The Hopefuls(23)

“That sounds great. Can I help in there?” I shook my head. Matt was always happy to help, but he wasn’t any more gifted at cooking than I was. I took a glass of wine and sat on the floor. Colleen squeezed onto the couch next to Bruce, forcing him to shift over a little bit. As he did, he exhaled loudly. He always made a lot of noise—groaning when he moved, slurping when he drank. It’s possible they had something to do with his age, all the sounds he made. I tried to be gracious and ignore it, but a lot of the time, I felt like asking, “Everything okay?” when he squeaked and moaned.

Ash plopped herself on the floor next to me and grabbed a cheese puff. I took one too and popped it in my mouth, already filled with regret that I’d decided to have a dinner party.

“So, Jimmy,” Colleen said. “What is it that you do?” She leaned forward, as if she couldn’t wait to hear his answer, in what we called her Barbara Walters pose.

“I’m the director of the White House travel office,” Jimmy said.

“And what does that entail, exactly?” she asked. I could tell that Colleen thought Jimmy was attractive from the way she kept raising her eyebrows. In college, we could always tell she liked a guy when she started resembling Jack Nicholson.

Jimmy answered her question, and she came back with three more. Ash and I swiveled our heads back and forth between them, like we were watching a tennis match. Colleen had come right from work and she was wearing a sleeveless red dress with a split at the neckline. She got her hair blown out each morning, and it was always shiny and smooth. Her makeup was done for the camera and looked a little heavy in real life, but she never wiped any of it off before going out. Either she didn’t notice how caked on it looked in regular light or she didn’t care. She sat up straight and focused on Jimmy, as if she really were interviewing him. Bruce leaned back on the couch and half closed his eyes. Matt got up to refill drinks, and when he returned, Colleen was asking Jimmy where he saw his career going.

“Give the guy a chance to catch his breath,” Matt said lightly, as he handed them both a drink.

“I’m a reporter, Dogpants. I can’t help it. And it sounds like an amazing job.”

“It does,” Matt said. I could tell he was deciding whether or not to say more. “Ask him about riding on Air Force One.”

Matt was pretty fascinated with Jimmy’s job—and to be honest, with Jimmy himself. He often came home and told me different things that he’d heard about Jimmy from other people—it was the closest Matt ever came to gossiping, although I would never have called it that because there wasn’t any ill will behind it. He told me people talked a lot about how surprised they were that Jimmy was hired as the travel director. I thought Jimmy was exaggerating when he’d described his career in advance as accidental, but it turned out he wasn’t. “It doesn’t sound like he worked all that hard,” Matt said to me. “I mean, on the campaigns, sure, he worked hard and did a great job. But in between he kind of just hung out. He had all these chunks of time where he wasn’t working at all, and from what I hear, it didn’t sound like he was all that concerned about finding a job. I think he really just kept doing it because he thought it was fun.”

After the election, Jimmy was offered the travel director job and he’d taken it, but the interesting part was he hadn’t been pursuing anything—they went after him. “People just really like him,” Matt said. “They wanted him in the office.”

I think part of the reason Matt was so interested in Jimmy was that they were so different. Matt was the hardest-working person I knew—he’d had a job from the time he was thirteen and started caddying. He cried when he got a B in sixth-grade science class, worried it would keep him from getting into Harvard. Jimmy was good at what he did, but made no secret of the fact that he didn’t especially like to work hard. Matt had wanted to run for office since he was in second grade, and it seemed like Jimmy had just recently looked around and thought, Well, that could be fun. I could almost guarantee that Jimmy hadn’t stopped himself from smoking pot (or doing anything else) in college because he was worried about his future political career. The idea of running for office seemed to be something he just stumbled across and decided to entertain.

Matt was currently a little bored at his job and he liked talking about Jimmy’s experiences, which were, without a doubt, more exciting than his own. Matt even enjoyed having Jimmy describe how he packed for trips—he traveled so often that he was basically a professional packer, and he’d shown us one time how fast he could pack for a weeklong trip: laying out his suits and ties in under a minute, rolling his socks with precision, wrapping the hangers on his hanging bag with gaffe tape to keep them from shifting. Matt asked him so many questions about riding on Air Force One that Jimmy swiped a couple of coasters from the plane to give to him. Whenever Matt used them, I could see his eyes turn green.

When Matt was first offered the position of associate counsel, he was thrilled. But it wasn’t quite what he expected. The rest of the associate counsels were younger than he was, which I know bothered him. Most of what he did was background checks on prospective hires, and he said in a lot of ways it was just as tedious as when he’d worked at the law firm, that he missed the excitement of the campaign.

“Well, you can’t really compare them,” I said. “No job will ever live up to the campaign.”