by Karin Tanabe
I was prepared. I had a camera. I had a dog-eared copy of Photography for Dummies, and I had a lot of tight black clothing and a pair of gray running shoes. I had also slapped some duct tape on my conscience to keep it from convincing me not to meddle in the affairs of others. That was basically the definition of reporting—meddle, pry, find dirt, report—and I was a reporter. It’s no wonder politicians always bitch and moan about the mainstream media. But I was part of it, and I wasn’t going to ignore the biggest lead of my extremely short career.
I felt skittish but ready for anything. Except an Olivia sighting.
She had been out of the office almost every day in March, spending all her time traveling with the president or following his every move at the White House, so when I sat down at my desk on Friday morning and saw that she was across the hall, right in front of me, I felt immediately ill.
I was petrified. Was it possible that she knew I lived in Middleburg and was having me watched by a private investigator? I looked at her out of the corner of my dry, tired right eye, but she wasn’t paying any attention to me. She was busy reporting, which sounded a lot like screaming “fuck” into the telephone over and over again. Maybe she was a warden before she became a journalist.
“Could she shut the fuck up with her fuck-yous,” Isabelle said, looking up at Olivia. “She acts like she’s the only person in this newsroom. And every time she screams ‘fuck’ I’m forced to look up and see her pale, angry little face.”
“Wear headphones,” said Alison in her signature pinstripes without looking up at us.
“You’re wearing headphones, and you can still hear us,” said Isabelle. “What she needs to do is shut up. She always talks like that. And you want to know why?”
None of us answered. Everyone else because they didn’t really care, and me because I was knocked mute with fear that Olivia could hear us.
“Because that’s how the guys talk. That’s how Upton talks, and Marcus Isaac, the only person in here with a Pulitzer. Two actually. She’s such a pathetic emulator.”
“It’s not just her,” said Libby. “All the women with good salaries here act like men. They curse like men, dress like men, and have banished all pastel colors and emotions.”
“Olivia’s the worst offender,” said Isabelle. Worst offender or not, Olivia certainly didn’t sound like a girl who was trying to keep a low profile because she was having a torrid affair with a senator.
Libby nodded, still messaging a source on Gchat. “You’re right. She screams like a frat boy all the time but I think she does more TV hits than any other girl in this place. Did you see her on Andrea Mitchell yesterday? She wore all beige. Head to toe. She looked weirdly naked.” Libby, like a good East Coast prep, was wearing a party of pastels. “Although she wore that twisty evil sorceress necklace she always has on, too. So, naked except for a symbol of darkness around her chicken neck—good look.”
“You know what’s sad?” said Isabelle, moving past Olivia’s questionable wardrobe choices. “There are barely any female reporters here to look up to and say, ‘That’s it. I want to be her. The reason I’m working this hard is to get her job.’ I mean, all the senior reporters are guys.”
That was true. There were a few senior female editors, not many, about three out of fifteen, but as high-ranking reporters went, there were almost none.
“Olivia’s a senior reporter,” I pointed out.
“That’s the point,” said Alison, crossing her thin legs. “Haven’t you been listening to us? She’s not human. She’s a cyborg and you can’t actually look up to her.”
Julia looked at all of us disapprovingly. “Why are we wasting our breath on her? Could one of you please file something? The page hasn’t moved in forty minutes, and you know if five more minutes go by we’re going to get a bitchy Hardy email.” We all looked over in panic at his empty desk. Lucky for us, he was working from the Capitol that day.
“I have something on Ludacris calling the Tea Party racist,” I said quickly.
“And I have something on Kelsey Grammer saying he loves the Tea Party,” added Alison.
We all wrote articles in silence, trying to stagger them so that Hardy had a steady flow for the next hour. When I finished my Ludacris piece and sent it off to our child editor, I walked to the bathroom with Isabelle, doing my best not to look in Olivia’s direction. I didn’t have any hard evidence of her wrongdoing—just my gut and all those pink flags—but I was still afraid she could see suspicion and curiosity painted all over my face.
