by Amy Gray
Still, morale at the Agency was at an all-time low. Sol and George no longer seemed to relish our foul humor. Sol, the eternal pessimist, had lost his caustic wit. His lovably morbid punch lines—like “If I live until tomorrow … but who knows?” he'd say, or “halfway to the PI playground in the sky—finally, I'll get a day off”—had turned into burdensome silence. He didn't call us names anymore. George, already stoic, spent most of his days in the office, never breaking a smile.
The technology market that had had analysts champing at the bit just six months before was in an alarming decline. Our dotcom work, which had constituted more than a third of our business at the beginning of the year, had slowed to a mere trickle. Business was down overall, for that matter, but none of us knew how much.
My last four cases were either total duds—boring background checks that yielded little pleasure—or grist for the scandal mill, and then, on top of that, one that was amusing in its absurdity but that I'd fucked up royally. Our client was investigating a potential executive for their manufacturing company. I found a lawsuit involving an export company the subject had run in Boca Raton called Hol-E-Wood Imports, which sold adult-size costumes modeled after famous Disney characters. The only problem was, the subject hadn't applied for the licensing from Disney, and the company was sued for $40 million. The case was appended by thousands of supporting exhibits, all showing photographs of creepy men in full-size costumes named “Ronald Duck” and “Quickie Mouse,” with illustrative lines drawn to them from text saying, “Note the similarity of ‘Ronald Duck's’ blue vest to that of the plaintiff's copyrighted Donald, as demonstrated in Exhbit D 259-328.” There was something seriously demented about the whole thing. So it wasn't suprising that one of the court diagrams made the rounds at the office and one ended up on the front of the refrigerator in the conference room, with new pointers drawn to Ronald Duck's crotch saying “small penis” and the word “Nestor” written across the top. Nestor then scratched this out and wrote “Sol's mom” on top before it was snatched precipitously off the fridge, never to be seen again. Only after the case was about to be sent to the client did George notice that Hol-E-Wood was funded by a Jason A. Burtle-baum, not Jason S. Burtlebaum. It wasn't even our guy. So as rumors of impending plans to “ax” people grew rampant over the next few weeks, I hoped it wouldn't be me. But I thought it probably would.
Sitting on the park bench, a squall at my feet lifted a pile of leaves into the air, at first slowly, looking like they were floating, and then whipping them higher and higher. The gray sky above me was flecked with brown shards. I pulled my collar shut and shivered. The swell had become a tempest, at the center of which thousands of leaves multiplied like a staggering swirl of facts.
From Bad to Worse
At lunch, the humor moratorium continued. It was depressing. Everyone was chewing quietly when Wendy ran in from the hallway with tears streaming down her face. George saw her first. I had never seen him look so serious. His face slackened, his insouciant grimace lost like the orange that fell out of his hands and rolled under the table.
Everyone stood up. George was over near his desk and ran back with the bloody broom in his hand he used to eliminate rats. Renora had her hands to her face, her mouth shaped in a big O. It was frightening. Tears were gathering in my eyes, and I didn't even know why yet. Wendy was just saying, “He grabbed me. This guy grabbed me,” but I could barely hear her. I just stared at her usually perfect go-go girl hair, going in every direction, a string of spit over her hand, strands of it coming out of her mouth, and I couldn't help myself from bawling.
I heard Gus yelling, “Go get him!” Then someone, maybe Evan, sputtered, “Motherfucker!” For the first time ever, Archie held himself as menacing as he looked; then he tore out the door, his huge frame thudding past us. Within seconds, all the guys were running down the stairs in a thunder of feet hitting creaky wood. And then it was silent, except for Wendy crying and me consoling her. “Shhhh,” I said. “It's okay. It'll be okay.” But what did I know?
Wally and Noah were still standing awkwardly in the room. Noah came over with some water for Wendy. Wally tried to ask Wendy a question, but then he started to stutter, “Wha … wha …” And then he just barked out, “Motherlover!” His tics had come back.
