The Washingtonienne (10 page)
“You had sex with Dan?” I asked. “When did this happen?”
“I thought you knew,” April said. “Dan and I were having an affair while Tom was in New Hampshire.”
“Why didn’t you tell me this before?”
“He wanted to keep it a secret, and now I know why: so he could make moves on other girls in the office behind my back.”
“He was probably more afraid of getting his ass kicked by Tom.”
“I was so ready to dump Tom for Dan, but then you came along. Naturally, I was jealous at first, especially when I saw you with Dan in the cafeteria looking so cute together. But now I realize that you stopped me from making a huge mistake.”
“Uh, thanks.”
“I know that Dan can be charming, so don’t feel stupid. At least Laura was around to stop
you
from getting in too deep.”
“So you’re not mad at me?” I asked.
“Not anymore,” April replied. “But can you believe all three of us have fucked the same guy? It’s so incestuous.”
“Yeah, I can’t believe Laura would want our
leftovers.
”
I was glad that April and I could joke about something that didn’t seem so funny at first. It would make great material for my blog, I thought. I ran a bath for myself, contemplating how I would write it up when I sat down at my computer on Monday morning. Then my phone rang.
It was Laura with some unsurprising news.
“I have to tell you something,” she began. “I think I might have had sex with Dan last night.”
“What do you mean?” I asked. “You’re not sure?”
“I was pretty drunk,” she explained. “I don’t remember much.”
“So why didn’t you bring this up earlier, when all three of us were in the same room?”
“I don’t know, Jackie. I was embarrassed.”
“Well, how does your ass feel today? Does it hurt? Because Dan’s a pretty big guy, or didn’t you notice?”
“Don’t be gross. This is difficult enough as it is.”
“You’re not telling me this just to hurt me, are you?”
“Of course not. That’s the last thing I want to do.”
“Then tell me what happened, Laura. Bring it on. I can take it.”
She took a deep breath and admitted that yes, Dan had fucked her on my living room floor while I was passed out in the other room.
“Are you mad at me?” she asked.
“I’m just glad that you finally told me the truth,” I told her. “You’re my friend, Laura. I’m not going to throw you away over this bullshit.”
“Don’t you care? I mean, I thought you really liked Dan.”
“Not so much,” I said dismissively. “I can always get another boyfriend.”
“So you’re breaking up with him?”
“I don’t know. I suppose I’ll talk it over with him when he comes over tomorrow night.”
“You’re going to have sex with him?” Laura asked incredulously.
“Yeah, I probably will,” I admitted. “So what?”
“Then there’s something else I have to tell you.”
“Now what?”
“I have HPV.”
“HPV?” I asked. “What the fuck is that?”
“Human papillomavirus.”
“You mean genital warts?”
“It’s the virus that
causes
genital warts, actually.”
“Is that better?”
“A lot of people in DC have them. It’s like an epidemic.”
“Who told you that?” I asked. “I’ve never heard anything about it.”
“My gynecologist,” Laura replied. “When he told me, he said that he had, like, thirty other women he had to call with the same thing.”
“A genital warts epidemic? What is this, the seventies?”
“I’m telling you this because I don’t want you to catch it from Dan,” Laura told me. “We didn’t use any protection last night. You have to promise that you won’t have sex with him!”
“Ew, don’t worry,” I replied. “But you have to tell Dan ASAP. You don’t want him spreading genital warts all over the Hill, do you?”
“Maybe I do!” she laughed. “After all, everything that goes around, comes around.”
Just when I thought the nightlife in DC couldn’t get any worse, an HPV epidemic breaks out. I sank into my bathtub after I got off the phone with Laura, realizing that I had just been fucked over by the people who called themselves my friends.
I guess April was right: We were all jealous and selfish people, especially at our age. We treated each other like shit, but as long as we did so with smiles on our faces, we all remained friends.
Why did everything have to be
political
? Maybe I was socializing with the wrong people.
LATER THAT DAY, I GOT
another surprise phone call. Sean the bike messenger wanted to “hang out,” so I invited him over to see my new apartment.
He rode his bike all the way from Adams Morgan to Capitol Hill, so his body gave off a ripe smell that was kind of sexy, but I imagined that his balls probably stank. No way was I ever giving him a blow job.
I let him into the apartment, and he pulled out a nice selection of drugs from his messenger bag.
