The List (3 page)

I looked at my feet to make sure I hadn’t sprouted hooves. “I have to live in the
barn?”

“Sweetheart. You make it sound like we’re treating you like a donkey! It’s the barn
apartment
. The horse trainers used to live there, but their kids just shot right up into giants
and they outgrew it. You’ll feel more independent there, anyway. You’re just a touch
o-l-d to be living in your parents’ actual house, don’t you think?”

No, I didn’t think. I thought it might be nice not to dwell twelve feet above piles
of horse manure. I knew just what to say to my gentlemen callers: “Keep walking until
you’re almost floored by the smell of animal feces. Then look up! I’ll be waving from
the barn window!”

But free rent was free rent, so I sucked it up and agreed to live in the barn at my
horse-loving parents’ house. Who cared if the first floor of my residence was full
of dung? I was going
to be a reporter for one of the country’s most prestigious newspapers. Writing careers
were made at the
Capitolist
. There was more blood, sweat, and tears within those walls than in an Amsterdam brothel.
Or that’s what I was told, anyway. All I really knew about the gig was that it would
allow me to go back home, hobnob with politicians, and write breaking news. And everyone
would pay attention.

I had been hired to work at the
Capitolist
(or the
List,
as the employees called it) by a very intense woman from L.A. named Rachel Monsoon.
She had been a music critic for
Rolling Stone,
a book critic for the
Los Angeles Times,
and then media editor for the
San Francisco Chronicle
. Basically, nothing like the usual
Capitolist
employee. But, to the delight of her conservative mother, she fell in love with a
preppy East Coaster who made hand-carved wooden boats for a living and took the gig
with the D.C.-based paper to avoid a life of air travel and conjugal visits. She had
been there for three months when she hired me. There was an opening on the Style section
because one of the reporters had left to “reclaim her soul in the blue waters of Goa,”
according to Rachel. I didn’t ask how this girl had lost her soul, and instead babbled
enthusiastically about how right I was for the job. What I liked best about Rachel
was her claim that my piles of prose and action-packed résumé had won her over. She
didn’t even mention the fact that my mother was once the scariest gossip columnist
Washington had ever known.

For a couple of decades, my parents had been raising horses in Virginia, but in her
former life my mom had penned the
Washington Post
’s scandal sheet. She ruled the rumor roost even when she was dragged to Middleburg,
but she grew out of it when people became “sober and boring.” Somehow she had managed
to keep a friend or two in town, but her enemies probably outnumbered the allies.
Once, when I was twelve, a woman poured
two gallons of milk on my mother’s head in a supermarket while screaming that she
was a fat bitch who had ruined her marriage. It was extremely awesome and the exact
moment I decided to become a writer.

But I still appreciated the fact that Rachel was not explicitly hiring me for my mother’s
golden Rolodex. Our interview was interesting. I was completely overdressed, even
though I was interviewing for the Style section, but Rachel and her quick-draw mind
seemed to like me anyway. And I liked her. She had a white streak in her hair and
laughed at my nervously rehearsed jokes. She had me take a two-day writing test and
meet with the higher-ups; she then called me to say, “Okay, welcome to Style. You
start in three weeks.”

Three weeks? Fantastic. I spent what would have been next month’s rent on a case of
really good champagne, boarded a friend’s chopper to Sag Harbor, and did the naked
lambada with a man named Dan (Stan, was it? Okay, Stan) for seventy-two hours. And
then my time ran out. My New York years were over. After I had packed seven years
of East Side living into boxes, I opened an email that read, “Why don’t you come in
at 11
A.M.
on October 15 and we’ll take it from there.” Eleven sounded perfectly civilized.
I had worked 10
A.M.
to 7
P.M.
during my days at
Town & Country
and was happy to cut that down a smidge. A girl needs time to do glamorous things
like groom her parents’ horses for pocket money and meet someone to have sex with.

In a rented Chevy van packed to the brim with my shabby chic furniture and the free
luxury goods I had amassed working in fashion journalism, I drove Beverly Hillbilly
style behind the moving truck I had soundly rented. The pollution of Elizabeth, New
Jersey, turned into the concrete skyways of the New Jersey Turnpike and then, finally,
the cold, glistening water under the Delaware Bridge. When I crossed into Maryland
and the Dixie
side of the Mason-Dixon Line, I blew a goodbye kiss to the northern lights. And when
my rented moving truck squished a raccoon three blocks from my parents’ house, I knew
I was really home.

