The Girls' Guide to Love and Supper Clubs (10 page)

“Sorry,” he says. “Bad joke.”

I shrug, smiling for real this time. “I’ve heard worse. How long will you be away?”

“Not that long. Mostly just a few days at a time, over the fall recesses—the last two weekends of this month, and then over Columbus Day weekend next month. With any luck, we’ll adjourn October thirtieth, and that’ll be that.”

“Doesn’t the congressman have an office in Tampa? Why do you have to go back with him?”

He shrugs. “Hand-holding, mostly. As his communications director, it’s my responsibility to handle the press—interviews, questions, press releases, stuff like that. Given how heated the immigration debate is becoming, he wants me there to grease the wheels.”

I reach out and take the keys from Blake’s hand. “I’ll keep an eye on the place. Not a problem.”

“Oh, and I’ve been meaning to ask you …” He reaches into his inside jacket pocket and pulls out a piece of paper and a pen. “Now that you’re living in the neighborhood, would you mind signing my petition for the Dupont Circle ANC?”

“ANC?”

“Advisory Neighborhood Commission. They basically serve as the voice for the Dupont community. They’re having a special election this fall, and I’d like to run. It’s an unpaid position—something to do on the side—but I thought I’d give it a whirl.”

“Oh. Sure.”

I grab the pen from his hand and scrawl my signature on the page.

“Excellent,” he says. “Thanks.”

I hand the paper and pen back to him. “My pleasure.”

I expect him to jump in with one more sailing reference (something about “learning the ropes” or “getting my sea legs”), but mercifully he does not. Instead he gives a small salute, marches up the front steps, and heads down Church Street, disappearing from my line of sight.

I lock the door and amble back into my apartment, heading straight for the kitchen to deposit Blake’s keys in my take-out menu drawer. Before dropping them inside, I hold the key chain by its yellow plastic tag and dangle the three keys in front of me like a little wind chime, studying the notched grooves as they clang back and forth against each other. Then I shrug, drop the keys in the drawer, and slam it shut. Me and a set of my landlord’s keys. What’s the worst that could happen?

I rush down Church Street toward Eighteenth Street, stumbling across the cracks in the pavement as I try to avert yet another late arrival at the office. NIRD’s building sits along Dupont Circle’s southern border, only three blocks from my apartment, but its proximity has done nothing to abate my rampant tardiness. This morning I could blame my mother’s call or my landlord’s surprise visit, but really, I still had a good forty-five minutes to shower and throw myself together. And yet, somehow, I’ve managed to both run late
and
look disheveled. My mastery of wasting time should impress one and all.

As I hurry along Eighteenth Street, passing the glorious Andrew Mellon building with its ornate stone balusters and wrought iron balconies, I brush past other workers equally as rushed as I. Washington always bustles with energy the Tuesday after Labor Day as Congress returns and the city comes alive again after the hot, sleepy days of August. A grown-up “back-to-school” feeling permeates the city, and there is a renewed sense of hope and optimism. September heralds a fresh start. A blank page. An opportunity to set things right for the rest of the year.

Yes, I decide, September is when I will turn it all around. Things will get better from now on.

And then I enter the office and find Millie hovering over my desk, leafing through my papers in her tight black sleeveless turtleneck and gray pencil skirt. If this is the start of a better day, I haven’t bought nearly enough vodka.

“Can I help you?” I ask.

Millie throws one of my folders back into the pile on my desk—the folder, I suspect, that I use to hide all my recipes, so that it looks as if I’m reading about interest rate policy when I’m actually reading about the best way to cook a turkey or how to make homemade mozzarella.

“Well hello to you, too.” Millie stares at my white button-down top. I look down to see one of the small pearlescent buttons hanging by a thread, pulled to its limit thanks to a few too many batches of triple-fudge brownies and homemade Twix bars. Marvelous.

“Susan wants to know how you’re coming with the December conference,” she says. “I thought maybe I’d find some notes on your desk.”

