by Karin Tanabe
But the woman now talking to Upton wasn’t his wife, whom I still hadn’t caught a glimpse of, but Olivia Campo. What was she doing here? There were barely any reporters, just a few senior editors. I hadn’t expected to see her. Was Upton that obvious with his favoritism?
I watched her talking to him, completely comfortable, like she was always popping by Upton’s house for a cozy chitchat. She was wearing a dress the color of an overcooked steak. Not exactly brown, but not quite black. It was drab and badly ironed, but from a distance, and in the soft porch lights, she looked almost pretty. And calm. Almost like she had the night I photographed her with Stanton. I watched them for a couple more seconds, but their intimacy started to nauseate me. I didn’t have that kind of editor-reporter relationship with Hardy and I knew I would never have it with Upton. Julia and Libby sure didn’t and they had been at the List for years.
I stood up to leave, crossed the garden, and got caught in a crowd in the living room. It wasn’t until I had been standing there for a few minutes trying to escape without being rude that I realized that the man blocking my path was Senator Stanton.
I couldn’t believe it. Had he been at this party for hours and I just hadn’t noticed? Was I really that bad of a reporter? I shouldn’t have gotten so caught up examining the nineteenth-century details of Upton’s house. I was crap at my job.
Stanton was tall, a good couple of inches above six feet, and held himself very straight. Up close, I noticed he had a few extra pounds in his midsection, but his padding was almost fully concealed by a well-tailored pinstripe suit jacket. His dark brown hair had a little gray around the temples. Not a white gray that makes one look terribly old and destined to live out a life of backgammon and adult diapers. More like a silvery “you can call me Clooney” kind of gray. And of course, he wore two small gold pins on the left lapel of his jacket. One was a circular gold official Senate pin, and the other, tucked right beneath, was a tiny enamel version of Old Glory. He was talking to a shorter man whom I recognized but couldn’t place. He was wearing a seersucker jacket and khakis and drinking something with a handful of mint in it. Now I had no intention of leaving the party. I moved to the side so I was a little farther from Stanton but could still listen to his conversation. I put my notepad back in my bag and pretended to be absolutely enthralled with Upton’s ficus plant.
It took a few minutes but finally a woman came up to the man chatting with Stanton and gave him a hug. “Taylor Miles!” she said with a strong drawl. “I knew you’d be here and I have something very important to talk to you about. You can listen, too, Senator Stanton,” she said, laughing when she noticed Stanton. “In fact, you should listen.”
Taylor Miles. He was quoted in an article I read on Stanton’s immigration stance. I had just placed a Google alert on the senator regarding all things immigration. I remembered him because I wondered if the reporter had reversed his first and last name by accident. Miles was an Arizona state senator and the founder of the Southern Immigration Reform Foundation, a staunchly right wing group, which had been accused of racist undertones by many critics. But that didn’t seem to bother Stanton. He continued to talk to Taylor and the woman with the southern accent about some town hall meeting coming up on the border fence and I continued to eavesdrop while staring at a plant.
After a few more minutes, Stanton said goodbye to Miles and the woman and walked out of the party. I counted quickly to ten and followed after him.
I didn’t know exactly what I was going to do. Slide-tackle Stanton and ask him if he was sleeping with Olivia? That didn’t seem like a very good idea considering security. Instead I just watched him get into a black town car that was waiting for him and then I quickly got into mine. I started the Volvo and was about to head for home but Stanton’s driver didn’t seem like he was going anywhere. I could see him in the front seat with the light on, reading a magazine.
He was waiting for Olivia. I put my car back into park, took the key out of the ignition, and turned off the headlights. Only minutes later, Olivia walked confidently down the steps and got in the back of the town car like it was totally empty and idling just for her. As soon as her door closed, the car did a quick U-turn and headed up Connecticut Avenue.
Their affair was still going strong.
