The Hopefuls(37)
Ash sounded amazed that she’d discovered this connection. But the truth was, those coincidences happened all the time. If you played the name game long enough, it always worked. It’s why Ellie’s blind items did so well. In New York, you could live years without running into someone you knew, but DC was different. It was smaller, everyone worked in the same business. Sometimes it didn’t feel like a real city at all.
Ash loved this part of DC. She said it made her feel like she was home, how nice it was to bump into people you knew at the grocery store or walking down the street. I sort of hated it. I hadn’t been in a place where everyone was so scrutinized since college. And it started to make me feel tired—how intertwined everything and everyone was, so that it was normal for your boss to gossip about your best friend’s husband, for your spinning teacher to know the people you hung out with.
“Not such a small world,” I said to Ash that night. “But definitely a small town.”
Chapter 9
At the beginning of the summer, Jimmy was asked to play golf with the President at Andrews Air Force Base. I braced myself for this invitation to become a regular thing, for Matt to start obsessing over it, but it only happened one other time. As far as I could tell, there was an unofficial ranking of the staff who played golf, and Jimmy was pretty low on the list. There had to be about ten other people out of town or otherwise occupied for him to even be considered. He tried to downplay it, but you could tell he desperately wanted to move higher up, not just because he kept talking about how much fun he’d had, but because he started going to hit a bucket of balls after work and spending his Saturdays playing eighteen holes.
Right after this, Matt signed us up for lessons at his parents’ club and then the four of us started playing together almost every weekend. Jimmy was a pretty good golfer (there was no chance that he’d endanger the President with his aim as Alan had) and Matt wasn’t bad either, and the only weird thing about these golf games was the idea that Jimmy was just using us to practice, hoping he’d get good enough to earn a regular invitation to play with Obama.
I’d noticed early on that Matt paid close attention to the things that Jimmy said and did, in the same way that preteen girls mimic the queen bee. Playing golf was just the tip of the iceberg. It was because of Jimmy that Matt got involved in the State Societies, which are basically clubs where people from the same place can get together for events. Jimmy was superinvolved in the Texas State Society, always going to a Boots & Spurs happy hour or a breakfast club with a famous Texan as the special guest. He loved going to these meetings. “It’s just nice,” he said, “to be around people who feel familiar.”
The State Societies were a good idea, I guess—it was nice to think that a young homesick assistant on the Hill could go to a happy hour and meet people from home, could form a network in a new city. But still, I was surprised when Matt joined the Maryland chapter. “Why do you need a state society?” I asked him. “You can drive ten minutes north and be in your state. If you want to be around people from Maryland, you can just go there.”
Matt laughed. “It’s about networking,” he said.
“Of course it is,” I said. What wasn’t about networking in DC? I ignored him when he suggested I look into the Wisconsin chapter. I didn’t need to sit around and talk about cheese curds with a bunch of strangers.
—
We had dinner with the Dillons every Friday night—it had become a standing date, a tradition. Really, we spent so much time with them that it was almost hard to remember how we’d filled our days before. They were low maintenance, which I came to appreciate more than anything—we could call them last minute to get dinner on a Tuesday, or they’d invite us over Saturday afternoon when Jimmy was cooking a brisket. It was just easy, especially compared to making plans with Colleen and Bruce, where we had to schedule everything weeks in advance and always ended up doing something complicated, like driving to Virginia or watching the Caps play in Bruce’s company box.
When we were in New York, the only other couple we’d ever spent a lot of time with was Chrissie and Joe, who’d both gone to college with Matt. We often went out to dinner with them in the city, and once wine tasting for the weekend in North Fork. But our friendship was more out of necessity than anything else—we were one of the only other married couples in Matt’s group of friends, so if they wanted to do coupley things, we were their only choice. The three of them had known one another for so long that sometimes hanging out with them felt like a college reunion that I’d ended up at by mistake. Chrissie was one of those girls who always wanted to make sure I knew my place, wanted to remind me that she’d known Matt when he was just eighteen, and she made a point of referencing inside jokes or calling people by their college nicknames, so that I spent much of the conversation one step behind, asking, “Wait, who is Cheeks? And why did Cheeks hate milk shakes?”
Sometimes when the three of them were talking, I dug my fingernails into my thighs, just to have something to do.
But with the Dillons, it was different—I don’t know if it was because we all met one another at the same time or if it was just a matter of chemistry, but our foursome could happily split off into any combination. Jimmy was a big fiction reader, and he and I traded books back and forth, e-mailed each other reviews of new novels we wanted to read. Sometimes when we were discussing a book, I’d hear Matt or Ash (neither of whom read much fiction) say to the other in a mocking voice, “Shhh…don’t interrupt. They’re in middle of another book club meeting.”