The List (9 page)

Bass fishing? My boss was now a North Dakotan fisherman? I was still in bed. The only
sounds were my rapid breathing and the winter wind whistling outside my window. That
near silence was soon shredded by a phone call from Isabelle.

“I knew it! I told you! He’s all of nineteen years old, it sounds like. And the business
section! Some snot-faced stock market whiz. Why the hell would they hire him for the
Style section!” she screamed. But we both knew why. Four words—Yale,
New, York,
and
Times
—were enough for them.

“What does a bass fisherman from North Dakota know about gossip or style?” I asked
Isabelle. “I bet he shows up in rubber overalls and a bright red patriotic tie.”

 • • • 

I was wrong about the overalls. But he did show up in the
Capitolist
office on January 2 in a candy-apple red tie. He was twenty-two years old. His full
name was Harold, and he was already married. Married!

On his second day, after he had sent us a ten-page document called “Section changes
and expectations,” Alison was forced to speak to him. We had spent all fourteen hours
of day one communicating by email.

“Marley died,” she said, walking up to his desk, already covered in wonky books and
stacks of newspapers. Alison’s voice was high-pitched and quivering. She stood nervously
in front of Hardy, trying to stay professional.

While Rachel had sat with the other editors in the middle of the newsroom, a prime
seating spot away from the hallway leading to the front door, management had decided
to put Hardy in the back by us. Maybe it was his age, or his salary, which was about
half of Rachel’s, but he was downgraded to a desk that was only three inches wider
than ours. We measured it before he came. It made us feel better for about thirty
seconds.

“Marley. Is that your dog?” Hardy asked, not looking up from his keyboard. He was
working on her piece for tomorrow’s paper; there was so much red it looked like he
was editing a piece for Joseph Stalin.

“There’s been a death in her
family,
” Libby whispered in his direction. “Family. Not family pet.”

“Is it a close relative?” he asked, not looking up.

“Yes, she’s my aunt and godmother, not my dog,” said Alison, taking a step away from
Hardy’s desk. “She was like a second mother to me.” With a desperate face, she looked
at Libby for help.

Libby, wearing a winter white pleated dress and Bass penny loafers, shook her head,
like an angry boarding school student.

“Ah, sorry about that,” said Hardy, standing up but avoiding Alison’s eyes. Without
another word, he started walking toward the front offices. In his absence we swore
like sailors and wished illness and disease on him.

When he came back five minutes later, he was all smiles.

“I checked the employee manual,” he reported. “Management approves two hours off for
next of next of kin. Why don’t you start at seven tomorrow? That will give you time
to collect yourself and properly grieve.” He looked down at his phone, remembered
that he was raised by a human mother and not a pack of wolves, and added, “And I’m
very sorry about your aunt.”

On our five-minute lunch break that day, Alison screamed about our new boss for four
minutes and fifty-nine seconds. The other second was used to say thank you to the
sandwich man when he gave us our food. But Julia and I spent a good deal of time on
BlackBerry Messenger that afternoon just writing the words “I can’t believe he’s twenty-two
years old.”

“If he’s the editor of a section at twenty-two, and I’m thirty-one, I think that makes
me officially dead,” Julia texted.

“When I was twenty-two, I was halfway between intoxicated and insane. I sure wasn’t
working my way up to the title of senior anything,” I wrote back.

“I should probably write my will,” wrote Julia. “I want to be cremated. Remember that
if I die of natural old age causes in the next week.”

When we returned to our desks, I looked over at my colleague, who was skillfully twisting
her hair into a silky rope and pretending not to be texting me. She reached up to
lower the volume on the TV that was drowning us in MSNBC gobbledygook.

“I have been working in journalism since I was out of college and I’m still not senior
anything. I’ve been here for almost three years, it would have happened by now,” she
wrote. “The thing with Upton and Cushing is they decide a month into your employment
if you’re a chosen one or not. If you are, you sprint to the top. But if they think
you’re not cut from their cloth, then
you work with no advancement opportunities for as long as you can stand it. And now
I’m thirty-one and I’m going to die soon.”

