The List

by Karin Tanabe

  He pulled her away from the window and pushed her playfully, presumably onto the bed. Just like that, they were out of my line of sight. I cursed under my breath and let the camera hang around my neck. My arms were shaking from nervousness, guilt, excitement, and the weight of the long, heavy telephoto lens.

  I waited twenty minutes for them to come back to the window, but no one came. Creeping on all fours through the grass, my camera in the bag again, I made my way around to the glass double doors that opened into the bedroom. They were covered in gauzy white curtains, moving slightly in the breeze. Maybe, if I timed it just right, I could snap while they moved and get something.

  Stomach to the grass, I got out the camera and started snapping. I was afraid to check the photos in the camera’s LCD screen, for fear of the bright light shining through the darkness. With every rustle of the curtain, I took pictures in the largest format I could. Somewhere in those images, there had to be something I could zoom into.

  And then I saw flesh, just for a second, and clicked as fast as I could, like an aerial photographer trying to beat the clouds.

  It was almost three o’clock in the morning when their bedroom light turned off. The rest, if more was happening, would be off the record. I got up to leave, but I was almost sure I had it. I put my camera back in the bag on top of my press pass, strapped it all tightly to my body, and started running. My legs moved quickly, muscle memory guiding them through the field. Everything felt disconnected. My body and mind, what I had just done, it was all so far away from who I used to be and what I had been raised to do. But I made it to the parking lot, where I jumped into my father’s truck. A change of clothes and a more normal-looking bag were awaiting me there. I couldn’t exactly walk into the hotel in the middle of the night dressed like a ninja. I might as well just write the word sketchy on my forehead. So I slipped on nice jeans, a more formal coat, and a pair of gold ballerina flats, to make it look like I had been out for a night on the town, and shoved the camera and backpack into a battered Louis Vuitton bag with a zipper. I brushed my hair, put on lipstick, and jumped out of the Toyota truck looking very little like the girl who had stepped into it five minutes before.

  I nodded to the night guard at the front desk and took the stairs up to the Hayloft suite two at a time, closing the door behind me and locking it while my lungs caught up with the rest of me. Rushing to the laptop I had left lying on the bed underneath the blue and white slanted ceiling, I attached a wire to the camera, labeled the photos “The Bull Barn,” and uploaded them. I password-protected the file, emailed it to myself, and downloaded it onto an external hard drive. Even if the entire state of Virginia was suddenly firebombed, these photos would exist somewhere.

  I poured the rest of the bottle of Prosecco into a water glass and slurped the warm wine into my cold body. Fortified, I pulled up Photoshop and got ready to zoom into the dark images.

  Thanks to the light inside the house, they were much clearer than I had expected. I pulled up the series of shots I took with the curtains blowing, and even without zooming in, they spelled career ruin. The senator was lying in bed with a sheet wrapped around parts of him. But not the right parts. Olivia, completely naked except for the small necklace she always wore, was next to him. He had his face on her breasts, her neck, her ears.

  I clicked through the pictures again and again on my laptop. I was a voyeur, the kind of reporter everyone hated, sitting alone in Middleburg looking at the annihilation of their professional, and probably personal, lives.

  I resaved the images five different ways and shut down my computer. I pulled the covers over me and held the silver laptop to my chest. I fell asleep hugging a thousand-dollar machine filled with ruin.

  CHAPTER 8

  I had always hated starting Monday mornings with a sleep debt, but that’s how it was every week at the Capitolist. You could do nothing all weekend but pop Ambiens and clock sixteen hours of REM a night, and you would still wake up on Monday feeling exhausted. It was like chasing a hundred-pound Kenyan man in a marathon. Knock yourself out: you could never catch up.

  And if there was ever a week where I wanted to start off shiny as the North Star, it was this one. It was White House Correspondents’ Dinner week.

