The List (13 page)

“Thanks for waiting, man. I had to get that out of my system. That rink is so oppressively
small, it’s hard to do anything but slap shots, but the chicks seemed to dig it.”

My husband laughed and called his friend pathetic. Funny, too! I was ready to strip
off my four layers of clothes for this man. Here and now.

“Cool coat,” his Canadian friend said in my general direction. I looked down at my
vintage Givenchy coat that I got into a midnight bidding war on eBay for, closed the
top button, and said thanks.

“Did you have fun watching the game?” the hockey player asked me. “Enjoy my little
performance?” Ew, gross. Marty the Canadian, though also pretty cute, was definitely
the kind of guy who watched himself in the mirror during sex. But who was I to judge!
I didn’t want to exchange saliva with him; I wanted to walk down the aisle to Vivaldi
with his gorgeous friend.

“Yeah!” I replied enthusiastically. “I missed the game but I’m glad I caught the end
of your shoot-out. Very cool. I need to learn more about hockey. Sport of kings.”

My new crush laughed and assured me that I didn’t have to lie. Then he put his hand
on my actual shoulder and said, “She
came to skate and you and your Canadian barbarians ruined her night. You should apologize
to her.”

I was frozen. Could I casually just grab his hand and slip it into mine for the rest
of eternity? Or just maybe place it directly on my boob? Before I could do anything,
his hand was back by his side.

I assured Marty that no apology was necessary and that ice hockey was my yet to be
unleashed passion. With both men laughing at my bad joke, I got ready to act like
a cool, confident, with-it kind of gal and boldly introduce myself, but more of Marty’s
Canadians joined them and they all started talking about the game. No one was speaking
to me or introducing himself so I pulled my BlackBerry out of my coat pocket and started
to scroll through my forty-six new messages. This was the moment when the gorgeous
guy would break away from the group, put his hand back on my shoulder, and say, “This
may sound forward, but will you marry me?”

That didn’t happen. The group of hockey players and spectators started walking away,
the two men I’d been talking to gave me friendly waves of the hand and said, “Nice
meeting you,” and I stood there like a jilted bride saying good night under my breath.

By the time I got the words out, the two men had their backs to me. “I didn’t catch
your name,” I added softly, but they were already well out of earshot and I had a
tad too much dignity to run after the dark-haired stranger, throw myself at his feet,
and beg him to love me physically, mentally, and spiritually.

Who was I kidding. I didn’t have time to have a crush on someone. I certainly didn’t
have time to date. I
had
tried logging on to some soft-core Internet porn site last Friday night but I fell
asleep before I had the nerve to push the “Yes, I’m over 18” button. My sex life was
pathetic.

P
ainfully single and with zero weekend social obligations, I finally decided to check
into the Goodstone Inn one Saturday afternoon, so that I could stalk the grounds as
a paying customer. The hotel couldn’t tell me to get lost if I was pitching six hundred
dollars their way to be on the property. To pay the hefty overnight fee, I sold two
of my
Town & Country
freebie designer bags on eBay, telling myself they were last season, and made my
reservation for the blue-and-white-toile-covered Hayloft suite in the main carriage
house. I deserved a staycation anyway. Juggling stalking and work had worn me out,
and this would be the first time in over five months I didn’t have to sleep ten feet
above horses.

I was prepared. I had a camera. I had a dog-eared copy of
Photography for Dummies,
and I had a lot of tight black clothing and a pair of gray running shoes. I had also
slapped some duct tape on my conscience to keep it from convincing me not to meddle
in the affairs of others. That was basically the definition of reporting—meddle, pry,
find dirt, report—and I was a reporter. It’s no wonder politicians always bitch and
moan about the mainstream media. But I was part of it, and I wasn’t going to ignore
the biggest lead of my extremely short career.

I felt skittish but ready for anything. Except an Olivia sighting.

She had been out of the office almost every day in March, spending all her time traveling
with the president or following his every move at the White House, so when I sat down
at my desk on Friday morning and saw that she was across the hall, right in front
of me, I felt immediately ill.

I was petrified. Was it possible that she knew I lived in Middleburg and was having
me watched by a private investigator? I looked at her out of the corner of my dry,
tired right eye, but she wasn’t paying any attention to me. She was busy reporting,
which sounded a lot like screaming “fuck” into the telephone over and over again.
Maybe she was a warden before she became a journalist.

