by Karin Tanabe
Elsa’s take on the offer was that if I said anything but yes, I was as good as lobotomized. Forget that it paid Starbucks wages. “You got a job at the Capitolist? That’s huge!” she shouted into her iPhone. “Everyone wants to work there. Seriously. People have been leaving the Washington Post in droves to work there. I read an article that said as much in the New York Times. Of course they’re probably biased, but whatever. It’s the place to be right now. It wins awards daily. It’s filled with geniuses. People are obsessed.” In the back I could hear a strange harmonica sound mixed with the clanging of dishes.
Elsa yelled at her interns to keep it down. “By the way, did I tell you I was pregnant? Not actually pregnant, but metaphorically so. It’s all part of this performance art piece we’re putting on next weekend. Will you be down here by then? We could use another metaphorically pregnant person. Plus, you have to take that job.”
“Eh, no. Next week, no. No time to be metaphorically pregnant until October,” I replied. Forget performance art; I was still a touch skeptical about the job. I liked to get my politics the old-fashioned way: from long-form articles, public radio, or drunks at cocktail parties. I wasn’t totally sold on taking over Capitol Hill one tweetable sentence at a time. But Elsa was right about the Capitolist’s reputation. The paper had its wonky tentacles stretched all over the country.
“Who are the obsessive people who read the Capitolist?” I asked. “Do you know any of them? Or are they all incarcerated? Because I had a gig in college that required a pair of latex gloves and tweezers to read the packets of mail delivered from the penitentiary.”
This was actually true. My first job in journalism was at a religious magazine in Boston that I believe was the most popular rag at America’s maximum-security prisons. Besides porn, obviously.
“No! Like everyone on the Hill,” Elsa assured me. “Everyone. And plus, their reporters are on TV all the time. You’ll definitely be on Larry King.”
“He retired.”
“Whatever. Take the job.”
I already had.
When I first arrived at Town & Country after slogging at a regional magazine for two years, I would have tattooed “I heart T&C” on a number of different body parts, not that the esteemed magazine would have approved such a tacky move. But I would have. It was such a fascinating place. The women were like smart, polished, walking, talking Barneys mannequins. They knew how to set a table for a ten-course meal, traded stories about summers in Cap d’Antibes and winters in Cape Town, but could also write delightful articles comparing Gilbert and Sullivan to Lil Wayne without breaking a sweat. Not that anyone at T&C ever broke a sweat—that’s why God invented armpit Botox. I was in awe and the awe lasted for years.
I can’t pinpoint the exact time when my devotion started to crack, but I think it was while dating a PhD student named Ilya who was obsessed with Russian literature. His name wasn’t actually Ilya, it was Brett Olney, but he made everyone call him Ilya for obvious reasons.
On our first date we sat in Central Park and he read to me from a book called The Master and Margarita, which I said sounded like a smutty Mexican telenovela. He stopped reading after I made that comment but I was so hot for him that I faked an obsession with Russian literature to try to get in his pants. The downside of this BS obsession was that I agreed to go to a lecture on the Russian Revolution of 1917, which I had stupidly said changed my perspective on history, never mind the fact that my knowledge of Russian history extended to ballet and caviar. The weekend before the daunting lecture I locked myself in my apartment with a five-hundred-page tome on that pesky war, a Rachmaninov playlist, and a bottle of Smirnoff, and had my own little holiday in St. Petersburg, or Petrograd as I soon started calling it. I only got halfway through the book, but I remember putting the thing down and thinking, Wowyzowy, I’m insanely wasted. After I ate a loaf of bread to sober up, my next thought was, I haven’t penned anything of substance since college.
I wanted to write about something other than luxury vacations and eccentric heiresses. Maybe history. Maybe politics. I soon realized that only senior citizens who can spell the word Smithsonian backward read history publications. Plus, the only part of that big book that held my attention was the description of Nicholas II’s lavish palace, complete with a hydraulic lift and a movie theater.
Politics won.
