by Amy Gray
He smiled. “Hey Amy.” I didn't think I'd ever seen him smiling like that before.
“I'm freaking out.”
He took my hand. “You're cold. Relax. What's going on?” He gave me his sweatshirt. A fine mist of rain was falling. Even so, we walked around for hours, from Pembroke to the library and then down around RISD. I felt like I was meeting him for the first time. My stomach was tight from laughing. He told me about his family. Never had I even considered that he had a family before. He suddenly became three-dimensional. His parents, he told me, had divorced and remarried—twice.
“Wow. You're like the perfect Jungian case study,” I said.
“Thanks. That was impolitic.”
“Sorry. I'm too tired to exercise self-control.”
“Hmm. Maybe I should take advantage of that.”
We both smiled. “Umm. Maybe.”
I seized on this tenderness and guarded it like a state secret. His sweetness was so exclusive, only I knew about it. I could do this: I could mistake a glance, a tiny upturn in a usually scowling mouth, and dream of decades of connubial bliss. Find me your freaks, your disgruntled misfits, your monosyllabic malcontents, your reclusive antiestablishment oddballs. I craved the exclusivity.
That night I slept on Elliott's very hard linoleum floor in his lilliputian-sized single in a dormitory that could have easily doubled as a prison. At four in the morning I climbed into his bed, nuzzled my head into his neck. “I've been waiting for you to do that all night,” he whispered. His T-shirt smelled like detergent and sweat. His lips were preternaturally soft. When Ben came back the next day, I put it behind me.
Two years almost to the day after Ben and I broke up, Elliott called me out of nowhere and asked me to meet him for a drink at the Marriott Spinnaker. This bar-slash-restaurant, which has been replicated all over the country, is situated on top of a giant rotating disk overlooking Times Square, perhaps the ugliest view in all of New York, and it turns 360 degrees every half hour. I marveled how Elliott was so unafraid to be uncool that he was cool. At twenty-five, I was a publishing lackey; he was a year out of law school working for a New Jersey-based nonprofit that defended indigent clients.
“Amy Gray,” he'd said when I met him at a table. He had that same amused curl in his lips.
“Elliott Reuther,” I returned. It reminded me what made me like Elliott so much—the electric-charged banter, the tit-for-tat tête-à-tête. Our rapid-fire wordplay made me feel brilliant and in on the joke that everyone else was outside of. It was heady. I felt my stomach flutter and my toes curl.
“It's great to see you. You look great—as always.”
The strange thing about the Spinnaker, the brainchild of a demented Marriott executive, is that, as you sit sipping your raspberry champagne fizz or whatever, you forget the motion, except for the slow, almost imperceptible ripples across the champagne flute. All of a sudden I was facing the flashing pearly whites of a smiling Gap model; just before I had been at crotch level of a four-story Al Roker beckoning me to “Watch Today.” It was unnerving.
“I think this bar is making me sick.”
“Don't think about it.”
Elliott asked me about my job. I hated it. I asked him about his. “You, unlike me, are doing noble work in the world,” I flattered him, “instead of kissing ass and dropping names, which is all I really do.”
“Don't give me any credit for being principled,” Elliott returned. “I'm doing this work out of pure sloth and selfishness.”
“Really? ” I had spent the days leading up to our date feeling guilty that my social conscience was grossly inadequate. “So, what are your clients like?”
“They're all toothless whores with seventeen children and crack habits. Seriously. It's hard to defend people that you know are guilty. It's always, ‘Listen Judge, Shattiqua has a family to feed, she's not a flight risk, and she can't make bail over $100’—because we bonded her out last week on a child-endangerment charge—‘so why don't we let her take care of her children in the nine weeks between now and the hearing?’ And then we settle.” My illusions of moral inferiority were melting rapidly.
“Sounds depressing.”
