The List (43 page)

“I saw you on the
Today
show,” she said. I told her I could hear the TV still on behind her. “It’s my computer,
actually,” Payton said. “You’re my new Internet star.”

“It’s very weird,” I said. “Within five minutes of the story going up, everyone who
had been ignoring me or bad-mouthing me since I came in October was suddenly my best
friend. I talk to Upton like every hour. He’s my editor now. When all this dies down,
they want to take me off the Style section. Put me on the investigative team. They
say I have a nose for it.”

“Wow. That sounds like a good thing. You must want that. You should want that.”

“I guess I do. I don’t know. I’m so tired right now, I don’t even trust myself to
drive a car.”

“Mom and Dad have been calling me every few hours to talk about you,” she said. “They’re
crazy proud. Like screaming
‘That’s my baby!’ proud. But they claim they’ve only seen you twice since the story
broke. Is that true?”

It was true. I had been home twice to get clothes, but every night since late Monday
when everything started, I had been sleeping on Upton’s couch. There was just too
much to do. Too many television reporters to talk to and Upton’s constant stream of
questions and research ideas for follow-up articles on Stanton’s inner circle and
Olivia’s motive. There were also safety records to look into at the plant in Arizona
and court files to be reexamined. Middleburg, which was the epicenter of everything
when I was digging, suddenly felt so far away.

Before I hung up with Payton, she asked the question she knew I was thinking about.
“Have you talked to Sandro?”

“I haven’t,” I replied. “I’ve tried. I called the only number I could find for him
over and over again. There’s no voice mail, and he’s not picking up. The office manager
at the
List
said Olivia isn’t answering her phone, either, and that their landline has been disconnected.”

“Well, you can’t blame them for that,” said Payton. “I would be taking a very long
vacation right now if I were them.”

“Yeah, but I still want to talk to Sandro. Just see how he’s doing. I still care about
him. And in a weird way, I care about Olivia, too. I tell myself every day that I’m
not the bad guy. She had the affair, she betrayed her husband, not me. But I still
feel guilty.”

“Anyone would,” said Payton. “But anyone else would have done the same thing, too.”

I wasn’t so sure.

 • • • 

Five days had gone by since the senator had stepped down. All the talk now centered
around who was going to replace him,
but I was still thinking about Olivia. It surprised me how much I wanted to talk to
her. Her professional life, the one she had toiled for and cared so much about, was
gone. She had been at the
List
much longer than I, put in even crazier hours, and I had knocked that all away with
my one lucky strike. Maybe not lucky. I had worked hard for the story, and she was
guilty as charged, but I still felt compelled to explain. She had been on top at the
List
and I had been at the bottom; now I was on top and she was at the
very
bottom. I had started to feel like we weren’t all that different.

Before I left that night, Upton waved me over to his office and gestured to a chair.
“Your pictures,” he said. “The naked ones. You know, everyone wants to buy them.”

I hadn’t even thought about that, but of course they did. They were the stuff of TMZ’s
pornographic fantasies.

“Legally,” he said, “they’re yours. You’re not a staff photographer, and you weren’t
shooting them for us.”

“Don’t worry,” I quickly assured him. “I have no interest in selling them. I think
enough has been shown already, don’t you?” One thing I could do to make everything
a little less twisted, at least in my own mind, was to not go public with those photos.
I could just wipe my computer and put the hard drive in a bank safe. They could sit
there forever, nothing more than an electronic memory.

I stood up to leave and Upton looked at me turning to walk back to the newsroom. “Wait,
Adrienne. One more thing.”

He waved me over and I sat down again.

“Have you heard who the governor is appointing?” he said frowning, like I should be
the one telling him.

“I haven’t.”

“Well, it’s not confirmed yet, but it looks like he’s filling Stanton’s seat with
Taylor Miles.”

Taylor Miles. The man I had seen talking to Stanton at Upton’s party! The monarch
of the anti-immigration movement.

“It sounds like it’s going to be announced today,” said Upton. “We got a tip from
the guy who is going to be his chief of staff. He’s a friend of ours. A friend of
the paper’s, you could say.”