“But you’re not old! Thirty-one is not old.”

My phone flashed with her next message. “I graduated from UCLA class of 2003, so I
am old. This place is like grad school, with less sex and liquor.”

She was right about the lack of sex. I had more impure thoughts in church than I did
at the
Capitolist
. As soon as you put your thumb on that little soul reader and walked through those
thick glass doors, your libido abandoned you for greener pastures.

But as I looked around the room at all the people working as hard as they could, I
felt a strange mix of horror and pride that I had been chosen to join these prestigious
ranks. It wasn’t like Upton and Cushing were actively trying to ruin your life. It
was just a pressure cooker. You knew what was expected of you, and you had to deliver
or you got axed. And what was expected of you was to work all the time and very quickly.
You had to make your job your only priority. This, it turned out, was much worse for
the soul than having someone yell at you occasionally, because it was constant, unrelenting
fear.

Fear that you wouldn’t have enough stories, or that someone would grab your scoop
about Shakira’s secret meeting with the president and get a quote from the sassy Colombian
before your article went live. The inevitable anger you felt when you got barraged
with hate mail and when your colleagues looked down at their phones and ran past you
rather than saying hi. You were constantly strapped to a computer, and every mistake
you made was a public mistake with your name on it. But in my case, the worst part
was that at the end of the day, after I had worked my tail off for fourteen hours,
my colleagues still deemed me an idiot. Because I worked for the Style section and
they covered the White House.

Tucker Cliff, a senior Congress reporter, walked past both of us talking loudly into
a Bluetooth headset. My phone flashed with a new message from Julia. “Tucker Cliff.
They love him. They’ve decided he’s a lifer,” she pointed out. “Olivia Campo. Another
lifer. That’s just their way. They only want to groom and keep a few of us, but we
all have to keep the pace and deal with child editors like Hardy.”

Unlike Julia, I tried not to hate Hardy just because he was six years younger than
I was. It didn’t make me feel great, but it wasn’t his fault that they had hired him
to supervise a bunch of crones. I wrote him nice emails with lots of exclamation points.
I tried to keep my speed Olympic and to stay calm when he edited my pieces to sound
like they were written by a man from North Dakota who liked to fly-fish.

During his second week, he emailed me and said that while I was doing a good job,
“my output wasn’t there.”

“Your goal,” he wrote, “should be an article every hour.”

I reread the line five times, but it really did say that. “An article every hour.”

That’s when I decided it was okay to hate him. I worked for about fourteen hours a
day on average, so he wanted fourteen articles? I wondered how hard it was to get
a prescription for speed. I mean, I knew speed was illegal and all, but I bet more
people used it recreationally than let on. If I had some, I would just forgo sleep
altogether. I would head to the gym, buzz on in to work, roller-skate across the newsroom
to save time, and produce Pulitzer Prize-winning four-sentence blurbs about Twitter.
And I would do it every hour.

W
hen Hardy had been our editor for a month, I had finally figured out how to make it
work.

As the trees outside in the early February snow stood cold and lifeless, I was on
autopilot. I shot out of bed at 4:50
A.M.
Made instant coffee to save time and started my 5
A.M.
to 7
P.M.
workday. I worked for two hours like a slug in my bed, got ready in twenty-five minutes,
worked and groomed in the hour-long car ride to the office, and then motored on through
the day. Sometimes, while spraying dry shampoo on my roots and combing my hair at
a red light, I would hear my sister’s voice in my head saying, “With limp colorless
hair like yours, you need daily blowouts to resemble a human being.” But now it was
a big day if I used liquid shampoo. After work ended, I would quickly drop by an event,
make cocktail party chatter while begging politicians to say something interesting,
and then drive my jalopy home. I would try to go to bed before 11
P.M.
, which usually required two NyQuil with a cheap chardonnay chaser.

It wasn’t a recipe for health, but it was a good elixir for success at the
Capitolist
. I was getting used to Hardy’s curt, aggressive emails and bookish edits. “This is
the Style section,” I would remind him when he tried to infect my copy with the terrible
plague called “lame.” After a while, he started to listen,
and we found a way to tolerate each other, fourteen hours a day, six days a week.

