by Amy Gray
“Have you seen Sol or George?”
“No, but I heard. It's awful.” At that moment I fleetingly spotted Sol cutting a rug on the dance floor. I didn't know it was Sol, though. He was wearing a woman's tennis outfit, and had a racquet in his hand. The costume was smudged with black paint. Every visible inch of skin on his body was covered with black paint, except for his eyes, white and blinking, like two gleaming sand dollars sinking into black velvet.
Evan came over and stood with us. “Pretty fucked, huh?”
“What is he?”
Evan pointed to Sol's back, where he had pinned a tiny black doll to himself, also outfitted in tennis whites. “He's the Williams sisters,” he coughed.
“You're joking.”
“I'm not.” Sol was bouncing, apparently ignorant of his racist gaffe.
“That's not funny.” Sol bounced over the dance floor, kicking his legs up with Jane Fonda and then pantomiming an atrocious serve over his head.
“Didn't blackface go out with the four humors and hydrogen-filled Zeppelins? There's something so completely wrong about that guy.”
“How about everything?” he agreed. “Have you seen George?”
“No,” I said, and Renora chimed in, joining us.
“I'll go get him.” Evan went to get him, coming back a minute later with George naked but for a pair of CK boxer briefs and several little yellow Post-its stuck all over his body.
“Okay, fucksticks, what am I?” We all stared on, disbelievingly.
“The naked guy?”
“A pervert?”
“The guy at the party who drinks too much and makes a fool of himself?”
“All true, but that's not my gig tonight. C'mon, fishlips, you're smarter than that.” He waited for another guess. “I'm the Naked Truth.” On closer inspection, the notes stuck to him had things penned on them: I read them aloud, almost as a question.
“Girls don't swallow? I think I've found a factual error in your costume.” I kept reading. “Yes, you do look … fatter? … Black men have bigger dicks? Your wife must love that one,” I cracked. “How would you know?”
“What's up with Sol's costume?” Evan asked. “Isn't that, I don't know … politically incorrect? Offensive? Illegal?”
“Brown sugar, baby,” he countered, smacking his lips in satisfaction.
“I can't believe I work here,” Renora reflected later.
“I know.”
I thought doing this kind of work would make me very powerful. Even if I saw a gruesome investigation in perfect clarity, it didn't matter. Our clients’ interests dictated the response, and I was no more or less powerful. Or I'd take a really dull case and will it to be sensational, all in service of my hunger to be clever and almighty. In my own life, I was a terrible detective—I struck a hypothesis and found things to support it. Even in the face of a faulty theorem, I would pursue it like a demented, lovelorn fool. Perhaps the learning curve of the Agency had flattened for me. I loved my job, but wasn't sure I was any good at it, and I wasn't sure if it was good for me, either.
TWENTY-TWO
Actual life was chaos, but there was something terribly logical in the imagination … It was the imagination that made each crime bear its misshapen brood. In the common world of fact the wicked were not punished, nor the good rewarded.
—OSCAR WILDE, THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY
A Real Live Wire
Other trusted professionals include: hairdresser. Drug dealer. Taxi driver. Therapist. In high school I took taxis from the subway to my parents’ house, which was a six-minute drive, five and a half if I told him to take the shortcut through Garland Road and we didn't hit a red light at Mill Street. Earl started driving me in sophomore year, and from then on if he was at the dispatcher when I got off the train, he'd take me home. Multiply five minutes by five times a week, and then by thirty-six school weeks, and you'll have an idea why I got to know Earl pretty well.
“Yoo look like a really smaat one. And a sweethaaat,” he said, winking at me in the rearview mirror one ride home. He looked like a young Don Knotts. His fingernails were bitten to slivers. His fingers were ropy and knotted, and his accent was classic Boston.
“Umm. Obviously you don't know me.”
“It's ya ayes,” he continued. “I've thawt a lat abowt this.” His theory was based on a psychology class he had taken in night school at Salem State. “Thare's this dockta who sez you can read a person's face by thare facial moovements.” This psychologist had classified every possible expression into an alphabet of emotion. Earl was already “a good judge of caarrocta,” he added.
I watched his eyes in the rearview mirror. “See,” he said, turning back to look at me for a second and then back to the road again, “if I contract my zygomatic maja and my orbicularis something or other, I'm haapy and so orn and so fawth.” One day on the way home from school, taking a shortcut, he pulled the car over to the side of the road and lifted a stack of papers off the front seat.
“I'm knawt that good a spella.” He declared. “I got this papuh due in a week. Can you read it ova for me?”
