Spygirl (12 page)

“Do you see her?” George asked.

“Uh-huh.”

“Good. Let me know what happens.”

“Great, okay. Love you too, Mom.” I clicked my phone off and tore out the door. She was walking away from the building with her back to the river. She was probably heading for the subway. I quickened my pace. When I followed her into the subway, I was glad I'd heeded George's advice to stock up on tokens, magazines, and dollar bills. She leaned against a peeling green column in the station, and I breathed in the mist of urine and garbage rising warmly from the tracks.

In New York, the proximity to squalor has been transformed into an aesthetic principle. This has inspired a booming industry in artificial distressing. Rich uptowners pay big money to have the butt cheeks on their jeans worn through, or to have the paint properly cracking off their armoires. They are trying to look like everyone else who has made hipster virtues of necessity.

On the subway platform, following my first subject into the underbelly of New York, I shivered happily. I have evolved so far in my love of the damaged and dirty that I get a perverse thrill out of being so near bodily emissions and refuse. I'm really doing it, I thought.

When the train pulled up and she coolly walked on, I sat at the opposite end of the car. I could see her sun-bleached hair, and when the train pulled into the station I followed her ponytail up some stairs, through the turnstiles, up some more stairs, and then onto Lexington Avenue, where she stopped in a deli. She came out, opened a pack of Silk Cut 100s, and lit one, and then continued uptown, where she turned into a storefront at Seventy-second Street. It was a Kate's Paperie. She fingered pretty silvery vellums and creamy hundred-pound envelopes, then headed to the back of the store. I closed in, clutching a lime-yellow stationery set and inkwell to the light, making like I was choosing color
combinations. I kept her blond head hemmed in my line of vision by the scallop-edged papers and ink bottles.

Since I'd gotten into the store, I kept imagining jumping up and outing myself. To the soon to be Alexis Wilbur, I'd say, I'm sorry to tell you your future husband is a con artist, and you've been conned. We know about the penthouse you've never been to, the son he had with a previous girlfriend you've never met. Well, there's no penthouse, there's no child, and there will be no marriage. Your future husband is being arrested at this moment. Don't cry. Things will be much easier this way than if you had never known. At this she would collapse on the floor, crying, and I'd tell the stationer, dryly, It could happen to the best of us. Somehow it just doesn't. I couldn't bury my hostility. How could someone be so dense? The guy was a classic bullshit artist, what George called a “fucking red flag of psychopathology”

The stationer said something to her, and I heard her say, “Yes, I'm looking for wedding invitations.” My stomach folded over. She smiled and blushed. There was a chair around the corner from the stationer's corner, which I quickly sat in and, whipping out a copy of
New York
magazine, put my tape recorder between the pages and clicked
ON.
I pretended to read the Gotham section.

“So when is the
wedding?”
The stationer was a thin, manic New Yorker type with a terrible arts-and-crafts style. She wore a quilted patchwork catastrophe of a jacket with glittery rainbow fabrics sewn next to printed text swaths with words like “dream” and “miracle.” The coat combined the worst style of high school art teachers, flea-market patrons, and therapists everywhere. She also seemed to italicize the last word of every sentence.

The girl, Alexis, had a crumbly, thin-pitched voice, like a girly eleven-year-old smoker.

“Well, it's soon actually. In May.”

“So
soon.”
The stationer thrust out a bell-sleeved arm in
excitement. The word “imagine” appeared at the inside of her elbow. “That's
terrific.
So it will be a
rush job
, if you choose to go with
us.
So how did you meet your
fiancé
?
”

“Well, at a bar, actually, which is the last place I thought I'd ever meet anybody.” She laughed. Yeah, me too, I thought to myself. “His name is Garry. He's the most generous, romantic, beautiful person I've ever met.”

“That's great—is it your
first?”
I imagined the stationer was probably on her second or third marriage, maybe to a part-time junk collector and painter who lived on disability and an army pension, but she was used to giving lip service to the translucent-skinned, unripe brides. Even the fashion-disaster stationer in her amazing Technicolor dreamcoat seemed to be more in on the joke than this poor girl I was tracking.

