The List (22 page)

When we walked out to his car, brought up from Pennsylvania Avenue by a valet in a
red jacket, it became clear to both of us that I was fairly drunk. He suggested a
bar, and when I declined, he suggested some Vitaminwater and an aspirin at his house.
To that, I stupidly said yes.

We drove through the straight grid of Washington streets with the windows down. He
lent me his arm as we walked into his town house near Eastern Market. It had a window
box full of flowers that I was sure he hadn’t planted himself.

“How about a martini?” he said, walking to his oak and marble kitchen, which seemed
to illuminate magically when he entered.

“Didn’t I say water and aspirin?” I replied, my head still spinning.

I waited in the living room while he opened bottles and filled crystal glasses with
ice. There were absolutely no personal photos in his apartment. There were three large,
colorful abstract paintings, which looked expensive and bland. In New York I went
on a date with a Flemish man who spent his weekends painting enormous vaginas on canvas,
so boring art didn’t bother me too much.

“Did you do these?” I asked as he effortlessly fished a few olives out of a Whole
Foods container with a tiny cocktail fork.

“No,” he replied. “My decorator chose them. Xavier dos Santos.”

Of course. I was actually mad at myself for not recognizing the style. Heaps of beige,
reclaimed oak furniture, heavy marble tables, and red, colorful art. He decorated
dozens of Washington apartments and houses in the same expensive, flavorless style.

“Before you judge me too heavily, I’m single,” James pointed out defensively, after
catching the sour look on my face. “And I don’t really like to spend my weekends buying
lampshades. So I hired Xavier. He’s fast, and he doesn’t care about my opinion, so
that worked out well for me.”

I wasn’t judging. I lived in a barn.

“Come. Try the Noguchi chair. I just got it.” He came over from the kitchen, sat in
it, and motioned to his knee.

“Don’t take this the wrong way,” I said, walking closer to him. “But how do you have
all this money? You’re a press flack.”

He started laughing like I’d just asked him the exact measure of his genitals. “Wow,
you really did just move here from New York, didn’t you. That is such a New York question.”

“It is not!” I protested. “It’s a safety question. Maybe you launder money on the
side. Maybe you’re busy scamming the elderly.”

“It’s neither of those, I promise,” he said, running his hand over the smooth wood
of the expensive chair. “I worked for Goldman Sachs for ten years. I guess I was pretty
good at it.”

An ex-banker in Washington? Quite the rarity.

“Why on earth would you leave that job?” I asked, looking around his apartment. “Didn’t
you take an eighty percent pay cut to work for the RNC?”

“More like ninety. It hurt,” he admitted. “But I wanted to do
something a little more meaningful with my life. Ten years on Wall Street and I felt
a little bit soulless. Plus, I was sick of those petty New York girls.” He flashed
me a perfect smile. “So I came down here and worked for Senator Estes for two years
and then got this gig. But don’t worry,” he said, reaching up for my hand. “I’m not
broke yet.”

He tried to pull me down to the chair, but I pulled away and said, “I’ll sit in it
if you stand up.”

“But that wouldn’t be fun,” he said, rubbing his knees.

“Have you ever been convicted of sexual harassment?” I asked, fishing the olive out
of my glass and popping it and its vodka-soaked insides into my mouth. James had handed
me both a Vitaminwater and a martini, which was a disgusting combination, but I was
too drunk to care. Plus, the martini came with a side of marble-shaped ice cubes.
In my state I found them fascinating and started rolling them around on his impeccable
hardwood floors.

“Not recently,” he said, smiling.

“Well, that’s reassuring.”

The two sips of vodka martini were a mistake. I was feeling awfully woozy. I was still
speaking, but I had no idea what I was saying. James’s face looked like a bowl of
pudding painted by Cubists. I felt sick and sleepy, and then, somehow, the world just
went away.

 • • • 

When I came to, I was lying in a luxuriously fluffy bed with white sheets and thick
down comforters up to my neck. The temperature felt like winter in Juneau, and long
curtains hung over the windows. Was I in James’s house? It didn’t look a thing like
it.

Magically, my cell phone was on the nightstand. I grabbed it and called him.

