by Karin Tanabe
Olivia had never been as stupid as me or Isabelle, I was sure, and like the rest of us she was never spotted without her identifying badge and Capitolist noose. I was surprised she wasn’t wearing it to sleep, or whatever she was doing in the house just twenty-five feet in front of me.
I backed away carefully until I was, I hoped, out of earshot and then ran half a mile back to my car. I felt like a cartoon character with no knees. Riding boots, which I had stupidly forgotten to change out of, have absolutely no give, which is great on a horse and bad if you need to sprint a mile. Finally I had to bend down to loosen the laces. While I was crunched over, I saw the lights of a car coming down the road.
I immediately threw myself to the ground, which was hard and frozen. Winter, it turned out, was the wrong time for dilettante espionage. There was no foliage to hide behind. Luckily, the car drove past me, and I watched its lights move up the hill to the Bull Barn. As soon as it rounded the bend, I took off running again, jumped the fence, started my car, and headed home. I felt like a suburban mother lost in the woods in her Volvo. I also felt like an idiot. Why was I leaving? I had exactly what I was looking for just a few feet away from me, but when it came down to fight or flight, I had hobbled away in my stiff boots.
I needed time to think. I also needed a mode of transportation with better wheel traction than the Volvo. I had to back up twice and make two loud attempts to get up the last hill to my parents’ house. When I got close to the house I turned off the headlights and wheeled the car around to the barn.
Jasper was lying, abandoned, in the outside riding ring. He looked excited and geared up for Paul Revere’s midnight ride when I approached, but I had to bring him in. I brushed his coat and thought about what to do next.
It was then that I looked up and saw the camera installed in the barn. We had put it there to keep an eye on the horses, and if one was sick, to monitor it through the night. I waved my hand back and forth in front of it, and the lens moved with me.
I needed a camera.
I lay in bed as the clock crept toward 4 A.M. I was unable to do anything but sit and chew my nails off thinking about them, a United States senator on the rise and my evil colleague. What was I going to do? I couldn’t exactly sneak around like a paparazzi with a telephoto lens, could I? Or could I? We ran pictures of celebs and politicians snapped by paparazzi around town. What was the difference if I took the photo myself?
As dawn crept up on me, I reached under my bed for the box of electronics I never had time to use. I found two different iPods, three Flip cameras, a Bose flat stereo, and an alarm clock shaped like an eagle that a marine had given me after I hooked up with him in a hotel room during Fleet Week. I think he had stolen it from the hotel, but whatever. It still worked. I also had two disposable cameras containing never-printed shots from the late nineties, a jumble of cords, and one of those giant roll-up piano mats from the movie Big. But no camera. I realized I hadn’t taken anything but a cell-phone picture in the last ten years.
I needed to quickly seduce a sports photographer and borrow his camera. Or find two grand and buy one. Or rent one! Could you rent those huge things? Probably. You could rent anything. You could rent people by the hour and have sex with them. Surely I could rent a camera.
Before heading to the office just a few hours later on Sunday morning, I first went to the hotel under the pretense of an early breakfast, just me and the New York Times and my cell-phone camera. But the car was gone. I would have to wait until the next weekend. They couldn’t possibly skulk out here during the week.
Still, I checked. Every night that week I made the short drive to the east side of the hotel through private property to see if I could spot the car. I had rented a camera from B&H in New York, and with its National Geographic-style telephoto lens, I could see almost all the way to Canada. I was pretty sure they wouldn’t chance staying in the main house of the hotel, so I concentrated on the five guesthouses. But all week long, I didn’t see a single car parked in front of any of the cottages.
Thanks to my nocturnal activities, my brain now had only five hours of sleep a night to run on. I had stopped being able to process things besides basic human needs. My life was now eat, sleep, write, report, drive, lurk around the Goodstone Inn, pet horse, greet parents, repeat. What I wanted it to be was sleep eight hours, have sex with brawny man, write at normal pace, report, drive Ferrari, have someone hand me a videotape of Olivia and the senator having sex, slap them five, win Pulitzer, compete on horse in Olympics, greet parents by phone, repeat. I was very far away from the second scenario.