Saturday was mine. I had to work Sundays, but from 7
P.M.
on Friday to 7
A.M.
on Sunday, I got to savor sweet, sweet freedom. Sometimes I spent the night in the
city at Elsa’s Logan Circle apartment. Other weekends, I convinced Elsa to come back
to the town where we had shared our formative years. We would go for trail rides on
the ponies I called roommates. We would have dinner at the Red Fox Inn, surrounded
by old people in tweed, and then drink brandy out of my mother’s nicest glassware
on her heated porch.

On the first Friday in February, when Elsa came out to the land of the elderly to
keep me company, we strayed slightly off the dirt path to a newly refurbished, very
expensive inn named after a dead Confederate general and that had reopened right on
the outskirts of town. Throughout our childhood, it was more or less an abandoned
property where we took long walks and rode our horses semilegally. But all that had
changed. A few years ago, the owners had decided to make actual money and had whipped
up a classic country escape for fried city birds. It now had organic everything and
a billion sommeliers and all sorts of nonsense like that.

When Elsa and I were growing up in Middleburg, there were small bed-and-breakfasts
with historical plaques instead of spas and meditation rooms. Kids rode ponies in
tiny Windsor checked jackets and women who filled their calendars with charity polo
matches and country club round robins greeted each other in town with warm hugs. About
a decade ago, developers realized that the picture-perfect Virginia postcard town
where people still woke up on Sunday mornings and fox-hunted was ideal for an outside-the-Beltway
getaway. So they started building. But luckily for the town beloved by people who
consider
jodhpurs daywear, Middleburg is home to a historical society run by retirees with
a love of aesthetics and rifles. So not
too
much changed. The new tony hotels were hidden on acres of land and our little streets
still looked like the love child of Colonial Williamsburg and Greenwich, Connecticut.
Before Christmas, we paraded hunting dogs and horses in our red jackets and white
gloves and the rest of the year it was pretty much the same way, minus the ode to
St. Nick.

But Goodstone Inn was the new Middleburg. A place that attracted tourists instead
of residents with a love of foxhounds and Barbour jackets.

Even though I lived a few miles away, I figured it was a perfect place for us to wrap
ourselves in the amazing clothes I had got gratis from
Town & Country
without getting too many odd looks. We would just pretend we were out-of-towners
who had come directly to hunt country from Bryant Park.

When Elsa came over, she air-kissed me and bowed before my closet like it was the
Sistine Chapel. “Ooooh! Let me wear this,” she said after she had thrown open the
doors. “This was meant for me. They gave it to you, but they were actually thinking,
this dress is made for an artiste!” Elsa said, ripping away a garment bag to reveal
a white cashmere YSL dress inspired by Bianca Jagger.

“You’re not an artiste. You sell the scribbles of artistes,” I replied, helping her
slither into the soft dress. “You’re really a salesman.”

“Which is an art. Trust me,” said Elsa from within the dress. “I had to sell a blank
canvas that someone had urinated all over. And I did. Don’t tell me that’s not a skill.”

I vaguely remembered all that bathroom art from my years in New York. My guess is
that it probably didn’t go over very well in Washington.

“There. It’s on. But I don’t think it will ever come off,” she said, trying to electric-slide
in the dress. “Can I keep it?”

Oh, what the hell. “Yes, of course,” I said. I would have to remember to use it as
bait every time I begged her to come to Middleburg.

Since all five feet and three inches of Elsa were dressed as a cashmere snow angel,
I decided to wear Hermès orange. Tons of Hermès orange. It was the dead of winter,
after all. The world needed color. In New York we would have been gleefully dividing
all the free clothes that were being shipped to our office. After a shot of flaming
gin and a lot of squinting, this felt almost the same.

Our dinner at the inn was fantastic, and not just because I washed that gin shot down
with half a bottle of wine. The food was delicious; it tasted as if it had come directly
from the backyard, which, I learned later, it had. So we stayed and ate and loitered.
We ended up at the bar, drinking far too many cocktails.