by Karin Tanabe
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CONTENTS
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Acknowledgments
Readers Club Guide
About Karin Tanabe
For my mom and dad
CHAPTER 1
Isabelle Norman’s skin was the color of uncooked meat, and her green eyes glistened with panic. She ran toward me, a Usain Bolt in heels.
She had just sprinted out of a closed-door meeting with our newspaper’s editor in chief, Mark Upton, and she looked about as happy as the fat girl picked last in gym class.
When she stopped at our group of plastic desks in the very back of the newsroom, I saw the lines of tears covering her pretty oval face.
“I’m going to get fired. Immediately,” she bleated, grabbing my arm, leading me toward a bank of glossy white elevators and collapsing onto a bench. “I’m—I’m a—I’m going to get fired for being an incompetent fool on CNN! Of all the networks out there, I had to be an absolute dimwitted idiot on CNN!” Her tears started to fall faster. She put her head between her knees and let her wavy blond hair fall into the pleats of her magenta silk skirt.
I wanted to wrap her up and take her directly to the Four Seasons for a large tequila and a shiatsu massage. But instead, I just watched her sob in a building with the privacy of a maximum-security prison.
What was she doing on CNN again? Wasn’t she doing a hit with that scary White House reporter Olivia Campo? A woman so pompous she made Hosni Mubarak look humble.
“Were you on with Olivia?” I asked, smoothing her sweaty hair down. I tried to speak in a buttery, soothing voice.
“Yes, I was on with that little termite,” shrieked Isabelle, clearly not responding to my lullaby tones. “And guess what? She stole everything! She stole all of my talking points! I sat silent on CNN for twenty entire minutes. A third of an hour. Someone called the network and asked if I had facial paralysis!”
That last part had to be made up.
She looked me square in the eyes and said, “That last part is not made up.”
Eek.
“It could not have been that bad,” I lied. I tried to sound calming and nurturing. The Mother Teresa of colleagues. “You are so charismatic. And smart!” I offered up. “I’m sure the majority of it went swimmingly.”
She looked up at me with the pain of an abandoned child. “Swimmingly?” she repeated. “No. Not even a little. Not even a dog paddle. I drowned, and I’m going to get fired. It was a quiet death, at least. I was mute,” she said, wiping away her tears. She took a coffee filter from the side table and patted her face with it.
“My mother texted me and said she’s praying for both my sanity and continued employment. She said she’s overnighting my white Confirmation dress, because it made me look so innocent. I’m going to wear it to work tomorrow.”
Confirmation? Wasn’t that a rite of Catholic passage dedicated to tweens?
“But didn’t you wear that like thirteen years ago? It might be a little tight,” I advised.
“Adrienne! Be realistic! Drastic measures must be taken.”
“No one watches stupid CNN anyway. Their ratings are way down,” I said. “Think about it. The only time I tune in is to see the rise and fall of the Asian markets. But that’s all. I bet like five thousand people were watching, tops.”
Isabelle shook her head no. She motioned for my mohair cardigan. I placed it in her shaky hand, and she rubbed it on her cheek and clutched it like a security blanket.
“This wasn’t some Washington-only program,” she assured me. “It was CNN. Hundreds of thousands of people saw me. Maybe millions!” she wailed, sounding muffled through the fabric. “And it was the international edition. I’m going to kill myself.”
That sounded bad. Had people from other time zones called in? Was the woman who asked if Isabelle had a mummified face ringing up the CNN hotline in New Delhi?
“How could Olivia have possibly stolen all your notes?” I asked. “Did she write them all on her palm? Can we have her ejected for verbal plagiarism?”
“There are no rules in television!” Isabelle screamed. Her voice bounced off the glass walls surrounding the bank of elevators and the smoky gray marble floors. “Plus,” she said, cracking all her knuckles one after the other, “it was all my fault. I should know that every single person at the Capitolist is a self-serving, self-righteous prick.”
After she had soaked two coffee filters with her saliva and tears, she balled them up, handed them to me, and explained what had led to her anguish.
“It was around eight P.M. last night. We were just sitting in the greenroom at the CNN headquarters in Northeast before our segment on the president’s upcoming vacation to the Gulf Coast. I was fact-checking a few things online and making small talk with Olivia. I’ve known the troll for a year, after all. And for some reason, I was pretty nervous. You know, I do a lot of TV, but it was a forty-minute segment, twenty minutes each. That’s a hell of a long time to be live. But I was prepared. I spent all weekend writing notes, everything organized and written in black and red fountain pen.”
I nodded encouragingly. It was always a good idea to have executive-looking pens.
“And then in the greenroom, while I drank a triple espresso so that I would be extra peppy, Olivia asked me what I was going to talk about, so we wouldn’t overlap. I viewed it as a perfectly normal team-player kind of question, so I let her look at my notes.”
At this point, she started to cry again, as if her puppy had just been microwaved.
“Adrienne, I swear, I didn’t know that red-haired narcissist would steal everything! I mean, who has a memory like that! If she’s so smart, why didn’t she just make her own multicolored notes!”