“I’ve never even spoken to Olivia,” I told Isabelle as we washed our hands. “Actually, she spoke at me once, but that doesn’t really count.”
“You’re missing nothing. You haven’t forgotten that she stole all my notes and had me banned from CNN for life?”
“That was horrible,” I said, remembering Isabelle’s flood of tears.
“And for some reason, she’s a senior White House reporter even though she’s a whopping twenty-eight. She worships herself and has somehow convinced Upton and Cushing to worship her, too. I once saw her reading Machiavelli’s The Prince, if that tells you anything.”
I laughed and squirted a quarter-sized puddle of Purell into each of my hands.
“Why do you know her so well?” I asked quietly when we were back at our desks. If there was one thing Isabelle had zero tolerance for, it was fake niceness. I could string together compliments about terrible people all day, but if Isabelle hated you, she looked right at you and said, “Stop talking, I hate you.”
“I don’t know her well, but when I first came here they tried us both out on the lobbying beat and we shared an editor. She convinced the editor that I was the worst thing that could happen to lobbying since Jack Abramoff. I was off the beat in two weeks, and she got moved back to the White House beat and promoted. Seriously. I heard her tell our editor that I was an incompetent fool who had trouble spelling my own name and should be moved to the Style section. She said ‘I can’t work with her, and you shouldn’t have to, either.’ ”
I wouldn’t have believed it elsewhere, but this was the List, where bad-mouthing of colleagues to one’s boss was standard.
Isabelle handed me a Diet Coke from the enormous stash she kept in her filing cabinet.
We both kept our eyes on Olivia gripping her phone to her frowny face. “I don’t give a shit if this information is embargoed. You said you would embargo it until noon, and now you’re saying four P.M.? I have all of it to the copy desk already, and it can’t change. You can take it up with Upton if you have a problem.” She disconnected her phone call with her index finger and immediately started dialing another number.
Isabelle brushed a few crumbs off her desk. “The thing I never understood about Olivia is how she got here in the first place. She was a metro reporter at a local paper in El Paso. Local paper! I don’t get the jump. It’s like she went from PTA president to secretary of state in under a week.”
“But she’s good at her job, isn’t she?” I asked.
“Only because she’s a ruthless, unrelenting bitch,” said Isabelle. “Girls like that are always good at their jobs.”
I spent my afternoon writing articles and cowering, trying not to look at Olivia. After four hours, I concluded that she was born without a bladder, since she never got up to go to the bathroom. Her long, stick-straight red hair hung around her head like a curtain of fire. It wasn’t yellowy red like my mother’s shoulder-length bob. It was a hot red. She dressed badly and somewhat seductively at the same time. Her blazer looked cheap, but her shirt fit very snugly and attractively, even if it was badly ironed and fading around the cuffs and collar. And she was always wearing that knotted silver necklace. I was dying to stand up and scream, “Are you having sex with Senator Stanton? Are you, are you, are you?” But of course I didn’t. Instead I listened as she yelled, “President’s trip to Iraq? Of course I’m covering!” into her phone at a decibel usually reserved for air raids. Finally I turned my computer o
n its pivot and didn’t dare look in her direction for the rest of the afternoon.
I wrote articles. Every hour I shot another piece to Hardy. They were short, and some were terribly boring, but all he seemed to want was quantity so that’s what he got. In between my seventh and eighth piece of the day, I allotted myself ten minutes of Google stalking to attempt to find the man from the skating rink. I had nothing on him, but Google knew all, right? I entered “tall, dark hair, gray coat, Canadian Embassy, hockey.” I got a series of pictures of toothless hockey players wearing maple leaves. So I tried, “hot hunk, ice skating, brown gloves, thick hair,” and got pictures of the fabulously flamboyant Johnny Weir. Our road to matrimonial bliss was not going well. I would just have to go with plan B: find Marty at the Canadian Embassy, call him, and ask him who his hot friend was. There was no way in hell I would actually go through with plan B, but I liked pretending that I was the kind of girl who would do that. Instead, I put my courage elsewhere. I was going to the Good-stone Inn with a camera strapped to my face and I was not going to leave until I had something.
