The List Page 6

  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.

  I reached for my wool riding jacket. I could have just closed the window, but I liked the feeling of the cold night wind on my tired face. By the time I slipped it on and turned around in the worn leather seat again, the woman had turned her face to the left and was looking at Baker’s old-fashioned sign.

  I did know her—Olivia Campo. She worked at the Capitolist and sat within my line of sight in the newsroom. She had a big title and covered the White House—the very top on the List’s pyramid of importance. We had never spoken, because I was in my Style section bubble, and she didn’t waste her breath on anyone except the editors she was sucking up to. But based on office layout, I did a lot of staring at the side of her head. And of course, I also knew her as the girl who ruined Isabelle’s future in television. It was definitely her. Her flame-colored hair and aggravated expression were visible even in the dark.

  I could only see her because her headlights were on, and what did I care if she saw me? But my heart seemed to care; I thought if I looked down I’d be able to see it bumping around underneath my sweater.

  I rolled up my driver’s side window and slumped down in my seat. When my nose was the same height as the steering wheel, I dared to turn around in the driver’s seat and peek in her direction. She didn’t exactly look like she was trying to keep a low profile, but in Middleburg at 1 A.M., there was no need to try.

  Why was she out here in the middle of the night? I knew why I was out so late. I lived here, and I was restless. I had no idea where Olivia lived, but my guess was that it wasn’t Middleburg, Virginia. And if her parents lived in Middleburg, I would have known. It was that kind of town. Unless they had a different name? Was it possible that I was not the only Capitolist reporter crashing with her parents in the country? But no. No girl as hungry to get ahead as Olivia would dare live outside the city. In Washington, after people looked you up and down to determine if you were fat, smelly, or unimportant, they always asked you the following three questions: what do you do, where did you go to college, and where do you live. Based on your answers, they might ask your name.

  Isabelle had mentioned that all the senior Congress and White House reporters made twice our salaries, so Olivia probably lived in a town house in Georgetown or Capitol Hill, not out here in hunt country. Maybe she had a country house? It was possible. The real estate was sinfully expensive in Middleburg, but if she was married to someone with money, she could.

  I wanted to drive away and stop awkwardly staring at her, but I also didn’t want to draw her attention. She was still reclining on her car, her arms crossed to stay warm, looking out of place but strangely at home.

  After five idle minutes, she took her phone out of her coat pocket. If the Capitolist had taught me anything, it was how to drive and dial at the same time. But she didn’t actually make a call. She just looked at her phone. Maybe she was reading a text?

  Finally, Olivia got back into her expensive car. She looked at the phone again and put her seat belt on. She then let out a groan, hit her steering wheel, and drove off in the direction she had come.

  I didn’t know what to think, except that it was weird for someone in their twenties to be alone in Middleburg on a weekday. Someone besides me.

  When I finally did collapse into bed, the soothing frog noises I turned on failed to soothe me. I tossed around, wondering what to do the next day. Should I mention to Olivia that I had seen her? I had never uttered a word to her, so it might be odd to open with “Oh hey, I saw you casually kicking around horse country last night. Were you lost? Or just in need of some fresh air fifty miles away from home?”

  But the next day was Friday, and the president was traveling. She was probably escaping the city, and I told myself it was unlikely she would even be in the office. And I was right. Friday came without one Olivia sighting and I never mentioned seeing her to Libby or Isabelle or anyone else.

  Days at the paper went by at a gallop. Some days you worked every waking moment; others allowed you an hour or two of downtime to frantically research future story ideas for the paper. But all had you spinning at a pace that sitting world leaders would look at and mutter, “You can’t be serious. No one can keep that schedule.” And some people couldn’t. Like Rachel.

  CHAPTER 4

  In most offices, there were employees who sprinted from task to task, happy to bring their blood pressure up to heart attack levels, while others kicked back at their desks like their cubicle was a tropical island. At the List, there was only one kind of employee, the kind that never stopped working. When a person decided that they didn’t want to devote every brain cell to the Capitolist or they started overdosing on Washington, they left and left quickly.

  One sunny Tuesday morning, after our section meeting, Rachel announced to us that she had given her two weeks’ notice to Upton and was ready to say goodbye to 5 A.M. wake-up calls and wall-to-wall C-SPAN. She had only been my editor for forty-five days.

  I wanted to hug her ankles the way I did Mrs. Van Hollen’s on my last day of kindergarten, but my pencil skirt really compromised my range of motion. So instead I nodded my head encouragingly, trying to look brave but feeling the way I did just before my sister shoved me off a ski lift in Gstaad. I had known her mitten-covered hand was going for the small of my back before I felt the firm shove and heard the cackle of joy, but there was nothing I could do about it. I flew through the crisp Swiss air in my pink snowsuit complete with rabbit ears and crash-landed onto a family of five frightened Germans. Unless I drugged Rachel and shoved her in a filing cabinet, there was probably nothing I could do about her departure, either.

