May 22, 2007;
8:30 A.M.
So here’s what I know about John Grayson: he’s a tall man with chiseled features and congressional hair; which is to say that it’s not bold enough to be presidential, nor distinguished enough to be senatorial, and so: congressional.
In the same way that some celebrities end up in prison, whereas others get their own reality shows on MTV, Grayson landed in the U.S. House of Representatives through no fault or accomplishment of his own, but rather through a series of unforeseen circumstances, accidental accolades, and healthy roots and no split ends. The younger son of a wealthy, second-generation land developer (practically a Vanderbilt by Orange County’s nouveau-riche standards) in Newport Beach, California, Grayson had gone to the University of Southern California on a football scholarship. Unfortunately, halfway through the first season, a drunken incident involving a rusty keg led to an infected ingrown fingernail. What started as a pesky inconvenience led to gangrene, which led to surgery, which led to the amputation of the little finger on his right hand, which—to the distress of his mother, a Trojan through and through—resulted in the downfall of his PAC-10 fame spiral, and then—finally—the subsequent death of his scholarship. The money wasn’t the problem, but the diminishing glory was, and Grayson spent the next three years drinking and screwing and mourning the loss of that damn little finger, all the while planning on simply taking over his father’s firm, pending graduation. He’d get a secretary to do the typing.
What Grayson hadn’t considered in his grand plan was that his older brother, who, while not as follically blessed, was certainly the more business savvy of the two. Rupert Jr. (you win some, you lose some) graduated two years ahead of John and made use of that 730-day head start at Grayson and Co. by leading the development of two new shopping centers and an upscale housing complex—which, in the Rupert Sr. Dictionary (second edition), translated roughly into “hugs,” “kisses,” and “favoritism.” By the time John left USC’s gated brick campus things were not looking good on his road map to wealth and comfort and pretty young secretaries transcribing his memos.
So he chalked it up as a loss, as just some other signifier of his less than perfect role in this world. He settled in as second in command with a noncorner office and an elderly secretary named Florence who, while she was not the nubile, youthful thing John had imagined, was competent enough to be ignored until she was needed. He toiled away for nine years, his time consumed with strip malls and low-rent condos and cheap hotels while his brother managed much of Newport’s booming residential scene. Eventually he bought a house in Corona del Mar (on one of the flower streets on the beach side of Pacific Coast Highway), where he and the rest of his friends who had managed to escape marriage would drink and occasionally get high and try to recollect the details of their nocturnal college conquests. Things were fine, comfortable. They weren’t great or spectacular or really how he’d imagined, but they were fine, and when things are fine, John knew, they really shouldn’t be trifled with because—while there’s a slim chance they can get better—probability and general experience showed that they are more likely to get worse.
Then, on the eve of his thirty-second birthday, John Grayson saved a life, and fine and comfortable went to shit.
It started out per usual: the birthday, John’s, in Grayson tradition, was an opulent affair on Rupert Sr.’s yacht, which patrolled the Newport harbor like some glittering sentinel powered by so many tiny lights. Rupert Sr. was a stern man with broad shoulders and a tight mouth that rarely showed teeth, who had garnered most of his friends and acquaintances through monetary threats and favors, both of which had heavy price tags attached. That said, on that fateful night the yacht (an eighty-five-footer with a spa and a helipad) played host to more of the father’s friends than the son’s. So John ran a hand through his near-perfect auburn hair and opened a beer for one of his two college buddies in attendance and watched from a distance as Rupert Sr. cut the cake and handed the first piece to his eldest son, the one who handled mansions instead of movie theaters, the one whose birthday wasn’t being celebrated. And maybe it was this distance from the center of things, or maybe it was destiny that caused the younger Grayson to hear a faint scream, followed by a splash, and then a woman from the crowded deck shriek “my baby!” He turned in time to see the red head of a young girl bob up and down like an apple in the boat’s wake. Women gasped. Men took longer than normal to take off their Rolexes and empty their pockets of keys and wallets and money clips. John dove in the cold Pacific brine and, in four wet minutes, became a local hero.
