The Hopefuls (8 page)

The kitchen in our apartment was tiny, had almost no counter space, and was walled off from the rest of the downstairs. In our old place, when we had people over, I could chop vegetables in the open kitchen, while taking part in the conversation. Now I was stuck in the back like a servant, poking my head out when people laughed, to ask, “What's so funny?”

Ash and Colleen came into the kitchen to talk to me, but there was nowhere for them to sit, and so they stood awkwardly in the middle of the room and had to keep moving out of the way as I grabbed things from the shelves. Cooking doesn't come easily to me—I had to really concentrate on the recipe, talk out loud to make sure I was measuring correctly, and it was impossible for me to chat at the same time.

“Really, you guys. Go out in the other room,” I said. “You don't need to keep me company, I'll be out in a minute.” The oven was making the kitchen hot, so in addition to being flustered, I was also starting to get sweaty.

“Oh, we don't mind,” Ash said. She leaned against the counter. “We're happy to keep you company.”

She was blocking the area where I was planning to bread the chicken cutlets and I had to reach around her to grab my bowl of flour. Colleen was standing right in the middle of the kitchen, slowly turning around to take it all in. “I can't believe they haven't updated this,” she said.

I went to place the flour next to the stove, but tripped and spilled a little bit. I could hear Bruce laughing in the other room, loudly, saying something about golf. “Let's just—you know what? Let's go have a drink and some appetizers and I'll come back in a few minutes to get the rest of it done,” I said and headed into the living room before they could argue.

Matt turned around, looking grateful to see us coming. “We're going to take a break from the kitchen,” I told him.

“That sounds great. Can I help in there?” I shook my head. Matt was always happy to help, but he wasn't any more gifted at cooking than I was. I took a glass of wine and sat on the floor. Colleen squeezed onto the couch next to Bruce, forcing him to shift over a little bit. As he did, he exhaled loudly. He always made a lot of noise—groaning when he moved, slurping when he drank. It's possible they had something to do with his age, all the sounds he made. I tried to be gracious and ignore it, but a lot of the time, I felt like asking, “Everything okay?” when he squeaked and moaned.

Ash plopped herself on the floor next to me and grabbed a cheese puff. I took one too and popped it in my mouth, already filled with regret that I'd decided to have a dinner party.

“So, Jimmy,” Colleen said. “What is it that you do?” She leaned forward, as if she couldn't wait to hear his answer, in what we called her Barbara Walters pose.

“I'm the director of the White House travel office,” Jimmy said.

“And what does that entail, exactly?” she asked. I could tell that Colleen thought Jimmy was attractive from the way she kept raising her eyebrows. In college, we could always tell she liked a guy when she started resembling Jack Nicholson.

Jimmy answered her question, and she came back with three more. Ash and I swiveled our heads back and forth between them, like we were watching a tennis match. Colleen had come right from work and she was wearing a sleeveless red dress with a split at the neckline. She got her hair blown out each morning, and it was always shiny and smooth. Her makeup was done for the camera and looked a little heavy in real life, but she never wiped any of it off before going out. Either she didn't notice how caked on it looked in regular light or she didn't care. She sat up straight and focused on Jimmy, as if she really were interviewing him. Bruce leaned back on the couch and half closed his eyes. Matt got up to refill drinks, and when he returned, Colleen was asking Jimmy where he saw his career going.

“Give the guy a chance to catch his breath,” Matt said lightly, as he handed them both a drink.

“I'm a reporter, Dogpants. I can't help it. And it sounds like an amazing job.”

“It does,” Matt said. I could tell he was deciding whether or not to say more. “Ask him about riding on Air Force One.”

Matt was pretty fascinated with Jimmy's job—and to be honest, with Jimmy himself. He often came home and told me different things that he'd heard about Jimmy from other people—it was the closest Matt ever came to gossiping, although I would never have called it that because there wasn't any ill will behind it. He told me people talked a lot about how surprised they were that Jimmy was hired as the travel director. I thought Jimmy was exaggerating when he'd described his career in advance as accidental, but it turned out he wasn't. “It doesn't sound like he worked all that hard,” Matt said to me. “I mean, on the campaigns, sure, he worked hard and did a great job. But in between he kind of just hung out. He had all these chunks of time where he wasn't working at all, and from what I hear, it didn't sound like he was all that concerned about finding a job. I think he really just kept doing it because he thought it was fun.”