Noah stayed nervously upstairs, along with Wally, and ten minutes later the guys all came trudging back, dropping their ad hoc weapons—a broom, a Wiffle bat, a bicycle chain, a pocketknife— defeatedly as they reassembled around the table.
Wendy eventually told us her story, crying, with the guys swearing and punching the already dirty conference room walls in rage. She had gotten her lunch and then gone to the gym. On her way back, she was waiting for the elevator, sluggish on its best days, and a small man knocked on the door of the building, indicating he wanted to be let in. She regretted it as soon as she walked over to the glass and saw that the man at the door, troll-like and twitchy was wearing grimy, dirty clothes, that he had greasy white hair and a bulbous, hairy nose flecked with blood. When they got in the elevator, she pressed four. He didn't press anything. The doors had just closed when he lunged at her, grabbed her chest, and pulled her shirt up. She screamed. He started to pull her pants down. But the elevator, whose movements we've always speculated were controlled by some phantom specter of a long-dead passenger, opened on three, where Wendy kicked him in the nuts and ran out into an insurance office. Her ghoulish assailant, apparently scared off, disappeared down the stairwell.
The guys ran miles up and down the blocks surrounding our office looking for him. They must have looked like some throwback to the days of New York streetfighting gangs, an unkempt roving mass of mismatched sizes and girths. They didn't find him, but the thought that they'd left the building with no intention other than to beat him to a pulp and defend Wendy put a lump in my throat.
Just Close Your Eyes and Think of Little Bunnies
By the end of that day my head was spinning. My whole body ached. I wanted to call someone and vent. I knew I could call Cas-sie and get some pity, but then I'd eventually complain about being lonely and she'd tell me I had no reason to be upset because I just got out of something and she's been waiting two years, so she's way overdue.
The night before, I'd seen Janeane Garofalo on television complaining about how unfair it is that everyone expects women to have a man. Men who sleep around and don't need women are pigs, she said. They can't settle down because they're assholes and don't have stick-to-it-ness. I wasn't arguing with that. But I wanted to know: When did it become politically incorrect to be lonely?
I felt weak and guilty and pathetic for being forlorn, even though I saw all my other coworkers, white-faced at their desks, whispering the day's events to their significant others in shaky voices. I thought about who I could call and pretend to be okay.
“Ben?”
“Mu?”
“What's up?” His voice was disappointing the second I heard it.
“You're on boycott, remember?” Then my resolve to act like everything was okay crumbled like a hollow Trojan horse. I started crying, and his tone softened.
“What's the matter, honey?”
“Oh, I don't know. This girl in my office got assaulted today, and I don't know if I'm even good at my job anymore, or if I even like it, and I think I might get fired and—” My other words dissolved into sobs.
“It's okay, sweetie.”
“No it's not!” I wailed.
“Yes it is. It just doesn't feel like it is. I prom.” (Another of our baby words, short for “promise.”) “What do you love?” he asked me.
“Whaaaat dddoo you meaaaan?” I bawled.
“Just think of something nice.”
“Like what?”
“Unicorns. Little bunnies.”
“I like bunnies,” I sniffled.
“Okay, then think of little bunnies. Hundreds of them. They're cute little bunnies, all hopping happily across pretty green fields. See? It works. You know you're smi
ling now.” I was, actually. But it was also sad that the only one who could make me laugh like this was Ben.
I'd been having weird body sensations all day since the incident—whenever I touched my hand to my face, it felt like someone else's. It was like reverse phantom limb syndrome. My limb was there, but the rest of my body wasn't. It was a sort of radical disembodiment.
I was trying to explain it to Nestor, who was never in too bad a mood to rile me. “You know that feeling, when you feel like your hand isn't your hand? ” It was exasperating trying to explain it. A mischievous grin crept across his face. “Yeah, I think I know what you mean.”
