The List

by Karin Tanabe

  It was getting very heated, and the main camera focused tightly on the guests as they shared their thoughts. I looked down to check the emails that kept flashing into my Outlook, but someone caught my eye.

  There, on my screen talking to Candy Crowley, was the man I had seen Friday night. The man who said “Olivia” into his phone with affectionate authority. I had been completely blitzed, but that was definitely him. He had a strong Roman profile and a chin that jutted out like a rolling hill and thick dark hair graying at the temples. Like an older version of Julius Caesar with twenty more pounds on him.

  I looked at the bottom of the screen where the names of the guests ran under their talking heads. Nothing. But when he flashed on again, his name and title scrolled under him. I was looking at the face of Hoyt Stanton, the junior senator from Arizona.

  CHAPTER 6

  There is some information you need to know and some you don’t want to know. “Adrienne, your parents are actually flesh-eating coneheads” would fall into the “don’t want to know” category. “Adrienne, is that you? It’s the Virginia lottery calling. You’ve won ten thousand buckets of pure gold!” would be categorized under the “need to know immediately” category.

  I deemed “Olivia Campo may or may not be slapping the pony with the junior senator from Arizona” to be “don’t want to know” information. This was the wrong instinct, because I was a gossip columnist and that was definitely glorified gossip, but I still didn’t want to know. Because what if she was? And what if I found out and reported it and the senator from Arizona had me killed? I was far too young to be bugged, stalked, and murdered. I had never been to Bora Bora or finished In Search of Lost Time or run naked around the Washington Monument or gone skiing with Karl Lagerfeld. I had so much living to do.

  I was, of course, jumping to conclusions. I had seen Olivia skulking around a pretentious ghost town at midnight. Not a red flag. Maybe a pink flag. Then I had seen Hoyt Stanton, a United States senator, say the name Olivia into a telephone while leaving a swanky hotel bar in the same pretentious ghost town. Another pink flag. I decided to look up his family history to see if there were any Olivias floating around his Wikipedia page. None. His wife’s name was Charlotte, his sister Mary-Clare, and out of his six kids—three biological and three adopted—only two were girls, Danielle and Daisy. My mind was spinning with possibilities, and they all seemed to lead to the bedroom.

  “You seem distracted,” my mother said after dinner en famille the next Saturday night. She held on to my freshly highlighted ponytail as I finished the dishes in her hand-carved soapstone sink. “It’s not like you, you’re usually so vivacious. And you just seem a little defeated.”

  I think I had become immune to 5-hour Energy shots and extra-strength Excedrin migraine. I needed a new legal upper. Worse, my new obsession with Olivia and Senator Hoyt Stanton was exhausting me. I felt like two little incidents had suddenly stamped every corner of my mind with the words “what if?” I had never seen them together. Never even in the same room together. I didn’t know if Olivia Campo was on the other end of his phone call. But I couldn’t shake the feeling. Middleburg was too small for coincidences.

  “I’m just thinking about a few of the people from work,” I answered my mother. I reached for a handful of candy from a bowl on the counter.

  “I think you just ate soap,” she said. She was right. I had ingested a full teaspoon of lavender-scented Palmolive rather than after-dinner mints, but I was too tired to spit it out.

  “You need to stop thinking about work and start thinking about yourself,” she said. “You never go out anymore unless it’s for your job. You spend your weekends moping around this tiny old person’s town, and even your horse looks depressed. You were never like this in New York. Remember all those pictures of you in New York Social Diary and Gotham magazine? And you made that 40 Under 40 list, remember? That’s the girl I know.” She kissed me loudly on the cheek, grabbed my tired shoulders, and told me I looked hunchbacked.

  I wanted to remind my mom that in New York, my job started at 10 A.M. and not 5 A.M. That the Town & Country editors encouraged us to go out, not to become cave dwellers with female facial hair and lots of Twitter followers. Instead, I just said, “I’m still getting my legs under me.”

  Braiding my hair, she secured the end with a rubber band meant for vegetables and used a step stool to take a seat on the slightly damp counter. My mom went to Wellesley, too. She loved it. She’s on the board now and goes up every other month to help advance the elite education of women. I think she started loving me more when I decided to go there.

