The Washingtonienne (9 page)

Chapter 15

T
he next morning, I spent another three hours with my friends on Instant Messenger, telling them all about my date in Dan’s office last night. Meanwhile, the pile of unopened mail on my desk grew larger. I loved my friends, but this was getting out of control.

Then it dawned on me. The best way to keep my friends up-to-date was to start keeping a Web log on the Internet. I could post things gossip-item style, like Blogette did on her site. All I had to do was write an update every so often, and my friends could check in on my life whenever they felt like it. It was free, easy, and what a time-saver!

I set up my blog, amazed at how simple it was to self-publish on the Web. I could write anything I wanted to and nobody could stop me. I typed the words
April is a butt
into my template and clicked on the Post icon.

And there it was, on the World Wide Web. I e-mailed her the link, and a minute later, she called me on my cell phone, demanding that I take it down.

How fun. The possibilities were endless.

My friends set up blogs of their own, too. We surmised that our productivity at work would go up, and that might lead to promotions.

But we decided against password-protecting our blogs. The whole point of all of this was
convenience.
Passwords were just too much trouble. What interest would strangers have in our lives anyway? With millions of blogs on the Web, they would have to be pretty hard up to care about any of the dumb bullshit we were writing about. We chose only to keep them anonymous, using pseudonyms or initials, just in case.

First, my blog needed a name. I had always thought that
Washingtonian
magazine needed a fashion supplemental. (Washington women could not dress themselves for shit.) I had the perfect name for it, too:
Washingtonienne
magazine. Cute, right? But since they were too stupid to come up with that one on their own, I’d use the name for my blog instead.

Unfortunately, I didn’t have time to post anything at first because the senator’s wife was in the office all week. She came by every so often in her hideous St. John suits and David Yurman necklaces to make us rearrange the furniture in the front office, or reshelve all the books so that the bookcases looked “less busy.” Never mind that we all had jobs that we were supposed to be doing.

Apparently, every senator’s wife thought she was Jackie Kennedy, and that her husband’s office was her own little White House. I suppose those were the perks of marrying well.

As I was pruning the plants in the front office at the behest of the senator’s wife, my cell phone rang. It was my sister, Lee, asking if she could borrow some more money. I hoped she might have some news about Mom and Dad, but she was just as clueless as I was about the divorce.

I went over to the post office in the Dirksen Building to mail her another check. Of course, Dan would have to be there, too.

I wasn’t really
mad
at him, but he wasn’t my favorite person in the world, either. I greeted him cordially like a grown-up and took my place in line.

He dropped to the back of the line to stand next to me.

“Your ass looks great in that dress,” he said in a low voice.

I rolled my eyes and sighed.

“Your ass looks great, too,” I said loud enough for everyone to hear.

Dan’s face turned red, and I couldn’t help but laugh at him. Despite his arrogance, he embarrassed pretty easily.

I ended up going to lunch with him that day. It was the first of several appearances together in the cafeteria, and by the end of the week, we were an “item.”

Random people in my office wanted to know if Dan was my boyfriend. Even Janet asked me, “Who is that guy you’re always prancing around with in the cafeteria?”

Prancing?
I guess I must have looked happy when I was with him. I suppose that I was, if only on a highly superficial level: He was the closest thing that I had to a boyfriend at the time. But the guy just didn’t make my heart skip a beat.

Eventually, Dan would surely stop calling me, so I could just wait it out and avoid the awkwardness of ending it with him. In the meantime, I had someone to make out with, which was good enough for me.

WE WENT TO LAURA’S
“going away” party at Kelly’s Irish Times to celebrate her new job. Some dude she was fucking finally got her a job at his lobbying firm. I guess that sleeping your way to the top actually worked. I knew from experience that a blow job could get you a career as a letter opener in the United States Senate.

“Aren’t you going to miss working on the Hill?” I asked her.

“It’s bittersweet, you know? Like when you graduate from high school. You know you’ll miss it, but at the same time, you can’t wait to leave,” she told me.

“How long have you been here?”

“A little over a year. But trust me, it feels
much
longer, like dog years. How long do you think you’ll stay?”

“I want to make a career of it.”

“Are you serious?” Laura asked. “I can’t see you staying here much longer.”

“I can write a fucking form letter,” I said defensively. “I used to be a writer, you know.”

“Anyone
can write a form letter, Jackie. A retarded monkey could be an LC. What I mean is that you’d be better off doing something else. You’re just not the Hill type.”

“What does that mean?” I asked. “I’m
here,
aren’t I?”

“Yeah, but
look
at you.”

I looked down at my leopard-print D&G dress and gold heels. I had put on a black cardigan to make my outfit look more conservative, which was a huge concession on my part: It was a shame to cover up such an expensive dress.

“Well, it’s not like I’m down on the Senate floor or anything,” I argued. “If there was a problem with the way I dress, I’m sure someone would have pulled me aside and mentioned it to me by now.”

“Of course no one is actually going to
say
anything to you about it,” Laura said. “They’ll just talk about you behind your back. That’s the way that people here operate.”

“I thought you political types were supposed to be opinionated and outspoken. What a bunch of pussies.”

April and Tom finally showed up, looking like the perfect Capitol Hill couple in his and hers navy suits from Brooks Brothers. They had just come from dinner at La Colline, paid for by the pro-life lobby. (Congressional staffers were famous dinner whores.)