“Yes. It's his first, too.” Guilt overtook me. I was feeling sick. I imagined demon-eyed daredevils in tight black-and-silver latex leotards on bicycles doing figure eights through three flaming rings in my mind. “At first I thought a gorgeous, successful, brilliant thirty-eight-year-old guy like him couldn't even exist.” Thirty-eight? He was fifty-two, according to our research! “Like he couldn't even be real, you know. But he proved to me that he's the real thing.” I was horrified. She seemed so relieved to have found him. How could I blame her? As disturbing as the circus wedding was to me, it didn't compare with the terror it would probably inspire for this poor girl. Like any of us, like me, I thought, she just wanted to be loved.

From Kate's I followed her to Harry Winston's. At the jewelry store, she asked to see a yellow-diamond-and-platinum tennis bracelet, where each link was a yellow teardrop surrounded by a sunflowerlike crown of small white diamonds. She admired it, but didn't try it on, and then asked to see three engagement rings, each with sleek white-gold bands and between three and four carats of
diamonds on them. One had an exquisite jadeite centerstone with two blue diamonds on either side The jeweler told her it matched her eyes. It cost $255,000.

“When are you getting married?” he asked her. “Well, soon, but I promised my future husband I'd look at rings and then just show him what I wanted.”

“Well, that's very generous of him. You're lucky. A lot of men want to surprise their brides, and they end up with a quarter-million-dollar ring that the bride can't stand and they have to sell it back and buy another one. I think letting the bride choose is the proper way to do it.”

She was still glued to the glinting baubles in front of her, sitting on a piece of velvet the jeweler had rolled out for viewing, like a tiny red carpet. “I have to bring him back with me,” she said. “We live right in the neighborhood, actually.”

“Really, where?” he asked, looking too interested.

“At Sixty-second and Central Park,” she said. “Well, we're still building the place, we're joining two apartments, but we're moving in within the next few weeks. I think. If the contractors do their job. Which, you know, they never do.”

The jeweler, shabbily genteel with a pink ascot, suddenly seemed to smell the stinking undercurrent of money oozing from her, and broke his haughty demeanor, chortling, “Isn't that the truth, honey!”

By the time she hailed a cab and told the driver she was going to Brooklyn, I felt a huge relief. It was bad enough identifying with Garry, but my contempt for Alexis had turned into sadness. Who didn't understand wanting to be wanted? I swallowed hard and told George about my discoveries.

“Nice work.” He was in an effusive mood that day. I was starving, having last had a boiled hot dog from a street vendor about eight hours prior. I indulged myself with a cab home that I
couldn't afford. When Abdullah, my driver, turned onto the FDR Drive toward Brooklyn, I rolled the window down and tried to wash her out of my mind with the salty wind running off the East River through my hair.

I had him drop me off at an ATM machine near my house, and I withdrew twenty dollars. I had forty-three dollars and twenty-two cents to last me through the next two weeks until I got paid again, although I would have to give all that money, minus ninety-five dollars, to my landlord. The rotary of my financial situation was driving me nuts. I was poor enough that an ad I'd read in
Allure
magazine at my dermatologist's soliciting “dreammakers” for the “true woman's gift of egg donation” gave me pause.

At home, as I passed my only mirror, I noticed that my hair was windblown and snarled into tornado shapes on top of my head. I pulled a can of Spaghetti-O's out of my cupboard. My eating habits had become a great indicator of my psychic well-being and the status of my love life. Before Elliott and I broke up, I was having oatmeal for breakfast every morning and salads for lunch. I was ironing my sheets. I even flossed. Now I was eating macaroni with tomato-flavored sauce.

The phone rang. It was Cassie.

“Hey, I'm leaving the office now. Are you coming out?”

“Yeah. Yeah.” My smoke alarm went off. The Boyardee sauce was burnt and bubbling on the sides of the pot, and a thick black smoke curled off its edges. I turned off the burner. With that I opted to get the hell out of my apartment and have a comforting night of free G&Ts and girl talk.

