Spygirl

by Amy Gray

  After graduation, Ben and I moved to a Brooklyn neighborhood called Cobble Hill, which was ungentrified enough that we could afford it, and for Ben to get mugged three times (twice with a gun) on our block. Our windows faced brick walls. I went from studying the panopticon and pornography to desk jobs at one and then another major publishing house, miserably ensconced in the ornery minutiae of forms, typing, and routine. I became sullen, and barely noticed my small reserve of hope fading away from my consciousness. I gritted and bore it for several years, perfecting the art of mediocre typing and barely passable message taking.

  It was Eleanor, another editorial drudge and my “pod-mate” (as we called the other overeducated postideologues who populated the plasterboard cubicles in my office), who first inspired my return to the clandestine province of investigation. She and I distracted ourselves from work with rituals like reading our horoscopes every morning off the Yahoo! website. She was a Virgo. One day hers read, “Your fixed star, Mizar, is at its highest point of illumination in the Ursa Major constellation, starting a period of astrological circumstances which foster deep emotional connection and perhaps true love. When he asks, give him your number.”

  That night she met a guy at a bar who talked to her all night about Charles Bukowski and Tom Waits and his work for the Anti-Defamation League, and at work the next day she thought she must be in love. When she met him for coffee the next weekend she found out he had a girlfriend, a hair weave, and acute male pattern balding. Luckily, a week later at an unbearable Upper East Side mixer for single Jewish cat lovers (she was Irish Catholic and a dog person), she met Bill. He was a nice Jewish boy, and they talked all night about how much they hated anything above Twentieth Street and how much they loved latkes, of which there were a lot at the party. Eleanor adjusted to Bill having a cat and a dog. Three weeks later, they were in love.

  After they professed their devotion, Bill had to go to Utah, where he was tracking the former cellmate of a guy his firm was investigating. He was a corporate investigator, Eleanor told me, and he was trying to find the prison mate of someone he was investigating for embezzlement and drug-running under the RICO statute. I got daily updates on Bill's progress. Eleanor stopped wanting to read her horoscope, although she let me continue. On his fourth day away, mine read, “Romantic and professional prospects stall, so tread water now. Treat yourself to a great new outfit.” That night I dreamt of sleeping in the back of a van parked outside in the hot Utah summer, and waking in the dead of night to scan the vast, black sky and stars for signs. In the day I would watch and draw clues from unlikely places. Subject wears Adidas sneakers. Subject has a nervous tick in his left upper eyelid. Subject eats four bowls of bran flakes. Subject makes numerous trips to the bathroom, etc. In the pantheon of my publishing experience, it seemed that I was always reading about and talking to people who were doing remarkable things with their lives, and yet I was so far from being one of them.

  The Odd Days Club and Other Rituals of the Young PI

  Now I was supposedly living the life I had dreamt about. Bill and Eleanor had moved to London together, and I had his job.

  My second week on the job, I followed everyone onto the fire escape for a smoke. Gus was talking about the Irish tradition of oral history. Gus was short for Gunther. At six feet six, with his head wrapped in a red bandana and a homemade sleeveless Slayer T-shirt stretched across his gut, he was the highest-ranking investigator under Sol and George. He was an expert at database research. I blurted out in my best pseudo-pimp voice, “Yeah, well I can tell you a little about oral history.” It was a joke, but they were all aghast for a moment until I broke up laughing and they all followed suit, patting me on the back as we filed back into the office, saying, “Nice one, A. Gray.”

  That droll display represented a shift from my isolation in the Nestor/Assman camp. Since the two of them baited the other investigators, I had started to feel isolated from the rest of the office. Or maybe I was just being paranoid. I wasn't sure. Until that moment, the three of us had been on different smoking shifts from the other investigators, and we ate lunch at the opposite end of the conference-room table.

  After my performance on the fire escape, Nestor and Assman didn't talk to me for the rest of the day, but I took my chances. That night, all the other investigators went out drinking. I had noticed they all left together a few times the week before, but this was the first time I'd been invited along. Assman and Nestor aside, I knew that I was viewed with suspicion by the other investigators in the office. I was only the third woman they'd ever hired, thrown into a sea of guys mourning the loss of a girl-free, belching-friendly office environment. And I was hanging out with the two office outcasts.