The first thing I had to do after I decided to ditch New York living was make a really depressing phone call to my parents asking if I could squat with them in Middleburg, Virginia, until I figured out how to maneuver a D.C. that had become far more expensive than the one I left behind in high school. I was taking a 25 percent pay cut to become one of those reporters who was on TV all the time. I had thought about alternatives: living in a houseboat on the Potomac River, living with a bunch of unknown roommates who ate cat for dinner, or dwelling in Washington’s seedy Ward 8, where I could afford an apartment with an actual bedroom. On my budget, it turned out the houseboat would be an inflatable raft, the Craigslist apartment ad I answered had the words “Wiccan witch circle” in tiny print at the bottom, and when I looked at the number of violent crimes in Ward 8, I decided that as exciting as a drive-by shooting might sound on my résumé, it was probably not something I wanted to endure.
My twenty-eight-year-old fingers dialed the first phone number I ever knew, and I prepared myself for a little humiliation. That morning I had been writing copy about why tiaras weren’t at all out of fashion, and just twelve hours later I had to grovel for room and board in the commonwealth of Virginia.
“Let Dad answer, let Dad answer,” I chanted out loud as the phone rang. “Helloo, helloo, Caroline Cleves Brown here!” my mother shouted into the receiver after three rings.
This was going to be a very belittling experience.
“Adrienne Brown here!” I shouted back. “Your favorite child. The one who didn’t pour scalding water on your feet when she was a teen.” This was true. When she was fifteen, my very dexterous and evil-spirited sister, Payton, “spilled” a large pot of boiling water on my mother’s toes. I don’t think my mother or her pedicurist ever truly forgave her.
After I yapped out some small talk, spouting lines about how much I appreciated her continued love and affection and how I would be a shred of an ugly little person if it weren’t for her wisdom, grace, and guidance, I made my request.
My mother huffed and puffed like someone at the summit of Everest, paused, and then declared, “Of course you can live with us! It will be just like old times. Except that spoiled sister of yours now lives in Argentina and your father has turned her bedroom into some sort of Hoarders den. I’m sure the housekeeper is thinking of reporting us to A&E. And did I tell you we had to fix the Tuscan shingled roof because of a hurricane and that the insurance company claimed it was ‘an act of God.’” She stopped to catch her breath, muttered something about the pains of seasonal affective disorder, and then added, “Oh, and you. Sorry. Yes, it will be great to have you home. The barn apartment happens to be empty right now.”
I looked at my feet to make sure I hadn’t sprouted hooves. “I have to live in the barn?”
“Sweetheart. You make it sound like we’re treating you like a donkey! It’s the barn apartment. The horse trainers used to live there, but their kids just shot right up into giants and they outgrew it. You’ll feel more independent there, anyway. You’re just a touch o-l-d to be living in your parents’ actual house, don’t you think?”
No, I didn’t think. I thought it might be nice not to dwell twelve feet above piles of horse manure. I knew just what to say to my gentlemen callers: “Keep walking until you’re almost floored by the smell of animal feces. Then look up! I’ll be waving from the barn window!”
But free rent was free rent, so I sucked it up and agreed to live in the barn at my horse-loving parents’ house. Who cared if the first floor of my residence was full of dung? I was going to be a reporter for one of the country’s most prestigious newspapers. Writing career
s were made at the Capitolist. There was more blood, sweat, and tears within those walls than in an Amsterdam brothel. Or that’s what I was told, anyway. All I really knew about the gig was that it would allow me to go back home, hobnob with politicians, and write breaking news. And everyone would pay attention.
I had been hired to work at the Capitolist (or the List, as the employees called it) by a very intense woman from L.A. named Rachel Monsoon. She had been a music critic for Rolling Stone, a book critic for the Los Angeles Times, and then media editor for the San Francisco Chronicle. Basically, nothing like the usual Capitolist employee. But, to the delight of her conservative mother, she fell in love with a preppy East Coaster who made hand-carved wooden boats for a living and took the gig with the D.C.-based paper to avoid a life of air travel and conjugal visits. She had been there for three months when she hired me. There was an opening on the Style section because one of the reporters had left to “reclaim her soul in the blue waters of Goa,” according to Rachel. I didn’t ask how this girl had lost her soul, and instead babbled enthusiastically about how right I was for the job. What I liked best about Rachel was her claim that my piles of prose and action-packed résumé had won her over. She didn’t even mention the fact that my mother was once the scariest gossip columnist Washington had ever known.
