Spygirl by Amy Gray

was constantly drafting notes to peeved agents telling them, “Please resend the proposal,” “There has been some error,” and “Boris never received it.” “But I sent it by messenger!” they would say, exasperated.
    In Gloria's office, as I filed away, I came across a picture of her and Newt posing over a Scrabble board, looking engrossed and in love for the only time in any picture I'd seen of them together. I also found a piece of paper on which she'd tried to figure out how to spell the word “fugue;” it had such variations as “fewgue” “feogwe” and “fooge.” I found a note she'd written to me that said, “Amy: to do: 1) Make new Xeroxes of
all news articles
for my books and make a new Pendaflex file called ‘Current Media,’ 2) Help figre [sic] how to Back up my Personal Digital Assistant, 3) What is going on with Raffeter contract and why haven't you mentioned it? 4) Please type thank you letter to my mother which I will dictate.” I stuffed her chickenscratch in my pocket and threw it away when I got home so she couldn't dig it out of the trash.
    From the glint on my shoes on her desk, I gazed over the view, watching airplanes leaving La Guardia, rising like tiny discol-orations, almost indistinguishable filaments against the bruised pale sky, and then surging up, from behind the arching girders of the Brooklyn Bridge, like tendrils rising out of the massive towers. The incoming planes followed a sweeping path to the left of the bridge, and the outgoing ones rose in a half-ellipse to the right. Together they formed a V, like the two edges of a highway meeting at a distant vanishing point.
    “What are you doing in here?”
    Gloria was standing, red-faced, sharp-eyed in the doorway, her language a little slurred, a cup of water in her hand. My eyes stung. I swung my feet off the desk.
    “I thought you weren't coming in.” She closed her eyes for a second into slits, and looked like she might pass out, then opened them up again so wide I thought they might roll out of her head. “Amy, what the hell is going on? ” I geared up to explain why I wasin her office—I was up all night working … I was getting some tea from her desk … “I was just in your office and I saw files in there I gave you days ago,” she said. “Plus, there's a contract I haven't heard back from you about.”
    I threw her a bone, albeit a false one. “The Bielman contract is signed and done.”
    “No, no, that's not it.” She paused and looked confused. “Well, I can't remember what contract it is, but I'll get back to you about it, but whatever it is, you should be coming to me and not the other way around. You have to think one step ahead of me.” The one-step-ahead thing was her mantra. She was constantly telling me that. But one step ahead of her was as useless as ten steps ahead of her, since she was miles
behind
everybody else. All of her books were years behind schedule because she took months to “edit” every page, if she was doing anything at all, and 80 percent of the work I did for her was personal: organizing dinner parties, drafting thank-you notes to the socialites that seemed to be friends of hers through her dead husband, sending to-do lists to her gardener, her housekeeper, her accountant, her lawyer.
    But that day, she seemed too out of it to remember to dress me down for being in her office, and instead sent me to my desk to get a pad of paper because she had something she desperately needed to get done, and by the way she'd be working late tonight and she'd need my help. I couldn't tell if she'd been crying, but she probably had. She continued to issue edicts, despite an unsteadiness and a suspect swagger when she turned corners.
    That night at seven she had me follow her into the bathroom (“I'm in a huge rush—we just can't miss a
beat
here!” she said) and take dictation from her to the sound of her piss hitting the water while I scratched down a note to her mother, filling her in