“Could she shut the fuck up with her fuck-yous,” Isabelle said, looking up at Olivia.
“She acts like she’s the only person in this newsroom. And every time she screams
‘fuck’ I’m forced to look up and see her pale, angry little face.”

“Wear headphones,” said Alison in her signature pinstripes without looking up at us.

“You’re wearing headphones, and you can still hear us,” said Isabelle. “What she needs
to do is shut up. She always talks like that. And you want to know why?”

None of us answered. Everyone else because they didn’t really care, and me because
I was knocked mute with fear that Olivia could hear us.

“Because that’s how the guys talk. That’s how Upton talks, and Marcus Isaac, the only
person in here with a Pulitzer. Two actually. She’s such a pathetic emulator.”

“It’s not just her,” said Libby. “All the women with good salaries here act like men.
They curse like men, dress like men, and have banished all pastel colors and emotions.”

“Olivia’s the worst offender,” said Isabelle. Worst offender or not, Olivia certainly
didn’t sound like a girl who was trying to
keep a low profile because she was having a torrid affair with a senator.

Libby nodded, still messaging a source on Gchat. “You’re right. She screams like a
frat boy all the time but I think she does more TV hits than any other girl in this
place. Did you see her on Andrea Mitchell yesterday? She wore all beige. Head to toe.
She looked weirdly naked.” Libby, like a good East Coast prep, was wearing a party
of pastels. “Although she wore that twisty evil sorceress necklace she always has
on, too. So, naked except for a symbol of darkness around her chicken neck—good look.”

“You know what’s sad?” said Isabelle, moving past Olivia’s questionable wardrobe choices.
“There are barely any female reporters here to look up to and say, ‘That’s it. I want
to be
her
. The reason I’m working this hard is to get
her
job.’ I mean, all the senior reporters are guys.”

That was true. There were a few senior female editors, not many, about three out of
fifteen, but as high-ranking reporters went, there were almost none.

“Olivia’s a senior reporter,” I pointed out.

“That’s the point,” said Alison, crossing her thin legs. “Haven’t you been listening
to us? She’s not human. She’s a cyborg and you can’t actually look up to her.”

Julia looked at all of us disapprovingly. “Why are we wasting our breath on her? Could
one of you please file something? The page hasn’t moved in forty minutes, and you
know if five more minutes go by we’re going to get a bitchy Hardy email.” We all looked
over in panic at his empty desk. Lucky for us, he was working from the Capitol that
day.

“I have something on Ludacris calling the Tea Party racist,” I said quickly.

“And I have something on Kelsey Grammer saying he loves the Tea Party,” added Alison.

We all wrote articles in silence, trying to stagger them so that Hardy had a steady
flow for the next hour. When I finished my Ludacris piece and sent it off to our child
editor, I walked to the bathroom with Isabelle, doing my best not to look in Olivia’s
direction. I didn’t have any hard evidence of her wrongdoing—just my gut and all those
pink flags—but I was still afraid she could see suspicion and curiosity painted all
over my face.

“I’ve never even spoken to Olivia,” I told Isabelle as we washed our hands. “Actually,
she spoke
at
me once, but that doesn’t really count.”

“You’re missing nothing. You haven’t forgotten that she stole all my notes and had
me banned from CNN for life?”

“That was horrible,” I said, remembering Isabelle’s flood of tears.

“And for some reason, she’s a senior White House reporter even though she’s a whopping
twenty-eight. She worships herself and has somehow convinced Upton and Cushing to
worship her, too. I once saw her reading Machiavelli’s
The Prince,
if that tells you anything.”

I laughed and squirted a quarter-sized puddle of Purell into each of my hands.

“Why do you know her so well?” I asked quietly when we were back at our desks. If
there was one thing Isabelle had zero tolerance for, it was fake niceness. I could
string together compliments about terrible people all day, but if Isabelle hated you,
she looked right at you and said, “Stop talking, I hate you.”