The girl, incidentally, was Erin O’Brien, the ninth of ten children fathered by Hannity O’Brien, a successful lawyer who had escaped his Roman Catholic roots by being born again, and who was an influential member of the Republican Party of Orange County. Even more incidentally, the following year was an election year, and the Orange County GOP was looking for a likable, photogenic candidate to challenge one of its district’s few incumbent Democrats—who, in the years directly following a scandal involving a president, an intern, and a little blue dress stained with DNA—seemed to be a healthy target for guilt by association. Background checks into the first three prospectives had turned up some less than desirable information (pedophilia accusations, pestering cocaine addictions, and money laundering, to be exact), and so Hannity and the rest of the committee were still searching desperately for a winnable name to get on the ballot before the primaries, which were but months away. In John Grayson they found what they were looking for: good pedigree, a stint in heroism meaningful to constituents, and—above all—prodigious hair. Two months later he was on the ballot, and fourteen months later, in a beauteous example of American democracy, John Grayson and his nine fingers were headed to Washington. For two glorious weeks Grayson—the young, fresh face from Orange County—was showered with the species of attention that had been reserved for Rupert Jr. for the past decade. Pundits lauded his frankness; fashion magazines lauded his widow’s peak.
Washington, though, is quick to forget a new kid, and after he was sworn in at the beginning of January, Grayson found himself barely treading water, fighting for seats on committees that he knew nothing about but that held the key to his future success as a legislator. It was a tough gig, and Grayson didn’t have a playbook, so privately he found himself wishing—over glasses of scotch at a one-bedroom apartment on Capitol Hill—that he had let that little girl dip up and down one more time, that he had let someone else be the hero, that he had cited his own inebriation or his own past indiscretions as handicaps for saving drowning children.
But we can spend hours and days and years wishing away our brief flirtations with greatness and the unexpected and unwelcome places they’ve taken us, yet in the end our races have been run and our winnings have become embedded in our blood, eclipsing our secret desires for defeat along the way. So John Grayson stayed put—the victim of his own heroism—as he won elections every two years, as he became another permanent feature in that great white building on the hill. After four cycles and eight Novembers, his presence became as expected and as uneventful as those oak benches that arc across the floor of the House of Representatives.
He managed minor accomplishments along the way. After two terms, Grayson—under the guidance of his chief of staff—secured a position on the House Armed Services Committee. It wasn’t Appropriations—or Ways and Means, for that matter—but given the clusterfuck in Iraq, it did carry what appeared to be an increasing amount of prestige. Over the years, he received invitations to speak at local universities—an honor he particularly enjoyed. His staff would write the speeches and walk him through the harder-to-grasp legislation, while his own hair and charisma would (for the most part) hide his rather impressive lack of knowledge.
One thing he did find: now at home, when he spoke, people listened. Undeserving or not, the title “Congressman” gave him some credibility, some oomph, at family gatherings where—at least for the past two decades—he had been but a fly on the wall. His father and his brother and his mother would nod intently as he waxed poetic on what needed to be done to correct the deteriorating conditions in Baghdad. They had faith in his beliefs on health care and education, and believed the facts that he presented—often wrong—on how global warming was a sham.
Or at least he thought they did. At least he was pretty sure they did.
And I’m sitting under the Great Seal of California in 1224 Longworth, the cubby that serves as John Grayson’s office in the long, dense neoclassical maze of structures that’s inhabited by the 435 members of the House of Representatives. The space itself is small and cluttered and dusty and looks nothing like what I expected after idealizing my political debut à la West Wing marathons. My desk sits in the front of the office, which also serves as a miniature lobby/meeting space for guests, constituents, and other visitors. There’s a bluish-green cloth couch, which can comfortably sit two and a half people and is just short enough to make napping on its faded fabric impossible (something that I discovered when the office was empty on Friday afternoon of last week). Above the couch hang these tacky pictures taken from California’s Forty-first Congressional District: here’s downtown Laguna Beach on a perfect summer day; here are waves crashing over the Newport jetty; here are surfers staring vacantly off into the Pacific. Regardless of their kitsch, they’re a nice touch, these pictures, I think as I search for any news clips of Grayson on the websites of the Orange County Register and the Los Angeles Times and a myriad of other papers, both local and national. (There are no clips. There haven’t been any since last Thursday, my fourteenth day of work, and the day before I attempted my intraoffice nap.) As the lowest-ranking member of Grayson’s staff, rummaging for clips each morning is part of my job. On my first day of work, I’d suggested to a more senior staff member that the clips—these news nuggets—could be easily collected using one of the many wonders of technology. “Google!” I’d said. “Or Lexis!” My problem-solving enthusiasm was greeted with glares and scorn and a largely undeserved speech about how everyone—everyone—has to search for clips when he first starts out, and no technological advancement was going to change that. And so, the clips. I’m also required to answer the phone; open the mail (twice a day); sort the mail; file letters from angry constituents; occasionally (and if I’m lucky) respond to said letters with form statements in which I fill in a series of blanks (“Dear Mr. [x], thank you for your letter regarding [y]. I’ve taken your letter into careful consideration, and am taking every possible action on [z].”); organize the newspapers, fetch coffee and chili fries for Peter Branson, the thirty-six-year-old bald chief of staff who sits directly behind me; and, when there are no interns present (there rarely are), I give tours of the U.S. Capitol to groups of Grayson’s visitors. I’m the office manager, the workhorse, the prole, the bitch. In a move of good faith, Peter knighted me unceremoniously as an assistant legislative correspondent, though I have no issues I cover or legislation on which I correspond.
