The List

by Karin Tanabe

  Libby, wearing a winter white pleated dress and Bass penny loafers, shook her head, like an angry boarding school student.

  “Ah, sorry about that,” said Hardy, standing up but avoiding Alison’s eyes. Without another word, he started walking toward the front offices. In his absence we swore like sailors and wished illness and disease on him.

  When he came back five minutes later, he was all smiles.

  “I checked the employee manual,” he reported. “Management approves two hours off for next of next of kin. Why don’t you start at seven tomorrow? That will give you time to collect yourself and properly grieve.” He looked down at his phone, remembered that he was raised by a human mother and not a pack of wolves, and added, “And I’m very sorry about your aunt.”

  On our five-minute lunch break that day, Alison screamed about our new boss for four minutes and fifty-nine seconds. The other second was used to say thank you to the sandwich man when he gave us our food. But Julia and I spent a good deal of time on BlackBerry Messenger that afternoon just writing the words “I can’t believe he’s twenty-two years old.”

  “If he’s the editor of a section at twenty-two, and I’m thirty-one, I think that makes me officially dead,” Julia texted.

  “When I was twenty-two, I was halfway between intoxicated and insane. I sure wasn’t working my way up to the title of senior anything,” I wrote back.

  “I should probably write my will,” wrote Julia. “I want to be cremated. Remember that if I die of natural old age causes in the next week.”

  When we returned to our desks, I looked over at my colleague, who was skillfully twisting her hair into a silky rope and pretending not to be texting me. She reached up to lower the volume on the TV that was drowning us in MSNBC gobbledygook.

  “I have been working in journalism since I was out of college and I’m still not senior anything. I’ve been here for almost three years, it would have happened by now,” she wrote. “The thing with Upton and Cushing is they decide a month into your employment if you’re a chosen one or not. If you are, you sprint to the top. But if they think you’re not cut from their cloth, then you work with no advancement opportunities for as long as you can stand it. And now I’m thirty-one and I’m going to die soon.”

  “But you’re not old! Thirty-one is not old.”

  My phone flashed with her next message. “I graduated from UCLA class of 2003, so I am old. This place is like grad school, with less sex and liquor.”

  She was right about the lack of sex. I had more impure thoughts in church than I did at the Capitolist. As soon as you put your thumb on that little soul reader and walked through those thick glass doors, your libido abandoned you for greener pastures.

  But as I looked around the room at all the people working as hard as they could, I felt a strange mix of horror and pride that I had been chosen to join these prestigious ranks. It wasn’t like Upton and Cushing were actively trying to ruin your life. It was just a pressure cooker. You knew what was expected of you, and you had to deliver or you got axed. And what was expected of you was to work all the time and very quickly. You had to make your job your only priority. This, it turned out, was much worse for the soul than having someone yell at you occasionally, because it was constant, unrelenting fear.

  Fear that you wouldn’t have enough stories, or that someone would grab your scoop about Shakira’s secret meeting with the president and get a quote from the sassy Colombian before your article went live. The inevitable anger you felt when you got barraged with hate mail and when your colleagues looked down at their phones and ran past you rather than saying hi. You were constantly strapped to a computer, and every mistake you made was a public mistake with your name on it. But in my case, the worst part was that at the end of the day, after I had worked my tail off for fourteen hours, my colleagues still deemed me an idiot. Because I worked for the Style section and they covered the White House.

  Tucker Cliff, a senior Congress reporter, walked past both of us talking loudly into a Bluetooth headset. My phone flashed with a new message from Julia. “Tucker Cliff. They love him. They’ve decided he’s a lifer,” she pointed out. “Olivia Campo. Another lifer. That’s just their way. They only want to groom and keep a few of us, but we all have to keep the pace and deal with child editors like Hardy.”

  Unlike Julia, I tried not to hate Hardy just because he was six years younger than I was. It didn’t make me feel great, but it wasn’t his fault that they had hired him to supervise a bunch of crones. I wrote him nice emails with lots of exclamation points. I tried to keep my speed Olympic and to stay calm when he edited my pieces to sound like they were written by a man from North Dakota who liked to fly-fish.

