by Karin Tanabe
I nodded my head in agreement, though I had actually cried over how much I missed New York at least three times since I’d come home.
“So, what do you do, besides reporting?” Sandro asked me, making easy small talk. “Olivia doesn’t do anything but work, so if that’s your answer, too, that’s okay.”
I lust after you. I look at a video I took of you at White House Correspondents’ over and over again on my computer. I pause it on your face and try to imagine what you’re thinking. What life would be like with you. And then I chase your wife around with a camera. I work on drafts of an eye-opening article starring your naked, cheating spouse. And then I look at your face some more.
“I spend a lot of time with horses,” I replied.
“Do you?” he said with laid-back enthusiasm. “I miss animals. I wanted a dog up here, but Olivia nixed that idea. Where do you ride horses?” He took a long sip of beer.
“I ride just outside Washington, in Middleburg, Virginia.” I watched his face for any sign of recognition, any knowledge of my hometown and his wife’s affair there, but his expression didn’t change. “It’s a beautiful spot,” I continued. “It’s like living in the pages of a magazine. I always feel like I’m going to run into Slim Aarons or some descendant of the Kennedys.”
“I’m afraid I don’t know Mr. Aarons,” said Sandro, putting down his nearly empty beer.
“It’s okay,” I replied. “He’s dead anyway.”
He laughed at his mistake. “Well, then I guess I’ll never get to know him.”
Timing my question between well-rehearsed bursts of laughter, I asked him if he worked for the Organization of American States. When he seemed slightly taken aback, I mentioned that there was a sign for the meeting at the front of the restaurant. This was of course another lie. It was a restaurant, not a conference center, but he seemed to believe me.
“I do work for OAS,” he said, still looking caught off guard. “I’m actually from Mexico. I only came to the U.S. for school. With a lot of luck, I ended up in College Station, Texas. Has Olivia mentioned she’s from Texas?” he asked.
“I think she has, yes,” I said, pretending that Olivia and I had an intimate friendship full of chatter about our girlhood days.
“Olivia and I met down there, in college, and she wasn’t much of a city person then, either. But that’s all changed now. She’s found her calling, and it requires a densely populated area and several telephones. But,” he said, wiping his stubbly upper lip, “that woman is amazing. Has been amazing me since day one. She can get anything done. She really can. I just have to show her that doesn’t necessarily mean running around chasing the president of the United States.”
He was wrong about that. Olivia Campo could not get it all done without chasing the president—and the man many predicted would be the next president.
“She was incredible at A&M. We were very involved in school. Did a lot of international stuff. She helped me navigate that huge place, and we got married during our senior year. That was, let’s see . . . that was seven years ago.” He smiled like an old man drinking to the memories of youth. “I still think it’s funny that she’s covering the president,” he said. “She always wanted to cover Congress, especially the Senate, but I guess the White House beat is the most prestigious, so she took it. I think her heart is still on the Hill, though. She always said there’s far more personality up there by Capitol South than on Pennsylvania Avenue.”
I looked up at his square jaw while he motioned for another round of drinks. “Please, let me,” he said to the bartender, who added my fourth glass of wine to his tab.
After a long pause, he said, “I like your clothes,” looking at my short red sundress, motorcycle boots, and long silk scarf. “You don’t look like you’re trying hard to blend in. And why should you.” His biceps moved while he spoke. His hair was thick, and I wondered if it felt soft to the touch or just like wires held down by heavy products and gravity.
I wanted to lean over and put my hand on his arms, his legs, everywhere. Maybe it was because my world had shrunk so drastically since I left New York, but I was conscious that I had never been so naturally attracted to someone. Sandro was so uncalculated, so easygoing and charming without knowing he was charming. It was nothing like the lip you got in New York or the careful talk most men delivered here. It was refreshing and I wanted his casual confidence around me all the time. Since I started working at the List, most people I met were either pompous or guarded, throwing an “off the record” at the end of every sentence. Hell, even my father said it over breakfast when he called my mother “paranoid and high-strung.” But Sandro somehow seemed above all that.
“I like sitting here, talking to you,” he said after we were both quiet for a minute. “Olivia is always traveling. I feel like I haven’t talked to someone in a while.”
In a rush of excitement from his compliment, I moved my leg and ran it slowly against his.
He let it linger for a few seconds and then said, “I’m sorry. I must be in your way.” He scooted his stool back, pretending not to notice my blatant come-on, but didn’t move his leg off of mine for a few seconds more. God that felt good.
What was I doing? He was married. I was working on ruining his wife’s career. I couldn’t act like a salivating tween. I moved my legs back under the stool and smiled coolly.
“No problem at all,” I said, cutting off his apology. “I like talking to you, too. We should do it again.”
“Yes, we should,” he replied. He was polite but not overly flirtatious. But then he leaned forward and ran his right hand through my hair. From my hairline, all the way back, he let his fingers comb slowly through it.
“You had something there,” he said, smiling.
Oh my God. How embarrassing. I probably had an entire squid from my ceviche sitting on my head during our whole conversation.
“I did?” I asked, feeling myself turn the color of a ripe tomato. This was clearly punishment for sins in a past life.
