Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist

12. NORAH

I am still hungry.

I am also still tired, and still vaguely interested in my future life of sainthood, but still. I gnaw. The stale Oreo I am munching in the cab, with the cookie part soggy instead of crisp, the white center near-gelatinous—like a room temperature ice cream sandwich—is brilliant, but not coming close to quelling this hunger. I’m not sure whether the gnawing is coming from my stomach or the Arctic vicinities around that area that, earlier, eerily melted under the greenhouse effect of Nick’s touch.

“Are we going or not?” the taxi driver asks me. We’ve sat through five rotations of the light at Houston and West Broadway while I decide where I want to go. The driver is putting up with my uncertainty because he’s hopeful I won’t follow through on my threat to either be driven to Jersey or file a formal complaint if he gives me any more shit about leaving the city.

“Where to, lady?”

I DON’T FUCKING KNOW!

I can only process two rational thoughts. (1) I want more stale Oreos from that Korean grocery, and (2) I don’t want some stupid fucking guy to be the reason I stop liking Where’s Fluffy. I need to erase the memory of my favorite Fluffy song, their gay rights anthem “Lesbian Lap Dance,” from being my last memory of the band, the song they were performing when genius girl decided to take Nick by the hand for some lap-dance action of our own. I need to get back to that fucking club.

“Back to Ludlow,” I tell the driver.

Did I go too far with Nick, or not far enough? Or is it that I’m just plain unattractive? I never should have deleted all those spam e-mails advertising the vitamin supplements for fuller, firmer breasts. I’m more stacked than Caroline and Tris but mine go off in the wrong directions—over and out instead of up and in. It’s probably time for me to wake up and accept the fact that I may be in need of a makeover.

The driver sighs, shakes his head, then pulls an illegal U-turn across four lanes of traffic from where we’ve been idling at the curb. He turns up the radio volume, perhaps hoping he will not hear me if I should change my mind again. How a former second-string player on the Kazakhstan soccer team came to be driving a graveyard-shift taxi in Manhattan and listening to Z100 instead of the standard 1010 WINS (all news, all depressing, all the time), which I had always assumed to be the one cardinal rule of taxicab radio etiquette, I don’t know. Everyone has their story.

Vintage Britney sings from the pop radio station; she knows about toxic. Nick must think I’m toxic, marauding him in a closet at a Fluffy show. He didn’t try to stop me when I left that room, or when I left him to get into this taxi. He didn’t even wave good-bye.

The cab is careening down Bowery, whizzing by the club where earlier tonight Nick asked if I would be his girlfriend for five minutes, then made me like him, then looked right at me and made a public declaration with those magic words—“FUCK-SHIT-COCK”—that left me no choice but to make a play for him. I remember seeing Crazy Lou at the Where’s Fluffy show, long after those five minutes had expired. Lou would only leave his club for someone else to close up shop if…

“STOP!” I shout at the driver over the music. I’m already where I’m supposed to be.

The driver slams the brakes so hard I toss my cookies—truly. The jolt sends my bag of Oreos to the floor. The taxi halted, the Kazakh poster king turns around and from the other side of the plastic divide yells back at me, “WHAT YOU WANT ANYWAY, LADY? WHAT’S THE MATTER WITH YOU?”

Tal is across the street, ushering the remaining club inhabitants from the establishment, closing up his uncle’s place for the night. His post-show usual, Tal’s shirt is off and he’s sweeping the sidewalk. I remember Tal’s chest, all lean muscle, too scrawny, too vegan. I remember my hands on Nick’s chest. I liked touching Nick. He had something to grab on to. I want more touch.

I don’t know what’s the matter with me, driver. But if I am destined to a life of loneliness and celibacy, isn’t there some side rule that entitles me to go out in one last blaze of glory? One last booty call?

Three times I start to get out of the cab to pursue that last rite. I reach for the door handle and count the money in my wallet. Three times I stop and sit still again.

“What’ll it be? Are you getting in or getting out?” the driver asks.

Over the tail end of Britney’s song, I can hear The Clash wailing in my head, Should I stay or should I go?

I can’t think with all these voices! I snap at the driver, “Lighten Up, Motherfucker.” I bet Where’s Fluffy are playing that conservative backlash song this very moment. Sucks that I am missing it. Nick’s fault.

In a flash, the driver turns around to face me. “You want to sit in this cab and decide where to go, I don’t care. It’s your money.” He points to the meter, still running. Time is always fucking me over. “But I’ll tell you what I tell my five daughters when they get fresh. This is a gentleman you’re talking to, not a casting director for The Sopranos. Watch your mouth or get out of the cab.”