“Good morning, sunshine!” he laughed into the phone. “Yes, you are, you definitely
are,” he assured me when I asked if I was in his apartment. “You’re in the guest room,
fully clothed, as you might have noticed. I am such a gentleman.”

Oh God. I must have passed out. That was the only explanation. I probably fell on
the floor and drooled all over my face and he took a video and it was now on YouTube
and I was going to get fired.

But actually, when James explained what had happened, the reality was worse.

“You talked to my mother,” he said, laughing. “It wasn’t really your fault. My parents
just moved to the West Coast and she can’t keep the time difference straight. She
called, I answered, and you grabbed the phone from me, but she woke me up with a message
for you this morning.” I conversed with his mother! I needed to check myself into
AA for a day. I wondered if they had speed courses for working professionals.

“Did I really? I didn’t. I’m so sorry . . . did I really talk to your mother?” I stuttered.

“Did you ever. She says hello. She also sends her regards to Caroline and Winston-who-went-to-Princeton.
Mind if I ask who they are?”

“Those would be my parents,” I confessed.

“Of course,” said James. “Most memorable date of my life. We should do it again. So,
how is next Saturday?”

“Sometimes I’m not great with my liquor,” I said, apologizing. “I just don’t drink
very often anymore with this job. So when I do—”

“You don’t need to explain,” said James, interrupting. “Like I said, most memorable
date of my entire life.”

I laughed at the fact that he wasn’t having me committed, and I agreed to go out with
him again. And then, like the gentleman that he was proving to be, he let me shower
and drove me all the way back to Middleburg, with the windows open and a painkiller
floating in my stomach.

I
t’s strange to learn about people without being close to them. I felt like I was watching
an opera from the wings; I would have preferred the limited view from the cheap seats
to all the backstage drama I was privy to now. Olivia, Sandro, and Stanton had been
shoved to the back burner while I caught up with
List
work after the Correspondents’ Dinner. But now that I had filed some meatier pieces,
including an exclusive interview with James Franco on his political agenda, I felt
like my job was more secure and Hardy wasn’t going to fire me on a whim. I was also
starting to understand what it took to inch a little higher at the
List
. Before I broke the Franco piece, most of my colleagues looked down at their phones
when I walked past them in the newsroom. Now, they looked straight ahead. Maybe, if
I decided to go ahead with the Olivia story, they would actually look at me. Perhaps
try out an exotic greeting like “hello.”

The senator was easier to stalk than Olivia or Sandro. His life was public knowledge,
and so was his job. When I got sick of watching him jabber on C-SPAN, I started looking
up his hearing schedule and heading to the Hill so I could listen to him speak in
person. The first two times I went, it was just a study in the motions of the man,
his physicality, the things that made
him tick. But the third time I saw him, he took to the Senate floor for half an hour.

Walking up the long hill, past tourists in comfortable shoes, I flashed my Congress
pass to the security guards at the door of the Capitol and put my bag through the
X-ray machine. Once it had been established that I was not a threat to national security,
my possessions were returned, and I walked through the marble building.

“Pass?” a handsome security guard asked as I opened the door of the press gallery
in the Senate chamber. I untangled it from my hair and showed him a picture where
I looked like a corpse. “Proceed,” he instructed me. I walked toward the front row.

Placed high above the Senate floor, too high for effective heckling or accurate spitballs,
the press gallery was occupied, as usual, by a handful of reporters reclining in their
horrific outfits, scribbling on creased notepads, and punching furiously away on their
BlackBerrys like they were instant-messaging Deep Throat. I recognized a girl from
the Associated Press who was wearing a mint green oversize polo shirt with a pair
of stained khakis and canvas sneakers. She looked like she was ready to depart for
spring break in Orlando. Another girl was in a too-loose skirt suit, huge plastic
bubblegum pearls, and a pair of ballerina flats with rubber soles.

That was the thing about female print journalists. Dressing up, grooming, having two
angular eyebrows—all frowned upon. It was still that archaic mentality of trying to
blend in with the boys. But I refused. I just couldn’t look like I dressed out of
a “take me” bin.

I took out my writing pad (Nepalese paper encased in a pink ostrich leather cover
embossed with a quote from Balzac, in
French) and settled into a dark wooden seat. I was scrolling through news on my BlackBerry,
hoping I could file something while I waited, when a reporter from Scripps started
barking in my general direction.

