by Karin Tanabe
“Here,” he said, standing and moving around the table to me. “Let me help you out. There are too many people in here. It’s the overflow from the National Journal brunch up the road. It’s not a good idea to be stuck in a basement with this group if you’re not feeling well.”
I let him take my arm and lead me up the back stairs and across the street to a bench in front of St. John’s Church. The White House was to our left, and the flow of traffic into the stone hotel in front of us was still heavy.
“Thank you, I really appreciate it,” I said, sitting down. I was ready to fall asleep for a week on a city bench. As he stood over me, I smiled again and said, “You were so nice to walk me out, but you don’t have to stay. Don’t feel obliged. You should go back to the party, I’m really okay.”
“But what if I’d like to stay?” he asked.
I looked up at him through my haze of fatigue. Nice blue eyes. Decent suit. Blond hair full of curls. He looked like a cherub with Tea Party tendencies. Not terrible, not the best I’d ever seen. But who was I to be picky these days. I lived in the sticks and worked every daylight hour and plenty of the dark ones, too. I didn’t have time to meet men, at least ones who were not married to Olivia Campo. I should probably jump on this one before succumbing to a sexual destiny of online chat rooms and anime porn.
I asked him to sit down and join me. His name was James Reddenhurst. He did communications for the Republican National Committee. And when he asked me if I would have dinner with him next Saturday, I said yes, just to see the look on his face when I gave him my address.
It took my father an hour to get downtown, and by the time he found me, I was a puddle of sweat in a linen sundress with a soggy notepad, a tape recorder, and tears in my bloodshot eyes. James shook my father’s hand, helped me into his car, and watched us drive away, his number safely entered into my phone.
“I can’t do this job,” I whispered in my dad’s general direction as I buckled my seat belt. “I’m so tired. I just want to curl up and die.”
“You know,” said my father, not taking his eyes off the road, “you don’t have to work there. No one is forcing you to. You could always apply to other newspapers.”
I shook my heavy head. “I can’t leave now. Everything’s finally starting to go well. I was on TV this morning. I broke a big story. This is what I moved back home to do and it’s a really important job.”
My dad shook his head in agreement and we drove in silence until we passed the big blue highway sign that said “Virginia is for lovers.”
When we turned off the highway, my dad put his hand on my arm and said, “I hate to do this to you, Addy. I know you’re tired. But I need to stop by the vet’s on the way back and get some medicine for Jasper’s eye. The IV doesn’t seem to be doing the trick. We’re going to try another approach.”
“Who’s Jasper?” I asked, laying my head on the glove compartment.
“Your horse,” answered my dad.
Right, right. That Jasper. I shook my head yes as his blue Mercedes glided home. I wanted animals and fresh air and people who would never grace the cover of US Weekly or Congressional Quarterly. I fell asleep in the warm, purring car while my father dealt with the vet. I didn’t wake up until Monday morning.
• • •
When I finally opened my eyes, still feeling like half a human, I had an email from Upton’s assistant in my inbox.
“Please come by Upton’s office at 10 A.M.,” it read. I scanned it four times, but it really didn’t say anything else.
When I drove in, shivering from caffeine detox, I put Visine in my eyes and followed his assistant into his office. I hated the fact that every editor’s office at the List had glass walls. That meant that every single employee could watch the higher-ups chew you out. From time to time, you also got to watch as some dorky reporter got applauded for some dorky reporter behavior, like breaking news courtesy of a little direct Eritrean-to-English translation in the middle of the night. But that wasn’t as fun.
Upton’s door opened, and he slammed it absentmindedly behind him as he walked quickly toward his desk.
He looked at me and declared, “You are here. Good.” He stammered slightly as he sat down across from me. His chair was large and mesh, and his unruly blond hair stuck to the back. I had gazed at Upton’s office from a few feet away, afraid to get any closer, but I’d never been inside it before. Dozens of awards, diplomas, and newspaper clippings adorned the walls around him. A shelf of books that he had written stood firmly below the awards and pictures of him with every living president served as bookends. The only lighthearted touch was a framed caricature of him holding a red pen, done by one of the paper’s illustrators.
