Spygirl (16 page)

My other line beeped. “Listen,” I said, “can you hold on a second? ”

“No, we're having a convo.” (Translation: conversation.) “Amee …” I clicked over.

“Hello?”
Pleeeease
let this be Andy.

“Hello?” The phone buzzed with static. “Hello? Hello?”

I clicked back to Ben. “Listen, I have to get off, I have work to do.”

“Amy,” he said, then paused.

“What?”

“My girlfriend broke up with me.” His voice cracked. My heart gave way.

“I'm so sorry.”

“Yeah. It's okay. She was a bitch anyway.”

“Listen, I really want to talk to you about this. Can I call you back?”

“Forget it,” he said defiantly. “You're on boycott. I'm sending you a one-way ticket to disstown.”

“Wait, Ben, don't be so fucking immature—”

He hung up. I remembered the night before I moved out of our apartment together. My dad was in town, helping me move into my own place. I had told Ben that it wasn't a “breakup;” I just needed distance. My father and I got back to the old apartment late. When I opened the door, Ben was draped over the living-room table. He jerked up, pulling a crumpled copy of
The New Yorker
onto the floor. A fine white dust swirled low around the table. His pupils were dilated. His eyes seemed to sink back into his face like shiny malachite marbles into dough.

My dad made a quick exit.

“You piece of shit! I can't believe you were doing dope in front of my father!”

He denied it. “I don't know what you're talking about. Just chill the fuck out.” Even though he protested, his denials were lazy and halfhearted. A line of black blood slowly drew out from his right nostril down over his lip. He didn't even seem to notice.

“You have a fucking nosebleed, you shit! How stupid do you think I am?”

“So? That doesn't mean anything!”

I was livid. I said, “Well, then let's settle this for good.” I licked my right forefinger and jabbed it up his other nostril, removed it, and put it in my mouth. It had a familiar bitter taste, like earwax.

Ben was completely still. “Give me the rest of it now,” I said. My heart was racing.

He went into the kitchen and reached under a frying pan. He threw something in my direction and walked into the bedroom. It was a small tin-foil ball. I grabbed it off the floor and ran into the bathroom and emptied it into the toilet to the sound of him quietly crying as I realized I had unwittingly become a spy in his life, that I had been one for a long time.

THIRTEEN             

In 1982, my parents moved to the house where they still live in Massachusetts. It was the year of the largest natural infestation of gypsy moths in the United States since 1965. I remember walking up the flagstone path to our new house, flanked by an enormous oak tree. But what had looked like wispy Spanish moss from our Ford wagon was actually a dense tangle of spidery silk casements. Tree boughs hung sadly under the draping nets. Inside these dusty tombs, organisms bobbed against the mesh like war prisoners desperately pressing their faces against their prison bars. The caterpillar tents enfolded every angle and incline on every tree's dusty limbs.

By the time we reached the house, the caterpillars had fallen into my hair, my jumper, even twisting pathetically in my shoelaces. My dad was covered with them. My sister got one in her eye. They were fat and black with blue circles down their back and black dots inside the blue circles. Their feet were a running set of tiny suction cups, like narrowing train tracks down their bodies. When you picked one up, it would flail helplessly and curl into a ball, using its gummy feet to stick to itself, forming a perfect curlicue.

My friends and I also took note that when you stepped on one end of them, noxious yellow guts would squirt out one side. The walk up to our new house was covered in the dry, yellowy paste of caterpillar innards. As long as you didn't eat them— although my best friend, Peter Weeter, did once, on a dare—they offered infinite but twisted diversions.

All the trees everywhere in the neighborhood had special double-sided tape around them at one-foot intervals, and they were greased with insecticidal jelly. The tape, after a few weeks, would acquire a brownish, gooey texture, and would be crowded with bugs in various stages of gestation. Here was a male adult, half its body severed. Here was a baby one, just four days hatched, here was a blue sliver from the shell of a robin's egg, here was some sap from a maple tree. The tape caught lots of things it wasn't supposed to.

On Friday, as I sat plugging “Joe Smith” in innumerable permutations with the words “felon,” “indictment,” “criminal,” and “misconduct” into my databases, I thought about the caterpillars, which had seemed perfectly normal to me as a six-year-old. The caterpillars, which had crystallized in my mind, like the many extraordinary things that children see and assume, must be ordinary. Like gruesome clues, the caterpillars were always there for the finding. Once I read that all the bacteria and single-celled organisms living beneath the earth's surface are equal in mass to ten
times that of plant and animal matter. It was a vile statistic. Now this wasn't just “the way things are.” It was sickening, encroaching on me with the claustrophobic immensity of an infestation.

It was six-ten. I leaned against a pillar at Penn Station, across from the doughnut store, and breathed in the familiar stink of frying fat, cigarettes, and piss. When Edward finally appeared at seven twenty-five, I held on for dear life.

“It's good to see you too, baby,” he cooed.

