“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.
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.