The List (10 page)

“Do you think my boobs are too big?” asked Elsa, poking at her Victoria’s Secret miracle
bra. I did.

“I do not,” I replied. And that’s the intellectual level we maintained the whole night.

Waiters waited on us. Busboys smiled and folded our napkins. I almost, for a few minutes,
forgot that I ate most of my meals in the car.

“The art world is fascinating,” said Elsa after I complained about how square everyone
was at the
List
. “We had a naked sculptor carving President Lincoln out of soy margarine the other
day,” she bragged. “Over four hundred people came to the gallery to see butter Lincoln.
We had to bring them inside in shifts. And you know, it was very cold in there, because
of the butter, I mean soy butter. We didn’t want it to melt. And they still waited,
just because the butter carver was naked. This is
such a prudish town. I mean, is it such a big deal to see someone naked?”

I would definitely wait in line to see a naked soy butter carver. “Naked? Yes, very
rare here. Doing an activity other than sex while naked? Even more rare. I think you’ve
stumbled upon the next big thing.”

Elsa raised her glass to me, slopping half her drink onto the bar.

“So who bought the butter president anyway?” I asked. “I assume with a line out the
door you sold it.”

“Yeah, of course. You’re going to love this one. We sold it to PETA. You know, the
People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.”

“Ha! That’s awesome. And makes perfect sense.”

She looked down at her vibrating phone and leapt off the bar stool.

“I have to take this call. It’s Ai Weiwei,” she declared, leaving me to Google what
an Ai Weiwei was. I wanted artists in my inner circle. Sculptors, dancers, mimes.
I was starting to feel very one-dimensional. The bar was pretty full, considering
where we were. But hotel rates around Washington fell in the dead of winter. These,
I supposed, were the penny-pinchers who didn’t mind romantic getaways in subzero weather
if it meant off-season rates.

Sitting alone at the bar, I asked the very attentive bartender for something to read
while I waited for Elsa to finish her call from Beijing. He handed me a hotel brochure,
which was not exactly what I was looking for, but once I saw that there were actual
historic houses for rent on the property that cost over one thousand dollars a night,
I was more intrigued. Some looked ready to welcome home General Lee, while others
were more French country chic. There was also a fat property pig that
snorted around and self-boarding stables where you could park your horse for a mere
seventy-five bucks a night.

“A lot of men,” whispered Elsa after she returned from taking the call. She inched
down her neckline and smiled at no one in particular.

The odd thing about alcohol is the way it warps time. What seemed like minutes of
screaming “remember in high school when you lit your hair on fire with a homemade
bong!” was actually hours. Soon we were two of six patrons facing down an impatient
bartender. Elsa waved for the bill, and I watched the other patrons get the hint and
prepare to go. Two women who couldn’t stop talking about spa products nodded for the
check. A tall older man with a stern face and helmet hair headed for the door, phone
glued to his ear.

As he walked slowly past me, weaving through the vacated bar stools, I caught part
of his conversation.

“No, no, don’t worry. I’m not asking you to come here. I’ll meet you. Of course I’ll
meet you,” he said. He moved back the sleeve of his wool blazer and looked at his
watch. It looked expensive. Or at least big and shiny. “I’ll be there in ten minutes,”
he said in a sweeter voice. Then a pause, followed by, “Olivia, you’re breaking up.
Are you there? Are you on your way? Olivia?” He looked at his phone to see if it had
cut off and then flipped it closed.

That’s when I hit myself in the jaw with a light thwap to make sure I wasn’t having
alcohol-induced hallucinations.

As he walked calmly out of the restaurant, it took the power of seven hundred imaginary
men to keep me in my seat. And not only did I stay in my seat, I attempted to continue
acting normal so that Elsa, a girl who knew me very well, would not think I had morphed
into a paranoid schizophrenic. Which maybe I had. Or maybe I was just very drunk.

He had definitely said “Olivia.” I was positive. And he was in Middleburg when he
said it. But Olivia was not such an unusual name. Plenty of people were named Olivia.
It’s not like her name was Pig Girl or Hiddeldedee or something truly unique. And
if it was the
Capitolist
Olivia he was talking to, so what? Maybe that man was her husband? Or father? Distant
uncle? Chauffeur? As my mind raced through fifty different scenarios, I calmly asked
Elsa about the weather forecast.

