Spygirl (31 page)

“So, how do you know Skye?” he asked.

When I was through answering that question, he pretended to check through his wallet and I pretended to be looking for someone. Finally I offered him a Tareyton, which he gladly took. When Skye finally came back, he seemed greatly relieved.

“Okay,” she inhaled. “Well, it was nice to see you.” Taking my cue, I returned downstairs to my lukewarm tropical nectar. Stuart had disappeared from behind the bar, and Cassie had abandoned her sidebar post. She did, however, leave a clue. On top of her jacket was a message in blue eyeliner on a yellow tiki cocktail napkin. It had tiny straw huts and dancing natives getting it on around the edges.

“Be right back,” it read, in loopy blue kohl. The windows
separating the storage room were foggy, tiny veins of condensation running down the panes and over the doorframe onto the linoleum, where combat boots on dancing punk rockers smudged them away.

I got a message from Skye the next day.

When I called back, she didn't answer, so I started leaving a message: “Hey babe, it's me, I'm sorry I interrupted your date last night. Call me—”

She picked up the phone. “Amy? I'm so glad I got you! I need to ask you about something.”

“Sure.”

“My friend Peter really liked you last night.”

“That's nice.” I paused. “Weren't you on a date?”

“No!” she laughed. “We work together. We were having a meeting. He's the curator of the Art Cooper gallery. They have a few pieces of mine right now. Anyway, he asked me if you were dating someone and I said—I hope this is okay—I didn't think you were.” It didn't seem possible to me that Peter, or any guy, for that matter, could not be in love with Skye. Although I believed that she thought they weren't on a date, I figured he must have secretly hoped it would turn into one. I simply wasn't buying that some cute guy could hang out with Skye and not be under her spell. She slayed men. Everyone wanted her.

“So, can I give him your number?” she pleaded.

“Are you sure he wants it?” I asked.

“Amy!”

I relented, but told her to give him my e-mail instead. I figured that if he'd gone to all the effort of asking about me, maybe he really was interested.

At my desk later, I heard the satisfying ping of incoming e-mail. I checked my inbox. There was a message from Peter. The subject line said, “AMY, AMy Amy, amy” “Amy, I very much enjoyed meeting you the other night, and getting a chance to smoke your tobacco. I would leap through puddles (and risk a soaker) to see you again. If you're interested, maybe you'll send me your phone number. Hoping to get lucky, Peter.”

My heart was in my mouth. I was touched. “Would you brave the Harlem Meer and risk the perilous jaws of the vicious mini-Alligator? If so, I'll meet you on the other side.” Send.

That night, I sat in my living room and stared at the lights. Three spindly threads of spider silk fell around the center of the bulb right above me. The translucent fibers trembled faintly from the movement of air in the room. My breathing slowed. I saw a tiny dark spot emerge from the white-hot center of the bulb. When I looked directly at it, the speck practically disappeared against the light, but if I fixed my sight just to the right of it, I could see it more clearly, a tiny almond-shaped rhizome falling from the sky. It grew larger, and materialized as a quivering fine line around a smaller, darker nucleus. It was a tiny sac, pulsing slowly with the air, when the edge of the line was pierced and seemed to melt into a squirming larger dark blot. I rolled off the couch and watched as dozens of baby spiders pitched their worlds on tiny spindles thinner than eyelashes. Evidence of these little lives that, I supposed, could be done in with a hearty sneeze.

When Ben and I broke up, he had just come back from three weeks on location in upstate New York, shooting his second-year movie short for NYU's graduate film school. We had spoken occasionally, but I'd resolved myself to end it right before he left. I had
found him, for, like, the fifth time, getting high in our apartment, drunk and stinking and laughing at me. I was years past my drug-experimentation phase, and tired of being the stern taskmaster girlfriend-slash-mommy to him. By the time he'd returned, I'd gone through my process of loss: sadness, anger, listlessness, weight loss, and then renewal. I felt hardened and excited about changing my life. We were a week away from our five-year anniversary. He came over to my tiny apartment, where, I'd assured him, I'd moved just months before “not because we're breaking up,” but to have “more independence.”

“You lied to me,” he said, staring out the window.

“I'm sorry,” I said. But at the time I didn't feel really sorry. I was over it—I thought. The conversation was short and not too painful. A week later, I was at work, still in publishing, when I got a call.

“Is this Amy Gray?”

“Yes, can I help you?” I answered dozens of calls daily from agents, authors, producers, editors and their assistants, and it could have been any number of legitimate persons on the line.

“This is John Marston, from Together Dating Service.”

“What?” Together Dating Service was a fee-for-service dating company that had been running low-production-value ads in metropolitan areas, showing couples in grainy color video running over a greenish sand beach. If Together didn't work for you, you were entitled to a full refund of your $19.95 membership fee. “Why not get Together,” they asked, “and have the life you know you deserve?”

“I'm not interested,” I said, my finger hovering over the flash button.

“But you signed up for our service—is your address Dean Street in Brooklyn? Are you twenty-four and a hundred-fifty pounds?”

“I am not a fucking hundred-fifty pounds! What the fuck?

This must be a joke. I did not sign up for your service—and I'm— I'm not interested.”

