The Washingtonienne (3 page)
A
s I climbed into Fred’s Volvo SUV, I noticed something in the backseat. A car seat. For a baby.
Oh.
Officially, he was only taking me to his office to show me a pretty view of the Mall, so I didn’t feel the need to ask him about the car seat at this point. I was much too drunk to have that conversation with him anyway. So I buckled myself into the passenger seat and smiled at him as he started the engine.
The office building was empty except for the bored security guard who waved to Fred as we scampered by, and I wondered how often he brought girls to the office in the middle of the night.
We played the “office tour game” for a few minutes. He led me from one room to the next and I pretended to be interested. But I really wasn’t impressed by any of it: Fred’s job sounded kind of boring. Besides, I was too busy wondering when he planned on putting the moves on me.
He concluded the tour by opening a pair of double doors onto a conference room that was bigger than April’s apartment.
There was the view. The Capitol. The Washington Monument. The Lincoln Memorial. Glowing yellow in the dark below us.
Fred stood very close.
I stepped away from him, and he took another step closer, backing me into the twenty-seven-foot conference table in the middle of the room. He leaned in, and I could feel his hard-on pressed against me.
I looked up at him, tilting my face toward his. He kissed me, sliding me onto the table. I knew what was precipitating and did not feel like stopping it. He pulled all of my clothes off, but left his on: He only unzipped. We fucked right on the conference table, like something out of
Penthouse Forum
. I was too drunk to have a real orgasm, but I made a lot of noise like I did. When I opened my eyes, I realized that Fred had fucked me the whole length of the table, from one end to the other.
Not bad for my first night in Washington.
I sat up and looked at the view again. The Capitol. The Washington Monument. The Lincoln Memorial. Still there, glowing yellow in the night, no less beautiful.
It was three in the morning by the time Fred took me home.
I imagined his wife standing on the front porch, waiting for him with a rolling pin. Actually, no, she wouldn’t be the rolling-pin type, would she? She was probably swirling a glass of scotch in her hand, frowning and contemplating how she could get back at him. Maybe another shopping spree at Saks? Or maybe she didn’t care if her husband stayed out all night like this. It was really none of my business either way.
“Don’t you have work tomorrow?” I asked him.
He glanced nervously over his shoulder at the baby seat.
The baby.
I had forgotten all about that. And so had he, apparently. And it was
his
damn baby!
His
marriage.
His
baby. Not mine.
“When am I going to see you again?” he asked me.
“I don’t know,” I said. “You’re the married one. It’s up to you.”
“So you know that I’m married?”
“Well,
duh.
”
Fred laughed, retrieving his wedding ring from his trouser pocket. He put it back on his finger and smiled at me.
“So, tell me, what kind of girl has sex with a married man?” he asked.
“What kind of man cheats on his wife?” I retorted, smiling at him.
“Let me borrow your phone.”
“You’re not calling your wife, are you?” I asked suspiciously.
“Just give me your phone, please.”
I watched as he dialed a number and hit the
Send
button. Then I heard a second phone ringing from somewhere inside the car. Obviously, Fred had just called himself from my phone.
“There,” he said. “Now we have each other’s number.”
These older guys knew all the moves, didn’t they? But I didn’t expect to hear from Fred ever again. He would surely go home, think about what he had done, and realize that it was wrong.
HE CALLED THE NEXT MORNING
.
I answered, hungover and squinting in the daylight.
“Let’s get together for lunch sometime this week,” he said in that rushed tone people use when they’re at work. “How about Thursday, at one thirty? I’ll meet you at your place.”
I had sort of counted on this being a one-night thing, but now it looked like it might turn into an
affair.
An affair with a married Washington bureaucrat—hilarious!
I climbed out of the sofa bed and looked around the apartment for April. It was apparent that she hadn’t come home last night. Maybe that venture capitalist she met had whisked her away to his mansion.
I remembered that my internship interview was at noon. It was already ten thirty. I needed to put myself together for my debut on the Hill.
My skin was dried out from too much drinking the night before, and my hair was knotted up from too much fucking. I had major work to do.
I put my hair in jumbo Velcro rollers and chose the perfect job interview outfit: a gray stretch wool skirt and matching three-quarter-sleeve top, black silk stockings (no naked legs on a job interview), black crocodile Manolos from last year’s sample sale, and my graduation pearls.
No makeup—too trampy. But must do brows. Brunettes should use a
blond
pencil. (I learned that from a
Harper’s Bazaar
interview with Cindy Crawford.) I needed blusher, especially when I had a hangover. “Orgasm” by NARS was the best. And I could not leave the house without Lancôme’s Définicils mascara. Must comb my eyelashes while I was at it, to get rid of any unsightly clumps.
But that was it.
No makeup.
My nails were trimmed short, neatly filed, with a single coat of clear nail polish. Manicures weren’t required here, as they were in New York, and neither were spray-on tans or chemically straightened hair. Now that I lived in Washington, I could finally let myself go.
I took my rollers out. Total pageant hair, unless I parted it to the side just so, for a more professional look.
Professional.
I didn’t know the meaning of the word.
AS I WALKED OVER TO
the Senate office buildings, I imagined the new life that lay ahead of me. Every morning, I would stroll past the Capitol, just as I was doing now. But I was no tourist—I
lived
in this beautiful city full of pretty shit that our tax dollars paid for: pretty marble buildings, pretty statues, pretty monuments to what a great nation this is.