I had spoken to no one about Olivia, her amazing husband, or the senator, even though I suspected there was a scandalous story behind their affair. If they stopped seeing each other, I wasn’t sure I could keep pursuing. I had already overstepped a few journalistic lines of ethics—I didn’t want to pole vault over any others. But the sighting at Upton’s had quieted my doubts. And lying in bed that night, my mind racing, I knew I couldn’t keep it to myself any longer.
I could only think of one person who had the kind of calculating personality I needed and who was far enough away to confide in.
I took the telephone off my desk, moved to the gingham window seat in the living room, and dialed. I heard the unfamiliar ringtone of another country.
“Hi, Payton, it’s me,” I said.
“And who is me?” asked a commanding voice. If I had to appoint one person to lead troops into battle, it would be Payton Brown. She even had a name like a general. Everyone who has ever met Payton is scared of her, and that includes her hulking husband. I think that’s what won him over in the first place, actually. He had never been scared of anything before and was just floored that the first person who frightened him was a 115-pound stick of a girl from Middleburg, Virginia.
“Me? Who is me? Hello? Are you still there?” Payton screamed into the phone.
“Payton. Stop yelling. It’s your sister,” I said, already regretting my bright idea.
She laughed like a woman who relishes making homemade bombs. “Of course I knew that already, Addy. You’re my one and only sister. Well, that I’m aware of anyway. I once had Dad ready to buy a DNA kit to make sure you were his, but that’s beside the point. I was just trying to see if your phone manners had improved at all, and clearly they have not.”
My phone voice was what one would describe as perfectly pleasant. But Payton, ever the actress, picks up the phone and announces, “This is Payton Cleves Brown Johnston calling from San Andres de Giles, Argentina, and I hope to speak to Madame Butthead,” or whoever it is she’s calling.
“It’s nice to hear your voice, Addy,” she said, sighing as if our conversation was already exhausting her. “Tell me everything. What’s going on in that hometown of ours? It really is so quaint that you left New York and your glamorous job to move home with Mom and Dad. But actually, you don’t live in the house, do you?”
She made it sound like I lived on a mat outside the back door and answered to the name of Fido.
“I don’t,” I confirmed. “I’m living in the barn apartment. The one the Hollands used to live in until they had another baby.” Payton gave a few “umm-humms” and I heard her tapping away on a computer, clearly sick of our back-and-forth.
“I’ve stopped showering and I roll myself in horse manure every night. It is so therapeutic. A bit like splashing around in the grotto in Lourdes.”
My sister sucked in her breath sharply, paying attention again. “You do what!” she screamed.
I collapsed into a pile of laughter. “Payton! I’m kidding! I sleep in a bed, not in a big pile of horse poop. Jesus, you’re so uptight.”
I could practically hear her spine straightening. “Look, Addy, you called me. Now if you’ve decided to spend a dollar a minute on long distance just to make fun of me in that horrifically sarcastic tone of yours, then so be it. I’ll just be your whipping post.”
I felt slightly bad for toying with Payton’s robotlike mind. We saw each other so seldom that it was easy to forget that she considered humor a time suck favored by the weak.
“I’m not calling to make fun of you, Payton,” I said apologetically. “I’m calling to tell you about something more serious. Something that is making me half insane and that I just need to talk out.
I . . . I need your help,” I admitted.
That perked her right up. All her life, there has been nothing Payton enjoys more than doling out advice like a sage upon a mountaintop.
“Do you now?” she said shrilly. “This is a first. Well, besides the summer you were almost arrested for smoking pot in Constitution Hall, but we’ve all forgotten about that little incident, haven’t we.”
Yes, we had. We had forgotten because I was sixteen years old and it was a Rusted Root concert and I was wearing a dress that I made out of curtains from a thrift store. I don’t remember a thing about it.
“I’ve stumbled across something pretty big,” I said to Payton. “Huge, actually. I found something out that could change the course of my life, other people’s lives, too. And I don’t feel comfortable thinking about it, let alone talking about it. I certainly can’t talk to anyone around here. But you, good old you, will happily tell me if I’ve gone insane.”