“You’re not pro-life, are you?” I asked April.

“No, but I’m pro free dinner,” she said, rubbing her belly. “What’s Laura drinking tonight? I need to buy her one at some point tonight.”

“Don’t bother,” I told her. “She’s already double-fisting Ketel One martinis. At this rate, I doubt she’ll make it past Happy Hour.”

April spotted Dan coming out of the men’s room.

“Are you here with
him
?” she asked me. “I thought he wanted to keep it on the Q-T.”

I shrugged.

“I don’t know
what
we’re doing,” I admitted. “We’re just having fun, I suppose.”

“Why are you wasting your time with Dan?” April asked me. “Are you that desperate?”

“I could ask the same question of you,” I replied, nodding toward Tom, who was tapping away furiously at his BlackBerry in the middle of the bar. “Are you sure you can’t do better than
that
?”

It was a terrible thing to say because April actually cared about Tom in a way that my apathetic, immature mind couldn’t comprehend.

She threw her drink on my sweater and walked out of the bar, dragging Tom behind her.

“What the fuck?” Laura wanted to know.

I took off my sweater and told her what happened.

“Don’t go after them,” she told me. “Let them feel superior all by themselves.”

Laura was so much cooler than April. Why didn’t I hang out with her more often?

We ended up getting trashed with Dan, who took us downstairs to the supercheesey dance floor.

Who knew that Irish bars had dance floors in their basements? Only in DC, I guess. I remember the deejay playing a lot of Nelly and Britney Spears. I also remember the three of us taking turns giving each other lap dances, and stuffing money down each other’s pants. But I don’t remember how the three of us ended up back at my new apartment.

I WOKE UP IN BED ALONE
the next morning, naked except for my bra.

In college, this would be one of those innocent “oh my God, we were
sooo
fucked-up!” situations. Now it was just scary. My mind raced with questions:

How did I get here?

What had they done to me?

Did anyone from work see me?

Were pictures taken?

Where is my wallet?

Where are they, and what are they doing now?

I heard Laura giggling from the living room, and I got a bad feeling about what might have happened while I was passed out.

Assuming that the two of them might be fucking, I put my underpants back on and tiptoed down the hallway so I could catch them in the act.

Much to my surprise, they were both fully clothed.

“Good morning, Sleeping Beauty,” Dan said, kissing me on the cheek.

“What happened last night?” I asked. “Did you guys fuck?”

They both told me that they hadn’t. According to them, we had taken a cab from the Irish Times because I wanted to show them the apartment. Then we attempted to have a threesome, but I changed my mind and backed out.

“That doesn’t sound like something I would do,” I said.

“You were really out of it,” Laura told me. “So we let you sleep in your bed, and we slept out here on the floor.”

(I still hadn’t bought any furniture for my new apartment.)

“And you guys didn’t fuck?” I asked.

Again, they denied it.

“Okay,” I said, “let’s not make a
thing
out of this. If something happened, let’s get it out into the open.”

“I wish there was more to tell,” Dan told me, “but really, nothing happened.”

I looked at the boy who was supposed to be my boyfriend, and the girl who was supposed to be my new friend, and I realized that I really didn’t know either of these people at all. How could I know if they were telling the truth? The most convenient thing for everyone involved was to go along with their story, especially since I wanted to believe that Dan and Laura actually gave a shit about me.

Dan made excuses to leave the apartment first, leaving Laura and me alone to see who would blink first.

“This is another one of those things that we should keep between us girls,” she told me.

“Including April?” I asked. “Because I tell her everything.”

Or at least I used to, before I let a fucker like Dan come between us because I let my crotch do all of my thinking for me.

“If you tell her, she’ll say ‘I told you so’ and pretend that she’s better than us just because she has a boyfriend—who she cheats on, by the way,” Laura reminded me. “That girl doesn’t know who she is anymore.”

I was having one of those Carrie Bradshaw “I couldn’t help but wonder” moments:
Did
any
of us really know who we were?

After Laura left, I went to the fridge for a bottle of Fiji. And that’s when I saw it.

Dan’s bottle of Astroglide on my kitchen counter. With the cap off.

Oh.

I tore my bedroom apart searching for my cell phone. I found it between my sheets, but I hesitated before pressing the
Call
button.

I really did not want to have this conversation, and there was a good chance that she might get angry and hang up on me. But even so, it was my chance to do the right thing, and the sooner I could set things straight, the better.

“I owe you an apology,” I said when April answered her phone, and told her the whole story.

“They had sex on your living room floor while you were unconscious?” she asked incredulously.

“You were right about him,” I admitted. “You were right about everything. I guess I’m one of those people who has to learn everything the hard way.”

“Aren’t you furious?” she asked. “If Laura fucked Tom, I would murder the both of them, then I would shoot myself.”

“Dan and I are nothing like you and Tom,” I explained.

“But still! What a fucked-up thing to do! That just goes to show how jealous and selfish people really are.”

“But we were about to have a
threesome:
Dan and Laura would have ended up fucking at some point anyway. Besides, this is exactly what I deserve for fucking your crush in the first place!”

“I guess you don’t have any right to be mad then, do you?” April laughed.

“That’s
exactly
how I feel! This is my punishment and I need to take it like a man. Only, if I were a man, I probably would have punched someone in the face by now.”

“I just regret having any kind of affection for Dan whatsoever,” April admitted. “He made total jackasses out of us, and he’s not even all that great.”