Spygirl (6 page)

“Yo, Gray, wanna go get shitfaced?” This came from Evan, who'd already gotten a head start on the rest us. He led the way, cradling his laptop in one hand and a Papst Blue Ribbon in the other.

“More than you know.” I packed up and followed everyone to the 119 Bar, which was a five-minute walk from the office. It was part of an exclusive circuit of dive bars frequented by young PIs, including the greasy spoon Corner Bistro, the grim Siberia Bar, as well as the rank-smelling Alphabet City dive standard, Blue and Gold. My coworkers had a tradition, called the Odd Days Club, which consisted of drinking well into the night at the office on odd-numbered days. But lately they had grown tired of working and drinking and then inevitably (or inadvertently) sleeping in the same place, and had focused their efforts on going out to get drunk. “You don't wanna shit where you sleep, ya know,” Gus editorialized.

I devoted time at the bar to chatting with my other colleagues. There was Ronny Finkelman, who grew up in what used to be the largest trash-dumping ground in the United States; that would be the island known as Staten. But he wanted to be an honorary native of Asbury Park, New Jersey. He'd seen Springsteen more times than he could count. Also, admitting he came from S.I. embarrassed him somehow. Ronny had crossed over from being an investigator to being a “marketing guy.” I wasn't sure what that meant then, and I'm still not, but I can say that he's the only marketing guy that's come and not gone since I've been at the Agency, and he somehow seems to bring in new clients.

Otis was a former editor at
Guns & Ammo
, who told me he was wrapping up eight years of work on a biography of Ted Nugent. “Yeah,” he said, “I'd put him up there with Dylan, and Springsteen for sure.” He was shortish and square-jawed, and he was wearing Tevas with socks. It was snowing out. “So, when does it get cold enough for, ya know, shoes?” I asked him. He laughed. “When hell freezes over, man.” He turned around and faced the rest the group, crowded in front of the bar. “Hey, can somebody get this girl another drink—she needs to
relax!
”

I finally got to spend awhile talking to Wendy. “Just don't date any of the guys in the office,” she advised.

“Nothing to worry about there,” I said.

She was a smart and hip (DJ boyfriend, loft in Williamsburg) Californian, so she played up the Valley girl thing too. I told her I liked her leg warmers. She gave me the address for her website, where she sells them along with ponchos and metallic appliquéd drawstring purses. We did shots together.

I don't remember much after that but the taste of the Wild Turkey, Jack Daniel's, and Coke coming up and swishing around my toilet bowl in Brooklyn with the most amazing force.

The next morning, hopped up on Advil and two Starbucks lattes, I was working glumly at my desk when Sol offered a bottle of Jack Daniel's to the investigator who could better his thus-far-ineffective efforts to dig up dirt on this one guy, a young dot-com entrepreneur. Challenges in the office, I learned, were frequent and cutthroat. This would be my first interview case. Sol assured us our subject was a deserving scumbag—he just didn't have the
proof
yet. He needed one crucial interview to break this case wide open. Galvanized by the provocation, my competitive spirit took hold. I wanted that JD, and I didn't even like whiskey.

I found out where the subject lived and started looking for former girlfriends, lovers, or business partners who may have had a reason to hate the guy. For me, it was easy to begrudge him. At seventeen, when I was studying for the SATs, my subject was a ski bum in Aspen. At twenty-one, when I was working for five dollars an hour in publishing, he was collecting money from his father's rich friends to buy real estate in condominiums in New Hampshire and resell them at obscene markups. At twenty-five, when I finally
joined the Agency to make a little more money and investigate him, he was heading an independent wireless ISP and planning an IPO that would net him a million dollars. Our client, a midsized venture capital company, was considering investing in this very offering. Sol told them to hold off.

Unlike private eyes on TV and film, I learned, the Agency staff spent most of its time running Internet searches. My first searches were not fruitful. I plugged Mr. Dot-Com into one search engine and found more than fifteen thousand documents. Adding his middle name, I found one four-year-old picture of him and an “unidentified friend” in a
New York Times
society piece at a benefit for the arts sponsored by some barely nonprofit pro-bono PR group. Not helpful.

I visited Gus in the back of the room.

“Gus, I need your help, and I don't mean kisses,” I joked, blowing him one.

“Anything for you, darlin’.”

He helped me find a website Dot-Commie had posted for a band he was playing in, replete with pictures of Mr. Dot-Com and his Pearl Jam-loving bandmates posing with a dozen Coronas, and a quote from Kid Rock: “Givin’ all my ducats to Uncle Sam. F**k it!” The quote seemed meaningful, but didn't lead anywhere. I considered writing, “Subject has crappy taste in friends and music” on my status report, but I resisted.

Rounding out my more significant findings was a divorce filing from a woman to whom he'd been married for eleven months. I tried to call her, and I got numbers in Arizona and New Mexico, but her family told me she was in Burkina Faso now, with the Peace Corps. They seemed unaware that she had ever been married to Dot-Com Guy at all, saying they knew that she and my subject had dated briefly, but not that they had been married. The folks gave me an address for a post office station forty miles from her camp
and assured me she would get any correspondence in “no longer than six weeks.”

Unfortunately, the company Dot-Com Guy was running was the only real job he'd had (tenure at his father's investment company aside), so there was no promise in calling there. None of his companies were registered. There were no incorporation records for them and no reported business partners or investors. I spoke to a few former college friends. One told me he was a whippit freak. I thanked him, and we chatted briefly about how he (the friend) was almost prosecuted for selling nitrous-oxide tanks to teens for inhalation. I got off the line quickly. When leaving the office that day, Sol offered a piqued, “You're losing your edge, A. Gray.” This was plainly sarcastic, since in my one week of work I had no edge to speak of. From that day on, “A. Gray” was my call sign around the office.

