Spygirl (14 page)

Jack had moved to Los Angeles after a generally smooth six-month courtship. He had seduced her with gifts (a Boston bull terrier puppy), romantic dates (picnic in the park), and sweet nothings (“baby, you
are fine,”
he said, famously). When he got a dot-com programming job in the City of Angels, Cass knew she couldn't expect him to kick $100,000 a year and lots of stock options out of bed, and she agreed not to end their relationship. They said they'd
“see how things go” long-distance. Two weeks later she called him and a woman answered the phone. “Who's this?” she asked.

“This is Carolyn,” the girl answered.

“Really?”

Cassie heard the sorry yelps of their terrier puppy in the background.

Jack picked up the phone and confirmed that Carolyn (pronounced Cairo-LEAN) was indeed his new girl, and suggested that Cassie probably shouldn't call again. She was devastated. Cass decided that during her six months of being in indifferent-like with Jack, she had actually been in love. She rewrote their six months together with the kind of stubborn nostalgia that is unique to getting dumped.

Now, a year after Cairo-Lean, Jack was coming to New York. He had called and asked Cassie if she'd like to meet for a drink, and had expediently mentioned that he and the new Mrs. Jack were spending some time apart. Cass couldn't conceal her glee as she repeated this. She was trying to decide if she should sleep with him, tease him, or completely ignore him. I noted that sleeping with ex-boyfriends was nice, because it doesn't add to your numbers: i.e., when someone asks how many people you've slept with, the numbers don't go up. For men this is probably a drawback, but for women it's a boon.

“Totally,” Cass agreed. I mean, on the one hand, I'd like to,” she contemplated, “but on the other hand, I don't want to give him the idea that I'm just going to forgive him for how he treated me.”

Skye and I nodded. Skye, who chewed men up and ate them for dinner, probably wouldn't know her numbers if she was asked for them, but I knew her just-get-on-with-it attitude might help tonight.

Meanwhile, as we sat mulling over the love of her life, Cass had me sit closest to the end of the bar, where I was freezing my ass
off, so she could keep a better watch on Stuart's coming and goings. “Listen, before you say another word about your beloved, can we move? I'm going into hypothermic shock.” We compromised when she lent me her sweater.

I maintained that she should tease him to the brink of satisfaction and then tell him that she was the best lay he'd never have. It was a line I'd got from Elliott once, and I'd been waiting for someone to use it on.

“But he has had me,” Cassie protested.

“Right, but he'll never have you
again.”

“Well, saying ‘I'm the best lay you'll never have
again’
doesn't have the same kind of punch to it.”

Skye threw in her two cents. She pointed to Stuart rinsing glasses at the bar sink. “Is that the bartender you dated? Forget about Jack—he's hot!” If Cassie was through with Stuart, Skye mentioned, she was happy to pick up from there. Cass declined.

I, meanwhile, was anticipating Edward coming to town. There was no way I was going to sleep with him—I was debating how to handle having him stay with me without blowing my wad when Skye pointed to my left ear and squealed, “Jimmy!” Standing behind me at the bar, holding a Molson Golden, was Jimmy Fallon, the hottie from the cast of
Saturday Night Live
, whom I'd admired long before he was asked to host the American Music Awards or pose for
Teen People
magazine.

“I'm going to talk to him,” Skye said, slipping past me, and, sure enough, minutes later they were having what looked like a flirty encounter by the bar, whispering in each other's ears.

“She should bottle herself and sell it,” I said glumly. Skye hadn't even known about Jimmy Fallon until I had pointed him out to her in a spread in
ID
magazine a few months earlier.

“Listen,” Cassie said, “I've been wanting to talk to you about something. I need you to be Spygirl for me.” Cass had been living
with her roommate, a mutual friend of ours, for over a year, and the roommate had pets. But their landlord had sent them a notice the previous week saying that if they didn't get rid of the animals, he would start eviction proceedings against her. They were both on the lease. “I can't find a new roommate in time, and Julie won't leave anyway. But I don't want to look for a new apartment.”

I told her I'd talk to George and Sol about it and try to find some dirt on her slumlord. The optimal approach would be to leverage whatever indignities I uncovered about him to keep him quiet, as in, “My lawyer will fight you on this, and by the way I know you're screwing your secretary.” I was thrilled at the heady power to be gained. As Spygirl, I could protect my friends and rebuke my enemies. I would vanquish the innocent and make the boys love me. I would impress my bosses and win over my coworkers.

When Cassie and I finally stumbled out of the bar, Skye was whispering with Jimmy in the phone booth in the back of the bar. “Good-byyyye, blue Skyyyy” I sang.

“Been there, done that,” Cassie quipped.

I arrived home at 1:45 to a message from Skye.

“Hey, Amy, it's Skye. I was just calling to say fuck you for letting me leave the bar tonight with my skirt tucked into my underwear! Yeah, I feel like a total idiot, but, anyway, I got Jimmy's number … and I have other news, so, uh, call me. Love you!”

On the cold, overcast Sunday morning the day after, I awoke, and surveyed the damage. I was still wearing Cass's sweater, a gorgeous fitted red cashmere cardigan with black beading of roses all over the arms and lapels. Evidently I'd slept in and vomited in this
little number, a piece I'd always coveted since unsuccessfully begging her to borrow it in high school.