In my hazy state, I thought I saw a flash of Olivia’s red hair around every turn in Middleburg. Every man I saw was the senator until I got close enough to realize that my target was too short, too round, or too something else. Still, I couldn’t stop looking for them. After work, I would drive down East Washington Street and buy a few things from Baker’s general store, where I first saw Olivia. Then I would walk past the clothing and antiques shops and pretend to be taking in some air. “Refreshing!” I would exclaim as I did some deep abdominal breathing outside a completely dark, locked store. And then I would walk the main street from the Chronicle of the Horse magazine office to the Presbyterian church with the tall white spire. I would, of course, see absolutely nothing of interest. Once, in the early evening, I witnessed a small girl fall off a bike and then eat a slice of turkey that her brother had produced, unwrapped, from his pocket. It had lint on it, but it did make her stop crying. I prayed she wouldn’t get Ebola. But that was all that happened. I walked, I loitered, then I would give up, drive home, demand that my mother feed me, and fall asleep for a few hours.
The result was that I was exhausted, getting uglier by the day, and making stupid mistakes in my articles.
“What is this crap?” Hardy asked me as I was drawing a red X on my desk calendar. It was eight o’clock in the morning on the last Monday in February. I had been out looking for the senator and Olivia the night before. He looked down at his printout and read aloud: “Senator Garland and his wife, Lauren, dressed like a John Singer Sargent tableau vivant, perched casually on their leather arm hairs while the Capitolist chatted with them.”
Oh God. Had I really written that?
“Could you possibly have meant ‘armchairs’?” Hardy asked, circling and recircling my idiot typo with his red pen. “Do you know what this shows me?” he asked in his nasal voice as I tried to think up an acceptable excuse.
I dunno. That I sashay around town looking for trouble and sleep for five minutes every night before washing down three espresso shots with a Diet Red Bull every morning?
“That I made a stupid mistake that will never happen again?” I offered.
“Not at all,” he replied, rolling up the sleeves of his wrinkly yellow dress shirt. “This shows me that you rely on spell-check rather than your own editing skills.”
Was he kidding? Of course I relied on spell-check. If I didn’t use spell-check, the word Massachusetts would have been spelled Masachewsettes all my life. My generation couldn’t spell. We texted! And his generation could barely even text. They communicated via Groupons and strange holograms, as far as I could tell.
He sighed and dropped his red pen on my desk. “For you. Use the red pen and attempt to discover your inner editor,” he said, moving away. “I know you can do better.”
He was right. I could. But I needed to rack up some REM sleep if I was going to write about politicians rather than forearm fuzz. The day-to-day of my job had been nudged aside by something out of the ordinary, something that might, despite my assignment to Style, cover me in Capitolist glory. A possible affair between Olivia and the senator was a much bigger story than a Kanye West sighting at the White House or a staid couple sitting on armchairs. Why shouldn’t I concentrate all my energy on what could be one of the biggest scandals of the year?
I just couldn’t get fired or caught in the process.
I needed to relax. I needed something to
Zen me out. Something cheap and soul altering that didn’t take more than fifteen minutes. That evening, after I finished interviewing a few congressmen about their iPod playlists in the Capitol’s Speaker’s lobby, and attended a cocktail party saluting congressional pets, I decided to find peace around the domed building. “What a relaxing area!” I exclaimed to no one as I walked down the Capitol’s marble steps. I smiled weakly at the stocky security guard who moved the guard rope for me and headed down the south side of the Mall toward the Washington Monument.
It was a beautiful view, one of the best in Washington, but I wasn’t in the mood for worshiping buildings named after dead presidents. I had been working in the city for five months but I had barely done anything for myself. Every party I went to I had to cover, every person I met I had to interview. As soon as I crossed in from Virginia, I lived only for the List. I felt like seeing something that had nothing to do with the laws of the land, like a zebra, or a trapeze artist, or considering that I could see six different museums from where I was standing, maybe some art. I looked at my watch; it was a few minutes past 7 P.M. All the museums, while gloriously free of charge, would be closed. I slipped on my hat and gloves and pulled my scarf tighter around my neck. In just a few weeks the paths linking all the monuments would be covered in puffy pink cherry blossoms and people enjoying the warmth of spring, but right now, walking around in late February still felt like scurrying on frozen dead earth.
