Steve Kistulentz - Panorama

Apparently Don felt the same way, that taxis meant business, which meant he shared Richard’s reluctance to engage in small talk. He didn’t know Don well enough to engage in anything deeper, but had Don asked, he was ready to tell him everything he knew about his city.

Washington wasn’t a city that you inhabited so much as one you survived. You told people you lived in the city and people shook their head and you knew they were thinking about the violent streets and the crack-smoking mayor. You endured the traffic as you did in any cosmopolis, and you endured the incompetent government that couldn’t remember to pick up the trash, couldn’t plow the streets when it snowed, couldn’t check to see whether its schoolteachers were criminals or had actually gone to college; the trains never ran on time, hardly ran at all in inclement weather.

Don covered the taxi fare, and together, they walked through the revolving doors at the hotel’s Connecticut Avenue entrance and moved silently toward the bar. Its narrow entryway, lined with signed portraits of five decades’ worth of members of Congress, Supreme Court justices, and presidential appointees, suggested an exclusivity that had always intimidated Richard, as if the waitstaff might accuse him of being an impostor and ask him to leave.

He’d taken Cadence here on their first date, an occasion that seemed almost as distant in his mind as his marriage or passing the bar exam. It had been a strange place to suggest for a date. He’d been out of the game long enough to know that it was wrong, but Cadence never mentioned it. Richard liked the way she’d handled herself, the banter with the bartender who’d teased her about her fruity drinks and threatened to ID her. He remembered thinking that it wasn’t a date until he’d noticed the details, her fresh pedicure, her newish shoes, the way her lips looked with their well-appointed lushness and their gloss. Her mouth reminded him of the women he saw reading the news on television, a wide smile that started in one corner and spread until it lit the entire face.

These hotel bars were where so much of Washington business got done; all the city’s nicer hotels made Richard feel the same way he had on that night with Cadence, as if he were a twelve-year-old boy dressed in one of his father’s suits, and mostly he wanted someone, another man, to explain to him why that was. Even now, at forty-two, he still felt as if he were playing dress-up, that an unbelievable stroke of good fortune had delivered him into a life of $2,500 bespoke suits and $150 ties of French silk. Sooner or later the grown-ups would come home and relieve him of his duties.

Don Keene hardly looked like the type to sit idly by for these emotional unzippings. Men did not make friends in their forties; they had activity partners and drinking buddies. Richard had professional acquaintances and guys who were not much more than familiar faces at the bar, guys who were good for superficial conversation but did not know his last name or home phone number. The men who had once been the great patriotic confidants of Richard’s 2:00 a.m. musings now lived thousands of miles away, alienated from Washington and a decade removed from their few common bonds. A phone call from any of them was as likely as a total eclipse. What Richard got out of those long-term friendships now was an email on his birthday, a Christmas letter filled with pictures, dogs in Santa hats and children he had never met.

Listening to whatever Don had to say would take half an hour, tops, and might give him a story to tell at the bar later that week. Of course, it bothered Richard that he could not think of anyone specific that he might tell the story to.

The bartender moved in front of Don and Richard but never stopped wiping the zinc-topped bar. Richard ordered a Bloody Mary with peppered vodka, and Don said, “God, that sounds good,” but when the bartender asked, “One for you, sir?” Don shook his head and ordered club soda, two limes, a dash of bitters.

“Sour stomach?” Richard asked.

“Actually, I was in bed by ten, up at four forty-five, and had to tip a guy at my hotel twenty bucks to let me into the gym. Forty-five minutes of cardio and forty-five minutes of trying to do some decent weight work with twenty-pound dumbbells. All followed by a fruit-and-yogurt parfait and a pot of coffee for the low, low Pilgrim Hotel price of twenty-eight dollars.”

“I hope that wasn’t a New Year’s resolution. You’re going to make me feel guilty,” Richard said, filling his mouth with a handful of bar peanuts.

Don put a slate-blue folder embossed in silver foil with the logo of his television station on the bar top. “Instead of making you feel guilty, how about I try to make you feel wanted? You should know two things right from the get,” Don said, tapping the folder with his index finger. “What’s in here is negotiable, within reason. It’s a four-year contract, with a station option for two more. A good-faith gesture that we’re committed. It contains certain easily attainable benchmarks that would allow you to automatically renew for another two years after that. That is, if you are the successful candidate.”

“Candidate for what?”

“I thought you’d be one step ahead of me on this one. You’re the number one draft choice. Eyewitness News at Six and Eleven, with Richard MacMurray and Anna Sogard. Thom Rollins on sports, and Gordon Helmer with your Doppler Eight Thousand forecast. Your reel tested off the charts. Our focus groups say that middle America would believe just about anything you tell them.”

“I didn’t even know I’d applied for the job. Until this morning, I didn’t even know I had a reel.”

“Well, what you need to know now is that, while you’re the leading candidate, you’re not the only candidate.”

Richard had used this ploy himself during his years of hiring research assistants and paralegals. The pay wasn’t much, he’d say, but the experience was invaluable, the same bullshit salt-of-the-earth rap his father must have given to the decidedly earnest young people who wanted to work in a congressional office. It’s not the dollar, it’s the experience, he could imagine Lew saying, especially since the entry-level jobs on Capitol Hill didn’t pay much more than McDonald’s. His father had been full of clichés and a fervent belief in a peculiarly American brand of opportunity (or was it opportunism?), often sounding like a cross between Elmer Gantry and Zig Ziglar. Twenty years after Lew died, and Richard could still hear him bungling messages together into malaprops like You have to leave the door unlocked for opportunity.

“How do I know I’m not the other guy?” Richard asked.

Don looked pleased. “What other guy?”

“The second choice. The fallback. The one that the other reporters really want. Say, a veteran network correspondent who’s being phased out of Washington because his Q rating is too low or he tests as too old.”

Don motioned for the bartender. “That guy doesn’t exist anymore, and even if he did, we couldn’t afford him. He’s got a second wife and a kid at Williams or Bowdoin that’s costing him something like forty grand a year, so he abandons the true calling of journalism for public relations or corporate communications and makes the world safe for special-interest organizations and comes up with slogans like Beef, it’s what’s for dinner. ” Don narrated the slogan in the resonant fakeness of a voice-over artist, but when he started talking again, any hint of artifice was gone. “And as for Q ratings, well, your Q rating isn’t much greater than zero. They’ve seen your face before, maybe even know you’re on television, but they can’t quite place you. The focus group described you as conventionally handsome. That beach bum who lived with O. J. Simpson, he’s got a higher recognition factor. You, my man, are the proverbial blank slate. Give me six months, and I’ll convince people that you’ve been doing this for twenty years.”