  “Yo, Gray, wanna go get shitfaced?” This came from Evan, who'd already gotten a head start on the rest us. He led the way, cradling his laptop in one hand and a Papst Blue Ribbon in the other.

  “More than you know.” I packed up and followed everyone to the 119 Bar, which was a five-minute walk from the office. It was part of an exclusive circuit of dive bars frequented by young PIs, including the greasy spoon Corner Bistro, the grim Siberia Bar, as well as the rank-smelling Alphabet City dive standard, Blue and Gold. My coworkers had a tradition, called the Odd Days Club, which consisted of drinking well into the night at the office on odd-numbered days. But lately they had grown tired of working and drinking and then inevitably (or inadvertently) sleeping in the same place, and had focused their efforts on going out to get drunk. “You don't wanna shit where you sleep, ya know,” Gus editorialized.

  I devoted time at the bar to chatting with my other colleagues. There was Ronny Finkelman, who grew up in what used to be the largest trash-dumping ground in the United States; that would be the island known as Staten. But he wanted to be an honorary native of Asbury Park, New Jersey. He'd seen Springsteen more times than he could count. Also, admitting he came from S.I. embarrassed him somehow. Ronny had crossed over from being an investigator to being a “marketing guy.” I wasn't sure what that meant then, and I'm still not, but I can say that he's the only marketing guy that's come and not gone since I've been at the Agency, and he somehow seems to bring in new clients.

  Otis was a former editor at Guns & Ammo, who told me he was wrapping up eight years of work on a biography of Ted Nugent. “Yeah,” he said, “I'd put him up there with Dylan, and Springsteen for sure.” He was shortish and square-jawed, and he was wearing Tevas with socks. It was snowing out. “So, when does it get cold enough for, ya know, shoes?” I asked him. He laughed. “When hell freezes over, man.” He turned around and faced the rest the group, crowded in front of the bar. “Hey, can somebody get this girl another drink—she needs to relax!”

  I finally got to spend awhile talking to Wendy. “Just don't date any of the guys in the office,” she advised.

  “Nothing to worry about there,” I said.

  She was a smart and hip (DJ boyfriend, loft in Williamsburg) Californian, so she played up the Valley girl thing too. I told her I liked her leg warmers. She gave me the address for her website, where she sells them along with ponchos and metallic appliquéd drawstring purses. We did shots together.

  I don't remember much after that but the taste of the Wild Turkey, Jack Daniel's, and Coke coming up and swishing around my toilet bowl in Brooklyn with the most amazing force.

  The First One to Nail This Guy Gets a Free Lunch

  The next morning, hopped up on Advil and two Starbucks lattes, I was working glumly at my desk when Sol offered a bottle of Jack Daniel's to the investigator who could better his thus-far-ineffective efforts to dig up dirt on this one guy, a young dot-com entrepreneur. Challenges in the office, I learned, were frequent and cutthroat. This would be my first interview case. Sol assured us our subject was a deserving scumbag—he just didn't have the proof yet. He needed one crucial interview to break this case wide open. Galvanized by the provocation, my competitive spirit took hold. I wanted that JD, and I didn't even like whiskey.

  I
found out where the subject lived and started looking for former girlfriends, lovers, or business partners who may have had a reason to hate the guy. For me, it was easy to begrudge him. At seventeen, when I was studying for the SATs, my subject was a ski bum in Aspen. At twenty-one, when I was working for five dollars an hour in publishing, he was collecting money from his father's rich friends to buy real estate in condominiums in New Hampshire and resell them at obscene markups. At twenty-five, when I finally joined the Agency to make a little more money and investigate him, he was heading an independent wireless ISP and planning an IPO that would net him a million dollars. Our client, a midsized venture capital company, was considering investing in this very offering. Sol told them to hold off.

  Unlike private eyes on TV and film, I learned, the Agency staff spent most of its time running Internet searches. My first searches were not fruitful. I plugged Mr. Dot-Com into one search engine and found more than fifteen thousand documents. Adding his middle name, I found one four-year-old picture of him and an “unidentified friend” in a New York Times society piece at a benefit for the arts sponsored by some barely nonprofit pro-bono PR group. Not helpful.