Millie works for Susan Jenkins, who runs NIRD’s economics department and is, by default, Mark’s direct boss. Susan resembles Condoleezza Rice, if Condi wore skirts several inches shorter and heels several inches higher, and she is both a fierce gossip and a fearsome manager. A total ice queen, she once made a research assistant cry simply by staring him down in silence after he turned in a substandard report. She also fired an intern for lacking intellectual vigor, but we all suspect the real reason was because the intern was thinner and prettier than she was. And, according to an e-mail somewhere in my in-box, Susan is cohosting Mark’s economic recovery/financial risk conference—the event I am supposed to be helping with and for which I have done almost nothing.

“I’m still waiting for a confirmation from the last speaker,” I say.

This is true. What is also true is that Mark sent me a memo with a little more information on the conference, as well as what I should ultimately include in the handouts and on the PowerPoint slides, and that memo is still floating somewhere in my in-box, unread. I would have read it, but I had more pressing matters to attend to, such as cropping Adam out of all my Facebook photos.

Millie scowls. “Susan wants an update sooner rather than later, so you’d better hurry up.”

“Relax, I’m on it. The conference is three months away.”

Millie purses her lips and lingers behind my desk, tapping her fingernails against the surface, as if she is stroking the keys on a piano.

“Is that all?” I ask.

“How’s the new apartment? Adam has been sleeping at his place for a while now, so I assume you moved out.”

Hearing Adam’s name makes my stomach somersault, and if I thought my mood couldn’t get worse, it already has. “The new apartment is great,” I say. “Amazing, actually. A real find. I totally lucked out.”

“Glad to hear it.” She probes my eyes, as if she is expecting them to well up with tears. “Anyway, Susan wants to coordinate her slides with Mark, so you’d better hurry up with all the conference stuff. I turned in an outline to Susan a week ago.”

Well la-di-da. Does she want a prize? “Will do,” I say. “Now, if you don’t mind?” I gesture toward Millie’s desk, and taking the hint, she stomps off in a huff.

I plop down in my chair and boot up my computer. I am taken through about eight security screens before I can check my e-mail, and when I finally do, I see I have sixty-five unread messages, several of them from Mark.

But before I can read any of Mark’s messages, the man himself emerges from his office and appears in front of my desk. He wears a rumpled tweed jacket and navy blue bow tie, this one studded with large yellow currency symbols, almost none of which I recognize. He is also barefoot.

“Ah, there you are,” he says. “Did you see my e-mail?”

“Um … yes,” I say, lying.

“Good. Because I really think we will need to talk about Greece come December.”

“Right. Greece.”

“Also, the dollar. The dollar will be very important.”

I pull out my pen and begin jotting on my notepad. “Greece … and the dollar. Got it.” Except that I don’t. “So … what would you like me to send you? About Greece … and the dollar.”

“I think I made that pretty clear in the e-mail.”

“Right. The e-mail.” That I haven’t read.

“Also, did you see the article I left you? I stuck it in one of your folders …” Mark reaches for my undercover recipe folder and lifts it from my desk.

“No!” I shout, snatching the folder from his hands. Mark recoils. “No, sorry, I haven’t seen it.”

“Well, you should find it and give it a quick read. Could be useful background for my presentation. Susan has been on my case since last week, so I need to send her a rough outline ASAP.”

“The event isn’t for like three months, right?” He frowns. Apparently that was the wrong thing to say. “Don’t worry—I’m on it.”

He disappears back into his office, and I frantically pull up all the e-mails he has sent me in the last month and print them out sequentially. I will get organized, I will figure out what I’m supposed to be working on, and I will forge ahead. I will triumph. But first, I will check my favorite food blogs.

“Hannah!” I jump as Mark pops out of his office. “One more thing. Did you send me anything on the pee pip?”

“The what?” I rack my brain. The pee pip. The pee pip. What the hell is the pee pip?

