Spygirl

by Amy Gray

  “Honestly,” Wendy continued, apparently tired of polite chatter, “when they first hired you guys, I was kind of ambivalent about it. I told them not to hire either of you.” Taken aback by her admission, Renora and I quickly sucked on our respective nicotine-delivery systems. We didn't want to let on to our shock, just so she'd tell us more.

  “The guys were worried about having to think about how they looked around the office, and I just didn't want to deal with things changing, I guess. But you're both cool.” After the initial trauma of her candor abated, Wendy's declaration had an air-clearing effect. Minutes later we were laughing—Renora about her two-week-old fling with a Brooklyn bar owner who was a lot older than her (forty-three), Wendy about her boyfriend, Rocco, of three years. “I was single for, like, ever before I met Rocco,” Wendy said wistfully, making the kind of pitch that girls with boyfriends make to their deaf-eared and loveless friends. “I was like the single girl. And it was fun.” I confessed that I feared Elliott had forever polluted the way I see men. “Oh, come on,” Wendy said, “You'll be over him in a few weeks.”

  “Nope. I'm on the wagon. Only eunuchs and hermaphrodites for me.”

  “That's disturbing,” Renora said. “Maybe you should go back to jerks.”

  I told them that when Skye's last boyfriend was diagnosed with a heart condition, her mother asked her why she couldn't get a healthy boyfriend and she screamed back at her, “Mom, at least there's medicine he can take for his heart condition, but there's no cure for being an asshole!”

  “Actually,” I said, blushing a little, “I met a great guy recently. He's … the best.”

  “Is he sweet?” Wendy asked.

  “Yeah.” Getting redder. I didn't want to jinx things by talking about them this early, but …

  “Is he hot?” Renora asked.

  “Completely. So, so hot.” They giggled.

  Wendy told us that Sol had once bragged that he had the hottest women working for him of any company in New York. “Well, that's not hard to do, when you only have three women working for you,” observed Renora.

  “Yeah, but I think he's right,” Wendy giggled.

  “Yeah!” I cheered, and we held our fists in a circle, à la Wonder Woman. “To the hottest dicks in New York City!” We all high-fived, some missing, some hitting.

  FOURTEEN

  The mystery in how little we know of other people is no greater than the mystery of how much.

  —EUDORA WELTY, THE OPTIMIST'S DAUGHTER

  Fake It Till You Make It

  New York is the home of con artists. It's also the home of the self-invented, the fulfillers of the American dream. But, in New York, cons and success stories are impossible to tell apart, depending on how you look at them, or when. Everyone is working it, fronting, faking it, so much so that there's an assumption of in-authenticity about everyone. People who seem to be born-and-bred New Yorkers usually are from Jersey. Williamsburg is full of hipster artist/DJ/clothing designers remade from MIT math geeks. Society girls ditch their prep-school vestments to spend summers panhandling and sleeping on benches in Tompkins Square Park. Most enviable is the ability to replace history with a more auspicious façade—take a drug addiction, a failed hedge fund, a series of failed acting bids, and start anew: a political career, new debt-consolidation company, a hit movie. Not only is there nothing perceived to be wrong with making this jump, but we prefer our stars to be fallen. Like a glittery, Gucci-clad Phoenix rising from the ashes, the prodigal idol in New York is better than a perfect pedigree.

  As much as we were all astonished by the Swindling Spin Doctor's tenacity, we reluctantly admired his enterprise. As George said, “You've got to have balls of steel to pull this shit off.” But our clients were now panicked about their involvement with him. I was pulling together everything we found into my report, and doing some final searches with the information we had from the book galleys, the newspaper clips we'd found, and prison records.

  I kept smelling my shirt, which I'd worn on Friday night with Edward. It was a low-V, pink-and-blue-striped cashmere sweater, and I thought it smelled like dirty metal, cigarettes, and the faintest hint of Edward's cologne. I closed my eyes and let his imprinted odor flood my memory. If only we could smell clues … I drifted into sweet nostalgia.

