With or Without You (6 page)

‘Guys kept telling me about places I haven’t ever been,’ I told her.

‘Like where?’

‘The Shadow Box. One guy told me he’d seen me up on stage, but I’ve never even been to the club.’

‘You don’t go dancing?’

I shook my head quickly.

‘Are you, like, Amish, or something?’

I gave her a look, but then saw she wasn’t kidding. Here was an actual reason that would have made sense to her. It would have explained why I didn’t dance, why I dressed so simply, why I never dyed my hair. ‘I don’t have religious beliefs that prevent me from engaging in motion to music,’ I told her, but she seemed to be waiting for a longer explanation. ‘Look, I just don’t know how to dance.’

‘You don’t know how to dance.’ She repeated the words softly, but she didn’t ask them as a question. It was almost as if she believed
everyone
knew how to dance, but I was trying to pull a fast one on her. I shrugged helplessly. I had never liked dances. I didn’t feel as if I had any sense of rhythm, and I tended to get lost in my own embarrassment. All through school, I was a wallflower,
ultimately choosing to spend dance nights at the library rather than suffer the humiliation of going and not engaging.

‘You have to just
dance
,’ she said, as if that made sense, as if her words of wisdom would clear everything up for me from now on. ‘You
feel
the music.’ They were playing James Brown, which is what they always played at this coffee shop, a pun on the shop’s name. The song was ‘Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag’, and Nora started to move to the beat. I didn’t actually
hear
the beat, but I could see, staring at her, how sexy she was. And people thought I was Nora. Did that make me sexy, as well? Or did it give me the potential to become sexy?

‘What are you studying?’ I asked, trying to woo her back to earth.

‘Everything.’ She was still moving her slender shoulders to the sounds of James Brown.

‘What does that mean?’

‘I don’t have a major yet,’ she admitted, still grooving to the music, shifting her hips seductively in her chair. ‘I know I have to declare one at some point, but I can’t decide. I like anthropology, but what does that do for you? I’m not going to live in the wilds studying monkeys. Where would I get the dye for my hair? Crushed berries? And afterwards, what can you do with that sort of degree? Become a teacher? They’d never let me in front of a class of students. Imagine what I would do to impressionable youngsters. How about you?’ She spoke in a rush, so many words at once, that I had a difficult time following her. When she stared at me, I realised she was waiting for an answer.

‘Art history.’

‘So you’re going to be a teacher?’ She laughed and shook her head, as if she’d said exactly the wrong thing.

‘No. I want to work in a museum.’ This was my big dream, even back as a freshman. I’ve always been focused on my future.

‘Then why do you dress like that?’

‘What do you mean?’ I asked.

‘I’d have thought someone who liked art would be more –’ she hesitated, but Nora has never been anything but blunt ‘– more artsy.’

‘I let the art be artsy,’ I said lamely, ‘and the artists. I only know about the sculptures and paintings. I don’t make any sort of art myself.’ Perhaps because I’m not artistic myself, I admire those who are. I revere them. And I don’t mean only the classicists. Some of my alltime favorite artists are the ones who push boundaries, the ones that other people cannot understand. Keith Haring. Claus Oldenburg. Julian Schnabel. Basquiat.

‘Sometimes I want to be an artist,’ Nora said vaguely, her eyes focused on one of the pathetic student-done canvases on the wall. This was a rip on Jackson Pollack. Or an homage. I knew that instantly. And I also knew the theory behind it. Splash stuff on a blank canvas. Call it a form of expression. But it had already been done, and done so much better.

‘What sort of art do you like?’ I asked. Here was a conversation I felt much more comfortable with than the one about dancing.

‘Myself.’

Inwardly, I cringed. ‘A performance artist?’ I could imagine her smothering herself on stage with hot fudge sauce, or standing in one place for hours at a time, not moving a muscle.