He stepped down from the bar stool and left some money on the bar as a tip. “No. Not really. I just felt like doing that. You have very nice hair.” While I pinched my thigh to make sure I was alive and not in The Matrix, he put his hand on my shoulder like the night we met.
“It was very nice to run into you like this. For the third time,” he added with a smile. “Are you staying? Or can I walk you to your car?”
My car. Oh God. Why had I driven my actual car here? Why hadn’t I used my monthly salary to rent a Bentley for a few hours, or at least borrowed one of my parents’ much nicer cars? Maybe I could just stand next to a fancy parked car with Virginia plates and pretend it was mine. Something built in the latter half of the past decade. But Sandro seemed like the kind of man who tapped the roof after you got in and made sure you made it off safely. I loved him despite his horrible wife; maybe he could love me despite my ancient car?
We left Oyamel and headed down Seventh Street toward my clunker. My scalp, where Sandro had run his hand through my hair, was tingling. I walked close to him. Though my boots had a slight heel, he was still a few inches taller than me and I looked up at him as he talked about his plans to visit his parents the next time Olivia was out of town. I was about to recommend he visit the Goodstone Inn with a large shotgun in hand instead, when we got to my embarrassing car. It was parked right in front of a cute white Mini Cooper and I slowed down in front of it, hoping Sandro would just give me a good-night French kiss, a little butt grope, and run off. But instead, after I admitted to owning the oldest car in the world, he took my keys, opened the door, helped me in, and didn’t mention one word about it being built during the early days of Bush 43’s administration.
• • •
So how did a girl with no manners, skin pigment, or ethics land not only someone who looked like a model and had the carriage of Cary Grant, but also a United States senator? Was Olivia secretly reading Cosmo’s “The Secret to Getting Any Guy” articles in the White Ho
use bathroom? Was the girl swaddled up in poly-cotton blends actually a tantric sex master?
I wanted to start LexisNexising Sandro and Olivia from a public computer. I didn’t trust my laptop—IP addresses were too easy to trace—and work was obviously out of the question. On Monday afternoon, I scheduled time at the Library of Congress. I had no idea how I was going to get out of work for two hours and go to the library. I was going to have to lie. Or pretend someone had sent me a tip that a celebrity was at the library having an academic renaissance and I was going to check it out.
My karma took some major blows after I told Hardy that I was running to Union Station because country singer Martina McBride was doing a whistle-stop tour. She actually was, but I had zero intention of going. My friend John, the best paparazzo in D.C., was covering it and had promised to send me a few sound bites to get me through, no questions asked. So I headed up the stairs of the beautiful marble library, knowing I had precisely one hundred and twenty minutes before I started getting a flood of BlackBerry messages harassing me about my whereabouts.
I walked through the main reading room in the Thomas Jefferson Building, with the half-moon windows and rows of mahogany desks and reference books, and headed toward the newspaper and periodical reading room. The only starting points I had with Sandro, beyond his name, were his studies at Texas A&M, his work at OAS, and his Mexican provenance. Olivia, I figured, must have worked at the college paper.
I knew that she, like me, was twenty-eight, and he must be around the same age, which would put them starting school around 2000.
Texas A&M’s newspaper was called the Battalion. On a microfilm reader, I searched every masthead since 1998 and never saw Olivia’s name. Not even as a contributor. Could she really not have written for her college paper? The girl who took a wrecking ball to her colleagues to come out on top? I had expected to see her name in the editor-in-chief slot. From print, I moved to photos. Maybe she had been photographed as part of an activity? Young Dictators Club? Future Homewreckers of America? Or maybe Sandro had been voted sexiest man in A&M’s history?
I started in 1998 again and prepared to look at every sheet of every paper printed for the next six years. Black-and-white photos with long captions shined brightly under the light of the machine. Smiling face after smiling face looked up at me until I was so numb to the unlined faces of youth that I doubted I would be able to recognize my targets.
I needed to put myself back together, let my eyes readjust. I put my bag next to the machine to lay claim to my space and walked toward the stacks to stretch my legs. I was in the music history section. I let my fingers drift on the leather-bound sheet music of Rachmaninov, Benjamin Britten, Clara Schumann. I missed studying. Professional journalism was so focused on quick hits, short bites that could be consumed in mere minutes while waiting for the subway. No one assigned long pieces anymore because no one read them. My college thesis on Edith Wharton’s and Henry James’s road trips was eighty-five pages long, which now seemed like an impossible amount of pages. I’m sure if anyone at the List attempted to write more than two thousand words they were immediately let go for having a poor grasp of the demands of new media. When I left Town & Country, I had grand visions of penning articles that would go through five drafts before they went to press, sitting down with my editor for hours to make sure every piece ended with a bon mot. Instead, I typed articles on a BlackBerry and all I did when I reached the last line was cheer.
That was at least a sliver of the reason I was letting the Olivia/Stanton affair consume me: it couldn’t be solved in an hour or less and then tweeted about immediately. It was a steady stream of work, of pushing myself to do and think things that were difficult.
