The List (20 page)

“I can’t do this job,” I whispered in my dad’s general direction as I buckled my seat
belt. “I’m so tired. I just want to curl up and die.”

“You know,” said my father, not taking his eyes off the road, “you don’t have to work
there. No one is forcing you to. You could always apply to other newspapers.”

I shook my heavy head. “I can’t leave now. Everything’s
finally starting to go well. I was on TV this morning. I broke a big story. This is
what I moved back home to do and it’s a really important job.”

My dad shook his head in agreement and we drove in silence until we passed the big
blue highway sign that said “Virginia is for lovers.”

When we turned off the highway, my dad put his hand on my arm and said, “I hate to
do this to you, Addy. I know you’re tired. But I need to stop by the vet’s on the
way back and get some medicine for Jasper’s eye. The IV doesn’t seem to be doing the
trick. We’re going to try another approach.”

“Who’s Jasper?” I asked, laying my head on the glove compartment.

“Your horse,” answered my dad.

Right, right. That Jasper. I shook my head yes as his blue Mercedes glided home. I
wanted animals and fresh air and people who would never grace the cover of
US Weekly
or
Congressional Quarterly
. I fell asleep in the warm, purring car while my father dealt with the vet. I didn’t
wake up until Monday morning.

 • • • 

When I finally opened my eyes, still feeling like half a human, I had an email from
Upton’s assistant in my inbox.

“Please come by Upton’s office at 10
A.M.
,” it read. I scanned it four times, but it really didn’t say anything else.

When I drove in, shivering from caffeine detox, I put Visine in my eyes and followed
his assistant into his office. I hated the fact that every editor’s office at the
List
had glass walls. That meant that every single employee could watch the higher-ups
chew you out. From time to time, you also got to watch as some dorky reporter got
applauded for some dorky
reporter behavior, like breaking news courtesy of a little direct Eritrean-to-English
translation in the middle of the night. But that wasn’t as fun.

Upton’s door opened, and he slammed it absentmindedly behind him as he walked quickly
toward his desk.

He looked at me and declared, “You are here. Good.” He stammered slightly as he sat
down across from me. His chair was large and mesh, and his unruly blond hair stuck
to the back. I had gazed at Upton’s office from a few feet away, afraid to get any
closer, but I’d never been inside it before. Dozens of awards, diplomas, and newspaper
clippings adorned the walls around him. A shelf of books that he had written stood
firmly below the awards and pictures of him with every living president served as
bookends. The only lighthearted touch was a framed caricature of him holding a red
pen, done by one of the paper’s illustrators.

“Good morning, Mark,” I said, trying to sound casual and brilliant at the same time.

“Is it still morning?” he said, looking at his Seiko. “I feel like I’ve been awake
for days.” He shuffled some papers, opened and closed a folder, and then leaned back
in his chair with a book in his hand.

He flipped through it and moved his lips as he read a few pages. Perhaps he had only
asked me to come in to observe him as he read. Weirder things had happened inside
these walls. I was about to ask if he wanted me to get him some coffee, or a bookmark,
when he slammed the book down like a fiery preacher.

“The reason I asked you in here is because . . . ” His voice trailed off. He took
the closed book off his glass desk and placed it on his lap. It was Nancy Reagan’s
biography. “Adrienne, this place is a meritocracy. One of the true meritocracies left
in the media business. If you don’t do a good job, you don’t work here, if you do
a great job, we say thank you. So, I wanted to just say, this morning . . . I—I—I
wanted to say good job.”

I almost fell off my chair and combusted at the same time. First a congrats from despicable
Hardy, and now this.

“We got lots of traffic from your scoop. Drudge linked it, the Hollywood sites went
nuts over it, and the morning shows liked you,” he said, twisting his thin lips into
an awkward smile and looking to the right of my head.

“You still have a lot to learn. A lot,” he declared, just in case I was actually feeling
good about myself. “Your reporting instincts are weak. Your research techniques, I
hear from Hardy, are sophomoric at best, and you spend way too much time commuting
in and out of the city. You really need to consider moving.” He checked to make sure
I was frowning now. I was.