Looking back, as a teenager, my investigatory skills were honed on Sunday mornings in the aisles of the Garment District, a superstore thrift shop in Cambridge where my love of all things vintage was born. I cut my chops with Cassie sifting through tight seventies-style turtlenecks, and although by this time in my life (circa 1990)
Charlie's Angels
was already long in syndication, the convergence of fashion, masquerade, and surveillance was not lost on me. My falling-apart-at-the-seams oxblood steel-toe Doc Martens could allow me to slip undetected into a tangle of weary-looking punks at the downtown speed-metal den the Rat; clad in a black slip turned party dress, I could bridge the gap to a 1980s Eurotrash club scene. Farrah's impeccably coiffed hair and her slip of a frame, loosely swathed and exposed by a plunging-collared V- or ruffle-necked velvet jumpsuit, seemed not only apropos, but apt. The distillation of every hot, hapless number we'd dredged from the dollar-a-pound floor and made into masterpieces with quick hand-hemming and good machine work had led to this: the embodiment of fashion as power, the hard facts of perfect hipness at the bottom of a cold cellar.

Sunday mornings, Cass and I waded knee-deep at the dollar-a-pound thrift sale. We stood in knots of leather suits and clots of retro ties and adult-sized rubber-footed onesies. There was a lot to sort through. We practiced being discerning, discarding the contents that didn't fit our needs and nimbly closing in on what we wanted. We weren't following fashion; we were creating it.

Cass had always refused to lend me the beaded cardigan since the time I borrowed it and broke some of the fragile beading. “Borrow something you can't break,” she'd say. Nine years after I last coveted that red cardigan, I took it off and laid it across my bed,
and put my face down. The sweater smelled musty, like the accumulation of wearers it left behind. I breathed the lives woven into it, reassembled from the meager facts of a chipped button or a pulled stitch. It wasn't much to work with. I considered all the clues I left behind every day that no one would ever notice, and that was probably the most heartbreaking thought of all.

TWELVE             

That night, I woke up and realized my house was on fire. I heard the menacing sirens of fire engines and realized I must have left the oven on, or the toaster with something in it, and I tried to get up and run into the kitchen. My arms seemed to be pinned. My vision was murky. As the screeches of sirens got louder—was it my smoke alarm or the fire trucks coming? Should I call the police?— I noticed a blazing light in the corner of my left eye, and my right cheek was wet. Was it blood? I finally struggled to sit up. I touched my cheek. It was slick with drool. My phone was ringing. I answered it.

“Amy? ”

“Yeah.”

“It's Edward.”

I was trying to acclimate myself to the fact that my house wasn't on fire and I wasn't facing imminent death. I wasn't quite there yet.

“Hi. Ummm.” I panicked. “Did you see any smoke?” I felt deeply embarrassed the second this escaped me. Cassie's cardigan had a brown-edged stain in the middle, where I'd had it stuck to my face.

“What did you say?”

“Sorry nothing,” I said quickly. “I got confused for a second. So! How are you?”

“I'm good.”

I was trying to remember how long it had been since Edward said he'd call me. One day? Three days? A week?

“Well, so, I'm still hoping to come down to New York this weekend,” he said, interrupting my uncomfortable silence. “Is it still cool if I stay with you? If you're busy, that's totally fine. I could stay somewhere else …”

“No, no, no. I think that will work out … fine.” I guess that's taken care of, I thought.

We agreed to meet at the Krispy Kreme stand at Penn Station on Friday. As I hung up, the reality of Barely Knowing Edward suddenly dawned on me. I wanted to cheat the system and get on my computer and run some databases and use this intelligence to protect myself. I wanted to assemble clues and accumulate knowledge and coat myself in a protective cover of
knowing more
that could protect me. Or I could find nothing.

The memory of his gorgeous eyes and the softness of his lips and his parting words—“Okay, sweetie, I'll see you soon”—kept my laptop in its Targus home for the night, and my uncertainties at bay.

I got ready to lie down again and bask in the delicious anticipation of almost unbearable physical tension and first kisses, and I heard what sounded like dozens of men running in the hallway past my door to the “back house.”

My apartment is on the first floor of a small three-story brownstone, and there's a hallway that I enter through that leads from the front of my building to the back and empties out into a yard. Behind the yard is another house we call the back house, a hundred-and-fifty-year-old three-story clapboard that now serves as two duplexes for my neighbors. I picked up the blinds in my bedroom, which faces the garden, to see at least a dozen firemen running a hose up the front of the back house, then hoisting a ladder up the side of the house. It
was
a fire.
“Definitely
New York's finest,” I observed aloud for anyone and no one before I ran into the yard. Small wisps of smoke were shooting out of the top floor of the back house. I couldn't see any fire. My neighbor Miriam was crying.

“What's going on?” I asked.

“My bathroom's on fire!” she cried, her hand over her eyes, crouching. I knelt down and I put my arm around her.

As Miriam sobbed and my other baffled neighbors descended on the garden, a fireman climbed up the ladder to the window and smashed it in with an ax. Another fireman on the roof turned a hose on the tiny bathroom window. The water had been on for about fifteen seconds when they turned it off, came down their ladders, coiled the hose back.

Miriam had accidentally used her halogen lamp as a towel-warmer. When she got into the shower she threw it toward the door handle and missed. Not until the towel caught fire, which then spread to the doorframe, did she notice the “funny smell” of burning acrylic and paint. She ran out of the house screaming, “Help! Fire! Run!” The fire marshall told us that “if that fire had
been a little worse, we wouldn't have had a chance.” That was hard to believe. They carried the damaged door to the yard, and it had a pathetic, blackened, singed corner the size of two dollar bills.

When people ask me what it's like working as a PI, I like to tell them that the Agency has subscriptions to four publications:
The Wall Street Journal, Crane's Business Weekly, The Daily Deal
, and
Mad
magazine. Evan was working on the new
Mad
inside fold-in picture when I approached his desk and asked for a new case. “New case … Okay, ‘Fold Here A’ and then ‘Fold Here B,’ ” he directed himself aloud. The magazine started to slide off the desk as he maneuvered the slippery pages. It finally slapped onto the floor, leaving behind the torn triangular remains of Part B. “Fuck it!” he yelled, flustered.