  My reverie was interrupted by another, competing odor. It smelled rotten, like roadkill. I checked under my desk for an errant piece of salami. A quick sift through my trash revealed only a moldy apple core, which smelled, but not that badly. It actually smelled like a skunk had unloaded itself on Twenty-first Street. Do they have skunks in New York? It's possible, I suppose. I envisioned a mob of tough inner-city skunks huddling in alleyways and scavenging from restaurant Dumpsters. It seemed implausible. But the smell seemed to balloon the more I thought about it. I swiveled around in my chair. “Hey, Assman! Nestor!” They were both facing me, nodding in different sequences to the throbbing in their headphones. I called to them again, but they each continued determinedly rocking out. I pulled a tiny audiotape out of my desk drawer and pitched it at Nestor. It hit him in the head. He clutched his head and looked at me.

  “What the fuck?”

  “Nestor, does it smell weird in here?”

  He sniffed. “Yeah, kinda.” He slugged Assman, who took off his headset and concurred. “It smells like ass.” How apropos.

  A crowd quickly gathered around my desk, where everyone played scent detectives. “It could be a dead rat,” Otis mused. He started tracing the walls, checking the sticky-glue traps for recent catch. Renora looked around the piles of crap surrounding George's desk, which could have easily hidden a small colony of skunks. Linus had been keeping a cat in the conference room for a couple of months before she mysteriously disappeared on a weekend when Morgan was working alone at the office. “I hate cats, but not enough to kill one,” he sniffed.

  “Has anybody heard anything in the walls here?” Gus wondered aloud.

  I wandered over to Noah's desk. He was typically oblivious to the commotion gathering right next to him. I sniffed the air around him. A swell of skunky air blasted me. “Ewww!” I fake-gagged. “Noah, you reek.”

  As everyone encircled his desk, Noah looked anxious. He finally took off his headphones and looked around nervously. “Shhh,” he hissed.

  “Are you hiding your ex-girlfriend in your desk?” “Take a shower recently, dude?” Reddening, Noah shushed us and pulled a small Ziploc bag out of his Manhattan portage bag. He handed it to me. The bag held four neat buds of marijuana. I held it to my nose. “Ugggghh.” Noah's scag redefined skunky.

  “Alright, but I don't want to get arrested. Can you guys just leave me alone, please? ” Eventually Noah conceded that he'd better evacuate his weed if he didn't want to get arrested, have George smoke it, or both.

  This Ain't No Party

  After the office was restored to its usual smell of cigarettes and soggy newspapers, I drifted into reminiscences about my weekend with Edward. On Saturday we woke up late and had a sleepy breakfast in Brooklyn of fried eggs and cheese grits and ham and hot chocolate. We ate at the counter on swiveling stools instead of waiting for a table and sat, locked together, my knees cupped by his legs.

  We went home and spent two more hours in bed, just kissing, and then went to the Promenade and took in the salty air and the mist-laden view of lower Manhattan from across the East River. That night I wore a sun dress and an apron and made him dinner. While I was cooking, he grabbed me from behind, around my greasy, soggy apron. When I turned around to kiss him, I saw us together in the five-by-nine mirror I put in the kitchen just to torture myself. In the movie of us, I was thinking, we could play ourselves. I was giddy with the thought of him.

  On Sunday, we went to P.S.1, an art-exhibition space that commissions a “beach” installation every summer. We sat next to a reflecting-pool surf and a beach of Astroturf and plastic rocks and cuddled. We looked out over a sea of hipsters, ebbing and receding like a real tide.

  �
�This is a weird place,” he said.

  “Ummm. I know.” I was spaced-out from the sun and beer.

  “It reminds me of the set on The Real World.”

  Nausea tightened my esophagus after Edward said this, but I concentrated my vision on the sun. I imagined tiny pickaxes deploying from my hips, like something Emma Peel might have, spinning through the cold outer atmosphere to pitch me weight-lessly toward the light and heat. I wanted to anchor myself to its fiery surface. I was melting away until the sun in my vision was eclipsed, and my eyelids pulsed with red heat, but Edward was still talking.

  “The worst thing about being twenty-six is I know I'd never get onto that show. I'd love to do that.”

  I felt my eyes widen until the sun made me wince. “I can't tell if you're joking,” I said, sounding small.

  “About what? The Real World? I seriously think it would be awesome.”

  “Really? I think it would be like a living hell.”