  “I had lunch with Vivian McLean yesterday, and she told me the most fascinating piece of information. There is a single man living in Middleburg. Not divorced, not a widower, just single and under forty. Dark hair. Cute.”

  He was definitely going to be either a riding instructor or a horse breeder.

  “He’s a riding instructor,” she said.

  “I can’t date a riding instructor!” I groaned. “He will announce that he’s either bisexual or gay-curious by the time we order a first course. Then he’ll want to borrow my clothes.”

  My mother shook her head and denied that the men in the horse world were almost always same-sex-oriented.

  “You should make his acquaintance!” she pressed. “I see thirty in your very near future. When I was thirty, I had already given birth to your sister.”

  “Well, that was a sound decision,” I said, chipping off my zebra-striped gel nail polish with a salad fork. Once, when I was seven, my mother caught me checking my sister’s head for horns. Before she could pull me away, I was positive I had found the little nubs where they had been sawed off.

  As she reshelved cookbooks and worried about her tired old celibate daughter, I sat on a bench whittled by the British a century ago and watched the fire in the kitchen fireplace start to die down.

  “It’s a small town. You’re going to run into him anyway,” said my mom, picking a stray thread off her Max Mara pants. “You might as well just meet him now. And Vivian didn’t mention anything about—”

  “Vivian McLean’s husband dresses as Princess Diana every Halloween!” I interrupted. “Princess Diana from the 1980s at that. I don’t think she’s a good judge.” I shivered, thinking about a man in a gold lamé dress and shoulder pads handing me Snickers bars all through my childhood.

  “Well, metrosexuals are all the rage. I read it in New York magazine. I don’t think you should be so closed-minded. I’ve always thought you were meant to be with a man in jodhpurs.”

  My mother actually looked hurt, and I felt a touch guilty. The woman just wanted to play Episcopalian Yenta. But a man in jodhpurs? I might as well frequent a leather bar in Tribeca to find my soul mate. I took my mother’s scheme to marry me off to Elton John as my cue to retire to the animal quarters.

  Julia was right. We were old. I had a working automobile and didn’t have to travel by horse. Maybe I should move out of Middleburg to Logan Circle. I could probably afford to live in a basement with ferocious rodents and several roommates. It would be humbling, but I currently lived with my parents. Par-ents! I felt like a forty-year-old Sicilian spinster forced to can spaghetti sauce all day to earn my room and board. Finally, my frustrated parents would marry me off to a grizzled widower. “We have to get you out of the house!” they would declare as I presented him with a dozen cans of Ragu old-world style and my child-bearing hips. Realistically, my situation was even worse. With my job, I would never have time to meet a grizzled widower.

  The Saturday after my mother tried to set me up with a gay man, Elsa called to beg me to come to her gallery on Fourteenth Street for an opening with too many people and not enough wine. I declined. I had trouble going out these days if I couldn’t find an angle to write a piece for the List. Who needed a social life? Or single men to meet? I was too tired to talk after most days anyway, so my future partner would have to have a fetish for girls with bags under their eyes and
BlackBerrys glued to their faces. In case it came down to him, I hoped this was what Vivian McLean’s homosexual riding instructor was looking for in a bride.

  With the joy of a work-free night ahead of me and a feast of lite beer and candy at my disposal, I opened the drawers of my white dresser and rearranged my sweaters, folding them all in seven moves like the girls who had run the Town & Country closet did. I emailed an ex-boyfriend from my magazine days (now probably married to a Russian supermodel, I speculated) and then I replaced all of my beech-wood shoe trees with new hand-carved cedar shoe trees that I had ordered with Amazon’s handy one-click service while conducting a phone interview last week. I felt like a domestic anorexic, trying to bring order to my chaotic life by making everything look nice.

  Three hours later, still pumped up from wet-dry Swiffering every corner of the apartment and wrapping all my silverware in velvet pouches, I put on a pair of old muddy paddock boots, my thick winter riding coat, earmuffs, and gloves and headed downstairs to see if my horse, Jasper, was asleep. Horses are like Capitolist workers, only dozing for about three hours a night, so he was most likely awake.