  I visited Gus in the back of the room.

  “Gus, I need your help, and I don't mean kisses,” I joked, blowing him one.

  “Anything for you, darlin’.”

  He helped me find a website Dot-Commie had posted for a band he was playing in, replete with pictures of Mr. Dot-Com and his Pearl Jam-loving bandmates posing with a dozen Coronas, and a quote from Kid Rock: “Givin’ all my ducats to Uncle Sam. F**k it!” The quote seemed meaningful, but didn't lead anywhere. I considered writing, “Subject has crappy taste in friends and music” on my status report, but I resisted.

  Rounding out my more significant findings was a divorce filing from a woman to whom he'd been married for eleven months. I tried to call her, and I got numbers in Arizona and New Mexico, but her family told me she was in Burkina Faso now, with the Peace Corps. They seemed unaware that she had ever been married to Dot-Com Guy at all, saying they knew that she and my subject had dated briefly, but not that they had been married. The folks gave me an address for a post office station forty miles from her camp and assured me she would get any correspondence in “no longer than six weeks.”

  Unfortunately, the company Dot-Com Guy was running was the only real job he'd had (tenure at his father's investment company aside), so there was no promise in calling there. None of his companies were registered. There were no incorporation records for them and no reported business partners or investors. I spoke to a few former college friends. One told me he was a whippit freak. I thanked him, and we chatted briefly about how he (the friend) was almost prosecuted for selling nitrous-oxide tanks to teens for inhalation. I got off the line quickly. When leaving the office that day, Sol offered a piqued, “You're losing your edge, A. Gray.” This was plainly sarcastic, since in my one week of work I had no edge to speak of. From that day on, “A. Gray” was my call sign around the office.

  “Kiss this JD good-bye.” Sol held the amber bottle in the air and took a pretend swipe from it, wiping his lips.

  Insert Foot in Mouth

  A month and one day into our affair, Elliott and I saw the movie Boiler Room. We were reviewing it for a his-and-her dating site, a job I had gotten through another publishing refugee friend of mine. The site later went bankrupt, though at the time my friend was blessing her stock options and the site was pumping out a torrent of forward-looking press releases and paying $1.50 a word, not to mention the price of our movie tickets.

  I was struck by how much our office resembled the grim basement office Giovanni Ribisi sets up in the film—a careless assembly of cheap accommodations, built for quick dismemberment, and a grab-your-employees’-401(k)-plans-and-head-for-the-Caymans kind of ethics. At the Agency, we could pack the place up and jettison the furniture in a few hours, leaving nothing behind but some graffiti on the ceiling above my desk, PUT DICK HERE, an arrow pointing at a dangling metal gasket; skidmarks from Evan riding his mountain bike around the office; and a bad smell around where the refrigerator had been.

  After the movie and some dirty martinis, we went back to his house. We were falling asleep and Pink Floyd's song “Fearless” was bleating in the background.

  Fearlessly the idiot faced the crowd, smiiiiiiling …

  Merciless the magistrate turns round, frooooowning …

  It surged into the kickout, breakout jam part, and I started playing air guitar. Later I hummed along and soon was hovering around sleep. The phone rang at about two-thirty in the morning.

  Elliott answered. “Yes, sort of. Well, Amy's here, so I'll call you later,” I heard him saying. He fell back down on the bed, sighing in annoyance.

  “Who was that?” I asked. His face was framed with the bluish light from the streetlamp outside, but I was clear about the withering look he imparted me.

  “It's really none of your fucking business.”

  I was shot through with an emboldening indignation. I couldn't believe he was treating me like a chick, like some girl, like all the other fucking girls he'd dated. I had flashbacks to being in college and hearing him with 10 percent of my attention speaking to other people with total detachment about his ex-girlfriends. “She says she wants to stay in touch with me, but I'm like why, I just don't give a shit about you anymore.” I remembered him saying the week before, when I asked him to hang out on consecutive nights, “Don't try to take this from A to Z all at once.”

