The Washingtonienne (22 page)

I didn’t give a damn about the senator and his office, and I guess I never really did in the first place. But I still cared about Marcus. If he wanted me to stop shooting my mouth off to every reporter who called, I owed him at least that much.

“You know, my friends are upset that we’re talking,” he told me. “They know that I still have feelings for you.”

“Did you tell anybody about last night?” I asked.

“I’m not sure if I want anyone to know.”

“Marcus, this is hard for me to hear,” I told him. “Do you think you can ever forgive me?”

“Jackie, I’m still on your side, in spite of everything you do.”

I wanted to believe this was true. I wanted to believe it so badly.

WE SPENT THE NIGHT
together, the two of us going over the blog line by line. It was one of the hardest things I ever had to do—he was a lawyer, after all. He questioned me for hours about everything I had written—who the other guys were, what the nature of those relationships were, et cetera.

I was exhausted by the time we worked backward to my first entry, but in the end, all we could do was laugh about it.

“I can’t believe you called Janet a ‘pimp.’ She was really pissed about that,” Marcus told me.

“Why didn’t you just ask me out yourself?” I wanted to know.

“I didn’t know that she was going to do that!”

“Then why did she?”

I wondered what the hell was going on here.

“When you first came to the office, Janet called me up and said, ‘Marcus, you have to see the new girl.’”

“What?”
I balked. “People do that?”

“So I went over to the mailroom to check you out,” Marcus continued. “I thought you were attractive, but I sort of put it out of my mind because I wasn’t sure if I should date someone from the office.”

“Oh, my God,” I said.

I felt awful.

“Then I saw you in the conference room that day, and I said to Janet, ‘That Jacqueline is pretty hot.’ Then she took it upon herself to ask you out for drinks. It wasn’t my idea.”

“So you didn’t even want to go out with me?” I asked him.

“I probably never would have asked you out.”

I couldn’t help but be crestfallen to hear this.

“But every day, I was liking what I saw more and more. But when I saw
this,
” he said, holding up the hard copy of my blog, “I felt as if I didn’t know you at all.”

“And I don’t know you, either,” I said, “which is why I can’t go to the City with you.”

“You’re staying in Washington?”

“I mean, I’m going to New York—just not with you.”

Marcus stood up, grabbed a pillow from the bed, and went downstairs to sleep on the couch. He left for work the next morning without saying a word to me, and I woke up alone in his empty house, wondering if I had made another huge mistake.

I WAS STILL AFRAID TO
go back to my apartment, with Fred still at large. My rent was due and I didn’t really feel like paying it, so I called Phillip to ask what he wanted to do about it.

“I knew you’d leave me stuck with that place,” he complained. “Usually, it’s the transients who get ripped off when they come to DC, not the other way around!”

“I’m sorry, Phillip, but I just can’t stay there anymore. Can you come with me to get my things, and I’ll stay with you until I go to New York on Thursday.”

“This isn’t a good week for me,” he said. “I have the kids here, and Penelope would go ballistic if she found out you were staying in the house with them.”

“But I thought you wanted me to move in with you.”

“Yeah, I was just being selfish, wanting you to stay here. But both you and I know that you’re too young for me. You’d end up breaking my heart.”

“So what should I do?”

“You should call that guy from your office who you were so in love with—the one from your blog.”

“So you don’t want me anymore?” I asked. “I thought you said you loved me.”

“I loved you just as much as you loved me,” he replied. “I’m not going to make you happy, Jackie. You’re looking for true love, and I gave up on that concept a long time ago. I’m a selfish bastard, and I’ll only make you miserable. Go find yourself a nice guy, and if it doesn’t work out, well, you always have my card.”

I knew that Phillip was trying to do the right thing, but I still felt dissed: He was abandoning me
because
he cared about me, only he cared about himself more. Obviously, he was afraid of getting ripped off again.

I was getting desperate here. When I went back to Dr. Klein’s office, I told her that I couldn’t afford to continue treatment.

“Have you asked your parents for financial help?” she asked. “You look like you haven’t been eating.”

“Oh, I
always
look like this,” I boasted. “But, no, I can’t ask my parents for help. We’re estranged right now.”

“Are they upset about the blog? Some parents have difficulty dealing with the fact that their children have a sexual life.”

“It’s
not
that—my parents are totally cool. It’s just my mother—she cheated on my father.”

Then I lost it: Tears and mucus spewed from my face, and my makeup was ruined.

“I don’t know why I’m crying!” I sobbed. “I mean, this is nothing—people cheat all the time!”

“Obviously, it’s
something,
or else you wouldn’t be falling apart right now,” Dr. Klein replied.

“I’m crazy, aren’t I? There’s something very wrong with me!”

“Why is it easier for you to believe that you’re crazy than it is for you to admit you’ve done something wrong?”

“Me? But I didn’t—”

I had to stop myself. I realized that I
did
do something wrong.

It may have seemed pretty basic (lying + cheating = bad), but life experience had taught me otherwise. The lesson I learned was:
You can get whatever you want for free by lying and cheating, and there are never any consequences.

When Mike broke off our engagement, the way out of my dire situation was by lying and cheating—and it worked! Now I was a
celebrated
liar/cheater who had fooled everyone, and it was their own stupid fault for being duped so easily by a pretty face.

But was my father a dupe for loving my mother? No, but my mother had the will to cause him pain anyway. It was a gross abuse of power in an unkind, unjust world.

