Other People's Clothes Read online

  We discussed New York, we discussed art. Yes, we were both studying here. Hailey listed her origins from Rhode Island to Kentucky. Yes, we were new to Berlin. Yes, we were new to everything. When Beatrice and her mother weren’t looking Hailey shot me big moon eyes, she wanted the apartment. Hailey switched into her Southern story mode, regaling them with the horrors of the Hostel Star and the Australian Aarons: Every night you miss in Berlin is a night you miss in Berlin. The pair released matching laughs, their necks now oscillating, moving from one another and back to us. They were warming up. I could see Beatrice beginning to see herself in us, the young expats full of wonder. Her questions became rapid as if the clock were running out in a game of charades.

  “Why Berlin?”

  “What sort of art do you like?”

  Hailey talked about Warhol.

  “Have you ever been abroad before?”

  Hailey nudged me, I told them about my Mexico City trip in high school, twenty-two girls and one boy.

  “What do your parents do?”

  Hailey began a lengthy explanation about how her family’s supermarket chain, Biggles, was reshaping American consuming.

  “Are you involved?” Beatrice asked, ignoring Hailey’s monologue on perishables. It took us a beat to realize what she meant. Hailey happily told her about her boyfriend Zander, “the genius,” trailing on about their open relationship and how he had been recently nominated for a prize for his work in robotics. Beatrice began to inspect her fingernails. Janet yawned and shot a look at her daughter. In a panic, Hailey clicked her tongue, “Zoe is dating her murdered best friend’s ex-boyfriend.”

  I flushed. How had Hailey found out? I had only told her I was dating someone named Jesse. She must have put the pieces together from Facebook. Beatrice’s eyes flashed, she looked toward me with a tight smile and Janet seemed to finally truly come alive.

  “Oh. I’m terribly sorry. How did it happen?” Janet asked.

  “Stabbed,” Hailey said, as if explaining how she wanted her steak cooked. Beatrice and Janet both raised their eyebrows, clearly wanting more.

  “Where?”

  “In the neck and chest, fourteen times,” Hailey responded.

  “I mean geographically?”

  “Florida. She was a ballerina.” Hailey glanced at me to continue. I looked down at the ground, a wide silence settled in the room, I hadn’t told Hailey any of that. Why was she doing this? I wanted to scream. Beatrice cocked her head with faint pleasure. Everyone was looking at me. A train rumbled by, casting a yellowish glow into the room. It was just close enough that you could make out the silhouettes of passengers gazing dimly out into the night. I wondered if they could see us, if they also knew the room was waiting for me to speak.

  “Why do you live in Berlin?” Hailey asked Beatrice, finally claiming the emptiness after the train’s whooshing exit.

  Beatrice sat up, turning her cheek to the side in thought, but before she could answer, Janet cut in, “It’s a wonderful place to write, one can still entertain darkness here—but we keep our main residence in Calii-four-nia, and my favorite—a Frisian cottage on the coast of Sylt.”

  Hailey smiled as if that explanation made perfect sense.

  “What’s a Frisian cottage?” I mumbled, trying to make up for my earlier silence. Hailey glared at me like I was an idiot.

  “It is a style of thatched farmhouse, ubiquitous on Sylt—an island up north,” Janet explained.

  “I love those cottages,” Hailey added.

  “They are darling, but need constant maintenance.”

  “All right then,” Beatrice clipped, clearly annoyed at her mother’s blabbering. She lifted her bony figure off the couch and beckoned us to follow, her crimson nails flying around as she pointed things out—the brand-new washing machine, a windowless bathroom, a nice nook for reading. The kitchen was clad in fading ’70s floral wallpaper and floor-to-ceiling books. I lingered, peering out the window near the sink at an empty courtyard.

  “And here is the bookshelf with all my own works,” she said, gesturing to the twelve-tier rainbow that stood behind her in the foyer. I shuffled out of the kitchen just as she paused in front of the shelf as if for a photograph, her black hair reflecting the overhead light.

  Beatrice ran to answer her phone, leaving us momentarily alone in the foyer.