I tackled my first two weeks in the office with a severity and an earnestness that’s normally reserved for new enlistees in the Marines or Olympic athletes, because the future of American democracy depended on the morning clips. Late-night study sessions were employed to read and to learn and to commit to memory little-known facts about the Capitol’s dome that I then imparted upon those fortunate enough to embark on one of my tours. Each time the phone rang, the world stopped. I was fighting for the freedom and the liberty and the voices of the upper-middle-class constituents in California’s Forty-first. And although that enthusiasm’s started to fade, my quixotic intentions remain. Last week, after my failed attempt at an intraoffice nap, I sat up partially guilty but really more amazed by the fact that Washington was still standing despite my thirty minutes’ worth of restless and uncomfortable shifting. Government proceeded at its glacial pace.
So I read the local session of the Register, half looking for news about Grayson, half wondering how reading Les Misérables (twice) in French, coupled with $160,000 in tuition fees, prepared me for this task. There’s a heat wave in Southern California. Temperatures are spiking well past what can reasonably be expected for mid-to-early May, which has firefighters concerned that the dry season will be longer and brush fires will be more prevalent, etc., etc. There was a gang skirmish in Laguna Niguel, which has prompted a local woman to fear that southern Orange County may start looking like Garden Grove or—worse—Los Angeles. A high school student in Aliso Viejo has written a book that documents the horrors of being young and blond and wealthy and anorexic. The Angels’ starting lineup is expected to be stronger than last year’s.
The door to the office swings open and knocks back against the adjacent wall and shifts the placement of one of the pictures. Peter stands in the frame, coffee already in hand, saddled down with files and reports and a leather shoulder bag that’s seen better days.
“Morning, Taylor,” he grumbles. He’s a nice man, Peter. I like him, and I get the sincere feeling that he likes me, too. “Any clips?” I shake my head: no, no, there aren’t—not today. “Goddamn it. City Council members in Newport get more press than we do.” Peter lumbers through the front room and sets the stack of file folders on his desk and half of them tumble to the floor. He’s sweating a little too profusely for eight thirty in the morning. “How was your night.” It’s more of a statement than a question; a kind of acknowledgment that we’re the only two in the office and I’m still the new guy and that these awkward questions are always better than those awkward silences. I tell him that it was okay, that I did some laundry and watched a rerun of a reality show on TV—something about a plastic surgeon in Beverly Hills. Peter grumbles and effectively stops listening when I say “rhinoplasty.” His computer boots up and I ask him how his night was. He sighs and shakes his head and taps his desk as he waits for his antiquated PC to come alive.
“Fine. It was fine. Grayson’s plane to Orange County was delayed, which of course he didn’t care about, but of course I did because he had that damned panel at UCI on preserving the Back Bay, and you know how he doesn’t sleep on planes.” As it turns out, I didn’t know that. But I don’t blame him. They’re impossible to sleep on without some kind of chemical assistance, so cramped and such. Then again, I’m sure he flies first class. I used to fly first class. Before the Belize thing. “We don’t get these opportunities too often, Taylor. So we’ve got to strike ’em while they’re hot.” Peter takes off his glasses and rubs his temples and (I imagine) thinks back to a time when all this was so much more exciting; when he was on the campaign trail in ’96 or when he was press secretary for someone much more important, someone in the leadership. “Anyway. I had to cancel dinner with my wife, which is strike two for this month. He got there in the end though, so…you know, crisis avoided, I guess.”
