Jennifer Close - The Hopefuls

Jimmy pretended to be embarrassed, but was thrilled with the attention. “I didn’t know I’d end up in the Times looking like a crazy person,” he said to us. But of course he knew that, it had been his whole reason for going. Somehow, he always managed to make it to the spotlight.

“This is exactly the kind of story we should’ve done,” Ellie said in the staff meeting that week. “We can’t let the Times scoop us like this.” I almost burst out laughing at the fact that Ellie could compare DCLOVE to The New York Times with a straight face, but I looked down at my notebook and concentrated on doodling.

“We need to be edgier,” she went on, “we need to be ahead of the curve.” (Sometimes I imagined that Ellie spent her weekends watching marathons of movies that featured unrealistic journalists as characters— The Devil Wears Prada, 13 Going on 30, The Paper —and wrote down different ridiculous catchphrases to say at work.)

The takeaway from that meeting was that DCLOVE started running blind items about White House and Hill staffers. I’m not sure why Ellie thought this would bring us closer to The New York Times, but I didn’t ask any questions. “I’m counting on you to bring us some good stuff,” she said to me after it was announced. “Make sure to use all your connections.”

—

Our first blind item at DCLOVE was this:

Which two White House staffers are secretly dating? One has to schedule herself into her wordy lover’s life, and rumor has it they’re keeping their relationship on the down low for reasons other than workplace decorum.

“This is mortifying,” I said, showing it to Matt. “It’s like ‘Page Six’ and Politico had a baby that’s not quite right in the head.”

Matt just laughed. “They really think people will get into this, huh?”

“Ellie said she was so excited about the new section she couldn’t sleep. She asked us all to pump our most ‘in the know’ friends for information we could use.”

Matt looked nervous for a minute. “You’re not going to repeat anything I tell you, are you?”

“No,” I said. “I’d never do that. And anyway, you’re just not good at gossip. You know that, right?”

“I do,” he said. “And that’s my burden to live with.”

—

A week or so later, this blind item ran:

Which talkative southern man is renowned for his amorous ways on campaign trails? No one is off-limits, not a Biden niece or a Gore daughter or even a close and personal friend of the Obamas. The number of campaign staffers that saw the inside of this cowboy’s hotel rooms is “too high to count,” says our source. “It would be like trying to guess how many jelly beans are in the jar, how many stars are in the sky.”

I showed it to Matt that night. “Is this Jimmy?” I asked. Matt read it and laughed. “Jesus,” he said. “That is the dumbest thing I’ve ever read. Can they print this stuff? They’re naming real people now.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Ellie doesn’t seem worried about it at all.” I noticed he didn’t answer my question.

“So is it?” I asked. “Do you think they’re talking about Jimmy? Really? It’s almost exactly what Ellie said about him before.”

Matt looked more serious for a minute. “I don’t know,” he said. “Like I said, I’ve heard people joke about things, but, Beth? These are just rumors. That’s the whole point of it.”

“I know,” I said. But it left me unsettled.

—

On the first truly warm Saturday of spring, we went to have afternoon drinks with Jimmy and Ash at American Ice, an outdoor bar near U Street that Jimmy loved because of its extensive whiskey menu. It was sunny and pleasant and felt great to be day-drinking outside for no real reason.

We’d only been there about an hour when Benji showed up with two of his roommates. “Oh, look who’s here,” he said loudly. “My favorite old married couple.”

He was referring to Matt and Jimmy when he said this and it wasn’t the first time I’d heard someone call them that. They were friendly with a large group, but I knew that people saw how tight the two of them were, sometimes felt left out of their friendship. “What are you two up to?” he asked. “Plotting to take over the world?”

“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!”