The List (11 page)

“Well, metrosexuals are all the rage. I read it in
New York
magazine. I don’t think you should be so closed-minded. I’ve always thought you were
meant to be with a man in jodhpurs.”

My mother actually looked hurt, and I felt a touch guilty. The woman just wanted to
play Episcopalian Yenta. But a man in jodhpurs? I might as well frequent a leather
bar in Tribeca to find my soul mate. I took my mother’s scheme to marry me off to
Elton John as my cue to retire to the animal quarters.

Julia was right. We were old. I had a working automobile and didn’t have to travel
by horse. Maybe I should move out of Middleburg to Logan Circle. I could probably
afford to live in a basement with ferocious rodents and several roommates. It would
be humbling, but I currently lived with my parents. Par-ents! I felt like a forty-year-old
Sicilian spinster forced to can spaghetti sauce all day to earn my room and board.
Finally, my frustrated parents would marry me off to a grizzled widower. “We have
to
get you out of the house!” they would declare as I presented him with a dozen cans
of Ragu old-world style and my child-bearing hips. Realistically, my situation was
even worse. With my job, I would never have time to meet a grizzled widower.

The Saturday after my mother tried to set me up with a gay man, Elsa called to beg
me to come to her gallery on Fourteenth Street for an opening with too many people
and not enough wine. I declined. I had trouble going out these days if I couldn’t
find an angle to write a piece for the
List
. Who needed a social life? Or single men to meet? I was too tired to talk after most
days anyway, so my future partner would have to have a fetish for girls with bags
under their eyes and BlackBerrys glued to their faces. In case it came down to him,
I hoped this was what Vivian McLean’s homosexual riding instructor was looking for
in a bride.

With the joy of a work-free night ahead of me and a feast of lite beer and candy at
my disposal, I opened the drawers of my white dresser and rearranged my sweaters,
folding them all in seven moves like the girls who had run the
Town & Country
closet did. I emailed an ex-boyfriend from my magazine days (now probably married
to a Russian supermodel, I speculated) and then I replaced all of my beech-wood shoe
trees with new hand-carved cedar shoe trees that I had ordered with Amazon’s handy
one-click service while conducting a phone interview last week. I felt like a domestic
anorexic, trying to bring order to my chaotic life by making everything look nice.

Three hours later, still pumped up from wet-dry Swiffering every corner of the apartment
and wrapping all my silverware in velvet pouches, I put on a pair of old muddy paddock
boots, my thick winter riding coat, earmuffs, and gloves and headed downstairs to
see if my horse, Jasper, was asleep. Horses are like
Capitolist
workers, only dozing for about three hours a night, so he was most likely awake.

When I was a kid, my mom made me put my arm in a chestnut mare’s mouth to prove her
contention that horses were gentle as kittens and I didn’t need to be afraid. The
horse bit me and I had to get a tetanus shot. But I got over my fear and spent many
summer nights with my head on one of our horse’s stomachs while it was lying down
in its stalls. Payton used to say that I was going to die, squished by a thousand
pounds of animal flesh. She said that if I died, she wouldn’t care at all, and that
she had already had a draftsman come up with plans to turn my bedroom into a nightclub.
But I was never squished.

When I walked through the powder-coated fir doors, I saw that I wouldn’t get to listen
to an animal’s rhythmic heartbeat tonight. All ten horses were still standing. Some
were drowsy, with their heads falling below their withers, but Jasper was wide awake.
The barn was flooded with moonlight, and I didn’t have to turn on a single lamp to
throw a bridle on Jasper and lead him out to pasture.

A few years after I was born, my dad, who grew up on a horse farm outside Charlottesville,
Virginia, decided to take a break from his big job lobbying for Boeing and Lockheed
to get back to his roots and raise horses in Middleburg. Much to everyone’s surprise,
he never went back to K Street full-time.

While Payton had very successfully devoted her life to horses, like my dad, the hundreds
of thousands of dollars he had spent on my young riding career had resulted in me
pulling my horse out at midnight while drinking a Bud Light Lime. I finished my beer,
put the empty aluminum bottle on a fence post to pick up later, and pulled myself
onto Jasper’s bare back. My arms shook and he moved a few feet, leaving me in a defeated
pile. But my second try got me on.