After the election, Jimmy was offered the travel director job and he'd taken it, but the interesting part was he hadn't been pursuing anything—they went after him. “People just really like him,” Matt said. “They wanted him in the office.”

I think part of the reason Matt was so interested in Jimmy was that they were so different. Matt was the hardest-working person I knew—he'd had a job from the time he was thirteen and started caddying. He cried when he got a B in sixth-grade science class, worried it would keep him from getting into Harvard. Jimmy was good at what he did, but made no secret of the fact that he didn't especially like to work hard. Matt had wanted to run for office since he was in second grade, and it seemed like Jimmy had just recently looked around and thought, Well, that could be fun. I could almost guarantee that Jimmy hadn't stopped himself from smoking pot (or doing anything else) in college because he was worried about his future political career. The idea of running for office seemed to be something he just stumbled across and decided to entertain.

Matt was currently a little bored at his job and he liked talking about Jimmy's experiences, which were, without a doubt, more exciting than his own. Matt even enjoyed having Jimmy describe how he packed for trips—he traveled so often that he was basically a professional packer, and he'd shown us one time how fast he could pack for a weeklong trip: laying out his suits and ties in under a minute, rolling his socks with precision, wrapping the hangers on his hanging bag with gaffe tape to keep them from shifting. Matt asked him so many questions about riding on Air Force One that Jimmy swiped a couple of coasters from the plane to give to him. Whenever Matt used them, I could see his eyes turn green.

When Matt was first offered the position of associate counsel, he was thrilled. But it wasn't quite what he expected. The rest of the associate counsels were younger than he was, which I know bothered him. Most of what he did was background checks on prospective hires, and he said in a lot of ways it was just as tedious as when he'd worked at the law firm, that he missed the excitement of the campaign.

“Well, you can't really compare them,” I said. “No job will ever live up to the campaign.”

“No,” he said, sadly, “I guess it won't.”

Matt had even begun to think about what he wanted to do next, talking to people about different opportunities. This seemed a little crazy to me, since he'd just started his job, but I didn't know then that this was just part of DC, that everyone was always looking ahead to the next step, peeking around to see what other people were doing, calculating the next move.

Every time I started to get up to go back to the kitchen, Ash would say, “Oh, just stay a few more minutes! We're still filling up on the puffs.” Maybe she was trying to be friendly, or maybe she didn't want to be left alone with Colleen, who was still grilling Jimmy. After a while, I didn't even move when I said, “I should start the chicken.”

What we learned that night was that Jimmy was from Texas, but also sort of wasn't. “I was born there,” he said, when Colleen pressed him. “In Houston. And I lived there until I was about eight and then we moved to a few different places before moving back.”

“Where?” Colleen asked.

“Well, we were in New York for a year and then we went to London because my dad opened up a branch of the firm out there. But we always kept the ranch in Johnson City and spent Thanksgiving and Christmas there each year. And then we moved back to Houston when I was in high school and my parents are still there.”

“So you went to high school in Houston?”

“No, I went to Choate.”

“Jesus Christ.” Colleen laughed. “You realize you're basically W, right? You're from Texas, but you're not really from Texas.”

“I'm from Texas,” Jimmy said. For a second, I saw his eyes flicker with annoyance, but then he smiled. “Once you're born there, that's it. Texas forever.”

“How very
Friday Night Lights
of you,” Colleen said. She looked at him for a second, but then she decided to drop it and smiled too. “Speaking of which, if you ever run into Tim Riggins, call me immediately.”

You shouldn't have a dinner party and not feed your guests for the first three hours. Lesson learned. By the time I went to the kitchen to cook the chicken, I'd lost count of how many drinks I'd had. I stood in front of the stove and closed one eye to concentrate and stop the pan from moving. I wondered if this ever happened to Ina Garten while she was waiting for Jeffrey to come home and decided it definitely did.