For dinner, I decided on a steamy little Korean restaurant in the East Village called Dok Suni. It was dark, so we leaned in over the tiny table over steamy platters of kim-chee and bikimbob.

Figuring this was my chance to corral information about Edward, I asked him everything, and he answered with the self-confidence of the genuine article.

He was the captain of his rugby team in college. This gave me a thrill. Rugby was quaint but European. Roguish yet sophisticated. We talked about how he came to be in medical school. His dad was a surgeon, and Edward had worshipped him. “I used to go to work with him when I was little. They'd give me a little white coat and I'd follow my dad around and take the pulse of chair legs and nurses and stuff. Plus I love to help people. This last Hallmark Sentiment made me simultaneously cringe and thaw a little. I smiled and focused on his good looks. “You have the most gorgeous eyes,” I murmured. I felt like melting into him.

But Edward was distracted. “Do you hear that noise?”

“I just said I like your eyes.”

“No.” He started rifling through his pockets. “It sounds like a cell phone.”

“Oh.” I grabbed my purse. It was
my
phone.

“Hello?”

It was Cassie. “Where have you been? I've tried you earlier today and your phone was fucked up or something.”

“I'm with Edward. Remember?”

“I need your help.”

“Okay hold on.” She was a dead woman. I excused myself to go to the bathroom.

Edward smiled sweetly. “Is everything cool?”

“Oh, yeah,” I assured him. “I'll be right back.”

I slammed the bathroom door behind me. There was a lonely blue lightbulb hanging from the ceiling and Asian graffiti written all over the walls. There was no toilet seat. “This better be a big fucking emergency,” I panted. Jack was in town, and she was calling me from Niagara. He was in the bathroom.

“He's like, all over me. I think he wants to come home with me, but I feel weird about it. We haven't even talked about what happened between us.”

“Don't do it.”

“But here's the other thing. He looks so hot tonight. I don't know. I'm torn.”

“Fine, then fuck his brains out.” It was impossible to give her advice, and I was neglecting my stunningly handsome new boyfriend.

“Uh-oh, he's coming this way. I'll call you later.”

I returned to Edward. “Hey, sweetie,” he said, pulling me onto his lap. “I missed you.” Next we went to Decibel, a sake bar, where we soaked up warm rice wine and held hands for the first time. I was alit by his beauty. I looked around and noticed the other women in the room stealing glances at Edward behind their dates. He reached out across the table. “I'm so happy to be here,” he said.

We went to a few more bars—the Boxcar Lounge, then Luca Lounge, then I don't even remember where. On the way to Luca, I
know I started to pull him across Avenue B, and he pulled me back close to him and yelled “No!” and a yellow cab swerved away from me.

“Oh, my God. You saved my life!” I said, laughing.

“Careful, baby!” he admonished, and I looked into his eyes and thought to myself, Yes, this is how it's supposed to be. By the time we got back to my house, and he squeezed me and whispered, “You're beautiful,” I shivered and almost believed it.

The next morning, Edward and I were awoken at ten by a call from Cass. The first thing she said was: “I'm over him!”

I was worried. “What happened?”

“No, it's not bad like it sounds. I mean it's bad, but—not for me! I'm so happy I could scream!”

“So?”

“So he came back to my house, and we were kissing, nothing major, and then he was trying to push things further, so finally I just said, I don't want to do this when we haven't even talked about what happened. He just totally dropped it and was like, okay.”

“Uh-huh.” I had been ready for the punch line to this story the day before.

“So then I was pissed that he'd changed his mind. He'd been after me all night, so I was like, ‘So now you don't want to sleep with me?’ And he finally turned to me and said, ‘I have herpes!’ ”

“No!”

“Yes! And the best part is, guess who gave it to him?”

“Cairo-Lean?”

“Yes! Ha-ha-ha! Can you believe it? Ha-ha-ha!” That night Cassie was completely cured of Jack, and, in a moment of perfect karmic symmetry, now he was the one who was afflicted.

On Monday morning, my weekend with Edward seemed like an exquisite dream. I pressed my face into the pillow that had held his perfect head and inhaled his aura and the smell of his cologne. My last boyfriend who'd worn cologne was in the ninth grade. I made a note to myself to go to Sephora and douse my personal effects with his magic elixir, Escape by Calvin Klein.

I walked into the office, dreamy and smiling.

“A. Gray,” Evan said when I got back. “How was your weekend?”

“Amaazing.” I hummed.

“Yeah? Did you meet someone?”

“Not
some
one.
The
one. I think I'm in love.”

Evan was fascinated with other people's love lives. Since he'd broken up with his girlfriend of six years, he was obsessed by matters of the heart, particularly new and steamy relationships. He was an emotional voyeur. “What's his name?”

I was only half listening to him, remembering snuggling with Edward, kissing Edward, falling asleep next to him, with him spooning me and whispering, “I'll miss you.”