Payton laughed with delight. “I’m sure I will declare you unfit to mingle with society. Straitjacket city is in your future.”
I don’t think she was kidding.
As we sat in our two different hemispheres, I explained to her about Olivia having sex with Stanton and how I shimmied on my belly in the dirt for hours in our hometown to get a picture of them together. I told her I was still sitting on the photos because a) I was a wimp and b) I felt like their relationship was more than just sex. I had evidence, I just didn’t fully understand why she was doing it. And then I confessed about Sandro. I told her how I wanted to strip off my clothes and have Sandro’s babies and what a whole mess it all was.
“Mess does not seem like a strong enough word,” said Payton when I came up for air.
I explained how the mess could catapult my career forward. If I wrote about Olivia and Stanton’s affair, broke the news, I would dominate the front page of the paper for weeks, months. I could sit across from Chris Matthews on Hardball and Anderson Cooper on CNN. I would no longer be filing articles that Upton and Cushing didn’t bother to read and I would be a guest at their parties, not the reporter tasked with writing about them. And our parents would sit back and marvel and say, “How can one person be so good at everything she does?” And this time they’d be talking about me.
It scared me that I wanted all that, but I did, and I could certainly admit it to Payton. I was sick of being just another one of the nameless Style girls stuck in the smallest desks in the farthest corner. I worked too hard for that. We all did, but I refused to watch the years tick by, waking up every day before 5 A.M. just to be ignored while someone louder and more aggressive was applauded. Someone like Olivia.
I explained that while I was trying to wrap my head around Stanton’s affair, I still had to do my job for fourteen hours a day, so I was moving at a snail’s pace on the story. In fact, there basically was no story. Just pictures and lots of speculation. “I can’t talk about it with anyone at the paper because it involves one of our star reporters. I’m afraid if I hand it to them now, they’ll pass my work off and let someone else finish my scoop, send someone else to do the real investigative work. They say it all the time, the List is about the five percent, and I’m not in that five percent. I can see them saying, ‘Thank you, you’ve done your part. Mike Bowles will be taking over from here.’ ”
“But you have to write it,” said Payton in a rare moment of encouragement. “You have photos. They can’t take those from you. Maybe you were in the right place at the right time in the beginning, but now you’ve done the legwork. You really haven’t told anyone at work about them?”
“Nope. Like I just said, no one, not even the girls on my section. Just you.”
“Right. I didn’t really believe you. You have a mouth like Hedda Hopper.”
This was completely untrue.
“Well, you’re the only one I’ve told.”
“Fine,” said Payton, conceding. “It makes sense to me. You don’t want any help from your colleagues on the story because you don’t want to share the glory with them, either.”
“That’s not why,” I replied after a slight pause. The hesitation in my voice surprised me. “I’m not telling anyone because I don’t want it to get out. I don’t want Olivia to find out. The Capitolist isn’t a big place and it’s full of people who dig up dirt for a living. It’s just too risky.”
“Whatever you say,” said Payton.
We both sat silently in our corners of the world and waited for the other to start talking.
“There’s one more thing that’s nagging at me, and it might sound a little nuts, but whatever, don’t judge me,” I said cautiously after a few seconds.
“I would never do that,” Payton replied sweetly.
This was bunk. Payton loved to judge me. When I was in my first pony show, when I was six, she jumped up from the risers and screamed, “Number four forty-eight is disqualified for being fat!” and was then escorted to the parking lot by my father. I weighed forty pounds at the time.
“Well, Olivia’s husband, Sandro, is this incredible Mexican guy. Well, I think he’s Mexican. Let’s say Central American to be safe. Handsome, charismatic. Just the full package. But here she is having an affair with a staunchly anti-immigration, terribly conservative senator from Arizona. I think she first got involved with him because she was reporting on immigration legislation. But then she’s married to Sandro. It doesn’t seem to add up.”