Shrugging, I give my best “wives just never understand” look to let Peter know that he and I are pals, see, in that great, old Fraternity of Men, even though I’m relatively certain that marriage does something to one’s membership status that I’ve yet to grasp. In anticipation of Grayson’s panel appearance, I’d printed out an Orange County Register feature from two months ago about a ragtag group of preservationists and their battle to preserve Newport’s Back Bay—a muddy swath of land that’s coveted by environmentalists and developers, though for largely different reasons. When Peter seems settled I hand it over to him and he says he read it when it was published, but then thanks me for my initiative.
“It’s just so goddamned problematic,” he says as he hands the article back to me. “Those bored housewives in Newport think there’s some grand gesture in protecting the Back Bay. Only problem is their real estate–developing husbands are the ones who want to kick out the herons and build more houses and condos. Got to make everyone happy, Taylor. Or, at least make one person happy while figuring out how to get the other ones to believe that they’re happy.”
I’m impressed with how succinctly he’s managed to express something I’ve been suspecting for the past few weeks and I watch him for a bit longer as he gets lost in his e-mail in-box before I turn back to a story about a young girl with leukemia in Corona del Mar.
The next time the door swings open, I’m not nearly as happy. Kelly Hawthorn—Grayson’s press secretary—and Janice Wagner—his scheduler—strut into the front office with the kind of authority that’s reminiscent of runway shows, though neither of them could be any traditional kind of model. Kelly’s young and thin, which, while those are two desirable qualities in a city known as “Hollywood for ugly people,” do not exactly land her in the “attractive” category. She attended UC Berkeley, where she was the star of the debate society, and, I suspect, never got laid. At twenty-seven, she’s a political wunderkind of sorts. Peter found her a little under year ago doing local politics in northern California, where she managed to turn a small-town mayor’s sex scandal into a reelection campaign. She’s cold; the girl who, in high school, never managed to infiltrate the ranks of the charismatic and popular, and who thus uses her newly acquired authority to remind you how unimportant you really are. And I suspect that regardless of my education and earnestness, she is less than confident of my intellectual abilities—a belief that Janice Wagner shares.
If—in Chase terms—Kelly borders on “bone-able” in the right light and with the correct amount of makeup, Janice eludes the label entirely. She hasn’t seen the inside of a gym or even a pair of running shoes in years. She insists that she eats healthily and wisely and “only for energy”—a proclamation that’s severely compromised by her habit of getting nachos with extra cheese daily at 4:00 P.M. According to D.C. lore, things had been going well for Janice, who started out as an office assistant before she graduated to a congressional campaign. She was married by age twenty-five, and was headed toward occupational success and pearls and a nice town house in DuPont Circle. But indiscretion be damned, her husband fell in love with a Post reporter (from the Style section, no less) and by age twenty-seven, Janice was back to a studio apartment in a less-than-desirable part of town, where she dealt with depression and loneliness and loss by eating too much ice cream and wearing too much makeup. And when the clouds finally cleared, she was seventy-five pounds heavier and her career hadn’t just fallen off the track, but jumped it entirely. Now, having endured thirty-five years, Janice handles the congressman’s schedule—which, while normally a prominent and fast-paced job in a political office, is rendered rather slow by Grayson’s status. Which is all fine by Janice. More time for the cafeteria, I suppose.
At first I felt sorry for these women, both in their own masochistic ways fighting for lost time that’d been poisoned by uncontrolled velocity and the cruelty of others. And so truth be told, I’d probably still feel sorry for them if they hadn’t made a routine of referring to me as “you” and demanding that I refill their staplers. But one’s got to pay one’s dues, I’m told. Then they brush by my desk without the faintest trace of hello: those fucking bitches.
The Sisters Grimm settle into their desks, which are behind me and next to Peter’s, and I settle back into childhood cancer. Lori, the Corona del Mar girl, was diagnosed a year ago, at age six. Since then, she and her parents have taken the battle against pediatric illnesses to the streets, where Lori has befriended underprivileged children diagnosed with diseases similar to her own. Through funding provided by her parents, Lori hosts picnics and playdates in the family’s beachfront manse, where clowns and magicians and musical guests entertain the children once a month. “We don’t have to wear our wigs here,” one of the party’s attendees is quoted as saying. There’s a picture of him—a young Hispanic boy proudly sporting a bald head that’s been robbed of its hair by chemotherapy. “And I like that because my wig is really itchy. I have to wear it at school, otherwise people get scared. But I don’t have to wear it here because no one’s scared and everyone’s nice. Even the clowns.”