But that’s the world we live in, and that’s what we all have to work with.

MY MOTHER CAME TO
Washington to help me pack up my apartment. It was the first time any of my family had come to visit me since I had moved here. I guess they assumed that I could take care of myself. I was my mother’s daughter, after all.

“Your father should be helping you with this,” she complained as we heaved my wardrobe boxes out of my apartment.

“He’s still mad,” I told her. “I tried calling him first, before I talked to you, but he didn’t take the call.”

“He’s your father—the only man a girl can ever count on in her life. He’ll get over it. The people who love you will always love you, no matter what.”

We packed as much of my stuff that could fit into the back of her BMW SUV as possible, and I watched her drive away with my dog in the passenger seat.

I knew what I had to do.

I didn’t change clothes or do my hair, because if he loved me, he would always love me, no matter what. I walked over to the Senate office buildings in my denim capris and Patricia Field T-shirt and lined up behind the clean-cut boys and girls who still worked here.

My flip-flops slapped across the marble floor as I padded toward the Russell Building. On the way back to Marcus’s office, the kids stared and whispered, but I didn’t pay attention to them. I was on a mission to get my man back.

If you ever visit the congressional office buildings, you might be interested to know that most of those solemn-looking wooden doors are unlocked, so if you ever want to surprise some pampered paper-pushers, feel free to try the knobs.

When I opened the door to Marcus’s office, no one even looked up. Everyone was busy looking at stuff on the Internet. Marcus was leaning back in his chair, stretching, with Blogette on his computer screen.

“Marcus?” I said, and he jumped in his chair.

Everybody in the room stopped and stared, unsure of what to do, as Marcus rushed me out into the hallway.

“Are you crazy?” he asked. “What are you doing here?”

We went into the empty conference room where I felt as if I were lobbying Marcus to take me back.

“I’m going to New York,” I told him. “Like, right now.”

“Well, I can’t run away with you if that’s what you came here to ask me,” he said. “I have work to do.”

“What is it that you do exactly? I’ve always wondered.”

“When we’re not answering phone calls from disc jockeys and gossip columnists, we find time to write legislation here, Jackie.”

“Really? Wow, that sounds important.”

“It
is
important, and now I can’t get anything done because of the scandal.”

“I’m sorry about the phone calls, but it’s beyond my control.”

“The latest rumor is that you and your friends planned this whole thing. Is it true?”

“It was beyond my control,” was all I could say, like that John Malkovich character from
Dangerous Liaisons.

“Jackie, I have to resign. Things are very uncomfortable for me here. I’m moving back to New York once my house is sold.”

“Oh, my God, I’ve ruined your life.”

“Just do the right thing. Don’t keep pursuing this.”

“
The right thing?
” I repeated. “Is it right to let a bunch of blog nerds ruin my life, too? I don’t think so.”

“I’m not trying to tell you what to do, Jackie. Obviously, we have a conflict of interest here. I have my agenda, and you have yours. Only, I’m not sure what yours is exactly. What are you still doing here? Shouldn’t you be lying on a beach somewhere?”

“I want to win you back,” I told him, “but now I see that it’s pointless because you’re still mad at me.”

“Well, quit jerking me around! Do you want to do this or not?”

“Yes, but we have to do it my way.”

“I thought we agreed to forget about all of this blog business. Were you lying then, or are you lying now?”

“We could make lots of money,” I argued, “and if we don’t take this opportunity now, I’m afraid of what may happen to us later.”

“Why are you fighting me on this? I want to be with you, and you’re making it so hard.”

“Well, this is me,” I told him. “Can you live with it or not?”

“No, I don’t think I can. I need to walk away from you, and you need to walk away from me.”

He didn’t even need to think about it.

“Well, it’s your loss,” I told him.

I wrote Naomi’s address on a Post-it and stuck it on the conference room door.

“This is where I’m living until I find my own apartment,” I explained. “When you move back to the City, stop by if you’re ever in Morningside Heights.”

“You mean
Harlem,
” he said, reading the address.

“Whatever. Don’t be a stranger.”

We parted ways in those marble corridors that were “the perfect place to meet boys and show off my outfits,” according to what I had written in my blog. Of course, I was a very different girl then, but despite everything that happened to me, I already felt nostalgia for this place. For a very brief time, I had been happy here, probably the happiest I had ever been in my whole life. And now I was walking away from the one person who still meant something to me, and he was letting me.

I HAD MISSED MY RIDE
back to the City with my mother, so I walked down to Union Station to catch the Acela. Unfortunately, the station was being evacuated for a bomb threat just as I arrived. So I called April to see if she wanted to get a coffee or something, but then I remembered that she didn’t work on the Hill anymore.

It occurred to me that I had no more friends left here, just enemies. This place was finished for me—for a few years anyway. Two years, four years, six years: There would always be fresh meat coming into our nation’s capital in the meantime. Ours was a government of laws, not men, after all.

So I was prepared to leave Washington the same way I came: alone, heartbroken, but determined to get the most out of life while I still had time.

Sitting outside of Union Station, admiring the perfectly manicured grounds surrounding me, it was hard not to notice that the landscape was strewn with dozens of homeless people.

“There’s so many of them!” all the tourists would marvel as they stepped off their tour buses in front of the station.

I guess everyone thought Washington was supposed to be perfect because
America
was supposed to be perfect, but who were we trying to kid? That was the problem with having too much pride: In the end, you’re only duping yourself.