In a tone that sounded appropriate for bootleggers and criminals, he hollered, “Hey
blondie, you got an extra pen?” I turned to him and pointed at my chest quizzically.

“Yes, you. Do you see any other blondes sitting here? Do you have a pen I could borrow?”

I reached into my bag, walked up the stairs, and handed him my backup. He inspected
it like I had just handed him a lit stick of dynamite.

“This is shaped like a tiger,” he said, examining the exotic writing utensil.

“It’s the only extra one I have,” I said with a smile, not mentioning that it was
actually a panther, it was made by Cartier, and it cost over a grand. “Nah, I’m gonna
break this thing,” he said, handing it back. “I’ll go inside and grab a Bic.” He was
getting up to leave when a girl unearthed a pen from her messy, mousy brown ponytail
and threw it at him.

“Hey, thanks,” he said. She raised her hand in acknowledgment while she continued
to type, but she didn’t say a thing.

Of course. Who would want to write with an enamel and gold pen when you could scribble
with a dandruff-covered white plastic stick? What a sound choice. I looked at the
Scripps reporter, silently wished him a lifetime of unhappiness and lice, and watched
as senators started to file into the formal room.

Stanton was chairman of the Judiciary Committee and was talking today about immigration
and the Freedom Fence Act, which would double the length of the existing border fence
between Mexico and the United States. Since hearing Olivia say she was writing about
the fence and discovering that she had
reported on it in depth in the past, I was beginning to think that it wasn’t just
the issue that brought them together, it was the issue that was keeping them together.
Olivia was from Texas, which is where one hundred miles of the fence would go. He
was from Arizona and her perfect husband was definitely from Mexico or Central America.
That couldn’t be a coincidence.

“I can think of nothing more important than protecting our borders, which will in
turn protect our freedoms and our families,” Stanton declared once he had the floor.
Pacing in front of the Senate president, he paused, lifted his left hand, and dropped
it again with the elegance of a symphony conductor. “Terrorism is a very real threat.
Those of us who see the fence as nothing but a means to keep out illegal immigrants
are asleep at the wheel. It’s a safety concern. The way the fence stands right now,
it’s like a catwalk straight into our country.”

There were some chuckles from a few in the room. The senator turned and looked at
his colleagues. “The American people deserve to tuck their children in at night without
fear. I think, especially, of the Americans living in border towns, in El Paso, in
San Diego and San Luis. Democrats say the numbers are already going in the right direction
and that we should stop making a fuss. But the pace is too slow.”

He opened the bottom button of his gray blazer and straightened his navy and maroon
tie. It reminded me of the one my college boyfriend wore to the boat races on the
Charles River. Stanton’s probably smelled a lot less like beer.

“We need more vehicle barriers,” he said, his body straight and tall. “We need more
pedestrian fence. Seven hundred miles is nothing. I was in the army with men who could
run seven hundred miles in a week.”

As Stanton finished his address, I held up my BlackBerry and zoomed in on him with
the phone’s video camera. His body
looked much younger than his years. His tan face was covered with fine lines but showed
a youthful vigor as he spoke. I thought about the photos I had of him having sex with
Olivia. What would his colleagues, sitting here intimidated now, say when they saw
those? All his arguments, all this passion would be reduced to nothing if I decided
to splash those photos around the world. Few politicians ever recovered from sex scandals
and when physical evidence was involved, it was always game over.

Senators were scrawling notes as Stanton spoke. Senator Dianne Feinstein and her perfect
hairdo and well-cut St. John suit looked like she was going to explode. But no one’s
ire was going to prevent Stanton from finishing his eloquent roar.

The reporter from the
Huffington Post
picked up his phone and called his editor. “I’m running late. I’ll be in when this
fucker decides to shut up. Do we have a stand-alone immigration page? We do? We have
a what page? A wedding page? When did that launch? Okay, well, this asshole isn’t
proposing to anyone, he’s just ranting about the border fence, so I think immigration
is a better landing page, don’t you? Yeah, it should be the lead. I’ll file quick.
Have someone get a photo off the AP wire of his fists flying. He’s like a prizefighter
out here.”