Lori and her clash with pediatric carcinogens have gotten me a little teared up, a little sad, and I write this off as a lack of caffeine, so I ask Peter if it’s all right if I take five minutes to grab some coffee from downstairs. He tells me it’s fine just so long as I grab him another iced-no-water-Americano and one of those “goddamned scone things that my wife is always telling me not to eat.” I smile and tell him sure, that it’s no problem, that it’s my treat, and head out the door before Kelly and Janice direct me to buy anything else.
As the morning drags on, the marble halls of Longworth have become increasingly crowded with frantic young staffers determined to convince anyone and everyone that they belong there, that they’ve been there all along. Politics aside, it’s an impressive structure, I think: a perfect example of neoclassical revival; a nod back to the folks in Athens who did it first—and maybe a little better. Five porticoes flanked with looming Ionic columns that support a grand entablature that cuts across the building’s exterior like some stone razor. Two stories in some places, four in others—an architectural phenomenon that’s got a sloping foundation to thank. I can’t help but think of Grayson each time I climb the stairs that lead to the building’s main entrance. Staring up at the pediment, it’s difficult not to feel emasculated. It’s difficult not to recognize, to pay deference, to the fact that two kinds of people have filed through these columns: those who have made a stamp on history, and those who haven’t. And that first group’s got a steep entrance fee that—chances are—you’re not willing to pay. I imagine Grayson had some conflicting emotions the first time he stepped into these hallowed halls; at once exhilarated by the prospect of self-worth, of importance, while quietly wondering if neoclassical revival was really his style; or if maybe he was better suited for the glass and steel and silicone that formed the buildings and the characters who tower above the Pacific.
But back to the building: like everything else in Washington, what’s most impressive about Longworth isn’t what you can see. It isn’t the columns or the pediments or the limestone worn thin by decades-long stampedes of loafers and heels. Rather, it’s the secrets that teem below the structure’s diagonal foundations. Longworth’s basement isn’t a basement; it’s a fully functioning, self-sustaining community. Aside from the standard cafeteria and Starbucks, the basement (it just feels so wrong to call it that) boasts:
So if God forbid the terrorists did get their vengeful hands on a nuke and if it did explode in America’s District of Columbia, Congress could continue as normal, fueled by cheap turkey sandwiches and skim lattes and freshly pressed trousers, all thanks to this community within a community. The complex is connected to the other House buildings and the Senate buildings and the Capitol through a series of tunnels that enable pale congressmen and their overworked staffers to conduct business without ever having to be troubled with the light of day.
Grayson prefers to walk outside.
And so I walk down three flights of stairs into the underground city and filter through the hordes of legislative aides and interns in cheap, boxy suits until, ten yards away from Starbucks, I’m accosted—tackled, really—by Anna, one of Grayson’s legislative aides who is searching for her caffeine fix before heading up to the office.
“Taylor,” she says and she grabs my arm. Her nails dig into it. “Thank God I saw you before I got to the office.” Anna, with her frazzled brown hair and horn-rimmed glasses and never-ending supply of black knee-length skirts, is more of an exaggeration of a person than a person herself. “Did you hear what happened at Tapatinis last night?”
“No…” I answer with hesitation. As the newest member of the congressman’s team I have not only been assigned the role of de facto outsider, but also the role of de facto Deep Throat—a holder of secrets. It’s a position that I’ve come to learn is bestowed upon those of us who have yet to learn the names or the faces or the places in this town and thus couldn’t spread poisonous facts even if we tried. I walk with her to Starbucks, her nails still ripping away at my flesh, and I order my coffee and Peter’s no-water-venti-ameri-whatever as Anna rattles off her latest discovery.
“Well. You know John, who works in Miller’s office?” I tell her that no, no, I don’t. “Whatever, it doesn’t matter. Anyway, we all thought that John was sleeping with this girl Rebecca who is an aide on the Ag committee because we’d seen them out together a few times at—God, where was it they liked to go—that’s right, Fin MacCools. Anyway, turns out that last night, he was at Tapatinis with Julie from Hershorn’s office.”
“And?”
