Noir Center

Noir Center is a Hollywood department store whose noir-inspired architecture and themed departments package the city’s cinematic past as luxury retail. Prairie Wheeler sees through its romanticized image of old Hollywood: the store’s stylized nostalgia sits alongside plastic landscaping, computer surveillance, and guards dressed like figures from the very films it invokes. When Prairie meets Ché there, the mall becomes both a stage for their long-standing friendship and the setting for one of their practiced thefts, as their old ease gives way to a sense that they are about to go separate ways.

Design and Commercial Nostalgia

Noir Center presents itself through a pastiche of Hollywood noir. Its architecture recalls the Bradbury Building, a recognizable setting for scenes in films from around the Second World War. The reference appeals to Prairie, who likes old black-and-white films and knows that her grandparents, Hub Gates and Sasha Gates, had worked on some of them. But the store’s use of that history irritates her. From what she has heard from Hub Gates, Sasha Gates, Dolly, and Wade, she knows that Hollywood’s actual past was not the romantic world suggested by its movies: corruption reached both its highest circles and its underworld. The store’s elegant period associations leave that uglier history outside the frame.

Its departments turn the cinematic theme into a series of retail puns. The mineral-water counter is called Bubble Indemnity; furniture is sold in The Lounge Good Buy; perfumes and cosmetics occupy The Mail Tease Flacon; and the New York-style food hall is The Lady ’n’ the Lox. These names make the store’s play with noir explicit: film history is not simply evoked but divided into purchasable departments. The result is a form of conspicuous commercial nostalgia that Prairie regards as overdone, part of a cycle of upscale reinvention she hopes has reached its limit.

A Different Kind of Mall

For Prairie, Noir Center stands apart from the malls she and Ché knew as girls. The old centers had real fountains and living plants, and their food departments might employ a girl their age willing to trade a hamburger for earrings. Some even had ice rinks, back when the insurance costs were affordable. Prairie remembers spending time with Ché watching young skaters glide and spin beneath greenish-gray light, their expensive costumes and white skates flashing against the ice. One skater, pale and serious, approached them and then spun away with her skirt lifted; Ché teased Prairie with a pun on kid, meaning both a young person and a young goat. The memory gives the earlier malls a vivid, improvised life that Noir Center’s elaborate design cannot reproduce.

The difference is also one of surveillance. At Noir Center, security staff wear brown suits with pointed lapels and soft felt fedoras, while closed-circuit cameras and computers monitor the store. Prairie compares this system with the less sophisticated guards at the malls she remembers, where ordinary jackets or safari shirts served as uniforms. The old centers offered room for barter, skating, and unplanned encounters; Noir Center makes observation part of its noir décor and part of its operation. Its references to the past are carefully staged, but its attention to shoppers is contemporary and efficient.

Prairie and Ché at the Store

Prairie and Ché arrange to meet at Noir Center after taking zigzag routes, as if trying to lose a tail. Their caution reflects the pressures around them: they imagine evading potential pursuers, child-welfare authorities, or the FBI. Ché arrives breathless in a mixture of leather, canvas, metal, and denim, carrying a bazooka-style purse and wearing her hair in a striking, feathered, lime-green-blond crest. The two friends exchange compliments, then stop for ice cream and inspect one another with courteous but unsparing attention. In childhood, a glance between them could set off laughter that lasted all day. Here, Ché’s smiles appear only briefly, and Prairie connects the change to the man involved with her mother.

At Macy’s, within the department store, their reunion turns into a demonstration of Ché’s skill. Ché quietly takes women’s clothes in her size, choosing black, red, or a combination of the two, while Prairie shields her from the cameras. Prairie keeps employees occupied with an animated conversation about boys, singers, friends, and enemies, holding up clothes and asking for opinions while drawing staff into discussions of unfashionable styles. Ché removes the security devices with a tool stolen from another store and conceals the devices among the merchandise. Her movements are so practiced that even Prairie, despite years of familiarity, cannot identify the precise moment a theft occurs. The routine is usually a warm-up; this time it takes on the character of a performance offered between two old friends.

Pursuit, Escape, and Farewell

The mall’s theatrical surface also frames a more dangerous escape. As pursuit closes in, Prairie charges into the crowd, shouting and disrupting the chase long enough to reach Ché. She grabs Ché by the wrist, spins her around until they are facing the right way, and runs with her out of the danger. The narrated sensation is of superhuman speed, while the store’s music continues to reassure bystanders and preserve the impression that ordinary life has not been interrupted. A lively oboe-and-strings version of Chuck Berry’s Maybellene accompanies the girls as they disappear into the evening. The incongruity turns the mall soundtrack into part of the scene’s disguise: cheerful music smooths over a youthful flight that is not what it first appears to be.

Afterward, Ché describes narrowly escaping a man whose face looked murderous as he lay on the ground trying to salvage bourbon and spitting out fragments of an Elvis head. Prairie realizes that she does not know the expression Ché describes, then understands with a pang of sadness that Ché does. The friendship remains intimate, but their experiences are no longer interchangeable. Even as Ché resumes shoplifting, she wonders in a low voice what she is supposed to do now, including whether to consider business offers from men in large limousines. The practiced thefts do not cancel the unease surrounding them; they give the pair a familiar routine to perform while their prospects change.

Noir Center therefore holds two kinds of memory in tension. It sells a polished, purchasable version of Hollywood’s past, while Prairie and Ché bring to it their own less polished history: teenage mall expeditions, skating, private jokes, evasive routes, and thefts learned through repetition. At the store, the old routine still works, but its mood has altered. Their final caper feels like an offering to one another, a last turn in the name of the good old days before they move on.