In the twilight I could see my mother rushing out of the big wooden front door with
the brass pineapple knocker to open the white gate onto the driveway. She had blond
hair like mine, but hers had a hint of red in it thanks to the miracles of modern
hair dye. It was perfectly straight at the top, curled under at the bottom and swishing
across the thick roll neck of her white cashmere sweater. Both Payton and I were a
little taller than her, having inherited our height from my father, Winston Brown’s
side of the family, but my mother had the same pale—though slightly freckled—skin
and lean limbs. She often liked to point out that at my age she weighed 114 pounds
and didn’t I want to think about giving up my addiction to carbohydrates? I could
hear her green Hunter boots crunching on fallen leaves and she waved energetically
in my direction. That’s when it hit me. I was going to live with my parents.

“Here you are! You penniless, squatting ingrate,” my mother said as she walked toward
me with open arms. She smelled like home and French perfume. Inside her sprawling
white and green house most of the lights were on and three English setters barked
just outside the door. She gave me a hug and whispered, “You know I’m happy, really,”
in my pink ear.

Relaxation and motherly love didn’t last long.

The Monday after I moved home, I was ready to walk into the
List
’s Capitol Hill newsroom and become the wonkiest of wonks; the kind of person who
chided others for not knowing every single member of the United States Senate and
House of Representatives. “What?” I would say. “There are only five hundred thirty-five
members of Congress. Is it too much for you
to get to know your government? What do you think the Constitution is, anyway? An
advice column?” I was going to be so brilliant and so annoying.

In my navy blue 2002 Volvo station wagon, the clunker I had driven home and abandoned
after college, I drove to the glass and steel office building on Constitution Avenue
that held the new media empire to which I now belonged. I had been inside for my interviews
and to drop off monogrammed thank-you notes, but walking in as an employee felt different.
Sure, I had to sign an ethics agreement that required me to just say no to the free
trips to Malaga I had grown so accustomed to at
Town & Country,
and there was no closet overflowing with feathered frocks for me to don at my leisure,
but I was about to become a brilliant Washington mind, digging up fraud—gossip fraud—for
the greater good.

Having been trained by the most primped and preened people in America, I had begun
getting ready for my first day on the job weeks in advance. My hair, usually bleached
a very expensive girl-from-the-fjords blond, was toned down with lowlights. I also
got my angular bangs straightened so I looked more
Good Housekeeping
than
Interview
magazine. At five foot eight I was tall enough to scare short girls and short enough
not to scare shorter men, and that was something I really couldn’t change in Washington.
So I didn’t. I bought a new pair of Louboutin heels, very high, very shiny. I also
bought an Hermès scarf that I could fashion into a cape, a headscarf, or even a chic
winter sarong of sorts. It also came in handy as a blanket if I needed to take a quick
nap. As it was both unique and expensive, I deemed it perfect to wrap myself in for
day one.

“First impressions are lasting impressions,” I sang out, quoting my old
Town & Country
editor Kevin St. Clair. He wore Finnish reindeer hide slippers, even when out for
a jog. Really.
You might have seen him running the New York City Marathon one year in these slippers
while simultaneously smoking a massive Cuban cigar. It was quite a sight.

Seven years of working at glossy magazines in New York had given me a really great
wardrobe. I had no money at all, but even my underwear was Miu Miu. That was the way
of the New York world: Everyone who worked at a fashion magazine had Ivanka Trump’s
wardrobe, but free. (The downside is that we were paid in air kisses and comped meals,
but it all balanced out. The only things I ever paid for in New York were rent, cabs,
and medicine.) Perhaps my wardrobe was a little zany for Washington, but wouldn’t
some originality help me get a leg up? Anything to build a name for myself in a town
dominated by massive egos.

Flying into the office, as my wonderful new 11
A.M.
start time meant no rush hour traffic, I left my old car with the valet, failing
to see the sign for the restaurant next door that read, “Valet for restaurant patrons
only.” I opened the
Capitolist
’s glass doors and got ready to become smarter just by breathing the same air as those
celebrated scribes.