He sighs. “The pee pip, Hannah.” As if any
idiot
knows what the pee pip is.

I stare at him blankly.

“The
P-P-I-P
? The Public-Private Investment Program the Treasury is running with the FDIC and the Fed?” he says. “Did you send me a status update or not?”

“Oh, no—I didn’t. Or, not yet at least.” Was I supposed to? Was that in one of his e-mails?

“Okay, good, because ultimately I may want to feature the PPIP on a slide with the TALF and the TIP, and so it would be more helpful to have a condensed status update on all three programs. Something short and snappy.”

I grab my pen. “Short … and … snappy …” This means nothing to me.

“In fact, we may want the PPIP, TALF, and TIP on the same slide as the TARP. To simplify it.”

Right.

“I don’t know, Mark. Don’t you think that’s a little … ‘alphabet soup-y’ for one slide? All those acronyms?”

Mark scrunches up his face in disapproval. “If these people don’t know a TIP from a TALF, they probably shouldn’t be coming to this conference.”

And, in a single sentence, Mark sums up why I do not belong at a place like the Institute for Research and Discourse and why I never should have started working here in the first place.

After lunch, Rachel sidles up to my desk, her graceful figure slinking between the rows of filing cabinets and bookshelves. She wears a cream vintage shift dress, striped with alternating horizontal bands of brown and baby blue. According to her latest Facebook update, Milk Glass won some award for “Best New Design Blog,” a distinction I might begrudge if she weren’t so damn deserving. Every photograph she takes and posts on her site looks like it belongs in
House Beautiful
or a Martha Stewart magazine, and she manages to keep her entries fresh and interesting. All this on top of her day job at NIRD. It’s impossible for me to resent someone who brings such a zest for life to everything she does.

Rachel parks herself on the edge of my desk as she sucks on a Jolly Rancher. “How are things?”

“Generally crappy, but what else is new?”

Rachel rolls her eyes. “Whaa, whaa, whaa.”

“Well it’s the truth.”

“You know what you need?”

“A winning lottery ticket and a plane ticket to Capri?”

Rachel clicks her tongue. “No. You need a diversion. Something to take your mind off of recent events.”

“I’ve been at NIRD for three years. My job isn’t particularly recent.”

“That’s not what I’m talking about.”

I know it’s not. She’s talking about Adam. But I don’t what to discuss him. And anyway, my job is responsible for at least 50 percent of my misery. Adam can’t claim all the credit.

“You’ve lost your joie de vivre,” she says, “and we need to get it back.”

“And how do you propose we do that?”

Rachel bows her head and stares at the tip of her chocolate round-toe pumps. She presses a finger to her lips and sighs. “You know what you
could
do …”

“Oh, here we go …”

“You could start one of those supper clubs you’re always talking about. Now that Adam is out of the picture.”

I laugh. “Nice try.”

I spent most of our relationship begging Adam to let me hold an underground supper club out of his apartment before we lived together, then out of our shared apartment once we did. Combining the novelty of a restaurant experience with the intimacy of a dinner party sounded exciting and offbeat and, above all,
fun
. I loved the idea of hosting a secret dinner in an undisclosed location. It was edgy. It was different. I wasn’t ready to start my own catering company, but I figured I could try my hand at an underground restaurant and see how it went. Adam put the kibosh on the idea immediately. I believe his exact words were, “I’m not going to ruin my reputation by running a speakeasy out of my home.” Rachel used it as one of her many examples of Adam putting his own interests before mine.

“I’m serious,” Rachel says. “It’ll keep you busy. You’ve always wanted to do it, and now there’s nothing holding you back.”

“Nothing but a dwindling bank account. Where am I going to get the money to put on a dinner for twelve? I can barely afford a dinner for one—even with my parents’ help.”

“That’s why you charge an entrance fee. Thirty-five bucks a head or something. And I can help. My grandmother just unloaded some cash on me. Something to do with the estate tax. I can decorate and feature the table setting on my blog.”