Before I left work that Friday night, Julia shoved a red folder of printouts into my bag. “From my realtor,” she said, putting her arm around my shoulders. “He too would like you to join us in the adult world. It’s one where we cohabitate with spouses, boyfriends, maybe a friend or two, but not our parents. Try it. You might like it.”
I was being property-bullied.
The folder contained pictures and floor plans for apartments, all on Capitol Hill. However much Julia moaned and groaned about the List, she lived and played in the land of the wonks. She liked being surrounded by people stamped with RNC and DNC. The men she dated worked in politics, all her friends were high-powered Hill flacks, and she didn’t really mind at all. A quick glance at the apartment descriptions she had given me suggested that she didn’t mind because she was making way more money than I was. Hired a few months after the paper launched, she had started when they were shelling out the big bucks to bring people in, before the paper was a big name and prestige was the largest part of the compensation package. To bring me in, they just reached under their couch cushions for some change, threw in a 401(k), and called it a day. The only way I could live in Julia’s apartments of choice was if I brought five of my closest friends with me. We could each sleep on a yoga mat. It would be charming.
Making sure that the papers didn’t fall out everywhere, I hugged Julia good night, thanked her for her help, and pushed the down button to call the elevator. Even though it was well past normal working hours, the garage was still packed with cars. The Capitolist had to be one of the only offices in America where the employees didn’t rush out when the clock struck 6 P.M. on Friday. Or 7 P.M. It wasn’t until eight o’clock that people started to trickle out.
Listening to my heels click on the cement, I walked to the purple section of the garage where I usually parked. It wasn’t very close to the elevators, but I didn’t exactly drive a car I wanted to show off to my peers.
I was ten cars away from the Volvo when I heard footsteps behind me. Having been raised by two paranoid parents who gave me bear spray before I went to college in one of the wealthiest suburbs in New England, I stopped walking, turned around slowly, and stopped dead. It was Olivia Campo and Justin Cushing. They were walking in stride and smiling. Actual smiles. I didn’t know Justin Cushing approved of smiles.
I turned around before I looked creepy but heard her say, “Good night, Justin,” and then the sound of him beeping his car open. By the time he started his engine, I realized that Olivia had parked her shiny, perfect automobile in the row behind mine. Why would she park in the purple section? She had a nice car! Everyone at the List knew that all the badly paid reporters parked their tin cans in the purple section and the well-paid employees, like Justin Cushing and Olivia, parked their much nicer cars in the green section. I had seen Olivia’s car in green before. Was she doing this to toy with my mind? Maybe she really had seen me that night. Maybe now she was going to assassinate me in the parking garage and pop my lifeless body into my trunk.
I could hear the click of her thick, practical heels and was going to jump in my car to make a getaway, but I took three deep breaths like Dr. Phil always suggested and turned around. Olivia was standing next to her white BMW, keys in hand.
“Nice car,” I said nervously. She didn’t turn around. “Nice car,” I said loudly. This time my words echoed through the parking lot. She turned around and faced me, startled to hear my voice.
“A 650i coupe. The most recent model, right?”
Olivia frowned at me but lowered her left hand, which was holding her keys.
“Why do you know that?” she asked with frustration in her voice. “Are you some kind of weird motorhead?”
Was I a what? “No,” I replied. “It just says so on the back of your car.” Olivia realized I was right and scowled. “Ha!” she said sarcastically, then lifted her keys again and beeped the doors open.
“I’m kidding,” I said, smiling and praying I didn’t sound like a girl with plans to stalk her that weekend. “My friend has the same one. Drives like a dream.”