“You do?” I was desperate to be understood. I would almost have settled for patent lies and duplicity just to be commiserated with. “Yeah, like when you get this kind of tickly electric feeling in your body.”
“Yes, yes!” I cried.
“Yeah, and your hand feels like it isn't your hand.”
I was getting excited.
“Oh, my God—totally!”
“And you touch your face with that hand and you're looking in the mirror and you realize it really isn't your hand, it's an alien hand, except it is, because you're an alien—”
“Fuck off!!” Clearly pleased with his ability to make me feel like a paranoid asshole, Nestor was cracking up and calling Ass-man over to tell him about his coup. But I was paranoid, so it didn't take much. I sat down at my desk and became aware of the blood pumping through my body in short, ineffective electric bursts. I couldn't shake the feeling of numbness. It was a feeling of not feeling, a nothingness where something should have been.
You Have to Wait Your Turn
At three o'clock, Sol told us “jerkoffs” to go home, so Renora and I took the subway back to Brooklyn together. The bars weren't open yet, so we went to Tea Too, a Park Slope coffeehouse that during normal working hours became a hotbed of out-of-work dot-commers and new-mommy playgroups. While Renora got us Chais, I plopped wearily onto a threadbare love seat that looked like it was lifted from a 1940s brothel. The whooshing air from my movements sent a pamphlet on the table next to me airborne, swinging near the ear of a close-by baby. Fifteen bohemian mommies at the next table glared at me.
“Sorry,” I said. Park Slope mommies are some of the nastiest in New York.
As Renora and I walked up to Prospect Park I asked her why it seemed like all new mothers suddenly saw their childless peers as the root of all evil.
“Because we're having sex.”
“No we're not,” I protested.
“Well, that's true, but we look like we are.”
I used to love babies. Now I hate them. They're like little albatrosses—chubby beacons of foulness afoot.
Here's how it happens. I see a cute baby. We make eye contact. The baby smiles. I “goo” or “ga,” and then some mommy comes over and moves the stroller with its back to me and says, “Tyler, would you like to play with mommy now,” and swoops my new friend off the floor. I tried to stop smiling at babies on the subway back when a toddler shot me a wet, toothless grin.
There are some days in New York when the city turns from its usual gritty glamour to just plain sinister. What was breathtaking and awesome a moment before begins to feel like it's encroaching, dizzying. The beautiful chaos of it is now a suffocating sepulchre. I felt like Renora and I and every twenty-something girl were embattled, stuck between two kinds of indentured servitude. First, to being lonely and single and never finding somebody, and second, to married life and motherhood. In either case, I thought, looking at the mommy group, we were damned to cling to these scraps of human connection with all the desperation of a convict on the run.
TWENTY-ONE
Oedipa wondered whether at the end of this (if it were supposed to end), she too might not be left with only compiled memories of clues, announcements, intimations, but never the central truth itself, which must somehow each time be too bright for her memory to hold; which must always blaze out, destroying its own message irreversibly, leaving an overexposed blank when the ordinary world came back.
—THOMAS PYNCHON, THE CRYING OF LOT 49
Who's Your Daddy?
Since the Cake debacle, I was stung by my memories of Evan. They'd faded into grainy low-resolution obscurity until a day in early October when I went over to his desk to get a case file, trying not to look him in the eye. It all came flooding back. Oh, the horror!
“Hey” I said, trying to focus on anything but his eyes.
“Miz Gray. How are you?” He leaned back in his chair and folded his arms behind his head. “Did you do anything fun this weekend?” Shit! Don't look in his eyes. I kept thinking of zebra stripes and the echoing sound of his voice onstage asking the audience, “Who's your daddy? I said, who's your daddy?”
My eyes widened. “Nope, not really.” Long pause.
“And you?”
“Not really” he said, leaning back into his desk. “I got laid, though.”
All I could think was, play along and run. “So. Any new cases for me?”
“In fact I do have something,” he said. “I think it's a good one. Can you handle it?”
I rolled my eyes. “What do you think?”
