Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist

by Rachel Cohn

  "Can I help you?" I ask.

  He keeps looking at Norah as he talks to me. "Yeah, buddy. I just got back to the States and I've been looking for this lady here. Can you spare her for a second?"

  He reaches in the window, unlocks the door, and opens it.

  "We'll be right back," he goes on. And I'm about to tell Norah she doesn't have to do a thing. But right then she reaches over and pops off her seatbelt. I figure this is a decision on her part-until she fails to follow it up with another movement. She just stays in the car.

  "Baby-," he purrs as he reaches in for her, as if she's a kid in a car seat. "I've missed you so much."

  I turn the key in the ignition. Still no start. Scot comes over to my window, looks inside the car, and says, "Problem here?"

  Now it's Scot that Norah looks at. And for some reason, this snaps her back.

  "Tal," she says with an edge usually reserved for cutlery, "you haven't missed me for one fucking minute. You have never for one single second in your entire pathetic life missed me. You might have missed fucking with my head, and you might have missed the satisfaction you so clearly got from demolishing me, but those are your emotions you're missing, not mine. I'm afraid I can't help you."

  "C'mon, baby," Tal says, leaning into her. She flinches back into the seat. I can sense Scot about to say something, but I beat him to it.

  "Dude, nobody puts baby in a corner," I say. "Get the fuck out of my car."

  Tal holds his hands up, steps out of the doorway.

  "Just giving the lady a choice," he says. "I didn't realize she was already ruining another guy's life. I hope you have better luck than I did."

  "Asshole," Norah murmurs.

  Tal laughs. "Piece of shit car: five dollars. Value of Norah's opinion: three cents. Irony of her calling me an asshole: priceless. "

  "Go. Away," Norah says.

  "What? Are you afraid I'm going to tell the truth?" Tal looks at me now. "Don't be fooled, partner. She talks a great game, but when you actually get to the field, you realize it's fucking empty. "

  From somewhere beyond the hood, Thom yells, "Gentleman, start your engine!"

  I cannot find a way to pray to God or some higher being. But I damn well feel comfortable praying to Jessie, and right at this moment I give her my evangelical all.

  Please start. I will buy premium gas for the next month if you please, please, please start.

  I turn the key in the ignition. There's a slight catch. And then-

  Jessie's talking to me again. And she's saying, Let's get the hell out of here.

  "I'd love to stay and chat," I say to Tal, "but we've got somewhere to be."

  "Fine," Tal says, shutting the door more gently than I would've expected. "Just don't say I never warned you. You're dating the Tin Woman here. Look for a heart, you'll only come up with dead air."

  "Thanks for the tip!" I say with mock cheer.

  He reaches in the window and touches Norah on the cheek, holding there for a moment.

  "Baby, it's you," he says. Then he turns back to the sidewalk and heads right into the club.

  "Seems like a nice guy," I say. Norah doesn't respond.

  Scot leans in my window now.

  "Don't worry about her friend," he says. "We'll get her home. You two kids have fun now, you hear?"

  "Sure thing," I tell him, even though Norah looks like the only use she has for the word fun is to make the word funeral.

  Thom shuts the hood and gives me a thumbs-up. Then he and Scot walk hand in hand back to the van, the jumper cables dangling over their shoulders like a boa.

  Norah hasn't moved to put her seatbelt back on. I don't know what this means. She turns to look at the door to the club.

  "You okay?" I ask.

  "I honestly have no idea," she says.

  I put Jessie into reverse and give our parking space away to whoever comes next. It gives me some satisfaction to know that my departure will become somebody else's good luck.

  It's only when I've pulled out onto the street that I realize I have no idea where we're going.

  "Do you want me to take you home?" I ask.

  I take her silence as a no. Because wanting to go home is the kind of thing you speak up about.

  I follow up with, "What do you want to do?"

  This seems to me to be a pretty straightforward question. But she looks at me with this total incomprehension, like she's watching footage of the world being blown up, and I'm the little blurb on the corner of the screen saying what the weather is like outside.

  I try again.

  "You hungry?"

  She just holds her hand to her mouth and looks out the front windshield.

  "You thirsty?"

  For all I know, she's counting the streetlamps.

