The Washingtonienne (20 page)

“Are you hungry?” he asked in his funny South African accent. “I am famished.”

I wasn’t eating anything, but I stood in line with him at Julia’s Empanadas on Connecticut Avenue.

“Are you Jacqueline Turner?” asked the guy waiting behind us.

I didn’t recognize him from anywhere, but I nodded yes.

Then I remembered, I was
that
Jacqueline Turner, the one with the sex blog: I didn’t know him, but he knew me.

“You are? Cool!” the guy said, handing me his business card. “Call me. We should hang out.”

The South African looked confused.

“How does he know you?” he asked.

I imagined that I would have a lot of explaining to do from now on, but this was my first time explaining it to a potential love interest. I half-expected him to freak out, but he still just looked confused.

“I don’t get it,” he said. “Why is this a big deal? Who gives a shit?”

“
Exactly,
” I told him. “I don’t get it either.”

“Fucking Americans,” he scoffed.

I went back to his hotel room, where we got under the sheets and cracked jokes in bed for a while. He was a lot of fun, and I wished that he wasn’t going back to Johannesburg the next day.

Eventually, we stopped joking around, and he climbed on top of me. We had taken our clothes off about half an hour prior, so we had built up a lot of anticipation, taking peeks and brushing up against each other in the bed.

“Do you have condoms?” I asked.

“No, I don’t,” he said. “Don’t you?”

I sighed and shook my head no.

“But Americans always have condoms,” he said.

“Do we?” I asked.

Then why didn’t any of the guys I knew ever seem to have any?

We had a frustratingly chaste makeout session until my cell phone went off. It was Laura, who was calling me from the George Washington University Hospital.

Chapter 33

I
spent the night in the waiting room, scoping out cute doctors with Laura until the nurses let us into detox, where they were keeping April.

Tom marched out of the room with a scowl on his face.

“How is she?” I asked him, but he blew right by me on his way toward the exit.

The nurse said that April was asking for me, so I got up from the chair that I was curled up in and went in to see her.

She was lying on a cot with an IV of fluids hooked up to her arm. Her face was red and puffy, and I could tell that she had been crying.

“Tom just dumped me!” she sobbed.

“He dumped you
here
?” I asked.

April nodded.

“He said that he could never marry someone like me because he wants to run for Congress someday!” she said. “He says that I’m an embarrassment!”

It was the most disgusting thing I had ever heard. If Tom had cared about anyone besides himself, he would have tried to
help
April, not throw her away like some used jizz rag.

“I’m a mess!” she wailed when she saw the huge purple bruises on her arms from the IV.

“That’s just, like, his opinion, April. This happens to everyone,” I said, trying to comfort her. “I’ve woken up in the hospital plenty of times—it’s no biggie.”

“Oh, shut up!” she said. “It’s a big deal to me! What kind of a friend are you anyway?”

“What kind of a friend am
I
?” I asked. “How dare you even ask that question! You, of all people!”

“What are you talking about?”

“April, I
know
it was you.”

“Huh?”

“You were the one who outed my blog. You ruined my life, you realize.”

“What are you talking about?” she asked. “Your life isn’t
ruined.
You’re much better off than you were before.”

I probably
was
better off than I was back in May, sorting mail for some senator who I secretly thought was an asshole, fucking guys who I secretly thought were assholes, too. But if I was better off, why was I still so angry? At that moment, I wanted to rip her arm off and beat her to death with it, Prozac or no.

“It wasn’t your choice to make!” I finally said. “You had no right to do what you did!”

“I feel bad enough already,” April broke down. “Can’t you let it go?”

“Well, you should feel bad,” I said.

“Get out,” April said, turning her back to me as she rolled over in her cot. “Maybe I’ll call you tomorrow. Maybe not. I’m not sure I want to be friends with you anymore.”

SORE FROM SLEEPING ON
the waiting room chairs, I fell into bed when I got back to my apartment. Biff was crying, trying to climb up into the bed with me. I reached over to pull him up, but I dropped him on the floor: He smelled awful.

Biff had pissed all over the kitchen floor because I hadn’t come home last night to take him out. My apartment smelled like a kennel, and his food and water dishes were empty. I felt like the most incompetent person in the world. I was totally incapable of caring for anyone beside myself.

I fell asleep as my puppy cried for attention.

So much for having a friend in Washington.

I jumped out of bed when my phone rang five minutes later.

“Can you explain why there’s a camera crew on my front lawn?”

It was my father, and he sounded pissed.

I hadn’t told him about the blog or anything. I didn’t think it had anything to do with my parents, but apparently, the local news media thought differently: They wanted to know how my father felt about his little girl having lewd sex in exchange for money in DC.

When I started to explain, he stopped me, much to my relief.

“When did you intend to tell me this?” he asked.

“I didn’t think I—”

“That’s right,” he said, “you
didn’t
think.”

I suddenly felt guilty about my “brazen and shameless” act. It seemed like a good media strategy, but I never stopped to think about how my parents might feel about it, because that’s not what brazen and shameless girls do.

“You’re my daughter, Jackie, but you’re not my little girl anymore,” he told me. “I don’t know what happened to you, but you’re not the young woman that
I
raised. I think you should spend the holidays with your mother from now on.”

Spending the holidays with my mother was like going over to the Dark Side: I didn’t want to be like
her,
but that’s what my father saw when he saw my picture in the newspapers: a girl who was just like her lying, cheating mother.

I SPENT THE NEXT FEW
days holed up in my bedroom, crying into my pillow, with “Against All Odds” by Phil Collins playing on repeat in my CD player. It was pathetic.

