The Hopefuls (13 page)

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.”

A
t 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.

When we were in New York, the only other couple we'd ever spent a lot of time with was Chrissie and Joe, who'd both gone to college with Matt. We often went out to dinner with them in the city, and once wine tasting for the weekend in North Fork. But our friendship was more out of necessity than anything else—we were one of the only other married couples in Matt's group of friends, so if they wanted to do coupley things, we were their only choice. The three of them had known one another for so long that sometimes hanging out with them felt like a college reunion that I'd ended up at by mistake. Chrissie was one of those girls who always wanted to make sure I knew my place, wanted to remind me that she'd known Matt when he was just eighteen, and she made a point of referencing inside jokes or calling people by their college nicknames, so that I spent much of the conversation one step behind, asking, “Wait, who is Cheeks? And why did Cheeks hate milk shakes?”

Sometimes when the three of them were talking, I dug my fingernails into my thighs, just to have something to do.

But with the Dillons, it was different—I don't know if it was because we all met one another at the same time or if it was just a matter of chemistry, but our foursome could happily split off into any combination. Jimmy was a big fiction reader, and he and I traded books back and forth, e-mailed each other reviews of new novels we wanted to read. Sometimes when we were discussing a book, I'd hear Matt or Ash (neither of whom read much fiction) say to the other in a mocking voice, “Shhh…don't interrupt. They're in middle of another book club meeting.”

When we were over at their house, Matt (a huge TV snob) would even watch
The Voice
or
The Bachelorette.
“As a joke,” he'd say. I thought maybe he was just doing it to be polite or to blend in (since Jimmy was an unapologetic fan of crappy TV), but once I saw Matt lean in close during a rose ceremony.

Matt relaxed around them in a way he couldn't with any of the other people we'd met. I'd never thought of my husband as an anxious person, but DC had turned him into one. It was like he constantly monitored his behavior, making sure that he was acting appropriately. But around Jimmy, he wasn't worried if he was drinking too much or being too loud (maybe because Jimmy was always drunker and louder) and he was able to actually just enjoy himself.

On the weekends when the Dillons were out of town or we couldn't get together, we felt lost. Sometimes we went out anyway, just the two of us, but it was always a quiet dinner, like we didn't know how to go on a date without Jimmy and Ash there, and sometimes we didn't even bother going out, just put on sweatpants and ordered takeout. If I thought about it too much, the whole thing made me nervous, like maybe we needed the Dillons to be happy.

It was almost like the four of us were all dating each other, like we were one big couple. I tried to explain that to Colleen once and she wrinkled her nose. “How kinky,” she said.

“Gross,” I'd said. “Not like that. You're such a perv.”

The Fourth of July was on a Sunday, which meant that we'd have that Monday off. We were all delighted with the idea of a three-day weekend, and we made plans way in advance—a BBQ at the Dillons' on Friday, Saturday we'd be at Matt's parents' club—golfing in the morning, hanging out by the pool in the afternoon, and dinner in the dining room that evening—Sunday we'd watch fireworks on the South Lawn, and Monday, we'd recover.

We'd spent a lot of time at the Kellys' club that summer, and while Matt and I were in the process of becoming members, we weren't officially in, so we were charging everything to his parents' account. Matt didn't think twice about this, but it made me feel funny. Sometimes we'd see Babs and Charles in the dining room and they'd come over to say hi—Babs thought Jimmy was “a hoot”—and I always felt like we'd been caught stealing from them. Once, I asked Matt about paying his parents back for those dinners, but he just shook his head. “They love when we use the club,” he said, like we were doing them a favor.

That weekend, Matt had insisted on an 8:00 a.m. tee time, “to get the most from the day,” and we were outside the gate at Beekman Place to pick up the Dillons at 7:15, a little bleary with coffee cups in hand. When we saw them coming toward the car, I got out and climbed in the backseat.

“Beth, stay where you are,” Jimmy said, when he saw me. “I'm fine in the back.”

“I'm already here,” I said, shutting the door behind me.

We often rode like this, and it felt weirdly old-fashioned to have the men up front and the women in the back—something grandparents would do—but Jimmy was tall enough that I always felt bad making him squeeze in the back.

“Not necessary, but thank you, sweetheart,” he said as he got in.

Ash placed two large bags between us, one with clothes to change into for dinner and another with a bathing suit and magazines for the pool. “It is hotter than Hades out there,” she said, fanning herself. “I'm glad we decided to only play nine, because I'm already dying to get in the pool.”

In the front, Matt and Jimmy started immediately discussing the interview that Matt had had the week before for a position as the White House liaison for the Department of Education. When he'd first mentioned the interview to me, I'd told him it sounded great and then paused and said, “Although I have no idea what that means.”