“Do I have to pay?” I asked.
“That all depends on you,” he answered, leaning in to kiss me.
He had a hard-on, which I could
smell
at this point. It sickened me to think that I had snorted lines off it a few weeks ago. The things we did for drugs!
The odor nauseated me when he pulled it out of his shorts, and I immediately turned my head away in response.
It was really too bad.
“I don’t feel good,” I told him. “Can we just lie down?”
He shrugged, tucking his boner back into his shorts. He looked kind of pissed.
“Where’s the TV?” he asked.
“I don’t have one,” I told him. “I don’t spend much time at home.”
“Can we go to my house?” he whined. “I have a DVD player and everything.”
“Okay, but we’re taking a cab.”
I wasn’t about to ride all the way up to Adams Morgan on his handlebars.
Back at his place, I did a few lines (off the coffee table) and agreed to let him fuck me as long as he took a shower first.
We stayed up all night, snorting coke, fucking, and watching
Fight Club
over and over again on DVD.
Sean had all these cool stories about beating up Skinheads and going to “juvie” when he was a kid growing up in Philly.
“Check out this scar,” he said, turning around. “Some dude stabbed me in the back when I was twelve.”
Damn, he was sexy. We didn’t have guys like this on the Hill.
“You’re a fun girl,” he said as the sun came up. “We should hang out all the time. I’m totally serious.”
“Totally!” I agreed. “Oh my God, you know what we should do today? We should do Robo! And walk around taking pictures of stuff!”
“That would be awesome, but I can’t today. I have stuff I need to do.”
Huh? For a few seconds there, I thought Sean actually liked me, but now he was giving me the same line that I had given Dan.
When Sean went to the bathroom that morning, I swiped half of his stash. I just couldn’t leave a relationship empty-handed.
I
met April at Murky Coffee, back in Capitol Hill. I looked like such an obvious druggie, wearing oversized sunglasses, sniffing incessantly, and nursing a triple-shot skim latte to fight off the inevitable coke headache.
“Jackie, you’re my hero,” April said, “but you should take a night off every once in a while. You’re not a party animal anymore.”
“I’m not?” I asked. “But I’m still in my twenties. This is what I’m
supposed
to be doing on the weekends.”
“Yeah, but eventually, you’ll have to move on from this. You don’t want to be fucking a bike messenger when you’re thirty.”
“
Thirty?
But thirty is still young! More like forty.”
“Jackie, by then you’ll probably be dead.”
I rolled my eyes behind my dark glasses.
“What are we doing today?” I asked. “I’m sick of sitting here.”
April looked up from the front page of the Sunday
New York Times
she was reading.
“Why don’t you go home and get some rest,” she suggested.
“I can’t sleep,” I replied, “and I can’t think of anything else to do besides shopping.”
“We live in
Washington, DC,
” April reminded me. “Wouldn’t you rather go to a museum or something?”
“Too many tourists. Besides, I’ve already seen all that junk.”
“But all you ever do is shop. It’s such an empty pastime.”
“Well, duh, I’m shallow. Look,” I said, holding up the “SundayStyles” section of the
Times.
“This is the first and only section I read, and I don’t even read it, I just look at the pictures. April, won’t you please go shopping with me?”
WE TOOK A CAB TO
Georgetown because April wanted to go to the H&M there. As we teetered down the brick sidewalks of M Street in our high heels, I made a mental note to myself never to move to Georgetown. It was damn near impossible to walk in heels there.
“Ooh!” I shrieked. “We
have
to go in here. I need a new Katie!”
The gorgeous Kate Spade shopgirls (and shopguy) greeted us as I dragged April into the boutique. All of the most fabulous people in DC worked in retail. Unlike the nerds running the country from Capitol Hill,
they
knew something about public service.
“I can’t afford this store,” April protested as she examined a pink leather handbag. “Let’s go to H&M.”
I looked at the price tag.
“Two hundred dollars? That one is probably on sale,” I told her. “Have you ever been to Chanel? The bags there are, like, two thousand, at least.”
She rolled her eyes at me.
“I’m perfectly happy with the Coach bag I have now,” she sniffed.
April didn’t know that her bag was made in China rather than Italy but cost the same as the Katie she was looking at now. But then again, April
wouldn’t
have known. She knew nothing about this sort of stuff, except for what I told her. (She never did any postgrad time in New York.)
