The List (24 page)

It took a few minutes but finally a woman came up to the man chatting with Stanton
and gave him a hug. “Taylor Miles!” she said with a strong drawl. “I knew you’d be
here and I have something very important to talk to you about. You can listen, too,
Senator Stanton,” she said, laughing when she noticed Stanton. “In fact, you
should
listen.”

Taylor Miles. He was quoted in an article I read on Stanton’s immigration stance.
I had just placed a Google alert on the senator regarding all things immigration.
I remembered him because I wondered if the reporter had reversed his first and last
name by accident. Miles was an Arizona state senator and the founder of the Southern
Immigration Reform Foundation, a staunchly right wing group, which had been accused
of racist undertones by many critics. But that didn’t seem to bother Stanton. He continued
to talk to Taylor and the woman with the southern accent about some town hall meeting
coming up on the border fence and I continued to eavesdrop while staring at a plant.

After a few more minutes, Stanton said goodbye to Miles and the woman and walked out
of the party. I counted quickly to ten and followed after him.

I didn’t know exactly what I was going to do. Slide-tackle Stanton and ask him if
he was sleeping with Olivia? That didn’t seem like a very good idea considering security.
Instead I just watched him get into a black town car that was waiting for him and
then I quickly got into mine. I started the Volvo and was about to head for home but
Stanton’s driver didn’t seem like he was going anywhere. I could see him in the front
seat with the light on, reading a magazine.

He was waiting for Olivia. I put my car back into park, took the key out of the ignition,
and turned off the headlights. Only minutes later, Olivia walked confidently down
the steps and got in the back of the town car like it was totally empty and idling
just for her. As soon as her door closed, the car did a quick U-turn and headed up
Connecticut Avenue.

Their affair was still going strong.

I had spoken to no one about Olivia, her amazing husband, or the senator, even though
I suspected there was a scandalous story behind their affair. If they stopped seeing
each other, I wasn’t sure I could keep pursuing. I had already overstepped a few journalistic
lines of ethics—I didn’t want to pole vault over any others. But the sighting at Upton’s
had quieted my doubts. And lying in bed that night, my mind racing, I knew I couldn’t
keep it to myself any longer.

I could only think of one person who had the kind of calculating personality I needed
and who was far enough away to confide in.

I took the telephone off my desk, moved to the gingham window seat in the living room,
and dialed. I heard the unfamiliar ringtone of another country.

“Hi, Payton, it’s me,” I said.

“And who is me?” asked a commanding voice. If I had to appoint one person to lead
troops into battle, it would be Payton Brown. She even had a name like a general.
Everyone who has ever met Payton is scared of her, and that includes her hulking husband.
I think that’s what won him over in the first place, actually. He had never been scared
of anything before and was just floored that the first person who frightened him was
a 115-pound stick of a girl from Middleburg, Virginia.

“Me? Who is me? Hello? Are you still there?” Payton screamed into the phone.

“Payton. Stop yelling. It’s your sister,” I said, already regretting my bright idea.

She laughed like a woman who relishes making homemade bombs. “Of course I knew that
already, Addy. You’re my one and only sister. Well, that I’m aware of anyway. I once
had Dad ready to buy a DNA kit to make sure you were his, but that’s beside the point.
I was just trying to see if your phone manners had improved at all, and clearly they
have not.”

My phone voice was what one would describe as perfectly pleasant. But Payton, ever
the actress, picks up the phone and announces, “This is Payton Cleves Brown Johnston
calling from San Andres de Giles, Argentina, and I hope to speak to Madame Butthead,”
or whoever it is she’s calling.

“It’s nice to hear your voice, Addy,” she said, sighing as if our conversation was
already exhausting her. “Tell me everything. What’s going on in that hometown of ours?
It really is so quaint that you left New York and your glamorous job to move home
with Mom and Dad. But actually, you don’t live in the house, do you?”

She made it sound like I lived on a mat outside the back door and answered to the
name of Fido.

“I don’t,” I confirmed. “I’m living in the barn apartment. The one the Hollands used
to live in until they had another baby.” Payton gave a few “umm-humms” and I heard
her tapping away on a computer, clearly sick of our back-and-forth.

