“I think he might actually meet us later,” Benji said. “And a few other people from work, too.”
“Great,” I said.
Ever since Matt had made the strange bedfellows comment about Benji and Alan, I couldn’t stop thinking about their friendship. Was it real? Or was it more a marriage of convenience? They each got different things out of it, both benefited from the pairing, and sometimes I wondered if that was the only reason they were friends, if they even liked each other at all.
And I asked myself the same thing about Matt and Jimmy — Jimmy introduced Matt to people, made him more social, more fun. And Matt grounded Jimmy, gave him an air of gravitas. But that wasn’t why they were friends, was it? Or at least, it wasn’t the only reason. I watched them that day, Jimmy laughing loudly, smacking Matt on the back, my stomach twisting just a little.
—
A new spinning studio opened on Fourteenth Street and Ellie asked me to review it. The name was (no joke) the United States of Spinning. “It’s brand-new,” Ellie told me. “Based only in DC.”
“I figured,” I said.
The walls of the studio were covered with pictures of all the presidents, and everything was red, white, and blue. The spinning shoes were white, the bikes were blue, the walls were red and white striped, the towels were blue with white stars. It made you kind of dizzy to be in there.
When I interviewed the owner, Andy, a fit and handsome man in his early thirties, he told me that while he loved SoulCycle, he felt it lacked personality. “I wanted this studio to reflect DC. This has been my home for twelve years, and it’s such a special place.”
“It really is,” I said. (I wasn’t being sarcastic—special can mean different things to different people.)
“My husband and I had this idea a few years ago and we knew we had to take the leap. We wanted to combine our love of politics and spinning.”
Andy told me that each ride would be dedicated to a different president. “But it will be a surprise,” he told me. “You’ll have to come to class to see which president we’re honoring that day!”
He sounded so excited, and I said, “I can’t wait.”
Ash came with me for the inaugural ride — I could always count on her to accompany me to random places and events that I was covering for the website. I think she looked at it as a free Groupon.
The ride started with “Proud to Be an American” blasting through the speakers and ended with a funky version of “Sea to Shining Sea,” but fortunately had normal pop music in between, like any regular spin class. Reagan was the President of the Day, and his picture hung up front, so that you had to look at him the whole time, which I found slightly uncomfortable. Andy wore American flag kneesocks and yelled out motivational things to the class. “Let’s be grateful,” he shouted. “Let’s give thanks that we have two legs and two arms to spin, and that we live in the greatest country in the world!” The class cheered and I panted, trying to keep up.
“This is the dorkiest thing I’ve ever seen,” I whispered to Ash as we stretched after class.
“Oh, I don’t know. I kind of like it,” she said.
As I toweled off and changed out of my spinning shoes, I saw Ash talking to Andy. “I’ll be back for sure,” I heard her tell him.
It was 7:00 p.m. when we left, but still light outside, and we decided to walk to Sweetgreen to grab salads for dinner.
“Did you know that Andy had Jimmy’s job under Bush?” Ash asked me as we walked down the block.
“Really?” I asked. I was more shocked that our gay spinning teacher was a Republican than I was that he’d had the same job as Jimmy. (Although when I thought about the choice of Reagan as the first “honored president,” it made more sense.)
“They met during the transition. It’s such a small world,” Ash said. And there it was again, that claustrophobia, the feeling that you were always being watched. I wondered what Andy knew about Jimmy, if he’d met Matt, what he thought about me. And maybe I was being paranoid; maybe he didn’t care enough about any of us to even form an opinion.
Ash sounded amazed that she’d discovered this connection. But the truth was, those coincidences happened all the time. If you played the name game long enough, it always worked. It’s why Ellie’s blind items did so well. In New York, you could live years without running into someone you knew, but DC was different. It was smaller, everyone worked in the same business. Sometimes it didn’t feel like a real city at all.
Ash loved this part of DC. She said it made her feel like she was home, how nice it was to bump into people you knew at the grocery store or walking down the street. I sort of hated it. I hadn’t been in a place where everyone was so scrutinized since college. And it started to make me feel tired — how intertwined everything and everyone was, so that it was normal for your boss to gossip about your best friend’s husband, for your spinning teacher to know the people you hung out with.
“Not such a small world,” I said to Ash that night. “But definitely a small town.”
Chapter 9
At the beginning of the summer, Jimmy was asked to play golf with the President at Andrews Air Force Base. I braced myself for this invitation to become a regular thing, for Matt to start obsessing over it, but it only happened one other time. As far as I could tell, there was an unofficial ranking of the staff who played golf, and Jimmy was pretty low on the list. There had to be about ten other people out of town or otherwise occupied for him to even be considered. He tried to downplay it, but you could tell he desperately wanted to move higher up, not just because he kept talking about how much fun he’d had, but because he started going to hit a bucket of balls after work and spending his Saturdays playing eighteen holes.
Right after this, Matt signed us up for lessons at his parents’ club and then the four of us started playing together almost every weekend. Jimmy was a pretty good golfer (there was no chance that he’d endanger the President with his aim as Alan had) and Matt wasn’t bad either, and the only weird thing about these golf games was the idea that Jimmy was just using us to practice, hoping he’d get good enough to earn a regular invitation to play with Obama.
I’d noticed early on that Matt paid close attention to the things that Jimmy said and did, in the same way that preteen girls mimic the queen bee. Playing golf was just the tip of the iceberg. It was because of Jimmy that Matt got involved in the State Societies, which are basically clubs where people from the same place can get together for events. Jimmy was superinvolved in the Texas State Society, always going to a Boots & Spurs happy hour or a breakfast club with a famous Texan as the special guest. He loved going to these meetings. “It’s just nice,” he said, “to be around people who feel familiar.”
The State Societies were a good idea, I guess — it was nice to think that a young homesick assistant on the Hill could go to a happy hour and meet people from home, could form a network in a new city. But still, I was surprised when Matt joined the Maryland chapter. “Why do you need a state society?” I asked him. “You can drive ten minutes north and be in your state. If you want to be around people from Maryland, you can just go there.”
Matt laughed. “It’s about networking,” he said.
“Of course it is,” I said. What wasn’t about networking in DC? I ignored him when he suggested I look into the Wisconsin chapter. I didn’t need to sit around and talk about cheese curds with a bunch of strangers.
—
We had dinner with the Dillons every Friday night — it had become a standing date, a tradition. Really, we spent so much time with them that it was almost hard to remember how we’d filled our days before. They were low maintenance, which I came to appreciate more than anything — we could call them last minute to get dinner on a Tuesday, or they’d invite us over Saturday afternoon when Jimmy was cooking a brisket. It was just easy, especially compared to making plans with Colleen and Bruce, where we had to schedule everything weeks in advance and always ended up doing something complicated, like driving to Virginia or watching the Caps play in Bruce’s company box.