The List

by Karin Tanabe

  “I’m not gas station stalking. I’m Adrienne stalking. Adrienne who is a very, very slow driver stalking. I thought you might find it charming.”

  “I don’t,” I replied. It was a little charming, but I wasn’t ready to admit it.

  The wind started blowing again. By now, instead of looking chic and polished, I looked like I was auditioning for the musical Hair.

  “You have very nice hair. I like the way it flies around your face,” said James, looking at me standing there in the wind. I had to keep my hands on the hem of my dress to keep it from flying up. Without skipping a beat, he said, “Judging from how you almost never return my messages and have only gone out with me twice since I saved you at the Hay-Adams, I’m getting the vibe that you’re not in love with me yet. And I think you should be. I’m a great guy, which you’ll realize soon enough.”

  “I will?”

  “Oh yeah. And until then, I thought I would just convince you by being incredibly romantic and driving to your quaint little town. Clearly, it’s working. I can tell that I’m wooing you.”

  “It might be working a little,” I said, walking closer. “But take me away from the empty gas station and I might be a little more wooable.”

  “Okay,” he said, reaching for my hand. “Let’s go to the Red Fox Inn.”

  “You know what that is?” I laughed.

  “Sure. I’ve been doing my research. I plan on spending a lot more time out here.”

  He opened his car door, promising we would come back later for mine, and we headed down the slick road to the stone inn. He had his radio on C-SPAN, but I changed it immediately to the Coffee House station and hummed along to the strum of an acoustic guitar.

  James turned to me at the next stop sign. “You should like me,” he declared. “I can feel you hesitating. Maybe you think I’m too good-looking for you. Too successful.”

  He smiled as I raised my eyebrows as high as they could go without causing my forehead to wrinkle.

  “But really. Seriously. I’m a very nice guy. Call my sister, she can vouch for me. I never lit her hair on fire or tore off her dolls’ heads. I’m a great big brother.”

  That was more than I could say for my sister, pyro extraordinaire.

  “I like you,” he said again, looking down into my embarrassed face before he put his foot back on the gas. “A lot. I will do my best to make you ludicrously happy if you just give me a chance.”

  I turned up Jackson Browne’s “Running on Empty,” now playing on the radio.

  “Okay,” I said evenly under Danny Kortchmar’s guitar strums.

  “Okay?”

  “Sure. Why not. I’ve already kissed you on a tourist trolley. I might as well go out with you a few more times.”

  When we pulled up to the hotel, we parked on the street outside and he walked around to open my door. He put his hand on the small of my back to help me down and led me out the door and into the hotel.

  When he ordered red wine, and I asked for tea, he looked at me with surprise.

  “You might not believe me—and considering the one-woman show I put on in your apartment, I would understand why—but I really am sober most of the time.”

  “I believe you,” he replied. “I know what you do for a living. I doubt you would be good at your job if you were a raging drunk.”

  No, instead I had the kind of job that turned you into a raging drunk when all was said and done. I imagined that my post-Capitolist years would be filled with a wine cooler addiction and lots of Jungian psychoanalysis.

  While my mind wandered, James interrupted me with a bash of his fist on the table. “Wait! I know that guy. Seriously, this world is too small. That’s Chip Mortimer. He was a fraternity brother of mine at Ole Miss.”

  I turned around, and we both looked at a man with sunburned cheeks wearing a brown linen shirt. He was built like a brick house.

  “Are there really people in the world named Chip?” I asked.

  “Sure,” said James, like it was right out of the Bible. “You want to meet him? He’s a real live person named Chip. You can shake his hand and everything.”

  “No, I’ll pass,” I said, motioning to the waiter for more hot water. “I’m not really in a small-talk mood.”

  “Then what are we doing?” James asked.

  “Big talk. Full sentences.”

  After he came back from exchanging hellos, we ordered our meals and I allowed myself one glass of wine.

  “I can’t believe Chip is out here,” he said to the roll of my eyes.

  “It’s not that far away! It takes more time to drive from the baseball stadium to American University than it does to come out here.”