“Why? Don’t you remember ‘Viva Bush’ and all that? She could be a Republican. Plus, she’s just having an affair with him, not writing policy. Libidos aren’t swayed by voting habits.”
“You clearly don’t live here,” I said, stretching my legs out on the window seat.
I heard Payton clanging dishes around. She mumbled something in Spanish and announced that she would be talking to me from the pool area. “It makes sense to me,” she declared. “You’re married to a blonde, you cheat with a brunette. Your wife is a tiny gnome, you cheat with a giant. You get what I’m saying. You want what you can’t have. If I cheated on Buck, I would probably choose a man who resembled a baby carrot.”
“You’re going to cheat on Buck?”
“No, you idiot. He would shoot me. Or, alternatively, he could just sit on my head. He’s still over two hundred pounds. It’s like being married to a whale.”
Her theory wasn’t a bad one. Olivia had young, hot, and handsome. Now she wanted old, rich, powerful, and old.
“Or maybe her husband knows about her affair,” Payton speculated.
“No. Not Sandro,” I replied. “He would never stand for something like that. He seems really decent.”
“Please,” she said. “You don’t know him at all. You’re just smitten and talking like an idiot.”
Of course I was. I had never been more attracted to a man. I had uploaded the video of Sandro at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner and now fell asleep to a still image of his face.
“I like this kerfuffle of yours,” said Payton. I could hear her lighting a cigarette with a flick of a match. “It’s nice to hear that you’re finally doing something interesting up there. Mom told me about your job and it sounds mind-numbing. All that tweeting. It’s for people with low IQs and ADD. But a scandalous affair, that’s much sexier.”
“Yeah, sex is the right word.”
“Was it crazy raunchy stuff?” asked Payton, never the shy one.
“Well, kind of,” I said honestly. “But that’s not what shocked me. It was their intimacy that freaked me out.” As I said it, I realized it was their closeness that was confusing me. “There’s something between them. Something pretty intense.”
“Gross,” said Payton, inhaling a mouthful of tobacco. “Intimacy is highly overrated. Still, keep me posted. And by posted, I don’t mean call me on a daily basis. Just send me an email every once in a while. I’ll get back to you when I can. If I can. Goodbye now.”
“You’re acting odd,” Julia said to me the next day over our three-minute lunch eaten i
n front of our black Dell computers. “What’s up? Are you interviewing other places?” She leaned over our short Plexiglas desk divider and frowned at me. “Because you’re not allowed to leave me.”
Julia and I had made a pact when we first became friends about the way we would leave the Capitolist. We had no grand plans to dart out of there anytime soon; something about the horrible hours and terrible pay was keeping us in our seats. But we agreed that when we did leave, it had to be within a month of each other.
Probably notified that his employees were having fun by some internal spying system, Hardy came to my desk and stared at the top of my head. “What’s with your hair,” he asked. It was really more of a statement than a question.
“What’s with your hair?” I asked, flicking my intricate fishtail braid over my shoulder and looking at his weird spongy curls.
Instead of answering me, he put the glossy proofs of the next day’s paper on my desk. “I don’t like this sentence,” he said, pointing to my third paragraph in a piece about the rapper Common’s new book. “It’s too late to change it now, design will kill us. But I just wanted you to know that I don’t like it.”
How sweet. Let’s not forget the fact that he edited the piece and could have changed it then. But no. He let it go into design and then publicly announced it was despicable.
“Thanks for pointing it out, Hardy,” I said as amicably as I could.
Julia made vomiting sounds as he walked away, then lurched for her ringing phone and eased into a conversation with a source. She twirled the emerald ring on her right hand and typed up a series of short sentences with her left. Her years at the Capitolist had made her such an ambidextrous multitasker that she’d probably learned to pee standing up to save time.
I had started checking the 175 news sources on my RSS feed when the newsroom loudspeaker crackled on. Upton, when brought on two years ago, had had his speakerphone wired to the entire floor so that he could boom news to everyone at once when he felt a burning desire to echo in our ears like the voice of God.