“It is. That's why I've cultivated total emotional detachment.” He swilled his dirty martini with greedy abandon. I was perversely fascinated. “I like winning,” he pronounced, “and I like working the courtroom and impressing the judge. But I actually took this job because I thought it would be easy. I didn't want to work eighty-hour weeks at a big firm. Plus, they probably wouldn't have hired me.” His law-school grades weren't very good. He told me a story about defending a client who was accused of stalking a former girlfriend.
“So the judge says to me, ‘Mr. Reuther, you claim no inappropriate or suggestive contact was initiated by your client.’ And I said, ‘Judge, that's correct. I don't see any harassment in the content of those messages.’ And she says, ‘You don't?’ And I say, ‘No, your honor.’ ”
His smooth olive skin glistened with a thin layer of oil, and his black, back-swept hair formed a clean arrow at the center of his forehead. He had very Sephardic looks, like Corey Feldman with an extra thirty pounds. Or a dark Bill Maher. I wasn't sure why I was attracted to him, but I was.
“So the judge said, ‘Mr. Reuther, I understand in the complaint that Mr. Hernandez said in his messages, ‘I put a spell on you because you're mine,’ as well as ‘I stand at my window, wring my hands and moan.’ ” Elliott repeated all this with his best uptight-white-guy impression.
“So the judge said, ‘Counselor, how do you explain your client's incendiary language?’ And I said, ‘Your honor, I'll concede to my client having bad musical taste, but not to his being a stalker. These are song lyrics. My client may be a Creedence Clearwater Revivalist, but he's not a criminal.’ ”
In addition to making the judge laugh, he told me proudly, he got the guy off.
There was something about Elliott's intrepid wickedness that made me laugh and feel nervous. He'd call me up and say he was thinking about me, and it was disarming. I would imagine his indifferent façade retreating, too. Then he'd talk about all the people he couldn't care less about and the social problems that bored him and the clients he'd warned, “Well, if you don't mind getting ass-raped, then go ahead and go to trial,” and I wondered if or when I might become the object of his hostility.
When we left the Spinnaker, I was staring in a vortex of flashing light that urged me to “enter my fantasy.” Even after excusing myself to the marbleized ladies’ room to throw up striking-pink Spinnaker vomit, I knew it wasn't our last date.
New Year's came, with Lily and Patrick. Elliott and Patrick were roommates, and Lily and Patrick were engaged. We held hands, we kissed, and spent the next two days together. I celebrated having “broken the boy seal,” having peeled away the layers of resistance like a sour onion.
The Assman Cometh
Although I was dating Elliott at the time, in a purely anthropological sense I was excited about the prospect of working with two dozen boys. I fantasized that being an investigator was to be a fruitful period of fact-gathering for me, amassing a database about people to whom I would never otherwise have access. My peers would also be my subjects, and I would toil alongside them, blending into studied anonymity. I also anticipated a certain base phero-monal attraction one feels to a crowd of guys who have been penned up in a room together for too long.
That is, of course, until I got to know them.
Evan first talked about the Assman in my interview, actually, but at the time I misunderstood and thought he was talking about “X-Men.” The Assman was an investigator whose real name was Matt. He was a long-limbed, burly guy who looked a little like he'd stopped working out after high school football and started smoking too much pot. Finally, I fettered my pride and appealed to Assman.
“So, what's the deal, Matt? Inquiring minds want to know. Why does everybody here call you Assman? ” Sol was relentlessly soliciting/berating Assman, as i
n, “Where's Assman's case?” or “Assman, haul it up here!” or “Finish that case or your ass is outta here!”
Matt didn't seem to mind my asking. “Yeah, it's kinda gross, I guess.” The previous fall, he told me, his posterior had been hurting for almost a month, just above the tailbone. He complained about it, but Sol told him, “Don't be such a pussy, Assman.” And so his name was born. In late November, he was sitting at his desk when he felt a pricking pressure at the point that had been hurting him, and then a wet, viscous relief. “I actually thought Sol was playing soccer with a ball-bearing and was using my seat as the target.” It turned out he'd had a pretty deep abscess that had just erupted. Nestor, another investigator who was Assman's best friend and mutual tormentor, called an ambulance, and the whole Agency saw Matt and his leaky butt off to St. Vincent's.