“Right, well now you really sound like a motorhead,” Olivia offered up while opening her door. She looked at my car, a Wellesley College sticker still stuck to the back window, and smirked. “Have a great weekend,” she said in a superior voice as she climbed into her car, then started the heavy German engine.
We had spoken. And not just Olivia barking at me. I had started the conversation and momentarily gotten her to feel like a moron. I wasn’t sure how I felt—it was a strange mix of nerves, panic, and even a little confidence—but suddenly Olivia seemed less like an unapproachable monarch who ruled the newsroom with a translucent fist and more like a woman, my exact same age, whose career I could potentially ruin.
I threw the folder from Julia in the back of my crappy car, among the empty water bottles, articles that were no longer relevant, and a smorgasbord of beauty products, and jumped in the driver’s seat. So my car wasn’t made in the last decade. It still got me from point A to point B. “Don’t mind that wench,” I said to the car, patting the steering wheel, and headed home.
I spent what was left of Friday night studying a map of the inn and comparing it to the Google Earth view. When I felt as if I could confidently crawl around the place in the dead of night, I switched to Googling Senator Stanton. I’d been doing it for weeks now, but every time I entered his name into the search engine, I was sure I would find something that I didn’t see before. As usual, there were many photos, with many American flags. Some were with his constituents, others with his wife and handful of children. He had the Internet presence of an upstanding family man and a devoted public citizen. Not one skeleton in his data closet. He hailed from a political family, married his college sweetheart, and had six children, three of them adopted. He graduated from Arizona State University and Yale Law and by all accounts lived a straight and narrow life. His Twitter account was policy and Bible verses in 140 characters or less. If you agreed with his politics, there was nothing wrong with Senator Hoyt Thomas Stanton.
An affair, if he was having one, would signal a major character flaw. He wasn’t shipping arms to Iran or embezzling government funds away from elementary education, though, so I didn’t feel a patriotic obligation to report out his story. At this point, it was mostly just curiosity, especially because it involved one of my most self-righteous colleagues. And if I was right, it could break his career and her career, but it would make mine. I wasn’t proud of the fact that bouncing up the Capitolist ladder interested me, but it did. If I was going to put in the same crazy hours as everyone else, I wanted to feel like I was part of the team, not riding the bench all season. I wanted Upton to say, “We’ll talk about this at lunch,” and walk to my car with Justin Cushing. A pay raise wouldn’t hurt, either.
• • •
“You’re going hunting?” My father lowered his newspaper on Saturday
morning and looked at me like I was a hot-blooded gun nut. “Since when do you hunt?”
Getting to the Goodstone should have been easy, but I had a few hurdles to bounce over going a mile down the road, and a little white lie was part of it. So I told my dad that I was getting the guns and going hunting.
My father was kind of like an accidental rich person. He never cared about making money or having money; he just happened to have a lot because he worked as a big-time lobbyist and he inherited barrels full from his dad. He wore old jeans, thick flannel work shirts, and cotton sweaters from L.L. Bean, drove a pickup, bought horses, and used the rest of his cash to keep my mother happy. I hadn’t had much time with him since he came back from Argentina, as he was always outside and I was always inside the Capitolist, but I liked being able to see him from my window when I got home at night. My dad was the family compass, steady and dependable. He was also eminently practical and not loving my fake hunting excursion.
I had decided I couldn’t take my temperamental old Volvo to the Goodstone Inn on Saturday because Olivia had stared it down in the parking garage at Capitolist headquarters. My mother’s cherry-red SUV was the most unsubtle color on the planet, so I nixed her car, too. My father had a 1967 Mercedes convertible and a Toyota pickup truck. I went with the pickup. It would get me through the mud and might even look like it belonged to a grounds worker.
“When is the last time you fired a gun?” he said, grilling me on my crazy lie. “I took you girls a few times when you were kids. I remember Payton being a very good shot, but you, you decapitated a snowman. Do you remember that? You cried. Payton then ate what was left of the head lying on the ground, and you cried some more. Now you’re telling me you’re going hunting?”