The Hopefuls(2)

After the inauguration, Matt was offered a job in the White House counsel’s office and I knew we were really moving to DC. It was what we’d talked about, what we’d planned for. It was the whole reason Matt joined the campaign in the first place. It was too late to back out now.

We found a place just north of Dupont Circle, on a tiny block with five town houses, diagonally across the street from a Hilton. The day we’d gone to look at the apartment, Matt had pointed at the hotel. “Do you know what that is?” he asked.

“What? The hotel?”

“Yeah, that right there. Look at the doorway. Does it look familiar?”

“No.”

“Not at all? Just look at it for a minute.”

Matt was always doing this, always insisting that I knew things I didn’t. Once, when we were on opposite teams during a Trivial Pursuit game with friends, he refused to let me pass on the question “Who once warned, ‘Never eat more than you can lift’?” I didn’t even have a guess, but Matt wouldn’t let it go. “Come on, Beth, you know this,” he kept saying, as our friends sat there and I got embarrassed and then mad. “I don’t know,” I kept insisting. (The answer was Miss Piggy, and to this day, I have no idea why Matt was sure I knew the answer, but it still remains one of the biggest fights we’ve ever had. We didn’t play Trivial Pursuit for years after that.)

Standing in front of the apartment, I didn’t have the patience to play Matt’s game and guess what was special about the Hilton. “Just tell me,” I said.

“It’s where Reagan was shot,” he said. “It’s the Hinckley Hilton. Look, that’s where he was coming out of the hotel, and right there is where he got shot. Crazy, right?”

“Crazy,” I said. I was tired of walking around and looking at apartments, and knew that my attitude was putting a sourness over the whole afternoon. Matt was just trying to lighten the mood, but it was a little weird to try to cheer me up by showing me the spot of an attempted presidential assassination, wasn’t it? (Although I soon found myself pointing it out to everyone who came to visit. When a friend from college who lived in Brooklyn told me that Sesame Street was filming on her block, I quickly came back with “From our front door, you can see where Reagan was shot.” Take that, Elmo.)

When we signed the lease, the broker took notice of Matt’s jacket, a fleece with an Obama-Biden logo embroidered on the chest. These jackets were given to the staff on election night, and you saw people wearing them all over town, like badges of honor.

“Did you work on the campaign?” the broker asked, and Matt nodded.

“It’s so great he won,” the broker said.

“It really is,” Matt agreed.

“I mean, for business it’s great,” the broker said. “All the real estate agents here are thrilled. We’ll be renting so many more places. Republicans don’t live in the District, you know, they live in Virginia.” He said this like it was a fact everyone knew.

“Isn’t that weird?” I said to Matt later.

“Not really.” He shrugged. “It’s like anything else divided down party lines. Republicans like Fox News and NASCAR and Democrats like MSNBC and Starbucks.”

“Simple as that?” I asked, and he said, “Absolutely.”

Our new neighborhood was nice—that was my answer to everyone who asked. And then I’d add, “I mean, it’s not New York, but it’s fine.” Dupont Circle was just so different from Manhattan—residential and much quieter; one step closer to the suburbs.

If you walked over to Eighteenth Street, there were a couple of restaurants and a gay bar called Larry’s Lounge that advertised “Yappy Hour” on the patio from five to seven, a time when customers could bring their dogs to hang out with them while they got drunk. If you walked five blocks down, there was a stretch of shops and then some more restaurants. Everything looked a little worn, like it was past its prime. Also, we lived just a few houses down from the “original” Ron Hubbard house, which to be honest freaked me out just a little. I wasn’t thrilled to have Scientologists as neighbors.

And there were so many trees and so much grass that it was disorienting. Maybe it was just more oxygen than I was used to. After we signed the lease, Matt and I took a walk around the neighborhood. He held my hand and squeezed it. “I think you’re really going to love it here,” he said.

I hoped he was right, I really did. I reminded myself that I’d once gone to a six-week boot camp class in Central Park, where a man yelled at us as we did push-ups and squats in the grass at 7:00 a.m. If I could convince myself that I liked that, I could do anything.

—

I spent my first couple of weeks in DC going to as many social gatherings as I could. We said yes to every invitation, asked people to dinner, made plans for almost every night of the week. Matt kept saying, “Once you meet people and get settled, it will feel like home.” And I believed him. (Or at least I wanted to.)

So we went to a dinner party where everyone—I swear to God—went around the table and announced their level of security clearance. As people said “Secret,” and “Top Secret,” the rest of the guests nodded and murmured. When they got to me, I looked at their expectant faces and then finally said, “Nothing. I don’t have clearance for anything.” There was a small pause and then the man to my left picked it up and said, “SCI,” which apparently stood for sensitive compartmented information, and got the most approving reaction of the night. I just took a bite of my chicken and concentrated on chewing. What a bunch of nerds.