The List (7 page)

By the time I wrapped with Chevy, I had eight minutes to get to the Dirksen Senate
Office Building to interview January
Jones. I would no doubt have to fight my way through a pack of male staffers with
dreams of dry-humping her, but that was not my biggest problem. Eight minutes: I had
eight minutes to go a mile.

I hustled to the underground train that runs between the House and Senate buildings.
It’s a little like Epcot Center, but instead of sitting next to chubby children wearing
mouse ears, you sit behind our country’s anointed ones. I say behind, because they
have reserved seating and you get to stare at the backs of their heads from steerage.

Darting around like a Senate page, I finally made it to Dirksen and to the front of
the line for press interviews with the blond actress.

“Oh, the
Capitolist,
” an eager PR gal in lots of J. Crew knitwear said after eyeing the pack of shiny
credentials hanging around my neck. “You’re Adrienne Brown, and I’m Kate Bonneville,”
she said, offering her hand.

We walked around a mess of TV crew wires. Kate gripped my elbow. “We don’t have the
press packets ready yet as my idiot intern printed them in red ink. Don’t worry, I
fired her, but you read the release I sent yesterday, right?” she asked. “It had all
the information you need. Info about Miss Jones’s current work with the group, her
recent PSAs, even a lengthy piece about the historical significance of her current
hairdo.”

“Of course,” I replied unconvincingly. In truth, I had glanced at it while robotically
reciting my morning Starbucks order. I took some shoddy notes, but January Jones could
be in town to promote atomic bombs for all I knew.

I nodded to the cameramen, photographers, and other gossipy writers—all the people
I was used to seeing in Hill rooms—and scanned January’s Wikipedia entry and some
Google news hits on my phone before I entered her holding room. I wasn’t
prepping for
Celebrity Jeopardy
against Stephen Hawking. I was sure I could gather enough from IMDb to do a decent
job with my quick-hit interview of a doe-eyed actress. January’s hair was glossy,
her hemline long, her neckline high. She looked like a very attractive person playing
the part of an erudite Washingtonian. I sat down next to her at a slick mahogany conference
table, pushed my bangs out of my face, got out my
Capitolist
-stamped pen and notepad, and gave my notes a glance. It seemed, according to the
nonsense I had jotted down this morning, that the actress had descended on our city
to lend her voice to the plight of the snail. I looked at my scrawl again. It was
written in a kind of exhausted hieroglyphics, but it definitely said “Jan Jones. Snails.”
Weird, but I had seen far stranger. Like those PETA girls who stand in public parks,
slather their bodies in egg-free mayonnaise, throw some iceberg lettuce on their privates,
and scream the day away about animal rights.

After shaking January’s slender, scented hand, I said, with far too much excitement,
“How wonderful that you’re in Washington advocating on behalf of the endangered snail.
Ah, the woe of a snail!” I flashed a smile in response to hers, feeling sure that
my teeth were the color of mud compared to her snow-white chompers. I quickly wrote
“Schedule Zoom! whitening” on my reporter’s pad right under the scrawl about snails.

Her press flack, sitting to her left, glared and mouthed something at me, which I
ignored.

“Tell me then, how did your passion for protecting snails come about?” I asked January.
“Years spent in the region around Burgundy perhaps? Les escargots de Bourgogne are
my absolute favorite . . . to save, that is! My favorite snails to protect in the
wild.”

Phew! Brilliant recovery on my part.

Snapping her fingers and then rapping the table with her
nails, January’s assistant mouthed something at me again. She looked very much like
a monkey eating chewing gum. What was she saying . . . inhale? Curtail? No . . . no . . .
what was it. Whale? Oh! Of course. Whales. Shit. “I mean whales!” I blurted out. “The
endangered whales. Right! Who cares about saving snails. They’re delicious!”

January didn’t seem to notice that I thought she was on the Hill to defend a slug
with a house on its back. We talked about whales. It was beautiful. She really seemed
to care about the huge, frightening things. She even showed me a public service announcement
on her iPad: there she was in a wet suit, swimming with whales and only kind of showing
off her famous rack. She then deflected all my personal questions, but considering
she also ignored my snail gaffe, I let it go and we went our separate ways. She, to
do the things famous people do, and me to file the story and then trudge back to the
newsroom so I could try to wrap up my fourteen-hour day.