  "Know any other bands playing?"

  Tumbleweed blowing down the armrest between us.

  "Wanna watch some nuns make out?"

  Am I even speaking out loud?

  "Maybe see if E.T. is up for a threeway?"

  This time she looks at me. And if she isn't exactly smiling, at least I think I see the potential for a smile there.

  "No," she says. "I'd much rather watch some nuns make out."

  "Okay, then," I say, swerving the car back toward the Lower East Side. "It's time for a little burlesque."

  I say this with some authority, even though I have only the faintest of faint ideas of where I'm going. Dev once told me about this place where strippers dressed like nuns and did this tease to "Climb Ev'ry Mountain." And that was only one of the acts. I figured it was too kitsch to be pervy-and that seemed to be Norah's range right there. As far as I could tell.

  As we're driving across Houston, Norah reaches over and turns on the radio. A black-lipsticked oldie: The Cure, "Pictures of You"-track four of my Breakup Desolation Mix.

  This, and every other song on this disc, is dedicated to Tris-.

  And if this is the soundtrack, my mind and my broken heart collaborate to provide me with the movie-that night she was so tired she said she needed to lie down, so she climbed over the seat and laid out in the back. I thought I'd lost her, but then five minutes later my cell phone rang and it was her, calling me from my own backseat. In a sleepy voice she told me how safe and comfortable she felt, how she was remembering all those late-night drives back from vacation, and how she'd stretch herself out and feel like her parents were driving her bed, nothing unusual about the movement of the road under the wheels and the tree branches waving across the windshield. She said those moments made her feel like the car was home, and maybe that's how I made her feel, too.

  Eventually she fell asleep, but I kept the phone against my ear, lulled by her breathing, and her breathing again in the background. And yes, it felt like home. Like everything belonged exactly where it was.

  "I so don't need this right now," Norah says. But she doesn't change the song.

  "Have you ever thought about their name?" I ask, just to make conversation. "I mean, for what?"

  "What are you talking about?"

  "The Cure. What do they think they're the cure for? Happiness?"

  "This coming from the bassist for The Fuck Offs?"

  And I can't help it. I think, Wow, she knows our name.

  "Dev's thinking of changing it to The Fuck Ons," I tell her.

  "How 'bout simply Fuck On?"

  "Maybe one word? Fuckon?"

  "The Friendly Fuckons?"

  "My Fuckon Or Yours?"

  "Why is he such a fucking Fuckon?"

  I look at her. "Is that a band name or a statement?"

  "He had no right to do that. None."

  We break into silence again. I lob a question right into it.

  "Who is he, then?"

  "An ex," she says, slumping back in the seat a little. "Theex, I guess."

  "Like Tris," I say, relating.

  She sits up and gives me a purely evil glance. "No. Not like Tris at all. This was real."

  I pause for a second,
listen to our breakup playing under the conversation.

  "That was mean," I say. "You have no idea."

  "Neither do you. So let's drop it. I'm supposed to show you a good time."

  I take this last sentence as a kind of apology. Mostly because that's what I want it to be.

  I'm winding through the Lower East Side now, on the streets that have names and not numbers. The night is still very much young here, hipster congregants exhaling their smoke from sidewalk square to sidewalk square. I find a parking space on the darker side of Ludlow, then convince Norah to retrace Jessie's steps until we're in front of a pink door.

  "Camera Obscura?" Norah asks.

  I nod.

  "Bring on the nuns," she says.

  I'm not sure if I'm supposed to knock or just open the door. The answer is given to me in the form of a burly bouncer dressed in a Playboy Bunny outfit.

  "ID?" he asks.

  I reach for my cousin's license from Illinois, won in a particularly intense Xbox challenge.

  Norah pats her pockets down. Blankly.

  And just as I think, Oh fuck, she says those exact words.

  6. NORAH

  Oh fuck.FUCK FUCK FUCK FUUUUUUUUUCK!!!!!!!