“Okay,” I say. “Sorry.” I bet he’s a really nice dad. I bet his daughters make his favorite foods from Kazakhstan for him and nag him about getting his prostate checked regularly. “But could you at least change the station?”

“Deal,” he says. The next station is playing “I Fall to Pieces” by Patsy Cline. I have no choice but to cry. The driver hands me a box of Kleenex from the front. “Want to tell me about it?”

“Boys are idiots,” I tell him, sniffling. If I’m a horrid bitch from the planet Schizophrenia, it’s because boys make me one. “I hope you don’t let your five daughters date them.”

“I try not to,” he laughs. “I try.”

I ask the driver to turn his headlights off while we idle at yet another curb. I want to think before I decide whether or not to talk to Tal, and I don’t want Tal to notice me in this cab before I’ve had time to figure this out.

The last time I saw Tal was also at Lou’s club, before Tal took off for the kibbutz, just after he dropped out of Columbia. We were in the back hallway after a show, the club room empty and darkened, smelling of beer and piss and cigarettes, littered with bottles and cups and shirts and the accumulated, spent energy of that night’s mosh. Tal stood over me—too tall Tal, he’s almost 6-foot-4—and had to crouch down to meet my lips. His kiss was wet, sloppy. I used to suspect this was true, but before, I didn’t have much comparison. “Norah,” Tal whispered, and it was the Israeli half of his inflection I heard, whereas the other tired word in his English vocabulary—“baby”—usually came out with the American side of his accent. When I was sixteen his Israeli accent saying “Norah” did sound hot to me, exciting, but at eighteen I heard it differently: it was grating, ugly, like phlegm choking up from the back of his throat instead of a wanton call.

Caroline had two guys fighting over her outside the club, and I think Tris must have been with Nick at that point, because I was all alone with Tal with nothing else to do. It was soon after our fifth and supposedly final breakup, and all I wanted from Tal was for him to shut up so we could get down to business. Tal generally preferred to read the Forward while whacking off in his dorm room instead of have sex with me, so it must have been a dream come true for him in the back hallway of the club—there I was, doing the work for him, without wanting anything in return. He was satisfied to let this happen and not speak to me or touch me back.

I was dead inside then, my hand cramped from the motion. Tal didn’t protest when I left the hallway to step into Lou’s office. He knew where I was going. He liked to be kept waiting for his release. I found the Jergens in Lou’s office. I had intended to finish what I started, but stepping out of that moment, however briefly, changed my mind. I thought, I can be up on my straight-edge high horse because I don’t drink or smoke or do drugs, but what does that all matter in comparison to this new low I am stooping to with Tal? He’s kind of a creep; he doesn’t even like me. I wondered—was it that I was frigid or that we just had no chemistry?

I placed the Jergens bottle back on the desk and snuck out the rear office door to the alley to release myself. I hadn’t seen or heard from Tal since, until tonight. She talks a great game, but when you actually get to the field, you realize it’s fucking empty. Maybe I shouldn’t be so mad at Tal’s review of me to Nick earlier tonight. I did last leave him with blue balls.

I am curious how Tal came to be back in my world, but getting out of this cab to ask Tal the question—Why did you come back to Manhattan?—may be more of a waste than the meter I am allowing to run through my time and money while I sit in this backseat. Why does anyone come here? Mere words defy that answer. The question is too big.

Whatever Tal came back here for, I’m sure he didn’t come back here for me. But if he did, he’s even stupider than me. How is it that two people with near-perfect SAT scores could have so little intelligence when it comes to each other?

Patsy’s finished falling to pieces, and now it’s Merle Haggard’s turn to taunt me from the radio. The song is “Always Wanting You,” a favorite of Dad’s, where cynical, heartsick Merle croons about always wanting but never having his love, and about how hard it will be to face tomorrow cuz he knows he’ll just be wanting her again. Doomed.

If I could have stayed in that closet with Nick, I might have figured out new degrees of wanting, tried out new moves, ones Tal never inspired in me. With me and Tal, it was straight Up/Down or In/Out. If Nick had me pinned against a wall right now, I’d be more imaginative than I ever was with Tal, stroking instead of pulling, kneading and threading, groping along with grazing, two hands instead of one, the soft scratch of fingernails included. Maybe I could inspire Nick to be a little imaginative with me, too. When Tris broke up with him, she said she knew she’d broken his heart, but she’d done him a favor, too. She’d sent him back out into the world with skills the women of his future could thank Tris for, because he certainly didn’t have them when she discovered him. Fuck Tris and her Tantric knowledge.

Tomorrow is already here and I’m truly feeling Merle’s bittersweet song. I shouldn’t, but I do. I still want Nick.

I should have trusted him.

