The List (2 page)

“How about I just get us some lunch?” I asked, trying to sound upbeat.

“Fine, suit yourself. I might as well accept your charity since I’ll be out of work
in the next twenty-four hours. They’ll probably choose lethal injection as my going-away
present.”

Isabelle was afraid her CNN clip was going to go viral. That every reporter on earth
would forward it to each other as what not to do when given a great television opportunity.
Luckily, that didn’t happen. It racked up a couple thousand hits on YouTube and Upton
joked about it in the next company-wide meeting, which had Isabelle eating Xanax for
a week. But the wave never swelled into a tsunami. Of course, CNN stopped requesting
her and the
Capitolist
’s media bookers struck her name from their telegenic reporters list—you didn’t get
to make the same mistake twice at the paper. When Isabelle got her next television
assignment, it was talking about presidential pets on a Maryland public access station.

I
once had a dream that I was backstroking naked with John Edwards in a murky swimming
pool in Washington, D.C. It was a bit like a swimming pool mated with a pot of soup.
We were splashing around together, and every so often I would duck my head under and
take a look at his baby maker. Besides us and the lobster bisque water, there was
only one other thing in the pool: a huge inflatable football that we batted around
like it was the size of a grapefruit rather than a Clydesdale. We just swatted and
splashed, all naked and flirty, until I was woken up by the piercing death machine
commonly known as the alarm clock.

While my trusty dream analysis book told me that my vision meant I would be pregnant
within a year and could expect a large raise, I interpreted it to mean that John Edwards
was going to be the 2008 Democratic nominee for president. Turns out I have the intuition
of someone with stage 6 Alzheimer’s. John Edwards was not made of the stuff presidents
are made of. He was a man whore. The whole disaster was a bit of a blow to my romance
with politics, but it was more like a slingshot to the heart than a semiautomatic
to the head.

I quickly forgot about baby daddy Edwards and gave all my spare change to Hillary
Clinton. I could throw all my egg whites
in one basket for Hillary and not worry that she was going to get knocked up.

It didn’t work out. As we all know, the chosen one from Honolulu did the hula all
the way into the White House, Hillary Clinton got her consolation prize, and John
Edwards became everyone’s favorite voodoo doll. I wouldn’t have written history that
way, but I was happy to be a tiny part of it. I donated, I voted, I embraced my born-and-bred-in-the-Washington-area
status and went to handfuls of political events in duplex apartments in Manhattan.
One time, I dressed as a donkey and casually ate a bunch of carrots at a debate night
party. At twenty-five, I was proud to be more politically involved than your average
American.

Fast-forward three years and my life revolves around politicians, all of whom seem
to think that laws are as flexible as gymnasts. Before the sun is up, I start reading
about politics. A few minutes later, I start writing about politics. And three hours
after that, I start physically stalking the people who write our incomprehensible
laws. Why? Because I work in Washington, a town where you don’t set up shop unless
you’re ready to let politics control your life. It’s like
1984
without the overalls and mind control torture.

I didn’t succumb to Washington’s marble fist immediately. When I became the proud
owner of a two-hundred-thousand-dollar college diploma, I knew I had to move to Manhattan,
have casual sex, and spend my rent money on Italian-made clothing and the Hampton
Jitney for a few years. So I did. I said goodbye to the sisterhood of Wellesley College
and moved to a minuscule apartment in a really nice neighborhood with a view of Central
Park. For a handful of years, I did what my Gen Y English major peers did and worked
my way up at glossy publications in
Manhattan. It was very glamorous and terribly paid. It was also fun. (Really fun.
Especially that one Dutch banker named Fritz who had hands like Sharper Image back
massagers.) But even as my apartments and paychecks got bigger, I never thought I’d
stay forever. I grew up in Middleburg, Virginia, a historic town just outside Washington.
I canvassed for a congressman in college up north and always thought politics would
be part of my future. After so many years in New York’s luxury media world, I realized
that I missed breaking affordable bread with people who loved Capitol Hill.

When I was ready to bite the bullet and say goodbye to heiresses with the last name
Getty and say a stern hello to hard-hitting news, I put out some feelers.