  “Depends who’s driving,” said James. “Man, I miss Chip. He was fun. He was such a slut when he worked on the Hill.”

  “A slut? Like how?”

  “I just mean that he worked for everyone. He worked for Manning, Hart, Getz, Stanton. He’s a lobbyist for Pfizer now. I guess their offices are out in Virginia or something.”

  I let his lineage sink in, the name Stanton ringing in my ear, and reached for my drink.

  When we left the restaurant and James took me back to my car, he asked me if I was sober enough to kiss him.

  Standing outside of his big, expensive SUV, I said, “I’m sober enough to tightrope walk.”

  “Good,” he said, taking my hand and pulling me toward him. He kissed me and put his arms around me to keep my clothes from flying up in the wind.

  “This is perfect, this is absolutely perfect,” he said, taking a break from biting my bottom lip.

  In the next few minutes, we were back in his car, like high schoolers with no place to go. Our clothes were off, our hands were everywhere. And then, because I didn’t want to be obsessed with Sandro Pena anymore, I slept with James.

  It was only a five-minute drive home from the gas station. When James kissed me good night and I fought off his offers of trailing my car home, I flew through the quiet streets and parked my car on the graveled drive. I ran inside to call my sister from a landline. I wished I’d confided in someone with a little bit more empathy, but everyone else was too close. Somehow Payton and her unrelenting pessimism and inky heart called my name.

  “You again,” she said when she picked up the phone. “I can’t say I’m surprised. I suppose I’m just going to have to keep my nights free from now on just in case you need a shoulder to whimper upon.”

  “Payton! Just listen to me,” I said, explaining the night’s events. “I feel like I’m going to do something stupid. Actually, I just did something pretty stupid. I slept with James, in the back of his car, of all places, and I feel inches away from throwing myself at Sandro.”

  I heard Payton exhale cigarette smoke into the South American air. She still allowed herself two cigarettes a week when Buck wasn’t home to chide her.

  “So you had sex. Big deal. People have been doing it since genitals were invented. Nothing to fret about, unless this was the very first time you had sex.”

  “No, Payton, thank you very much. I’ve been having sex for a decade.”

  It actually had been over a decade since Jeff Grant had suggested we take off our clothes and “just do it” at his parents’ Christmas party in Middleburg. Like tonight, I had idiotically said yes.

  “As for Sandro . . . ” Payton interrupted my sexual reminiscing. “Let’s not dramatize that, either. I slept with a slew of married men before I started dating Buck,” she admitted casually. “One . . . two, maybe three. It won’t kill you if you do, too.”

  She had? Was my sister secretly a dominatrix for hire by the hour? Because with her Machiavellian personality and bra size, she would make a hell of a good one.

  “But you were twenty when you met Buck!” I said like a missionary shaking a Bible at a girl in a short skirt.

  “We didn’t all go to the convent known as Wellesley College,” she replied. “I went to school in the city. And I didn’t meet Buck until spring break junior
year.”

  She had indeed. She had gone to Columbia and become best friends with some soul-crushing heir to the Hearst fortune and spent a lot of time dancing downtown and making other girls feel inferior and fat. When Payton came back for Christmas after her first semester, the Virginia prep school girl was gone and Manhattan Payton had arrived. She was terrifying. Money in Middleburg meant your parents bought you a Jeep Grand Cherokee for your sixteenth birthday and you had your own horse—pretty darn nice by anyone’s standards. Except spoiled New Yorkers. All of a sudden it was dancing on tables with hedge fund managers and Fashion Week wardrobes and having someone’s parents send their chauffeur to take you to the Hamptons. I was fifteen years old that August when Payton went to college, still happily singing along to Shania Twain and wearing J. Crew sundresses. By December, she had become a skinny space alien with really nice accessories and I was left even further behind.

  But, as is Payton’s way, she graduated summa cum laude. Her advisor actually wept in front of my family over her thesis on warhorses. I hated Payton sometimes. Most of the time, actually. It really would have done a lot for my ego if she blurted out that she used to pour hot wax on businessmen’s crotches for a hundred bucks an hour.