The article filing process at the
List
was very simple. As soon as you finished your interviews, you typed them up on whatever
writing device was readily accessible. This usually meant your BlackBerry. You could
walk a few feet, maybe move to a pressroom or an empty hallway, but you never moved
much because that was just a waste of time. You tried to avoid all factual errors
and typos but what really mattered was speed. Much better to break the news that Cher
was yelling at Michele Bachmann over Twitter than to spell the name Bachmann correctly.
As soon as you sent your piece to your editor, he or she wrote you an email that said,
“Got it, hold for edits.” You then sat there and pinched a stress ball or started
your next article and then five minutes later, your article was back to you and ready
for your approval. You were allowed to go back and forth on breaking news pieces twice
and no more. If you didn’t like the edits, it was
not worth your time to speak up because there was no time. And five minutes after
you wrote the words, “Okay, let’s go live,” to your editor, your piece was on the
site and in design for the next day’s paper.

At
Town & Country,
we filed three months in advance.

After exiting the conference room, and in the hope of staving off arthritis for a
few more months, I took two small rubber stress balls out of my suitcase-sized purse
and began trying to turn my extremities back into hands. Since I had gotten the stress
balls at some Sally Field event for Boniva, they were stamped with inspirational phrases
about bone health.

Four minutes had gone by and I was just starting to regain feeling in my thumbs when
my BlackBerry started buzzing. It was an email from Rachel. “Where are you? Are you
done? How were the interviews? Did they talk about Boehner? Did they talk about who
they’re voting for in the primaries and can you file the stories from your phone or
do you absolutely have to take the extra time to come in?”

I dropped the stress balls into the nearest trash can. “Yes on Boehner, no on primaries,
Chase was funny, Jones was less funny but prettier. And yes. I can definitely file
from my phone,” I wrote back.

I found an empty marble bench in a quiet Dirksen hallway. With my purse strapped to
me like an Eagle Scout’s day pack, I hunkered down and started punching out back-to-back
six-hundred-word pieces on a phone keyboard, Hill staffers darting past me all the
while. During those twenty minutes, I shared my bench first with Senator Al Franken,
then a painfully smelly woman, and then a young Hill intern screaming on the phone
in a
Gone with the Wind
drawl. (I also checked the word
whale
every time I typed it, worried I would name the garlic-friendly mollusk instead of
the mammal the size of a submarine.) It was
nice to have a brush with senators, malodorous people, Scarlett O’Hara’s offspring,
and January Jones in the same day. But what I was really savoring was a rare moment
in the sun. I had almost forgotten what heat generated by something other than stress
felt like.

I paused for the first time on my “Celebs who love promoting causes” pieces, walked
out the heavy bronze doors into the cold November air, and typed out my kicker. As
I pushed send, I looked at the long list of messages I had missed during my type-fest:
fifty-five emails, including one from Rachel that just read, “No rush, but when do
you think you’ll file? The next two minutes would be best.”

I had missed her deadline by a minute and a half.

I couldn’t get to sleep that night. I was so wired that even the thought of changing
into my pajamas and lying down gave me anxiety. I had reached the point that Isabelle
described as Listintoxication. It’s when the paper got so deep in your brain that
every part of your life overlapped with work.

Still mad at myself for filing my Jones story late, I turned off my “sounds of the
Amazon” noise machine and walked to my closet. I put on a coat and old riding boots
and headed outside. The downsides of living out in the country were plenty, but sometimes
when I stood on the neatly mown lawn in the silence and moonlight, looking out at
the horse fields and their white fences, it seemed worth it. Especially since I was
paying for none of it.

From the barn, I strolled out into a long meadow and sat on the top slat of one of
the fences. It was made for girls to sit serenely on while their Palomino horse grazed
in front of them. I had used the same exact slab of fence as a balance beam once when
I was ten; I fell off and basically broke my face. For two years afterward, my sister
had me convinced that they had
replaced the cartilage in my broken nose with wood. She called me Pinocchio and threatened
me with matches.