“That said, you’re a good writer.” He looked at me. I looked at him. No one smiled.
But inside, I was doing the Macarena. The great
Capitolist
ruler just told me I was Carl Bernstein in a dress. “Now, go and write.” He gestured
to the door. I stood up, thanked him for his time, and ran for the safe corner of
the Style section.

Before I could download our conversation on Julia, Hardy yelled at me from his desk.

“Adrienne. There you are. I’ve been looking around for you everywhere.” That was an
obvious lie because everyone could see clear as day that I was in Upton’s office.

“I only count three posts so far from you today. Did you hear me? Three. Is someone
asleep at the keyboard?”

I looked at his smug face in panic. Had I only done three pieces? I looked at the
clock. It was 10:18
A.M.
I had usually filed at least four by then. With all the White House Correspondents’
writing yesterday, I was a little behind.

I looked at Julia in alarm. “Here, write about this,” she texted me, sending a link
to a piece in the
Hollywood Reporter
about George Clooney’s declaration that he never wanted to be
president because he liked having casual sex too much. “It’s not groundbreaking, but
it should shut him up.”

I mouthed, “Thank God for you,” and started speed-reading the article before I got
axed.

After I pounded out three short pieces in a row, I leaned back in my chair and looked
around the newsroom. Every person had their head down, typing out stories or reading
other people’s copy. Newsrooms usually buzzed, but this was like a crypt. People didn’t
take breaks or talk to their neighbors. There was no banter with a colleague across
the room. Instead, there was just hunger and guilt. Hunger because everyone there
was cut from the same motivated cloth, and guilt because no one wanted to be caught
doing anything but working.

As I refreshed the Style page to make sure my last piece was formatted correctly,
I saw Emily Baumgarten, another White House reporter, and Olivia walking down the
hall together. Olivia was no longer just Olivia “having sex with a senator” to me.
She was Olivia “cheating on a man I loved.” I had touched her husband’s hand, breathed
him in, and thought about him every free moment I had. In my eyes, her transgression
had become much worse.

I watched her take her seat at her desk and begin cursing at people on the phone.
She didn’t seem like the kind of girl her handsome husband would go for, and her husband
didn’t seem like the kind of man she would handpick to be her mate for life. A girl
with an ego like that never went for the genteel Ken doll. She went for the bigger
fish. She went for the senator.

My boyfriend in college, brown-haired, blue-eyed Brady Keller, was my introduction
to the genteel Ken doll. He was from Raleigh, North Carolina, and majored in environmental
studies at Harvard. Together, we did New Englandy things like wearing scarves and
mittens and reading poetry under trees.
He wrote me a note every day on paper that he aged himself. I asked him once if this
just meant leaving it out in the rain and running it over with his car, but he promised
me there was more to it than that.

Brady was the perfect college boyfriend. He was cute, he threw a football skillfully
around the quad, he wore a peacoat, he was adept at memorizing Shakespeare, and he
had about 3 percent body fat despite his love of keg parties.

After Wellesley, I forgot all about nice boys from the South and discovered a different
breed of man: the investment banker. Lots of money, no free time, not all that attractive
if you got rid of the expensive clothes, a close personal friendship with every worthwhile
maître d’ in town, and the owner of a really good Manhattan apartment. That was the
kind of man I imagined Olivia Campo married to: someone as pompous and gruff as she
was, with a bank account to catapult her to the top. But I had been wrong before.

Julia had gone out and brought us all sandwiches. Hardy thought it was best if only
one of us abandoned the production line at a time. When she placed my turkey and sprouts
on my desk, she let out a few tsk-tsks and turned my head away from the TV.

“You’re watching C-SPAN? Don’t tell me you’re becoming that girl,” she chided.

There were different levels of wonk at the
Capitolist
. We were all forced to watch CNN and Fox News and MSNBC, but when you caught yourself
watching C-SPAN and enjoying it, it meant you had officially bathed in the Kool-Aid.
I was watching C-SPAN because it was my only legal entrée into the life of Senator
Stanton. He was a bigwig on the Judiciary Committee and usually let out eloquent bursts
about immigration and homeland security. I was going to have to figure out how to
stream
it on my computer. Julia would become suspicious if I suddenly found a passion for
the most boring channel on television.