She nodded gleefully. But my fears weren’t realised. She didn’t want to be an artist on stage. She wanted to be an artist in
life
. Everyday life. Nora named her individual looks, believing that she was a painter of hair colour and make-up. She might be Ziggy Stardust one day and a Spider from Mars the next. She kept Polaroids of each outfit, never replicating the same look twice. She might wear the bottle-green stretch pants emblazoned with black skulls for two different outfits, but the rest of the look would be entirely unique. I’d never wear stretch pants, or skull-emblazoned anything. Back then, I had no
idea who Ziggy Stardust was, and the thought of basing an outfit on something called ‘Spiders from Mars’ made my head hurt.

But I liked Nora.

I couldn’t explain the attraction to her, other than she was different from all the other people I knew in school. I wasn’t a total loser. I did have friends. But
my
friends were the type who would have shushed
her
friends in the library, had her friends ever gone to the library. Just like her crowd, my gang tended to stay up late – but we went out studying not dancing. The group I hung out with actually had the gall to correct teachers in class. They prided themselves on knowing all there was to know about artists who had been dead for hundreds of years. One of my classmates actually carried a set of home-made flashcards of church floor plans with her at all times. Whenever Gina had a free moment, she’d test herself. I tried to imagine what Nora would think of a person like that, someone who considered viewing a series of tiny black dots on an index card a good time.

Nora and her crowd were alive in a much more vibrant way. They missed classes, and didn’t seem to care. They stayed up all night long, staring at the ceiling, talking for hours about things they didn’t know anything about. Nora was the best of them, and they seemed to realise that, coming in tight around her, as if trying to make a little bit of her power rub off on them.

I didn’t want to be like those members of her group. I didn’t want her to think I was a hanger-on. But I realised fairly quickly that she liked me back. She appreciated my sense of purpose, organisation and dark humour. I’d never tell other people the jokes that I told her, but when I was by her side, I could give in to the wicked observations that I made mentally on a daily basis.

What I learned from being friends with Nora was that sometimes opposites do more than attract. Sometimes opposites perfectly balance each other, keeping each other sane and safe. Nora and I were able to provide each
other with the type of flat-out honesty that you can’t always get from a lover, that you can’t even expect from your family. We were there for each other, to extremes that boyfriends and girlfriends hardly ever reach.

Nora created her first club while we were still in college, transforming her dorm room into a members-only environment. Waxe Wod (or WW) was an anti-sorority/anti-fraternity environment to which both male and female students could retreat, like an officers’ club. The words Waxe Wod were from a poem circa 1200. She didn’t take the poetry class.
I
did. She read the piece in my book one evening when she was bored, coming upon this poem:

Fowles in the frith

The fisshes in the flod,

And I mon waxe wod
,

Much sorwe I walke with,

For beste of boon and blood.

(Translation: The birds are in the wood and the fishes in the flood, surely I go mad, all the grief I’ve had, for best of bone and blood.)

Nora decided that ‘waxe wod’ stood for ‘surely I go mad’. And she liked that.

Most of the patrons at WW were punk and goth, art-house friends of Nora’s who dressed like her. Well, perhaps not
quite
like her. I have never met anyone else who actually named their outfits – and I’ve hung out with my fair share of artist types. But these were the students who I should have looked more like. We shared classes together on art history – ancient and modern. We sat in the sculpture gardens together, cramming before tests from coffee-table-sized tomes. Yet I was the most out of place physically, never having the nerve to dye my hair the colour of a ripe plum or pierce my eyebrows, tongue, nose or any other body part. But Nora always made me feel welcome.

Even if I am conservative in my own dress style, I’ve never judged Nora. And even if she is more adventurous in her lovemaking, more adventurous in every part of her life, she would never judge me.

There were times back in school when Nora would hide out in my room to get away from the circus she’d created at Waxe Wod. She’d slip away, unseen by the masses who’d come to pay their respects to her, ducking under the clouds of clove cigarette smoke, manoeuvring around the velvet pillows spread all over the floor. I’d hear her knocking and, when I’d open my door, would find her standing there, similar to the way she found me at her place this very evening. Not bedraggled, exactly, but insecure. Nora exudes confidence. She is a bright flame. But every so often she has moments of self-doubt. On nights like these, she would climb onto my twin bed and lay her head on my pillow, wondering when the people in her room would notice her absence. But almost as soon as the curious clouds would come, they would lift, and she would be Nora again. Filled with animation. Fully sure of her choices.