  Attendees dubbed the dinner “Washington prom,” and society journalists called it “hell week.” What sounded like one night of handshakes and forced conversation was actually twenty-five parties in six days. The twenty-four-hour news cycle and the national obsession with celebrity had turned the “dinner” into a weeklong A-list circus. Hundreds of politicians turned out. Handfuls of celebrities flew in. Media outlets tried to one-up each other with famous guests. The president got roasted and then got his turn to bash the press. Comedians, cynics, critics, and crashers all exchanged business cards, and a million flashbulbs went off to record it all. Everyone drank heavily for a week, either to celebrate or to cope.

  It should have been fun. Or at least that’s what I thought when I was told we would be covering it. “Oh, fun!” I yelped. My colleagues looked at me like I was cheering over a pelvic exam. “It’s hell,” said Libby. “You have to work twenty-four-hour days for the entire week. And then you get zero comp time.”

  “But I thought it started Thursday?”

  “The good parties start Thursday. The bad parties start Tuesday,” said Libby, as if it were as obvious as pairing peanut butter and jelly. “And we have to cover those, too.” Her mouth already starting to twitch in frustration. “I can’t believe I’m doing this again. I swore I would only cover this shitfest once, and here I am, back for a third. God, get me out of here.” She pulled a small rubber bear out of her Kate Spade bag and started squeezing it. “Don’t judge my stress bear,” she said curtly when she caught me eyeing it.

  “It sounds really fun,” I said as she headed back to her desk. It also sounded like the one place I was sure to see both Olivia and Senator Stanton. Not having an intimate tête-à-tête, I imagined, but at least in the same building. I hadn’t glimpsed them together since the night I saw them enacting May-December passion at Goodstone and while I had amazing pictures, I needed the story to go along with them. And I knew there had to be a story. I wasn’t about to publish the photos and let someone else get the scoop; I wanted my hands on the whole thing.

  Scurrying up to us like a man whose pants had caught fire, Hardy said, “Everyone, executive conference room, now. Let’s work out all the details of this week. People are expecting a lot from us, and we’re going to exceed all expectations. We’re going to cover everything, from the moment the first door is opened on Tuesday to the last mimosa at Sunday brunch. Game faces go on now. Right now. Say goodbye to that grin, Adrienne Brown. Let’s move.”

  “This from a man who defines ‘party’ as two people and a bottle of O’Doul’s,” grumbled Julia as we followed Hardy.

  The five of us grabbed our Capitolist-stamped pens and notepads and followed Hardy to the glass-walled room, a squad of well-groomed females on a mission. We blended into the newsroom like transvestites at the Iowa State Fair. I smiled at two grimacing energy reporters as we headed down the long hallway with the smooth blue rug. They looked like they had just drunk a combination of poison and frustration.

  “Why are you so nice to them?” Julia hissed at me.

  “I don’t know. I don’t want them to hate me.”

  She laughed and put her arm around my shoulders. “Haven’t you learned not to care about anyone but the girls in our section yet?”

  Hardy was waiting outside the room as a meeting finished up. It was the White House team’s weekly rundown, and Olivia and her cascade of red hair were sitting right in the middle. A self-important smirk hovered on her pale face. No Olivia sightings for days and now she was around every bend. Well she could smirk all she wanted, I had Olivia porn on my hard drive.

  I slowed down, no longer nervous at the sight of her, but she didn’t even notice us. She looked aggravated, as usual. She was taking notes in a weathered
spiral notebook with a Montblanc fountain pen, the fluorescent lights dancing off its slender form.

  “Does Olivia come from money?” I whispered to Julia as we watched her put away her drugstore notebook and very expensive writing implement.

  “I don’t know. Some, I guess. I think her dad’s a dentist in Texas. If you haven’t noticed, she has really good teeth. I bet they’re all fake. Probably made of marble.” The reporters, considered the best in the newsroom, gathered their things and stomped to the door, while we, with our shiny hair and significantly lower BMIs, just stood there and watched.

  “Why do you ask?” said Julia, uncapping her chewed-up Bic pen with her teeth.

  “Because that was a Montblanc skeleton pen she was writing with. They only made three hundred and thirty-three total, and they cost about fifty grand.”

  “You lie!” hissed Julia, pressing her nose up to the glass so she could get a better look. “You have to be wrong.”

