American Subversive (3 page)

“More like fifty.”

“Fine. An impressive following. But you can get that many people to go watch a preacher, or professional wrestling.”

“What's your point?”

“That it doesn't matter. That we focus too much on statistics. On small details. Americans sit too close to the television.” Touché laughed. “I'm sorry. I'm getting wrapped up in everything that's happened this week, and we're here to have—”

“You boys should always greet the hostess when you come to a party,” said a voice behind us. We both turned. Cressida was standing there, flush from the dance floor. Her auburn bangs were matted to her forehead, and her halter top clung like a wet stamp to her pale, freckled frame. Cressida wasn't traditionally beautiful—her lips were too thin, her breasts got lost in bras—but with her curious eyes, her small button nose, and her almost perfect English ass, she could be quite stunning in specific moments.

“A vision,” said Touché, kissing her theatrically on both cheeks. “
And you must meet my friend Aidan. He was just asking about you.” But Cressida wasn't playing along, so Touché held up his empty cup. “I'll let the two of you get
reacquainted
,” he announced, and with that he drifted off in the general direction of the dance floor.

“He's such an asshole,” I said.

“You love him.” Cressida was looking straight at me—questioning, considering, accusing, all at once. Then she blinked. “What's wrong with you? You've been glaring at me all night. You can't come over and say hello?”

“Not if you can't invite me in the first place. It's so great to find out about your girlfriend's party from someone else.”

She rolled her eyes, a habit I hated (although when I'd said as much, months before, she replied that eye-rolling was what I did for a living, one blog post at a time). Someone called her name, and she looked up and blew a kiss to a departing couple. When she turned back around, her smile had evaporated. “Aidan, can we try not to ruin the night? It's been a hard enough week already. It's all hands on deck at the paper. Dozens of reporters, hundreds of leads . . . all leading nowhere. I've been at the office late every night. I must look a right mess.”

“You haven't called once.”

“There hasn't been time.”

“There's always time. You said it yourself in one of your fine columns on commitment.”

“Stop it.” She moved closer, clasping her arms loosely around my waist. Then she looked at me again. This time the bravado was gone, and I could see how exhausted, how fetchingly vulnerable she was under that dusting of freckles and makeup.

“I'm sorry,” I whispered, through strands of damp hair, and I was, though for what, exactly, I wasn't sure. Fighting, I guess. Stubbornness. Selfishness. Hell, when aren't we sorry?

I don't want to make this sound overly dramatic. This was hardly the height of romance. We were just two people on the fringes of a party, made small by sound and circumstance, but—and I keep thinking cinematically as I recall that night—if the camera had panned in close, it would have caught something genuine. Though I wouldn't call it love. We were too far along for that.

“Stop looking at me,” she said.

“But you look nice.”

“Nice?”

“Yes. Nice. Sexy. Beauti—”

“We need to talk.”

“I know.”

She cleared her throat and gazed outside. “What do you want?”

It was the worst kind of question, and it grew in the silence that followed. There were a thousand answers—all correct, but none quite right.

“I want to have dinner tomorrow night,” I said.

She looked surprised. “Okay, fine, but I have to work late again.”

“What exactly do they have you doing?”

“I don't know. Chasing scraps. Not even scraps. The metro desk is a mob scene, which means I probably won't have to write a column this month.”

“Oh, too bad,” I said, but she ignored the comment.

“There's just so little information, something has to break. I mean, how can someone
succeed
at—that's not the right word—but you know what I'm trying to say. How can a person plant a bomb, completely undetected, inside a well-secured office building in the middle of Manhattan? Do you know how many security cameras there are on Madison Avenue?”

“We're still in the early days,” I said.

“But there's been nothing. And not a peep from the FBI either. Oh, listen to us, prattling on like everyone else. We throw a party to give people a few hours of fun, and look, we're all still working.”