  During his second week, he emailed me and said that while I was doing a good job, “my output wasn’t there.”

  “Your goal,” he wrote, “should be an article every hour.”

  I reread the line five times, but it really did say that. “An article every hour.”

  That’s when I decided it was okay to hate him. I worked for about fourteen hours a day on average, so he wanted fourteen articles? I wondered how hard it was to get a prescription for speed. I mean, I knew speed was illegal and all, but I bet more people used it recreationally than let on. If I had some, I would just forgo sleep altogether. I would head to the gym, buzz on in to work, roller-skate across the newsroom to save time, and produce Pulitzer Prize-winning four-sentence blurbs about Twitter. And I would do it every hour.

  CHAPTER 5

  When Hardy had been our editor for a month, I had finally figured out how to make it work.

  As the trees outside in the early February snow stood cold and lifeless, I was on autopilot. I shot out of bed at 4:50 A.M. Made instant coffee to save time and started my 5 A.M. to 7 P.M. workday. I worked for two hours like a slug in my bed, got ready in twenty-five minutes, worked and groomed in the hour-long car ride to the office, and then motored on through the day. Sometimes, while spraying dry shampoo on my roots and combing my hair at a red light, I would hear my sister’s voice in my head saying, “With limp colorless hair like yours, you need daily blowouts to resemble a human being.” But now it was a big day if I used liquid shampoo. After work ended, I would quickly drop by an event, make cocktail party chatter while begging politicians to say something interesting, and then drive my jalopy home. I would try to go to bed before 11 P.M., which usually required two NyQuil with a cheap chardonnay chaser.

  It wasn’t a recipe for health, but it was a good elixir for success at the Capitolist. I was getting used to Hardy’s curt, aggressive emails and bookish edits. “This is the Style section,” I would remind him when he tried to infect my copy with the terrible plague called “lame.” After a while, he started to listen, and we found a way to tolerate each other, fourteen hours a day, six days a week.

  Saturday was mine. I had to work Sundays, but from 7 P.M. on Friday to 7 A.M. on Sunday, I got to savor sweet, sweet freedom. Sometimes I spent the night in the city at Elsa’s Logan Circle apartment. Other weekends, I convinced Elsa to come back to the town where we had shared our formative years. We would go for trail rides on the ponies I called roommates. We would have dinner at the Red Fox Inn, surrounded by old people in tweed, and then drink brandy out of my mother’s nicest glassware on her heated porch.

  On the first Friday in February, when Elsa came out to the land of the elderly to keep me company, we strayed slightly off the dirt path to a newly refurbished, very expensive inn named after a dead Confederate general and that had reopened right on the outskirts of town. Throughout our childhood, it was more or less an abandoned property where we took long walks and rode our horses semilegally. But all that had changed. A few years ago, the owners had decided to make actual money and had whipped up a classic country escape for fried city birds. It now had organic everything and a billion sommeliers and all sorts of nonsense like that.

  When Elsa and I were growing up in Middleburg, there were small bed-and-breakfasts wit
h historical plaques instead of spas and meditation rooms. Kids rode ponies in tiny Windsor checked jackets and women who filled their calendars with charity polo matches and country club round robins greeted each other in town with warm hugs. About a decade ago, developers realized that the picture-perfect Virginia postcard town where people still woke up on Sunday mornings and fox-hunted was ideal for an outside-the-Beltway getaway. So they started building. But luckily for the town beloved by people who consider jodhpurs daywear, Middleburg is home to a historical society run by retirees with a love of aesthetics and rifles. So not too much changed. The new tony hotels were hidden on acres of land and our little streets still looked like the love child of Colonial Williamsburg and Greenwich, Connecticut. Before Christmas, we paraded hunting dogs and horses in our red jackets and white gloves and the rest of the year it was pretty much the same way, minus the ode to St. Nick.

  But Goodstone Inn was the new Middleburg. A place that attracted tourists instead of residents with a love of foxhounds and Barbour jackets.