For a couple of decades, my parents had been raising horses in Virginia, but in her former life my mom had penned the Washington Post’s scandal sheet. She ruled the rumor roost even when she was dragged to Middleburg, but she grew out of it when people became “sober and boring.” Somehow she had managed to keep a friend or two in town, but her enemies probably outnumbered the allies. Once, when I was twelve, a woman poured two gallons of milk on my mother’s head in a supermarket while screaming that she was a fat bitch who had ruined her marriage. It was extremely awesome and the exact moment I decided to become a writer.
But I still appreciated the fact that Rachel was not explicitly hiring me for my mother’s golden Rolodex. Our interview was interesting. I was completely overdressed, even though I was interviewing for the Style section, but Rachel and her quick-draw mind seemed to like me anyway. And I liked her. She had a white streak in her hair and laughed at my nervously rehearsed jokes. She had me take a two-day writing test and meet with the higher-ups; she then called me to say, “Okay, welcome to Style. You start in three weeks.”
Three weeks? Fantastic. I spent what would have been next month’s rent on a case of really good champagne, boarded a friend’s chopper to Sag Harbor, and did the naked lambada with a man named Dan (Stan, was it? Okay, Stan) for seventy-two hours. And then my time ran out. My New York years were over. After I had packed seven years of East Side living into boxes, I opened an email that read, “Why don’t you come in at 11 A.M. on October 15 and we’ll take it from there.” Eleven sounded perfectly civilized. I had worked 10 A.M. to 7 P.M. during my days at Town & Country and was happy to cut that down a smidge. A girl needs time to do glamorous things like groom her parents’ horses for pocket money and meet someone to have sex with.
In a rented Chevy van packed to the brim with my shabby chic furniture and the free luxury goods I had amassed working in fashion journalism, I drove Beverly Hillbilly style behind the moving truck I had soundly rented. The pollution of Elizabeth, New Jersey, turned into the concrete skyways of the New Jersey Turnpike and then, finally, the cold, glistening water under the Delaware Bridge. When I crossed into Maryland and the Dixie side of the Mason-Dixon Line, I blew a goodbye kiss to the northern lights. And when my rented moving truck squished a raccoon three blocks from my parents’ house, I knew I was really home.
In the twilight I could see my mother rushing out of the big wooden front door with the brass pineapple knocker to open the white gate onto the driveway. She had blond hair like mine, but hers had a hint of red in it thanks to the miracles of modern hair dye. It was perfectly straight at the top, curled under at the bottom and swishing across the thick roll neck of her white cashmere sweater. Both Payton and I were a little taller than her, having inherited our height from my father, Winston Brown’s side of the family, but my mother had the same pale—though slightly freckled—skin and lean limbs. She often liked to point out that at my age she weighed 114 pounds and didn’t I want to think about giving up my addiction to carbohydrates? I could hear her green Hunter boots crunching on fallen leaves and she waved energetically in my direction. That’s when it hit me. I was going to live with my parents.
“Here you are! You penniless, squatting ingrate,” my mother said as she walked toward me with open arms. She smelled like home and French perfume. Inside her sprawling white and green house most of the lights were on and three English setters barked just outside the door. She gave me a hug and whispered, “You know I’m happy, really,” in my pink ear.
Relaxation and motherly love didn’t last long.
The Monday after I moved home, I was ready to walk into the List’s Capitol Hill newsroom and become the wonkiest of wonks; the kind of person who chided others for not knowing every single member of the United States Senate and House of Representatives. “What?” I would say. “There are only five hundred thirty-five members of Congress. Is it too much for you to get to know your government? What do you think the Constitution is, anyway? An advice column?” I was going to be so brilliant and so annoying.