At the end of July, when New York was in its summer slowdown, I started reaching out
to my Washington contacts and was told that
the
place to be was the
Capitolist
. Both the fast-moving website and the daily print publication were dominating the
Hill, an editor friend at the
Washington Post
told me. As soon as her contract ended, she was applying there and I should, too.
I asked her for her
Capitolist
contact, sent my résumé to the hiring manager for a Style reporter position, and
a month of interviews and writing tests later, I had an offer.

The
Capitolist
. I considered it for about a nanosecond, and then I said yes.

“You’ve gone insane,” said my boss at
Town & Country
magazine in New York when I gave notice in September. “Do you know what happens to
people who work at the
Capitolist
? Immediate varicose veins. All over. Even in your face. You’ll gain ten to fifteen
pounds, your hair will dull, your teeth will yellow, you’ll forget all foreign languages,
and you’ll start eating entire cakes for breakfast.”

“Entire cakes?” I asked.

“Yes, entire cakes,” he said.

He sighed and looked at me as if I had just declared that I was donating all my working
limbs to science. “But yes,” he conceded, “you will know a hell of a lot about politics
and those ugly, sad people who call themselves leaders.” He walked right up to me,
gave me a kiss on each cheek, and said, “If that’s what you want, go on.” He took
my official, typed two-weeks notice and told human resources to open the job I had
worked so hard to get.

After deciding to trade in Manhattan’s money and eccentricity for Washington’s power
and traditions, I called my only childhood friend who had stayed home rather than
running north. Twenty years ago, we had eaten live starfish together while on a church
group vacation and had ended the jaunt as two very ill best friends. She was working
at the single cool art gallery in D.C. and had taken to wearing origami shapes instead
of clothing with archaic things like sleeves.

Elsa’s take on the offer was that if I said anything but yes, I was as good as lobotomized.
Forget that it paid Starbucks wages. “You got a job at the
Capitolist
? That’s huge!” she shouted into her iPhone. “Everyone wants to work there. Seriously.
People have been leaving the
Washington Post
in droves to work there. I read an article that said as much in the
New York Times
. Of course they’re probably biased, but whatever. It’s the place to be right now.
It wins awards daily. It’s filled with geniuses. People are obsessed.” In the back
I could hear a strange harmonica sound mixed with the clanging of dishes.

Elsa yelled at her interns to keep it down. “By the way, did I tell you I was pregnant?
Not actually pregnant, but metaphorically so. It’s all part of this performance art
piece we’re putting on next weekend. Will you be down here by then? We could use another
metaphorically pregnant person. Plus, you have to take that job.”

“Eh, no. Next week, no. No time to be metaphorically pregnant until October,” I replied.
Forget performance art; I was still a touch skeptical about the job. I liked to get
my politics the old-fashioned way: from long-form articles, public radio, or drunks
at cocktail parties. I wasn’t totally sold on taking over Capitol Hill one tweetable
sentence at a time. But Elsa was right about the
Capitolist
’s reputation. The paper had its wonky tentacles stretched all over the country.

“Who are the obsessive people who read the
Capitolist
?” I asked. “Do you know any of them? Or are they all incarcerated? Because I had
a gig in college that required a pair of latex gloves and tweezers to read the packets
of mail delivered from the penitentiary.”

This was actually true. My first job in journalism was at a religious magazine in
Boston that I believe was the most popular rag at America’s maximum-security prisons.
Besides porn, obviously.

“No! Like everyone on the Hill,” Elsa assured me. “Everyone. And plus, their reporters
are on TV all the time. You’ll definitely be on Larry King.”

“He retired.”

“Whatever. Take the job.”

I already had.

When I first arrived at
Town & Country
after slogging at a regional magazine for two years, I would have tattooed “I heart
T&C
” on a number of different body parts, not that the esteemed magazine would have approved
such a tacky move. But I would have. It was such a fascinating place. The women were
like smart, polished, walking, talking Barneys mannequins. They knew how to set a
table for a ten-course meal, traded stories about summers in Cap d’Antibes and winters
in Cape Town, but could also write delightful articles comparing Gilbert and
Sullivan to Lil Wayne without breaking a sweat. Not that anyone at
T&C
ever broke a sweat—that’s why God invented armpit Botox. I was in awe and the awe
lasted for years.

