The Washingtonienne (17 page)

You could be in the middle of a serious conversation with somebody, and they would interrupt, “Excuse me, Miss! Excuse me! Excuse me!” And you would think it was something important, like you were about to walk into traffic or something. So you would stop to see what it was, only to learn that the guy just wanted a quarter. Then you’d tell them no, and they would get all pissed off and call you a “rich honky bitch” or whatever.

I mean, so rude! And if you ever
did
give them money, they would stalk you on the way to work every morning, expecting you to give them money every day for the rest of your life.

I learned a valuable lesson living here:
If you want to keep money in your pocket, never be nice to anyone.
Or in other words, if you wanted to be rich, you had to be bitch.

When I got back to my apartment, I saw two pink envelopes sticking out of my mailbox: One was the birthday check from my mother, and the other was a birthday card from Diane.

On the front was a picture of a snobby-looking white Persian cat with a wee, cat-sized crown on her head.

Inside, the card said:

Happy Birthday, You Drama Queen!

And beneath that, Diane had written:

Here’s to another year of living vicariously through you!

Was this a joke? Why would anyone want to live vicariously through
me
? My life was shit. The only good thing about it was Marcus.

The thought of him made my heart ache. He had given me his love and trust, and I stabbed him in the back. Of all the bad things I had ever done in my life, I feared this was the one that would plague me.

But tonight I could only worry about myself. I still had no indication of how out of control this blog thing might get, but I knew I had enemies, and Marcus was probably one of them.

As promised, April came by after work, and she had stopped at the liquor store on the way over.

“Another drink, and you won’t miss him anymore,” she said as she poured me a tall glass of Southern Comfort.

“I’m supposed to be having dinner with him right now,” I sighed.

“Well, there’s been a change of plans.”

We clinked glasses and chugged our drinks.

THE NEXT MORNING,
we were lying on my living room floor, surrounded by empty bottles and cigarette butts, when my phone started ringing.

“Jesus fucking Christ, what time is it?” April complained.

I scrambled to find my cell.

It was eight o’clock in the morning, and the caller ID showed a phone number with a 224 prefix, which meant that it was coming from a Senate office.

“Oh my God, they’re calling me!” I shrieked. “What should I do?”

“Don’t pick up!” she warned. “If they have something important to tell you, they’ll leave a voice mail!”

We waited for my Salt-N-Pepa “Push It” ringtone to end.

Then Jay-Z’s “Dirt Off Your Shoulder” started to play.

“Ha!” April laughed. “That’s the ringtone for your voice mail? Cool!”

“How rude of them to call so early,” I scoffed. “They should have known I’d have gone on a bender last night.”

We listened to the message:

“Jacqueline, this is Janet from the office. It is extremely important that you call me right away. Thank you.”

“Should I call her back?” I asked April. “Or should I get a lawyer first?”

“Do you have one?” she asked.

I thought about this.

“Phillip is an attorney. Do you think I should call him?”

“Didn’t you write about him in the blog?”

I remembered that I had. Nasty stuff, too.

“Then you don’t want to call Phillip!” April warned. “Isn’t he some sort of legal mastermind? He could sue the shit out of you!”

“What for?” I wondered. “I don’t think anyone has grounds for a lawsuit. I didn’t use any names, so reasonable expectation wouldn’t apply.”

“What about privilege?”

“Ha,” I laughed. “There’s no such thing as ‘top-bottom privilege,’ is there?”

“But you never know, somebody might make up a reason to sue, like ‘emotional duress’ or whatever.”

“They can sue me all they want, but I’m sure none of them would risk outing themselves. They wouldn’t get a dime anyway. I’m unemployed!”

My phone rang a second time.

“Oh, my God! They’re calling me again!” I gasped.

“They’re sweating you,” April laughed. “Let it go to voice mail.”

We listened to the second message:

“Hello, Jacqueline. This is Janet from the office. I just want you to know that you are on paid leave, but I need you to call me back right away. Thank you.”

“Now she’s panicking,” April observed. “She’s probably afraid she’ll get fired for scaring you away yesterday.”

“Well, she should be,” I said. “I mean, the
ego
that woman has, thinking she can act like that and get away with it!”

I realized that people were probably saying the same thing about me, but so what? This was America: I had the right to be an immature, hypocritical jerk if I wanted to, and if I was getting fired for it, then maybe Janet should too.

“Why are they putting me on paid leave?” I wondered. “Why don’t they just fire me?”