Anna stops and rips off her glasses and her mouth goes agape. “And it’s so obvious they slept together!” she yells. I tell her to quiet down and then she says “Oh, God” because she thinks that John is behind her or something, but I assure her that no, no, he’s not, it’s just that she’s speaking rather loudly. See, for as hard as these Hill staffers work, their libidos work harder. And because they never leave this mound of democracy, the only sources of hormonal relief they have are one another, which I’m quite certain will result in some sort of Tudoresque genetic disaster in the years to come.
“Shit,” I say as we’re walking back up the stairs to the office.
“What? It’s John again, isn’t it. He heard me. You were lying before.” I shake my head in irritation.
“No, no, he didn’t hear you. I forgot to get Peter’s scone. He asked me to buy him one. Fuck.”
“I hear they’re going to get a divorce.”
“Who?”
“Peter and his wife. That’s what people are saying at least.”
“Anna…” She holds up both hands.
“You didn’t hear it from me.”
“Stop.”
When I get back to the office, the remanding members of Grayson’s staff—the rest of his team of BlackBerry-armed legislative aides and correspondents—have arrived and are umbilically attached to their computers in a room that’s adjoined to the front office by a hallway littered with copy machines, printers, and a door leading to the congressman’s personal office. I give Peter his coffee and feign realization that I’ve forgotten to get his scone. I apologize and he tells me not to worry about it, and assures me his wife will thank me later. Kelly and Janice shoot me daggers for not asking them if they wanted anything.
When I settle back into my desk, the clock reads nine-fifteen. Seven hours and forty-five minutes to fill with mail and local news. The phone’s still silent. I log into my personal e-mail and see that I’ve received 147 pieces of spam. And then, among the offers for naturally enhanced penises, mail-order brides, and Cartier (Super cheap! Super real!) watches, there’s one personal message, from my brother, Nathaniel.
I open the e-mail, which—per his signature style—is composed entirely in abbreviations and incomplete sentences as if to remind me that his correspondence is something he’d elect to do on his own, if he only had the time; that, really, when it comes down to it, he’s too busy to be dealing with this shit (“not shit in the derogatory sense, but, Jesus, Taylor, you know what I mean”), but I’m his little brother and after all the crises and catastrophes of the past two years, he’s obligated to fill the role of patriarch that our father so recklessly abandoned.
To: Taylor.Mark@gmail.com
From: Nathaniel.Mark@gs.com
Subject: chking in
taylor,
hope all’s well w third (?) wk of work, in dc, etc etc etc. have been looking but havent found anything re: grayson in news. Impressive still you’re working on hill. Am v proud. NYC becoming hot and filled w more tourists every day. Work’s work, still making rich richer. Gotta love banking. Would love to see you in nyc some time this summer let me know weekends you’re free and will work something out. re mom: pls call her. Know you’re busy w new job etc etc etc but you know I cant take her calls at office. Know its difficult right now and that youve done enough already but pls do me this favor. Spoke to dad two days ago. He says he misses you would like to hear from you too—but know that’s between you two so will do best not to get involved. he’s leaving for anther trip sat and doesn’t know when he’ll have phone access again. Keep in mind. Be in touch.
Love you
N
I shut the window and go back to Lori and her cells and her wigs and her clowns.
By lunchtime I’ve sorted one load of mail and the phone has rung a total of seven times. Twice, the calls came from the party whip’s office, which means they were transferred immediately to Peter. Twice more they came from lobbyists who did not have the direct number of the legislative aides they were trying to reach. And three times they came from constituents, which meant the callers were either (a) members of America’s aging demographic that has little more to do with their time than become politically active and shop on QVC, or (b) bloggers.
At one thirty, I’m reading lewd e-mails on my fraternity’s listserv (“Kristen Harper’s banged four bros so far—one more and she gets a set of steak knives.” And “N E one know when Lorena Palmer stopped waxing?”) when the phone rings once again. I let it continue for two more chimes as I reach the end of the e-mail (Lorena Palmer, as it turns out, stopped waxing after she got back from spending a semester in Senegal, much to the disappointment of Penn’s Greek community), but then Kelly calls out and reminds me that phones don’t answer themselves, and I roll my eyes and reach for the handset.
“Congressman John Grayson’s office,” I say and I hear Kelly sigh on the other side of the office.
“Hello, yes, can you transfer me to Peter, please?” The man’s voice is hurried and flustered. Older than I, but younger than my father. “I can never remember his direct dial.” I turn around and look at Peter, who’s engrossed in an e-mail and is shaking his head.