Her facial paralysis seemed to have been cured: she had dropped the cardigan and was scrunching up her button nose like a Shih Tzu.
“Well, you should say something,” I suggested. “Rat her out. Tell Upton that you were more prepped than the president but Benedict Arnold swiped your notes!”
Isabelle sighed. “They won’t believe me. Or care.”
“Show them your talking points,” I urged. “Give them irrefutable proof.”
Isabelle reached for another coffee filter. “You know how this place works, Adrienne. No missteps. No mercy! They’ll just say I’m totally stupid for having to prep that much. You know them. They think you should be able to recite the entire history of American politics on cue, like a dancing monkey. I just don’t think that way. I have to prep.”
She was right. I had only been at the paper for three weeks, but I knew that. You walked in the door, and they gave you a phone and a computer and said “go.” That was it. From that moment on, you had to get everything right.
“You should talk to Upton anyway,” I said. “That’s so morally wrong. Maybe they’ll actually listen to you and fire her.” I knew they wouldn’t. They didn’t care how you got your info, as l
ong as you didn’t plagiarize it and you presented it with Napoleonic confidence. But I had to say it anyway.
“Fire her? They love her,” said Isabelle through her sniffles. “God, I wish she would just disappear to the mountains of Papua New Guinea. Are there mountains in Papua New Guinea?”
I shrugged and looked at her blankly.
“Maybe someone would eat her. Or maybe she would contract a horrific case of syphilis like Paul Gauguin and die a slow and painful death.”
“I think that happened in Tahiti.” I was standing in front of her, trying to shield her from curious colleagues who might suddenly jump out of the elevators.
“Whatever. Tropical island teeming with germs, STDs, and cannibals,” said Isabelle. “That’s where the little thief deserves to be.”
I was ready to share a hearty laugh and invent a few more ways for our amoral colleague to die, but Isabelle had succumbed to further crying.
“You must have answered a few questions. I don’t believe it was all that bad,” I said. I had seen Isabelle do plenty of TV, and she was photogenic and great on camera. That’s why our media bookers had dared to put her on CNN for twenty long minutes.
“I didn’t answer a thing,” said Isabelle. “I sat there, frozen, like those ice people they found perfectly pickled in Nova Scotia. Whiskers and everything.”
“I think you mean preserved.”
“Whatever! I looked like I was born without the ability to smile,” she said, sniffling. “Oh, and as a bonus, those horrific media training girls marched right in to my Upton meeting. That girl Gretchen, the one who always eats papayas with a steak knife, she analyzed the footage for our dear editor and guided him on a master plan of damage control. She watched it ten times!”
Wow. Ten times. That seemed excessive. The only videos I had seen ten times were Love Actually and this night-vision sex tape I made with a Parisian bartender in college. Both did get better after multiple viewings but I doubted the same rule applied to Isabelle on CNN.
“What did Gretchen say?” I asked cautiously.
“Oh, well she was an absolute dear. A real chum. She said I was too thin and mannish and not meant for the screen.” Isabelle’s eyes started to tear up in a soap opera kind of way. “She brought the video into the meeting and forced us all to watch it together. While I was making this terrible blank face, she smacked the pause button and sucked in her breath through her teeth. It made this sound: ahhzzzzz. Then she looked at me and said, ‘Isabelle. Let me say something to you woman to woman.’ I thought she was going to compliment me on my skin-care regime or something equally chickish, but she didn’t. Oh and of course Upton was right there. Woman to woman, my ass. So while I sat on my hands to keep from punching her in the jaw, she said, ‘I look at that video, and I just can’t stop thinking, Ron Paul. Ron Paul. I’m looking at the female Ron Paul.’ Can you believe it? Ron fucking Paul!”
“Wait, what?!” I exclaimed. “He’s like eight hundred years old.”
Isabelle shook her head. “Well then that’s what I look like, too. Because according to the media witch, I am the spitting image of United States representative Ron Paul. Never mind that he’s very old and a man.”
“He is a doctor and a committed Libertarian!” I pointed out. “And a Texan.”
“Gretchen said that if I was going to put on this big California glamour act of mine, I needed more pigment in my face and more meat on my bones. It’s like she wants me to be a Maori rugby player! And male. Do you know how hard people work to be thin? Has she never seen Giuliana Rancic? People are supposed to want to be thin. I’m an athlete. I’ve been thin and muscular all my life! Since birth. I weighed five and a half pounds and was the only baby in the hospital with a six-pack.”
Looking from glass door to glass door to make sure no one was coming, Isabelle put her head between her knees again and said, “It’s too much. Please fetch me my pistols.”
“How about I just get us some lunch?” I asked, trying to sound upbeat.
“Fine, suit yourself. I might as well accept your charity since I’ll be out of work in the next twenty-four hours. They’ll probably choose lethal injection as my going-away present.”
Isabelle was afraid her CNN clip was going to go viral. That every reporter on earth would forward it to each other as what not to do when given a great television opportunity. Luckily, that didn’t happen. It racked up a couple thousand hits on YouTube and Upton joked about it in the next company-wide meeting, which had Isabelle eating Xanax for a week. But the wave never swelled into a tsunami. Of course, CNN stopped requesting her and the Capitolist’s media bookers struck her name from their telegenic reporters list—you didn’t get to make the same mistake twice at the paper. When Isabelle got her next television assignment, it was talking about presidential pets on a Maryland public access station.