  Deep in mourning about the loss of Rachel, we stayed mum
for much of the afternoon, only looking up when someone stopped in front of our bank of desks in the very back. Though there were five of us seated in the corner that I had dubbed the Outback, Upton liked to use the space just in front of our desks as a little conference area, oblivious that we were sitting there with working ears. There were plenty of glass-walled conference rooms in the newsroom, but if given the chance, staffers preferred to have desk-side chats with Upton to show their close personal relationships off to the rest of us.

  A few hours after Rachel dropped her “ta-ta suckers!” bomb on us, Upton, Cushing, two of the deputy editors, and Olivia Campo all gathered in front of our desks holding Capitolist coffee mugs. I hadn’t seen very much of Olivia since the night I spotted her in Middleburg. I’d learned she was a senior White House reporter who spent most of her time on Pennsylvania Avenue—and I had never been this close to her. I lifted my head, trying to look like a girl casually engrossed in The Situation Room, playing on the TV closest to them.

  “I think we go big with Hu Jintao,” Olivia said, getting into details about the Chinese president’s imminent visit. She really was very thin, and her skin was kind of magical looking. It was so pale that I was pretty convinced that with the help of a flashlight and some reading glasses, I could actually see the blood coursing through her veins.

  “Olivia’s right,” said Cushing. “That should be tomorrow’s lead. Olivia, their meeting is open press?”

  “It’s not,” she replied, shifting her thin legs to lean in closer to Cushing. “But Kelson will give me ten minutes.”

  “Are you sure?” asked Clark, the deputy managing editor for online. “Why would POTUS’s press sec give you ten minutes on such a busy day?” Upton and Olivia both smirked and looked at each other knowingly.

  Gross. Was Olivia lap-dancing for the president’s press flack or was she really that much better of a reporter than everyone else? I looked at her, all thin and pale with her limp red hair and gray wool pantsuit, and didn’t see anything so extraordinary about her. She didn’t look like she could bend kryptonite with her teeth; she just looked like a girl who liked frowning. In a few months, I had learned that part of making it big at the List was acting like you owned the building. Few had the temerity to do it, especially the women and definitely not me. But Olivia did and it was kind of amazing to watch.

  When it was all sorted that Olivia would save the day with her close, nearly familial connection to the president’s press secretary, the little group broke up, leaving only Upton and Olivia to finish their coffee and pretend the Style section didn’t exist.

  “Olivia, I’m sending Mike to follow the president and his delegation to India next week. I know I’ve had you in a holding pattern for pool duty, so I wanted you to know you can clear your schedule,” Upton said, draining his coffee and shifting his tall slender frame.

  Olivia’s pale face was suddenly not so pale anymore.

  “Upton! You can’t put Mike on that trip. He doesn’t have the foreign policy experience,” she replied at a perfectly audible level. “The only trip he’s been on for the paper was with POTUS to Toronto, which is basically like going to upstate New York. He’s not going to be able to cover.”

  “Does she know Mike is sitting right behind her?” asked Alison quietly from her desk.

  “Of course she knows! It’s all part of her warped power game,” hissed Julia, the resident expert on analyzing Machiavellian behavior at the List. It was true. Mike Bowles sat at the bank of desks just in front of us. There was a wide hallway and a pillar between them, but from the expression on his face, he could definitely hear her.

  “Let’s talk about it at lunch,” said Upton in a low, quiet voice before rapping his fingers on the top of a water cooler and walking back to his office.

  Mike looked like he had just been told he had testicular cancer.

  Standing alone by our back area, I saw Olivia’s face light up, not with a smile exactly, but with a confident, satisfied expression. She must have finally realized that instead of a wall next to her, there were actual people with eardrums and the ability to write disparaging emails. She turned toward our group, looked directly at my terrified face, and said, “Don’t you have something to do?” Too frozen to respond, I looked down at my keyboard and Julia waved her away with an annoyed flick of the wrist.

  “She’s having lunch with Upton?” hissed Libby when Olivia had left our area. “No way. I could never eat lunch with him. I would be so nervous. I would spill everything and probably start crying and call my mother.” Alison nodded in nervous agreement and I tried to bring my pulse down, still shaken by my very first verbal interaction with Olivia. Well, verbal on her part.

  “You two would not cry,” said Isabelle, calmly fluffing her perky blond ponytail. “I had lunch with him and Apolo once. It wasn’t that big a deal.”

