Spygirl (8 page)

I took the F train to the Second Avenue subway station and walked over to Avenue A and then up to Seventh Street. When I got to Sixth Street, Cassie was waiting on a corner a block away from the bar.

“What are you doing? ” I asked her. We were supposed to meet
at
the bar.

“I didn't want to go in alone!” Cassie snapped. She had a thing about that. She refused to go to any social event—even drink at a bar—and arrive alone. She could be alone there, and usually did stay longer than me wherever we went, but arriving alone was out of the question.

Our love affair with Niagara started as an attachment of convenience. In college, when we used to descend on New York on the weekends, the bar was at the center of a downtown drag of dives we frequented. Then, when Cass first moved to the city after school, she lived a block away. Now, six years later, we still make the pilgrimage to our favorite watering hole at least once a week— she from her new fifth-floor tenement walk-up on Avenue B and me from Brooklyn. In addition to the appeal of reliable free drinks (she has vodka cranberry with a splash of seltzer and I have G&T), there is the pull of endless romantic potential: Cass has had crushes on, made out with, and/or dated all of the bartenders there. They are all members of a rockabilly-dressing, punk-rock-sounding band called Hogweed.

For me, the romantic tension at Niagara is negligible, but I go in my capacity as best friend and coconspirator in Cassie's romantic travails. We get waves when we arrive (no ID-checking for us!) and kisses when we leave, although Cass's sometimes involve deep-throat action. I'm the dutiful sidekick, the Watson to her
Sherlock. The Horatio to her Hamlet. The black, joke-cracking supporting actor to her dashing white male lead.

In the glow of the bar's greenly illuminated rows of liquor, we took our usual seats at the end of the bar—the best place for chatting up the bartenders and for spotting hotties’ comings and goings. Cass refuses to sit anywhere else, in fact, than at the bar itself, and there aren't always seats available. So sometimes we'll elect some poor innocuous male sitting alone and we'll descend on him with the social equivalent of double-teaming. We squeeze up against the bar on either side of him, and, leaning in seductively in all our water-bra-enhanced glory, we converse with as much ear-splitting vulgarity as we can muster. Efforts are made to talk about “female problems,” like urinary-tract infections and menstruation, whenever possible. Like a lamb to slaughter, he invariably offers us his seat and tears off to the remote depths of the bar.

When we got there, the seats were almost all taken, so we staked out a single guy sitting next to an empty bar stool and moved in on him. All we could see was the back of his bald head, since he kept it turned 180 degrees away from us, presumably because he didn't want to give up his seat. “What do you want?” Cassie asked me. She was leaning in over to Stuart, one of our bartender friends and, for Cassie, an occasional suitor. “Whatever you're having,” I said. Even though Cassie was making major dough, she never picked up the tab. She passed me a dirty vodka martini and whispered, “You owe me nine please, with tip.”

“Right.” Cass was as cheap as she was single. We continued talking about Elliott, and Cassie resumed railing about how awful he was. I was just soaking it in, enjoying the armor of righteousness that one gets from laying waste to an ex-boyfriend. Iggy Pop's “Search and Destroy” was thumping out of the jukebox.

I was singing along.
“Somebody will save my soul …
Yeah, that's totally true. He's a fucker,” I allowed.

And with that the bald guy turned around and flashed us a gorgeous smile and two sweet puppylike big azure eyes and said, “He's stupid.”
“Love in the middle of the firefight …”

Cassie rolled her eyes, “What?”

“He's stupid. For blowing it with you. Big mistake.”
He was talking to me.
His sweetness was so unexpected that I couldn't help laughing, which I was doing when I finally looked at him dead-on, and I almost departed this life. He was tan, tall, and he was close enough that I could smell him, like Tide and honeysuckle and wheat. I was laughing, and even though he wasn't smiling, he looked amused, his blue eyes revealing an intensity and innocence that was mesmerizing. He had an immaculately chiseled jaw, enticing lips, and a subtle tug in his shirt that hinted at the muscles beneath—an immaculate specimen of masculine form. This was no regular Niagara man, boy, guy, or bartender—he was an angel.

He must be dumb, I figured. Plus, I was only seeing him sitting from the waist up. Maybe he was short, which was a deal-breaker for me. Maybe he had skinny legs. Even worse, maybe he had no legs. There was, I tried to remind myself, no end to how bad this could get. Cass excused herself to the bathroom, and I introduced myself. Gorgeous Boy said his name was Edward, and he was in town from Boston, where he was a third-year resident in cardiology at Amherst. I mentally bracketed “dumb” for further research. I told him I grew up outside of Boston and I used to see bands at the Paradise all the time. He had been to the Paradise. He saw Dave Matthews there. I reinstated “dumb” in full force and added “jock” after it. He also saw Fu Man Chu. I set aside drawing any conclusions for now. By the time my cell phone rang an hour and a half later, I was so engrossed that I didn't recognize the voice
on the other end of the phone. “Hello?” The line was crackling. “Who is it?” The reception was awful.

“It's Elliott!” a voice screamed.

“Oh, hi.” I flushed and looked at Edward, who was tending his Guinness and pretending not to listen.

“Look, Elliott, now's not a good time.” This was sweet justice. He wants me but he can't have me back. Did he think he could just apologize and I'd forgive him?

“I think I … you.” He was breaking up.

My eyes widened. “This reception is terrible—I can't hear you—what, what did you just say?” I was panicked.

“I think I lo—” The line went dead. Shit! I was dying. An infinitesimal world of possibilities, a Kierkegaardian labyrinth of ei-thers and ors ran through my mind. I considered life spans’ worth of love, heartbreak, and death in fractions of seconds. Finally I searched my heart, and I determined that even if Elliott was in love with me, I still felt the same way about him. He was a piece of shit.

