Spygirl (18 page)

“Hey,” Renora said, halting awkwardly before me as Wendy slumped in front of the door.

“Hi,” we said in unison.

“What's going on with the fire escape?” she asked softly.

“They locked us out,” I said.

“Really?” she said, looking panicky. This was the first time the three of us girls had ever hung out together, I observed to myself.

There was also a new glossy red sign posted on the door, warning that an alarm would sound if the door was opened.

“I don't think they actually put an alarm on the door yet,” Renora said. “There isn't a new handle. Usually when they install these things, they put a handle that pushes in and trips the alarm.”

“Really?” Wendy asked.

“Yeah. Look.” She turned the knob on the door, which was locked, but the alarm didn't go off. “If it was going to go off, it would have done it already.”

“Huh,” Wendy said, looking dubious.

“No, really,” Renora said. She put a shaky hand in her pocket and pulled out her license. “When I lived in London my friend Randy taught me how to pick locks and not set off alarms. There were a few weeks where we had nowhere to live, and we borrowed a few places at night in Brixton.”

Wendy and I both sprung up to witness her maneuvering the card. She clipped it in between the doorframe and the edge of the lock plate. I noticed that her tapered fingers were yellowed at the ends, probably stained from two packs of American Spirits’ worth of nicotine a day. Her hands shook slightly. “I just need to find the clip,” she whispered, looking harried, when finally we heard a click and the door swung free.

“Yippee!” Wendy screamed, and we stepped onto the fire escape. Renora smiled and looked pleased with her transgression.

“So, how are you guys liking it here?” Wendy asked.

“I like it,” Renora said. “It's the best job I've had since I moved to New York. Other than my plant-watering job.” She had spent six months watering plants for rich clients in Park Slope. She'd been working with a company called Feeding Flora, but after she started sleeping with and then broke up with the married owner, she had to leave. “That gave me lots of practice working on locks.”

Wendy and I exchanged glances. “Why?” I ventured.

“I had no job—I needed a place to stay.” She shrugged. “There was one place on St. Marks with a swimming pool and a solarium I used to crash in,” she recalled nostalgically.

Wendy started to tell us about how things were when she was the only girl there. She was actually the second woman that had been hired. The first, Diana Flynn, was a curvy cheesecake who, it was rumored, had been nailed by many of the dicks in the office. Her supposed dalliances included one with the former investigator of thrown-stapler fame on the fire escape during the company Halloween party. Wendy filled us in on the sleazy details of their tryst, which led me and Renora to get up from our perch. “I'll just
lean
against this step from now on,” Renora said. “How did they even—” I wasn't sure how to word this inoffensively—“keep their balance?”

“Honestly,” Wendy continued, apparently tired of polite chatter, “when they first hired you guys, I was kind of ambivalent about it. I told them not to hire either of you.” Taken aback by her admission, Renora and I quickly sucked on our respective nicotine-delivery systems. We didn't want to let on to our shock, just so she'd tell us more.

“The guys were worried about having to think about how they looked around the office, and I just didn't want to deal with things changing, I guess. But you're both cool.” After the initial trauma of her candor abated, Wendy's declaration had an air-clearing effect. Minutes later we were laughing—Renora about her two-week-old fling with a Brooklyn bar owner who was a lot older than her (forty-three), Wendy about her boyfriend, Rocco, of three years. “I was single for, like, ever before I met Rocco,” Wendy said wistfully, making the kind of pitch that girls with boyfriends make to their deaf-eared and loveless friends. “I was like
the
single girl. And it was fun.” I confessed that I feared Elliott had forever
polluted the way I see men. “Oh, come on,” Wendy said, “You'll be over him in a few weeks.”

“Nope. I'm on the wagon. Only eunuchs and hermaphrodites for me.”

“That's disturbing,” Renora said. “Maybe you should go back to jerks.”