My television watching stopped short when the girl responsible for my new C-SPAN habit
started chatting with Upton at her desk.

“What do you have in the works?” he asked loudly.

Without looking for notes, Olivia perked up and said, “I’ve got half a dozen leads—as
in paper leads—going right now.” She lifted her dry unmanicured hand and started ticking
off her treasure box of stories on her small fingers. “There’s some talk that Gorham
pulled in shady donor funds for POTUS so clearly looking into that. Got great sources
in Anchorage.” She did? She had great sources in Anchorage? Like who? Retired Iditarod
champs? While I sat shocked and a little jealous, she kept clicking down her list.
“Then there’s all that border fence nonsense that the president is speaking out on—great
stuff coming from Texas reps—then there’s the pushback on his health care bill, some
stuff with the shakedown in the East Wing, and some little crap followup thing on
foster care that POTUS is gearing up to sign. I did two articles on it already, but
might as well make it a hat trick. Oh, and I’ve got twenty with Hillary on Friday.”

Twenty minutes with Hillary Clinton? Twenty? I wanted just one minute with Hillary.
Mike, who sat next to Olivia and whose press trip she had stolen a few months ago,
was sitting there trying not to strangle his skinny, ass-kissing colleague. I understood
Mike’s frustration. Why did Upton have these cozy little desk-sides with Olivia? She
wasn’t an editor or even the highest ranking White House reporter. She was just the
loudest.

I wanted to stand up and scream at Upton to stop slapping all of Olivia’s copy on
page one because the big story he was looking for was right in front of him and I
had it. Olivia may have sources in Anchorage, but I had pictures of her having sex
with a United States senator. Even if Upton barely knew my name right now, I could
soon have the entire country looking at a picture of Olivia Campo’s ass.

I didn’t know how often Stanton was looking at Olivia’s ass, which—along with her
severe lack of ethics—had been bothering me ever since I found out she was married
to Sandro. Did they just get together a few times, check the “I slept with a senator
/ I had sex with a girl half my age” boxes and move on? Or was this something that
was going to last? Even break up their marriages. Olivia was absolutely nuts to risk
her powerful job and perfect husband for Hoyt Stanton, but maybe she was mentally
ill. I needed to find out more.

“Let’s go bigger than you think on that foster care legislation,” said Upton, breaking
my train of thought. “We need some more warm fuzzy stuff because Mike’s doing some
depressing piece on the president’s response to Syria and I could use a picture of
a smiling child somewhere close to his.” Olivia rolled her eyes, didn’t bother to
look at Mike, who was now a lovely shade of plum, and promised Upton she’d try.

I went over her long list of stories in my head, trying to see if I could spin any
into Style-worthy topics. How was she perusing all those stories? And when did she
even get the time to cultivate sources? My five sources all lived in the lower forty-eight.
Pushing aside my feelings of inferiority, I stopped short at her comment about “border
fence nonsense.” Senator Stanton was always talking about his support for the border
fence on C-SPAN. He was from Arizona and he was championing the controversial bill.
And Olivia was from Texas, where they also rallied behind it. I quickly minimized
my Web browser on my computer and Googled Stanton, border fence, Olivia Campo. I got
ten hits at the top of the page. She had written about it before, especially about
the president’s opposition to the bill, but
she had quotes from Stanton—the long, good quotes you got from an in-person interview.
I wondered where, exactly, those interviews had been conducted.

 • • • 

When I woke up painfully early on Saturday morning, I ducked into my parents’ house
to poke around for their superior coffee. My mother was in the living room, sitting
in the middle of an enormous ottoman, trying to twist herself into a complicated yoga
posture. I curled myself on the sofa away from her old-people gymnastics.

“Did you ever just get so tired that you felt like you would never catch up on sleep
again? Like there was some tipping point and you had let the pendulum swing past it,
and now your life would be nothing but chaos and forced labor?” I asked, shifting
positions on the couch.