I didn’t want to get into a pissing match with her over handbags, so I didn’t say anything. Instead, I tried on a pair of three-hundred-dollar earrings that looked fabulous on me.
“I can’t believe you would spend that kind of money on a pair of earrings,” April grumbled.
“Three hundred dollars is cheap for jewelry,” I said defensively. “If a man only spent three hundred dollars on jewelry for me, I’d dump his ass.”
I whipped out my envelope and bought the earrings with the cash inside.
“Did Fred give you that?” April asked, obviously upset by my gauche spending. “Where do you plan on wearing those things? You can’t wear them to the office or you’ll look ridiculous.”
“Spending money just feels good,” I explained. “It’s such a
release
—it’s better than sex.”
“I can’t believe this,” April said, stopping in the middle of the sidewalk on the way to H&M. “I can barely pay my rent, and you’re dropping cash all over the place just because it
feels good
? Do you really think that’s fair?”
“Nothing in life is fair, April. Working on the Hill for twenty-five thousand dollars a year was your choice. But you’re a young, pretty girl living in a town full of shallow, horny men. If you’re not making the most of an unfair advantage, well, that’s your own stupid fault.”
April scowled at me.
“And I suppose that you’re the smart one, getting dumped by your fiancé?” she asked. “Now you’re making twenty-five thousand on the Hill, dating assholes who treat you like a whore. That’s not smart, Jackie, that’s pathetic!”
I shook my head in disagreement.
“No, I
was
pathetic,” I argued. “I hated myself for giving up my independence because I wanted Mike to take care of me. But I’ve found a way to keep my independence and still get what I want from other people.
That’s
what makes me the smart one.”
“I still think you’re pathetic,” April said as we entered the store. “But from now on, you’re buying all of my drinks.”
D
o you ever feel like you’re not accomplishing anything at all? That’s what working on the Hill was like. Maybe somebody somewhere was working hard, but I only knew what I saw: lots of people with way too much free time on their hands.
Dan called my cell a few times before he resorted to calling me out over Instant Messenger Monday afternoon. He knew I was at my desk because his Buddy List showed that I was “Available.”
I wrote back telling him that I couldn’t talk because I was about to get lunch, and who do I see in the cafeteria five minutes later?
Dan must have run down there as soon as we signed off.
“What a coincidence,” he said as he followed me to the checkout.
“Yeah, it’s uncanny,” I said as Dan paid for my Diet Dr Pepper.
“Let’s sit over here,” he suggested, setting his tray down on one of the high-visibility tables right next to the checkout.
“I’m going back upstairs, actually,” I told him. “I have stuff to do today.”
“I guess the mail isn’t going to sort itself,” he said, patting me on the ass.
I looked at him, astonished that he would do such a thing in the middle of the Senate cafeteria. He smiled, daring me to make a scene here. Well, he asked for it.
“You left your Astroglide at my apartment on Saturday!” I said loudly.
He dragged me out of the dining room.
“Jackie, what is your problem?” he asked. “Why are you hell-bent on embarrassing me?”
“Do you
always
carry a bottle of lube around with you wherever you go?” I asked, ignoring his question.
“Of course not!”
“Oh, that’s right, I almost forgot.
Every vein.
”
Dan’s face turned red.
“Jackie, please, not here,” he begged. “We’ll talk later, okay?”
“We don’t need to talk about this,” I told him. “I think you should just stop calling me.”
“Where is this coming from? Do you think I did something with Laura because there was lube on your kitchen counter?”
I rolled my eyes.
“I know what happened,” I informed him. “She told me everything.”
“Did she?” Dan asked. “Because I think you should know that your friend is a little unstable. She was acting very strangely that night.”
“Why would Laura lie about something like this? Are you trying to create reasonable doubt?”
“Well, it’s my word against hers.”
“Yeah, and everyone is a liar, so I don’t know who to believe. It’s like something out of
Cruel Intentions,
and I’m sick of all this intrigue, Dan. Just tell me what happened.”
Again, I gave him a chance to tell the truth and he blew it. Nevertheless, part of me wanted to believe that he was a faithful partner to me, and I began to doubt Laura’s confession, suspecting that maybe she made it all up so she could have Dan to herself.