  When I was a kid, my mom made me put my arm in a chestnut mare’s mouth to prove her contention that horses were gentle as kittens and I didn’t need to be afraid. The horse bit me and I had to get a tetanus shot. But I got over my fear and spent many summer nights with my head on one of our horse’s stomachs while it was lying down in its stalls. Payton used to say that I was going to die, squished by a thousand pounds of animal flesh. She said that if I died, she wouldn’t care at all, and that she had already had a draftsman come up with plans to turn my bedroom into a nightclub. But I was never squished.

  When I walked through the powder-coated fir doors, I saw that I wouldn’t get to listen to an animal’s rhythmic heartbeat tonight. All ten horses were still standing. Some were drowsy, with their heads falling below their withers, but Jasper was wide awake. The barn was flooded with moonlight, and I didn’t have to turn on a single lamp to throw a bridle on Jasper and lead him out to pasture.

  A few years after I was born, my dad, who grew up on a horse farm outside Charlottesville, Virginia, decided to take a break from his big job lobbying for Boeing and Lockheed to get back to his roots and raise horses in Middleburg. Much to everyone’s surprise, he never went back to K Street full-time.

  While Payton had very successfully devoted her life to horses, like my dad, the hundreds of thousands of dollars he had spent on my young riding career had resulted in me pulling my horse out at midnight while drinking a Bud Light Lime. I finished my beer, put the empty aluminum bottle on a fence post to pick up later, and pulled myself onto Jasper’s bare back. My arms shook and he moved a few feet, leaving me in a defeated pile. But my second try got me on.

  Riding bareback was hard. Saddles have been around since 800 B.C.; why exactly was I not using one? When Jasper got into a slow trot, I leaned my face against his loose mane, held on, and remembered why.

  I had no plans to leave the riding ring or to do more than a few loops around in the moonlight, but as soon as I saw the faint outline of the Blue Ridge Mountains jutting up in the light, I knew where I had to go. I just couldn’t get there easily on a horse.

  From my parents’ house, it was possible, with a lot of illegal trespassing on property owned by the rich and angry, to take Snake Hill Road to the Goodstone Inn. That’s where I had seen the senator say Olivia’s name in the bar, and that could have been where she was going to or coming from the Thursday night I had seen her on the road—there was nothing nice open in Middleburg at that hour except hotels.

  I hadn’t thought of it until now, but Goodstone screamed, “Welcome, adulterers with discerning taste!” The staff was practically invisible, and along with a few hotel rooms there were those cozy cabins sprinkled around the sprawling property. If the senator were staying in one, Olivia wouldn’t even have to walk through the lobby of the hotel to meet him. She could just drive straight up the hill with the flower beds and the organic vegetable garden, park next to his cabin, and join him there, totally unseen. It was a perfect place for enjoying life and lies, getting away and getting it on, undisturbed by indiscreet staff and inquisitive guests. If you had seven hundred dollars a night to spend, that is, which Stanton definitely did. Wikipedia had enlightened me to the fact that he was not one of those lawmakers who slept on a cot in his office to pinch pennies. Stanton came from a family of politicians and entrepreneurs with plenty of money.

  I knew the area around Goodstone very well. The hotel had been remodeled only a few years ago. Before there was nothing but the stone carriage house, and we used to ride our horses on the empty hills and watch the sun set over the rolling mountains. The owner didn’t care if we trespassed back then, mostly because he couldn’t see us. But even in its new form, the property still had 250 acres around it, now dotted with luxury accommodations.

  I jumped off Jasper’s smooth back, took his bridle off, and climbed into my old reliable car. The radio started loudly blaring a love songs and dedications show, which I silenced immediately with my fist. I got back out of the Volvo to wipe some frost off the windshield with my coat sleeve, looked up at my parents’ dark house, and hopped back in before the car iced up again. After ten minutes of driving on land more suited to an ATV than a station wagon, I could see the low stone fence that surrounded the sprawling estate. Thanks to that drunken night at Goodstone with Elsa, I had a decent sense of the property’s houses. Of the hotel’s five cottages, I deemed the antebellum Spring House and the colonial-style Manor House too big for two. Maybe Olivia and Stanton had a four-bedroom minimum for their sexual escapades, but that sounded a little nuts, almost as nuts as my driving a Volvo to a remote hotel to see if my colleague was naked and upside down. Scanning the area from inside my now warm car, I set my sights on the brown and white Dutch Cottage, the French Farm Cottage, and the red Bull Barn.