We ran out of vodka, so Matt went to the liquor store across the street to get a new bottle. I was a little appalled we'd gone through the whole thing, but Colleen kept saying, “Relax, it's Friday night.” Matt came back to find me standing over the stove with one eye closed, and put his arm around my waist and kissed my neck, which is how I knew he was drunk too. I don't have the faintest idea of what dinner tasted like. The last thing I remember is hugging Colleen good-bye, while we told each other how happy we were to be living in the same city again. Bruce was standing by the door, getting impatient, and he said, “Look at you two, you look like a couple of lesbians,” which made me realize he was also the kind of person who would get racist after a bottle of wine.

The next morning, I was drinking coffee and feeling out my hangover when Colleen called to talk about the dinner.

“What's Jimmy's deal?” she asked. “He's so on all the time. I kept wanting to tell him to relax.”

“I like him,” I said.

“No, he's nice. It's just…there's something about him, you know? Like his whole, ‘I'm a Texan' thing. It feels a little over the top. He said something about a talking coon in a tree last night. Like, okay, we get it. You're super-Texan.”

I tried not to laugh. What Jimmy had said was, “She could talk a coon out of a tree,” and he'd been referring to Colleen, who was going on and on about all the problems she saw with the healthcare law, talking over anyone who tried to interject.

“And her? Beth, she's so weird. She seems like the kind of person who would be in a crafting group or really into scrapbooking or something like that. When you were in the kitchen, she told me how happy and blessed she was to have met you, and then she said, ‘Praise God.' ”

“Yeah, she's really religious,” I said.

“Normal religious or religious like she's in a cult? I'm guessing the cult.”

“Okay, I get your point. You didn't like her, but remember you didn't like me at first either.” Colleen and I were freshman-year roommates, but she barely paid any attention to me for the first month of school. She came to school knowing a few people from Long Island, and always had parties and bars to go to (she had a fake ID, I did not) and she never invited me. It wasn't until she threw up in her bed one night, after returning home drunk, and I helped her that she even talked to me. I had to prop her up and change her sheets and she was disobedient and annoying, and I told her she was disgusting. The next morning, I woke up to her eating Cheerios on her bed (Colleen never got hungover), and she smiled at me. “You told me I was like a pig in slop last night,” she said. “You were,” I told her, and she laughed. “You're funny,” she said, and after that we were somehow unexpectedly friends.

On the other end of the phone, Colleen sniffed. “That's not true, I just didn't know you. You barely talked when we first met. And even then, I knew you weren't a total freak.”

“I'm just saying, first impressions aren't everything. She's nice. And she's been a good friend to me here.”

“Whatever,” Colleen said. “I'm telling you, something about them is weird.” But then she changed the subject and we talked about another friend of ours from college who'd just broken up with her boyfriend. “I knew he was a creep all along,” she said. “Remember when he offered to buy her a Burberry scarf if she lost ten pounds?”

When we finally hung up, I poured myself more coffee and settled back on the couch. I wasn't all that surprised that Colleen didn't like Ash, and I wasn't going to push for the two of them to be friends. We didn't need to keep having them at the same dinner parties. Sometimes friends of friends just plain don't like each other, and there's nothing you can do about it.

Ash refrained from saying much about Colleen for a while, but sometimes she'd bring up Colleen and Bruce and ask me what I thought it was like to have sex with someone so old and wrinkled.

I never told Colleen that she'd guessed right, that a lot of the things she'd said about Ash were pretty close to the truth. Ash was Evangelical, and often referred to the time when she was “saved.” Once, I went to church with her because she invited me and we were new friends and it seemed rude to turn her down. Her church was in a theater with a live band and a screen that dropped down for the sermon. There were padded chairs and stadium-style seating, and people sang and clapped and murmured “Amen,” and said, “Mmmm-hmmm,” loudly, when they agreed with something. As a Catholic, used to kneeling and subdued chanting, I felt wildly uncomfortable with all this, which Ash must have guessed because she never asked me to go to church with her again.