Clearly I should be in movies, because Elsa did not say one word about my peculiar
blend of paranoia and enthusiasm for meteorology. Instead she said, “Should we ask
your mom to pick us up?” when I fell down the slate steps on the way to the parking
lot.

Yes, we should. If someone had pulled me over and asked me to take a Breathalyzer,
the thing would have gone up in flames. But I wasn’t feeling very sensible. “I promise
I’ll drive slow,” I said, slurring every single word, even
I.
“Plus, this is a Volvo,” I said, rapping on the hood. “They use them as humvees in
Sweden.” That was a total lie. But Elsa played along, probably because she was so
drunk she was legally blind.

The next day we did not go horseback riding. We sat in bed until dusk and watched
nine hours of
My First Home
on TLC, taking swigs of Pepto-Bismol and gasping at the incredibly low price of property
in Wisconsin. What I should have been doing was driving around town trying to find
the man who knew someone named Olivia, but my limbs weren’t working. Instead I just
thought about it until I decided that it really wasn’t worth thinking about. No one
had tipped me off about the Bay of Pigs. I had just heard someone say someone else’s
name.

By Sunday, when I crawled in to work to man the desk just in case some breaking Style
news happened, I had rejoined the world of sobriety. I was ready to pop out some punchy
headlines. I wrote about a portly former congressman sunbathing on a
rock in Mykonos. I worked on a slide show of Michelle Obama’s shoes. I propped my
head on a large University of Texas mug to keep from falling asleep. It was not my
mug, but I was working on Sunday and germs were the least of my problems.

I looked up at the flat-screen TV over my desk, the one that always had to be on CNN.
Every inch of me wanted to change it to the Lifetime Movie Network, but I was almost
positive we did not get that channel at the office. If we did get it and I dared to
watch, it was probably rigged so some alarm would go off, and I would be shot with
a Taser and turned to dust. So I tried to watch CNN. The hosts were talking to a panel
of distinguished guests about something incredibly boring. I listened for a few minutes,
trying to figure out what it was. Money. Angry people. Lots of blame-game-playing.
Ah, the debt ceiling. How fascinating. I needed some toothpicks to prop my eyelids
open.

It was getting very heated, and the main camera focused tightly on the guests as they
shared their thoughts. I looked down to check the emails that kept flashing into my
Outlook, but someone caught my eye.

There, on my screen talking to Candy Crowley, was the man I had seen Friday night.
The man who said “Olivia” into his phone with affectionate authority. I had been completely
blitzed, but that was definitely him. He had a strong Roman profile and a chin that
jutted out like a rolling hill and thick dark hair graying at the temples. Like an
older version of Julius Caesar with twenty more pounds on him.

I looked at the bottom of the screen where the names of the guests ran under their
talking heads. Nothing. But when he flashed on again, his name and title scrolled
under him. I was looking at the face of Hoyt Stanton, the junior senator from Arizona.

T
here is some information you need to know and some you don’t want to know. “Adrienne,
your parents are actually flesh-eating coneheads” would fall into the “don’t want
to know” category. “Adrienne, is that you? It’s the Virginia lottery calling. You’ve
won ten thousand buckets of pure gold!” would be categorized under the “need to know
immediately” category.

I deemed “Olivia Campo may or may not be slapping the pony with the junior senator
from Arizona” to be “don’t want to know” information. This was the wrong instinct,
because I was a gossip columnist and that was definitely glorified gossip, but I still
didn’t want to know. Because what if she was? And what if I found out and reported
it and the senator from Arizona had me killed? I was far too young to be bugged, stalked,
and murdered. I had never been to Bora Bora or finished
In Search of Lost Time
or run naked around the Washington Monument or gone skiing with Karl Lagerfeld. I
had so much living to do.

