by Amy Gray
That night, I sat in my living room and stared at the lights. Three spindly threads of spider silk fell around the center of the bulb right above me. The translucent fibers trembled faintly from the movement of air in the room. My breathing slowed. I saw a tiny dark spot emerge from the white-hot center of the bulb. When I looked directly at it, the speck practically disappeared against the light, but if I fixed my sight just to the right of it, I could see it more clearly, a tiny almond-shaped rhizome falling from the sky. It grew larger, and materialized as a quivering fine line around a smaller, darker nucleus. It was a tiny sac, pulsing slowly with the air, when the edge of the line was pierced and seemed to melt into a squirming larger dark blot. I rolled off the couch and watched as dozens of baby spiders pitched their worlds on tiny spindles thinner than eyelashes. Evidence of these little lives that, I supposed, could be done in with a hearty sneeze.
Yankee My Doodle
When Ben and I broke up, he had just come back from three weeks on location in upstate New York, shooting his second-year movie short for NYU's graduate film school. We had spoken occasionally, but I'd resolved myself to end it right before he left. I had found him, for, like, the fifth time, getting high in our apartment, drunk and stinking and laughing at me. I was years past my drug-experimentation phase, and tired of being the stern taskmaster girlfriend-slash-mommy to him. By the time he'd returned, I'd gone through my process of loss: sadness, anger, listlessness, weight loss, and then renewal. I felt hardened and excited about changing my life. We were a week away from our five-year anniversary. He came over to my tiny apartment, where, I'd assured him, I'd moved just months before “not because we're breaking up,” but to have “more independence.”
“You lied to me,” he said, staring out the window.
“I'm sorry,” I said. But at the time I didn't feel really sorry. I was over it—I thought. The conversation was short and not too painful. A week later, I was at work, still in publishing, when I got a call.
“Is this Amy Gray?”
“Yes, can I help you?” I answered dozens of calls daily from agents, authors, producers, editors and their assistants, and it could have been any number of legitimate persons on the line.
“This is John Marston, from Together Dating Service.”
“What?” Together Dating Service was a fee-for-service dating company that had been running low-production-value ads in metropolitan areas, showing couples in grainy color video running over a greenish sand beach. If Together didn't work for you, you were entitled to a full refund of your $19.95 membership fee. “Why not get Together,” they asked, “and have the life you know you deserve?”
“I'm not interested,” I said, my finger hovering over the flash button.
“But you signed up for our service—is your address Dean Street in Brooklyn? Are you twenty-four and a hundred-fifty pounds?”
“I am not a fucking hundred-fifty pounds! What the fuck?
This must be a joke. I did not sign up for your service—and I'm— I'm not interested.”
“Well, are you single?”
“Yeah.” Why did I answer that?
“Maybe you didn't sign up for the service, but since you're single anyway, maybe you should try it. There are lots of great people in Together—”
“Well, no I'm not—”
“Maybe you and I could go out sometime. I work here, but I'm single too, and you have a nice voice.”
“NO!” I was livid. “If you phone me again, I'm calling the police, asshole.” I hit the line, and it occurred to me at that moment that it was Ben who had signed me up.
Two days later, I got home from work and there was a black bubble-wrapped package sitting in front of my door. I opened it to uncover a white box and, inside of that, several layers of tightly wrapped and taped tissue paper. Inside that was another box with gold embossing around the edges and a cellophane window to reveal its contents, a cylindrical baby-blue object that looked like a plastic cigar. I took it out of the box and saw the lettering across the bottom, “Batteries not included.” It was a dildo! “That fucker,” I thought, and picked up the phone to tell him what an immature, vengeful baby he was. But I dialed six digits and stopped and dropped the phone on my lap. I would not give him what he wanted—again. I would not.
Lying on the couch, I felt a tickle on my neck and swatted mindlessly. On my hand was a tiny mash of spider. I thought about the snapdragons in my garden in summer and the baby spiders and the fragility of ecological equilibrium they forged in an unforgiving metropolis. Peter and I were like that, too. I resolved to tread carefully.
