Spygirl (4 page)

On the train home, I made the face I always make on the subway. It says, “Don't look at me, don't talk to me, don't even think about me.” Everybody who rides the subway has this defensive
camouflage. It's not that we're mean or cold or indifferent. It's just that if you stop to look at everything, you'll miss your stop. Or worse.

Occasionally this shield is penetrated, usually by cute babies, superior panhandlers, or, when I'm premenstrual, pretty much anything. On the way home, on the illuminated overhead across from me was an advertisement for a dermatologist named Dr. Ziz-mor. It looked like a fifth-generation copy of an ad from the early seventies, a jumble of weird quotes from patients and lists of procedures and really bad clip art. “Dr. Z,” it told me, does “laser, varicose veins, spot removal, acne …” It also had a before-and-after picture of a zitty girl and a reproduction of a letter from her in pink bubbly print that said, “Dr. Z, you totally changed my life, Luv, Liza.” A rainbow stretched from the end of his name to the beginning of the “Z” in Zizmor. I imagined myself at the end of Dr. Ziz-mor's rainbow. Not that there was anything wrong with my skin, but I liked the idea that Liza's transformation could be so absolute. Here's before. Here's after.

FOUR             

Elliott and I were the kind of friends who had spent dozens of nights together in college, smoking pot and otherwise misbehaving. Still, we didn't have much to say to each other. We shared friends and rolling papers, but I didn't
know
him. Junior year in college I got an indication that there was more to him. My boyfriend then was Ben, and he was away from school, hiking in Arizona with some of our friends. The problem was, I lost my only copy of the already-pirated key to the dorm where I was living with him illegally. Student security could send me for disciplinary action if they knew, and adding to the insult, would charge me $75 to let me into a room I wasn't living in. I, in turn, was renting out the
dorm room where I was
supposed
to be living on a weekly basis to other people. Like freshman boys who wanted some privacy with their girlfriends. Wandering around campus that day I was hoping to entertain myself until I found someone I knew and found a place to sleep or a key. When I saw Elliott, I was overjoyed. “Elliott!” I exclaimed, as I locked my arm in his. “Thank God I found you.” I squeezed my temples and moaned with the force of six hours of futile aggravation. “Arrrrgggh!”

He smiled. “Hey Amy.” I didn't think I'd ever seen him smiling like
that
before.

“I'm freaking out.”

He took my hand. “You're cold. Relax. What's going on?” He gave me his sweatshirt. A fine mist of rain was falling. Even so, we walked around for hours, from Pembroke to the library and then down around RISD. I felt like I was meeting him for the first time. My stomach was tight from laughing. He told me about his family. Never had I even considered that he had a family before. He suddenly became three-dimensional. His parents, he told me, had divorced and remarried—twice.

“Wow. You're like the perfect Jungian case study,” I said.

“Thanks. That was impolitic.”

“Sorry. I'm too tired to exercise self-control.”

“Hmm. Maybe I should take advantage of that.”

We both smiled. “Umm. Maybe.”

I seized on this tenderness and guarded it like a state secret. His sweetness was so exclusive, only I knew about it. I could do this: I could mistake a glance, a tiny upturn in a usually scowling mouth, and dream of decades of connubial bliss. Find me your freaks, your disgruntled misfits, your monosyllabic malcontents, your reclusive antiestablishment oddballs. I craved the exclusivity.

That night I slept on Elliott's very hard linoleum floor in his
lilliputian-sized single in a dormitory that could have easily doubled as a prison. At four in the morning I climbed into his bed, nuzzled my head into his neck. “I've been waiting for you to do that all night,” he whispered. His T-shirt smelled like detergent and sweat. His lips were preternaturally soft. When Ben came back the next day, I put it behind me.

Two years almost to the day after Ben and I broke up, Elliott called me out of nowhere and asked me to meet him for a drink at the Marriott Spinnaker. This bar-slash-restaurant, which has been replicated all over the country, is situated on top of a giant rotating disk overlooking Times Square, perhaps the ugliest view in all of New York, and it turns 360 degrees every half hour. I marveled how Elliott was so unafraid to be uncool that he
was
cool. At twenty-five, I was a publishing lackey; he was a year out of law school working for a New Jersey-based nonprofit that defended indigent clients.

“Amy Gray,” he'd said when I met him at a table. He had that same amused curl in his lips.

“Elliott Reuther,” I returned. It reminded me what made me like Elliott so much—the electric-charged banter, the tit-for-tat tête-à-tête. Our rapid-fire wordplay made me feel brilliant and in on the joke that everyone else was outside of. It was heady. I felt my stomach flutter and my toes curl.

“It's great to see you. You look great—as always.”

The strange thing about the Spinnaker, the brainchild of a demented Marriott executive, is that, as you sit sipping your raspberry champagne fizz or whatever, you forget the motion, except for the slow, almost imperceptible ripples across the champagne flute. All of a sudden I was facing the flashing pearly whites of a smiling Gap model; just before I had been at crotch level of a four-story Al Roker beckoning me to “Watch
Today.”
It was unnerving.

“I think this bar is making me sick.”