Riding bareback was hard. Saddles have been around since 800 B.C.; why exactly was
I not using one? When Jasper got
into a slow trot, I leaned my face against his loose mane, held on, and remembered
why.

I had no plans to leave the riding ring or to do more than a few loops around in the
moonlight, but as soon as I saw the faint outline of the Blue Ridge Mountains jutting
up in the light, I knew where I had to go. I just couldn’t get there easily on a horse.

From my parents’ house, it was possible, with a lot of illegal trespassing on property
owned by the rich and angry, to take Snake Hill Road to the Goodstone Inn. That’s
where I had seen the senator say Olivia’s name in the bar, and that could have been
where she was going to or coming from the Thursday night I had seen her on the road—there
was nothing nice open in Middleburg at that hour except hotels.

I hadn’t thought of it until now, but Goodstone screamed, “Welcome, adulterers with
discerning taste!” The staff was practically invisible, and along with a few hotel
rooms there were those cozy cabins sprinkled around the sprawling property. If the
senator were staying in one, Olivia wouldn’t even have to walk through the lobby of
the hotel to meet him. She could just drive straight up the hill with the flower beds
and the organic vegetable garden, park next to his cabin, and join him there, totally
unseen. It was a perfect place for enjoying life and lies, getting away and getting
it on, undisturbed by indiscreet staff and inquisitive guests. If you had seven hundred
dollars a night to spend, that is, which Stanton definitely did. Wikipedia had enlightened
me to the fact that he was not one of those lawmakers who slept on a cot in his office
to pinch pennies. Stanton came from a family of politicians and entrepreneurs with
plenty of money.

I knew the area around Goodstone very well. The hotel had been remodeled only a few
years ago. Before there was nothing
but the stone carriage house, and we used to ride our horses on the empty hills and
watch the sun set over the rolling mountains. The owner didn’t care if we trespassed
back then, mostly because he couldn’t see us. But even in its new form, the property
still had 250 acres around it, now dotted with luxury accommodations.

I jumped off Jasper’s smooth back, took his bridle off, and climbed into my old reliable
car. The radio started loudly blaring a love songs and dedications show, which I silenced
immediately with my fist. I got back out of the Volvo to wipe some frost off the windshield
with my coat sleeve, looked up at my parents’ dark house, and hopped back in before
the car iced up again. After ten minutes of driving on land more suited to an ATV
than a station wagon, I could see the low stone fence that surrounded the sprawling
estate. Thanks to that drunken night at Goodstone with Elsa, I had a decent sense
of the property’s houses. Of the hotel’s five cottages, I deemed the antebellum Spring
House and the colonial-style Manor House too big for two. Maybe Olivia and Stanton
had a four-bedroom minimum for their sexual escapades, but that sounded a little nuts,
almost as nuts as my driving a Volvo to a remote hotel to see if my colleague was
naked and upside down. Scanning the area from inside my now warm car, I set my sights
on the brown and white Dutch Cottage, the French Farm Cottage, and the red Bull Barn.

I parked the Volvo and walked the remaining hundred yards to the stone fence. I gripped
my keys tightly in my left hand as the freezing cold air of late February burned my
lungs. I needed to put my suspicions to rest so I could reclaim my sanity and devote
every brain cell to becoming a star
Capitolist
reporter.

But what exactly was my plan? The cottages I wanted to see were, according to the
brochure I had read at the bar, a ten-minute walk, on private property, from the main
house. And all
I had come up with if I got caught was to say that I was just arriving. So what if
it was almost 1
A.M.
, I smelled like horse, and was on foot with no bags? It would cost me a minimum of
four hundred dollars just to check in, but who would arrest a paying guest? I could
say I had just walked on in and was traveling light.

Trying to look confident and not like a trespasser on a mission, I headed to the Dutch
Cottage first. All the lights were off, and there were no cars out front. On nervous
legs, I walked about four hundred yards to the French Cottage. Before I got very close,
I could tell that there was at least one light on. I felt elated. It could be them.
But when I got closer, I saw that the car parked outside had Massachusetts plates.
Unless Olivia had decided to head north and canoodle with Senator Scott Brown, a much
sexier choice, I doubted that she was inside.