“Good morning, Mark,” I said, trying to sound casual and brilliant at the same time.
“Is it still morning?” he said, looking at his Seiko. “I feel like I’ve been awake for days.” He shuffled some papers, opened and closed a folder, and then leaned back in his chair with a book in his hand.
He flipped through it and moved his lips as he read a few pages. Perhaps he had only asked me to come in to observe him as he read. Weirder things had happened inside these walls. I was about to ask if he wanted me to get him some coffee, or a bookmark, when he slammed the book down like a fiery preacher.
“The reason I asked you in here is because . . . ” His voice trailed off. He took the closed book off his glass desk and placed it on his lap. It was Nancy Reagan’s biography. “Adrienne, this place is a meritocracy. One of the true meritocracies left in the media business. If you don’t do a good job, you don’t work here, if you do a great job, we say thank you. So, I wanted to just say, this morning . . . I—I—I wanted to say good job.”
I almost fell off my chair and combusted at the same time. First a congrats from despicable Hardy, and now this.
“We got lots of traffic from your scoop. Drudge linked it, the Hollywood sites went nuts over it, and the morning shows liked you,” he said, twisting his thin lips into an awkward smile and looking to the right of my head.
“You still have a lot to learn. A lot,” he declared, just in case I was actually feeling good about myself. “Your reporting instincts are weak. Your research techniques, I hear from Hardy, are sophomoric at best, and you spend way too much time commuting in and out of the city. You really need to consider moving.” He checked to make sure I was frowning now. I was.
“That said, you’re a good writer.” He looked at me. I looked at him. No one smiled. But inside, I was doing the Macarena. The great Capitolist ruler just told me I was Carl Bernstein in a dress. “Now, go and write.” He gestured to the door. I stood up, thanked him for his time, and ran for the safe corner of the Style section.
Before I could download our conversation on Julia, Hardy yelled at me from his desk.
“Adrienne. There you are. I’ve been looking around for you everywhere.” That was an obvious lie because everyone could see clear as day that I was in Upton’s office.
“I only count three posts so far from you today. Did you hear me? Three. Is someone asleep at the keyboard?”
I looked at his smug face in panic. Had I only done three pieces? I looked at the clock. It was 10:18 A.M. I had usually filed at least four by then. With all the White House Correspondents’ writing yesterday, I was a little behind.
I looked at Julia in alarm. “Here, write about this,” she texted me, sending a link to a piece in the Hollywood Reporter about George Clooney’s declaration that he never wanted to be president because he liked having casual sex too much. “It’s not groundbreaking, but it should shut him up.”
I mouthed, “Thank God for you,” and started speed-reading the article before I got axed.
After I pounded out three short pieces in a row, I leaned back in my chair and looked around the newsroom. Every person had their head down, typing out stories or reading other people’s copy. Newsrooms usually buzzed, but this was like a crypt. People didn’t take breaks or talk to the
ir neighbors. There was no banter with a colleague across the room. Instead, there was just hunger and guilt. Hunger because everyone there was cut from the same motivated cloth, and guilt because no one wanted to be caught doing anything but working.
As I refreshed the Style page to make sure my last piece was formatted correctly, I saw Emily Baumgarten, another White House reporter, and Olivia walking down the hall together. Olivia was no longer just Olivia “having sex with a senator” to me. She was Olivia “cheating on a man I loved.” I had touched her husband’s hand, breathed him in, and thought about him every free moment I had. In my eyes, her transgression had become much worse.
I watched her take her seat at her desk and begin cursing at people on the phone. She didn’t seem like the kind of girl her handsome husband would go for, and her husband didn’t seem like the kind of man she would handpick to be her mate for life. A girl with an ego like that never went for the genteel Ken doll. She went for the bigger fish. She went for the senator.
