The Washingtonienne (4 page)

“I am too hungover to deal with these crazy people,” she whined. “I’m forwarding all of my calls to voice mail for the rest of the day!”

April and Laura were both “Front Office Staff Assistants.” They greeted visitors and answered phone calls from crazy people all day long, so basically, they were receptionists with college degrees.

“So what happened to you last night?” I asked April.

“Dude, you dissed me,” she said. “You left me alone with that creep at the bar!”

She explained that she was out of cash, so she couldn’t take a cab home, and the Metro had shut down at midnight. The man she had met at the bar was a guest at the hotel, in town on business from Los Angeles.

“I had no choice but to go back to his room with him,” she said. “I ended up fucking him just because I didn’t have a ride home!”

“Shhh! Keep it down!” Laura warned from her desk on the other side of the room. “What if someone overhears you?”

“Oh, nobody’s listening,” April said. “And if they are, they need to get a real job.”

Laura took off her telephone headset and shook her hair out.

“If you’re not taking calls, then I’m not either,” she said, hitting the
Call Fwd
button on her phone. “I can’t believe you guys went to the Four Seasons without me. What did you end up doing last night, Jackie?”

“Jackie fucked that guy she left the bar with,” April said knowingly.

“How do you know?” I asked.

“You had the apartment to yourself, so I assumed that you might take advantage. I hope he didn’t jizz all over my sofa.”

“April!” I squawked. “For your information, we did it on a conference table in his office.”

“
What?
”

“We’ll talk later,” I told the girls.

“So where is Dan?” I asked. “I want to see what the office crush looks like!”

“I’ll introduce you to him,” April said, “but don’t you dare say anything, not even kidding! I have a boyfriend!”

“What about that guy at the Four Seasons last night?” Laura asked.

“He didn’t count,” April said. “He works off the Hill.”

“Just be careful. Fun is fun, but you wouldn’t want Tom to find out. He would freak the fuck out. And then you’d have to quit working here.”

“That’s exactly why I only mess with guys who work
off
the Hill. And if you were smart, you would do the same, Laura.”

“But I only sleep around with boys who work over on the House side!”

“Laura is a
bicameral
slut,” April informed me.

“Jackie, don’t listen to her,” Laura said. “She’s just jealous that I get laid more than she does because I’m a blonde.”

Since April couldn’t leave her desk, she called up Dan and told him to keep me company while I waited for my interview.

“Make sure you wipe down the conference table when you’re done in there,” Laura joked.

April and I rolled our eyes.

DAN REMINDED ME OF A
young James Spader: somewhat watery-looking, but oddly attractive nonetheless. He wasn’t my type—I usually don’t go for a guy with glasses—but he was probably the best-looking guy in the office. By Hill standards, that’s not saying much, but I could see how April might start crushing on him, being as bored with her job as she was.

In the conference room we made small talk. I felt like he was making excessive eye contact and smiling at me too much. But, then again, I was batting my eyelashes at him and smiling harder than a beauty pageant contestant. I was preparing for my interview so I was trying to be as charming as possible. I couldn’t help it if Dan was susceptible to my feminine wiles.

“You’re from New York,” he said. “So what brings you to DC?”

I wished I had an easier answer to this question. So I made one up.

“I have a boyfriend here,” I told him.

“You do?”

I nodded to confirm.

“But I thought—aren’t you living with April?” he asked.

“I’m not ready to move in with him just yet,” I lied. “But, yes, I’m living with April for the time being.”

What was he trying to say about my pretend relationship with my imaginary boyfriend? That it wasn’t serious?

He moved on.

“So what issues are you interested in?” he asked. “What would you like to work on?”

I struck a thoughtful pose, but was unable to come up with an answer. Did I give a shit about anything besides my own wardrobe and well-being? Not really.

“What do you know about appropriations?” Dan asked. “We always need help with our appropriations requests.”

Appropriations.
The word alone bored me to tears.

“That would be great,” I said, tossing my hair.

“Great,” he agreed. “I’ll check and see if Gloria is ready to see you.”

I aced the interview; I would begin the next day as an intern. Another day, another no dollar. But now I could put it on my resume and start looking for a real job.

I TRIED CALLING HOME,
to give the fam an update, but again, there was no answer, so I called up my sister, Lee, who was away at school.

“Mike broke up with me!” I announced when she picked up the phone. “The wedding is off, and now I’m in Washington, sleeping on my friend’s couch!”

