The Washingtonienne (11 page)
L
aura wore a bright red Chanel suit, a gift she had bought herself with her signing bonus. I wore a gray Calvin Klein shift dress, a gift I had bought myself with Fred’s cash.
It was classic. We spotted George Stephanopoulos
and
James Carville in the restaurant before our martinis had even arrived.
“How sad is that?” Laura mused. “Those are the biggest celebrities Washington has to offer, and they’re not even attractive.”
“I don’t see any hotties here at all,” I observed, spinning my head to get a look around. “Hollywood for the Ugly.”
“Except for us, of course,” Laura said as we clinked glasses.
We were pretty trashed by the time our steaks arrived. We barely touched them as they cooled off on our plates. Ordering steaks seemed like the right thing to do at the time, despite having no appetite because of the blow we did in the bathroom when we arrived.
That was the thing we girls loved about coke. It gave you such a nice, skinny feeling.
“Do you think we’ll ever have our pictures on the wall here?” Laura asked, gazing at the caricature of James Carville’s dog.
“We’d have to get famous somehow,” I reminded her, “and you can’t really get famous working on the Hill.”
“No, I suppose you can’t. Not unless you do something really bad.”
“Who wants to be famous anyway? I’d rather just get rich.”
“Well, you can’t get rich working on the Hill, either. You’ll have to marry someone with money. Either that, or go back to school.”
“I’d like to go back to school, but I still don’t know what I want to be when I grow up.”
“You should really be a writer, Jackie.”
“I tried that once, but it didn’t work out. Where is our waiter?” I asked, changing the subject.
“We should order champagne,” Laura suggested, looking around. “Jackie, I think that guy over there is checking you out!”
“What guy?” I asked, turning around.
“The guy in the suit who looks like an asshole. The older one.”
I turned again. Yes, he looked like an asshole, and yes, he was looking at me. It seemed like assholes were always looking at me.
“Why do I keep getting the old ones?” I asked.
“I think it’s your face,” Laura said thoughtfully.
“My face?”
“You have a classic face.”
“What the fuck does that mean? Do I look old?”
“No, I mean you have a
classic face.
It’s pretty.”
“Are you saying that young guys don’t like pretty faces?”
“No, I don’t think that they do anymore. They’re more into the body these days.”
“What is that supposed to mean? That I don’t have a good body? Laura, by now I’m used to the fact that every guy likes you better than me. You don’t need to insult my body to prove that point.”
I imagined Dan comparing my body to Laura’s, and the thought was absolutely nauseating.
“Your body is fine,” Laura reassured me. “You’re just a little too thin, that’s all.”
She knew exactly the right thing to say. To us, “too thin” was the ultimate compliment.
“Did you ever get around to calling Dan?” I asked. “I saw him in the cafeteria today, and he didn’t say anything to me about
you know what.
”
“No, but he called my office today,” Laura told me. “We’re going out to dinner tomorrow, so I’ll probably tell him about
you know what
afterwards.”
“You guys are
dating
now?” I asked incredulously. “How did this happen?”
“He said that he wanted to hear all about my new job, and he asked me out for a drink. Then I suggested that we get dinner instead. It’s not really a
date
per se.”
“But you obviously like him if you’re inviting him out to dinner.”
“Well, it’s not as if you and Dan are
serious.
You’re always saying how much you hate guys who work on the Hill.”
I suppose that she was right. Obviously, Dan and I weren’t serious if he was calling Laura’s office and asking her out for drinks, so why should I care?
Sure, they had already fucked, but I thought that was just incidental to
my
sexy relationship with Dan. I guess if they liked each other, I should have been happy for them, but I couldn’t help but feel slighted. At least I knew where things stood with us.
“If you like Dan, then you owe it to yourself to pursue a relationship with him,” I told Laura. “But he rims me, you know.”
Laura winced at this.
“God, Jackie, you’re so vulgar!” she groaned.
“Well, it’s a vulgar age,” I replied.
“That guy keeps looking over here,” Laura whispered to me, changing the subject. “Maybe you should go talk to him.”
“What am I supposed to do? Go over there and offer him a table dance? Besides, I don’t hit on guys. They hit on
me.
But, look, I’ll give him some eye contact, and he’ll come over in no time.”
Instead, the waiter walked over to our table with a message.
“The gentleman seated in the corner would like to pay your bill this evening,” he informed us.
Laura nodded her approval. Like me, she saw nothing wrong with leaving the Palm with a total stranger.
No matter how many expensive meals we ate here, or how much our designer outfits cost, girls like us would never be fat cats. In this town, we were nothing but pussy.
HE TOLD ME THAT HIS
name was Paul as we got into the cab. He was a fund-raiser for the Democrats and was in town from Boston.
“Where to?” the driver asked.
“The Hay-Adams,” Paul answered.
He explained to me that he needed to stop by his room to check for a very important fax that he was expecting. I knew this was bullshit, but since I had nothing else to do that night, why not get to know somebody new?