  Even though I lived a few miles away, I figured it was a perfect place for us to wrap ourselves in the amazing clothes I had got gratis from Town & Country without getting too many odd looks. We would just pretend we were out-of-towners who had come directly to hunt country from Bryant Park.

  When Elsa came over, she air-kissed me and bowed before my closet like it was the Sistine Chapel. “Ooooh! Let me wear this,” she said after she had thrown open the doors. “This was meant for me. They gave it to you, but they were actually thinking, this dress is made for an artiste!” Elsa said, ripping away a garment bag to reveal a white cashmere YSL dress inspired by Bianca Jagger.

  “You’re not an artiste. You sell the scribbles of artistes,” I replied, helping her slither into the soft dress. “You’re really a salesman.”

  “Which is an art. Trust me,” said Elsa from within the dress. “I had to sell a blank canvas that someone had urinated all over. And I did. Don’t tell me that’s not a skill.”

  I vaguely remembered all that bathroom art from my years in New York. My guess is that it probably didn’t go over very well in Washington.

  “There. It’s on. But I don’t think it will ever come off,” she said, trying to electric-slide in the dress. “Can I keep it?”

  Oh, what the hell. “Yes, of course,” I said. I would have to remember to use it as bait every time I begged her to come to Middleburg.

  Since all five feet and three inches of Elsa were dressed as a cashmere snow angel, I decided to wear Hermès orange. Tons of Hermès orange. It was the dead of winter, after all. The world needed color. In New York we would have been gleefully dividing all the free clothes that were being shipped to our office. After a shot of flaming gin and a lot of squinting, this felt almost the same.

  Our dinner at the inn was fantastic, and not just because I washed that gin shot down with half a bottle of wine. The food was delicious; it tasted as if it had come directly from the backyard, which, I learned later, it had. So we stayed and ate and loitered. We ended up at the bar, drinking far too many cocktails.

  “Do you think my boobs are too big?” asked Elsa, poking at her Victoria’s Secret miracle bra. I did.

  “I do not,” I replied. And that’s the intellectual level we maintained the whole night.

  Waiters waited on us. Busboys smiled and folded our napkins. I almost, for a few minutes, forgot that I ate most of my meals in the car.

  “The art world is fascinating,” said Elsa after I complained about how square everyone was at the List. “We had a naked sculptor carving President Lincoln out of soy margarine the other day,” she bragged. “Over four hundred people came to the gallery to see butter Lincoln. We had to bring them inside in shifts. And you know, it was very cold in there, because of the butter, I mean soy butter. We didn’t want it to melt. And they still waited, just because the butter carver was naked. This is such a prudish town. I mean, is it such a big deal to see someone naked?”

  I would definitely wait in line to see a naked soy butter carver. “Naked? Yes, very rare here. Doing an activity other than sex while naked? Even more rare. I think you’ve stumbled upon the next big thing.”

  Elsa raised her glass to me, slopping half her drink onto the bar.

  “So who bought the butter president anyway?” I asked. “I assume with a line out the door you sold it.”

  “Yeah, of course. You’re going to love this one. We sold it to PETA. You know, the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.”

  “Ha! That’s awesome. And makes perfect sense.”

  She looked down at her vibrating phone and leapt off the bar stool.

  “I have to take this call. It’s Ai Weiwei,” she declared, leaving me to Google what an Ai Weiwei was. I wanted artists in my inner circle. Sculptors, dancers, mimes. I was starting to feel very one-dimensional. The bar was pretty full, considering where we were. But hotel rates around Washington fell in the dead of winter. These, I supposed, were the penny-pinchers who didn’t mind romantic getaways in subzero weather if it meant off-season rates.

  Sitting alone at the bar, I asked the very attentive bartender for something to read while I waited for Elsa to finish her call from Beijing. He handed me a hotel brochure, which was not exactly what I was looking for, but once I saw that there were actual historic houses for rent on the property that cost over one thousand dollars a night, I was more intrigued. Some looked ready to welcome home General Lee, while others were more French country chic. There was also a fat property pig that snorted around and self-boarding stables where you could park your horse for a mere seventy-five bucks a night.