  I mailed the letter turning down the acceptance to Brown just this morning. And only now, in the middle of this night or is it morning and why does time cease to tick when I see Tal, only now do I get it. Kibbutz in South Africa: BIG FUCKING MISTAKE. Like, HUGE. What was I thinking? So we've broken up five times over the last three years. Somehow in the back of my mind was the thought that either (1) Tal and I would work things out next time, and what better place to do that than away from our families and friends in a commune on the flip side of the world, or (2) we wouldn't work things out yet again, but I'd be the best freakin' worker that kibbutz had ever seen; and as a bonus, Tal would die of jealousy when I fell madly in love with some beautiful surfer boy from Capetown and left Tal weeding gardens while I bailed on the kibbutz to backpack across the world with my new surfer love who hopefully would have a pretty-looking name like Ndgijo.

  Except that would never happen to me. How did such a reputedly smart girl get herself in this predicament, on the brink of adulthood, with no future to grab on to? These last few weeks I've been missing Tal as much as I've been bemoaning him as the Evil Ex. I've held on to the hope of surprising him by showing up in South Africa, yet when he was RIGHT THERE in front of me in Manhattan, what did I do? I froze. Suddenly all my fantasies of reconciliation were gone, suddenly all I could remember was how I was never good enough for him, Jewish enough, political enough, committed enough. Tal wasn't a lying cheating skank like Tris, but who had I been kidding? He had been, as Caroline likes to remind me, a "controlling fuckface." So right there, in a fucking Yugo, next to the poor schmuck I introduced myself to by making out with him, I finally had the moment of clarity that Mom and Dad and Caroline have been waiting for me to have since I was fifteen: ENOUGH! Caroline has been right all along. Tal and I are better off living our lives apart from one another.

  Oh fuck.Did I just say that aloud? I'm trying to pay attention to the Nick guy but I can't get Tal's words in front of the club off repeat playback in my mind: She talks a great game, but when you actually get to the field, you realize it's fucking empty.

  The Tin Woman! Tal called me the fucking Tin Woman! I lost my virginity and my whole youth to him, and that's his review of me? At least I can be grateful that when Tal took off from South Africa back to Manhattan without telling anybody, he couldn't possibly have received my letter yet; I only just mailed it. I was so hell-bent on the sentiment, I posted the letter international fucking snail mail when I could have just e-mailed him. I drew smiley faces on the outside of the envelope! Oh, God, I want to be sick right now.

  Norah, why are you such a regression bitch? One night last weekend spent holding Caroline's hair back while she puked in the toilet, feeling lonely and lost-for me, not for Caroline; she had an army of dudes outside the bathroom waiting for her to sober up-and I let the dark side of my mind, the Tal side, win out. As Caroline slept it off later that night in the extra twin bed that's been in my room for her since kindergarten, I wrote to Tal. Was it all the caffeine I consumed riding the night out with Caroline, or the leftover ganja haze of the reggae club where we'd passed the night? Secondhand smoke may be deadlier than firsthand straight-edge inhale, at least when it comes to impairing my ability to distinguish between lonely longing for the Evil Ex and actually trying to get back together with him.

  I hope Tal never finds out the Tin Woman was ready to compromise. I didn't outright say I wanted to get back together. But I said I was willing to consider it. I told him I could be vegan. I could be more Jewish. I could be kosher fucking vegan! I could learn to care about saving the sea otter and only drinking fair-trade coffee. I could believe that Tal and his brothers in Tel Aviv actually have talent and will become the next big thing, an older, punk-infused, pro-Israel, fuck-Europe, politicized version of Hanson. I would at least consider living with his miserable controlling psychotic mother in Tel Aviv once Tal starts his mandatory Israeli Army service next year, and oh alright fine, she could teach me how to cook the meals he likes and how to hang linens on a line in the sun so his sheets would always be crisp and fresh.

  That fucking letter! Shit! I was like Saddam Hussein in the South Park movie, professing to Satan, I can change! I can change!

  No. I can't change. I shouldn't change.

  Caroline may be a lush and a slut but she's not a complete moron. She begged me not to post the letter, but I wouldn't listen to her. "What the fuck do you have to change for?" she said. "Heshould fucking change, uptight bastard. Why are you doing this? If you need some end-of-adolescence protest, couldn't you like just wreck your dad's Jaguar on the Palisades Parkway or something? Are you really going to put us through you and Tal, the nightmare couple, one more time? And lose out on Brown for it? Norah, you know you'll meet someone else, don't you?" Only I didn't believe her-until tonight.