The doctors removed an apple-core-shaped slice from Assman's derriere about three inches deep and a half-inch in diameter. He spent the next three weeks at home, soaking his wound three times a day. “It's pretty nasty,” he concluded, “but not a lot of guys have a built-in butt-pouch.” He leaned in to me and said, “I keep keys in there when I'm in the field, working a case.”
“Stop,” I interjected. “I have a sensitive stomach.”
Assman and Nestor were the proletariat of the Agency, and I was immediately attracted to their outsider status and subversive bent. Nestor had a lot of things sustaining his victim status. At four feet nine, he was towered over by the freshman college girls we hired out of NYU to do part-time work for us. He had moved to the Lower East Side from Venezuela at the age of eight, and he was an art-school dropout and freelance undercover investigator who'd retired from a highly profitable business selling reconstituted low-rider bikes before he started working at the Agency. We knew he'd been living in New York for at least the past fifteen years, but beyond that his history was murky. Nestor was reticent. Except when it came to busting on Assman.
Although his methods remained fuzzy to the rest of us, Nestor had the most investigative experience of anyone at the Agency and he was grudgingly regarded as the ballsiest investigator we had. In the early nineties he had worked undercover for another firm started by a former top-ranking CIA operative. For six months, his beat was working The Tunnel and The Vault when Peter Gatien's clubs reigned supreme in a pre-Giuliani Gotham, an investigation that led to Gatien's indictment. He said he had a lot of girls then, because he could get them into the clubs free and had total VIP access. He rubbed elbows with celebrities and hitmen. He hung out with models. When the clubs were shut down, his social life went with them.
I was happy to be accepted by some of the investigators at the Agency. Since my first interview, Evan's chummy banter had devolved into grunts and a vocabulary of crude sign language. He pointed, he shooed, he shushed. Wendy, the only other girl, didn't talk to me. Gus seemed preoccupied and sat on the opposite side of the office. Linus had his head in the clouds. He did manage to talk to some people though, so I supposed his haze just didn't include me. The same story held true for everyone else there, it seemed. I consoled myself by visiting Assman's and Nestor's desks often, to talk shit, smoke cigarettes, and laugh. It was the end of my second week at the Agency, and I left Assman's desk, where he had lured me with bubble rope and Slim Jims. There was a message from Elliott. We had dinner plans.
To Ill a Mockingbird
After work, I met him at his apartment and we went out for a drink. Living as he did on Eighty-second and Second, there were no cool bars within forty blocks. The neighborhood was all leatheryskinned old ladies, dogs, and, seemingly unparented toddlers. We walked past a bar called Quench, which had sleek white leather-upholstered couches and hot-pink bulbs in all the fixtures.
“It's like a modernist bordello,” I said.
“Okay, if anybody asks, I'm your pimp.” He winked. “And your name is Candy.”
“No, I want to be Bambi.”
The bar was only about half full. The house special was their chocolate martini, which I ordered, and Elliott got a Manhattan.
“Hey, what's this?” Elliott pulled an oversized binder from the next table. He opened it to a laminated page in the middle with a picture of a brunette smiling too widely in a huddle of other girlfriends whose faces were smudged out.
“She's all gums. Maybe she forgot to put her falsies in.”
“Nope, she's wearing them.” He pointed to her ample décol-letage as she leaned into the camera. “Listen to this,” Elliott started reading, “ ‘Name: MinervaMilk. Book last read: To Ill a Mockingbird.’ It says ‘Ill.’ That's funny. She must be rereading her sixth-grade reading list.”
“Very badly,” I added.