“Can I ask who it is?”

“I guess you can,” said Upton, putting his feet on his desk and holding two BlackBerrys
in his left hand. He flipped them over each other like cards in a deck.

“Off the record. Very off the record, it’s James Reddenhurst. Current head of communications
for the RNC. Do you know him?”

“You could say I do,” I said.

James was going to flack for Taylor Miles. I wondered how long that had been in the
works. My guess was about five days. I knew James didn’t have the same ideals as Miles,
but this was Washington. A big job was a big job, and the rest didn’t really matter.
I wondered if James would still be mad at me now that I’d been indirectly involved
in his promotion.

Before Upton dismissed me, he slipped his feet back onto the floor and put his hands
through his slicked-back hair. “Water?” he asked me, reaching for a bottle off his
desk. I shook my head no. “I really feel like you’re one of the few reporters here
who now has this place in their blood,” he said after taking a swig. “You’re going
to do great things. You might need to work a little harder, but you’re going to really
soar here.”

“I already start at five
A.M.
,” I pointed out.

“You do?” he said incredulously. “Why does the Style section start at five? That’s
crazy. No one ever told me that. How long do you think that’s been happening?”

“I don’t know,” I replied. “About four years.”

Upton snorted with laughter and I knew he planned to do
nothing about it. “Well stop worrying about Style. You’re going to do bigger things.”

“What kinds of things?” I asked. Was I going to out every senator playing dirty on
weekends? Was that my new job?

“Well, like I said, you’ve got to do investigative work,” said Upton, looking off
into the distance, as if my head was thirty degrees to the left.

“Investigative journalism,” I repeated.

“Absolutely,” he replied. “You’re clearly good at it. You’re ruthless. The way you
pursued that story and didn’t tell a soul. It wasn’t the choice you should have made.
You should have come straight to me. But you didn’t blow it, either. You’ve got an
iron spine, and that’s just the kind of thing you need when writing pieces that can
throw a U-turn in someone’s career. Or in your case, just flat-out ruin it.”

I was ruthless? It sounded like he was describing the Craigs-list killer. Since when
did I have an iron spine? I liked kitschy musicals and the Lifetime network. My favorite
sport was ice dancing.

“How’s your inbox, by the way?” asked Upton. I could feel dozens of reporters’ eyes
on me as I sat in that office, just as I had since the story broke. It was the way
I used to look at the people who had been in Upton’s office before me—with a mix of
terror and envy.

“My inbox is overflowing with hate mail,” I replied.

“I thought it might be. We’ve been getting a lot of phone calls for you. Don’t worry.
We’re just taking down names. You don’t have to talk to anyone. But if you get a death
threat, let us know.”

A death threat? Fantastic. I needed to buy a semiautomatic for my purse.

“Think about what I said,” Upton reminded me. “I think you have the right personality
to really fly here.”

I stood up to leave and said, “Some might say I already have.”

“Right,” said Upton. “That was a hell of a scoop.” He looked down at his desk. It
was covered in papers and printed out emails and little notes on crumpled Post-its.
With a sigh, he looked up again. “Can you close the door on your way out? I don’t
want to hear the noise. The newsroom is still roaring because of you.”

It was silent as ever, but I smiled and walked out, gently shutting the thick glass
door as I left.

When I went to the Style area, my desk looked like it belonged to someone else. There
was a cardboard box on it that said “Julia” in black Sharpie filled with old newspapers
and printouts and a few unopened packages addressed to me from PR flacks. Isabelle
was on the Hill but Libby, Alison, and Julia were all sitting quietly, researching
and writing articles. No one was on the phone or talking to each other. They had their
pretty faces plastered to their computer screens and didn’t look up at me when I approached
them. When I went to move the box to one side, Julia looked up and muttered, “Sorry.
It was under my desk and bugging me so I put it on yours because I didn’t think you
were sitting here anymore.”

“It’s fine!” I said, trying to be perky. I slid the box over and turned on my computer,
my left elbow smacking into the cardboard.

