Spygirl Read Online Free Page A

jersey.) He was pistol-whipped trying to cross Washington Square Park at night. We said if we never fell in love with anyone else, we could always just marry each other someday. Even though I didn't mean it, it gave me comfort.
    At the time I started at the Agency, Ben wasn't dating anybody and I didn't want to tell him about Elliott because he knew him from college, and that would have made him jealous and pissed-off. But obviously, among our discreet group of friends, word travels fast.
    “Sooooo,” he whistled, “how's your booyfrieeeend?”
    “Ben, I don't want to talk about this.”
    “Is he giving you the hot beef?” Yes, this was copped from
The Breakfast Club.
    “Fuck off. How's your girlfriieeend?” I teased back.
    “She's goood,” he said.
    “What do you mean? You don't have a girlfriend.” He didn't have a fucking girlfriend.
    “Yes, I do. I have a new girlfriend. And she's pretty and she's rich and you know her.” I felt sick. Why was I jealous of my ex-boyfriend who I broke up with's new girlfriend?
    “It's Lisa Saaaks.” He said the “a” in “Saks” with the same provocative sing-song he used to talk about Elliott, and for good reason. I did know her. She went to college with us, and her father, Jeffrey Saks, was the owner of the department-store chain. This was a girl who came back from spring break freshman year with a new $20,000 nose and $30,000 breast implants, the teardrop ones before they were all the rage. She had tried to remake herself as a trendy rock “n’ roll chick by not dry-cleaning her sweater sets as often and wearing her hair in ridiculous faux dreadlocks she got at Frédéric Fekkai. She used $100,000 of her daddy's money to do herfirst ten-minute short film at USC, something everyone else managed with $50 and a Super Eight from the Salvation Army.
    “You must be kidding. I hope she gives great head, because that's all she'll do for you.”
    “Somebody's jealoousss,” Ben hissed.
    “I am
not
jealous, you're jealous, and I am not continuing this conversation anymore. Good-bye.” I hung up. It was 4:55. I
was
jealous, which was exactly his intent, and that made it all the more annoying. I couldn't wait to get the hell out of work and see Elliott, and make myself feel better.
    At lunch that day I had munched on Cheetos and a salami sandwich and watched the other investigators shout over their lunches. One of the favorite office parlor games was figuring out who would play who in the TV movie of us. Vinny Gamba, the litigation retrieval manager, was always played by “that short Italian actor with the lisp”—by which everyone always meant Joe Pesci. I didn't ask who would play me, and no one made any suggestions. Then Sol slammed into the room and told us to stop stuffing our faces and get back to work.
    The office had the entrepreneurial enthusiasm of a dot-com mixed with the dinginess usually associated with sweatshops and boiler rooms. Sol and George had both grown up in New York working-class families, Sol of Russian and Polish Jews, his father a door-to-door insurance broker, and George the son of an Irish-Catholic cop. They met at a now-defunct New York investigative firm, and, as George delicately put it, they figured, “We can do this crap better than they're doing it,
and
make more money!”

    On the train home, I made the face I always make on the subway. It says, “Don't look at me, don't talk to me, don't even think about me.” Everybody who rides the subway has this defensivecamouflage. It's not that we're mean or cold or indifferent. It's just that if you stop to look at everything, you'll miss your stop. Or worse.
    Occasionally this shield is penetrated, usually by cute babies, superior panhandlers, or, when I'm premenstrual, pretty much anything. On the way home, on the illuminated overhead across from me was an advertisement for a dermatologist named Dr. Ziz-mor. It looked like a fifth-generation copy of an ad from the early seventies, a jumble