“He’s on another call,” I say. “Would you like his voice mail?” This, I’ve been taught, is how you deal with callers such as this man. Democracy, see, doesn’t have time for all Americans—just the ones Peter wants to talk to.
“He is? I suppose I could leave him a voice mail. How about Janice? Is Janice there?”
“Sir”—I do not have time for this American—“is there something I can help you with?”
“Maybe. I’m supposed to meet a man for breakfast. Someone from Deidrich and Howe. And I can’t remember for the life of me where I’m supposed to meet him. Somewhere in Newport, but I’ll be damned if I can remember where.”
“Sir?”
He starts again and then laughs self-consciously. “I’m sorry, I should have introduced myself at the beginning of the conversation. You must be one of our new interns. This is Congressman Grayson.”
My heart sinks and I begin wondering if making an ass of oneself is a genetic trait; if Belize has something to do with it. “I’m sorry, Congressman, I’m relatively new, and we’ve only been introduced once before, and I couldn’t rec—”
“Taylor!” Grayson’s voice rises and his laughing grows in sincerity. “I was wondering if that was you. How are things going so far? You’ll get used to the humidity. It might take a few months, but you’ll get used to it.”
“Okay.”
“I was telling Peter the other day how happy I was to have a fellow Californian in the office. I tell you, the weather out here is gorgeous. Why’d we ever leave?”
“I’m…I’m not sure, sir.”
He laughs again. “That’s what I always say. We must be crazy, right?” I tell him that yes! Yes, we must be! And we laugh briefly until silence takes over and he says, “I suppose I should find out where I’m supposed to meet this guy. Is Janice still busy?” I tell him no, she’s not, and that she really never was, and he laughs and congratulates me on perpetuating the myth of productivity that’s come to define D.C. “Always tell them you’re busy,” he tells me. Noted, I say, duly noted, before I transfer him to the larger of the Sisters Grimm. I hear her squeal and giggle—two techniques that I imagine were entirely more effective when she was seventy-five pounds lighter. She tells him where to meet the man, and I go back to Lorena Palmer and her newfound au naturel take on hygiene, until I hear Janice bellow out a disgruntled “YOU!” from behind the partition that breaks the front room into three distinct sections.
“Nachos,” she says, when I ask her if she’s called my name.
“Pardon?”
“Speak English? I said nachos.”
I stutter. “Well, to be honest, Janice, ‘nachos’ isn’t really an English word.”
“Save it, Cervantes. Get me some nachos.” She starts slathering on lipstick and looking into a mirror that’s set on the edge of her cluttered desk. “And make sure there’s extra cheese. It’s been a rough day, what with the congressman calling so early and all.”
Back downstairs, back in Longworth’s basement, the cafeteria’s lunch crowd has largely cleared out. I order Janet’s nachos and cover them with four large scoopfuls of creamy Velveeta cheese. Fun fact: Velveeta is actually still considered pasteurized cheese by the FDA, believe it or not. Actually, to be technical, it’s “pasteurized process cheese food,” which means it’s only got to contain 51 percent of cheese ingredient, by weight. I Googled it last week, the first time I was commanded to retrieve snacks for the fatter of the Sisters Grimm.
It’s amazing what you can get away with around here.
I get a turkey sandwich for myself and take my tray over to one of the open registers to pay. In the line ahead of me, a girl close to my age reads the Style section of the Post as the cashier asks for her money. After waiting for a moment, and after seeing that the staffer has no intention of paying anytime soon, I clear my throat, which, I’ll admit, is an obnoxiously passive form of protest. But so is holding up a queue of busy people in the name of reading an 850-word story about Anna Nicole’s children.
“What?” she says, without looking up. “Worried that your nachos might get cold or something?”
“No. It’s just that there’s a line. And you’re holding it up.”
She looks up. “Is there?” Behind us, a lone aide pounds relentlessly on his BlackBerry, unaware of the confrontation unfolding in front of him.
“Yeah, there is. Me. Now, can you please pay so I can get back to work?”
She smiles. “Oh, yeah? And whose office are you running?”
I think back to my fraternity’s listserv. Lorena Palmer’s waxing habits don’t exactly constitute running an office—or a reason to be offended, at that. I break down and I hang my head and I laugh. “Grayson, from California. You’re keeping me from sorting his mail, you know.”
“Ah, yes, the Republican.” She finally reaches into her purse. “Great hair.”
“What about you?”
“Reyes. New York.”
“Right, the Democrat.”
