Spygirl (32 page)

“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.

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.

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.

“I had accident.”

“I know—are you okay? I was worried.”

“Yes, yes,” he said. “It was good. I realize that I need to stop doing what I'm doing, you know. I hate to drive that car, you know, so I been applying to school and I go back to Tunisia in a week.”

I felt my heart drop a little. It was so much easier to imagine Moez tragically outdone by New York than leaving willingly. Leaving me.

“I get married,” he said.

“What?” My shock was evident.

“Yes, my sister's friend. I met her a few years ago, you know. It's time to settle down, my sister says, and I miss my home.” I wished him luck, and felt strangely relieved about the marriage thing. It was less romantic than the bildungsroman I'd scripted seconds before about a handsome, gentle young man returning to a bucolic life in the Promised Land after a punishing turn foraging for survival as a New York cabdriver.

At eleven-thirty Peter joined me.

“You're wearing a skirt,” he said, fingering the edge of my sexy tight purple herringbone pencil skirt.

“Your crown jewels aren't on display,” I protested.

“Umm, they will be later,” he said. Soon enough I was completely entranced, forgetting all the other characters, foreign and otherwise, in that bar. Then I was only taking note of my own slow, hopeful breathing and monitoring the respiration and movements of one other person.

Peter and I woke up at ten and cuddled until eleven.

“I'm scared to let go of you,” he said.

“I know,” I said.

“Let's not,” he said.

At noon he said he had to go to the gallery to put up a new show. I held on tighter.

“You can stay here,” he said, kissing my arms.

“Really?”

“As long as you don't take the opportunity to read my diary and look through my underwear drawer.”

“Why? What's in your underwear drawer?” I asked.

“Maybe I should send you home,” he said, unpeeling himself from my embrace.

“Nooo, I'll be good,” I begged.

At two he kissed me for the billionth time and brought me a cup of coffee in bed.

“So, when will I see you again?” He leaned over the bed as I sipped.

“I dunno.”

“How about tonight?” he asked, smiling.

“That's two nights in a row.”

“I know. It's a big move for us.”

We agreed I'd call him around six.

Being in Peter's house without him was exhilarating. It required a confidence that was exciting to have conferred on me. I wore his boxers around the house, watched
Oprah
, ate some bran flakes, and admired his book collection. He had beautiful taste, effete and distinct. I wanted to live there and study his mind like gospel and commit it to memory and make it mine. I was touched by our sameness and thrilled by our differences.

By five I was bored and stir crazy. I got dressed and stood at the door, ready to leave, trying to think of what final discoveries I could make in my ephemeral moment in his house.

I couldn't think of any, but I decided to check my e-mail before I left. His computer was asleep. I hit the return key and listened to the quiet whiz as it reignited. H-o-t-m-a-i-l-d-o-t-c-o-m. There was a note from Peter with the subject “Lovely.” “I've decided that this is what you are, so this is your new nickname, if you'll have it.”

I wrote back, “With honor!” and sent it. Then I read that day's
Salon.com
postings—just a lot about the crumbling technology sector. And I was seized by a sudden panic that there might be something I needed to know about Peter that I might need to protect myself from and this might be my only chance to learn it. His warning not to go through his drawers hung in my mind, but I felt overwhelmed by fear.

I'll just check through some of his files, I thought to myself, clicking on his hard drive, and opening several documents only to
quickly close them and think how stupid this whole thing was. I even found a letter, but it was eleven years old and who gives a damn. Then I spotted a file that said “Theoneyouleft,” and I was riveted. I had to open it.