora and I climbed into her lemon-yellow Mercedes. I watched the scenery blur by, thinking about the act we’d just engaged in, thinking about what it means to be Nora’s best friend.

We’ve been nearly inseparable for ten years. Ever since we met in Santa Barbara as college freshmen and decided together that the sorority system sucked. (That was her term.) We both felt that there
had
to be a better way to meet people, one that didn’t involve any type of hazing
or being fondled by drunken frat boys. Nora was sporting a rebellious punk look even then, and I was all buttoned up as only a librarian-in-training can be.

Nora and I weren’t actually buddies right away. In fact, I didn’t know who she was until the middle of my first semester. I only discovered that there was someone who resembled me on campus, because one afternoon a popular boy in my 1960s art class kept looking at me strangely. Whenever I turned towards him, I caught him staring at me. I didn’t have enough male admirers so as to be accustomed to this sort of undivided attention. After class, he approached me and said, ‘You know, you look totally different today.’

‘Different than what?’ I asked. Did he mean that I looked different than I usually looked? He couldn’t, because that wasn’t true. I
always
dressed like this, a rather refined preppy. It was my concept of how college students ought to dress. Of course, most of them didn’t. Most looked as if they’d tumbled out of bed after having slept in their clothes. But I couldn’t help that; I could only take care of myself.

‘Different than you did at the Sinuosity concert.’

I hadn’t gone to the Sinuosity concert, and I told him so. I hadn’t actually heard of the band Sinuosity. My listening tastes veered from the innocent to the mundane. Steely Dan. The Beatles. Paul Simon. Dire Straits. The Rolling Stones were about as edgy as I got. I thought ‘Under My Thumb’ was deviously delightful.

‘Yeah, you did,’ he said, not in the least bit convinced by my denial. He spoke as if trying to remind me of an event that must have slipped my mind. ‘You were wearing a little sparkly top as a dress and all that purple eyeliner like Siouxsie.’

‘Who’s Susie?’

He pointed to a sticker on his binder, and I saw that he was referring to someone who spelled her name ‘Siouxsie’ and who played with a group called ‘the Banshees’. ‘And you were dancing up on stage,’ he continued,
as if that settled the matter. His attention to detail let me know that he’d liked what he’d seen, but I couldn’t take credit for the fashionista he was describing.

‘Not me,’ I insisted, thinking: Purple eyeliner? I stuck with brown or olive. And a top as a dress? Perhaps, the man was on drugs. That wouldn’t have surprised me. Many of my fellow art history students appeared to be high most of the time. Quite a few envisioned themselves to be the artists of the future, and most seemed to believe that an artist’s temperament depended on altered substances. While that’s true for some artists, you need talent to start with before you can take off for the stratosphere.

This student gave me a confused frown, as if he thought I were lying to him, and unsure why I would be that cruel. As he walked away, he continued to shoot me hurt puppy dog looks over his shoulder. He must have believed that I was trying to shake him off. I wouldn’t have done that. I had very little experience with boys so far, but this one was good looking in a punk-rock sort of way: shredded jeans, ragged T-shirt, khaki backpack with anti-establishment buttons studding the rough fabric. I would have loved to continue to talk with him, but my mind didn’t work like that. I could have filled hours discussing the floor plans of churches that had long ago disintegrated into dust, or compared ancient Greek iconography to the type found in Gaul, or even expounded on the different styles of Monet and Manet. But talking to boys was beyond me.

I decided that
he
was the crazy one, and put the incident out of my mind. At least, I did until a similar episode occurred at James Grounds, the best coffee bar on campus. A tall student in a Lichtenstein T-shirt that said ‘Oh, Brad!’ walked by and asked what I was in costume for.

‘What do you mean?’

‘You’re not wearing that for real, are you?’ he asked, in obvious disbelief.

I had on a cashmere argyle cardigan sweater done in various shades of pink, a tweed pencil skirt and shiny maroon penny loafers with bright silver dimes tucked into the cut-out slots. I felt ever so clever for putting dimes in my loafers rather than pennies, as if this were a wicked bit of wit. Yes, I was a bit more dressed up than usual, but I’d just come from an interview to do volunteer work at the campus outdoor sculpture gallery. I’d done my best to look professional, yet from his expression, I could tell this wasn’t what he meant.

‘I mean, come on, what’s up with the freakin’ glasses?’

My hand went immediately to the bridge of my nose, self-consciously pushing up my shiny black frames. I’ve always worn reading glasses, and I thought these ones made me look more adult. Sitting in the café, studying before my next class, I had actually thought I looked good until this man came along.

‘And how’d you change your hair so quickly? It’s got to be a wig.’ He looked as if he might actually grip into my hair to test, and I flinched away from him.