  “I’m not. My boss at Town & Country had one. He wore it on a platinum chain around his neck. But he wasn’t stupid enough to write with the thing. It’s like making your to-do list with a Mercedes.”

  Our curious eyes followed Olivia and her five-figure pen out of the room. She and the other White House reporters marched like soldiers back to their desk, oozing a fierce pride. The fact that they had White House hard passes around their necks was as coveted in Washington as a Harry Winston necklace was in New York.

  “Get in the room, ladies.” Hardy cut our curiosity short. It was time to talk about the party of the year.

  Assigning events, Hardy got to me last. He said, “Adrienne. You have Quinn Gillespie on Tuesday; Washington Life on Wednesday; MSNBC and Fox News on Thursday; Capitol File and the Atlantic on Friday; red carpet, the pre-parties, the dinner, the Funny or Die party, and Vanity Fair party on Saturday; and the McLaughlin brunch on Sunday.”

  He ran his short fingers through the black sponge he called hair, looked at my stunned face and the shocked faces around me, and announced, “Well, that’s about everything. Oh, and of course we will still start the page at five A.M. like we always do. That can’t change just because we have a few things to attend to in the evenings. And don’t forget, we have the paper pages to fill, too. I’ll have a little additional editorial help here, but with five of you on the street, you should be absolutely fine.” He stared at us—five women who woke up before the sun did, curled our eyelashes, read hundreds of pages, glued our faces to Twitter, and managed to write articles we didn’t mind having our names attached to. He shook his head, put his arms out like a baseball umpire, and said, “Adjourned.”

  “You have Vanity Fair,” said Alison as we walked back to our desks. “That’s the best one. I covered it last year, and Sting tried to hook-up with me in the bathroom.”

  “Why were you with Sting in the bathroom? Drugs?” I asked. Drug addiction would actually explain a lot about Alison.

  “Are you crazy? I was trying to get a quote.”

  “In the bathroom?”

  “Sure. What the hell.”

  Wonderful. Noted. Follow all celebrities at all times, even into bathrooms or basements, into torture chambers or off of cliffs.

  When I got back to my desk, one of the paper’s videographers was waiting for me, spinning around in my high-backed mesh desk chair. He was assigned to be my red carpet cameraman so that we could co-post our clips on E!’s website.

  “Okay, so what’s the deal. What time do we have to be there on Saturday?” I asked him as he rapped his fingers on my desk to show he was annoyed with my five-second tardiness.

  Simon was the youngest of the young video guys. He smiled and said, “Noon.”

  “Noon! How can that be? Doesn’t the event start at seven P.M.?” I asked. He must have spent his morning drinking cough syrup.

  “Yes. But if we want to get any interviews at all, we have to claim our space in the front row on the red carpet at noon.” He touched some swirly-whirly device on the small camera he was holding and looked up again. He eyed my Phillip Lim dress and Giuseppe Zanotti platform gladiator heels and said, “You should probably wear comfortable shoes. But you’ll be on camera, too, so, well, up to you.”

  On camera? Comfortable shoes? Those words went together like “North Korea. Luxury vacation.” I was going to wear the highest, most expensive shoes I could find. If I had to kick them off and hang out barefoot in a pit of videographers all day, so be it.

  As the workday neared an end, I was tasked with the mindless assignment of rounding up our daily tweets. This basically entailed searching the terms “President Obama,” “Barack Obama,” “Michelle Obama” over and over again on Twitter until my eyes started to twitch from the repetition of 140-character babble.

  I scrolled and scrolled through Twitter feeds, my eyes watering from the screen and repetitive motion. My concentration was broken when I heard Olivia and a senior lobbying reporter, Brian Harrington, walking to the back area where we sat. They chatted loudly as they came toward us, not caring if they broke the newsroom hush.

  Olivia spoke loudly and clearly, inspiring Brian to burst out laughing. Her beige suit, worn over a pink tank top, looked like it could use dry cleaning, and her heels were scuffed on the toe. But it didn’t matter. Olivia could dress like a Hare Krishna and her presence would still command respect.