  “I fucking knew it. She’s famous, her books are in airports,” Hailey whispered with zeal. Her love of pop extended to the literary, with a penchant for carrying around fat bricklike books with embossed covers and bloody fonts. She was giddy.

  Beatrice returned. “So as you can see there is a primary bedroom, but the living room has a lovely daybed.”

  “Fantastic,” Hailey said with a shit-eating grin.

  I flushed with anger at her empty exuberance. She had thrown Ivy on the table like a poker chip. She had no filter. No breaks.

  “Take a look around,” Beatrice said, bangs fluttering as she nodded toward the entrance to the bedroom.

  Separated into two enormous rooms, the once ballroom was partitioned by carved double doors painted white with gold handles, prewar, or as Beatrice had said, Altbau. The floors were patterned in parquet diamonds with thin strips of dark cherry running along the edges and covered in a smattering of carpets. The biggest room, the bedroom, had a bay window overlooking the park, a wrought-iron bed, and a glossy upright Blüthner piano. And the slightly smaller room, the living room, where Janet sat rigidly on the lip-shaped couch, boasted a large oak dining table and a collection of bookshelves. Both rooms had a massive ceramic-tiled rectangle in the corner.

  “Ah yes, the proverbial elephant in the room. It’s the only drawback, girls—coal heating. But it’s terribly efficient once you get the knack,” Beatrice said gingerly as she caught Hailey side-eyeing the tiled mass.

  After the tour we headed toward the entrance hall and retrieved our jackets, Beatrice gave us each a stiff embrace, covering us in her mutant floral scent. “It would be so nice to have you girls stay here, my fellow travelers,” she cooed. Janet joined her daughter in the doorframe, both women now backlit, their matching bobs silhouetted.

  “So we—can—have it?” Hailey asked nervously.

  “Yes, I don’t see why not,” Janet said, leaning her neck out.

  Beatrice shot her mother a look. “I’ll be in touch with the details.”

  “And I do hope you girls will enjoy our library,” Janet added just before the door shut.

  Hailey hummed excitedly, releasing a “fuck yes” as we hit the street. I couldn’t celebrate. As the apartment faded into darkness I felt choked in anger at Hailey for mentioning the “murdered friend’s ex-boyfriend.” I snapped at her, “Hailey, that wasn’t—”

  She didn’t even let me finish. “Oh, come on. It’s Beatrice Becks, we needed to tell her a good story so she’d give us the apartment. Look at what we got—it’s insane, it’s the best apartment in Berlin. What, do you have a better plan?”

  I didn’t. This was the invisible weight between us. It was Hailey who spoke German, it was Hailey who understood the map of the city, who wasn’t afraid to ask strangers directions and send emails about apartments. I sighed, letting her comment melt away on the train.

  Later that night, after receiving the confirmation and details from Beatrice, we were on a cloud, even joining the Australian Aarons in smoking weed out the window, while they regaled us about a club called Berghain.

  “You gotta try, man. No one gets in, we’ve been rejected two nights in a row.”

  “It’s just a roll of the dice—the hardest club to get into in the world.”

  “It’s a motherfucking church of sound.”

  “Oy, we will—and we’ll get in,” Hailey said, making fun of their accents while passing the joint to me.

  Ten minutes later the Australians were putting on jackets and stra
ightening beanies, readying their luck.

  Hailey called to them just as they were opening the door, “I have ecstasy. It’s the good stuff, if you want it.”

  The boys yipped. Hailey dug into her toiletries, removing three blue pills.

  “Thanks, babe, you’re the best,” the tallest said, palming the pills and knocking a peck on her cheek.

  The door shut behind them, Hailey wiped her face.

  “You have ecstasy?”

  “Sleeping pills. I scratched off the logo.”

  I snorted, then was hit with concern for the Australians and their impending lethal tox reports.

  “Revenge, served with a yawn,” Hailey laughed.

  We finally drifted off, the doorknobs of Beatrice’s apartment dancing like sugar plums in our stoned heads.