I could see myself in my little gray suit, running around under the Capitol Dome. Doing
what
exactly, I didn’t know. April never told me much about the
work
that people did on the Hill. Listening to her, you would think that it was all Happy Hours and staff romances, like an episode of
Ally McBeal
or something. And the impression I got from watching C-SPAN was that everybody got paid to put on a suit and watch each other give speeches all day.
I could do that,
I thought.
I wanted a fluffy government job that I could start taking for granted as soon as possible. I must have looked so
hopeful
in my Marc Jacobs peacoat, with my hair parted perfectly to the side, on my way to get an internship in the United States Senate. I didn’t look like the sort of girl who fucked strange married men on conference tables at three o’clock in the morning.
I found the Hart Senate Office Building and queued up for the security screening. I wondered if I would have to stand in line like this every day as I waited for each person ahead of me to clear. Maybe it was the southern or midwestern influence here, but people were so friggin’
slow
. And no one was yelling or complaining about it. I guess there was no rush to get to work.
I threw my black boarskin Kate Spade bag onto the X-ray belt and stepped through the metal detector.
Beeep!
“It’s probably your shoes, ma’am,” one of the security guards said.
Ma’am?
Was he talking to me?
“You’ll have to remove your shoes, ma’am, and put them through the X-ray machine.”
“Seriously?” I balked as a plain-looking girl wearing flats grumbled in line behind me.
How unglamorous. So much for my Hill debut. Frown.
Note to self: You can never wear Manolos as long as you work here.
Or I could wear them anyway and use the security screening as an excuse for being late to work in the future! Fabulous.
I returned through the metal detector, put my pumps back on, and immediately felt better. I despised that “taken-down-a-notch” feeling I got whenever I took my heels off.
I click-clacked across the marble floor, looking up at
Mountains and Clouds,
the colossal Alexander Calder sculpture in the atrium. The looming steel mountain and the black metal clouds hanging overhead were so ominous-looking. I had never seen anything like it before .
My phone suddenly went off, its Salt-N-Pepa “Push It” ringtone echoing throughout the marble hall. It was April calling to make sure I was on my way to the office.
“Where are you?” she asked.
“I’m standing next to the big black thingy,” I told her.
“I always hated that thing. It’s so big and scary looking, like something out of a nightmare.”
“Exactly! It’s fabulous.”
“I feel like shit,” she groaned.
“Hungover?”
“Big-time. And I’m still wearing your dress. By the way, people are loving it! The senator was in the office this morning, and he was checking me out!”
“Maybe he’ll ask you out on a date.”
I was kidding, but didn’t these things sometimes happen? At least, it was fun to think that they did.
“I feel disgusting,” April continued. “I had to buy a toothbrush at the Senate convenience store when I came in this morning.”
“The Senate has a convenience store? Where?”
“It’s in the Dirksen Building. And isn’t it funny that they sell
toothbrushes
there? It’s like they know we’re all having one-night stands or something!”
“Do they sell condoms?” I asked. “Because if they don’t, they probably should.”
“Condoms? Oh, please. No one would be caught dead buying condoms here!”
“Why not? Do senators only hire virgins or something? You would think that they would want people with
life experience
working for them, and that they’d want to keep you all disease-free.”
“Shit, I have a call on the other line—fucking constituents!” April groaned. “See you up here soon. Bring coffee!”
I looked around. I didn’t see a Starbucks anywhere, so I asked a security guard where I should go.
“Two places: Dirksen or Russell,” he said, referring to the other two Senate office buildings. “The good coffee is in Russell.”
He gave me directions to a pseudo-Starbucks called Cups. To get there from the Hart Building, I had to take the elevator to the ground level, where I crossed over into the Dirksen Building. Once inside Dirksen, I took the stairs down one flight to the basement level, at which point I circumvented the cafeteria, arriving at the hallway that connected Dirksen to Russell, where Cups was located, at the end of the hall.
It took me about half an hour to find the place, and my phone didn’t work in the underground tunnels that connected the buildings. But I had come too far to leave empty-handed, so I ordered two triple-shot skim lattes before going back to the Hart Building, which took another fifteen minutes. No wonder government was so inefficient: It took forty-five minutes just to get a decent cup of coffee!
The wait for an elevator took
forever,
which made no sense since the building only had nine floors. Finally, one arrived. Two men in suits got out. Everybody stared at them, but nobody moved to get into their elevator. A sign above the closing doors read SENATORS ONLY. So I guess those guys were senators or something? They didn’t
look
important. All I saw were a couple of old men.
An elevator for us regular people arrived, and we all squeezed into it. When the doors shut, I could see that someone had scratched the words
FUCK YOU
on the inside of the doors. I wondered what misfit would do such a thing in a Senate office building, and if they still worked here.
It was the kind of thing that I might do myself when I was high, but I would have to keep myself in check from now on, especially if I ended up working for some ultraconservative congressman or something. I had heard that Hill staffers could get fired for just about any made-up reason: There was always some flimsy language written into the employee code of conduct that gave congressional offices this sort of discretionary power. It was usually something like “any improper conduct reflecting upon the Senate office.”
Of course, everyone knew the old adage “You don’t shit where you eat.” But if you worked on the Hill, you couldn’t shit
anywhere
. If I was serious about making a career here, I would have to hold it in from now on.
APRIL PUT HER CALLER
ON
hold when I arrived with her coffee.