A gush of tears streaming down my face have replaced the light sprinkle Patsy’s song inspired.

Fuck him. Fuck me.

Happy endings don’t happen. Merle Haggard knows it, and now I know it.

Okay, I know one thing I want, something that I can have. I want to conclusively end the Tal regression spiral. So maybe I lost out on Nick. But at least now I know. There are Nicks out there.

I also really want some borscht about now. “Could you please turn the lights back on?” I ask the driver. I direct him to the 24-hour Ukrainian restaurant in the East Village that’s the one place Tris, Caroline, and I ever agreed on. Since we first started coming into the city on our own to hear music—as we’ve successively stretched parental boundaries until the restrictions and curfews have not only been lifted but banished, because we’re big girls now, we might fuck up but we’ll figure it all out, eventually—the three of us sometimes cap off our nights out, at least those that don’t end in fights or hooking up or passing out, at the restaurant with the great borscht and the clean bathroom. I wonder if we three will ever go to this restaurant together again, or if that era is over, like mine and Tal’s, and Nick and Tris’s.

“Good choice,” the driver tells me. He’s been watching Tal’s sweeping motions from the window.

I consider taking a catnap for the short drive over to the East Village but my chest is ringing. What the fuck? I forgot I was wearing Nick’s—I mean my—jacket. I reach into the chest pocket to pull out a crumpled ten-dollar bill and a small, flip-up cell phone that has a photo-booth sticker of Tris stuck on it. I wouldn’t have figured Nick to be the cell phone type, but then I remember, Tris gave him the phone at Christmas. When she wants to keep tabs on a boy, when she’s in that mode with him, she means it. I remove the Tris photo sticker from the phone and place it on the city map beneath the taxi’s back plastic divider, above the Empire State Building image, in a position so that the building appears to be giving Tris the finger.

I don’t know if I should answer Nick’s phone. The name flashing is “tHom.”

I am a terrible person. I let two strangers take off with my sistah-girl. For all I know, Thom and Scot are the power couple of serial killers, the Ted Bundy and Aileen Wuornos of the garage-band New Jersey punk-rock scene. What if Caroline has woken up and is looking for me, like after her mom died and her dad checked out for a younger model, and Caroline would wake up in the middle of the night, scared and alone, and creep over the fence to my house? No, I shouldn’t worry. My instinct may have been wrong that Nick was attracted to me, but it wasn’t wrong that his friends were good guys. They’ll get her home.

I answer. “Thom? Is Caroline okay?”

“Finally!” he says. “Yes, she’s still asleep. Seems happy. Keeps mumbling something about cartoons and Krispy Kremes in the morning. But I’ve been trying to call Nick for the past hour. Didn’t you guys hear the phone? Scot and I got lost coming off the parkway and then, er, we got distracted at the rest stop and the directions on my hand kinda got rubbed off. We’re sitting in the parking lot of a 7-Eleven. I have no idea where we are or how to get to your house.”

I try to talk Thom through it, figure out where he is, but he confuses me more, and I’m lost all over again. The taxi driver slams on his brakes again. I think we’re near St. Marks Place now. “Give me that,” the driver says, pointing to the phone. I like that he is law-abiding and does not try to use Nick’s cell phone while the vehicle is motion.

I hand him the phone and the driver talks to Thom, figures out where he is and how to get him home to my place in Englewood Cliffs, then hands the phone back to me. “Here, Thom wants to talk to you again.”

“Hi again,” I say into the phone.

I hear Thom’s giggle. “So how is it going? How was the date with Nick? You love him, right?”

“It’s been great. We’re getting married.”

“Really? Can I talk to him?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“I have no idea where he is.” I click off the cell.

We’re at the restaurant. “You coming in?” I ask the driver. “Borscht and pierogies are on me.”

He smiles at me. His daughters must have some really nice family portraits from Sears hanging in their house. “Thanks, but I’m a working man. Got to keep working. You keep the Kleenex, though.”

I take the box of Kleenex out of the car and give the driver my hundred-dollar bill, the whole of my emergency cab money Dad placed in the secret crevice of my wallet. I only have enough money left in my wallet for something to eat and to take the bus back to Englewood Cliffs, so I’ll have to hang out at the restaurant for a couple hours until the bus service is running again.

A crazy lady stands at the restaurant entrance, holding a Chock full o’Nuts tin can, the Wicked Witch of the Stank. She eyeballs me, zeroing in on my chest area. Maybe she knows something about those vitamin supplements. She tells me, “Salvatore is looking for you.”

I reach back into the jacket pocket for the crumpled ten-dollar bill. I donate Nick’s tunnel money into the witch’s can.

“No, he’s not,” I assure her.