CHAPTER 2
I once had a dream that I was backstroking naked with John Edwards in a murky swimming pool in Washington, D.C. It was a bit like a swimming pool mated with a pot of soup. We were splashing around together, and every so often I would duck my head under and take a look at his baby maker. Besides us and the lobster bisque water, there was only one other thing in the pool: a huge inflatable football that we batted around like it was the size of a grapefruit rather than a Clydesdale. We just swatted and splashed, all naked and flirty, until I was woken up by the piercing death machine commonly known as the alarm clock.
While my trusty dream analysis book told me that my vision meant I would be pregnant within a year and could expect a large raise, I interpreted it to mean that John Edwards was going to be the 2008 Democratic nominee for president. Turns out I have the intuition of someone with stage 6 Alzheimer’s. John Edwards was not made of the stuff presidents are made of. He was a man whore. The whole disaster was a bit of a blow to my romance with politics, but it was more like a slingshot to the heart than a semiautomatic to the head.
I quickly forgot about baby daddy Edwards and gave all my spare change to Hillary Clinton. I could throw all my egg whites in one basket for Hillary and not worry that she was going to get knocked up.
It didn’t work out. As we all know, the chosen one from Honolulu did the hula all the way into the White House, Hillary Clinton got her consolation prize, and John Edwards became everyone’s favorite voodoo doll. I wouldn’t have written history that way, but I was happy to be a tiny part of it. I donated, I voted, I embraced my born-and-bred-in-the-Washington-area status and went to handfuls of political events in duplex apartments in Manhattan. One time, I dressed as a donkey and casually ate a bunch of carrots at a debate night party. At twenty-five, I was proud to be more politically involved than your average American.
Fast-forward three years and my life revolves around politicians, all of whom seem to think that laws are as flexible as gymnasts. Before the sun is up, I start reading about politics. A few minutes later, I start writing about politics. And three hours after that, I start physically stalking the people who write our incomprehensible laws. Why? Because I work in Washington, a town where you don’t set up shop unless you’re ready to let politics control your life. It’s like 1984 without the overalls and mind control torture.
I didn’t succumb to Washington’s marble fist immediately. When I became the proud owner of a two-hundred-thousand-dollar college diploma, I knew I had to move to Manhattan, have casual sex, and spend my rent money on Italian-made clothing and the Hampton Jitney for a few years. So I did. I said goodbye to the sisterhood of Wellesley College and moved to a minuscule apartment in a really nice neighborhood with a view of Central Park. For a handful of years, I did what my Gen Y English major peers did and worked my way up at glossy publications in Manhattan. It was very glamorous and terribly paid. It was also fun. (Really fun. Especially that one Dutch banker named Fritz who had hands like Sharper Image back massagers.) But even as my apartments and paychecks got bigger, I never thought I’d stay forever. I grew up in Middleburg, Virginia, a historic town just ou
tside Washington. I canvassed for a congressman in college up north and always thought politics would be part of my future. After so many years in New York’s luxury media world, I realized that I missed breaking affordable bread with people who loved Capitol Hill.
When I was ready to bite the bullet and say goodbye to heiresses with the last name Getty and say a stern hello to hard-hitting news, I put out some feelers.
At the end of July, when New York was in its summer slowdown, I started reaching out to my Washington contacts and was told that the place to be was the Capitolist. Both the fast-moving website and the daily print publication were dominating the Hill, an editor friend at the Washington Post told me. As soon as her contract ended, she was applying there and I should, too. I asked her for her Capitolist contact, sent my résumé to the hiring manager for a Style reporter position, and a month of interviews and writing tests later, I had an offer.
The Capitolist. I considered it for about a nanosecond, and then I said yes.
“You’ve gone insane,” said my boss at Town & Country magazine in New York when I gave notice in September. “Do you know what happens to people who work at the Capitolist? Immediate varicose veins. All over. Even in your face. You’ll gain ten to fifteen pounds, your hair will dull, your teeth will yellow, you’ll forget all foreign languages, and you’ll start eating entire cakes for breakfast.”
“Entire cakes?” I asked.
“Yes, entire cakes,” he said.
He sighed and looked at me as if I had just declared that I was donating all my working limbs to science. “But yes,” he conceded, “you will know a hell of a lot about politics and those ugly, sad people who call themselves leaders.” He walked right up to me, gave me a kiss on each cheek, and said, “If that’s what you want, go on.” He took my official, typed two-weeks notice and told human resources to open the job I had worked so hard to get.
After deciding to trade in Manhattan’s money and eccentricity for Washington’s power and traditions, I called my only childhood friend who had stayed home rather than running north. Twenty years ago, we had eaten live starfish together while on a church group vacation and had ended the jaunt as two very ill best friends. She was working at the single cool art gallery in D.C. and had taken to wearing origami shapes instead of clothing with archaic things like sleeves.