Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist

5. NICK

I never thought Jessie would betray me like this. I have done nothing but love her and treat her right. I’ve stood by her side and defended her when people called her trash and said they didn’t understand why I kept her. I thought that meant something. But no. Now when I need her most, she’s totally bailed. I turn the key and I turn the key and I turn the key and she doesn’t do a damn thing. How alone am I right now? Even my car has decided to give up on me.

I could be really mad at her. But mostly I’m afraid. That this is it—terminal. That we can volt her till the lights go out in Manhattan, and she’ll just sit here. Unblinking. I can’t afford to fix her again. If this is it, then this is really it.

I’m not really paying attention when Scot and Thom remove Caroline from my backseat. After all the time it took to get her in. But I can understand the impulse to abandon ship.

I’m about to help Scot connect the cables when this guy I’ve never seen before leans into Norah’s window and says, “Hey, baby, you ready to pick up where we left off?”

What. the. fuck?

Okay, maybe I hang with a queercore crowd and all, but still—I never, ever, in a million zillion years would have imagined that a guy could use the phrase “hey, baby” and mean it. He says it like he’s whistling at some girl’s boobs as she walks down the street. Who does that?

I expect Norah to put him right in his place. But instead she freezes. She looks away, as if she can ignore her way out of it. By some logic, this should mean that she’s now looking at me, since I’m 180 degrees away from our uninvited guest. But instead she focuses on the dashboard, on the place where the lighter should be. And I guess I’m a little surprised, because it was just starting to look like we were going to go someplace together. That this wasn’t just going to be a ride home. Now it’s becoming a ride nowhere, and I’m sad that it’s so out of my hands.

“Baby, I’m back,” the guy goes on. “How ’bout getting out of this heap and saying hello?”

Now, it’s one thing to try to harass Norah out of my passenger seat. But to bring Jessie into it is completely uncalled for.

“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. “The ex, 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.