I was too tired to refuse, so I read the whole thing in ten minutes, and learned to read cues from the backseat's reflection in the rearview mirror.
The next time I went into Lucky Car Service in late November, Mussah told me that Moez had been in a car accident.
“Oh my God! Is he okay?”
“Yeah, he fine, but he total the car. He can't afford to use the car anymore. The insurance is too high and he got to pay for the damage now, too, so he move to Philly”
“Pennsylvania?”
“Yeah.” And with that, Moez was gone.
Down with Dubya
The election of 2000 came just in time to salvage me from the doldrums of my disillusionment. It taught me to appreciate the little things, like how “families are where wings take dreams,” or potential president-elect Al Gore brandishing a boner on the cover of Esquire. Politics had never been so fun, and I felt myself strangely privy to the whole affair, since on both sides it was moles, people like me, that the candidates were using to smear each other. I was shocked when Bush's DWI was heavy-handedly released. We could have found that in a few hours. Two weeks before the election, I made a color-coded map of the country, and, averaging the latest polling numbers from five I figured out who would take each state. By my most judicious calculations, Gore would win handily.
I spent election night with my ex-boyfriend Ben, who suffered my delusions of political grandeur. For some reason, I needed the anchor of his attention at moments like this, perhaps to counter the sting that could come from a defeat. We split a bottle of Clos du Bois at nine, when Gore won Florida. I licked the red sediment in a bloom-shaped deposit off the lip of my wineglass and marveled at how easy it was all going to be. Everything had gone according to my calculations: I had a logarithm for determining which polling services were more accurate and included them in appropriate rank, and I accounted for the precalculated margin of error for each figure, plus an additional conservative percentage for variance. With this kind of mathematics, I could forecast the future, foretell the climate, even constitute snow. At eleven the winds of fate shifted like a fickle downpour, and the networks took Florida back and put it in the “undetermined” column. By midnight, a barometric reversal had awarded Florida to George W, and Ben and I drank Brooklyn Pale Ale and flat Guinness out of the can and consoled ourselves that things could turn around. They did, at 2 A.M., and at 7 A.M., when I don't remember lying down in a devotional pose on my sheepskin in front of the television, they were still as uncertain as ever.
I'm what urban archivist Luc Sante has coined a “dirt broker.” Or I might also be a missionary of facts, a crusader of certainty, or perhaps all of them. But part of my anguish after the election was the realization that, as Hendrik Hertzberg wrote in The New Yorker, “It will never be possible to get to the truth of this vote.” I had abandoned my espousal of the indiscriminateness of being af
ter I sold all my Derrida and de Man books after college. As an investigator, for all my digging, I've struggled with the reality that it's not possible to “get all the facts” or “generate the truth.” The degree to which I'd forsaken my intellectual past was dramatic, and now it was all in jeopardy.
Circle Jerk
The office was abuzz with the topsy-turviness of the times. The tension was palpable. Now it wasn't just inside of me, it was in the office, it was everywhere. The markets were plummeting, the elections were a postmodern mess. We had all abandoned our Nap-sterizing to listen to live CNN feeds on the status of the elections. What else could go wrong? And then I noticed things in the office were strange. People were gathered at Evan's desk, and a hum of activity was transpiring in the conference room. I buzzed Evan.
“What's going on?”
“I think Assman's getting fired.” I was stunned.
I made a bogus drop-off to Evan's desk so I could do a walk-by and peek into the conference room. Assman was sitting in there with George, Sol, and our accountant, Adrienne. I couldn't tell jack.
Ten minutes later, Assman picked up his messenger bag and stormed out of the office, face flushed, and Sol came out and walked toward— me! He swerved at Nestor's desk, and Nestor followed him into the room. “Jesus!” I heard Noah whisper.
I ran to the door after Assman. “Wait!” I caught him in the stairwell on the second floor. “What happened?” I asked him, as he turned his back on me and said, “They fired me. And my name is Matt.”
After the bloodletting at work that day, I met Cassie for drinks. First stop was one of our two Niagara-alternative haunts. Tom & Jerry, another Lower East Side bar—though totally unremarkable, it seemed to be a destination for a lot of my friends— happened to be just inside the perimeter of Cassie's approved barfly zone. Perky publishing assistants buzzed behind slouchy girls starting their own fashion labels and uppity personal assistants.
Cassie and I forged a path to the back of the bar, suffering sloppy gimlets and sharp elbows. “Ouch!” she hissed, shoving back at a girl in an asymmetrical cotton top with FERRAGAMO written on it and a single pigeon-feather earring fluttering out one ear. “Watch it, bitch!” the girl shot back at Cass, when we realized simultaneously it was Kim Deal, the guitarist from our favorite band in high school, the Breeders.