I prayed that the rolling hills weren’t also covered in surveillance cameras, and
walked over to my last option. I reminded myself that there was a huge chance they
were not there. I had never seen them at the inn together, and the senator probably
had to return to his home state and put on the good-husband act sometimes. Or, even
worse, they could have been in one of the private rooms inside the main carriage house,
which meant I was screwed. Short of breaking and entering, I would never see them
there. Outside, on these farm hills, I wasn’t really breaking or entering anything.
Wasn’t it really all God’s country, regardless of ownership? I decided that was my
Plan B argument. Religious zealot out for a stroll.

I stopped in my lawbreaking tracks when I got close to the Bull Barn. Parked outside
the brick red building was the white BMW 650i Coupe I had seen Olivia reclining on
weeks ago. It was the same car, I was sure. It had Washington, D.C., plates and the
outside was meticulously clean.

Crouching down by the wooden fence surrounding the house, I waited. I didn’t know
exactly what for, just something. But ten minutes later, nothing had happened. I was
too scared to approach the house. I had read Senator Stanton’s bio, and the odds of
his having a large gun were 100 to 0. What if he went insane and shot me in the face?
Or what if Olivia just took a fire poker and beat me to death and then tossed my body
into a ravine? There were clearly no cameras out here, or I would already be in lockup
at the Loudoun County jail.

So instead of walking to the house, I crawled quietly over to the car. It gleamed
in the light of the full moon, as did, presumably, my skulking, shuddering body.

The front seats were pristine. Not a Styrofoam cup or gum wrapper to be seen. But
the light beige leather-back seats were a mess. There were clothes piled up, a red
knit throw blanket, an old-fashioned picnic basket, and a few books scattered around.
I saw the collected works of Muriel Spark and felt immediately violated. I loved Muriel
Spark, and I didn’t think her work belonged in a car that most likely housed Senator
Stanton and Olivia’s adventures in oral sex. There were also some boring-looking hardcover
biographies. I was trying to read the titles without getting too close to the car
when I saw something so identifying that there could no longer be any doubt that it
was either Stanton’s or Olivia’s car. Under Doris Kearns Goodwin’s
Team of Rivals
was the neck string of a
Capitolist
entry pass. I couldn’t see the badge, which was trapped under the book, but I saw
the navy blue satin lanyard, stamped with the paper’s logo, that we were all required
to wear when we were in the building.

I had changed mine to Hermès orange leather the first week, and Isabelle had ripped
it off my neck like it was a venomous cobra. “You can’t do that!” she warned. “You
won’t be seen as
a team player. Everyone wears the
Capitolist
lanyard. You have to, or they’ll immediately judge you and you’ll get stuck covering
holiday parties at the Office of Waste Management. Take my word for it,” she had said
gravely. “I once used one I had from the Olympics, and Julia made me throw it away.
She saved me.” Afraid of getting the boot for individual expression, I had switched
back immediately.

Olivia had never been as stupid as me or Isabelle, I was sure, and like the rest of
us she was never spotted without her identifying badge and
Capitolist
noose. I was surprised she wasn’t wearing it to sleep, or whatever she was doing
in the house just twenty-five feet in front of me.

I backed away carefully until I was, I hoped, out of earshot and then ran half a mile
back to my car. I felt like a cartoon character with no knees. Riding boots, which
I had stupidly forgotten to change out of, have absolutely no give, which is great
on a horse and bad if you need to sprint a mile. Finally I had to bend down to loosen
the laces. While I was crunched over, I saw the lights of a car coming down the road.

I immediately threw myself to the ground, which was hard and frozen. Winter, it turned
out, was the wrong time for dilettante espionage. There was no foliage to hide behind.
Luckily, the car drove past me, and I watched its lights move up the hill to the Bull
Barn. As soon as it rounded the bend, I took off running again, jumped the fence,
started my car, and headed home. I felt like a suburban mother lost in the woods in
her Volvo. I also felt like an idiot. Why was I leaving? I had exactly what I was
looking for just a few feet away from me, but when it came down to fight or flight,
I had hobbled away in my stiff boots.