“Umm, humm, just sign, here, here, here, here, and here. And initial here. And here.
Oh, and there,” said the receptionist as she gave me my secure pass and building access
codes. I was about to ask her if
Capitolist
headquarters also doubled as our country’s uranium plant, but I was distracted by
the sight of Nathaniel Heard, a Congress reporter I saw on TV all the time. He was
shorter in person, and his hair looked like he washed it with chlorine. But he had
the sheen of someone very busy and important. That, I decided, was what I would radiate
in less than a week, even if I had to donate all my Kérastase hair products to an
animal shelter.

The receptionist motioned to me to follow Nathaniel through
the door. But first I had to put my thumb on some sort of soul-stealing reader. Two
frosted doors, etched with the company logo, slid open at my thumb’s command. I felt
like I was about to open the Christian Dior couture show. “Think authority! Think
girl genius!” I whispered to myself as I walked down the navy blue carpeted hall roughly
the length of an airplane runway.

Not one person looked up at me or the coif I had just paid Nancy Pelosi’s stylist
several hundred dollars to create. All I could hear besides my overactive heartbeat
were the murmur of dozens of massive televisions tuned to CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, and
C-SPAN, an occasional serious-sounding phone conversation, and the frenetic pitter-patter
of calloused fingers on keyboards.

On every wall
THE CAPITOLIST
was printed in huge, navy blue block letters. Some of the letters were painted on;
others floated slightly above the wall. But they were everywhere, just in case someone
had a bout of dementia and forgot where they worked. The walls were gray, the desks
were gray, the ceilings were gray, and the faces that hovered semipossessed behind
computers looked a touch ashen, too. But heck! It was probably just the lighting.
This was the place to be right now. So they hired people with a lack of skin pigment.
Pish posh. History was being changed by these waxen beings, and I was lucky to join
them.

I learned very soon that people who were important had two desks. People who were
less important had one. And people of the least importance, like me and the other
Style section girls, had one small desk in the very back of the office in a corner
with no windows.

I found Rachel sitting at her desk, her dark, angular haircut swooshing like a sail
as she typed. She welcomed me with a smile, gave me a hug, and put a BlackBerry, two
backup batteries, and a headset into my sweaty hand.

“This is your BlackBerry,” she declared. She pointed to the device, gripped tightly
by my navy blue
Capitolist
-pride manicured nails, and said, “Keep it with you at all times. It helps if you
imagine that it’s Velcroed to your hand. Feel free to do that if it makes it easier.”

I looked down at the phone and saw that it was already turned on and had the phrase
“Write to Live, Live to Write” as a screen saver. That would have to be changed at
once.

“We’ve disabled the off buttons on all the phones, so just keep charging it when the
battery is low. If it breaks from overuse—which it will—no problem, we’ll get you
a new one immediately. And it’s configured to work in every country in the world.
Even East Timor.” I expected us to share a hearty laugh right about then, but Rachel
was silent.

She reached across the desk and wrapped my fingers around the device a little tighter.

“If you don’t reply to an email within three minutes, I will be calling you. The pace
is frenetic here, to put it mildly. We write seven to ten articles a day. It sounds
like a lot, and it is. If you’re re-reporting a story, get fresh quotes. Don’t start
paragraphs with questions; I hate that. Speed is more important than grammatical accuracy.
You can always change a comma, not a time stamp. Have a good kicker, but don’t take
ten minutes to write it. You don’t have to come up with your own headlines, but I
will like you more if you do. So do. And they have to stay under one hundred and sixty-five
characters and be written with search engines in mind. So keep them boring, but fun.
Be creative, but not edgy. Always use a neutral voice, but try not to make it a total
yawn. Inspire, but never with bias. Remember, you can’t do or say anything politically
charged outside the office. You can’t campaign, you can’t donate, and you can’t wear
any T-shirts or buttons printed with political slogans.” She looked at my outfit,
made almost entirely of Mongolian cashmere, and added, “not that you look like the
Newt Gingrich T-shirt type . . . Oh! and I’ll expect you to file at least one thing
today. Two would be better. Three would be best. Sound good?”