He'd laughed, looking happier than I'd seen him in a while, and said, “I doubt anyone really does.”

The job would mean that he was the go-between for the DOE and the White House. It wasn't a clear upward move—in fact, everyone that Matt talked to agreed that it was probably lateral. But he was excited at the idea of not being in the office all day, of going to meetings, being a part of different projects. “This could be my chance to get involved in policy,” he'd said, and I'd nodded but hadn't asked him to elaborate. He was pretty sure he was going to be offered the job—Jimmy had asked a friend he had in the Personnel Office, who had insinuated that Matt was as good as hired.

I badly wanted Matt to find a job that he liked so that he would be happy and also so we could stop talking about it. His job search had dominated all of our conversations in the past few months, and it was exhausting. I felt a little ashamed as I settled into the backseat that day, because while I probably would've given Jimmy the front anyway, it was just an extra bonus that I didn't have to be up there, listening as Matt listed the pros and cons of the liaison position for the hundredth time.

As we got ready to head out on the course, we noticed that they'd put our clubs on the carts so that my bag was with Jimmy's and Ash's was with Matt's. If this had happened with Bruce and Colleen (or any other couple, really), there would've been an awkward moment where we tried to switch the bags without being rude. But that day, we all just jumped into our carts without thinking about it.

“Are we betting today?” Jimmy asked, looking over at Matt and Ash. “You two want to take us on?” I already knew that I was the worst golfer out of the four of us, so this wasn't a great bet for Jimmy to make.

“Absolutely,” Matt said. “Get ready to lose.”

“Oh, I'll get ready,” Jimmy said. “I'll get ready to crush you.” He drove the cart away as fast as it would go, and I saw Ash rolling her eyes at me.

They went ahead of us after the second hole, because we were searching for my ball that had gone sharply left when I wanted it to go straight. When we joined them at the third hole, Matt was bent over and at first I thought he was sick, but as we got closer, I saw that he was laughing helplessly, tears in his eyes.

“Stop,” we heard him say to Ash. “Please stop!”

“What's so funny?” Jimmy asked, pulling up next to them.

“I was just telling Matt about Hector the pig and how he attacked Daddy's ankles that one time. Daddy learned the hard way that you should never smack a pig.”

This sent Matt off in a new laughing fit, and when he was finally able to sit up, he had to wipe his eyes. “Jesus,” he said, trying to catch his breath.

His laughter was contagious, and I couldn't help but join in even though I had no idea what they were talking about.

“Ah, Hector,” Jimmy said, turning to me. “The most famous pig in Texas. He was Ash's pet growing up, lived in the house like a dog because Lauren Sybil was too allergic to have a pet with any fur.”

“Seriously?” I asked.

“Seriously,” Ash said. “He was a great pig until he turned. Daddy was happy to get rid of him, because we didn't eat pork while he lived with us, out of respect, of course. Daddy smacked him when he was just a piglet and years later, Hector got his revenge on him. Pigs have a long memory, you know.”

We were all laughing now. Matt looked like he was in pain, like his stomach hurt from the effort, and soon none of us could catch our breath.

“You don't spank a pig,” Ash said, shaking her head. She looked completely serious. “You just don't do it.”

Ash and Matt beat us handily, and I told Jimmy he should never bet when he was on my team. “Hogwash,” he said, winking at me. “The two of them probably cheated.”

After we were done golfing, we all went to the locker rooms to change into our suits and claimed four lounge chairs farther back on the deck, away from the children who were running and jumping into the pool over and over again. I'd brought a book with me, but I was happy to just lie in the sun for a while. Matt and Jimmy went to put our order in for lunch at the snack bar—chicken Caesar salads for me and Ash and burgers for them—and I watched them across the deck, talking to each other and laughing.

“This day is perfect,” I said.

“I know,” Ash said. “It's amazing. Aren't we just so lucky to be here?” I knew from Ash's tone that she didn't just mean she felt lucky to be near a pool on such a hot day, but that she meant it in a larger sense. Ash often commented on the things she was grateful for—our friendship, our privilege, our place in life. It made me a little uncomfortable the way she said it, like she thought we were being rewarded by God for being good people, instead of it being completely random. Sometimes I wanted to point out that some truly shitty and evil people were filthy rich and led happy lives. But that day, I just said, “We are lucky.”

She sighed and closed her eyes to the sun, stretched out like a cat and smiled. “We're blessed,” she said.

We didn't eat dinner until almost 8:00 that night, and when we gathered at the table, we were all a little sun drunk and sleepy, our cheeks and foreheads pink and tight. Because I was sure at this point that Ash had no intention of getting a job, I thought I'd misheard her when she announced to the table that she'd just been hired.