Where Wings Take Dream
Peter and I had e-mailed many more times that day and he called me the next night. Thinking about Ben recently had made me feel a mix of pity and defensiveness. I never wanted to let myself come close to being the insentient punch line in my own life ever again. I still felt the need for armor, a chain mail suit of intelligence. Who was Peter, anyway? I felt uneasy. I, Spygirl, would find him out.
“So, you want to do something?” he asked.
“Yeah,” I said, sounding unenthusiastic simply by trying to play it cool.
“I don't want to do something datey” he specified.
“What does that mean?”
“Well …” I immediately felt bad I'd asked this. What could he say? Eating out is the number-one date activity, but it's also biologically essential.
“Going out for dinner, or a movie,” he said. “I don't know, really.”
I waited. “So, do you have any unorthodox propositions?”
“Taking a walk? I could come over to your house and we could walk over the Brooklyn Bridge.”
“I'd love to do that. That's a brilliant idea!” I had actually never done this before. He seemed bolstered by my enthusiasm.
“Well, thanks. I've been working on that concept for months.”
“Nice one.”
We agreed to meet at my apartment.
On Sunday at noon, I met Peter at the gate of my apartment building. It was warm for November, in the sixties. Even so, he was wearing a T-shirt, entirely sweat through. We headed over to Adams Street and then onto the bridge. It was an exquisite day. We talked about our jobs; he told me about his gallery, how he'd come to have the idea for it and secure the funding. Not to be outdone by the land and sea, the skies over New York were their own bustling ecology. The blue was littered with helicopters, tiny toylike airplanes and huge dirigibles heaving across the sky; flocks of gulls, pigeons, and kites.
“Doesn't it seem as if nothing in New York City is undiscovered? Every inch is spoken for,” Peter reflected, longingly.
I always think about lonely stretches of highway. Pieces of land that are forgotten and unloved with no prospects of ever being remembered. “What about that?” I pointed to a tiny square of green grass and a small rotting pier about a hundred yards away. He laughed.
“Should we go?”
“Sure.”
“It'll be our own private square foot of Manhattan.”
But when we walked off the bridge, we realized our square foot was nestled behind someone else's eight feet of chain-link and razor wire that held a truck lot.
“Maybe our square foot is actually under a red Mercedes big rig.”
“Wait, I have an idea,” he said. He ducked down the fence and reappeared skulking along its inside minutes later.
“How'd you do that?”
“It's magic,” he said, waving his fingers like he was casting a spell.
“Okay, David Copperfield, enjoy yourself.”
“No, there's a hole in the fence down here.” He led me to a hole that was dug in the ground under the fence, and I ducked in.
By the time we were sitting in our own eight-by-five piece of grass, it felt luxurious.
“This is, like, the smallest little park in all of the world,” he said. And then a big fat raindrop fell on my shoulder. Minutes later, we were sliding through the mud at the base of the fence. We ran li
ke crazy, heading away from the river, the rain hitting us like fist-fuls of gravel. By the time we ran into the Liquor Store Bar, my sneakers were sloshing loudly with all the water in them.
“Two Guinnesses, please,” Peter asked the bartender, water puddling from his chin onto the oak bar below. That was the first of five pints each, whereupon we hailed a taxi, completely plastered, and went back to my apartment in Brooklyn. I played some Yo La Tengo for him, which he'd never heard before.
“Well, would it be too ‘datey’ if we have dinner? ” I asked him.
He laughed. “I think we're ready.” We went to a Vietnamese place in my neighborhood, and then to a bar afterward, where we sat knee-to-knee, warming up by a wood-burning stove at the back of the bar. At one point he took my hand, and before I knew it our cheeks were touching. From our first point of contact, a warm flush spread over me, spreading and sticking like hot red happiness.
He kissed me good night at my door. I ran into my room and flopped myself onto the bed. Oh. My. God.