  We had a week until we could move into Beatrice’s apartment. We drank beers in the lemon-scented lobby bar of the hostel, which consisted of a mini fridge, sloppily muraled map of Berlin pubs and a TV Tower–shaped honor box chained to the window. Hailey turned to me, “You know what we need?” I shook my head. “We need to go out, it’s our last weekend before school—we’ll probably be too busy once it starts.”

  “Where?” I asked, contorting my neck, sarcastically motioning to the map of cartoon beer steins above us.

  “Berghain.”

  My image of European clubs was mainly derived from Alias episodes where Jennifer Garner donned short black wigs and spoke in Russian to meaty bouncers and snaky women, the Australians being rejected made perfect sense; they didn’t belong.

  “Come on, we can prove to them that they’re losers.”

  “Yeah, let’s,” I said.

  Hailey settled on a pair of purple lowriders and an iridescent buttercream blouse, me in silver American Apparel tights under ripped jeans and a leather jacket with hoop earrings. The club wasn’t far from Hostel Star. We bought a smallish bottle of vodka and drank it as we walked, its rim slick with Hailey’s ruby Dior lipstick.

  The industrial building stood alone in a field dotted with chain-link fence and locked bikes, it was well past midnight and the line was at least a hundred people long.

  “Everyone’s ugly,” Hailey said too loudly toward the queue, “we’ll definitely get in.” We had drained the bottle of vodka. My legs felt loose but waiting for our fate at the door made my nerves stretch like piano wire.

  “I know we’ll get in,” Hailey kept saying to no one in particular. She popped another wad of her imported Dentyne Ice into her mouth and began smacking. We got closer, we could see clumps getting rejected and some let in.

  “Let me do the talking in German, I’m sure they hate tourists.” I nodded, picking at my cuticles. “And here, put on my lipstick.”

  I obeyed, squishing the plastic wand into the bright-red hole, then rimming my lips. “God, everyone’s in black.” She gestured toward the fifty or so people who stood, winding back and forth in the cattle-corral between us and the door. “We shouldn’t have worn so much color.” A hooded guy swooped in and offered to sell us cocaine. Hailey shrugged and exchanged two twenties for a white plastic Baggie.

  “We have to do it before we get in, I heard they really search you…” she said, fondling the Baggie, panic ricocheting through her voice. A group of four were rejected. A lanky guy in a bomber was let in. Hailey and I hid behind the lumbering bodies in front of us and snorted rough wet mounds off of her plastic wallet. I knew immediately it wasn’t coke. Maybe speed. Something intense. We became way too high. “I’ll put the rest in my underwear,” I suggested. Hailey nodded, her face anesthetized. Finally, the three tall bodies in front of us were let in. The bouncer, with a thick neck and mean stare, looked us up and down quickly, “Heute leider nicht.”

  I didn’t need to speak German to know. I began walking away quickly, my eyes glued to the dirt, my heart sunk deep into my stomach. Nostrils burning. Where was she? I looked back. Hailey was arguing with the bouncer. It sank further. “Hailey, come on,” I called, desperate for the situation to fade behind us. Desperate to be anywhere but standing in front of that line, all those other eyes, calculating the signifiers of our rejection. She finally turned and left.

  “Asshole told me it’s ’cause he hated my shoes.”

  I looked down at her strappy Marc Jacobs gladiator boots. They were hideous.

  “But I think it’s because we weren’t wearing black. And maybe it’s because we were too sexy. Apparently you have to look like a garbage bag to get in there. Fuck him.” Her face was hard, her pupils huge. “Let’s go somewhere else. I hate techno anyway—”

  I nodded. Hailey bought another bottle of vodka and we walked to the train. She was on a warpath. I was too high to talk. Hailey’s nose began dripping blood, pooling onto the breastplate of her blue coat, the synthetic surface turning amethyst. She cleaned it up with napkins from a kiosk at the train station, assuring me it happened all the time, a side effect from the nose job.

  “There is an artist club I heard about, on Skalitzer, let’s go there,” she said, holding the now-red heap of tissues to her face. Sipping from the bottle, I followed obediently for what felt like hours, until we found ourselves in a parking lot, music thumping from a brick building just beyond. There were only a dozen or so people in line, again, all dressed in black. I flushed with the possibility of a second rejection. “We could also just go drink at the hostel, I’m high—” I deflected.