I didn’t even know what I was crying about most of the time, but I was miserable.

Janet was right about me: I really was a piece of shit. I pretended that I was some sort of glamour girl when I went on TV and posed for photographers, but the truth was not so pretty.

“The Washingtonienne” was a girl who knew that pussy was power—a walking Id with a huge Ego. She was me, but she wasn’t me. I had stopped being that girl when I started dating Marcus.

When I was with Marcus, I felt like I could be myself. But if I was lying and cheating the whole time, what did that even mean?

That
was why I could not stop crying: I didn’t know
who
I was anymore. I felt like the biggest phony in Washington. How did all these politicians do it?

April finally called me, on the third day of my Phil Collins marathon.

“I owe you an apology,” she said. “I’m sorry I—”

“No, I owe
you
an apology,” I interrupted her. “You were in the hospital, Tom just dumped you, and all I could think about was myself.”

“But you were right! I shouldn’t have done that to you. God, I feel like such a bad person.”

“April, you are
not
a bad person! There’s no such thing as a ‘bad person’ anyway. I mean, no one is
that
consistent in their behavior. We just fucked shit up—big-time.”

“You have to know that I didn’t mean for any of this to happen. I thought that everyone would think your blog was funny—I didn’t know that people would be such bitches about it.”

“Well, people are stupid—how totally shocking.”

“Yeah, I should have known better. I mean, I work on the Hill
and
I talk to idiots on the phone all day!”

I started to laugh, and now we were two crazy girls, giggling about all the trouble that we had caused.

“So you and Tom are finished?” I asked.

“Yeah,” April sighed. “I’m quitting the office, too. Dan is acting like a total prick toward me, and Tom is trying to get me fired. He told the chief of staff that I was on drugs! Luckily, my dealer works on the Hill, too, so there were no suspicious numbers in my phone records because they were all interoffice calls.

“But he was right: I
do
have a problem. I should probably go to AA or something.”

“That’s what my therapist says! Will you come with me tonight?” I begged. “I really need to get out of my apartment.”

“Do you even know what they make you do there?” April asked. “You have to tell everyone stories about all the fucked-up stuff you did while you were drunk.”

At this, I laughed.

“That’s easy! I’ll just pass out copies of all those newspaper articles about me.”

“And you know what else?” April asked. “You have to make amends with all the people who you’ve wronged while you were drunk.”

I had forgotten all about Step Nine of the Twelve Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous. I imagined calling up Mike, Dan, the senator. And Marcus.

“I probably shouldn’t go,” I said.

“But don’t you want to see who else is there?” April asked. “Even if we hate it, at least we’ll find out who else in this town has hit rock bottom.”

I had to admit, I was curious.

AS WE CLIMBED THE STAIRS
to the meeting space above the gay bookstore in Dupont Circle, I reminded April that we couldn’t go out for drinks after the meeting.

“We’ll just have to sit somewhere and eat something,” I told her.

“AA is going to make us fat,” she surmised.

“Maybe we should just go home afterward,” I said as we walked into a room filled with folding chairs.

Then I saw something that made me turn around and go home early.

Sitting across the room was Marcus.

And he knew that I was running away because April was yelling after me, “
Jackie, where are you going?
”

I didn’t know that Marcus was in Alcoholics Anonymous, and I guess that’s the point. I mean, I knew that he didn’t drink, he just never told me that he was in
recovery.

He caught me at the bottom of the stairs, grabbing my arm from behind. I knew I would cry if he started yelling, so I gathered up my courage and turned to face him.

“Is there something you want to say to me?” I asked defensively.

“No,” he said, “I just wanted to see you.”

I had known Marcus would never be able to look at me the same way after what had happened. And now that we were here, standing face-to-face again, he
did
look at me differently, as if he was seeing the real me for the first time.

“Please don’t look at me,” I winced, turning away from him. He didn’t stop me this time, so I pushed the door open and started down the street toward the Metro station.

Marcus was just a few steps behind.

He was following me. Didn’t that mean something? I had to turn around. But what could I say?

“You don’t need to apologize,” he said, reading my mind. “Do you want to talk?”

“I do, but I don’t know,” I replied. “I don’t want to get you in any more trouble.”

“Yeah, Janet would shit if she knew I was talking to you right now,” he admitted.

“You’re still in the office?” I asked. “How is it over there?”

“It’s pretty chaotic, with you on TV and everything.”

“You saw me?”

“Yeah, you looked good.”

I was amazed that he could still find me attractive—this meant something, too. Maybe I really
could
win him back. He had been so understanding about the spanking rumor before, maybe he could get over this, too. And if Phillip could forgive me, it was not impossible that Marcus could do the same.

His forgiveness would be the ultimate validation. I realized that it was probably wrong to entertain these ideas, but when I was with him, I couldn’t help it: I always wanted what I couldn’t have, and Marcus was the most unattainable man in the world to me right now.

“So why haven’t you called?” I wanted to know.

“I was waiting for you to call me,” he replied, “but as the days went by, and I didn’t hear from you, I assumed that you didn’t care.”

“Of course I care! I was just afraid.”

“Then why did you go on television and laugh about it?” he asked. “You didn’t look scared to me! And if you really cared, you wouldn’t have done that—you wouldn’t have done any of this!”

We were having this argument in the middle of Dupont Circle, and I was afraid we might make a spectacle out of ourselves.

“Can we talk about this at my place?” I asked.

We ended up having the best sex of our lives.