  “You remember Eleanor Hearst, of course,” said Payton in her breathy voice. The one she put on when she wanted people to actually like her.

  Of course I did. She or some relative of hers was in every issue of Town & Country. Once I convinced my friend in the graphics department to Photoshop a large toucan attacking her at a fund-raiser for the Bronx Zoo, but we were too chicken to print it in the end.

  “Well, Eleanor ran with this incredibly rich group one summer. They were all from Monaco or something like that. They had long names and great cars, and I slept with one of them. Maybe two. And I learned that an older, powerful, married man can be a real aphrodisiac.”

  I laughed out loud for probably a minute and a half. “You sound like an idiot. If moneyed geriatrics are such an aphrodisiac then why did you marry Buck? He’s gorgeous. And technically younger than you are.”

  “I know,” she said. “I grew up. Grown-ups don’t need an aphrodisiac. We need a strong man to kill bugs.”

  Ah, love. “That’s really depressing, Payton. You married a man because he can swat flies.”

  “Didn’t you call for my help? You better be nice to me.”

  She was right. Payton was most definitely one of Satan’s handmaidens, but she had one sterling quality: she could keep a secret.

  “I need you to come home,” I admitted. “For at least a week or two. I feel like I’m sitting on something big, and I’m too involved to act straight on it. I’m sleeping with James when I really want to be sleeping with Sandro. And those Olivia-screwing-Stanton pictures are still burning a hole in my soul, but I haven’t done anything with them yet because now I’m wondering if an immigrants’ rights group is pushing her into bed with him. Either way, I think that while she was busy wrinkling the sheets, she fell in love. I’m confused—I need your help.”

  It was probably the words “I need your help,” that did it. Words I hadn’t said to my sister since 1998 while hallucinating on a potent mix of THC and magic mushrooms.

  To my surprise, Payton said, “I’ll think about it. I’m exceptionally busy. But maybe I can come in a few weeks.” Before I could thank her, she said, “If I decide to come, you must send a car to pick me up at the airport and you must make sure it doesn’t have any air freshener in it. At all. It makes me gag, especially those horrific Christmas-tree-shaped ones. They’re more effective at making me retch than a finger down the throat.” She laughed, because Payton would find bulimia hilarious, and said, “Also, tell Mom and Dad that I refuse to sleep in a barn with my little sister.”

  CHAPTER 13

  Sleeping with James had been a huge mistake. I once had sex with someone so he would stop speaking, so I wasn’t worried about my pristine honor, but it still felt like one of my stupider decisions. I wasn’t lusting after James—I was watching a video of Sandro almost every night and studying his face, the way he laughed, the way he spoke. But he was married, and James was not. If I had to choose one to sleep with, I guess I’d picked the right one. But it didn’t feel that way.

  I needed to see Sandro again. The way he had touched my hair at the restaurant was so intimate, such a clear sign that he was interested. But I wanted more than just another round of footsie. If I could talk to him alone again, build some familiarity between us, maybe I could figure out how much he knew about Stanton and Olivia. It was hard to imagine Sandro sleeping with his wife if he was au courant of her weekend activities, but maybe he was familiar with the senator’s policies. He might be aware that Olivia spent time with Stanton, might even encourage it, but not know that it was naked time.

  I pictured myself alone with Sandro. I could just drop the name Hoyt Stanton and see how he reacted. Maybe he would tell me everything he knew and then caress my neck with his tongue.

  Finding him seemed next to impossible. Besides his band of hockey-loving Canadians, I didn’t know his friends, hobbies, favorite restaurants, anything. I finally realized that one thing I could find out was his address. The List’s office manager, Megan, had on her desk a binder containing all of our personal information.

  The next day at work I walked up to Megan and prepared to awkwardly camp out at her workstation until I got Olivia’s address.

  “Oh, hi, Adrienne,” Megan said sweetly. She had come to the List from a law firm and still seemed very far away from the rat race of journalism. She said “good morning” and “thank you” and other niceties that were generally blacklisted in List land.