  What good is Caroline now, passed out in Nick's friend's van? I wonder if her cell is turned on. I need to tell her Tal is back! And I fucked up but now I have officially woken the fuck up.

  "Norah?" the Playboy Bunny bouncer responds to my pronouncement of oh fuck, which is no small relief because I don't have a fake ID. When your dad is the well-known head of a major record label, it tends not to be necessary at most clubs in Lower Manhattan.

  "Toni?" I say. S/he grabs me in a hug. Toni interned for Dad last year while deciding whether s/he wanted to pursue a career in the music industry; s/he was also my biggest advocate in my futile campaign (thus far) to convince Dad to produce an all-punk band tribute album to the Spice Girls. "Still working on that demo?"

  S/he pulls out a CD strapped inside the bushy tail at her back. "Just finished it! Will you pass it on?"

  "Sure," I say, hoping Nick will not interrogate me about who am I, some eighteen-year-old flannel-shirt-wearing BandT girl, to be passing on demos.

  "Go right on over to the VIP area," Toni says. "I'll make sure your drinks are on the house."

  "I don't drink," I remind Toni.

  "Oh, live a little," s/he says, bumping me at the hip. "Miss Straight Edge, bend 'round the corner for once in your life." Toni turns to Nick. "Illinois? Twenty-three years old? Give me a fucking break. But have fun, kids."

  S/he gives Nick a playful slap on the ass as we walk in and Nick doesn't react like Tal, who would have pounced back at a drag queen daring to touch him. Instead, Nick laughs and turns back around to return the gesture on Toni's ass. S/he gives him a butt shimmy dance in return. "I like this one, Norah!" s/he says. "Big improvement. Good egg."

  As opposed to what-nasty, fermented egg, the kind one naturally would assume Tris would pass off?

  We sit down at a small table that miraculously vacated of bodies as we approached it. For fuck's sake, my heart actually flutters for a moment when Nick pulls out the wooden chair for me. Who does that? And
why does that simple gesture for a moment make me forget I am REALLY PISSED OFF and MY LIFE IS OVER. I am distracted from my Tal malaise by the nuns making out to "Climb Ev'ry Mountain" on the stage, and find myself chuckling, all of a sudden having a mental image of me and Nick in a threeway with E.T. I feel the crack of a smile on my lips and a non-frigid buzz spreading through my body. In the flashing neon lights, and with the distraction of the stage show, I finally have the opportunity to truly appraise Nick. I admire his vintage gas station attendant jacket with the name "Salvatore" stenciled under the Texaco logo, and I admit to wanting to run my fingers through his mod mess of shag hair. He seems to have an ironic but sweet half-smile stenciled on his face, despite his Tris hangover.

  Nick waves thanks in Toni's direction at the door. He says, "Nice seats your friend hooked us up with. I have to admit, between your drunk girlfriend and your Yugo-insulting ex-boyfriend, it's a relief to see you have some nice friends." He winks at me and why won't that kind smile leave his face because I know if we are ever going to make it through this night/morning/whatever we have going, eventually I am going to have to tell him about Tris and that smile will be gone and I don't want to be the person responsible for killing it.

  I don't owe him an explanation or anything but I do say, "I'm sorry about Tal." Only what I'm really sorry about is what I said about Tris, but I can't find it in myself to speak that apology. Yet.

  Nick tells the cocktail bunny who approaches our table to please bring us drinks with little umbrellas in them, we don't care what, we're from Jersey, we won't know the difference anyway. He says to please just make sure the drinks are of the virgin variety.

  Then he turns to me and says, "I don't drink. I'm pretty straight edge. I hope that's not a problem for you."

  I'm only "pretty" straight edge myself. I mean, I don't drink or smoke or do drugs, but I'm not over the top about it like some of the straight-edge breed who also don't eat meat or have sex, either. My straight-edginess is rather like my Judaism: firm, but reform.

  I mean to answer Nick with, "It's not a problem for me. It's a fucking miracle." But I think I end up just doing some inane yes/no head-bob of shock.