“ ‘Favorite Movie: Nine and a Half Weeks.’ I think I'm liking what I'm seeing now.” When we looked up from the book, we realized all the people at the other tables were reading these books. Quench was a dating bar. (“Find a friend, a fling, or a forever romance. Quench is the antidote to your romantic thirst.”) Just registering cost $250, and each “setup” cost $40 for an e-mail, and $80 for a special phone number and “introduction.”
We played around for a while, reading the ads and trying to find people for each other. “Okay, here's the woman you need.” I pointed faux-seductively at Elliott, reading, “ Name: SweetJordana; Most Ideal Date: Tarring and Feathering; Last Book Read: 2001 Contact-Free Ways to Drive a Man Wild.’ ”
“Number one: read these ads to them,” Elliott winced.
“Seriously.” I continued, “ ‘Favorite Food: whipped cream, Favorite Body Part: neck.’ ” I noticed Elliott wasn't paying attention to my reading, but kept glancing over his shoulder where a woman was doing an impromptu lap dance for her boyfriend/date/client/ whatever.
“Hold on,” he said, “I need to get a better view of this.” He picked up his Barcelona chair and turned his back toward me. The girl squeezed her boobs together in her hands and shoved them in her companion's face, shimmying to the music. Watching Elliott watching her, I wondered what the fuck I was doing there, when SweetJordana or someone like her would be much better.
FIVE
Don't be a spy.
—GARRISON KEILLOR, IN HIS ONLINE ADVICE COLUMN TO A WOMAN CONCERNED ABOUT HER FATHERS EXCESSIVE USE OF INTERNET PORN
Perfecting the Art of Mediocrity
In high school, I didn't have a clue what I wanted to do with my life, beyond getting into college. The guidance counselor maintained a closely guarded book of spectrographs organized by college. The graphs were plotted by combined SAT score, on the x-axis, and then GPA on the y with admittance represented by red dots, wait lists indicated by black doughnut holes, and rejections by black dots. I couldn't stop thinking about the black dots, and how each one of them was a person, with a disappointed family behind them, and a disappointed world to face after their rejection. To me the black dots’ despair practically dripped off the pages, representing thousands of dollars misspent on SSAT tutoring, flash cards, math camp, private school, karate lessons, and art therapy, all adding up to nothing. I'd sneak into our advisor's office and smuggle the tome back to my desk. I poured over this book, willing myself into a red dot, resolving through pure single-mindedness and daily prayer to the gods of college admission the oneness of myself and that dot.
When we finally achieved unity, I was at a loss. After the dust had settled, my years in high school seemed like nothing more than the sum of some smudgy purple-inked exegesis in my yearbook. Graduation left a smoky impression of white linen and country club luncheons. I was caught by dread. I had given so little thought to what I actually wanted to do in college that when I received my catalog three weeks after my letter of admission to Brown, I cried. That summer I smoked my first joint, had my first boyfriend, and waited for inspiration to hit me.
In college, my friends and I practiced insulting each other, making bad art, becoming semioticians, and then, having achieved that to varying degrees, rejecting the whole enterprise to embrace a new kind of studied anti-intellectua
lism. White boys called each other nigga. My girlfriends and I took pride in looking trashy. We also built bongs, and I picked up dirty colloquialisms like “poon-tang” and “felching.”
My college boyfriend, Ben, was a tall, brooding boy I met the first week of school after my roommate, Sarah, took him home with her. It took us two years to fall in love, and then we were inseparable, united by our mutual dependence and our desire to at once eschew the world because “everybody else sucks” and yet still not be disliked by anybody.
I created and discarded many selves. By senior year I applied my skills of clue-gathering to becoming a tamer of unwieldy texts. I wrote a pretentious thesis that strongly favored style over substance, fancying myself the intellectual equivalent of a streetwise Scotland Yarder—fearlessly willing to bring together elements other people saw as impossible, repulsive, and absurd. One of my advisors wrote in my evaluation that she was “suspicious” of a paper that I wrote so well about “terrible literature.” By the time I was done I agreed with her, and I suspected my paper was terrible too.