  I had thought that our history together would give me some kind of emotional immunity. I realized that sitting around smoking pot near somebody for four years does not a friend make. I barely knew him.

  “I'm sorry. I didn't mean that.” He was reaching for me, shaking his head, but his tone belied his annoyance, like he had to clean up red wine on a white couch and he was pissed off about it.

  “I don't give a shit if you meant it or not.” Suddenly I was seized with the same hardened indifference that had always fascinated me in him. He begged me not to leave, and I did anyway, in a mechanistic daze that enveloped me like a cloak. He was crying when I left.

  When I got home, after running out into the wet, snowy night with hard clarity, my anger melted on my bed, into two little saltwater pools on my pillow, not for the things I was losing with him but for the things I hadn't had.

  SIX

  The world is full of obvious things which no one, by chance, ever observes.

  —SHERLOCK HOLMES

  If You Can't Say Something Nice …

  Elliott left me a plaintive message the following Monday. When he called I was napping in the same position I'd flopped myself down in after work, so I actually just caught the tone of it, which seemed to be plaintive. When I went to hit PLAY, the tiny cassette made a screeching sound and ejected itself, also defecating lots of brown silky tape containing the last probable communiqué I might ever get from Elliott.

  I turned off the ringer on my phone and balanced cucumber slices on my distended eyes. They started to hurt from the cold, which gave me goosebumps, so I ate them instead. I felt restless. I didn't know what to do with myself. It was a feeling I remembered having had before, and it always hit me as a sort of shock. I had a superstitious ritual that, when I felt it, I would have to say to myself, “I'm lonely.” The last time I did this was in the pink downstairs bathroom of my parents’ house, where I locked myself during one Thanksgiving dinner in high school. How can I feel lonely when I'm surrounded by so many other people? I wondered. This time, I wrote it down, in big black bubble graffiti on the back of my Con Edison bill, which I then stuffed in my “Pay it fast” file: “I'm lonely.”

  I went to the liquor store across the street, which was a narrow shopping isle enclosed by bulletproof glass where you would point to the liquor you wanted and they would push it to you in one of those sliding plastic drawer slots like they have at gas stations. I bought a bottle of Lillet. I went home and turned up the volume on P
J Harvey's “Rid of Me.”

  I wasn't even attached to Elliott. His mind was his big appeal. Plus he was surly. And narcissistic. I was thinking of all the bad things about him I could to convince myself I was happy about being alone. As I was drifting into sleep, I thought to myself, Can't I just be happy about ditching Elliott instead of being lonely? I braced myself and fell asleep on my couch at 9:45.

  The Hide-a-Jew

  The next morning I patted on some concealer and steeled myself. Having a boyfriend had been a nice cover at work, too, while it lasted. It made it easier to blend in and make friends with the guys. I didn't want to tell anybody about the breakup.

  “Jesus, did your boyfriend hit you?” Sol was two inches away from the large gray saucers on my face that doubled as my under-eyes.

  “Jesus? I thought you were Jewish.” I glared at him. “You really know how to make a girl feel like she's the only freak in the room. If you must know, we broke up.” Nothing like personal discretion. I wanted to hit me. So much for playing my cards close to the chest, for keeping up my game face.

  Big Gus walked by us. His nose was red, and he was hacking his way to his desk in the back of the office, practically coughing up a lung. He looked worse than I did, but that didn't keep him from saying, “Late night, Gray?” as he walked by. Do I have a KICK ME WHILE I’M DOWN sign on my forehead? I wondered. “What's wrong with Gus?” I said aloud.

  “He's got strep throat.” This came from Linus. “Strep, huh?” Sol cleared his throat before commanding to the back of the office, “Gus, uh, when you get a chance, can you make out with Amy?” I started laughing. Linus chuckled with his hand over his mouth, pointing to me and Gus and saying, “Oh shit, he got you guys! Oh shit!” Linus had a Ph.D. in philosophy and a copy of Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason on his desk, along with an Elvis Costello boxed set and a small heart-framed photo of Wynona Judd, “The queen of country.” He was a recovering Ritalin kid and wore horn-rimmed glasses with the corners duct-taped, because, he told anyone who would listen, he didn't make the ducats at the Agency to get those special screws to fix them.