I really don’t miss her very much.

It was incredibly quiet, after-midnight quiet. I was happy to pick silence over sleep
for a few hours, if it meant time without my BlackBerry or a screen covered in Twitter
babble.

I always left the keys in my Volvo, just in case I had to drive into the city with
my taillights on fire, but this time, I got in slowly. I knew my hours of sleep were
ticking away, but I couldn’t help it. I just wanted to drive without feeling like
I had to get anywhere—no traffic, no deadline.

A repeat of that day’s Diane Rehm show was crackling on NPR, but I turned it off in
favor of a little Waylon Jennings. Being an outlaw country star with a guitar and
a drinking problem sounded like a really good job right now. Maybe I could start guzzling
Kentucky bourbon in the morning and carry a banjo everywhere I went. I would certainly
get fired then. Sometimes I wanted to get fired. But then I remembered how hard I
had worked in New York to get to the
List,
and I decided against it. I was at one of the best publications in the country and
I shouldn’t take that lightly. Yes, the pace was ridiculous, but I had great access,
interviewed interesting people, and liked all the Style girls. I knew I was going
to do something amazing with my journalism serfdom; I just wasn’t sure what yet.

I drove down my parents’ winding drive. There were no lights, but there were lots
of trees trimmed to look miniature and a broad iron gate that opened as you approached
it. I crept out of our patch of land and headed to East Washington Street.

There weren’t many places to go in the sleepy town at such a late hour, but there
was one store open round the clock in Middleburg and that’s where I was headed. I
didn’t need anything, I just felt like seeing the inside of a building that wasn’t
my office or my house. The small twenty-four-hour store probably grossed about thirty
dollars from midnight to 6
A.M.
, but it stayed open anyway. I figured they got a few extra bucks from the tourism
board to do it, just to prove that Middleburg was more than a haven for moneyed geriatrics.

I drove twenty miles per hour past the English clothiers, the riding supply store,
a café with a picture of a garden snake on it, and the restaurant that John F. Kennedy
had once graced with his good looks, assuring it local fame for all eternity.

Over the slow rumble of my motor, I could hear a red fox groaning a few feet away.
If you’ve never heard one before, let me tell you that they sound like a person in
the throes of an ice-pick attack. When my parents first moved to Middleburg, my mother
continuously called the police because she thought women were being slaughtered all
around her. Not so. Just the song of a bourgeois hunting animal.

There wasn’t another car on the dark roads. The lampposts were out in an effort to
go green, and the storefronts’ dim lights did only enough so you didn’t trip on your
own feet. The inn where Liz Taylor and John Warner used to lock their blue eyes on
each other was pitch black, though inside, you knew, all the tables were set, tall
tapered candles waiting to be lit.

I parked my car in front of Baker’s, the twenty-four-hour store. The bell on the door
rang for safety when I walked in, and I started to slowly walk the aisles of processed
food. I reached for five products, all containing caffeine. Richard Baker, the owner
of the store, had his oldest son working the graveyard shift, and in my daze I was
happy that I remembered to ask after his family. Decades ago, his grandmother had
been a great source for Jackie Kennedy in hunt country sightings.

Back in my car, I cracked open the passenger side window and started to drink some
lukewarm hazelnut coffee without
turning on the ignition. In front of me were the lights of the store; behind me, you
couldn’t see a thing.

I finished my drink without hearing the rumble of a single motor. That’s just the
way it is out in the country. And then, when I was about to head home for four hours
of sleep, I heard the purr of an engine, a white BMW 650i Coupe creeping down the
road. Elsa had the same one in silver. She bought it after she sold an entire Kara
Walker show to a widow in Palm Beach.

The car slowed down across from the little market and parked in front of the closed
stores on the other side of the wide, dark street. The headlights dimmed but stayed
on, the door opened, and a woman who looked upset emerged in a thick red down coat
and perched on the hood. The light from Baker’s store was faint, but even in the darkness,
she seemed a little familiar.