Jennifer Close - The Hopefuls

We walked the rest of the way home without talking, just watching our breath become little white puffs in the air. It was quiet, like the city was empty or everyone was already asleep. This wasn’t the case — later, when DCLOVE did a special post on all of the couples who met during the blizzard, I realized that there must have been parties in every apartment we passed. We weren’t the only ones celebrating the snow. But that night, it felt like we were the only people left in DC.

—

That was the only time Matt acknowledged that he was upset about what happened with Jimmy’s job. Maybe he was embarrassed that he’d accused Jimmy of being sneaky or maybe he figured it just wasn’t worth it. Whatever it was, from that point on he went out of his way to be enthusiastic about Jimmy’s new position.

But at home, when it was just us, he talked more often about needing a new job, almost like it was a dire situation, like he wouldn’t survive in the counsel’s office much longer. And there were times when Jimmy would tell us about a trip he’d just taken and Matt would stiffen next to me — just for a second — and I had no doubt that he thought he deserved Jimmy’s job, that he believed he could do it better.

Matt’s jealousy no longer surprised me. I’d figured out that DC was a city that was crammed full of jealousy, that there was, in fact, a hierarchy of jealousy among the people we spent time with. Matt was jealous of Jimmy, who was jealous of Alan, because he got to spend every single minute with the President, got a Christmas present from him, got to walk alongside him in the West Wing. And Alan was jealous of Drew, who was the trip director and also one of Obama’s favorite golf partners because he was such a great player. (Rumor had it that Alan played golf once with the President and was so bad that he stopped on the third hole after almost hitting Obama with a ball after a wild swing. He was so ashamed of this that no one ever mocked him, never made one joke about it, which was very telling. This was a group that taunted and made fun of each other with a sibling-like viciousness.) And almost everyone was jealous of Pete, a cranky thirtysomething who worked in the speechwriting office, who the President found hilarious and who was always asked to play Hearts with him on Air Force One.

The only person who didn’t seem to be jealous of anyone was Drew, who was happy to golf with the President, was friendly to every person he met, helped anyone who asked him to, was always pleasant and kind, and truly just didn’t seem to give a shit about any of the rest of it. But he was an anomaly.

It wasn’t that I didn’t understand it, this jealousy, because I did. It’s just that it was hard sometimes to watch a group of grown people act like seventh graders trying to sit next to the coolest kid at the lunch table. Honestly, it just made you feel sad because you always thought people would outgrow this, thought that adulthood would be different. And it wasn’t.

All I could do was listen, really, when Matt talked about the kind of job he was looking for, when he told me that he felt like he was wasting time. It started to consume him. “I know you’ll find something,” I told him almost every day. And he’d look at me like he both was grateful for my support and knew I had no idea what I was talking about.

—

Everyone returned to work on Friday, and the snow took a while to melt but eventually did, making that lost week feel almost like a dream, like we’d all imagined the three feet of snow that had clobbered the city. I was busy at work, and if I wasn’t wildly excited about what I was doing there, I was at least content. The site was expanding quickly, and Ellie put me in charge of several different sections, including one called “Query,” where we answered e-mail questions from readers. Some of them were silly, about the best places to get a sandwich around the White House or the best burger on Capitol Hill. And some were about the layout and logistics of the city. Why were there so many goddamn traffic circles? Where was J Street?

It was the J Street question that stuck with me, that I always remembered, because I’d wondered about it too. There is no J Street in DC — the streets skip right from I to K, and there’s a rumor that L’Enfant did it on purpose when he designed the city, that he hated John Jay and left out J Street as a big fuck you. Some people say it’s because John Jay was having an affair with L’Enfant’s wife. Some say it’s because John Jay insulted his design. And some people think it’s Jefferson that L’Enfant was trying to snub.

“It’s just a rumor though,” I explained to Matt when I was writing the response for the site. “Most people think it has nothing to do with any drama or jealousy, that maybe it’s just because I and J looked too similar.”

Matt tilted his head when I told him this. “Well that makes more sense,” he said. “It seems kind of far-fetched to alter the layout of a city just for revenge.”

“Really?” I said. “It seems to me that’s exactly the kind of thing that would happen in this town.”

The truth about DCLOVE was that it was a little trashy, sort of like the Us Weekly of Washington, DC. We did plenty of restaurant reviews and things like that, but what really got Ellie and Miles excited was gossip and party pictures. All you had to say to get a story approved was “Well, no one knows this yet, but—” and Ellie would scream out, “Love it!” before you even finished.

They founded the website in 2009, when the whole world was obsessed with Obama’s administration — Gawker couldn’t get enough, writing about the hot young speechwriter and how he was maybe dating the twentysomething woman who worked in foreign policy and had also posed in Maxim. Even Jimmy was on Gawker a couple of times, once in an “Obama Hotties” roundup that named the most attractive staffers. But by 2010, the world was sort of over it and Gawker went back to writing about socialites and celebrities.

And DCLOVE picked up the slack, was committed to reporting every little bit of gossip in the District. Our most popular section was “Movin’ On Up and Movin’ On Out,” which reported notable hirings, firings, and job jumping. We weren’t the only place to do this — Politico Playbook did it quite well, with snappy anecdotes and fresh language. But the difference between us and Politico was that they were classy about it and we weren’t. We always trashed up the announcement with a takedown or a quote. We didn’t mind printing anything. For example:

Regional Communications Director Bobby London is leaving his post at the White House and heading to PepsiCo, where he’ll be Director of External Relations. Sources say he beat out co-worker and nemesis Maggie McDonnel, White House Director of Press Advance, for the job, mostly because of his family connections, and not because of any real qualifications. Co-workers say they won’t miss his standing desk, which he constructed out of cases of Diet Coke (take note, Pepsi!), or his half-pack-a-day habit, which supposedly left a Pigpen-like cloud of smoke around him. “He judged the rest of us for sitting all day,” one officemate said, “but all he did was smoke cigarettes and eat bacon, so really, good luck to him.”

When I told people I worked at DCLOVE, especially people at the White House, they often gave me a condescending smile, and would say something like “Oh, I’ve heard of it,” while implying that they would never actually read it. Sometimes I wondered if Matt was embarrassed that his wife worked at a website that put out a monthly list of the “most datable” White House staffers. High-class journalism we were not.