With or Without You (3 page)

I saw in his washed-out grey eyes that I’d hurt him. It gave me a spark of pleasure that was an entirely new sensation. Joy at someone else’s pain. Who would ever have thought this sort of thing would give me happiness. Bitter happiness, perhaps. But an evil glee, nonetheless. Byron came a step closer, dullness falling away as his own anger was revealed. What did he have to be angry about? The fact that I was right? He caught me by the shoulder and held on.

‘You’re wrong.’

I shrugged him away and moved down the hall. ‘Gwen likes the unattainable. Fucking you while you were mine gave her what she needed. Come on, Byron. You’re a second-rate lawyer who’s come pretty far without a lot of talent. You dress nicely and you have great hair. Really you do. But what else have you got?’

I’d hit him where it hurt, and I could tell.

Bravo, I said to myself.

‘Bitch!’ Byron yelled, grabbing at me again. He missed and came forwards, his open hand swinging, catching hard on the side of my head. Had he meant to hit me? I don’t know. I’ll never know for sure. But I stumbled from the blow and turned on him, hissing, ‘I always thought deep down that you were nice. That’s the one thing I always thought.’ It’s why I’d stayed. I was nice, and he was nice, and that little fantasy was gone like smoke. I was at him, now too, dropping the suitcase, my hands not outstretched and clawlike, but balled into fists. If I were going to fight him, then I meant to do it for real.

Byron stepped back, grabbing my wrists to hold them away from his body. Adrenaline coursed through me. With almost no effort at all, I got free and picked up my suitcase, but it was too heavy. I swung my computer bag instead, aiming for his head. In a movie, I’d have connected – I knew exactly how that would have felt, the
satisfaction that the impact would have given me. In real life, I missed, and in the after-swing knocked the urn from the hallway table. The pot should have hit the thick creamy carpet and bounced, rolling gently to a stop against the wall.

It didn’t.

Nothing was going right. My computer case, heavy with the PowerBook inside, swung the pot hard enough so that it slammed directly into the wall. And shattered.

I don’t know how I got to Nora’s house. I have no memory of the drive, zero recall whatsoever. Somehow I managed to climb into my little red Toyota Prius, to place my suitcase and laptop on the passenger seat and back out of the tight parking space without hitting any nearby parked cars, a feat that’s not so easy even when one is in total control. Apparently, in my dreamy state, I was able to pause at the mandatory stoplights decorating Ocean Boulevard, to weave my way through the congested evening traffic, a bumper-to-bumper carpet with everyone jostling to get home at once. I’m probably lucky to be alive, although ‘lucky’ wasn’t a correct description of how I felt. People on the verge of breakdowns should not be allowed near motor vehicles. There ought to be some sort of test, like the blood/alcohol exam. If you are 1.98 per cent upset, you should have a designated driver.

Honestly, I don’t even remember leaving the apartment. Once the ancient urn broke, my memory seemed to have gone with it. All I know is that I sort of ‘came to’ outside Nora’s pink stucco Spanish-style Venice Beach bungalow, and that I found myself pounding hard on the window of her bedroom, knowing full well that Nora generally wakes up long after the sun goes down.

In order to gain access, I’d have to compete with her high-end headset and whatever newly fashionable band was playing on her NanoPod. Nora knows what’s hot. She always has. It’s why she’s often invited to guest write a Top Ten List for our local alternative weekly, why she was profiled in one of my favourite women’s magazines, why her hair colour changes as frequently as her
mood. Upbeat? She might be sporting violet or fuchsia spikes. Pensive? She’ll go for dark forest green. In love – or, more likely – lust? Crimson, as you might guess. At this point, I don’t think she even knows what her true colour is any more.

I pounded harder on the window, praying that she was there by herself and not in bed with some drummer who’d stopped by to jam at her club the previous evening and ended up going home with her for a midnight snack. I knew that she’d be shocked to find me standing there in the plum-coloured dark, rumpled, angry, broken. I looked down to discover that in my haste to leave the apartment, I had managed to put on two different shoes – one flat, one with a slight heel, both sensible but mismatched nonetheless – and then I cupped my hands against the glass and peered hard inside.