“I’ve stopped showering and I roll myself in horse manure every night. It is so therapeutic.
A bit like splashing around in the grotto in Lourdes.”

My sister sucked in her breath sharply, paying attention again. “You do
what
!” she screamed.

I collapsed into a pile of laughter. “Payton! I’m kidding! I sleep in a bed, not in
a big pile of horse poop. Jesus, you’re so uptight.”

I could practically hear her spine straightening. “Look, Addy, you called me. Now
if you’ve decided to spend a dollar a minute on long distance just to make fun of
me in that horrifically sarcastic tone of yours, then so be it. I’ll just be your
whipping post.”

I felt slightly bad for toying with Payton’s robotlike mind. We saw each other so
seldom that it was easy to forget that she considered humor a time suck favored by
the weak.

“I’m not calling to make fun of you, Payton,” I said apologetically. “I’m calling
to tell you about something more serious. Something that is making me half insane
and that I just need to talk out. I . . . I need your help,” I admitted.

That perked her right up. All her life, there has been nothing Payton enjoys more
than doling out advice like a sage upon a mountaintop.

“Do you now?” she said shrilly. “This is a first. Well, besides the summer you were
almost arrested for smoking pot in Constitution Hall, but we’ve all forgotten about
that little incident, haven’t we.”

Yes, we had. We had forgotten because I was sixteen years
old and it was a Rusted Root concert and I was wearing a dress that I made out of
curtains from a thrift store. I don’t remember a thing about it.

“I’ve stumbled across something pretty big,” I said to Payton. “Huge, actually. I
found something out that could change the course of my life, other people’s lives,
too. And I don’t feel comfortable thinking about it, let alone talking about it. I
certainly can’t talk to anyone around here. But you, good old you, will happily tell
me if I’ve gone insane.”

Payton laughed with delight. “I’m sure I will declare you unfit to mingle with society.
Straitjacket city is in your future.”

I don’t think she was kidding.

As we sat in our two different hemispheres, I explained to her about Olivia having
sex with Stanton and how I shimmied on my belly in the dirt for hours in our hometown
to get a picture of them together. I told her I was still sitting on the photos because
a) I was a wimp and b) I felt like their relationship was more than just sex. I had
evidence, I just didn’t fully understand why she was doing it. And then I confessed
about Sandro. I told her how I wanted to strip off my clothes and have Sandro’s babies
and what a whole mess it all was.

“
Mess
does not seem like a strong enough word,” said Payton when I came up for air.

I explained how the mess could catapult my career forward. If I wrote about Olivia
and Stanton’s affair, broke the news, I would dominate the front page of the paper
for weeks, months. I could sit across from Chris Matthews on
Hardball
and Anderson Cooper on CNN. I would no longer be filing articles that Upton and Cushing
didn’t bother to read and I would be a guest at their parties, not the reporter tasked
with writing about them. And our parents would sit back and marvel and say, “How can
one person be so good at everything she does?” And this time they’d be talking about
me.

It scared me that I wanted all that, but I did, and I could certainly admit it to
Payton. I was sick of being just another one of the nameless Style girls stuck in
the smallest desks in the farthest corner. I worked too hard for that. We all did,
but I refused to watch the years tick by, waking up every day before 5
A.M.
just to be ignored while someone louder and more aggressive was applauded. Someone
like Olivia.

I explained that while I was trying to wrap my head around Stanton’s affair, I still
had to do my job for fourteen hours a day, so I was moving at a snail’s pace on the
story. In fact, there basically was no story. Just pictures and lots of speculation.
“I can’t talk about it with anyone at the paper because it involves one of our star
reporters. I’m afraid if I hand it to them now, they’ll pass my work off and let someone
else finish my scoop, send someone else to do the real investigative work. They say
it all the time, the
List
is about the five percent, and I’m not in that five percent. I can see them saying,
‘Thank you, you’ve done your part. Mike Bowles will be taking over from here.’ ”

“But you have to write it,” said Payton in a rare moment of encouragement. “You have
photos. They can’t take those from you. Maybe you were in the right place at the right
time in the beginning, but now you’ve done the legwork. You really haven’t told anyone
at work about them?”