  Apolo Ohno! I loved when Isabelle talked about Apolo. It made me feel like his best friend once removed.

  “But you’re trained to handle stress,” Alison shot back. “You skied in front of like ten million people. You probably had a stress coach and a team of sports psychiatrists.”

  “I didn’t,” said Isabelle. “I had confidence in my craft and so should you. We’re not idiots. Just because Olivia and people like Olivia treat us like we’re the Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders who happened to have gotten hold of some laptops and press credentials does not mean we’re bad at our jobs. All our badges around our necks say Capitolist reporter, just like Olivia’s.” Isabelle was right, but I bet that if I talked back to Upton in the middle of the newsroom I would have been asked to give notice.

  Though I hated to admit it to myself, the way I hated to admit that I listened to Josh Groban’s Noël album in July, part of me was in awe of Olivia. What she said in earshot of Mike was terribly mean, but she was so confident in her work, so vocal in her demands, while I still felt guilty and unworthy when I took a Capitolist stamped envelope from the supply room. How, I wondered, did she learn to act like that?

  Seeing my puzzled face, Julia frowned and said, “Olivia Campo is actually the devil. If her red hair doesn’t tip you off, then her egomaniacal personality and her ability to shove her face up Upton’s ass will.” I nodded my understanding and got back to writing a piece on football players with political aspirations.

  After Rachel left, one of the older Congress editors stepped in for a few weeks. Our copy was rewritten to sound like breaking legislation news. We got morning emails written in all caps and were chided for not getting direct quotes from every lawmaker we referenced. It was like having a gymnastics squad led by the curling coach. But we knew it was temporary.

  Just before Christmas, I woke up to a company-wide email announcing new hires. At the top was a new tech reporter to replace the one who had smashed his computer and moved to New Mexico. There was also a copy editor who came from USA Today, and then, listed last, was the new Style section editor. You would think we Style reporters might have learned about our new boss before the mass email went out, but no. After all, Libby and Isabelle had once overheard Upton saying, “Honestly, I never read the Style section.”

  “We are very pleased to welcome Hardy Hamm, who will serve as our new Style editor,” the email nod to him began. “Hardy, a 2010 graduate of Yale, was editor of the Yale Daily News, completed internships at the Herald Tribune in London and Le Monde in Paris and worked for the New York Times business section before coming to the Capitolist. He is the recipient of a William Randolph Hearst Foundation journalism award, the College Press Freedom Award, and a Poynter award. A native of Minot, North Dakota, he graduated from Yale in three years. In his spare time, he enjoys bass fishing, following the stock market, coin collecting, and writing to the editors of Bloomberg to point out their mistakes.”

  Bass fishing? My boss was now a North Dakotan fisherman? I was still in bed. The only sounds were my rapid breathing and the winter wind whistling outside my window. That near silence was soon shredded by a phone call from Is
abelle.

  “I knew it! I told you! He’s all of nineteen years old, it sounds like. And the business section! Some snot-faced stock market whiz. Why the hell would they hire him for the Style section!” she screamed. But we both knew why. Four words—Yale, New, York, and Times—were enough for them.

  “What does a bass fisherman from North Dakota know about gossip or style?” I asked Isabelle. “I bet he shows up in rubber overalls and a bright red patriotic tie.”

  • • •

  I was wrong about the overalls. But he did show up in the Capitolist office on January 2 in a candy-apple red tie. He was twenty-two years old. His full name was Harold, and he was already married. Married!

  On his second day, after he had sent us a ten-page document called “Section changes and expectations,” Alison was forced to speak to him. We had spent all fourteen hours of day one communicating by email.

  “Marley died,” she said, walking up to his desk, already covered in wonky books and stacks of newspapers. Alison’s voice was high-pitched and quivering. She stood nervously in front of Hardy, trying to stay professional.

  While Rachel had sat with the other editors in the middle of the newsroom, a prime seating spot away from the hallway leading to the front door, management had decided to put Hardy in the back by us. Maybe it was his age, or his salary, which was about half of Rachel’s, but he was downgraded to a desk that was only three inches wider than ours. We measured it before he came. It made us feel better for about thirty seconds.

  “Marley. Is that your dog?” Hardy asked, not looking up from his keyboard. He was working on her piece for tomorrow’s paper; there was so much red it looked like he was editing a piece for Joseph Stalin.

  “There’s been a death in her family,” Libby whispered in his direction. “Family. Not family pet.”

  “Is it a close relative?” he asked, not looking up.

  “Yes, she’s my aunt and godmother, not my dog,” said Alison, taking a step away from Hardy’s desk. “She was like a second mother to me.” With a desperate face, she looked at Libby for help.