I went back to the microfiche machine, flipped through hundreds more photos, and stopped on November 21, 2003. That was the date I finally saw Olivia’s picture in the paper. And when I saw the caption, I decided it was worth the wait.
Her hair was shorter then. Just above her shoulders. But she was with Sandro, clutching hands with him and another student. The caption of the photo read, “Olivia Campo, Sandro Pena and Paul Martinez lead students in a march for the Students for Immigration Solidarity Campaign,” which Google quickly confirmed was a college branch of a national immigrants’ rights organization.
So maybe Olivia was indeed the Mata Hari of a left-wing immigrants’ rights group, trying to sway the opposition’s policy by giving Stanton access to her naked body. It was possible. But it was also possible that it was just a coincidence. Plenty of Wellesley girls I knew had protested against the World Bank and eaten vegan chicken for every meal in college, and now they worked at Credit Suisse and demanded that their beef be from Kobe. People changed.
The other intriguing article I found was from 2005, the year Sandro and Olivia graduated from A&M. It was their wedding announcement. Maybe in Texas it was normal to get married before graduation, but to my East Coast eyes it looked like time travel. It also would have kept him on U.S. soil.
“Seniors Sandro Pena and Olivia Campo were married on March 29 in the All Faiths Chapel. The couple met during orientation week freshman year in Neeley Hall. The two plan to live in Corpus Christi after graduation.” There was no picture, which was good, because I think my heart might have broken if I had seen their wedding day.
I forced myself to go to sleep that night without looking at Sandro’s smooth, tan face on my computer screen. And when James texted me and asked me to meet him at Union Station Friday after work, I said yes.
• • •
As the workweek came to a close, I walked up Constitution Avenue toward Union Station with confidence. James was a very nice, very normal, and totally single guy. I could like him. I should like him. For some crazy reason, he seemed to like me.
When I arrived, he was already in line for the Old Town Trolley, the green and orange relic that took tourists around the city and pumped out historical information in a dozen different languages. “Look who it is,” he said, pulling me over to him by the hand and giving me a kiss on the cheek as if we were about to pose for a prom photo. He was wearing a crisp spring suit and a light green Vineyard Vines tie and looked happy to be standing in what was left of the day’s sunshine. He moved a strand of my hair out of my face, pushed my aviator sunglasses down my nose, and said, “I’m glad you said yes.”
I laughed, grateful for a moment of levity. I had ignored three calls from James that week and wasn’t sure how to proceed. But this was good. He felt easy and friendly and unmarried. “You know, I’ve never been on one of these things before,” I said.
“And why would you have,” said James, motioning to the ticket salesman. “You grew up around here. You never had to pay attention to the city.”
Five minutes later, we were installed on a small wooden bench, chugging toward the Capitol. I looked at the building with its perfect dome covering an iron frame, and for the first time since I had started working at the Capitolist, I saw it through the eyes of a tourist.
“What’s it like to work in politics?” I asked James as the historic building disappeared behind us.
“It’s fun,” he said honestly. “Lots of smart people. I’ve always been a Republican, so it’s nice to have that continuity in life. And you feel like you’re making a difference. I like helping to shape our message, fixing misperceptions about us and bringing the attention to our great candidates.”
“Never mind, let’s not talk about politics,” I said, putting my arm on the side of the bench and letting the wind turn my hair into a tangled mess.
“It’s not that bad a city, is it,” said James.
“No, it’s not so bad when you look at it like this,” I replied. I turned to smile at him and before I could protest, he took my face in his hands and kissed me. “I like you,” he said, still cradling my cheeks in his palms. “I don’t know if you like me, since I haven’t seen you since our amazing first date and you haven’t answered any of my calls until two days ago. But I like you anyway.
Thanks for coming with me.”
A kiss in a trolley with the Capitol behind us. There were worse things. I let James talk about work and his friends and his summer plans and let my mind clear for a while. I hadn’t felt this relaxed since the day I drove down the long stretch of highway from New York to Virginia.
When we got out of the trolley, it was drizzling, and he walked me to my car while holding his suit jacket over my head. He kissed me again and held on to my waist until I smiled, squirmed away, and promised I would see him soon.
The rain stopped by the time I was through the city traffic. The days were getting longer, and it was easier to navigate the two small, hilly roads that led into town. I saw the lights of East Washington Street in the distance and I opened all the car windows and the sunroof and let the wind continue to ruin my hair.
As I drove slowly past the historic gas station on the Middleburg line, I saw someone familiar sitting on the hood of a pale SUV. He motioned with his hands, trying to wave me in, and I laughed when I saw it was James. I did a U-turn on the damp road and pulled my car in next to his.
The gas station was faintly illuminated. I got out and stood in front of him. He stayed where he was, leaning back on his hood and smiling. “I decided I wasn’t quite ready for our date to end,” he said, pushing himself off the car.
“Are you serious?” I replied, amused and genuinely surprised.
“I thought you needed to know just how patient and persistent I am. You’ve seen patient; now I’m showing you persistent. And I figured I could catch you here, since everyone has to stop at this light.”
“Late-night gas station stalking is normal to you,” I said.