  I parked the Volvo and walked the remaining hundred yards to the stone fence. I gripped my keys tightly in my left hand as the freezing cold air of late February burned my lungs. I needed to put my suspicions to rest so I could reclaim my sanity and devote every brain cell to becoming a star Capitolist reporter.

  But what exactly was my plan? The cottages I wanted to see were, according to the brochure I had read at the bar, a ten-minute walk, on private property, from the main house. And all I had come up with if I got caught was to say that I was just arriving. So what if it was almost 1 A.M., I smelled like horse, and was on foot with no bags? It would cost me a minimum of four hundred dollars just to check in, but who would arrest a paying guest? I could say I had just walked on in and was traveling light.

  Trying to look confident and not like a trespasser on a mission, I headed to the Dutch Cottage first. All the lights were off, and there were no cars out front. On nervous legs, I walked about four hundred yards to the French Cottage. Before I got very close, I could tell that there was at least one light on. I felt elated. It could be them. But when I got closer, I saw that the car parked outside had Massachusetts plates. Unless Olivia had decided to head north and canoodle with Senator Scott Brown, a much sexier choice, I doubted that she was inside.

  I prayed that the rolling hills weren’t also covered in surveillance cameras, and walked over to my last option. I reminded myself that there was a huge chance they were not there. I had never seen them at the inn together, and the senator probably had to return to his home state and put on the good-husband act sometimes. Or, even worse, they could have been in one of the private rooms inside the main carriage house, which meant I was screwed. Short of breaking and entering, I would never see them there. Outside, on these farm hills, I wasn’t really breaking or entering anything. Wasn’t it really all God’s country, regardless of ownership? I decided that was my Plan B argument. Religious zealot out for a stroll.

  I stopped in my lawbreaking tracks when I got close to the Bull Barn. Parked outside the brick red building was the white BMW 650i Co
upe I had seen Olivia reclining on weeks ago. It was the same car, I was sure. It had Washington, D.C., plates and the outside was meticulously clean.

  Crouching down by the wooden fence surrounding the house, I waited. I didn’t know exactly what for, just something. But ten minutes later, nothing had happened. I was too scared to approach the house. I had read Senator Stanton’s bio, and the odds of his having a large gun were 100 to 0. What if he went insane and shot me in the face? Or what if Olivia just took a fire poker and beat me to death and then tossed my body into a ravine? There were clearly no cameras out here, or I would already be in lockup at the Loudoun County jail.

  So instead of walking to the house, I crawled quietly over to the car. It gleamed in the light of the full moon, as did, presumably, my skulking, shuddering body.

  The front seats were pristine. Not a Styrofoam cup or gum wrapper to be seen. But the light beige leather-back seats were a mess. There were clothes piled up, a red knit throw blanket, an old-fashioned picnic basket, and a few books scattered around. I saw the collected works of Muriel Spark and felt immediately violated. I loved Muriel Spark, and I didn’t think her work belonged in a car that most likely housed Senator Stanton and Olivia’s adventures in oral sex. There were also some boring-looking hardcover biographies. I was trying to read the titles without getting too close to the car when I saw something so identifying that there could no longer be any doubt that it was either Stanton’s or Olivia’s car. Under Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Team of Rivals was the neck string of a Capitolist entry pass. I couldn’t see the badge, which was trapped under the book, but I saw the navy blue satin lanyard, stamped with the paper’s logo, that we were all required to wear when we were in the building.

  I had changed mine to Hermès orange leather the first week, and Isabelle had ripped it off my neck like it was a venomous cobra. “You can’t do that!” she warned. “You won’t be seen as a team player. Everyone wears the Capitolist lanyard. You have to, or they’ll immediately judge you and you’ll get stuck covering holiday parties at the Office of Waste Management. Take my word for it,” she had said gravely. “I once used one I had from the Olympics, and Julia made me throw it away. She saved me.” Afraid of getting the boot for individual expression, I had switched back immediately.