“What did you do?” she asked, knowing that this could only be my fault.

“I fucked up,” I admitted and told her the whole story, to which she responded with her usual candor.

“Mike wasn’t right for you anyway,” she said. “He was too nice.”

“But that’s why I should have him.” I sighed. “He was the nicest guy I ever met.”

“And then he threw you away! If he loved you, he would have married you by now. And if
you
loved
him,
you wouldn’t have fucked Kevin. You probably
wanted
to get caught cheating, because subconsciously, you wanted a way out.”

(Lee was a psych major.)

“I didn’t want any of this to happen!” I argued. “I ruined everything. But there’s nothing I can do now. Mike hates me, and I have no right to bother him ever again. It’s over.”

“So what will you do now that you have your freedom?” Lee asked. “Are you enjoying the single life?”

“Well, right now I have to get a job, but I’m interning on the Hill in the meantime.”

“Aren’t you too old to be an intern? It’s a little
Strangers with Candy.
”

“Yeah, but I don’t know what else to do with myself.”

“How much do internships pay?”

“They don’t.”

“That sucks! So what are you doing for money? Are Mom and Dad helping you out?”

“Actually, I haven’t heard from them lately. I’ve tried calling home several times but they never pick up.”

“Yeah, me too,” Lee said. “It’s not like them to dodge our calls.”

“Were you calling home to ask for money again?”

My sister was
always
hitting my parents up for cash. And they would actually give it to her, which enraged me. When
I
was in college, I worked as a cocktail waitress, which turned me into the malevolent misanthrope that I am today. I was too proud to beg my parents for handouts. But not Lee.

“Can I borrow some money?” she asked me. “I’ll totally pay you back.”

I sighed, knowing that she would never repay me.

“I’m broke, but I’ll put a check in the mail this afternoon,” I said. “If you hear from Mom and Dad, tell them to call me. I’m starting to worry.”

“Me, too. They forgot to pay my Visa bill.”

“Oh, get a job, Lee.”

“Don’t be a bitch, Jackie. Just send me a check. And try to have some fun now that you’re single again. You need to get yourself a rebound guy and forget about Mike.”

I told Lee about Fred, and we agreed that he was definitely a rebound guy: The most I could hope for with him was some hot sex and that was it.

But I didn’t want to rebound—I wanted to
dunk.

“I hate being single again,” I told Lee.

“Well, you know what they say: You can either be single and lonely, or married and bored,” she offered.

“Thanks for cheering me up, Lee.”

I got off the phone and went to bed. Or, in my case, the couch.

Chapter 7

A
pril skipped her morning workout so we could walk to the office together on my first day. I appreciated the nice gesture, but we kept getting in each other’s way, trying to do our hair and makeup in front of the same mirror. I wondered just how soon I would wear out my welcome here.

“Maybe you could get a job as a waitress in the meantime,” April suggested, rummaging through my half of the closet, looking for something to wear. “You could work at Hooters or something.”

I was appalled at the suggestion.

“I am
not
a waitress,” I said indignantly. “My tits aren’t big enough anyway.”

I checked myself out in the full-length mirror, as I pulled a sweater on over my chest. No, they definitely were not big enough, even though I was taking extra birth control pills to give that part of my body more volume.

I was a fat thin person: a scrawny size zero whose body consisted of bones and flab, but no muscle. April was also a size zero, but she had one of those “gym bodies” sculpted by daily workouts at Gold’s. (They gave Hill staffers a generous membership discount.)

She shook her head at me as I put on the mink coat that I had borrowed from my mother.

“What? It’s cold out!” I said defensively.

“Yeah, but
interns
don’t typically walk around the Senate offices wearing furs,” she sniffed.

“I’m not going to walk around the
office
in my fur,April. Besides, who gives a fuck what some intern is wearing?”

“You don’t want to give people a reason not to like you on your first day, do you?”

“Oh, please. It’s the fucking U.S. Senate. I’m sure people have better things to do than sweat
me.
”

“But what if someone throws paint on it or something?”

“Would security actually let someone into the building with a can of red paint? As if.”

Besides, even if somebody threw paint on me, I was the sort of person who would wear my fur
with
the paint stains, just to show them that I didn’t care. Now
that
would be a fashion statement. I would have been surprised if Alexander McQueen or someone wasn’t already selling fur coats with paint stains on them.

GLORIA GAVE ME SOME
paperwork to fill out when I got to the office, including a confidentiality agreement. I wondered what sort of stuff went on here that I had to keep on the D-L? Wasn’t this place on the up-and-up?