Cutting through the Smithsonian sculpture garden, I walked past a sea of illuminated bronze legs and boobs. “Rodin. Rooooodin!” I rolled the only sculptor’s name I could think of off my tongue and walked slowly through the garden of art. When I reached the end of the sculpture walk I took a deep breath and smiled. There! A four-minute walk. I was totally rejuvenated. I was ready to head back toward the Capitol and find my car when two young girls and their mother walked past me holding ice skates. Skating! I didn’t realize the skating rink was still open. That would calm my nerves. I wasn’t about to risk my life on two steel blades; whoever decided strapping knives to their feet was a good idea anyway? But I still had eleven minutes in my allotted relaxation time to kill. I could watch the kamikaze children go round and round in circles.
Walking to the far side of the rink, I placed my hands on the wall built to keep spectators off the ice and skaters on the ice and was gravely disappointed by the sight of a group of grown men in red ski parkas having a hockey shoot-out. Where were the children? The future Kristi Yamaguchis of tomorrow? Those two little girls I passed were probably crying in despair right now.
I put my hands in my pockets and watched a group of testosterone-crazed guys with hockey sticks screaming out to each other as they slapped a few pucks around. Disappointed, I checked my BlackBerry and readjusted my white cashmere beret. There was one man in a hooded Patagonia parka who was really good. He was making a series of shots from between his legs, finding the goal every time. Applause filled the area and the man next to me started whistling his approval. I turned instinctively and realized that the gentleman in question was not only a skilled whistler but incredibly handsome. Like Hollywood heartthrob handsome. With deep tan skin and thick black hair, he looked like a cross between Andy Garcia and Montgomery Clift. Or a cigar model come to life. Did men in Washington look like this? Non-Capitolist employed hockey fans, that is? He clapped his hands, covered in elegant brown leather gloves, together for warmth and smiled at me. I took a small step away from him, afraid that if I was too close I’d do something irrational like lick his beautiful face.
“That’s my friend Marty,” he said, gesturing toward the really good hockey player. “The Canadian Embassy rented the rink out tonight. Some of them are really bad, but Marty’s amazing.” Marty hit a puck with his friend’s hands covering his eyes and it went smoothly into the goal. Everyone cheered and Marty did a celebratory lap around the rink. “He’s also well aware of how amazing he is,” my gorgeous hockey fan said with a deep laugh.
It was like hearing an American version of Pavarotti speak. His voice was a song: Smooth, animated, but manly. God, he would sound amazing reciting our wedding vows. I hadn’t seen a man like this since I left New York City, and those had usually been money-grubbing dickheads. But this guy was friendly and hadn’t said the words Morgan Stanley! He was also gorgeous and just happened to be talking to sex-starved me. I had to introduce myself. Maybe get an address and some identifying information like his mother’s maiden name. No, no. Bad. Overzealous. I had to play it cool.
We watched Marty the Canadian make yet another shot and start pounding his chest in celebration. I clapped, suddenly full of light and optimism and joie de vivre. I loved hockey! What an underrated sport. What was our team in Washington called again? The Penguins? The Geese?
“He is very good!” I replied. I sounded hysterical. And loud. Why was I shouting?
The gorgeous man kindly didn’t recoil from my megaphone voice. Instead, with his straight white teeth and perfectly shaped lips, he explained that his friend had played professional hockey in Calgary before retiring and going to work at the Canadian Embassy.
“Of course,” I nodded knowingly. “I love Canada. All those lakes and moose.” Wait. Was that grammatically correct? Moose? Mooses? Meese?
Perfect Guy laughed, looked deeply into my eyes, and pointed to the rink. “Did you come here to skate? They should be off the rink soon,” he said apologetically.