The phone rang again. It was him.

“Hi.”

“Yeah, hi,” he seemed rushed. “I don't know what was up with that connection, but I was trying to tell you I think I left my card at your house.”

I was incredulous. “Your card?”

“Yeah—my Citibank card. Can you look for it? I think we used it when we ordered burritos last Thursday.”

I remembered. I remembered well enough to remember the credit card perched in front of my fake orchid on the ledge of my window, where I'd found it days ago and decided not to tell him. “I don't think I have it, but I'll look,” I said, and I hung up.

When I looked up from the glowing red
STOP
button on my cell phone, Edward was talking to another girl to his right. I couldn't get a good look at her, but she seemed attractive. I felt a stabbing in my stomach. Another battle lost. To top it off, Cassie was at the other end of the bar talking to Stuart, her bartender-suitor du jour. It didn't seem to matter that their relationship consisted mainly of heavy oral flirtation and dry humping on kegs of Corona in the stockroom. Cassie enjoyed having a boy around to flirt with.

Meanwhile, Elliott had fucked up another night and possibly my entire future. I glumly nursed my Sin Cider and kept an eye on Cassie in one corner of the mirror of the bar and Edward in the other. Half an hour later Cassie was making out with Stuart next to the bathroom at the end of the bar, so I tapped her and whispered in her ear, “I'm outtie.” I was walking out the door to mourn my loss when I felt someone grab my arm. It was Edward.

“Hey,” he said, looking embarrassed. I noticed his large square hand on my arm, squeezing slightly. I have a hand fetish. I adore big, boyish hands. Goosebumps bulleted down my arm and neck. He towered over me, probably about six foot three or four. I have a tall fetish, too.

“Hey,” I said, trying to sound aloof.

“Listen,” he said, “I'm sorry, that's someone I used to know. Someone I used to date.”

“Oh.” That was reassuring.

“In high school. I had planned on meeting her and her boyfriend, but he couldn't make it. We were just catching up.” I let him continue. “Listen, can I call you? I'm going back to Massachusetts tomorrow, but I'd really like to see you again. Maybe you're up there sometimes visiting your parents? ”

“Yeah, I visit my parents sometimes.” He was winning me over. He grabbed a Heineken coaster off the bar, and I wrote my phone numbers, work and home, in a circle around the green periphery. As I walked to the F train, briskly, I said his name under my breath fifty times. Elliott was an abstract recollection, a distant dream. Edward, Edward, Edward …

EIGHT             

As a little girl, I found God. I imagined Him not as an omnipotent or sovereign character, but more like a modest puppeteer, and His provenance was the weather—specifically, snow. I prayed for it all year long, but particularly in the fall, when my birthday started to roll around in late October and the smoky fall air pointed to a potentiality that was more ripe, more
on the verge
than any other time of year.

Even as I got older, I craved the equalizing and quieting effects a snowfall had on the world around me. In high school, on one of the two snow days ever, just before heading out with Cassie
to smoke Larks in a Boston alleyway called the Crevice and say “Fuck you” to the world, I fell back against the door of my room, with its Lemonheads poster and picture of Johnny Rotten and Sid relieving themselves, holding their members like battling warriors, and felt tingly from the beautiful anarchy of it all. My High Holy Days were, strictly speaking, snow days. There was no more solemn time, no state of being more deserving of reverence and awe.

The day of my boss Sol's father's funeral was a snowy day. It was three weeks into my job at the Agency. I arrived at the office a little early to find Evan holding court with a Marlboro Red hanging out of his mouth and one foot on his desk. “Hey, Gray,” he said, calling me over and gesturing with his chin like a movie-made mafioso from the 1950s.

“It's freezing in here,” I said to him. It couldn't have been more than forty degrees, and the whole airy space shivered as gusts snuck through cracks in the windows, holes in the floorboards, pipes in the walls.

“I know, it's pretty bad,” he said. “I just wanted to tell you that the heat is busted and you can feel free to take your laptop and go work at home, “cause it'll probably be awhile before we get this fixed—HEY, ASSMAN!” Evan called over me to Matt to deliver him the same good news. I was blissful with the prospect of a grownup snow day, a clean white layer to erase everything— my doubts, my mistrust, my hangover. I was opening the door of the office, which swung open a little too easily with the pull of the wind behind it, when Evan made an announcement: “Nobody move!”

We all gathered around his desk. Evan explained that Sol had called in and told him that his father had just died. We could use our discretion about whether or not to attend the funeral, which
would be that day in Neptune City, New Jersey. They were going to rent a van to get there.

I was quietly beset. On the one hand, I was thrilled with the gift of snow, and relieved to have another day to clear my head. On the other hand, it would be an egregious slight to blow off the funeral to have a few extra hours at the Liquor Store Bar, or, even worse, shop, which my bank account couldn't sustain right now. Still, I was used to the steadfastness of massive central heating systems, like the one in the fifty-floored building, where I'd hammered out flap copy till one or two in the morning to the soothing hum of the air flowing through ten thousand tiny grates in ten thousand tiny cubicles in a hundred thousand square feet of perfectly calibrated office space heat. A broken heating system was—a gift from God! It released me, however temporarily, from another day of professional self-flagellation. A day off was painfully alluring, but attending the funeral might be the perfect way to ingratiate myself with Sol. Or he might consider it an intrusion to have me there, a new hire, witnessing one of the most intimate moments of his life. In the end, I decided to go.