  Edward seemed to consider this carefully. “Yeah, I know what you mean.” He paused. “I'm fascinated by celebrity,” he said without a hint of irony. “I'd love to date a celebrity.” He was quiet for a second, and then reanimated when he said, “I could be the cardiologist to the stars. Maybe I can have a TV show or something. Like, Lifestyles of the Doctors of the Rich and Famous. Or something.”

  House of Mirrors

  I was determined to soften my critical edges, to subvert my instinct to judge swiftly and cruelly, to sustain my disbelief. Yet my natural instinct would certainly have urged me to look at Edward twice before this resolve. I probably would have looked at him a dozen times. So what if he wasn't part of the arty, self-hating, I-wouldn't-want-to-be-a-member-of-any-club-that-would-have-me set I was used to? I also realized that I loved being seen with Edward almost more than being with him. Which reminded me. I wanted to try to meet up with some Brown friends and show him off. I had left my friend Jeremy a message and called my land line to see if he had called back.

  There was a message from Cassie, wondering if she could get herpes subcutaneously and there was also a message from Jeremy. “Hey Amy it's Jeremy calling. I'm heading to a show tonight from that band Clinic that performs all their shows with surgical masks on. The opener is this chick electroclash band called Ladytron who had glitter guns onstage at their last show and took all their tops off. I'm sure you're already going, but if not, call me. Miss you. Bye.” Jeremy was always inviting me to events with naked women so he could feel less perverted about going alone. This time, Jeremy was going to have to endure surgery without me. (It was hard to imagine Edward, or me, for that matter, suffering the arty Williams-burg performance art/electronica scene of bad music and hardcore hipster pageantry.)

  Jeremy was one of my closest and most loyal friends from college. We'd met on my third day of freshman year. Our meeting was chance and providential, although, because of the other people we knew at school, our eventual introduction was not a matter of if but when. The inevitable came to pass in September 1992, when an old girlfriend of his came to surprise him, and she asked me and my roommate if we knew a Jeremy Blumstein. “Jeremy—isn't he on our floor?” I asked Sarah. Sarah was much better with names, faces, and social climbing generally than I was. “Yeah, I think he's the one that sold Sammy a dimebag of buds yesterday.

  “Yeah,” Sarah asserted, “he's the guy.” We had sort of ripped him off, but, nonetheless, we took his chickie, Kit, to Jeremy's room and knocked on the door.

  A curl of smoke rushed out of the room as he opened the door. He exhaled a sweaty blast of hot smoky bong breath. We pushed our way in. One bed was strewn with CDs, presumably Jeremy's, and on the other, lying back with his arms folded over his head and his eyes narrowed into little almonds in his doughy face, was Elliott, wearing his usual look of self-satisfaction, the first time I had ever laid eyes on him. “Hey,” he said, with obvious contempt. “Jeremy!” Kit squealed, throwing her arms around his neck and wrapping her legs around his waist. Sarah and I sat on Jeremy's bed and giggled and smoked until it was clear Kit and Jeremy were way too excited to see each other. We excused ourselves just as Kit had taken off her tube top and was holding her generous bosom up to Jeremy's face, cooing, “Boo-hoo, Kitty missed you!”

  During junior year at college we spent a weekend at Jeremy's family home in Riverdale. The entire house was covered in mirrors: the floors, the countertops, the cabinet cover on the kitchen, the headboards on the beds. Ben and my other friends took the opportunity to do coke off every surface in the house. I remember sitting on the toilet, my feet grazing the mirrored eternity below, looking at a million reflections of myself to infinity in every direction. Extended in every direction was just more of the same, an infinity of humdrum sameness. In my reflection six levels deep in the walls, my eyes turned beady and black. Each generation of reflections was a poorer copy of the first, until I wasted into a fuzzy collection of light and dark with no particular form. Under the P.S.1 hot sun, with Edward's square hand glued to my thigh, I dreamed of myself in the mirrored room, refracted in all directions. I was desperately trying to find the real me. Just when I thought I had found the source, the authentic being at the center of the glassy vortex, I touched the image, only to feel shock and another cold, unforgiving mirrored pane, another bad copy.

  “Maybe I could be a celebrity cardiologist, with a book series, too. The first one could be called My Heart Belongs to Maya.” Edward's voice shocked me out of my daydreaming. His Doberman's name, Maya, was short for Amaya. Her namesake was the “hot but sort of chunky girl on Hawaii Real World.” Maya—the dog, not the person—had been auditioning for commercials.