“Paid leave means that you’re still an employee, so you’re probably not allowed to talk to the press or anything.”

“Why would I want to talk to the press?”

April shrugged.

“Phase two of the plan?” she suggested.

The plan.

I
wished
I had a plan. All I knew was that I wasn’t going to the office today.

“Let’s just wait and see what happens,” April told me. “People have short attention spans. This thing might just blow over.”

It was eight thirty in the morning, and despite her hangover, April was going into the office so that she could report back any updates on the blog situation.

An hour later, April called me from work with some bad news.

“Everybody here is talking about it!” she whispered over the phone. “It’s all over the Staff Ass message board! People know that it’s you!”

Apparently, people on the Hill were playing on the Internet instead of doing their work. How totally shocking.

“Is my name out there?” I asked anxiously.

“Yeah, and there’s a picture, too,” April told me. “It looks like a yearbook photo or something.”

This was just getting worse and worse.

“My life is over,” I groaned. “Nothing will ever happen to me again.”

“Don’t feel bad!” April insisted. “It would have happened sooner or later, and all these losers on the Internet are giving you all this free publicity! You should be happy!”

April was really giving herself away, telling me to be happy as my life fell apart, live over the Internet. She was doing the right thing by helping me through this, but for all I knew, she was the one who put my name and picture out there. I just couldn’t trust anybody anymore.

“Now that your name and face are all over the Internet, you’ve got nothing to lose,” April offered.

“Is it a good picture at least?”

April hesitated, so I could tell that it wasn’t.

“Can you e-mail it to me so I can at least see what it looks like?” I asked. “Maybe I can figure out where it came from.”

When I opened the link that April sent me, I could barely recognize the girl in the photo. She looked like a child, with a round face and a funny-looking ponytail. It must have been taken during my tomboy years at Syracuse.

I will never know why one of my college classmates would go to the trouble of scanning my photo and sending it to all these freakazoid Web sites. It was obviously someone I knew, who stood next to me at alumni receptions, and they wanted to participate in my humiliation for reasons I didn’t understand. I guess they were just bored at work, like I was.

Apparently, there were a lot of bored people in DC who didn’t feel like doing their jobs, or else the news wouldn’t have spread so quickly.

The Internet was
the
forum for opinions that nobody asked for, hence the abundance of Web logs like mine. Blogs are a great way for us self-absorbed exhibitionists to exercise our First Amendment rights. But I didn’t write about my sex life to outrage anyone or piss off the girls who read it; I was actually trying to keep an account of my actions. Instead, it just became this shocking tabloid thing.

Chapter 30

L
ate that night, I got a phone call from a number I didn’t recognize. Of course, I let the voice mail pick up.

“Hi. It’s me,” a man’s voice said. “Listen, I just have to say—and I’m not calling to yell at you—this is a
very
painful thing for everybody involved, and I’m sure, especially for you. I— I don’t know what’s going on. I don’t know what you’re doing here. But I’m just going to give you some friendly advice because I think you’re a nice person.

“You need to move on with your life. You need to get this behind you and just move on, and forget about it, and not talk to anybody about it, and not write about it, not go forward with it. You just need to
move on.
It’s better for you, it’s better for everybody. You’ve been hurt, people have been hurt, I’ve been hurt, a lot of people have been hurt. Just do the right thing. You don’t want to go in this direction. You know I— I feel bad. I feel bad for me. I feel bad for
you.

“I wish you the best, I really do. And, um, it’s just a very sad thing. And you’ve just— you’ve got to
move on.
Bye.”

I played the message again for April.

“It’s obviously Dan,” she concluded. “Who else would leave such a bitch-ass message?”

“He sounded scared, April.”

“He’s
scared?” April scoffed. “Don’t worry about him, Jackie. He’s an asshole, remember?”

“Yeah, but he’s right, I need to move on,” I admitted. “I’lI go back to New York and move in with Naomi—I can leave Washington just as easily as I came, and I’ll forget this even happened.”

“You can’t just run away,” April argued. “You shouldn’t be forced to move out because of this rubbish—you need to stay here and show people that you’re not ashamed!”

“People? What people?” I asked. “Just who am I trying to impress here?”

“It’s not about
impressing
anyone—it’s about coming out of this a winner.”

“But I’m
not
a winner—I’m a total screwup! I don’t deserve to get anything from this at all.”

“Not true! Everyone deserves success—everyone deserves to be
happy.
It’s, like, in the Bill of Rights.”

“Actually, we’re only entitled to the
pursuit
of happiness.”