I told them that when Skye's last boyfriend was diagnosed with a heart condition, her mother asked her why she couldn't get a healthy boyfriend and she screamed back at her, “Mom, at least there's medicine he can take for his heart condition, but there's no cure for being an
asshole!”

“Actually,” I said, blushing a little, “I met a great guy recently. He's … the best.”

“Is he sweet?” Wendy asked.

“Yeah.” Getting redder. I didn't want to jinx things by talking about them this early, but …

“Is he hot?” Renora asked.

“Completely. So, so hot.” They giggled.

Wendy told us that Sol had once bragged that he had the hottest women working for him of any company in New York. “Well, that's not hard to do, when you only have three women working for you,” observed Renora.

“Yeah, but I think he's right,” Wendy giggled.

“Yeah!” I cheered, and we held our fists in a circle, à la Wonder Woman. “To the hottest dicks in New York City!” We all high-fived, some missing, some hitting.

FOURTEEN             

New York is the home of con artists. It's also the home of the self-invented, the fulfillers of the American dream. But, in New York, cons and success stories are impossible to tell apart, depending on how you look at them, or when. Everyone is working it, fronting, faking it, so much so that there's an assumption of in-authenticity about everyone. People who seem to be born-and-bred New Yorkers usually are from Jersey. Williamsburg is full of hipster artist/DJ/clothing designers remade from MIT math geeks. Society girls ditch their prep-school vestments to spend summers panhandling and sleeping on benches in Tompkins Square Park. Most enviable is the ability to replace history with a more
auspicious façade—take a drug addiction, a failed hedge fund, a series of failed acting bids, and start anew: a political career, new debt-consolidation company, a hit movie. Not only is there nothing perceived to be wrong with making this jump, but we prefer our stars to be fallen. Like a glittery, Gucci-clad Phoenix rising from the ashes, the prodigal idol in New York is better than a perfect pedigree.

As much as we were all astonished by the Swindling Spin Doctor's tenacity, we reluctantly admired his enterprise. As George said, “You've got to have balls of steel to pull this shit off.” But our clients were now panicked about their involvement with him. I was pulling together everything we found into my report, and doing some final searches with the information we had from the book galleys, the newspaper clips we'd found, and prison records.

I kept smelling my shirt, which I'd worn on Friday night with Edward. It was a low-V, pink-and-blue-striped cashmere sweater, and I thought it smelled like dirty metal, cigarettes, and the faintest hint of Edward's cologne. I closed my eyes and let his imprinted odor flood my memory. If only we could smell clues … I drifted into sweet nostalgia.

My reverie was interrupted by another, competing odor. It smelled rotten, like roadkill. I checked under my desk for an errant piece of salami. A quick sift through my trash revealed only a moldy apple core, which smelled, but not that badly. It actually smelled like a skunk had unloaded itself on Twenty-first Street. Do they have skunks in New York? It's possible, I suppose. I envisioned a mob of tough inner-city skunks huddling in alleyways and scavenging from restaurant Dumpsters. It seemed implausible. But the smell seemed to balloon the more I thought about it. I swiveled around in my chair. “Hey, Assman! Nestor!” They were both facing me, nodding in different sequences to the throbbing in their headphones. I called to them again, but they each continued
determinedly rocking out. I pulled a tiny audiotape out of my desk drawer and pitched it at Nestor. It hit him in the head. He clutched his head and looked at me.

“What the fuck?”

“Nestor, does it smell weird in here?”

He sniffed. “Yeah, kinda.” He slugged Assman, who took off his headset and concurred. “It smells like
ass.”
How apropos.

A crowd quickly gathered around my desk, where everyone played scent detectives. “It could be a dead rat,” Otis mused. He started tracing the walls, checking the sticky-glue traps for recent catch. Renora looked around the piles of crap surrounding George's desk, which could have easily hidden a small colony of skunks. Linus had been keeping a cat in the conference room for a couple of months before she mysteriously disappeared on a weekend when Morgan was working alone at the office. “I hate cats, but not enough to kill one,” he sniffed.