“The one and only.”
“She get a lot of mail?”
The girl laughs and brushes back a dark strand of hair off her olive face. “Tons. Those women from Spanish Harlem can get pretty feisty.”
The cashier gives her a handful of change.
I grin. “Right, I bet. Well…good luck with that.”
“Nice pants,” she says, glancing downward before walking off. A puddle of yellow (pasteurized) goo has dribbled onto the folds of khaki covering my zipper.
Janice asks what took me so long but then she cuts me some slack after taking notice of the inconspicuous stain. I apologize for the delay, and I tell her that there was a long line in the cafeteria. “Tourists, you know.” She rolls her eyes as she shovels the first chip into her gaping mouth.
“The afternoon mail got here while you were gone. It needs to be sorted.”
“Where is it?”
“Taylor,” she says with a sigh, letting out noxious fumes, “it’s by the mailboxes. Where it always is.”
I nod and tell her of course, and then I say sorry for interrupting her lunch before I head over to the mailboxes, which are really nothing more than a series of cubbies on a wall in the adjoining room.
When I walk into the room the legislative aides briefly look up from their computers and give me nods. Anna keeps her head down but says, “So you guys hear about John from Miller’s office last night at Tapatinis?”
“Yeah,” another one answers, and Anna gives me a look that says, “See, idiot, I told you.” “I always thought that chick he brought home was a lesbian, though.”
“She is?” This is Anna, who is already frantically typing an e-mail, and I roll my eyes and get back to the mail. The twice-daily mail deliveries are not necessarily good news for them, the aides. Generally, the bundles of envelopes and packages mean nothing more than an increased workload: angry constituents who need prompt responses, passport requests from housewives with poor vacation planning skills, reports that need to be read from the ever-growing army of foundations and think tanks that’ve formed around town.
“Don’t worry, guys,” I say as I cut the plastic band holding the bundle together, “there’s not too much this afternoon. Just about four thousand letters from bottled blondes fighting for the Back Bay.”
They give me quiet chuckles and thumbs-up.
“What happened to your pants?” one of them asks after I’ve sorted about twenty-five letters.
“Cheese accident.”
“Fuckin’ Janice,” he mumbles. “One of these days that bitch is going to turn into a nacho.” The aide sitting next to him laughs and gives him a high five and I imagine Janice, a giant, cheese-covered chip (I don’t think she’d be pasteurized), BlackBerry in hand, and the seven-year-old in me grins along with them until my phone starts vibrating in my pocket. Startled, I grab it through the cotton. “You sure it was the nachos?” he says, raising an eyebrow and getting back to his work.
I roll my eyes before stepping out into Longworth’s hall and flipping open the mobile. “Hello?”
“Sir, this is the FBI, and we’ve obtained evidence that a Congressman John Grayson has been harboring douche bags in his office.”
“Nice, Chase. Funny. Hilarious, in fact. What do you need? I’m at work.” He starts laughing.
“Jesus, look who’s suddenly important. Got some votes to cast, champ?” He’s right. The only thing I’ve got to do, now that the second load of mail is sorted, is sit and wait for the phone to ring. And maybe, if I’m lucky, refill Janice’s stapler.
“I just want to make a good impression, that’s all.” This is something Chase won’t understand. He’s working for his father at Latham, Scripps, Howard, where, as I understand it, his days are comprised entirely of expensive three-martini lunches with clients and the occasional golf trip.
“Right, right. Anyway. We’re going to Café Milano for dinner tonight. And by ‘dinner’ I mean ‘drinks.’ Reservation’s at seven thirty. Early, I know. But it’s a school night.” I sigh. So far I’ve made a determined effort to avoid interactions with Chase during the workweek. While the outings are no doubt fun, they’re hard on my productivity and even harder on my liver. Our apartments—mine in Woodley Park, his in Georgetown—are far enough apart that they’ve made the goal seem reasonable—obtainable, even. But Chase has caught on, and has been pushing back hard.
“I don’t know, man. Grayson’s back in the office tomorrow afternoon and things are going to really start picking up.”
“C’mon. Caitlin, Annalee, and Jack are going. We’ll get a bottle of wine, tops. You’ll be in bed by ten thirty.”
“Chase, it’s Tuesday.” There’s a silence on the other line, and then for this moment I’m relieved because I’ve won, I think. I’ve changed the course. But then:
“You’re right. Reservations were probably a bit much.”