Yes, she was in there – but as I stared into the dimly lit room, my heart sank. I wasn’t competing with her headset alone. As I’d feared, she was on the bed in a clinch with a musician I recognised as one of her favourite playmates. There, on her low Japanese-style bed, were two specimens of sexual beauty: Nora and her man, a rumpled rose-hued sheet doing nothing to hide his fine muscular ass and strong back. He had several scrawling tattoos decorating his arms, and next to the bed was a battered guitar case, stickered all over with decals of skulls, roses, devils and angry messages.

So she hadn’t fucked the drummer. She was fucking the bass player.

In true Nora style, the pair had on matching headsets, which was why she hadn’t heard my pounding. A different sort of pounding took over now – the sound of my own heartbeat in my ears. Unable to look away, I watched as my friend moved sinuously beneath her most recent conquest. Was she moving to the beat of the music? Or to the pulsing rhythm of her own libido?

Why couldn’t I look away?

Dean pushed up with his powerful arms, and I stared,
transfixed, as he thrust his hips forwards, his unbelievable ass looking like an advertisement for some new workout device. I could see now why Nora opened her bedroom door to him. God, they were sexy. At any other time, I would have turned my head, hurried off to lick my wounds in some dark corner. But I wasn’t myself at all now, and I simply stood and stared, witnessing what I knew was a deeply private act, yet one I found myself drawn to view.

Was this art in motion? In my opinion it was.

Dean moved like a machine, up and down, and then he swivelled his hips and the sheet fell the rest of the way onto the floor. I now saw that Nora wasn’t entirely naked. She had on a pair of fishnets the colour of a dark-red wine. The stockings made her legs look endless and, when she suddenly wrapped her legs around Dean’s waist, I noted the high-heeled patent-leather shoes she was wearing. I recognised the pair – had been with her when she’d bought them, marvelling at the way she strode around the store in the four-inch heels. Had she put them on for this moment, playing a sexy dress-up game for her man, or had the two been so desperate to connect that she hadn’t had time to take them off?

I’d never done a striptease for Byron, didn’t own a pair of fancy stockings. Was that why I was standing out here, looking in? If I’d been more adventurous, would we still be together? Did Gwen like to play dress-up games? I worked hard to shut the door on those mental queries. I couldn’t deal with those thoughts at a time like this.

Dean rotated his hips again, and I could almost feel him move against me, as if I’d magically taken Nora’s place on the mattress beneath him. He was strikingly handsome, with his long rock ’n’ roll hair loose down his back, his jaw like rock. I couldn’t see his eyes, but I knew that they were almost black, as dark as his hair. He and Nora moved together, and I imagined that they were listening to the same band on their headsets. Wouldn’t be a group I would choose, I was sure. They weren’t
listening to Sting, were they? No, something about the way they were moving told me that they’d be tuned into Nine Inch Nails or Nickleback. A hard sound to match the intensity of their motions.

As Dean pounded forwards, I sucked in my breath, wishing I were the one on the mattress beneath him. Wishing I were as free as Nora with my sexual whims. But could I ever be in such an erotic scenario without feeling as if I were playing a role? Nora likes to share her sexual stories with me – but this was different. I was watching for myself, seeing her throw her head back, seeing her headset come off with the motion, then seeing her large eyes open as she met my own gaze and shrieked.

Oh, damn, I thought, ducking back down.

Only moments before, I’d wanted her to see me, but now everything had changed. What to do? Nora had just caught me staring at her while she made love, and I had no excuse as to why I was there. My mind raced as Nora hurled herself across the room and raised the window with a ‘What the fuck is wrong with you?’ howl that died when she saw me standing there like some pitiful alley cat. The only thing missing at this point was a sudden rainstorm. Then I’d be truly bedraggled.

‘Sorry,’ I said, knowing I sounded like an idiot.

‘Oh, Christ, Eleanor. I didn’t realise it was you. I just saw a shadow against the glass and thought there was a peeping Tom out there.’

Even in my haze, I registered the thought that Nora had decided to confront a peeping Tom rather than call the cops. That’s her style.

‘You OK?’ she continued, asking the question before she could stop herself. At no other time in our friendship had I banged on her bedroom window. If I were OK, I would not have been standing in her side yard. We both knew that. Still, I shook my head.