  “Sweetie,” I said, aghast, “let's make out.” So we spent the rest of our time on the asphalt upper level of the imitation beach, watching everyone else watching us.

  When I got home, Jeremy had left me a message saying that he was sorry I couldn't make it out, and that, true to Williamsburg hipster form, the show was “full of punk girls wearing clothes that looked like they used to be other clothes.” This is just what Jeremy likes, by the way, and I should call him for details.

  There weren't any other Edward incidents that weekend. That conversation and the nagging echoes of his voice saying, “I thought Puck was cool,” aside, things went well. I submerged my queasiness, and when we held hands, the whole time I was thinking how perfect we must have looked together. Something felt wrong with that, but something about it felt right, too. But why was I thinking about how we looked while I was living my life— instead of just living it? There was something about being with someone so exquisite—they became entirely surface. I wasn't sure if I was emptying Edward or it really was him, if he was really that blank. Or if it mattered. Like Joe Smythe, like Jeremy's bathroom: surface, surface everywhere.

  FIFTEEN

  The truth is out there.

  — FROM THE OPENING OF THE X-FILES

  Like Water off a Duck's Back

  Edward hadn't called me yet since our blissful weekend. I picked up the receiver when I got home from work, hoping to hear the familiar stuttering dial tone of the voicemail. No luck. My stomach twisted. I stretched out on the bed. Call him. Don't call him. Call him. Don't. Do. Don't.

  A few minutes later, the phone rang.

  It was him. “Hey, baby,” he cooed.

  “Hi,” I said, thawing at once. “Wow. It's so good to hear from you.”

  “I know. I miss you.” He had finished a thirty-four-hour rotation and called me before he went to bed. We talked about seeing the Sex Pistols documentary The Filth and the Fury together, and the whole time I wondered what I'd made all the fuss about. He was so funny. So laid-back. My second-guessing was ancient history. I had all but forgotten my unease.

  By the end of the week, our shell-shocked clients on the Swindling Spin Doctor case were hysterical. George wanted to wrap it up. The clients had engaged a law firm, hoping to file civil charges, and were also working on getting the district attorney in New York to reconsider cr
iminal charges. I had to send a copy of our report to our clients’ civil lawyers as well as their bankruptcy lawyers (their misjudgments had put them in some financial trouble), the top executives of the client company, and its board members. George said their chances of getting money back were about equal to Hillary Clinton's chances of getting elected to Congress. To him, that meant a probability of little to none. Lou DeSanto had also made some calls at George's request, and he reported back that New York wasn't interested in going after Smythe again. He was already in jail, they said. They'd worry about it when he was eligible for parole—in six years. They did, however, seize some of the implements of his trade from his cell: a typewriter, paper, pens, a toothbrush, some chalk, some lipstick. I suspected he could figure out a way to run an international con ring with a pair of nail clippers and cinder blocks.

  “Mr. John Nguyen Smythe was born on June 18, 1961. For a comprehensive list of his aliases, please see Exhibit E of this report.” As I wrote up my memo to the client, I ran a few of Smythe's more unusual aliases in some Internet search engines. Unlike our database research, unless you're in law enforcement or the FBI, we don't have specialized search engines for locating material on the web. But trial and error had led us to a number of sites and search engines that were intermittently helpful. Finally, up popped a Flash site on my screen and text started running across it, along with a voice-over accompaniment in bombastic radio-announcer style.

  “This is not just another day. This is a day in the life of John N. Smith.” The text faded out and a picture appeared on the screen of a stout, dark-skinned man in a suit surrounded by surgically endowed women in small bathing suits, all grabbing the leis falling across his leisure suit. Another photo faded in on Mr. Smythe standing next to a 1965 Rolls-Royce, his hands on his hips. It looked yellowed, like it was taken in the seventies. Then came a picture of him in an empty boardroom, wearing a suit and silk ascot, then on the beach with two curvy escorts. “Enter the world of John N. Smith, international financial expert, and international socialite.” I must have been laughing out loud, because Vinny and Evan came running over. “Nice cans,” Vinny commented.