The room came back to us then, puncturing the moment, what was left of it. Cressida suddenly seemed unfamiliar, like someone I knew only casually. People were hovering nearby, waiting to talk to her, to say hello or good-bye. She had to go. We kissed, lingering for a moment, but no longer.

“Okay, tomorrow night then,” she said, and waded back into the scrum.

I made my way to the bar and ordered a beer. The party had peaked and was coming down the other side. It was a weeknight after all, and
we weren't so young anymore. Early thirties, midthirties, a few even older. We had entered the second stage of city living. These days we checked our watches, wary of the critical difference between one and three in the morning. These days we agreed with each other more than we used to, if only to avoid awkwardness or argument. And these days we betrayed one another, too. With women, with men, with work. Our close friends—from childhood, from college, from those first anxious years in New York—had moved away or melted into marriage. Our new friends were hungrier, more successful, a bit ruthless. We'd all been here a long time now.

I was drunk and floating, group to group, like everyone else. No one cared at this hour about listening. The music was still loud. People were making out. I walked to the bathroom but the line was too long. Where once we laid our drugs out on coffee tables, now we sniffled and fidgeted as we waited to do them alone. Why hadn't Cressida asked me to stay the night? Maybe she'd tried and I'd missed the signal. No, there had been no signal. I looked across the room at the DJ. She was doing a shot with another girl. Had Touché gone home? Maybe I should go home. Cut the proverbial losses.

Then I saw my boss, Derrick Franklin. He was holding court near the front door. I turned back toward the bar, but it was too late. I'd been spotted. Derrick waved me over with a sly grin, followed by an aside to his older male companions. They laughed, too readily. Money people, I thought.

“Aidan, you're out late,” he said, making a big deal of looking at his watch. “Collecting material, I hope.”

Derrick found this sort of thing amusing. I—and the rest of his blogging empire—found it exasperating. But he signed the paychecks, so I stood there and endured fifteen torturous minutes of Roorback anecdotes and Cressida jokes—all of them at my expense. When the talk finally shifted to weightier matters, I excused myself and ducked into Cressida's empty bedroom. My phone had been buzzing all night with e-mails, so I shut the door and turned on her computer.

Blogging was a business, at least for me, and I was contractually obligated to produce at least a dozen well-researched posts a day, the first by 8:30 a.m. For this I received a modest salary and health
insurance, but the real benefits weren't so quantifiable. If Roorback wasn't New York's most popular blog strictly by numbers, it was certainly one of its most essential; the people who read it were the city's new bourgeois, the complex circuitry of the information age (and I, a kind of hidden conductor). Because of Roorback I now had access to a New York I'd only read about before. Touché's New York. Cressida's New York. A New York of public names, private clubs, and the kind of parties that made the papers. It's funny: you search forever for success, and then, as soon as you stop trying so hard, you wake up one morning and suddenly you're somebody. Of course, you also remain the person you were, and for me that meant in debt. I was thirty-three years old, had $35,000 in unpaid student loans, and $1,200 in my checking account. In life's slower moments—on subways or in bed—these facts momentarily caught up with me, until I got to where I was going or fell safely asleep. I'd convinced myself that living paycheck to paycheck was some kind of martyr's life, the only true way to experience New York as a young man. Implicit in that lie, of course, was the assumption that my situation was temporary, that being mildly impoverished was only a phase. Except the phase had settled in, become steadfast, enduring.

Cressida's laptop was coming to life. Lights and beeps, a soft whir. I looked around the room. She'd been here three years, and still it felt only half lived-in. The walls were bare. Her books were stacked in a corner on the floor. She'd made an effort to clean up, but that meant lumping clothes into piles, kicking shoes under the bed. Only her desk was neat, a few folders to one side of the computer, a collection of recent clips on the other. I picked up the one on top, her latest column, and skimmed it, my eyes landing hard on the all-too-familiar sentences.