‘Of course, you’re not.’ She could tell that from where she stood, peering out at me, beautiful as always in spite
of her shock, confident in spite of being more than halfway naked. Concern showed fully in her face. In my everyday life, I’m as predictable as one might imagine. To find me breaking any sort of social rule meant something had gone wildly wrong in my world.

‘Come in,’ she said. ‘You have to come in.’

I nodded this time and, for a split second, I imagined climbing in through her bedroom window and collapsing on her mattress, curling myself into a fetal position and letting every bit of sorrow pour from me. I saw myself crying until my eyes were as pink as Nora’s stucco bungalow and my shirt was wet from my tears. Pulling myself into the window would have been a reverse of what Nora had done to escape her bedroom back in high school. She loves to tell the story of the time she got locked out and had to sleep under the window box, praying that she’d be able to sneak in undiscovered once her mother had brought in the morning paper.

As Nora motioned for me to go around to the front of the house, I saw Dean slipping his headset back on and leaning back against the mattress. He didn’t seem put out at all by the shift in events. But maybe that’s because he’d already come.

‘What happened?’ Nora asked, pouring herself a cup of turbo coffee and me a shot of undeniably excellent whisky. With Nora, everything is the best, from her 400-thread count Egyptian sheets to her imported Viennese espresso beans. She had on a turquoise robe now, one that looked to be silk and was most likely more expensive than most of my best dresses.

‘We’re through,’ I said.

‘For real?’

I nodded.

‘You’re definitely not going back?’ she demanded. As if on cue, my cellphone rang, punctuating her words. We both stared at my red computer bag, and when I didn’t make a reach for it, Nora did. She held up the phone in front of me, as if this were a test, letting me see the call coming in was from Byron.

‘No,’ I told her forcefully, pushing the phone away. ‘Never. We’re done.’

‘Good, I always hated the fucker.’ She thrust the phone unanswered back into my case.

I couldn’t help but laugh at the malice in her words. I knew that she and Byron didn’t get along, but I wouldn’t have guessed at the intensity of her feeling. Now, I understood that she meant every word.

‘But what happened? What made you leave tonight?’

‘Gwen.’ I only had to say the name, and Nora instantly grimaced. Gwen is a casting director’s dream lawyer. Meaning, she looks like a lawyer the way that Heather Locklear looks like your average advertising executive or Penelope Cruz resembles any doctor you may ever have
had the luck to meet. She boasts classic blonde hair, bronze skin, almond-shaped eyes and a starlet’s body. Put her on a beach in a red string bikini, and you’ve got an extra for
Baywatch
.

‘Really?’ she asked, wrinkling her nose in surprise. ‘I thought he was only rambling on his blog about her. I never thought he meant anything by it.’

‘You what?’

‘Don’t you read his blog, Eli? He’s been talking about Gwen since she joined the firm last spring.’

I shrugged. ‘I read it sometimes,’ I told her, which was the truth. I didn’t want to admit that I only read Nora’s blog occasionally as well. The Pink Fedora blog chronicles a behind-the-scenes look at the clubs she owns. I joined in with other people who posted in responses every once in awhile. I’d teased her recently about her upcoming reality show, posting to her blog rather than coming right out and saying that I thought the idea was surreal. Nora’s actually signed a deal in which contestants will vie for a spot as head bartender at her club. I couldn’t help myself but join in on the comments.

But in general, reading other people’s blogs seems far too invasive. Sure, this is coming from someone who just witnessed her best friend making love, but that’s not my normal style. My favourite story about blogs came from the Talking Heads’ lead singer David Byrne.
Esquire
magazine awarded him an ESKY for best blog, and he related a tale about a friend of his who had run into another blogger. When the friend asked how the person was doing, she indignantly replied, ‘Don’t you read my blog?’ Byrne said that if he ever got to that point,
Esquire
should feel free to rescind the ESKY.

I love that philosophy.

Unfortunately, I’m one of the last people in LA
not
to have a blog. My hairdresser has one. The guy who runs the Roach Coach that parks outside ARTSI at lunch everyday has one. The last valet attendant who parked my car
actually left a business card tucked into my never-used ashtray that featured information about
his
blog. But friends’ blogs are the worst, because friends can find out if you don’t keep up with the drama of their daily lives.