‘Come on, Nora.’ But then he took a step closer to me and lifted his shades. And then, as reality set in, he murmured, ‘You’re
not
Nora, are you?’

‘Elea
nor
,’ I told him.

‘And that’s your hair for real?’ He didn’t say this as if it were a compliment.

I nodded, wondering what on earth he was going on about.

‘You have a doppelgänger,’ he told me. When I continued to give him a blank stare, he explained further, ‘A double. But your eyes are different. And her hair is green right now. That’s what I couldn’t understand. I just saw her last night. There was no way she could have done such a complete reversal in a matter of hours.’ He gave me another look. ‘But it’s eerie. On first sight, you could be her twin. Now, that I look at you closer, you’re more like a little sister.’

A double. That made sense. It explained why I
occasionally felt as if people were looking at me strangely, why students that I didn’t know waved to me every once in awhile. And it explained the two boys and their insistence that I was someone who I wasn’t. I felt oddly excited. Somewhere out there on campus was a student who lived a life I had no concept of. A green-haired girl who had many friends of the male persuasion.

I made it my mission to find this girl, the one who danced on stage, who dyed her hair daily, who wore sparkly dresses and purple eyeliner. A girl who would never choose outfits like those nestled in my own closet. A student whose friends thought that
my
clothes looked like costumes. Turns out, when I found her, she was looking for me. Her buddies kept reporting seeing her in an altogether too preppy look. They hadn’t understood, thinking she was engaging in some sort of subversive performance-art piece, dressing like a normal person for extended periods of time and refusing to sit with them when they waved her over at the cafeteria.

When I finally saw her, I immediately understood the confusion. At first glance, we do look quite similar: same height, same build, same heart-shaped face. We both have slim bodies, small breasts, large wide-set eyes, full lips. I played my lips down with nude gloss. She played hers up with dark red or bubble-gum pink or shimmering blue.

‘You,’ she said when we finally met. ‘
You’re
the one.’

And I stopped and gazed at her, realising the same thing. She didn’t have green hair any more. She’d changed it to snow white with a pink frost on the tips. Her make-up was comical to me, like theatre make-up. I had been taught to use cosmetics to enhance my features. To wear make-up so that it looked as if I didn’t have any on at all. Nora used make-up for effect. She had on tangerine-hued eye shadow, lip gloss with fancy silver sparkles and streaks of peony blush to emphasise the sharpness of her cheekbones. Her face was a canvas gone mad, a painting made by one of the Pop artists from the
50s and 60s. Warhol would have swooned for her. He would have made her his queen.

The most interesting thing to me about seeing her was realising what someone else might do with my body. I’d always sort of wondered. If another person had the chance, how would they dress me, how would they fix my hair? Nora’s was super short and spiky. Her clothes were form-fitting, thrift-store snagged purchases. A red-and-black plaid schoolgirl skirt safety pinned at the waist, a Ramones T-shirt with the short sleeves intentionally shredded, a pair of holey black fishnets and lizard-green slouchy suede boots. She didn’t wear a backpack like most of the campus drones. Instead, she carried her books in a leather messenger bag, slung around her neck and off one shoulder. The bag looked positively ancient, and this added to her charm.

I wouldn’t even have dressed like her on Halloween, but I could see that she was pretty, and since it had only been boys who had approached me so far, I knew that she won her fair share of masculine attention. Who wouldn’t notice someone with hair like hers?

Nora took in my own clothes with a sad little shake of her head. I wondered if her thoughts mirrored mine – that here was what someone else would do with
he
r body. She was intrigued that I had true-to-life hair colour, a light-caramel brown that streaked blonde naturally in the summertime, and she was shocked that my lips were glossed in a natural tone – why would I waste bee-stung lips with something beige and boring? Mostly, she appeared completely flabbergasted by my penny loafers. It was as if she’d never seen average, everyday shoes before. She viewed me like some specimen in a science experiment, and appeared to be mildly revolted by the results.

‘Man,’ she said as we walked, ‘I couldn’t believe the stories people were saying to me. That I was wearing argyle. That I got an A plus on an art history paper.’

We headed towards the coffee shop together, comparing
notes. When we made it to the front of the line to order, she rummaged into her bag, but came up empty-handed. ‘Can you buy?’ she asked. ‘I promise to pay you back.’

I nodded, handing over a crisp five, watching as she carefully noted the amount of her small debt in a surprisingly neat ring notebook.

‘People kept stopping me,’ she continued as we found ourselves seats in the corner, ‘asking how I could change my hair so quickly. Really, I choose a new hue every week or so, but they couldn’t understand how it could get so long so fast. They were sure I had on a wig. Which wouldn’t have been beyond me. But wigs are really expensive, and they’re not the sort of thing one wants to buy used.’