The Hopefuls(36)

“Always,” Jimmy said.

Benji turned to me. “Beth, I met your college roommate the other day.”

“Colleen?” I asked.

“That’s the one. We were in Sidecar and she was there with a girl I used to know who works at Bloomberg now.”

“Funny,” I said. “How’d you guys put it together?”

“Oh, you know. I told her I worked at the White House and she asked if I knew Matt—or really what she said was ‘You must know my friend Dogpants.’?” He turned to give a wicked smile to Matt.

“Don’t y’all just love that story?” Ash asked him. “It’s the cutest New York love story I’ve ever heard.”

Matt sighed and put his arm around me. “I know. Imagine I’d just worn jeans that day. It’s possible I wouldn’t have ever caught this one’s eye.”

We all laughed, but what I really felt was a sense of claustrophobia, something that had been happening more and more. It was like the city was getting smaller the longer we were there. It was incestuous, the way everyone knew everything about people. There was no such thing as a secret in this town, and I thought that if any of the rumors about Jimmy were true, it would only be a matter of time before Ash found out—or I found out and had to tell her.

Benji joined our table, leaving his other friends to go inside and get drinks. “So, is Alan on his way here?” I asked, half joking.

“I think he might actually meet us later,” Benji said. “And a few other people from work, too.”

“Great,” I said.

Ever since Matt had made the strange bedfellows comment about Benji and Alan, I couldn’t stop thinking about their friendship. Was it real? Or was it more a marriage of convenience? They each got different things out of it, both benefited from the pairing, and sometimes I wondered if that was the only reason they were friends, if they even liked each other at all.

And I asked myself the same thing about Matt and Jimmy—Jimmy introduced Matt to people, made him more social, more fun. And Matt grounded Jimmy, gave him an air of gravitas. But that wasn’t why they were friends, was it? Or at least, it wasn’t the only reason. I watched them that day, Jimmy laughing loudly, smacking Matt on the back, my stomach twisting just a little.

—

A new spinning studio opened on Fourteenth Street and Ellie asked me to review it. The name was (no joke) the United States of Spinning. “It’s brand-new,” Ellie told me. “Based only in DC.”

“I figured,” I said.

The walls of the studio were covered with pictures of all the presidents, and everything was red, white, and blue. The spinning shoes were white, the bikes were blue, the walls were red and white striped, the towels were blue with white stars. It made you kind of dizzy to be in there.

When I interviewed the owner, Andy, a fit and handsome man in his early thirties, he told me that while he loved SoulCycle, he felt it lacked personality. “I wanted this studio to reflect DC. This has been my home for twelve years, and it’s such a special place.”

“It really is,” I said. (I wasn’t being sarcastic—special can mean different things to different people.)

“My husband and I had this idea a few years ago and we knew we had to take the leap. We wanted to combine our love of politics and spinning.”

Andy told me that each ride would be dedicated to a different president. “But it will be a surprise,” he told me. “You’ll have to come to class to see which president we’re honoring that day!”

He sounded so excited, and I said, “I can’t wait.”

Ash came with me for the inaugural ride—I could always count on her to accompany me to random places and events that I was covering for the website. I think she looked at it as a free Groupon.

The ride started with “Proud to Be an American” blasting through the speakers and ended with a funky version of “Sea to Shining Sea,” but fortunately had normal pop music in between, like any regular spin class. Reagan was the President of the Day, and his picture hung up front, so that you had to look at him the whole time, which I found slightly uncomfortable. Andy wore American flag kneesocks and yelled out motivational things to the class. “Let’s be grateful,” he shouted. “Let’s give thanks that we have two legs and two arms to spin, and that we live in the greatest country in the world!” The class cheered and I panted, trying to keep up.

“This is the dorkiest thing I’ve ever seen,” I whispered to Ash as we stretched after class.

“Oh, I don’t know. I kind of like it,” she said.

As I toweled off and changed out of my spinning shoes, I saw Ash talking to Andy. “I’ll be back for sure,” I heard her tell him.

It was 7:00 p.m. when we left, but still light outside, and we decided to walk to Sweetgreen to grab salads for dinner.

“Did you know that Andy had Jimmy’s job under Bush?” Ash asked me as we walked down the block.

“Really?” I asked. I was more shocked that our gay spinning teacher was a Republican than I was that he’d had the same job as Jimmy. (Although when I thought about the choice of Reagan as the first “honored president,” it made more sense.)

“They met during the transition. It’s such a small world,” Ash said. And there it was again, that claustrophobia, the feeling that you were always being watched. I wondered what Andy knew about Jimmy, if he’d met Matt, what he thought about me. And maybe I was being paranoid; maybe he didn’t care enough about any of us to even form an opinion.