The Hopefuls(22)

I accepted the job as soon as it was offered to me. Maybe I was supposed to negotiate, or at least pretend to think about it, but I was sure my desperation would give me away if I tried.

—

The weekend before I started at DCLOVE, I told Matt we should have a party. We were in bed, both reading, although I’d been daydreaming mostly, my book lying open on my lap. Matt looked up from his issue of The Atlantic and raised his eyebrows at me, probably wondering who I was imagining inviting to this party. “A dinner party,” I clarified, and he nodded.

“That could be fun,” he said. “We can celebrate your new job.”

“No, no. No need to celebrate. But I want something to plan. I feel restless.”

“Are you nervous about starting there?” Matt turned onto his side to face me.

“Not nervous exactly. More unsure.”

I’d gone to one of the pitch meetings at DCLOVE to meet the rest of the staff. Afterward, one of the writers, Maria, asked if I wanted to get coffee. We went to the Starbucks on the corner for iced coffees and I watched as she put eight packets of sugar into her cup.

“The thing to remember,” she told me, “is to always come to the meetings with like thirty ideas to pitch. That way, you’ll get to write about something you have some sort of interest in. If you don’t, they’ll start assigning things to you. Last year, I had to write about the pandas at the zoo for months. Months! Just once, I went to a meeting without a list of ideas and I ended up on the panda beat. Panda baby watch, panda birthdays, Panda Cam, pandas getting deported.” She shuddered and took a long sip of her coffee. I could hear the sugar crunch between her teeth. “It’s the kind of thing that will make you lose all hope in journalism. Sometimes I still have nightmares about Bao Bao.”

“So who are you going to invite to this dinner party?” Matt asked that night.

“Maybe just Ash and Jimmy and Colleen and Bruce?”

“That sounds good.”

“Is that weird though? Do you think they’ll get along?”

“A couple of Texans and a loud Long Island girl with her elderly husband? I think they’ll be great friends.”

“Very funny,” I said. “Beggars can’t be choosers.”

“You should include that in your invitation,” Matt said. “You’ll charm the pants right off of them.”

“Call me old-fashioned, but I prefer dinner parties where everyone wears pants.”

Matt laughed and then turned to me. Put his arms around my waist and rested his chin on my chest. “You are such a liar,” he said. “Because I happen to know that you like it best when no one’s wearing pants.”

“Really?” I asked.

“Really.” He kept looking right at me as he took his boxers off, then gave me a little grin before hooking his fingers in the elastic of my pajama shorts and pulling them down.

“I don’t know where you’d hear such a thing,” I said, as he climbed on top of me.

“Believe me,” he said, kissing my neck. “I have it on good authority.”

—

For the dinner, I decided to make Parmesan chicken over arugula with roasted tomatoes. I knew it was a mistake about ten minutes into prepping, when I realized I’d have to cook the chicken right before we were supposed to sit down. I’d spent most of the day cleaning, thinking that the dinner was so simple it would take no time at all. But before my cheese puffs even came out of the oven, the doorbell rang and all four of our guests were standing outside our door, holding bottles of wine.

The kitchen in our apartment was tiny, had almost no counter space, and was walled off from the rest of the downstairs. In our old place, when we had people over, I could chop vegetables in the open kitchen, while taking part in the conversation. Now I was stuck in the back like a servant, poking my head out when people laughed, to ask, “What’s so funny?”

Ash and Colleen came into the kitchen to talk to me, but there was nowhere for them to sit, and so they stood awkwardly in the middle of the room and had to keep moving out of the way as I grabbed things from the shelves. Cooking doesn’t come easily to me—I had to really concentrate on the recipe, talk out loud to make sure I was measuring correctly, and it was impossible for me to chat at the same time.

“Really, you guys. Go out in the other room,” I said. “You don’t need to keep me company, I’ll be out in a minute.” The oven was making the kitchen hot, so in addition to being flustered, I was also starting to get sweaty.

“Oh, we don’t mind,” Ash said. She leaned against the counter. “We’re happy to keep you company.”

She was blocking the area where I was planning to bread the chicken cutlets and I had to reach around her to grab my bowl of flour. Colleen was standing right in the middle of the kitchen, slowly turning around to take it all in. “I can’t believe they haven’t updated this,” she said.

I went to place the flour next to the stove, but tripped and spilled a little bit. I could hear Bruce laughing in the other room, loudly, saying something about golf. “Let’s just—you know what? Let’s go have a drink and some appetizers and I’ll come back in a few minutes to get the rest of it done,” I said and headed into the living room before they could argue.

Matt turned around, looking grateful to see us coming. “We’re going to take a break from the kitchen,” I told him.