I watched her the way I viewed art. She taught me to take myself more loosely, not to be so uptight about an A− or a B+. I went to concerts with her, and I learned to appreciate the colourful array of life that was displayed around me. Nora has never felt the need to look for art in a museum. She sees it everywhere she goes. Graffiti on a building – art. A fabulously decadent hairstyle – art. A pair of the most perfectly worn-in holey jeans – art.

I could spend all day talking to Nora, could spend my whole life talking to her, and never run out of things to say. I could listen to her forever, and still want to hear more.

Of course, Byron hated her on sight. He didn’t let me know his true feelings about her right away, because that would have been a deal breaker. At first, I think he might actually have thought there was a chance that he’d get the two of us into bed. When I took him to the
club to meet Nora, he danced with her, and then with me – I’ve gotten to the point under Nora’s instruction that I don’t make a total fool of myself on the dance floor. But once that fantasy wore off, he claimed she was pretentious. ‘If there was nobody watching her, would she even exist?’ he asked. I said he simply didn’t understand her, and we left it at that. Nora never has had a long-term relationship with a man, so I’ve not had to compete with her love life for attention.

Thank God. I don’t think I’d be up to it. Not after joining her and Dean in that unexpected ménage à trois. Things like that are commonplace in Nora’s world. But not in mine.

Once we reached Nora’s club, she set me up in the best booth in the room, a semicircle in the far corner upholstered in a dark-fuchsia vinyl and trimmed with multicoloured marabou feathers. The booths on the edges of the dance floor were all done in different shades of shiny material and different types of fringe: glass beads, silver bells, tiny twinkling Christmas lights. This was the best one because it had the clearest view of the rest of the club.

After making sure I was comfortable, Nora ordered our drinks. And then she spent all her time with me, as if I were as important as the celebrities who continually stopped by the table to pay their respects to her, the doyenne of the club, the queen of the hour.

‘Nora, I didn’t even tell you the rest. The thing that happened after Byron and I broke up. The best thing.’

‘I was there,’ she teased.

‘I don’t mean with Dean.’ I flushed. ‘I mean, while I was still at the apartment.’

My best friend sipped her cobalt-tinted drink and waited, tapping her berry-hued nails against the base of the glass in rhythm to the music. Actually, her nails weren’t totally berry coulored. Every other nail was – the ones in between were painted a glossy black. In the
lights of the club, this was difficult to discern, but when Nora held up her Martini glass, the candlelight played over her hands, and I could see. With Nora, things are never exactly normal. It’s probably one of the main reasons why I like her so much. She doesn’t follow other people’s rules. Or, rather, she only marches to the beat of the drummers she wants to fuck.

‘So tell me,’ she insisted. ‘What’s the best part of getting rid of that loser? I mean, aside from getting rid of that loser?’

‘He wasn’t really –’ I started, but she held up her hand.

‘He actually said another woman’s name while he was inside of you.’

I winced and looked down at the découpaged table. The pictures under the clear coating were all of Bettie Page. I stared down at the bondage maven and realised that Nora was right. Why the hell was I trying to defend him? Because I didn’t want to think I’d been dating a villain for four years. Didn’t want to admit that I’d been with someone so low. If I looked at our relationship too closely, and still couldn’t see the signs, then what sort of moron did that make me?

‘Has that ever happened to you?’ I asked.

Nora shrugged. ‘Sure,’ she said. I opened my eyes wide at her, surprised until she continued, ‘At least, when I’ve been playing some sort of fantasy game. I’ve been called Marilyn and Madonna and Brad.’

‘You’re joking.’

She raised her arched eyebrows at me, and I realised that she wasn’t. And why should she have been? Nora has the ability to transform herself on a daily basis. Why shouldn’t she use this ability when in bed? She is definitely the type to wear a white dress and stand over a grate, to put on armfuls of rubber bangles and a bustier as a top, to purchase and wear a harness and a strap-on if this sort of thing would work for a lover.

‘But back to it,’ Nora insisted, her hand squeezing
mine. ‘I don’t think you two were engaged in role-playing activities at the time, were you?’