My boyfriend in college, brown-haired, blue-eyed Brady Keller, was my introduction to the genteel Ken doll. He was from Raleigh, North Carolina, and majored in environmental studies at Harvard. Together, we did New Englandy things like wearing scarves and mittens and reading poetry under trees. He wrote me a note every day on paper that he aged himself. I asked him once if this just meant leaving it out in the rain and running it over with his car, but he promised me there was more to it than that.
Brady was the perfect college boyfriend. He was cute, he threw a football skillfully around the quad, he wore a peacoat, he was adept at memorizing Shakespeare, and he had about 3 percent body fat despite his love of keg parties.
After Wellesley, I forgot all about nice boys from the South and discovered a different breed of man: the investment banker. Lots of money, no free time, not all that attractive if you got rid of the expensive clothes, a close personal friendship with every worthwhile maître d’ in town, and the owner of a really good Manhattan apartment. That was the kind of man I imagined Olivia Campo married to: someone as pompous and gruff as she was, with a bank account to catapult her to the top. But I had been wrong before.
Julia had gone out and brought us all sandwiches. Hardy thought it was best if only one of us abandoned the production line at a time. When she placed my turkey and sprouts on my desk, she let out a few tsk-tsks and turned my head away from the TV.
“You’re watching C-SPAN? Don’t tell me you’re becoming that girl,” she chided.
There were different levels of wonk at the Capitolist. We were all forced to watch CNN and Fox News and MSNBC, but when you caught yourself watching C-SPAN and enjoying it, it meant you had officially bathed in the Kool-Aid. I was watching C-SPAN because it was my only legal entrée into the life of Senator Stanton. He was a bigwig on the Judiciary Committee and usually let out eloquent bursts about immigration and homeland security. I was going to have to figure out how to stream it on my computer. Julia would become suspicious if I suddenly found a passion for the most boring channel on television.
My television watching stopped short when the girl responsible for my new C-SPAN habit started chatting with Upton at her desk.
“What do you have in the works?” he asked loudly.
Without looking for notes, Olivia perked up and said, “I’ve got half a dozen leads—as in paper leads—going right now.” She lifted her dry unmanicured hand and started ticking off her treasure box of stories on her small fingers. “There’s some talk that Gorham pulled in shady donor funds for POTUS so clearly looking into that. Got great sources in Anchorage.” She did? She had great sources in Anchorage? Like who? Retired Iditarod champs? While I sat shocked and a little jealous, she kept clicking down her list. “Then there’s all that border fence nonsense that the president is speaking out on—great stuff coming from Texas reps—then there’s the pushback on his health care bill, some stuff with the shakedown in the East Wing, and some little crap followup thing on foster care that POTUS is gearing up to sign. I did two articles on it already, but might as well make it a hat trick. Oh, and I’ve got twenty with Hillary on Friday.”
Twenty minutes with Hillary Clinton? Twenty? I wanted just one minute with Hillary. Mike, who sat next to Olivia and whose press trip she had stolen a few months ago, was sitting there trying not to strangle his skinny, ass-kissing colleague. I understood Mike’s frustration. Why did Upton have these cozy little desk-sides with Olivia? She wasn’t an editor or even the highest ranking White House reporter. She was just the loudest.
I wanted to stand up and scream at Upton to stop slapping all of Olivia’s copy on page one because the big story he was looking for was right in front of him and I had it. Olivia may have sources in Anchorage, but I had pictures of her having sex with a United States senator. Even if Upton barely knew my name right now, I could soon have the entire country looking at a picture of Olivia Campo’s ass.
I didn’t know how often Stanton was looking at Olivia’s ass, which—along with her severe lack of ethics—had been bothering me ever since I found out she was married to Sandro. Did they just get together a few times, check the “I slept with a senator / I had sex with a girl half my age” boxes and move on? Or was this something that was going to last? Even break up their marriages. Olivia was absolutely nuts to risk her powerful job and perfect husband for Hoyt Stanton, but maybe she was mentally ill. I needed to find out more.