“Nope. Well, that's too bad, I didn't think so.”
“C'mon, Pringle, tell me about the case!”
“Actually, it's pretty nasty, but Gray, you can handle it.” Egg-licious, my subject company, was the largest manufacturer of nondairy imitation egg products in the Northwest. Gag me. The Case of the Rotten Egghead was under way.
Brushed with Fame
The phone rang in time to save me from the eggy monotony of my case. I picked it up. “Hello? Hello?” I said. But the line was dead. “Fuck this phone system,” I said, cursing audibly. A minute later the message light was flashing. “Hi, hon, it's Skye. You won't believe what happened to me! Call me! Now!”
When I called her back, she sounded breathless. “I'm being stalked by David Blaine.”
I was racking my brain. “The—magician?”
“Yes!” Skye was a magnet for weirdos. She was a magnet, period. She was the perfect mix of gorgeous and totally wacko. Even though she was six feet tall, she had been doing ballet since the age of three and, we joked, subsisted on peaches, tomatoes, water, and flower petals, so she was slender and lithe. Once she went on a date with Chuck Scarborough, the 5:00 news anchor on the local NBC station in New York, who was thirty-one years her senior. She also had a fling with a famous Israeli actor when she was visiting a friend in Tel Aviv, at a Jewish camp for guilty Jewish Americans. She had dated innumerable cute boys in college, too, but this was her first mega-celebrity as much as a magician can be a celebrity, even if he did have a prime-time special on Fox.
“I was walking down the street and I heard some guy calling, ‘Hey baby’ and so of course I just kept walking, and he said it a few more times and I ignored it.” For women living in New York, catcalling is a part of the fabric of the daily soundscape that we ignore, along with the screams of children on the subway, the moaning of panhandlers and drunks, the booming soapbox preachers, the squealing teenagers and boomboxes and sirens and honking and car alarms and buses braking and fenders crunching and rubber burning. So when Skye said this, I completely understood. In many neighborhoods, my neighborhood in Brooklyn included, the catcalling is so pervasive that any acknowledgment might leave the door open for further harassment. We steel ourselves, and try to look bored and mean, while still trying to stay attractive and well dressed for the guys we really want to notice us, the guys who would never ever call to us on the subway. “How come the only guys that tell me I'm beautiful are construction workers?” a friend of mine once whined.
“So finally this guy runs up to me and he says, ‘Stop, I want to show you something, it's magic,’ so of course I stopped.” She was hooked. He pulled a deck of cards out of his pocket, asked her to think of one, and pulled it out of the deck, to her wide-eyed shock. He did two more tricks and asked her for her phone numb
er (she gave him the one for her cell phone). He then put her in a taxi and give the driver $20.
“He said, ‘Take her wherever she wants to go,’ ” she said, giggling.
“To the driver?”
“Yep.”
“That's wild.” I thought for a minute. “What if you'd been going to New Jersey?”
“Well, I told him I was just going to West Fourth, so …”
She went uptown to her parents’ house on the West Side, and when she got home there were already two logged calls on her cell phone from him, but no messages. Twenty minutes later the phone rang, and he was begging to see her that night.
“ ‘Please, please, please,’ ” she repeated. “I said I was busy.”
“You did?”
“Yeah, but he asked what I was doing and I said I had a meeting so he said call me after your meeting and I said I would. But I didn't, and then he called me at one-thirty in the morning.”
“No!”
“Yes! And all he said was, ‘Hey sexy, what are you wearing?’ ”
“Eeewww. That's so pathetic.”
“I know. I said I was sleeping and to call me later, and so he called me at nine-thirty in the morning.”
“What?”
“And he said, ‘You've been a very bad girl because I wanted to see you yesterday and I didn't get to and now you have to make it up to me.’ ”
“Jesus. What a nut job.”
“I know. He's called me ten times. But luckily he's leaving tonight for a monthlong European tour, so I won't have to worry about it anymore.”