“Nope. Like I just said, no one, not even the girls on my section. Just you.”

“Right. I didn’t really believe you. You have a mouth like Hedda Hopper.”

This was completely untrue.

“Well, you’re the only one I’ve told.”

“Fine,” said Payton, conceding. “It makes sense to me. You don’t want any help from
your colleagues on the story because you don’t want to share the glory with them,
either.”

“That’s not why,” I replied after a slight pause. The hesitation in my voice surprised
me. “I’m not telling anyone because I don’t want it to get out. I don’t want Olivia
to find out. The
Capitolist
isn’t a big place and it’s full of people who dig up dirt for a living. It’s just
too risky.”

“Whatever you say,” said Payton.

We both sat silently in our corners of the world and waited for the other to start
talking.

“There’s one more thing that’s nagging at me, and it might sound a little nuts, but
whatever, don’t judge me,” I said cautiously after a few seconds.

“I would never do that,” Payton replied sweetly.

This was bunk. Payton loved to judge me. When I was in my first pony show, when I
was six, she jumped up from the risers and screamed, “Number four forty-eight is disqualified
for being fat!” and was then escorted to the parking lot by my father. I weighed forty
pounds at the time.

“Well, Olivia’s husband, Sandro, is this incredible Mexican guy. Well, I think he’s
Mexican. Let’s say Central American to be safe. Handsome, charismatic. Just the full
package. But here she is having an affair with a staunchly anti-immigration, terribly
conservative senator from Arizona. I think she first got involved with him because
she was reporting on immigration legislation. But then she’s married to Sandro. It
doesn’t seem to add up.”

“Why? Don’t you remember ‘Viva Bush’ and all that? She could be a Republican. Plus,
she’s just having an affair with him, not writing policy. Libidos aren’t swayed by
voting habits.”

“You clearly don’t live here,” I said, stretching my legs out on the window seat.

I heard Payton clanging dishes around. She mumbled something in Spanish and announced
that she would be talking to me from the pool area. “It makes sense to me,” she declared.
“You’re married to a blonde, you cheat with a brunette. Your wife is a tiny gnome,
you cheat with a giant. You get what I’m saying. You want what you can’t have. If
I cheated on Buck, I would probably choose a man who resembled a baby carrot.”

“You’re going to cheat on Buck?”

“No, you idiot. He would shoot me. Or, alternatively, he could just sit on my head.
He’s still over two hundred pounds. It’s like being married to a whale.”

Her theory wasn’t a bad one. Olivia had young, hot, and handsome. Now she wanted old,
rich, powerful, and old.

“Or maybe her husband knows about her affair,” Payton speculated.

“No. Not Sandro,” I replied. “He would never stand for something like that. He seems
really decent.”

“Please,” she said. “You don’t know him at all. You’re just smitten and talking like
an idiot.”

Of course I was. I had never been more attracted to a man. I had uploaded the video
of Sandro at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner and now fell asleep to a still
image of his face.

“I like this kerfuffle of yours,” said Payton. I could hear her lighting a cigarette
with a flick of a match. “It’s nice to hear that you’re finally doing something interesting
up there. Mom told me about your job and it sounds mind-numbing. All that tweeting.
It’s for people with low IQs and ADD. But a scandalous affair, that’s much sexier.”

“Yeah,
sex
is the right word.”

“Was it crazy raunchy stuff?” asked Payton, never the shy one.

“Well, kind of,” I said honestly. “But that’s not what shocked me. It was their intimacy
that freaked me out.” As I said it, I
realized it was their closeness that was confusing me. “There’s something between
them. Something pretty intense.”

“Gross,” said Payton, inhaling a mouthful of tobacco. “Intimacy is highly overrated.
Still, keep me posted. And by posted, I don’t mean call me on a daily basis. Just
send me an email every once in a while. I’ll get back to you when I can. If I can.
Goodbye now.”

“You’re acting odd,” Julia said to me the next day over our three-minute lunch eaten
in front of our black Dell computers. “What’s up? Are you interviewing other places?”
She leaned over our short Plexiglas desk divider and frowned at me. “Because you’re
not allowed to leave me.”