  “A lot of men,” whispered Elsa after she returned from taking the call. She inched down her neckline and smiled at no one in particular.

  The odd thing about alcohol is the way it warps time. What seemed like minutes of screaming “remember in high school when you lit your hair on fire with a homemade bong!” was actually hours. Soon we were two of six patrons facing down an impatient bartender. Elsa waved for the bill, and I watched the other patrons get the hint and prepare to go. Two women who couldn’t stop talking about spa products nodded for the check. A tall older man with a stern face and helmet hair headed for the door, phone glued to his ear.

  As he walked slowly past me, weaving through the vacated bar stools, I caught part of his conversation.

  “No, no, don’t worry. I’m not asking you to come here. I’ll meet you. Of course I’ll meet you,” he said. He moved back the sleeve of his wool blazer and looked at his watch. It looked expensive. Or at least big and shiny. “I’ll be there in ten minutes,” he said in a sweeter voice. Then a pause, followed by, “Olivia, you’re breaking up. Are you there? Are you on your way? Olivia?” He looked at his phone to see if it had cut off and then flipped it closed.

  That’s when I hit myself in the jaw with a light thwap to make sure I wasn’t having alcohol-induced hallucinations.

  As he walked calmly out of the restaurant, it took the power of seven hundred imaginary men to keep me in my seat. And not only did I stay in my seat, I attempted to continue acting normal so that Elsa, a girl who knew me very well, would not think I had morphed into a paranoid schizophrenic. Which maybe I had. Or maybe I was just very drunk.

  He had definitely said “Olivia.” I was positive. And he was in Middleburg when he said it. But Olivia was not such an unusual name. Plenty of people were named Olivia. It’s not like her name was Pig Girl or Hiddeldedee or something truly unique. And if it was the Capitolist Olivia he was talking to, so what? Maybe that man was her husband? Or father? Distant uncle? Chauffeur? As my mind raced through fifty different scenarios, I calmly asked Elsa about the weather forecast.

  Clearly I should be in movies, because Elsa did not say one word about my peculiar blend of paranoia and enthusiasm for meteorology. Instead she said, “Should we ask your mom to pick us up?” when I fell down the slate steps on the way to the parking lot.

  Yes, we should. If some
one had pulled me over and asked me to take a Breathalyzer, the thing would have gone up in flames. But I wasn’t feeling very sensible. “I promise I’ll drive slow,” I said, slurring every single word, even I. “Plus, this is a Volvo,” I said, rapping on the hood. “They use them as humvees in Sweden.” That was a total lie. But Elsa played along, probably because she was so drunk she was legally blind.

  The next day we did not go horseback riding. We sat in bed until dusk and watched nine hours of My First Home on TLC, taking swigs of Pepto-Bismol and gasping at the incredibly low price of property in Wisconsin. What I should have been doing was driving around town trying to find the man who knew someone named Olivia, but my limbs weren’t working. Instead I just thought about it until I decided that it really wasn’t worth thinking about. No one had tipped me off about the Bay of Pigs. I had just heard someone say someone else’s name.

  By Sunday, when I crawled in to work to man the desk just in case some breaking Style news happened, I had rejoined the world of sobriety. I was ready to pop out some punchy headlines. I wrote about a portly former congressman sunbathing on a rock in Mykonos. I worked on a slide show of Michelle Obama’s shoes. I propped my head on a large University of Texas mug to keep from falling asleep. It was not my mug, but I was working on Sunday and germs were the least of my problems.

  I looked up at the flat-screen TV over my desk, the one that always had to be on CNN. Every inch of me wanted to change it to the Lifetime Movie Network, but I was almost positive we did not get that channel at the office. If we did get it and I dared to watch, it was probably rigged so some alarm would go off, and I would be shot with a Taser and turned to dust. So I tried to watch CNN. The hosts were talking to a panel of distinguished guests about something incredibly boring. I listened for a few minutes, trying to figure out what it was. Money. Angry people. Lots of blame-game-playing. Ah, the debt ceiling. How fascinating. I needed some toothpicks to prop my eyelids open.