  “Hi, Julia,” Olivia condescended as she walked quickly past.

  Julia smiled and didn’t respond. “I hate that girl,” she growled to me when the two of them were out of earshot. Olivia had walked up to Upton, who was standing by the water cooler on our end of the newsroom, and was leaning in toward him to show just how close she had his ear. Brian just stood next to both of them, not minding that he was being completely ignored.

  “Can I ask you a weird question?” I said to Julia, who was already back to pounding out copy.

  “My favorite kind.”

  “Is she married?” I asked, trying to look like I was just asking out of the blue. “Because I can’t imagine anyone marrying her.” Since I had seen her bedding Stanton, I had wondered whether she was just having sex with a married man, or whether she, too, was having an affair. She didn’t seem married to me. I had never seen her wear a ring, and she just didn’t give off the air of settled domesticity. But I had zoomed in on the necklace she always wore, and was wearing that night in Middleburg. It was a Celtic eternity knot. It seemed like something a not very fashion savvy husband or boyfriend—or United States senator—might give her to profess his eternal love. It was disgusting to think that Olivia was lusting after Stanton, even wearing a necklace he gave her, but it was possible.

  “Definitely not,” replied Julia. “I don’t think I’ve ever heard about her dating anyone even. Nothing like that. She just lives to serve the Capitolist army.”

  “Are you sure?” I asked. Julia paused and thought about it. “I’m sure,” she said finally. “Are you asking because of that weird pen?” She held up her pink Tory Burch pencil and waved it in my face.

  “Yeah, I guess.”

  “It had to be a knockoff or something,” said Julia, going back to marking up a book she was reviewing with her loopy writing. “Maybe something she picked up on a press trip to China. She dresses in rags. There’s no way she’s writing with a pen that cost more than my car.”

  “But maybe she just does that so she looks like a journalist. You know, people in this town take you more seriously if you look like crap,” I suggested. It was true. If I wore badly cut suits instead of my usual Parisian prêt-à-porter, I would probably have more Hill cronies. I just couldn’t get myself to do it. Polyester gave my soul hives.

  “I don’t think she has any significant money,” said Julia. “She doesn’t walk around here with an heiress vibe.”

  “But what about her car?” I asked, not letting it go. “Have you seen what she drives? That’s an eighty-thousand-dollar BMW she spins around in.”

  “Yeah, maybe she murdered someone for i
t,” said Julia. She looked totally serious. “Or maybe Upton gave it to her for racking up a bazillion Web hits in one day. Who knows how Olivia lives her life; all I know is that I don’t want to be a part of it.”

  I did want to be a part of it. At least enough to understand it before splashing her intimate moments on television screens across the globe. Olivia might have gunned down some yuppie for her wheels, but it seemed more likely that Stanton bought them for her. I doubted she was stupid enough to accept lavish gifts from her illicit lover, but considering the photos I had on my computer, maybe she was.

  CHAPTER 9

  The week soon launched us through town like note-taking, party-going Adderall addicts. We curled our hair, waxed our everythings, wore cocktail dress after cocktail dress, made excited small talk with everyone who had vocal cords, chased celebrities, begged for quotes without looking like we were begging, kissed up to bouncers, had PR girls kiss up to us, and recorded all of it before passing out for a few hours of sleep. “A few” as in “three.”

  By the time Saturday rolled around, I felt like I had fought in the front lines of the Crimean War and lost. I had covered so many parties that I no longer could discern famous people from unfamous people. At the Quinn Gillespie party I asked a guy refilling an ice bucket for a quote. He looked at me like I was on acid and said, “Brrr.”

  But Saturday was D-Day. I had to be upbeat and spunky and celebrity-friendly and ready to stay up all night long. By 9 A.M. I was in D.C. with my dress in my trunk and my exhausted body in a chair at the Red Door salon. “I need everything done,” I told the woman at the front desk. “Exfoliate my eyes, dye my hair, tattoo my eyebrows, I don’t care. Just make sure it will all last from now until five A.M.”