“Well, are you single?”

“Yeah.” Why did I answer that?

“Maybe you didn't sign up for the service, but since you're single anyway, maybe you should try it. There are lots of great people in Together—”

“Well, no I'm not—”

“Maybe you and I could go out sometime. I work here, but I'm single too, and you have a nice voice.”

“NO!” I was livid. “If you phone me again, I'm calling the police, asshole.” I hit the line, and it occurred to me at that moment that it was Ben who had signed me up.

Two days later, I got home from work and there was a black bubble-wrapped package sitting in front of my door. I opened it to uncover a white box and, inside of that, several layers of tightly wrapped and taped tissue paper. Inside that was another box with gold embossing around the edges and a cellophane window to reveal its contents, a cylindrical baby-blue object that looked like a plastic cigar. I took it out of the box and saw the lettering across the bottom, “Batteries not included.” It was a dildo! “That fucker,” I thought, and picked up the phone to tell him what an immature, vengeful baby he was. But I dialed six digits and stopped and dropped the phone on my lap. I would not give him what he wanted—again. I would not.

Lying on the couch, I felt a tickle on my neck and swatted mindlessly. On my hand was a tiny mash of spider. I thought about the snapdragons in my garden in summer and the baby spiders and the fragility of ecological equilibrium they forged in an unforgiving
metropolis. Peter and I were like that, too. I resolved to tread carefully.

Peter and I had e-mailed many more times that day and he called me the next night. Thinking about Ben recently had made me feel a mix of pity and defensiveness. I never wanted to let myself come close to being the insentient punch line in my own life ever again. I still felt the need for armor, a chain mail suit of intelligence. Who was Peter, anyway? I felt uneasy. I, Spygirl, would find him out.

“So, you want to do something?” he asked.

“Yeah,” I said, sounding unenthusiastic simply by trying to play it cool.

“I don't want to do something datey” he specified.

“What does that mean?”

“Well …” I immediately felt bad I'd asked this. What could he say? Eating out is the number-one date activity, but it's also biologically essential.

“Going out for dinner, or a movie,” he said. “I don't know, really.”

I waited. “So, do you have any unorthodox propositions?”

“Taking a walk? I could come over to your house and we could walk over the Brooklyn Bridge.”

“I'd love to do that. That's a brilliant idea!” I had actually never done this before. He seemed bolstered by my enthusiasm.

“Well, thanks. I've been working on that concept for months.”

“Nice one.”

We agreed to meet at my apartment.

On Sunday at noon, I met Peter at the gate of my apartment
building. It was warm for November, in the sixties. Even so, he was wearing a T-shirt, entirely sweat through. We headed over to Adams Street and then onto the bridge. It was an exquisite day. We talked about our jobs; he told me about his gallery, how he'd come to have the idea for it and secure the funding. Not to be outdone by the land and sea, the skies over New York were their own bustling ecology. The blue was littered with helicopters, tiny toylike airplanes and huge dirigibles heaving across the sky; flocks of gulls, pigeons, and kites.

“Doesn't it seem as if nothing in New York City is undiscovered? Every inch is spoken for,” Peter reflected, longingly.

I always think about lonely stretches of highway. Pieces of land that are forgotten and unloved with no prospects of ever being remembered. “What about that?” I pointed to a tiny square of green grass and a small rotting pier about a hundred yards away. He laughed.

“Should we go?”

“Sure.”

“It'll be our own private square foot of Manhattan.”

But when we walked off the bridge, we realized our square foot was nestled behind someone else's eight feet of chain-link and razor wire that held a truck lot.

“Maybe our square foot is actually under a red Mercedes big rig.”

“Wait, I have an idea,” he said. He ducked down the fence and reappeared skulking along its inside minutes later.

“How'd you do that?”

“It's magic,” he said, waving his fingers like he was casting a spell.

“Okay, David Copperfield, enjoy yourself.”

“No, there's a hole in the fence down here.” He led me to a hole that was dug in the ground under the fence, and I ducked in.

By the time we were sitting in our own eight-by-five piece of grass, it felt luxurious.

“This is, like, the smallest little park in all of the world,” he said. And then a big fat raindrop fell on my shoulder. Minutes later, we were sliding through the mud at the base of the fence. We ran like crazy, heading away from the river, the rain hitting us like fist-fuls of gravel. By the time we ran into the Liquor Store Bar, my sneakers were sloshing loudly with all the water in them.

“Two Guinnesses, please,” Peter asked the bartender, water puddling from his chin onto the oak bar below. That was the first of five pints each, whereupon we hailed a taxi, completely plastered, and went back to my apartment in Brooklyn. I played some Yo La Tengo for him, which he'd never heard before.

“Well, would it be too ‘datey’ if we have dinner? ” I asked him.

He laughed. “I think we're ready.” We went to a Vietnamese place in my neighborhood, and then to a bar afterward, where we sat knee-to-knee, warming up by a wood-burning stove at the back of the bar. At one point he took my hand, and before I knew it our cheeks were touching. From our first point of contact, a warm flush spread over me, spreading and sticking like hot red happiness.

He kissed me good night at my door. I ran into my room and flopped myself onto the bed.
Oh. My. God.

TWENTY-THREE