Something has come between us, and it's never been more evident than in the moments before sleep. Once, these were ours, together, but now the literary has replaced the libidinal, and the stuff of rainy weekend mornings—books and lazy crosswords—has become the focus of our bedroom nights. “What's wrong with me, Jack?” That's what I want to scream as I lie there beside him, feigning interest in some
magazine of my own, but really reading the same page over and over again, like an obsessive child, unable to concentrate on anything—

I couldn't go on. When friends asked, Cressida and I were quick to throw up a smoke screen, tell them her columns were an amalgamation, a compilation, even a fabrication, but no one really believed us. “Jack” was no work of fiction. The bitch.

Outside the door, the party was dying. The DJ's turntable classics had been replaced by someone's iPod, and songs kept getting cut off halfway through. I clicked my way online. I'd learned early on that late-night blogging was a fast road to trouble. Beware the drunken slur, the 3 a.m. slander; it was advice I adhered to closely. But blogging was an addiction, the Internet a drug. There was always an in-box to sift through, comments to read, links to follow. But that night the online traffic was lighter than usual. In the drawn-out aftermath of a major story, the rest of the world had gone quiet. News was still being made, of course, but the press wasn't paying attention. The limelight could only shine so much, even in this day and age, and just then there was only the bombing. That left the rest of us—we cynics, humorists, and online opiners—feeling ignored and slightly worthless.

The Roorback in-box contained just four e-mails—a celebrity sighting (James Franco outside Cafe Gitane), a publicist hawking a new chick-lit book, and some (potentially libelous) gossip from
Vanity Fair.
Nothing I could use the next day. I clicked open the last one. The subject line was blank, as was the body of the e-mail. But an image was attached, and as Cressida's laptop labored to open it, I heard a banging behind me, followed by laughter. “Just turn the knob,” said a girl's muffled voice, then the door opened and two bodies came stumbling into the room. The DJ regained her balance, took a few running steps, and jumped onto the bed. Touché began to chase after her, then stopped. He opened his mouth to speak, but no words came out. He wasn't looking at me, he was looking past me, at the screen. I turned back around just as the picture finished loading. You remember it: the now iconic shot of a young woman with long, dark hair striding purposefully across Madison Avenue, the
red Barneys awnings visible in the blurry background. She wore a knee-length skirt, tasteful sleeveless top, and oversize sunglasses that covered much of her face. Her head was turned to the side, toward the camera, and she seemed in a hurry, like a European beauty hastening past a group of lecherous men.

“Who the fuck is that?” Touché asked, from over my right shoulder. But something else had my attention. The words below the photograph:

This is Paige Roderick. She's the one responsible.

PAIGE
 

KNOW YOUR SURROUNDINGS: MEMORIZE THE ROOM, THE PEOPLE, THE EXITS. A run-down truck stop on an old tobacco highway. Long-haulers eating breakfasts in corners. A church group in the gift shop. Old couples shuffling arm in arm toward the restrooms, then breaking off at the last moment—to
HIS
, to
HERS.
Vans of Girl Scouts and Little Leaguers: kids in uniforms, pleading and tugging, hungry for food, starving for attention. That had been me once, but a long time ago. I was their opposite now. A person trying to fade away, climb into a car and disappear completely. I was sitting at a table near the window, newspaper spread before me, pretending to read. No eye contact, no conversations. In my excitement I'd arrived too early (despite biking the route twice the week before, nine miles of hills through a Smoky Mountain dawn), and after dumping the bike out back, had no choice but to buy a cup of coffee and settle in. It was the longest hour of my life. I got up and walked to the bathroom, fighting the urge to glance in the mirror, take one last look. Would I have recognized myself? The faded jeans, the loose peasant top, the old running shoes. My hair tied in a simple ponytail, no makeup. But I didn't look. What was the point? I went back out and sat down. Know your surroundings? It wasn't difficult. Everything was so familiar. The hard part was realizing I might never see any of it again.