I didn’t know what to think anymore. I was on my way to meet Fred that afternoon, so I had no right to be mad at Dan anyway.
MEETING AT MY
apartment wasn’t as sexy as the hotel, but since Fred was paying the rent, I couldn’t really complain.
Right or wrong, the “married-man-and-his-young-mistress” thing made for some of the hottest sex of my life. He fucked like a prisoner out on parole, admiring my soft skin and slender body. He asked me to keep getting waxed, and I wanted to give him his money’s worth so I obliged him.
“My little girl,” he would say over and over again as he fucked me. If he was taking too long to finish, all I had to do was say something like, “Oh, Daddy, please, harder!” and that was all it took. He loved that.
Most older guys do. They get off on that father figure stuff. But sometimes Fred took a condescending tone toward me that really pissed me off. He was always lecturing me about stuff and counting the number of times that I’d say the word
like
in a sentence.
“It makes you sound unintelligent,” he told me.
“That’s how people my age talk,” I explained. “If you don’t like it, then maybe you should have an affair with a woman your own age.”
“Well, it’s a lazy way of talking,” he replied. “People your age need to realize that it’s not cool to be lazy.”
Like, since when? The guy was paying my rent and giving me an allowance for doing absolutely nothing.
Older men loved people my age when they were getting off on our hot young bodies. But then they’d always be so disappointed when they realized that we were so
immature.
Like, duh, of course I was immature: I was half his age! That was why he was fucking me instead of his wife, remember?
But, like I said, the sex was great. Despite whatever else was going on in our lives, Fred and I could always meet up somewhere for a few hours and make each other happy. It was as if our relationship existed in a vacuum: It would begin at noon and end about an hour later, confined within my bedroom walls. Then we’d go back to our real lives as if nothing had happened. It was total sexcapism. But unfortunately, my long lunches were starting to arouse suspicion among my coworkers. I always told them that I had doctors’ appointments, and they probably wondered what sort of crazy problems I had that I needed to see a doctor three times a week.
But I wasn’t seeing any doctor (although maybe I should have been), because I felt fabulous. Maybe I should have felt bad about carrying on an affair with a married man, but the bad feelings just weren’t there. If he didn’t feel bad about it, then why should I?
But we had a problem.
“I think my wife knows,” Fred told me one day.
This was
after
we had sex, of course.
“How
much
does she know?” I asked him. “Like, does she know my name?”
“She knows your name, she knows where you work, your phone number, your address.”
Obviously, Fred had fucked up.
“She was looking through my BlackBerry in the car while I was driving,” he explained. “She saw your name in there and asked me who you were.”
“You didn’t tell her about
this,
did you?”
I hoped that Fred the chief of staff was a smarter man than that, if not for my own sake, then for the sake of the federal government.
“I told her that you were the contact person in your office,” he explained, “but she might call to check, so don’t answer your phone for a few days.”
I let out a sigh of relief. Compared to what could have happened, missing a few phone calls was no problem.
“Poor Fred,” I said, rubbing his shoulders. “You must be worried sick over this.”
“Forget about it,” he said. “I already have.”
I kept rubbing even though I was supposed to be back at my desk about twenty minutes ago.
“You’re so good to me, Jacqueline,” he said. “Sometimes I spend all day thinking about running away with you. I would never actually do it, but I think about it all the time. If I ever asked you to run away with me, would you?”
Fuck.
This was not supposed to happen. We had an arrangement: He used me for sex, and I used him for money. I thought it was pretty straightforward.
I had never stopped to think about how I really felt about Fred, because I wouldn’t let myself have feelings for a married man with a baby.
Why get my hopes up? And what would I be hoping for anyway? That Fred would dump his wife? That his baby would grow up without a father? Even
I
knew that was just plain wrong.
Meanwhile, Fred had been sitting in his office all this time, daydreaming about doing these things, and now he was asking if I’d go along with it.
“You shouldn’t say things like that,” I told him. “You might just get what you wish for.”
When I got back to the office, there was a voice mail from Laura, inviting me out to dinner at the Palm, another favorite restaurant of the expense account crowd.
“Let’s drink martinis and order steaks,” I suggested, “like a couple of real fat cats.”
“So long as we talk politics for a few minutes, I can expense everything because you’re a Senate employee,” Laura explained. “No one has to know that you’re Staff Ass.”