“Sorry,” Cass said, shocked as we walked away, and she whispered, “I can't believe I cried at their show in high school.”
I said, shell-shocked, “We should just go to Niagara.” She assented.
We decided to get one drink first. The bartender was a cute Irish bloke with cool blue eyes. “What “kin I get ya, ladies?”
“I'll have an Amstel Light.” Cassie was doing some variation on the Atkins diet. A low-carb but not totally cold-turkey thing. She could eat buckwheat, for example, although it wasn't clear why she'd want to.
“I'll have the same, please.” Still, I was intrigued. Plus I was feeling fat. Then I saw Renora coming out the bathroom at the back of the bar. She was holding her usual double shot of Jameson's and puffing on a cigarette.
“Renora!” She didn't see me waving at her, but instead walked over to a table behind a corner of the bar I couldn't see. Renora had told me she was hanging out with one of the many in her revolving door of male suitors tonight. But she didn't say she was coming to Manhattan.
I told Cass I'd be right back and went around the side of the bar and saw Renora leaning against the wall next to the bar, kissing someone—except it wasn't just someone. It was—could it be?— Linus. She was fooling around with … Linus? I was confused and disbelieving. Was she cheating on her English bartender boyfriend with Linus? And what about what he was saying the other day, about being “unburdened” and not buying into the female “art of ball bashing”?
I was going to turn around and pretend I wasn't seeing what I was seeing, but Renora looked up from their interlude, tongue wagging, and looked like she was about to faint.
She whispered something to Linus, who turned to look at me, and then they walked over together, Renora looking wobbly.
“Hi, Amy,” Linus said sheepishly.
“I guess we're busted,” Renora said.
“Sorry, I didn't mean to—”
“No, it's okay,” Renora interrupted. “This was going to happen at some point. Just don't tell anyone at work. Please.” She and Linus sat like strangers next to each other before she jumped up and handed me a glass of green fluid that looked like automobile coolant. “What is this?”
“It's absinthe? ” I had heard absinthe was making a comeback, but I hadn't yet seen it make an appearance before.
“Will it make me insane?”
“No, it's different now. It doesn't have all those things in it that caused hysteria.”
“I guess I already have that, anyway.” I eyed the greasy-looking green fluid. “You know what, that's okay. I'll stick to beer.”
I reemphasized my willingness to keep their secret, and went back to the bar. They made a mad dash for the exit. “What was that?” Cassie asked.
“Don't ask.”
“Listen, while you were over there, some guy came over and said his friend was wondering if you had a boyfriend.”
“Really? Was he cute?”
“Well, his friend was, but I don't know who his friend is. Plus they were standing over at that side of the bar, and they're not there anymore.”
“Fuck.”
We eventually made our usual deal with the devil and headed over to Niagara. It was a slow night. Stuart was standing in front of us at the bar, holding a shaker.
“Love the shirt,” Cassie said to him cheerily, eyeing his blue-and-red embroidered bowling top.
“Really?”
“Yeah, it's cool.”
“I think you told me that last time you were here,” he recalled, leaning in to pour our drinks into ceramic half-coconuts.
“See,” she said, “I really like that shirt.”
“Hey” I threw in, frustrated, “I like your shirt, too.” His scornful look seemed to say, “I like your friend Cassie's tatas, but don't flatter yourself, I'm not interested in yours.” As usual with Stuart, he ignored me and kept his eyes on the prize. Thank God these drinks were free.
“So what is it about this shirt you like so much? ” he said, leaning in and propping his chin on both palms right in front of Cassie's barstool, a bolt of light flashing off his shiny head as he moved.
“I've gotta pee,” I said to the nobody that was listening, and I slipped upstairs to clear my head. As I walked down to the bar, I spotted Skye. She had already seen me, and she was with a boy.
“Hey hon!” she cried, throwing her arms around my neck. “What are you doing here?”
“I'm with Cassie. The real question is, what are you doing here? ” I wagged a suggestive forefinger at her.
“I was meeting my friend Peter.” Peter was a supposedly really cute spiky-blondish-haired boy I'd never met before. “Hey” he said, extending his hand.
Skye said she had to run to the bathroom, and I was suddenly left alone with Peter, who seemed uncomfortable with our sudden proximity.
“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 th
e linoleum, where combat boots on dancing punk rockers smudged them away.
Getting Lucky
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.