Niagara's clientele represent the fragile social ecosystem of the Lower East Side. We once spotted Matt Dillon, who was
flanked by two Amazonian big-breasted lesbians. We'd also met a guy who was an uncanny dead ringer for Iggy Pop, although he took great offense at my characterization (“That dude's ugly—and old!” he protested); a guy who carried around a handheld DVD player showing a grisly film he's made for PETA about ferrets, and who also claimed to have invented the “morphing” software; and a freakish barfly Cassie and I liked to call the Spider Lady, who had tattooed her entire body—face included—with a web design that makes her look like an unusually buxom smallpox victim.

When we're not trying to snag a seat or butter up the bar boys, our conversation typically concerns three central motifs: boys, guys, and men—although admittedly our actual experience is primarily with the first two.

Truth be told, our adventures at Niagara keep me coming back, too, even if I don't have the same kind of stake in the place that Cass does. Maybe it's the hope that, by some miracle, I'll have a chance meeting with the boy of my dreams here, too. But probably not.

I wanted to tell her about Garry Wilbur and my fear that I might be like him—even a little bit—but I couldn't. Not only was the case strictly confidential, but I didn't want her to think I was a total freak. I stuck to trashing Elliott. Pretty soon, two attractive guys with messy hair and Carharts approached us. They said they were record executives and named some bands they represented. The bands all sucked, but we feigned interest. The shorter one, Jake, seemed to really like Cassie, and the other one, Dino, out of de facto default, was talking to me.

“So what do you do?” he asked me.

I wanted to avoid inciting any conversation by mentioning my job. “I'm in research,” I said, looking distracted.

“She's a PI!” Cassie interjected, leaning over from Jake. I groaned. Cass loved to expose this to strangers. It was a great
conversation piece with people I wanted to talk to, or the worst kind of conversation snare with boring people.

Dino launched into the usual wide-eyed interrogation. “That's such a sexy job.” Ugh. “Do you carry a gun?” No. “Do you ever fear for your life?” No, but I fear for yours. I found myself nodding, not listening to a word he was saying, gazing out the window of the bar with a dreamy smile on my face.

Aside from the spittle from Dino's mouth occasionally hitting my left ear, I shivered from the warm sight of the ochre-lit trees of Tompkins Square and the streetlamps on Avenue A yearning out with their warm, carroty light. Still nodding, still smiling. My eyes landed on the window to the right. There stood a homeless man who had hovered outside the windows of Niagara since the first night I remembered visiting the bar, arranged between me and the park like a scarecrow talisman. He wore an elaborate headdress of tiny thornlike Christmas bulbs over his oil-slicked hair, and he had stuck five grimy pigeon feathers in them. He beat his arms, draped in what looked like a woman's sparkly blue gossamer dress ripped down the front and donned as a cape. Still nodding, still smiling. His arms thumped against the windows like the frantic flapping wings of a bloodied bird that had flown into a window. It was as if he desperately wanted to will himself to the other side of the divide, staring in the window at the elusive world beyond. I looked out at him with corresponding panic and envy, wondering what I was doing there. Wondering how I could get out.

Then my cell phone rang, and I realized at once that Dino was looking at me like I was nuts, saying, “What's so funny about that? Why are you laughing? ” and I found myself saying, “Hold on one second … I just need to get this call,” as I groped around in my purse. I got it on the last ring.

“Hello?”

“Hey, Amy?”

“Yeah.” I was looking at Dino apologetically, but I was apoplectic. The homeless guy was receding from the window like a fallen angel.

“It's Edward. I met you last week at Niagara …”

Everything disappeared at that point, and I was drenched in the glory that
he was actually calling.
“Of course I remember you,” I said.

“So, I was thinking of coming down to visit the city soon. I have a long weekend at school coming up next week.”

“Oh, really? ” My hands were cold and wet, and I wanted to laugh so hard I could cry.

“I'd love to see you. Actually, I'd love to stay with you, but that might be kind of weird, so—”

I interrupted him. “No, I don't think so”— I caught myself. “Let's just see how it goes. We'll figure something out.” We agreed that we'd talk in a few days, when I wasn't in the middle of a noisy bar. At the end of our conversation he said he couldn't stop thinking about me. Without thinking about it I said, “I know,” and for the next three full seconds there was silence until I said, “Okay, so I'll call you tomorrow.” When I turned my attention back to my surroundings, I noticed Dino and the guy in the window had both quietly slipped away.