“Don't think about it.”

Elliott asked me about my job. I hated it. I asked him about his. “You, unlike me, are doing noble work in the world,” I flattered him, “instead of kissing ass and dropping names, which is all I really do.”

“Don't give me any credit for being principled,” Elliott returned. “I'm doing this work out of pure sloth and selfishness.”

“Really? ” I had spent the days leading up to our date feeling guilty that my social conscience was grossly inadequate. “So, what are your clients like?”

“They're all toothless whores with seventeen children and crack habits. Seriously. It's hard to defend people that you know are guilty. It's always, ‘Listen Judge, Shattiqua has a family to feed, she's not a flight risk, and she can't make bail over $100’—because we bonded her out last week on a child-endangerment charge—‘so why don't we let her take care of her children in the nine weeks between now and the hearing?’ And then we settle.” My illusions of moral inferiority were melting rapidly.

“Sounds depressing.”

“It is. That's why I've cultivated total emotional detachment.” He swilled his dirty martini with greedy abandon. I was perversely fascinated. “I like winning,” he pronounced, “and I like working the courtroom and impressing the judge. But I actually took this job because I thought it would be easy. I didn't want to work eighty-hour weeks at a big firm. Plus, they probably wouldn't have hired me.” His law-school grades weren't very good. He told me a story about defending a client who was accused of stalking a former girlfriend.

“So the judge says to me, ‘Mr. Reuther, you claim no inappropriate or suggestive contact was initiated by your client.’ And I said,
‘Judge, that's correct. I don't see any harassment in the content of those messages.’ And she says, ‘You don't?’ And I say, ‘No, your honor.’ ”

His smooth olive skin glistened with a thin layer of oil, and his black, back-swept hair formed a clean arrow at the center of his forehead. He had very Sephardic looks, like Corey Feldman with an extra thirty pounds. Or a dark Bill Maher. I wasn't sure why I was attracted to him, but I was.

“So the judge said, ‘Mr. Reuther, I understand in the complaint that Mr. Hernandez said in his messages, ‘I put a spell on you because you're mine,’ as well as ‘I stand at my window, wring my hands and moan.’ ” Elliott repeated all this with his best uptight-white-guy impression.

“So the judge said, ‘Counselor, how do you explain your client's incendiary language?’ And I said, ‘Your honor, I'll concede to my client having bad musical taste, but not to his being a stalker. These are song lyrics. My client may be a Creedence Clearwater Revivalist, but he's not a criminal.’ ”

In addition to making the judge laugh, he told me proudly, he got the guy off.

There was something about Elliott's intrepid wickedness that made me laugh and feel nervous. He'd call me up and say he was thinking about me, and it was disarming. I would imagine his indifferent façade retreating, too. Then he'd talk about all the people he couldn't care less about and the social problems that bored him and the clients he'd warned, “Well, if you don't mind getting ass-raped, then go ahead and go to trial,” and I wondered if or when I might become the object of his hostility.

When we left the Spinnaker, I was staring in a vortex of flashing light that urged me to “enter my fantasy.” Even after excusing myself to the marbleized ladies’ room to throw up striking-pink Spinnaker vomit, I knew it wasn't our last date.

New Year's came, with Lily and Patrick. Elliott and Patrick were roommates, and Lily and Patrick were engaged. We held hands, we kissed, and spent the next two days together. I celebrated having “broken the boy seal,” having peeled away the layers of resistance like a sour onion.

Although I was dating Elliott at the time, in a purely anthropological sense I was excited about the prospect of working with two dozen boys. I fantasized that being an investigator was to be a fruitful period of fact-gathering for me, amassing a database about people to whom I would never otherwise have access. My peers would also be my subjects, and I would toil alongside them, blending into studied anonymity. I also anticipated a certain base phero-monal attraction one feels to a crowd of guys who have been penned up in a room together for too long.

That is, of course, until I got to know them.

Evan first talked about the Assman in my interview, actually, but at the time I misunderstood and thought he was talking about “X-Men.” The Assman was an investigator whose real name was Matt. He was a long-limbed, burly guy who looked a little like he'd stopped working out after high school football and started smoking too much pot. Finally, I fettered my pride and appealed to Assman.

“So, what's the deal, Matt? Inquiring minds want to know. Why does everybody here call you Assman? ” Sol was relentlessly soliciting/berating Assman, as in, “Where's Assman's case?” or “Assman, haul it up here!” or “Finish that case or your ass is outta here!”

Matt didn't seem to mind my asking. “Yeah, it's kinda gross, I guess.” The previous fall, he told me, his posterior had been hurting for almost a month, just above the tailbone. He complained about it, but Sol told him, “Don't be such a pussy, Assman.” And so his name was born. In late November, he was sitting at his desk when he felt a pricking pressure at the point that had been hurting him, and then a wet, viscous relief. “I actually thought Sol was playing soccer with a ball-bearing and was using my seat as the target.” It turned out he'd had a pretty deep abscess that had just erupted. Nestor, another investigator who was Assman's best friend and mutual tormentor, called an ambulance, and the whole Agency saw Matt and his leaky butt off to St. Vincent's.