I typed my very long password to relog into my computer and listened as Libby and
Alison started quietly chatting. They were talking about a list of some sort. A guest
list. A birthday. Crap. Alison’s birthday. I vaguely remembered getting an invite
to it when I was busy doing all the TV hits. Had I RSVP’d? I didn’t think so. And
I certainly hadn’t wished Alison a happy birthday.

I walked over to her desk and apologized. She pulled her legs under her chair, her
pinstriped skirt tight over her thighs, and
smiled at me. “It’s okay,” she said. “You were super busy. We all went to Café Milano.
It was great. Lionel Richie was there and Julia, Isabelle, and Libby bought three
bottles of Moët White Star. It’s my favorite.”

“Oh! That’s so cool. I’m really sorry I missed it. Can I take you out to dinner to
make it up to you?” I asked.

Alison nodded unenthusiastically. “I’d really like that, thanks,” she said with her
face turned the other way. No one had told me they had seen Lionel Richie. Or texted
me to remind me about Alison’s birthday dinner. In fact, I hadn’t really talked to
any of the Style girls since their phone calls the night the Olivia story broke.

I returned to my desk and typed in silence for ten minutes, looking for a short Style
item, something I hadn’t been required to do since the Tuesday before the story broke.

“Have you written about Mitt Romney jogging in khakis and loafers?” I asked Julia.
Without looking up from her monitor, she answered, “We broke that yesterday. Our photog
snapped the picture.”

I apologized and kept looking for an item.

After I found something on Debbie Wasserman Schultz’s hair care regimen, wrote it
up and sent it to Hardy to edit, I saw Upton walking down the hall. It was the very
first time since I had been at the
List
that he had ever walked back expressly to talk to us.

But he wasn’t coming back to talk to us. He was coming back to talk to me.

“Adrienne,” he said, smoothing his hair back. “Chris Matthews wants us on
Hardball
tonight, together. Can you come? We can drive from my house after work. They’ll send
us a car.” I nodded my assent and thanked him again for letting me continuously crash
on his couch.

When Upton left, Julia smiled at me and said dryly, “You and Upton have gotten awfully
chummy. Sounds like you’re in line to be the next Olivia Campo. Little Christine Lewis
better watch out.”

“Well, I worked with him on the story. The Olivia story. So I guess it was inevitable.”
I stopped and waited for Julia to respond but she didn’t.

“He’s a really great editor, but I guess most editors in chief are. I just . . . I’d
never worked with him before. I’d barely spoken to him. But now that I know him a
little better, I can honestly say that he’s a lot nicer than he seems.”

It was only after I fell silent that I realized none of the Style girls, my only good
friends at the paper, had actually congratulated me on my scoop. They had called me
the day of, shrieked about seeing Olivia naked, but what they most wanted to know
was why I didn’t confide in them. It was a fair question. After Upton’s staff-wide
email about the story I had gotten plenty of way-to-gos from my
List
colleagues, but not from my friends.

“So is it true you’re sleeping on his couch? That’s what he meant when he said you
could go to the studio together, right?” asked Julia.

“Yup. I am. It’s kind of weird, I know, but with all these TV hits, I couldn’t do
the commute back and forth to Middleburg. It’s just . . . I’m so tired. I don’t think
I’ve ever been this run-down in my life.”

Julia turned away from her screen and looked at my face. I had bags under my eyes,
I needed to get my highlights redone, and my lips were cracking from constantly reapplying
heavy TV makeup.

“You do look terrible,” said Julia. “If you weren’t a Style girl, I’d have to make
fun of you.” She smiled and I sat silent and ugly.

“It was a big story,” said Julia quietly, her head bent down at
her screen. “All that research you dug up is crazy. You should be proud of yourself.”

I was. But it was clear that she and the other Style girls weren’t.

“Do you think I shouldn’t have written it?” I asked Julia. “Is that what’s wrong?
Because you don’t seem to be that into my presence right now.”

Julia laughed like I had accused her of abandonment. “It’s not that,” she said. “Of
course I’m glad you wrote it and I’m glad you’re here. We’re friends, aren’t we? Very
good friends. You might say I’m your best friend at the paper,” she said to me levelly.
“But you still chose not to tell me anything about your major scoop.”