“No,” I replied, shaking my head. “I just like to watch. It helps me relax.” Slick. I sounded like someone with a neurological disorder.
“Yeah,” he replied, putting his glove-covered hands in the pockets of his light gray cashmere overcoat. He turned his head away from me and looked around for his friend, who had left the rink. “I don’t skate, either. I’m from the South, so not really our thing down there. I’m actually pretty ready to grab some dinner as soon as Brian Boitano here is finished shaking a leg.”
I smiled as warmly as I could. I wanted to give off a vibe of domestic bliss, of homemade cookies and plates full of angel food cake. But maybe that wasn’t his thing. I changed my kind smile to a sexy pout. Before I could see his reaction his tall Canadian friend bounced over, having changed his skates for sneakers and smacked my future husband on the back.
“Thanks for waiting, man. I had to get that out of my system. That rink is so oppressively small, it’s hard to do anything but slap shots, but the chicks seemed to dig it.”
My husband laughed and called his friend pathetic. Funny, too! I was ready to strip off my four layers of clothes for this man. Here and now.
“Cool coat,” his Canadian friend said in my general direction. I looked down at my vintage Givenchy coat that I got into a midnight bidding war on eBay for, closed the top button, and said thanks.
“Did you have fun watching the game?” the hockey player asked me. “Enjoy my little performance?” Ew, gross. Marty the Canadian, though also pretty cute, was definitely the kind of guy who watched himself in the mirror during sex. But who was I to judge! I didn’t want to exchange saliva with him; I wanted to walk down the aisle to Vivaldi with his gorgeous friend.
“Yeah!” I replied enthusiastically. “I missed the game but I’m glad I caught the end of your shoot-out. Very cool. I need to learn more about hockey. Sport of kings.”
My new crush laughed and assured me that I didn’t have to lie. Then he put his hand on my actual shoulder and said, “She came to skate and you and your Canadian barbarians ruined her night. You should apologize to her.”
I was frozen. Could I casually just grab his hand and slip it into mine for the rest of eternity? Or just maybe place it directly on my boob? Before I could do anything, his hand was back by his side.
I assured Marty that no apology was necessary and that ice hockey was my yet to be unleashed passion. With both men laughing at my bad joke, I got ready to act like a cool, confident, with-it kind of gal and boldly introduce myself, but more of Marty’s Canadians joined them and they all sta
rted talking about the game. No one was speaking to me or introducing himself so I pulled my BlackBerry out of my coat pocket and started to scroll through my forty-six new messages. This was the moment when the gorgeous guy would break away from the group, put his hand back on my shoulder, and say, “This may sound forward, but will you marry me?”
That didn’t happen. The group of hockey players and spectators started walking away, the two men I’d been talking to gave me friendly waves of the hand and said, “Nice meeting you,” and I stood there like a jilted bride saying good night under my breath.
By the time I got the words out, the two men had their backs to me. “I didn’t catch your name,” I added softly, but they were already well out of earshot and I had a tad too much dignity to run after the dark-haired stranger, throw myself at his feet, and beg him to love me physically, mentally, and spiritually.
Who was I kidding. I didn’t have time to have a crush on someone. I certainly didn’t have time to date. I had tried logging on to some soft-core Internet porn site last Friday night but I fell asleep before I had the nerve to push the “Yes, I’m over 18” button. My sex life was pathetic.
CHAPTER 7
Painfully single and with zero weekend social obligations, I finally decided to check into the Goodstone Inn one Saturday afternoon, so that I could stalk the grounds as a paying customer. The hotel couldn’t tell me to get lost if I was pitching six hundred dollars their way to be on the property. To pay the hefty overnight fee, I sold two of my Town & Country freebie designer bags on eBay, telling myself they were last season, and made my reservation for the blue-and-white-toile-covered Hayloft suite in the main carriage house. I deserved a staycation anyway. Juggling stalking and work had worn me out, and this would be the first time in over five months I didn’t have to sleep ten feet above horses.