I was, of course, jumping to conclusions. I had seen Olivia skulking around a pretentious
ghost town at midnight. Not a red flag. Maybe a pink flag. Then I had seen Hoyt Stanton,
a United States senator, say the name Olivia into a telephone while leaving a swanky
hotel bar in the same pretentious ghost town. Another pink flag. I decided to look
up his family history to see if there
were any Olivias floating around his Wikipedia page. None. His wife’s name was Charlotte,
his sister Mary-Clare, and out of his six kids—three biological and three adopted—only
two were girls, Danielle and Daisy. My mind was spinning with possibilities, and they
all seemed to lead to the bedroom.

“You seem distracted,” my mother said after dinner
en famille
the next Saturday night. She held on to my freshly highlighted ponytail as I finished
the dishes in her hand-carved soapstone sink. “It’s not like you, you’re usually so
vivacious. And you just seem a little defeated.”

I think I had become immune to 5-hour Energy shots and extra-strength Excedrin migraine.
I needed a new legal upper. Worse, my new obsession with Olivia and Senator Hoyt Stanton
was exhausting me. I felt like two little incidents had suddenly stamped every corner
of my mind with the words “what if?” I had never seen them together. Never even in
the same room together. I didn’t know if Olivia Campo was on the other end of his
phone call. But I couldn’t shake the feeling. Middleburg was too small for coincidences.

“I’m just thinking about a few of the people from work,” I answered my mother. I reached
for a handful of candy from a bowl on the counter.

“I think you just ate soap,” she said. She was right. I had ingested a full teaspoon
of lavender-scented Palmolive rather than after-dinner mints, but I was too tired
to spit it out.

“You need to stop thinking about work and start thinking about yourself,” she said.
“You never go out anymore unless it’s for your job. You spend your weekends moping
around this tiny old person’s town, and even your horse looks depressed. You were
never like this in New York. Remember all those pictures of you in New York Social
Diary and
Gotham
magazine? And
you made that 40 Under 40 list, remember? That’s the girl I know.” She kissed me loudly
on the cheek, grabbed my tired shoulders, and told me I looked hunchbacked.

I wanted to remind my mom that in New York, my job started at 10
A.M.
and not 5
A.M.
That the
Town & Country
editors encouraged us to go out, not to become cave dwellers with female facial hair
and lots of Twitter followers. Instead, I just said, “I’m still getting my legs under
me.”

Braiding my hair, she secured the end with a rubber band meant for vegetables and
used a step stool to take a seat on the slightly damp counter. My mom went to Wellesley,
too. She loved it. She’s on the board now and goes up every other month to help advance
the elite education of women. I think she started loving me more when I decided to
go there.

“I had lunch with Vivian McLean yesterday, and she told me the most fascinating piece
of information. There is a single man living in Middleburg. Not divorced, not a widower,
just single and under forty. Dark hair.
Cute
.”

He was definitely going to be either a riding instructor or a horse breeder.

“He’s a riding instructor,” she said.

“I can’t date a riding instructor!” I groaned. “He will announce that he’s either
bisexual or gay-curious by the time we order a first course. Then he’ll want to borrow
my clothes.”

My mother shook her head and denied that the men in the horse world were almost always
same-sex-oriented.

“You should make his acquaintance!” she pressed. “I see thirty in your very near future.
When I was thirty, I had already given birth to your sister.”

“Well, that was a sound decision,” I said, chipping off my zebra-striped gel nail
polish with a salad fork. Once, when I
was seven, my mother caught me checking my sister’s head for horns. Before she could
pull me away, I was positive I had found the little nubs where they had been sawed
off.

As she reshelved cookbooks and worried about her tired old celibate daughter, I sat
on a bench whittled by the British a century ago and watched the fire in the kitchen
fireplace start to die down.

“It’s a small town. You’re going to run into him anyway,” said my mom, picking a stray
thread off her Max Mara pants. “You might as well just meet him now. And Vivian didn’t
mention anything about—”

“Vivian McLean’s husband dresses as Princess Diana every Halloween!” I interrupted.
“Princess Diana from the 1980s at that. I don’t think she’s a good judge.” I shivered,
thinking about a man in a gold lamé dress and shoulder pads handing me Snickers bars
all through my childhood.