Spygirl (5 page)

The doctors removed an apple-core-shaped slice from Assman's derriere about three inches deep and a half-inch in diameter. He spent the next three weeks at home, soaking his wound three times a day. “It's pretty nasty,” he concluded, “but not a lot of guys have a built-in butt-pouch.” He leaned in to me and said, “I keep keys in there when I'm in the field, working a case.”

“Stop,” I interjected. “I have a sensitive stomach.”

Assman and Nestor were the proletariat of the Agency, and I was immediately attracted to their outsider status and subversive bent. Nestor had a lot of things sustaining his victim status. At four feet nine, he was towered over by the freshman college girls we hired out of NYU to do part-time work for us. He had moved to the Lower East Side from Venezuela at the age of eight, and he was an art-school dropout and freelance undercover investigator who'd retired from a highly profitable business selling reconstituted low-rider bikes before he started working at the Agency. We knew he'd been living in New York for at least the past fifteen years, but beyond that his history was murky. Nestor was reticent. Except when it came to busting on Assman.

Although his methods remained fuzzy to the rest of us, Nestor had the most investigative experience of anyone at the Agency and he was grudgingly regarded as the ballsiest investigator we had. In the early nineties he had worked undercover for another firm started by a former top-ranking CIA operative. For six months, his beat was working The Tunnel and The Vault when Peter Gatien's clubs reigned supreme in a pre-Giuliani Gotham, an investigation that led to Gatien's indictment. He said he had a lot of girls then, because he could get them into the clubs free and had total VIP access. He rubbed elbows with celebrities and hitmen. He hung out with models. When the clubs were shut down, his social life went with them.

I was happy to be accepted by some of the investigators at the Agency. Since my first interview, Evan's chummy banter had devolved into grunts and a vocabulary of crude sign language. He pointed, he shooed, he shushed. Wendy, the only other girl, didn't talk to me. Gus seemed preoccupied and sat on the opposite side of the office. Linus had his head in the clouds. He did manage to talk to some people though, so I supposed his haze just didn't include me. The same story held true for everyone else there, it seemed. I consoled myself by visiting Assman's and Nestor's desks often, to talk shit, smoke cigarettes, and laugh. It was the end of my second week at the Agency, and I left Assman's desk, where he had lured me with bubble rope and Slim Jims. There was a message from Elliott. We had dinner plans.

After work, I met him at his apartment and we went out for a drink. Living as he did on Eighty-second and Second, there were no cool bars within forty blocks. The neighborhood was all
leatheryskinned old ladies, dogs, and, seemingly unparented toddlers. We walked past a bar called Quench, which had sleek white leather-upholstered couches and hot-pink bulbs in all the fixtures.

“It's like a modernist bordello,” I said.

“Okay, if anybody asks, I'm your pimp.” He winked. “And your name is Candy.”

“No, I want to be Bambi.”

The bar was only about half full. The house special was their chocolate martini, which I ordered, and Elliott got a Manhattan.

“Hey, what's this?” Elliott pulled an oversized binder from the next table. He opened it to a laminated page in the middle with a picture of a brunette smiling too widely in a huddle of other girlfriends whose faces were smudged out.

“She's all gums. Maybe she forgot to put her falsies in.”

“Nope, she's wearing them.” He pointed to her ample décol-letage as she leaned into the camera. “Listen to this,” Elliott started reading, “ ‘Name: MinervaMilk. Book last read:
To Ill a Mockingbird.
’ It says ‘Ill.’ That's funny. She must be rereading her sixth-grade reading list.”

“Very badly,” I added.

“ ‘Favorite Movie:
Nine and a Half Weeks.’
I think I'm liking what I'm seeing now.” When we looked up from the book, we realized
all
the people at the other tables were reading these books. Quench was a dating bar. (“Find a friend, a fling, or a forever romance. Quench is the antidote to your romantic thirst.”) Just registering cost $250, and each “setup” cost $40 for an e-mail, and $80 for a special phone number and “introduction.”

We played around for a while, reading the ads and trying to find people for each other. “Okay, here's the woman you need.” I pointed faux-seductively at Elliott, reading, “ Name: SweetJordana; Most Ideal Date: Tarring and Feathering; Last Book Read:
2001 Contact-Free Ways to Drive a Man Wild.’
”

“Number one: read these ads to them,” Elliott winced.

“Seriously.” I continued, “ ‘Favorite Food: whipped cream, Favorite Body Part: neck.’ ” I noticed Elliott wasn't paying attention to my reading, but kept glancing over his shoulder where a woman was doing an impromptu lap dance for her boyfriend/date/client/ whatever.

“Hold on,” he said, “I need to get a better view of this.” He picked up his Barcelona chair and turned his back toward me. The girl squeezed her boobs together in her hands and shoved them in her companion's face, shimmying to the music. Watching Elliott watching her, I wondered what the fuck
I
was doing there, when SweetJordana or someone like her would be much better.

FIVE             

In high school, I didn't have a clue what I wanted to do with my life, beyond getting into college. The guidance counselor maintained a closely guarded book of spectrographs organized by college. The graphs were plotted by combined SAT score, on the
x
-axis, and then GPA on the
y
with admittance represented by red dots, wait lists indicated by black doughnut holes, and rejections by black dots. I couldn't stop thinking about the black dots, and how each one of them was a person, with a disappointed family behind them, and a disappointed world to face after their rejection. To me the black dots’ despair practically dripped off the pages, representing thousands of dollars misspent on SSAT tutoring, flash
cards, math camp, private school, karate lessons, and art therapy, all adding up to nothing. I'd sneak into our advisor's office and smuggle the tome back to my desk. I poured over this book, willing myself into a red dot, resolving through pure single-mindedness and daily prayer to the gods of college admission the oneness of myself and that dot.

When we finally achieved unity, I was at a loss. After the dust had settled, my years in high school seemed like nothing more than the sum of some smudgy purple-inked exegesis in my yearbook. Graduation left a smoky impression of white linen and country club luncheons. I was caught by dread. I had given so little thought to what I actually wanted to do in college that when I received my catalog three weeks after my letter of admission to Brown, I cried. That summer I smoked my first joint, had my first boyfriend, and waited for inspiration to hit me.

In college, my friends and I practiced insulting each other, making bad art, becoming semioticians, and then, having achieved that to varying degrees, rejecting the whole enterprise to embrace a new kind of studied anti-intellectualism. White boys called each other nigga. My girlfriends and I took pride in looking trashy. We also built bongs, and I picked up dirty colloquialisms like “poon-tang” and “felching.”

My college boyfriend, Ben, was a tall, brooding boy I met the first week of school after my roommate, Sarah, took him home with her. It took us two years to fall in love, and then we were inseparable, united by our mutual dependence and our desire to at once eschew the world because “everybody else sucks” and yet still not be disliked by anybody.

I created and discarded many selves. By senior year I applied my skills of clue-gathering to becoming a tamer of unwieldy texts. I wrote a pretentious thesis that strongly favored style over substance, fancying myself the intellectual equivalent of a streetwise
Scotland Yarder—fearlessly willing to bring together elements other people saw as impossible, repulsive, and absurd. One of my advisors wrote in my evaluation that she was “suspicious” of a paper that I wrote so well about “terrible literature.” By the time I was done I agreed with her, and I suspected my paper was terrible too.

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.

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.