  “Hey!” I said, with far too much excitement. I picked up a squishy toy turtle she had on her desk and started poking at its eyeballs.

  “I got that at a National Geographic party. Fun, isn’t it,” she said.

  It was kind of fun. I clearly needed some children’s toys on my desk. Focus! I put the turtle down and turned to walk away, but quickly spun back around. I hoped my little dance move looked natural; I had just practiced it in the handicap bathroom in front of the full-length mirror.

  “Now I remember why I came over here,” I said. “My neighbor brought over my paycheck stub yesterday. She said it came to her house. So I just wanted to check to see if you guys have the right address for me.”

  “Oh, that’s weird. Sorry about that,” said Megan, reaching for a red binder and opening it on her desk.

  I quickly ran up behind her, like this was the most interesting task in the world, and watched as she flipped the pages. Brown, Campo, they were pretty close alphabetically. I thanked all that was holy for making my last name start with a B and prayed that our names would be on the same page.

  Megan quickly flipped to my listing. There I was. Adrienne Brown, then Jeffrey Butler, then Olivia Campo: 2797 Church Street, NW.

  When I came to, I realized Megan was asking me about life in Middleburg.

  “Oh, I just love it,” I told her. “It’s beautiful. Everyone has a horse and a dog and there’s lots of tweed. You should come visit sometime.”

  “But isn’t the commute horrible?” she asked.

  Yes, the commute was horrible. I was almost fluent in German I spent so much time listening to Rosetta Stone in the car. And D.C. drivers were enraged lunatics with lead feet.

  “It’s really not that bad,” I said, smiling. “I can drive and type at the same time now.”

  “Oh, sure, of course,” she said, putting the binder away.

  2797 Church Street. I knew exactly where that was. Church was a small, cute street just a few blocks east of Dupont Circle.

  Since Olivia always traveled with the president, whose schedule was emailed to everyone at the Capitolist every day, it was easy to keep tabs on her. I knew that POTUS was going to be in Detroit and then Madison for the next two days, so I didn’t have to worry about running into her. I could just loiter on the block and wait to see Sandro.


  The problem with Church Street, I realized when I got there that night, was that it was entirely residential. I couldn’t just sit outside of Starbucks and pretend to be reading instead of stalking. There were houses, and there was a church, and that was it. I was wearing a bright magenta dress that day. If Sandro came outside, he was going to see me: I was like a traffic cone on a gray street. After circling the block six times, I found a parking space on P Street big enough for my submarine of a car and walked over to Church. It was 7:15 P.M. I had no concept of Sandro’s hours, but very few jobs in Washington released you before 7 P.M.

  I found 2797, a very nice, dark gray, four-story town house with a bright green door. The roof was peaked, unlike the rest of the houses on that road, and there were vertical rows of pretty bay windows.

  Olivia was clearly making four times my salary! We were roughly the same age, and she lived here. With a gorgeous husband. It was so unfair. She didn’t even appreciate it. She spent her Saturday nights having sex in Middleburg. I spent the majority of my Saturday nights not having sex in Middleburg. What an ingrate.

  I walked past the house, trying to look natural. I didn’t want to leave the street for fear of missing Sandro, so I went to the church. I was a somewhat practicing Episcopalian. They weren’t going to turn me away.

  Or maybe they were. The doors were locked. I was being rejected by God. Which made perfect sense, since I was using the church as my cover while I stalked a married man and tried to get information out of him. I sank onto the stone steps to contemplate my poor life choices of late.

  “They only have evening service on Thursday, I’m afraid,” said a voice behind me. It was a woman with dark hair, graying in the front, and a distinct Brooklyn accent.

  “Oh, okay. Thank you,” I said, turning around.

  The woman, who was forty-five or so, gave me a big smile, probably because I looked like a supercommitted Christian on the verge of a religious breakdown. When she was twenty feet past me, I moved away from the church door and walked down the block. Maybe I could just sit on the stoop of a house and pretend I lived there. If the owner came home, I would just apologize and say I had the wrong address.