“I don’t know her well, but when I first came here they tried us both out on the lobbying
beat and we shared an editor. She convinced the editor that I was the worst thing
that could happen to lobbying since Jack Abramoff. I was off the beat in two weeks,
and she got moved back to the White House beat
and
promoted. Seriously. I heard her tell our editor that I was an
incompetent fool who had trouble spelling my own name and should be moved to the Style
section. She said ‘I can’t work with her, and you shouldn’t have to, either.’ ”

I wouldn’t have believed it elsewhere, but this was the
List,
where bad-mouthing of colleagues to one’s boss was standard.

Isabelle handed me a Diet Coke from the enormous stash she kept in her filing cabinet.

We both kept our eyes on Olivia gripping her phone to her frowny face. “I don’t give
a shit if this information is embargoed. You said you would embargo it until noon,
and now you’re saying four
P.M.
? I have all of it to the copy desk already, and it can’t change. You can take it
up with Upton if you have a problem.” She disconnected her phone call with her index
finger and immediately started dialing another number.

Isabelle brushed a few crumbs off her desk. “The thing I never understood about Olivia
is how she got here in the first place. She was a metro reporter at a local paper
in El Paso. Local paper! I don’t get the jump. It’s like she went from PTA president
to secretary of state in under a week.”

“But she’s good at her job, isn’t she?” I asked.

“Only because she’s a ruthless, unrelenting bitch,” said Isabelle. “Girls like that
are always good at their jobs.”

I spent my afternoon writing articles and cowering, trying not to look at Olivia.
After four hours, I concluded that she was born without a bladder, since she never
got up to go to the bathroom. Her long, stick-straight red hair hung around her head
like a curtain of fire. It wasn’t yellowy red like my mother’s shoulder-length bob.
It was a hot red. She dressed badly and somewhat seductively at the same time. Her
blazer looked cheap, but her shirt fit very snugly and attractively, even if it was
badly ironed and fading around the cuffs and collar. And she was always wearing that
knotted silver necklace. I was dying to stand
up and scream, “Are you having sex with Senator Stanton? Are you, are you, are you?”
But of course I didn’t. Instead I listened as she yelled, “President’s trip to Iraq?
Of course I’m covering!” into her phone at a decibel usually reserved for air raids.
Finally I turned my computer on its pivot and didn’t dare look in her direction for
the rest of the afternoon.

I wrote articles. Every hour I shot another piece to Hardy. They were short, and some
were terribly boring, but all he seemed to want was quantity so that’s what he got.
In between my seventh and eighth piece of the day, I allotted myself ten minutes of
Google stalking to attempt to find the man from the skating rink. I had nothing on
him, but Google knew all, right? I entered “tall, dark hair, gray coat, Canadian Embassy,
hockey.” I got a series of pictures of toothless hockey players wearing maple leaves.
So I tried, “hot hunk, ice skating, brown gloves, thick hair,” and got pictures of
the fabulously flamboyant Johnny Weir. Our road to matrimonial bliss was not going
well. I would just have to go with plan B: find Marty at the Canadian Embassy, call
him, and ask him who his hot friend was. There was no way in hell I would actually
go through with plan B, but I liked pretending that I was the kind of girl who would
do that. Instead, I put my courage elsewhere. I was going to the Good-stone Inn with
a camera strapped to my face and I was not going to leave until I had something.

Before I left work that Friday night, Julia shoved a red folder of printouts into
my bag. “From my realtor,” she said, putting her arm around my shoulders. “He too
would like you to join us in the adult world. It’s one where we cohabitate with spouses,
boyfriends, maybe a friend or two, but not our parents. Try it. You might like it.”

I was being property-bullied.

The folder contained pictures and floor plans for apartments,
all on Capitol Hill. However much Julia moaned and groaned about the
List,
she lived and played in the land of the wonks. She liked being surrounded by people
stamped with RNC and DNC. The men she dated worked in politics, all her friends were
high-powered Hill flacks, and she didn’t really mind at all. A quick glance at the
apartment descriptions she had given me suggested that she didn’t mind because she
was making way more money than I was. Hired a few months after the paper launched,
she had started when they were shelling out the big bucks to bring people in, before
the paper was a big name and prestige was the largest part of the compensation package.
To bring me in, they just reached under their couch cushions for some change, threw
in a 401(k), and called it a day. The only way I could live in Julia’s apartments
of choice was if I brought five of my closest friends with me. We could each sleep
on a yoga mat. It would be charming.