Look at me: by Jennifer Egan Page B

looked current, though surely by now the information was obsolete. Or maybe not; maybe you didn’t move, once you’d settled with a wife and children in a house outside Seattle you’d designed yourself. Why would you?
    My eye fell on a tiny Post-it that I’d added to the H’s: the detective, Anthony Halliday. He had called me again, exactly when he’d promised, but I had avoided calling him back. I wanted no part of his search for Z. Yet the allure of calling a person who actively wished to speak with me was too potent to resist.
    “It’s Charlotte Swenson,” I said, when he answered. “I’m back in New York.”
    He sounded pleased, and suggested paying me a visit. I imagined this: a private detective inside my apartment, looking at my things. “I’d rather come to you,” I said.
    “When?” he asked. “Now? Today?” And the eagerness in his voice was so welcome to my drunken ear, so sweetly beckoning, that it jumped the wall of my resistance, and I agreed to come immediately.
    Before leaving, I had another large glass of brandy and two Pop-Tarts, which I kept around in large numbers because they were easier to make than pie and I considered them dietetic. I wrapped myself in my long alpaca coat and rode down in the elevator. It was 10:30 A.M. and I was hugely drunk, full of joy and purpose and mischief. My only regret was over all the days of my life I’d spent sober. Why, when drinking wasn’t illegal? Why had I deprived myself?
    Outside, the temperature was below zero and tiny splinters of ice swarmed the air and lodged in my poor face, which was still tight and a little tingly from its second operation. I hailed a cab and instructed the driver, an elderly Sikh playing Gilbert and Sullivan tunes on a tape deck, to take me to Fourteenth Street, where I made him idle at the curb before a store that sold bins of winter clothing. I chose a black face mask that covered the whole of my head and neck, and pulled it on. When I returned to my cab, the Sikh promptly locked the doors, refusing to let me inside until I removed the mask. As he drove, I slipped it back on, looked in his rearview mirror and let out a whoop of laughter. The Sikh shook his head.
    The detective’s office was on Seventh Avenue just south of Twenty-fifth Street, inside a seedy brick building whose elevator lurched skyward with an ominous rattling of chains. It released me into an empty corridor lined with doors containing panes of frosted glass where the names of businesses were stenciled: Nelson Watch Repairs; Dr. A. A. Street, Dentistry; Hummingbird Travel Services. None of them showed any visible signs of human occupancy. My steps slapped against the walls. Finally I reached a door that read “Anthony M. Halliday, Esq. Private Investigator.”
    A young girl in stone-washed jeans led me through a cramped reception area to the detective’s office, a small disheveled room crammed with hundreds of loose-leaf files, many disgorging their contents onto the floor.
    “Petit, don’t make it so complicated,” said the man behind the desk—Mr. Halliday, I presumed—into the blue cordless phone wedged between his ear and shoulder. He raised a finger in apology and motioned for me to sit, which I was able to do only by removing a pile of files from the single extra chair.
    “The guy’s a sleazeball, his story’s bullshit, there’s no mystery here,” the detective was saying. “Agatha Christie wouldn’t touch it.”
    He looked forty or thereabouts, with a pale, diamond-shaped face and a head of unruly dark hair shot with gray, though its unruliness seemed less a matter of style than the lack of a recent haircut. Dark circles under his eyes: an insomniac. Hard living showed somewhere in his face, though precisely where I couldn’t say. He wore a crisp white shirt straight from the cleaners and a tweed jacket that had spent the past several days tossed over the arm of a chair, or possibly on the floor. I guessed he must be single; a woman