TWENTY-THREE
I'm the type of person who's willing to confront moderately awesome phenomena…. Chipping away at gigantic unproved postulates. Investigating the properties of common whole numbers and ending up in the wilds of analysis. Intoxicating theorems. Nagging little symmetries. The secrets hidden deep inside the great big primes. The way one formula or number or expression keeps turning up in the most unexpected places. The infinite. The infinitesimal. Glimpsing something then losing it. The way it slides off the eyeball. The unfinished nature of the thing.
—DON DELILLO, RATNER'S STAR
Kicking Ass and Taking Names
“Aysome Graysom,” Evan called to me from across the room. “What are you doing for New Year's?”
I groaned. “I dunno. Hopefully spending it with the quote-unquote perfect guy love of my life, yang to my yin.”
“I don't know what you're talking about. I'm available,” Evan teased.
The ghosts of New Year's 1999 still haunted me, and I felt lackluster about planning another one. It had been a year since I started my job at the Agency and celebrated my last millennium New Year. The year had started with a lot of empty paranoia, but it ended in real chaos. You could hear it whispered by former CEOs who went home from work with pieces of paper that said zero, and Florida voters who dreamt of hanging chads and magazine-reading girls who didn't care anymore about assembling wardrobes that “go from workaday fun to nighttime glamour.” People couldn't even agree on whether the millennium had begun. Since then, the market crashed, the democratic process had failed, and even baseball had a hiccup, pitting brothers against brothers in the Subway Series. We had even failed at achieving our own disaster; the Y2K Bug had been a bust.
Evan was trying to plan something at the Blue and Gold for everyone at the Agency, plus friends. “Preferably blond, single, slutty friends,” he clarified.
“Evan, love, you're my only one.”
“Nice one, Gray.” The party, he explained, would be “chill.” We would have the bar to our cheap, one-dollar-draft-slinging selves. “It'll be us, the St. Marks junkies, and the Tompkins Square winos,” he declared. I filed it under “last-ditch options” and let the next five days fly by.
Romance Under a Kitchen Sink
Now I can see that my path to becoming a PI was circuitous yet inevitable. Like many young girls, I fantasized about spy work, fostering a sense of hearing particularly attuned to whispers and undertones. I culled the entire series of Nancy Drew mysteries, and held Harriet the Spy in almost biblical reverence, equipping myself with the available tools of documentation: a plastic phone, a note pad, binoculars, a Lucite hammer, and a screwdriver. (The purpose of the latter two: dismantling sinks, which seemed at the time like a probable enough occupation for a spy.) I spent my time mostly in the cupboard under our leaky kitchen sink and standing next to phone poles, where my cover as a Bell-Atlantic repairman, heightened by my snappy orange reflector belt (acquired for my new crossing-guard job) allowed eavesdropping and apparent obscurity.
Thrilled by the notion that I could use my wiles to glean weighty clues and grave intelligence, I became opposed to being told what to do, a trait that, for better or worse, still seems to linger and shield me like a security blanket. When my mother ordered me to set the table, for example, her directives evaporated into the wind: I was locked into my dreamy frequency. My new, loftier goals could take me into the kinds of forbidden places only boys went.
My neighbors, the Dickersons, had a backyard that bordered on ours. A newly forged covert sensibility kicked in when I initiated my first plan of real surveillance. Hiding behind the fence separating our houses, I lowered a plastic bucket into their yard. Inside was the first of a series of notes reading, “Hello. Who are you?” and then “Do you like frogs?” and then “I'm having a party right now. Come over.” I will never forget the daily ritual of hoisting the bucket back up the next day, swelling with anticipation for the rejoinder within, a secret connection conceived in anonymity … that never came.