“Has anybody heard anything in the walls here?” Gus wondered aloud.

I wandered over to Noah's desk. He was typically oblivious to the commotion gathering right next to him. I sniffed the air around him. A swell of skunky air blasted me. “Ewww!” I fake-gagged. “Noah, you reek.”

As everyone encircled his desk, Noah looked anxious. He finally took off his headphones and looked around nervously. “Shhh,” he hissed.

“Are you hiding your ex-girlfriend in your desk?” “Take a shower recently, dude?” Reddening, Noah shushed us and pulled a small Ziploc bag out of his Manhattan portage bag. He handed it to me. The bag held four neat buds of marijuana. I held it to my nose. “Ugggghh.” Noah's scag redefined skunky.

“Alright, but I don't want to get arrested. Can you guys just leave me alone, please? ” Eventually Noah conceded that he'd
better evacuate his weed if he didn't want to get arrested, have George smoke it, or both.

After the office was restored to its usual smell of cigarettes and soggy newspapers, I drifted into reminiscences about my weekend with Edward. On Saturday we woke up late and had a sleepy breakfast in Brooklyn of fried eggs and cheese grits and ham and hot chocolate. We ate at the counter on swiveling stools instead of waiting for a table and sat, locked together, my knees cupped by his legs.

We went home and spent two more hours in bed, just kissing, and then went to the Promenade and took in the salty air and the mist-laden view of lower Manhattan from across the East River. That night I wore a sun dress and an apron and made him dinner. While I was cooking, he grabbed me from behind, around my greasy, soggy apron. When I turned around to kiss him, I saw us together in the five-by-nine mirror I put in the kitchen just to torture myself. In the movie of us, I was thinking, we could play ourselves. I was giddy with the thought of him.

On Sunday, we went to P.S.1, an art-exhibition space that commissions a “beach” installation every summer. We sat next to a reflecting-pool surf and a beach of Astroturf and plastic rocks and cuddled. We looked out over a sea of hipsters, ebbing and receding like a real tide.

“This is a weird place,” he said.

“Ummm. I know.” I was spaced-out from the sun and beer.

“It reminds me of the set on
The Real World.”

Nausea tightened my esophagus after Edward said this, but I concentrated my vision on the sun. I imagined tiny pickaxes deploying from my hips, like something Emma Peel might have,
spinning through the cold outer atmosphere to pitch me weight-lessly toward the light and heat. I wanted to anchor myself to its fiery surface. I was melting away until the sun in my vision was eclipsed, and my eyelids pulsed with red heat, but Edward was still talking.

“The worst thing about being twenty-six is I know I'd never get onto that show. I'd love to do that.”

I felt my eyes widen until the sun made me wince. “I can't tell if you're joking,” I said, sounding small.

“About what?
The Real World?
I seriously think it would be awesome.”

“Really? I think it would be like a living hell.”

Edward seemed to consider this carefully. “Yeah, I know what you mean.” He paused. “I'm fascinated by celebrity,” he said without a hint of irony. “I'd love to date a celebrity.” He was quiet for a second, and then reanimated when he said, “I could be the cardiologist to the stars. Maybe I can have a TV show or something. Like,
Lifestyles of the Doctors of the Rich and Famous.
Or something.”

I was determined to soften my critical edges, to subvert my instinct to judge swiftly and cruelly, to sustain my disbelief. Yet my natural instinct would certainly have urged me to look at Edward twice before this resolve. I probably would have looked at him a
dozen
times. So what if he wasn't part of the arty, self-hating, I-wouldn't-want-to-be-a-member-of-any-club-that-would-have-me set I was used to? I also realized that I loved being
seen
with Edward almost more than
being
with him. Which reminded me. I wanted to try to meet up with some Brown friends and show him
off. I had left my friend Jeremy a message and called my land line to see if he had called back.