His eyes ran over my body as I sat next to him in the cab, assuring himself that he had chosen wisely from the selection of available women at the Palm. He probably went there whenever he was in town, waiting for some girl like me with a “classic face,” who had no boyfriend to take her out. Some girl who worked on the Hill and made shit money at her job, who would jump at the chance of fucking a Very Important Person such as himself.
He told me that I was the prettiest girl at the Palm, which I guess was supposed to be a compliment. Then he asked the driver to stop and wait at the CVS in Dupont Circle.
“I have to get something,” was all he said, but I already knew that he was going in to buy condoms.
He tried to hide them from me when he got back into the car, holding the translucent plastic bag behind his back. He offered me gum as a distraction, but I could see through the bag that he had also purchased Magnums.
Well, at least he’s big,
I thought.
We went up to Paul’s room, where he checked the fax machine for that important thingy he was waiting for. Of course, it hadn’t arrived yet, but it should at any minute, and would I mind waiting a few minutes for it to arrive? It was
really
important.
He told me that I could watch some television if I wanted, so I took the remote and reclined on the bed, flipping channels.
“What’s on?” he asked, sitting down on the bed next to me.
But he wasn’t looking at the television screen. He was looking down at me, with his hand hovering over my body, waiting for just the right moment to make his move.
I looked him in the eye and unbuttoned my shirt so he could see underneath.
He took my hand and placed it on his crotch so that I understood what we would be doing tonight, but I had known the moment I got into the cab with him that we were going to fuck.
Paul was one of those Jekyll-and-Hyde types who seemed like your average horny dude, but as soon as you got in bed with him, watch out! He started fucking me without putting on one of those condoms he’d stopped to buy, and he actually put his hand over my mouth so that I couldn’t object. He pulled out instead, shooting his load all over my chest.
“Whose office do you work for?” he asked me as we disengaged.
I answered him, wiping the ejaculate off my chest with a tissue. I threw it on the floor with attitude, fighting the urge to throw it in his face.
“Do they know what a slut you are?” he asked, stroking himself.
Paul was obviously a sicko who got off on making me feel uncomfortable, but his question confounded me. Could I possibly get fired for being a slut? Was my behavior “improper conduct reflecting upon the Senate office,” or was it no one’s business but my own?
Whenever April and I went to Capitol Lounge or one of the other bars on the Hill, we’d see congressional staffers hooking up and going home with strangers all the time, so I knew I wasn’t the only one slutting around: It was common practice, and I wasn’t doing anything illegal, so as an American woman, didn’t I have the
right
to be a slut?
In New York, young professionals were encouraged to have sexy, exciting personal lives. If you could get clients into the hot club of the moment, or if you were sleeping with the CEO of a Fortune 500 company, you were seen as a valuable asset to any organization. But in Washington, people looked down on us girls who wanted to live the Fly Life. Maybe it was something of a character flaw, but what else were we supposed to do? Spend our evenings reading briefs? There was plenty of time for that once we got old and guys stopped asking us out. Even if I was ending up in hotel rooms with freaky perverts like Paul, at least it got me out of the house.
“Are we going to fuck again or what?” I asked him impatiently. “I don’t have time for these mind games.”
So we did, and afterward, Paul ordered room service and invited me up to Boston for the weekend.
“Maybe when the weather gets warmer,” I lied. “Boston’s too cold for me.”
The truth was that this was a one-night stand if there ever was one.
“You should come up for the convention in July,” he suggested. “I think we’d have a lot of fun.”
“Yeah, call me. You know where I work,” I reminded him. “But do me a favor?”
“Sure. What is it?”
“Please don’t tell anybody what a slut I am.”
BACK AT THE OFFICE, I
often found myself rereading the same letter, like, six times before I could discern what the person was writing about. My eyes would just glaze over whenever I started to read. I wondered if I had undiagnosed ADD or something, but the truth was, I was just an apathetic brat who shouldn’t have been working there.
But if I just sat at my desk, looking busy (which was easy to do with computers in the workplace), I would never get fired as long as I kept coming in. After all, “80 percent of success is showing up,” and the other 20 percent is keeping up appearances.
My friends in New York said that blogging reminded them of the Web site that we worked on during the dot-com era. For me, it was a job in itself.
If you ask any blogger, they’ll tell you that it quickly becomes an addiction. It was better than shopping and better than sex, because it was easy and free. (Sex is hard work if you’re doing it right, and no, it ain’t free. I’m
not
talking about prostitution. Just ask your boyfriend how much he’s spent on drinks and dinners since you started dating. And how much have you spent on beauty treatments so that you’ll look pretty for him? Sex is expensive, isn’t it?)
Writing a blog gave me the opportunity to explain what was happening in my life on my own terms, to my friends, but more importantly, to myself. I was having trouble figuring it out.
Later, I would delete the whole thing and start all over again. It was like seeing a bad photo of yourself: The first thing you wanted to do was tear it up, but at some point, you had to accept that, yes, that’s what you really looked like.