“Well, that’s bullshit.”

April looked at the sweatshirt I was wearing, which I hadn’t taken off in days.

“
Fordham Law?
” she asked. “Did you get that from Marcus?”

I nodded.

“Take that shit off,” she scolded me. “You can’t let these guys get into your head. If any of them still cared about you, they’d be trying to help you right now.”

I supposed April was right. It was every man for himself.

THE NEXT DAY, I GOT
a FedEx from the senator’s office.

It was the letter I had been waiting for all week.

Ms. Turner:

As you know, we have been trying to contact you since early on the morning of May 19. We had hoped to discuss this issue in person, but since you have not returned our calls or come in to the office we have no option but to send you this letter instead.

On the afternoon of May 18, our office became aware of allegations that you had been using Senate resources and work time to post unsuitable and offensive material to an Internet Web log. After investigating these allegations the office finds that your use of your office computer, and other materials associated with that computer, was unprofessional and inappropriate, and that these actions are unacceptable.

Accordingly, effective May 21 your employment with this office is terminated . . .

I totally agreed: My actions were unacceptable, and I deserved to be fired. But I objected to what they had said about my blog, calling it “unsuitable and offensive material.” I mean, this was my
life
they were talking about: Was there really such a thing as an “unsuitable and offensive” lifestyle? It seemed like a very un-American thing to say.

I guess it was officially over. I did something terrible and got punished for it. The End.

But I was still here, with nothing to do, no place to go, and nobody to talk to.

When I called home, no one picked up. But what would I have said anyway? My parents already had enough drama in their lives, with the divorce and everything—they didn’t need to hear about this bullshit. If this thing was just going to die out anyway, then I didn’t have to bring it up to them just yet. I could tell them over Thanksgiving dinner or something.

I went outside, wondering if anyone in my neighborhood might recognize me, but no one said anything if they did. It seemed like whatever hostility people felt toward me was contained entirely within the four corners of my computer screen. After reading post after bitchy post about me and what an ugly whore I was, I expected that people might spit on me in the street or something, but that never happened.

It was sort of disappointing, actually. I wanted the opportunity to confront the people who dissed me on the Internet—to shake their hands and thank them for all the free publicity—but they never came forward to give me the satisfaction.

I ordered my skim latte at Murky Coffee “to stay.” After all, I was an unemployed person with no job to go to. But what would I do now for coffee money, with no income? Would anyone pay my rent this month, or would they just let me get evicted? (If you ever get involved in a sex scandal, make sure you’re financially prepared.)

I guessed I could get a job at the Gap folding jeans or something. That wouldn’t be so bad, would it? I would live a simple life and make an honest living. But how long would it take for me to go absolutely insane?

I sat in the coffee shop, staring into space, wondering what to do with my life, when my phone rang.

It was Mike!

Had he heard the news? I mean, had people in
New York
heard this story? I couldn’t imagine that anyone up there would even care.

I called him back right away.

“How was your birthday?” he asked.

Was this some sick joke?

“Not good,” I told him.

“What happened?” he asked.

Obviously, he didn’t know—which was good. That meant the story was still local. But how would I tell him? Where should I begin?

“Mike,” I said, “it’s really bad.”

“Jackie, just tell me what it is.”

“I’m involved in a sex scandal.”

I didn’t know how else to put it.

“
What?
” he asked. “With who, the president?”

I was flattered that Mike thought I could sleep my way to the top like that, but the true story was pathetic in comparison. I was embarrassed to admit how low level it was.

“With some guys from work,” I told him.

I realized that he didn’t know that I had been working in the Senate, so I explained everything. The job, the men, the blog. Mike just listened, taking it all in. Then he spoke.

“I called you, thinking that maybe we could get back together,” he told me. “I’d been thinking about you a lot lately, and I wanted to see how you were doing.”

This was a deus ex machina if there ever was one,
I thought. Mike still loved me and he wanted me back! I could catch a train back to New York right now and live happily ever after.

Then he started to laugh.

“Now I realize that I shouldn’t have bothered,” he said. “You’re still the same screwed-up train wreck you’ve always been. Good luck with all of that. Just leave me out of it—don’t call me, don’t e-mail me, just leave me out of it.”

I winced as Mike hung up on me, but I knew he was right: I really was a screwed-up train wreck—but at least I wasn’t
boring.

I realized that if Mike truly loved me, he wouldn’t just throw his hands up and walk away, especially now, when I needed someone on my side.