Then Gloria took me and the other interns down to the Senate ID Office to have our photos taken for our security badges.

“Sexy!” Dan said later when I showed him my finished ID photo. “You look like Catherine Zeta-Jones.”

I was surprised that Dan would use the word
sexy.
It seemed kind of inappropriate, but I
did
look like CZJ in that picture. In person, I looked more like the Jessica Lovejoy character from that one episode of
The Simpsons.
But I knew something about posing for pictures: I watched
America’s Next Top Model
every week and I owned
Zoolander
on DVD.

On my way back to the mailroom with the other interns, I was intercepted by Kate, the senator’s scheduler. Kate, a middle-aged woman who kept jars of candy all over her office, informed me that I would be helping her with “regrets” from now on.

I grabbed my coat and handbag from the closet before leaving the room with her.

“Is that real fur?” she asked.

“It’s one of my mother’s,” I told her.

She raised her eyebrows but said nothing further on the subject. We sat down in her office and she explained that the senator could not attend any events in Washington while he was running for president. So my job was to RSVP to these invitations and send the senator’s regrets. Easy enough.

I would have preferred to lie low, sorting mail and goofing off with the other interns in the mailroom, but was nevertheless flattered that Kate had chosen me. I got my own cubicle right outside the senator’s office! I planned to buy a bud vase for my desk, just like Mary Tyler Moore.

I noticed that a lot of people in the office kept a “Me Wall” in their cubicles, these little photo galleries of themselves standing next to Congressman So-and-So, Senator What’s-His-Face, and Governor Whoever. As if that was supposed to impress anyone. Like, “Wow! You got to stand next to some unrecognizable person who is way more important than you are! That’s awesome! Excuse me while I jizz all over myself!”

Kate put a stack of invites on my desk.

“If you see anything that looks interesting, you can ask if the invitation is transferable,” she told me. “I go to events on the senator’s behalf all the time.”

That sounded like fun, but I was pretty disappointed when I saw the invitations. Senators got invited to a lot of lame parties, like receptions in honor of helicopters, and charity balls for revolting diseases I had never heard of (Blue Diaper Syndrome?). Being a congressman must have really sucked sometimes. I would have killed myself if I had to go to all these dumb things, even with all the free booze.

So I was making phone calls, setting up my desk, and typing up a few cover letters for jobs that I was applying to, minding my own business. Then Dan stopped by my cubicle.

“What’s up?” he asked. “What are you doing in here?”

“Not much,” I replied, minimizing the cover letter that I was working on. “I’m just helping Kate.”

“Doing what?”

“Calling people and telling them that the senator can’t go to their parties.”

Dan looked surprised.

“I thought you were supposed to be working on appropriations,” he said.

“Yeah, so did I. What happened?” I asked him, smiling.

“Jacqueline,
sweetie
!” Kate called from her office. “Could I please see you?”

I excused myself to see what she wanted.

“Close the door,” she whispered.

I shut the door, curious as to why we needed the privacy.

“Have you finished that stack of regrets I just gave you?” she asked me.

“I’m almost done,” I told her.

“Jacqueline,” she began, “you are a very attractive young woman, and there are a lot of single guys in this office.”

Oh, no.

“But I cannot have you
entertaining
them in your cubicle.”

What!

“You should not encourage any of them to talk to you while you’re working,” she continued. “Look, I know how these guys are. They’ll stand there and talk to you all day if you let them. If you’re interested in any of the guys in the office, you should go for it, but I don’t want them interfering with your work.”

Go for it?

“Don’t worry, Kate,” I told her before returning to my desk. “I didn’t come here to meet guys.”

Seriously, I didn’t.

I was never tempted to date in the workplace, especially on the Hill. Not just for professional reasons, but because the guys here really weren’t my type. I always hated those obnoxious poli-sci majors in college, who ran for student government and tried to schmooze me to write up their fraternity’s charity work in the student newspaper.

Take one of these bottom-feeders, put him through grad school, sell him a cheap suit, and you had your typical Capitol Hill male. According to April and Laura, these guys watched themselves on C-SPAN when they got home from work at night, bored their dates with anecdotes about the congressmen they worked for, and had framed pictures of themselves with people like Dan Quayle. They wore their BlackBerries
and
cell phones clipped to their belts, and some of them even wore
bow ties
. But worst of all, they made less than six figures, which was so not sexy.