“Kiss this JD good-bye.” Sol held the amber bottle in the air and took a pretend swipe from it, wiping his lips.

A month and one day into our affair, Elliott and I saw the movie
Boiler Room.
We were reviewing it for a his-and-her dating site, a job I had gotten through another publishing refugee friend of mine. The site later went bankrupt, though at the time my friend was blessing her stock options and the site was pumping out a torrent of forward-looking press releases and paying $1.50 a word, not to mention the price of our movie tickets.

I was struck by how much our office resembled the grim basement office Giovanni Ribisi sets up in the film—a careless assembly of cheap accommodations, built for quick dismemberment, and a grab-your-employees’-401(k)-plans-and-head-for-the-Caymans kind of ethics. At the Agency, we could pack the place up
and jettison the furniture in a few hours, leaving nothing behind but some graffiti on the ceiling above my desk,
PUT DICK HERE
, an arrow pointing at a dangling metal gasket; skidmarks from Evan riding his mountain bike around the office; and a bad smell around where the refrigerator had been.

After the movie and some dirty martinis, we went back to his house. We were falling asleep and Pink Floyd's song “Fearless” was bleating in the background.

It surged into the kickout, breakout jam part, and I started playing air guitar. Later I hummed along and soon was hovering around sleep. The phone rang at about two-thirty in the morning.

Elliott answered. “Yes, sort of. Well, Amy's here, so I'll call you later,” I heard him saying. He fell back down on the bed, sighing in annoyance.

“Who was that?” I asked. His face was framed with the bluish light from the streetlamp outside, but I was clear about the withering look he imparted me.

“It's really none of your fucking business.”

I was shot through with an emboldening indignation. I couldn't believe he was treating me like a
chick
, like
some girl, like all the other fucking girls he'd dated.
I had flashbacks to being in college and hearing him with 10 percent of my attention speaking to other people with total detachment about his ex-girlfriends. “She says she wants to stay in touch with me, but I'm like why, I just don't give a shit about you anymore.” I remembered him saying the week before, when I asked him to hang out on consecutive nights, “Don't try to take this from A to Z all at once.”

I had thought that our history together would give me some
kind of emotional immunity. I realized that sitting around smoking pot
near
somebody for four years does not a friend make. I barely knew him.

“I'm sorry. I didn't mean that.” He was reaching for me, shaking his head, but his tone belied his annoyance, like he had to clean up red wine on a white couch and he was pissed off about it.

“I don't give a shit if you meant it or not.” Suddenly I was seized with the same hardened indifference that had always fascinated me in him. He begged me not to leave, and I did anyway, in a mechanistic daze that enveloped me like a cloak. He was crying when I left.

When I got home, after running out into the wet, snowy night with hard clarity, my anger melted on my bed, into two little saltwater pools on my pillow, not for the things I was losing with him but for the things I hadn't had.

SIX             

Elliott left me a plaintive message the following Monday. When he called I was napping in the same position I'd flopped myself down in after work, so I actually just caught the tone of it, which
seemed
to be plaintive. When I went to hit
PLAY
, the tiny cassette made a screeching sound and ejected itself, also defecating lots of brown silky tape containing the last probable communiqué I might ever get from Elliott.

I turned off the ringer on my phone and balanced cucumber slices on my distended eyes. They started to hurt from the cold, which gave me goosebumps, so I ate them instead. I felt restless. I didn't know what to do with myself. It was a feeling I remembered
having had before, and it always hit me as a sort of shock. I had a superstitious ritual that, when I felt it, I would have to say to myself, “I'm lonely.” The last time I did this was in the pink downstairs bathroom of my parents’ house, where I locked myself during one Thanksgiving dinner in high school. How can I feel lonely when I'm surrounded by so many other people? I wondered. This time, I wrote it down, in big black bubble graffiti on the back of my Con Edison bill, which I then stuffed in my “Pay it fast” file: “I'm lonely.”

I went to the liquor store across the street, which was a narrow shopping isle enclosed by bulletproof glass where you would point to the liquor you wanted and they would push it to you in one of those sliding plastic drawer slots like they have at gas stations. I bought a bottle of Lillet. I went home and turned up the volume on PJ Harvey's “Rid of Me.”

I wasn't even attached to Elliott. His mind was his big appeal. Plus he was surly. And narcissistic. I was thinking of all the bad things about him I could to convince myself I was happy about being alone. As I was drifting into sleep, I thought to myself, Can't I just be happy about ditching Elliott instead of being
lonely
? I braced myself and fell asleep on my couch at 9:45.

The next morning I patted on some concealer and steeled myself. Having a boyfriend had been a nice cover at work, too, while it lasted. It made it easier to blend in and make friends with the guys. I didn't want to tell anybody about the breakup.

“Jesus, did your boyfriend hit you?” Sol was two inches away from the large gray saucers on my face that doubled as my under-eyes.

“Jesus? I thought you were Jewish.” I glared at him. “You really know how to make a girl feel like she's the only freak in the room. If you must know, we broke up.” Nothing like personal discretion.
I
wanted to hit me. So much for playing my cards close to the chest, for keeping up my game face.

Big Gus walked by us. His nose was red, and he was hacking his way to his desk in the back of the office, practically coughing up a lung. He looked worse than I did, but that didn't keep him from saying, “Late night, Gray?” as he walked by. Do I have a
KICK ME WHILE I
’
M DOWN
sign on my forehead? I wondered. “What's wrong with Gus?” I said aloud.