I can’t pinpoint the exact time when my devotion started to crack, but I think it
was while dating a PhD student named Ilya who was obsessed with Russian literature.
His name wasn’t actually Ilya, it was Brett Olney, but he made everyone call him Ilya
for obvious reasons.

On our first date we sat in Central Park and he read to me from a book called
The Master and Margarita,
which I said sounded like a smutty Mexican telenovela. He stopped reading after I
made that comment but I was so hot for him that I faked an obsession with Russian
literature to try to get in his pants. The downside of this BS obsession was that
I agreed to go to a lecture on the Russian Revolution of 1917, which I had stupidly
said changed my perspective on history, never mind the fact that my knowledge of Russian
history extended to ballet and caviar. The weekend before the daunting lecture I locked
myself in my apartment with a five-hundred-page tome on that pesky war, a Rachmaninov
playlist, and a bottle of Smirnoff, and had my own little holiday in St. Petersburg,
or Petrograd as I soon started calling it. I only got halfway through the book, but
I remember putting the thing down and thinking,
Wowyzowy, I’m insanely wasted
. After I ate a loaf of bread to sober up, my next thought was,
I haven’t penned anything of substance since college
.

I wanted to write about something other than luxury vacations and eccentric heiresses.
Maybe history. Maybe politics. I soon realized that only senior citizens who can spell
the word
Smithsonian
backward read history publications. Plus, the only part of that big book that held
my attention was the description of Nicholas II’s lavish palace, complete with a hydraulic
lift and a movie theater.

Politics won.

The first thing I had to do after I decided to ditch New York living was make a really
depressing phone call to my parents asking if I could squat with them in Middleburg,
Virginia, until I figured out how to maneuver a D.C. that had become far more expensive
than the one I left behind in high school. I was taking a 25 percent pay cut to become
one of those reporters who was on TV all the time. I had thought about alternatives:
living in a houseboat on the Potomac River, living with a bunch of unknown roommates
who ate cat for dinner, or dwelling in Washington’s seedy Ward 8, where I could afford
an apartment with an actual bedroom. On my budget, it turned out the houseboat would
be an inflatable raft, the Craigslist apartment ad I answered had the words “Wiccan
witch circle” in tiny print at the bottom, and when I looked at the number of violent
crimes in Ward 8, I decided that as exciting as a drive-by shooting might sound on
my résumé, it was probably not something I wanted to endure.

My twenty-eight-year-old fingers dialed the first phone number I ever knew, and I
prepared myself for a little humiliation. That morning I had been writing copy about
why tiaras weren’t at all out of fashion, and just twelve hours later I had to grovel
for room and board in the commonwealth of Virginia.

“Let Dad answer, let Dad answer,” I chanted out loud as the phone rang. “Helloo, helloo,
Caroline Cleves Brown here!” my mother shouted into the receiver after three rings.

This was going to be a very belittling experience.

“Adrienne Brown here!” I shouted back. “Your favorite child. The one who didn’t pour
scalding water on your feet when she was a teen.” This was true. When she was fifteen,
my very dexterous and evil-spirited sister, Payton, “spilled” a large pot of boiling
water on my mother’s toes. I don’t think my mother or her pedicurist ever truly forgave
her.

After I yapped out some small talk, spouting lines about how much I appreciated her
continued love and affection and how I would be a shred of an ugly little person if
it weren’t for her wisdom, grace, and guidance, I made my request.

My mother huffed and puffed like someone at the summit of Everest, paused, and then
declared, “Of course you can live with us! It will be just like old times. Except
that spoiled sister of yours now lives in Argentina and your father has turned her
bedroom into some sort of
Hoarders
den. I’m sure the housekeeper is thinking of reporting us to A&E. And did I tell
you we had to fix the Tuscan shingled roof because of a hurricane and that the insurance
company claimed it was ‘an act of God.’” She stopped to catch her breath, muttered
something about the pains of seasonal affective disorder, and then added, “Oh, and
you. Sorry. Yes, it will be great to have you home. The barn apartment happens to
be empty right now.”