“Let’s go bigger than you think on that foster care legislation,” said Upton, breaking my train of thought. “We need some more warm fuzzy stuff because Mike’s doing some depressing piece on the president’s response to Syria and I could use a picture of a smiling child somewhere close to his.” Olivia rolled her eyes, didn’t bother to look at Mike, who was now a lovely shade of plum, and promised Upton she’d try.
I went over her long list of stories in my head, trying to see if I could spin any into Style-worthy topics. How was she perusing all those stories? And when did she even get the time to cultivate sources? My five sources all lived in the lower forty-eight. Pushing aside my feelings of inferiority, I stopped short at her comment about “border fence nonsense.” Senator Stanton was always talking about his support for the border fence on C-SPAN. He was from Arizona and he was championing the controversial bill. And Olivia was from Texas, where they also rallied behind it. I quickly minimized my Web browser on my computer and Googled Stanton, border fence, Olivia Campo. I got ten hits at the top of the page. She had written about it before, especially about the president’s opposition to the bill, but she had quotes from Stanton—the long, good quotes you got from an in-person interview. I wondered where, exactly, those interviews had been conducted.
• • •
When I woke up painfully early on Saturday morning, I ducked into my parents’ house to poke around for their superior coffee. My mother was in the living room, sitting in the middle of an enormous ottoman, trying to twist herself into a complicated yoga posture. I curled myself on the sofa away from her old-people gymnastics.
“Did you ever just get so tired that you felt like you would never catch up on sleep again? Like there was some tipping point and you had let the pendulum swing past it, and now your life would be nothing but chaos and forced labor?” I asked, shifting positions on the couch.
“Well, to be honest with you, no.” She unraveled herself, headed to the kitchen, and motioned for me to follow. I sat in a tall rush-seat chair and watched as she tended a pot of tea.
“I danced with Hugh Hefner at the Playboy mansion and expensed the whole trip when I was a journalist. It was fun. It wasn’t this eternal flame of mediocre copy and no joy that you have to keep up.”
“Mediocre seems like the wrong word,” I said, crumpling up a mint leaf and putting it in my nose. It felt like a green bug, but I saw it as a cheap alternative to aromatherapy.
“Well, it’s not going to be your best. You’re moving too fast. And you’re not on drugs like Jack Kerouac and company.” She turned and lo
oked at my bloodshot eyes squinting at her. “Or are you?” she asked. “I wouldn’t judge you too harshly. You can tell me these things.”
I loved how my mother claimed to be fine with potential annoyances such as drug addiction as long as she knew they weren’t true. In reality, she would have flipped out and threatened to do an honor killing. When she found a six-pack of Zima in my closet in high school, she cried and said I had disgraced the family name. Then again, maybe she was just disappointed in my crappy choice of alcoholic beverages. If there had been a case of Château Margaux under my pile of cardigans instead, she might have saluted my sophisticated palate.
“I’m not on drugs,” I assured her. She took a seat and crossed her freckled legs. I got my freckled legs from her. “I’m just so tired,” I said. And with that statement, the tears started to pour down my face. Curled up on the high chair, I cried like you can only do with your mother. It felt good.
When she finished smoothing down my hair and wiped the rivers of mascara off my face with a perfectly folded linen napkin, I was happy that I was home. I didn’t care that I had given up New York and free haute couture and seven hours of sleep a night. I had someone to wipe off my puffy, tired face. I would have preferred if it was Sandro Pena, but for now, I was happy to have my mom.
I was still leaning against her when my father walked through the kitchen with his reading glasses on his head.
“Adrienne. Your sister sent new pictures. Come and have a look.” He didn’t comment on the fact that I was a tear-stained mess, which I kind of appreciated. I gave my face a final wipe and followed him.
In a nook on the landing between the first and second floors, I sat next to my dad on a wide cashmere sofa as he pulled up a slide show on his black, rubber-coated laptop. The first picture was of Payton standing in front of a palatial white house. Not tacky, but not exactly understated—which was basically how most people would describe my sister, too.