In my navy blue 2002 Volvo station wagon, the clunker I had driven home and abandoned after college, I drove to the glass and steel office building on Constitution Avenue that held the new media empire to which I now belonged. I had been inside for my interviews and to drop off monogrammed thank-you notes, but walking in as an employee felt different. Sure, I had to sign an ethics agreement that required me to just say no to the free trips to Malaga I had grown so accustomed to at Town & Country, and there was no closet overflowing with feathered frocks for me to don at my leisure, but I was about to become a brilliant Washington mind, digging up fraud—gossip fraud—for the greater good.
Having been trained by the most primped and preened people in America, I had begun getting ready for my first day on the job weeks in advance. My hair, usually bleached a very expensive girl-from-the-fjords blond, was toned down with lowlights. I also got my angular bangs straightened so I looked more Good Housekeeping than Interview magazine. At five foot eight I was tall enough to scare short girls and short enough not to scare shorter men, and that was something I really couldn’t change in Washington. So I didn’t. I bought a new pair of Louboutin heels, very high, very shiny. I also bought an Hermès scarf that I could fashion into a cape, a headscarf, or even a chic winter sarong of sorts. It also came in handy as a blanket if I needed to take a quick nap. As it was both unique and expensive, I deemed it perfect to wrap myself in for day one.
“First impressions are lasting impressions,” I sang out, quoting my old Town & Country editor Kevin St. Clair. He wore Finnish reindeer hide slippers, even when out for a jog. Really. You might have seen him running the New York City Marathon one year in these slippers while simultaneously smoking a massive Cuban cigar. It was quite a sight.
Seven years of working at glossy magazines in New York had given me a really great wardrobe. I had no money at all, but even my underwear was Miu Miu. That was the way of the New York world: Everyone who worked at a fashion magazine had Ivanka Trump’s wardrobe, but free. (The downside is that we were paid in air kisses and comped meals, but it all balanced out. The only things I ever paid for in New York were rent, cabs, and medicine.) Perhaps my wardrobe was a little zany for Washington, but wouldn’t some originality help me get a leg up? Anything to build a name for myself in a town dominated by massive egos.
Flying into the office, as my wonderful new 11 A.M. start time meant no rush hour traffic, I left my old car with the valet, failing to see the sign for the restaurant next door that read, “Valet for restaurant patrons only.” I opened the Capitolist’s glass doors and got ready to become smarter just by breathing the same air as those celebrated scr
ibes.
“Umm, humm, just sign, here, here, here, here, and here. And initial here. And here. Oh, and there,” said the receptionist as she gave me my secure pass and building access codes. I was about to ask her if Capitolist headquarters also doubled as our country’s uranium plant, but I was distracted by the sight of Nathaniel Heard, a Congress reporter I saw on TV all the time. He was shorter in person, and his hair looked like he washed it with chlorine. But he had the sheen of someone very busy and important. That, I decided, was what I would radiate in less than a week, even if I had to donate all my Kérastase hair products to an animal shelter.
The receptionist motioned to me to follow Nathaniel through the door. But first I had to put my thumb on some sort of soul-stealing reader. Two frosted doors, etched with the company logo, slid open at my thumb’s command. I felt like I was about to open the Christian Dior couture show. “Think authority! Think girl genius!” I whispered to myself as I walked down the navy blue carpeted hall roughly the length of an airplane runway.
Not one person looked up at me or the coif I had just paid Nancy Pelosi’s stylist several hundred dollars to create. All I could hear besides my overactive heartbeat were the murmur of dozens of massive televisions tuned to CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, and C-SPAN, an occasional serious-sounding phone conversation, and the frenetic pitter-patter of calloused fingers on keyboards.
On every wall THE CAPITOLIST was printed in huge, navy blue block letters. Some of the letters were painted on; others floated slightly above the wall. But they were everywhere, just in case someone had a bout of dementia and forgot where they worked. The walls were gray, the desks were gray, the ceilings were gray, and the faces that hovered semipossessed behind computers looked a touch ashen, too. But heck! It was probably just the lighting. This was the place to be right now. So they hired people with a lack of skin pigment. Pish posh. History was being changed by these waxen beings, and I was lucky to join them.