I’d gone to one of the pitch meetings at DCLOVE to meet the rest of the staff. Afterward, one of the writers, Maria, asked if I wanted to get coffee. We went to the Starbucks on the corner for iced coffees and I watched as she put eight packets of sugar into her cup.
“The thing to remember,” she told me, “is to always come to the meetings with like thirty ideas to pitch. That way, you’ll get to write about something you have some sort of interest in. If you don’t, they’ll start assigning things to you. Last year, I had to write about the pandas at the zoo for months. Months! Just once, I went to a meeting without a list of ideas and I ended up on the panda beat. Panda baby watch, panda birthdays, Panda Cam, pandas getting deported.” She shuddered and took a long sip of her coffee. I could hear the sugar crunch between her teeth. “It’s the kind of thing that will make you lose all hope in journalism. Sometimes I still have nightmares about Bao Bao.”
“So who are you going to invite to this dinner party?” Matt asked that night.
“Maybe just Ash and Jimmy and Colleen and Bruce?”
“That sounds good.”
“Is that weird though? Do you think they’ll get along?”
“A couple of Texans and a loud Long Island girl with her elderly husband? I think they’ll be great friends.”
“Very funny,” I said. “Beggars can’t be choosers.”
“You should include that in your invitation,” Matt said. “You’ll charm the pants right off of them.”
“Call me old-fashioned, but I prefer dinner parties where everyone wears pants.”
Matt laughed and then turned to me. Put his arms around my waist and rested his chin on my chest. “You are such a liar,” he said. “Because I happen to know that you like it best when no one’s wearing pants.”
“Really?” I asked.
“Really.” He kept looking right at me as he took his boxers off, then gave me a little grin before hooking his fingers in the elastic of my pajama shorts and pulling them down.
“I don’t know where you’d hear such a thing,” I said, as he climbed on top of me.
“Believe me,” he said, kissing my neck. “I have it on good authority.”
—
For the dinner, I decided to make Parmesan chicken over arugula with roasted tomatoes. I knew it was a mistake about ten minutes into prepping, when I realized I’d have to cook the chicken right before we were supposed to sit down. I’d spent most of the day cleaning, thinking that the dinner was so simple it would take no time at all. But before my cheese puffs even came out of the oven, the doorbell rang and all four of our guests were standing outside our door, holding bottles of wine.
The kitchen in our apartment was tiny, had almost no counter space, and was walled off from the rest of the downstairs. In our old place, when we had people over, I could chop vegetables in the open kitchen, while taking part in the conversation. Now I was stuck in the back like a servant, poking my head out when people laughed, to ask, “What’s so funny?”
Ash and Colleen came into the kitchen to talk to me, but there was nowhere for them to sit, and so they stood awkwardly in the middle of the room and had to keep moving out of the way as I grabbed things from the shelves. Cooking doesn’t come easily to me — I had to really concentrate on the recipe, talk out loud to make sure I was measuring correctly, and it was impossible for me to chat at the same time.
“Really, you guys. Go out in the other room,” I said. “You don’t need to keep me company, I’ll be out in a minute.” The oven was making the kitchen hot, so in addition to being flustered, I was also starting to get sweaty.
“Oh, we don’t mind,” Ash said. She leaned against the counter. “We’re happy to keep you company.”
She was blocking the area where I was planning to bread the chicken cutlets and I had to reach around her to grab my bowl of flour. Colleen was standing right in the middle of the kitchen, slowly turning around to take it all in. “I can’t believe they haven’t updated this,” she said.
I went to place the flour next to the stove, but tripped and spilled a little bit. I could hear Bruce laughing in the other room, loudly, saying something about golf. “Let’s just — you know what? Let’s go have a drink and some appetizers and I’ll come back in a few minutes to get the rest of it done,” I said and headed into the living room before they could argue.
Matt turned around, looking grateful to see us coming. “We’re going to take a break from the kitchen,” I told him.
“That sounds great. Can I help in there?” I shook my head. Matt was always happy to help, but he wasn’t any more gifted at cooking than I was. I took a glass of wine and sat on the floor. Colleen squeezed onto the couch next to Bruce, forcing him to shift over a little bit. As he did, he exhaled loudly. He always made a lot of noise — groaning when he moved, slurping when he drank. It’s possible they had something to do with his age, all the sounds he made. I tried to be gracious and ignore it, but a lot of the time, I felt like asking, “Everything okay?” when he squeaked and moaned.
Ash plopped herself on the floor next to me and grabbed a cheese puff. I took one too and popped it in my mouth, already filled with regret that I’d decided to have a dinner party.
“So, Jimmy,” Colleen said. “What is it that you do?” She leaned forward, as if she couldn’t wait to hear his answer, in what we called her Barbara Walters pose.
“I’m the director of the White House travel office,” Jimmy said.
“And what does that entail, exactly?” she asked. I could tell that Colleen thought Jimmy was attractive from the way she kept raising her eyebrows. In college, we could always tell she liked a guy when she started resembling Jack Nicholson.
Jimmy answered her question, and she came back with three more. Ash and I swiveled our heads back and forth between them, like we were watching a tennis match. Colleen had come right from work and she was wearing a sleeveless red dress with a split at the neckline. She got her hair blown out each morning, and it was always shiny and smooth. Her makeup was done for the camera and looked a little heavy in real life, but she never wiped any of it off before going out. Either she didn’t notice how caked on it looked in regular light or she didn’t care. She sat up straight and focused on Jimmy, as if she really were interviewing him. Bruce leaned back on the couch and half closed his eyes. Matt got up to refill drinks, and when he returned, Colleen was asking Jimmy where he saw his career going.
“Give the guy a chance to catch his breath,” Matt said lightly, as he handed them both a drink.
“I’m a reporter, Dogpants. I can’t help it. And it sounds like an amazing job.”
“It does,” Matt said. I could tell he was deciding whether or not to say more. “Ask him about riding on Air Force One.”
Matt was pretty fascinated with Jimmy’s job — and to be honest, with Jimmy himself. He often came home and told me different things that he’d heard about Jimmy from other people — it was the closest Matt ever came to gossiping, although I would never have called it that because there wasn’t any ill will behind it. He told me people talked a lot about how surprised they were that Jimmy was hired as the travel director. I thought Jimmy was exaggerating when he’d described his career in advance as accidental, but it turned out he wasn’t. “It doesn’t sound like he worked all that hard,” Matt said to me. “I mean, on the campaigns, sure, he worked hard and did a great job. But in between he kind of just hung out. He had all these chunks of time where he wasn’t working at all, and from what I hear, it didn’t sound like he was all that concerned about finding a job. I think he really just kept doing it because he thought it was fun.”
After the election, Jimmy was offered the travel director job and he’d taken it, but the interesting part was he hadn’t been pursuing anything — they went after him. “People just really like him,” Matt said. “They wanted him in the office.”