At dusk, I walked around the neighborhood, a neat oval of attractive shingled three-bedrooms with tidy lawns, and peered out into the yellowish-lit windows. I considered how I might penetrate that glowing world on the other side, how the secrets and rituals of these other families might be infiltrated. What did they eat for dinner? Did their mom wake them up in the morning like mine, chirping, “Rise and shine, darling!” How many minutes did they have to brush their teeth for? I came home and went to my room to use my dad's binoculars, looking for clues to life at the Dickersons’. Although I only observed the most insubstantial movements—a pair of kid's legs here, a streak of a mom's orangey mop there—they didn't seem to notice me. I hoped they would.
A month into my scheme, I was sniffed out. My mother came to my room one day asking, “Have you been throwing paper into the Dickersons’ backyard?” “No,” I said. “Well, even though you haven't been, don't anymore,” she said. In truth, I had grown tired of my daily sacrament and was already planning further subversions and hatching more elaborate subterfuges. I was eight years old.
Now the Harriet in me craved a huge calamity to reconstruct neatly from the ruins. She wanted the disorder followed by an orderly cleanup. A lightning storm in a bottle. A tempest in a teapot. But the mania of the millennium year was anything but. It was a nebulous kind of mess that was hard to put your finger on.
Harriet wanted the safety of becoming a trained observer of her own life, but while she was busy watching, no one was there to live it. Alas, it didn't work for her. I thought of Three-Ring Circus Guy creating fragments of his own life to live like movie stills. I decided to e-mail Peter. The suspense was killing me.
“What's your idea of a perfect New Year's Eve?” I wrote him.
“Curling up with a copy of some timeless prose like Up the Butt and diddling myself,” he wrote back. This had to be the guy for me. He made me laugh more than Ben—no small feat.
I picked up the phone and called him. “Hey, what are you doing?”
“Hey!” He fell silent.
“Uh, that's okay, you don't have to tell me. For example, if you're on the toilet or sitting around diddling yourself.”
“No. Sorry. I'm just working.”
“Do you want to do something tonight?” I asked.
“I have to finish taking down a show here. I'll be done at ten-thirty eleven. Is that too late for you?”
I responded slowly, trying to be coy. “Nooo.”
He waited to answer too. I imagined it was just enough time for a smile. “I'll be hungry then,” he said.
“Me too.”
“So bring your beautiful self to Casimir, and when I get there I want to find you sipping Merlot. And if you're wearing a skirt it wouldn't hurt.”
I laughed. “I'll try to work my magic,” I said. “On you, crotchless leather bell-bottoms might not hurt, either.”
“Actually, I can say from experience, they would,” he countered. I giggled.
Up, Up, and Away
I went home to change after work before I went to meet Peter. Resting on my couch, I squished a spider rounding my left upper arm. Hopefully I thought, we're all more than hapless creatures quivering at the slightest ripple in the still air of an otherwise quiescent New York apartment.
Four hours later I sat at a small table in the side room at Casimir near the back corner. The space looks like a sultry salon in Prague. It's full of French, Turks, Israelis, Germans, and other foreigners leaning conspiratorially over tea-lit tables that bob as they move. The windows are steamy, posing a warm, damp defense against the bitterness outside.
I savored a cigarette and let myself revel in the romance of it all: meeting Peter, liking Peter, having a beautiful week and a half together. I looked around the bar and thought of all the other abandoned people. What a relief it was not to be one of them, even just for a week and a half. I observed a curly-haired man gesticulating uneasily to his British girlfriend. She argued back a few times and then marched out the door, giving him a good four-letter parting shot. I saw a petite woman frantically trying to rub a wine stain out of her skirt. When her boyfriend arrived, she batted her eyes and ignored it until he asked her, “What's on your skirt?” and she looked like she'd cry. I saw two New Yorkers arrive together. Sit down. Suck face for four or five minutes and then looking conjoined, leave. I saw—Moez?
Yes, it was. Coming toward me was Moez, my car driver.
“Oh my God!”
“Hello,” he said, standing in front of me, smiling with his usual sheepishness.
“Hi, how are you?” I said, and without thinking I stood up and kissed his cheek, the cheek which I'd contemplated so thoroughly from so many backseats. He seemed to blush.