So enough with the self-loathing: I had nothing to be ashamed of, really. I was a bitchy slut and so were all of my friends. Why not put it out there? This was just between us girls anyway.
I
t started off innocently enough. April forwarded the link to four other people on the Hill.
Laura sent it to a few of her sorority sisters.
Diane forwarded it to her boyfriend.
Naomi sent it to a coworker.
And so on, and so on.
I was sort of flattered that my friends felt compelled to share my blog with others. It was as if I had my own little cult following. And when they would send me Instant Messages, pestering me to write more posts, I realized that I was giving them something to look forward to, just as I looked forward to reading Blogette every day.
But my friends’ blogs were just as entertaining as mine, if not more so.
Naomi’s was about how she had just broken up with her boyfriend and what it was like to be single again. (My favorite, because I could relate.)
Diane’s was mostly about how much she hated her coworkers at
Brides
magazine (a Condé Nast publication).
Laura’s was mostly about her new job and Dan’s strange sexual antics.
But nothing could top April’s M&Ms story. The New York girls were fascinated by our encounters with all of the closet freaks we met in Washington.
“I thought people in DC were supposed to be more dignified,” Naomi told me over the phone.
“In Washington, you don’t know what you’re getting until it’s too late,” I explained. “Like, you think you’ve met this nice, normal guy, and then it turns out that he’s into knife play or something.”
“It’s like living in a town full of Patrick Batemans.”
“So do you still want to come visit me here?”
“Not really. But I think a weekend in the City would do you some good. Diane knows the deejay at that new club I was telling you about, so we’re going on Saturday.”
“
Everyone
says that they ‘know the deejay.’ We’d better not have to stand on line.”
“Oh, we won’t. But you should come up here for the weekend! I need another single girl to go out with. My married friends always have to go home early.”
“I’ll be there,” I promised. “The two of us can stay out all night and do whatever we want.”
I looked forward to going back to New York, but in the meantime, I had nothing left to do but
work.
Janet sent me an e-mail reminder that my performance review was coming up next week, so I had to get rid of the weeks of backlogged mail that covered my desk before I left the office on Friday.
I tried drinking more coffee to boost my energy, but it only made me pee more. I needed something else.
I still had some of Sean’s coke at home, so I tried doing some before I went to the office the next day, and the work just flew off of my desk! The days went by so much faster when I did a line or two. The cranky constituent letters no longer got me down. I was able to say, “People are crazy, God bless ’em!” and move on to the next pile without hesitation. I was no longer taking part in a conspiracy to dupe Middle America. I was keeping the dream alive!
I ran out of blow by Thursday, which gave me an excuse to ring up Sean. He didn’t pick up when I called, so I assumed he was out on his bike.
About twenty minutes later, my phone rang.
“Is this Jacqueline Turner?” a girl’s voice asked me when I picked up.
“Um, who is
this
?” I wanted to know.
“This is Sean’s girlfriend.”
How did this bitch get my number? Obviously, Sean had fucked up.
“Do you have black hair?” she asked. “Is it long?”
Why was she asking me about my
hair,
of all things?
“What is this about?” I asked.
“I think you know very well why I’m calling,” she replied. “Apparently, you’re fucking my boyfriend.”
I didn’t want to say anything to incriminate myself, nor did I want to snitch on Sean. I had to be very careful, so as not to confirm or contradict whatever she thought had happened between me and her boyfriend.
“I’m sorry,” I said, “but I think you might be confused.”
“Oh, don’t even try it! Sean already told me everything,” she said.
I wondered what story he had told this girl. Did he tell her the truth, or did he lie, as I would have done?
“Does it make you feel good to fuck other people’s boyfriends?” she asked. “You know, you shouldn’t sleep with people you don’t know very well. I’m telling you this for your own good.”
Then I heard her say to someone, “What’s wrong with her? She’s not saying anything.”
Most likely, it was Sean, shitting himself over what I might tell his girlfriend. I suppose this was her way of punishing him.
“I’m still here,” I told her.
“Good. Because I want you to know that Sean and I have a very special relationship, and you’re not going to ruin it for us. Hopefully, you’ll find someone of your own who will love you as much as Sean loves me.”
This girl was hysterical. I wanted to put her on speakerphone to give my officemates a good laugh, but decided that it wouldn’t have been professional.
“And another thing, Jacqueline Turner. I know your name, I know your phone number, I know where you work, and I know where you live,” she warned. “So don’t fuck with me.”
Then she hung up.
Whoa.
I wondered if she might actually come
here,
to the senator’s office, to kick my ass. She sure sounded as if she were crazy enough to try it. And why did she ask about my hair? Did she know what I looked like? Was she watching me right now?
These careless flings were starting to cause a lot of stress in my life. Couldn’t I just have a normal relationship with someone? How did I end up with all of these nonboyfriends anyway? Now was a good time to get out of town.