  “No,” she spat. The drugs made her mean. Ten grueling minutes later the bouncer, a guy in a denim jacket with floppy hair, let us in with a smile. Once through the door, we erupted.

  “Oh my god, yes. See!” Hailey squealed, pushing her way to the bar.

  The menu was written out in Sharpie on glitter board, the bartenders, four men, were nearly hairless and all shirtless. Hailey’s drug eyes had softened. The dance floor was packed with bodies, glistening limbs swinging, while all the surrounding crevices under chairs and above windowsills were plugged with sweaters and jackets. We shoved our coats under a bench. Hailey ordered vodka sodas, she paid. We bobbed onto the dance floor. The music was more disco than techno, and we soon found ourselves enmeshed in a group of four expats who had the studied ease of having hundreds of nights out together—their hands multiplying like Hindu gods, sliding in and around each other, exchanging drinks, smirks, comments and key bumps.

  “Hi, where are you from?” the tall one of the group, with curly brown hair and proud designer glasses, asked Hailey.

  “New York,” she said, tucking her hair behind her ear.

  “I’m Christopher, I’m from Connecticut,” I heard him say before spinning her ironically as if in a ’40s swing movie. Christopher from Connecticut, it had the ring of a fancy hand-towel brand. I watched Hailey’s red hair release from behind her ear, swooping back and forth, neck elastic, in sync with his. Hailey was pretty. I knew that. I understood what that meant, but seeing her on the dance floor made it real. Like a currency that could get exchanged at the airport. People were drawn to her. She winked at me and I felt a shimmer of pride, we were in this together. I danced off to the side of our new group, nervous, sweaty. Still too high. A Donna Summer song played, it was one of Ivy’s favorites, which she kept on repeat in her copper Bravada, blasting it with the windows down—I feeeel love.

  I reached for the ribbons of Ivy lacing through me. She felt close. The music climbed. I closed my eyes and I could see her, tanned and focused, moving her shoulders in scientific rhythm. I felt her heat braid into mine, and when I returned to the room, my lids fluttering, Ivy was there, just another bouncing body. I stopped moving and she shot eyes into me, they’d always had the effect of Nerf guns, softly capturing whoever they were pointed toward. I held my hand out, dumbfounded. She was solid, flesh, bone, blood pumping. Euphoric, I wove my hands around her wrist, pulling her toward me. We moved in unison, I had ten thousand questions I wanted to ask. Wha
t happened? Who killed you? Where are you? Are you mad at me? I leaned in, my lips suddenly Saharan. Ivy held her finger up, shushing my fumbling mouth, then slowly backed away. She began to slip, dissolving into the room. Panicking, I grabbed for her wrist, but this time it was Hailey’s, she smiled before turning back toward Christopher from Connecticut.

  Donna Summer faded out but Hailey and Ivy’s merge felt permanent, diluting the confused venom that had been pumping through me since the funeral. I continued to dance, staring at Hailey as she flipped her hair back and forth, her tits jumping from her push-up bra with each step, my heart expanding every time her eyes met mine. Only then did I realize how desperate I was for her friendship.

  Thirty minutes later Hailey pulled her face close to mine, “They want to get out of here. I like this guy, he’s a filmmaker—I think maybe famous. They’re all really cool and like—we should go, they have a taxi outside—”

  I would have followed her anywhere. We found our coats, which were now wet with spilled drinks, and followed as the group of four jumped into a pale yellow van. As the door slid shut, Hailey and Christopher’s tongues began making watery whale sounds. The girl seated next to me, dressed in stretchy layers of black that gave her the outline of a bat, extended her hand in an expression of deep boredom without even offering her name.

  “Where are we going?” I asked her.

  “Berghain,” she said nonchalantly, her angular haircut shifting toward me as she turned to look out the window.

  My heart sank. Hailey looked up at me in horror, her tongue still in Christopher’s mouth. The car rode on.

  After a few minutes, Christopher released himself from Hailey’s face, smeared in her lipstick, “Let’s do some lines.”