Just between us girls, Washington is an easy place to get
laid. It’s not like I was the prettiest girl in town or anything.
I usually wasn’t even the prettiest girl in the
room. But I can tell you that it wasn’t my personality that
brought all the boys to the yard.
It was a simple matter of economics: supply and demand.
Washington lacks those industries that attract the
Beautiful People, such as entertainment and fashion. Instead
it has the government, also known as “Hollywood for
the Ugly.” And without the model-actress population to
compete with, my stock shot up when I moved to DC.
It didn’t take much to turn heads there, and everybody
was on the make and pretty damn obvious about it. Washington
was a town full of young single people and bored married
people, all desperate to connect with, oh, anyone. All you had
to do was say hi to somebody and they were yours. You could
go home with a different man every night of the week if you
wanted to. So many men, so little time. How could I lose?
The downside was that almost everyone in Washington
was an insecure nerd. Even the better-looking ones had
nerdy skeletons in their closets. This was especially true of
anyone who worked in politics. Only a nerd would be attracted
to legislative power, of all things. Nerds love the idea
of ruling over people, don’t they? They truly believe that
they should make all of our decisions for us just because
they went to graduate school. I mean, can you name even one
cool person in politics? There just aren’t any. If any of us
were truly cool, we would have been living in New York.
I CAME TO WASHINGTON by way of Manhattan, and I had
made a nice little life for myself there before I shit all over it.
In New York, I mean. And, yes, I suppose that happened in
Washington, too, but that was later. New York came first.
We all grew up with big dreams of moving to New York
City and living the Glamorous Life, but I was stuck with a
four-year scholarship to Syracuse University, while my
friends took off for NYU, Columbia, or one of the several
“art and design” schools in New York. Between classes at
Syracuse, I would trudge through the dirty snow to check my
e-mail at one of the campus computer clusters. The brown
slush on my practical, reasonably priced L.L. Bean boots
would turn into a puddle as I read about the clubs and crazy
situations that my friends were getting themselves into in
New York. They were all there, having fun and being fabulous
without me, while I languished at keggers and struggled
to meet my deadlines at the college newspaper.
I could never get past the feeling that I was missing out
on something: I had to get out of Syracuse as soon as possible,
before I went insane with boredom.
On the merits of my resume alone, I was granted an
interview at Condé Nast Publications in New York. I had
beat out countless wannabes (which included many of my
classmates at Syracuse) for a highly coveted chance to become
a Condé Nastie.
These were the Big Girls: Vogue, Glamour, and back then,
Mademoiselle, the one that hired my best friend, Naomi, right
out of journalism school at Columbia. I had known Naomi
since the second grade, when we were OshKosh B’Gosh-wearing
tomboys who wiped boogers on the other kids when
they weren’t looking. How cool would it be if we both ended
up at Condé Nast? I called to tell her the news, and she congratulated
me on getting an interview, but warned me that if
I didn’t “look the part,” Human Resources would send me
home with nothing but a stack of complimentary magazines.
“Make sure you look good, Jacqueline!” she told me.
“Get a blowout and a manicure before you come in. And you
might want to tone up a little, too.”
I knew that the girls in New York looked like models, but
this was a job interview, not the velvet rope at Spa. Nevertheless,
I had an outstanding resume and a charming personality.
How could they not hire me?
Obviously, I had much to learn.
* * *
“SO HOW DID IT GO?” Naomi asked. We met outside for a
cigarette after my interview. I didn’t smoke, but I liked to
pretend that I did. Smoking looked so good on me. Besides,
it gave me something to do whenever I felt like goofing off
and standing around outside.
I opened the L.L. Bean Boat and Tote that I used as a
handbag, realizing that it didn’t look right with the heavy
gabardine pantsuit that I was wearing in June. It was the
only suit that I owned at the time, and it was all wrong.
Everything about me was wrong: I had put my hair up in
a messy ponytail because I was sweating in all of that wool,
and my clunky Nine West shoes needed shining, but why
bother shining $40 shoes? No makeup, no tan, no manicure:
wrong, wrong, wrong.
I showed Naomi the stack of free magazines that the
Human Resources manager had given me before she showed
me the way out.
“They would have given you a job,” Naomi told me, “if
you had put yourself together like I told you to.”
Naomi was wearing a giraffe-print Tracy Feith dress, gold
stiletto-heeled sandals, and huge gold bangles on her arms.
This was what entry-level employees wore to the offices at
Condé Nast. She looked like Vogue, she looked like Mademoiselle.
Naomi looked the part. Then I realized just how dumpy I
looked in comparison. I needed a makeover ASAP.
“Did they make you sit in one of the Skinny Chairs?”
Naomi asked, but I wasn’t sure what she was talking about.
“They have these chairs in there,” she explained. “If
your ass goes over the edges when you sit down, they won’t
hire you.”
She glanced at my posterior.
“I don’t think you fit in,” she concluded.
“Too much pizza and beer up at Syracuse,” I explained,
embarrassed that I was too big for the Big Girls at Condé
Nast.
Naomi looked horrified.
“New York girls don’t eat,” she said. “Learn it. Live it.”
Chapter Two
If Washington’s dirty little secret was sex, New York’s was
its epidemic of eating disorders. Everybody had one. It
was de rigueur. It was just a part of the Big City
makeover that every girl got when she arrived in New York
and realized that she needed to step up her game. You start
getting your hair blown out and your nails done, and you
buy yourself a Kate Spade handbag and a whole new size-zero
wardrobe at the Tocca sample sale. When you’re done
shopping, you have no money left to buy food anyway, so
it’s just as well.
Not that I was paying for anything anymore. Now that I
was thin and gorgeous, New York was the friendliest city
in the world: Guys held doors for me, I no longer had to
stand on line for anything, and it seemed like rich men
were always looking for an underfed waif who needed a
benefactor.
Why would they be so generous with a girl they hardly
knew? Because, unlike their ungrateful wives and spoiled
mistresses, I showed these men some appreciation. And the
nicer I was to them, the nicer they would be to me. It was
win-win.
I considered all of this a learning experience. No matter
what girl power bullshit you read in Sassy magazine, or what
your ivory tower women’s studies professors at university try
to tell you, this world is no meritocracy. It revolves around
looks and money. Period. When I was in New York, it was the
age of Britney Spears and Maxim magazine. You could either
miss out on all the fun, or you could make the most of the fact
that people were so fucking shallow and take them for all they
were worth. Maybe you could even make them see the error
of their ways, if you wanted to be moralistic about it.
So I was going out every night, and, yes, I was taking
drugs and having one-night stands and all that “crazy shit”
that young, gorgeous people do. I was unemployed, living
in the city that never sleeps, so why not go out and have a
good time? I almost didn’t want to be employed. I didn’t
want to be one of those dreary people who had to get out of
bed at eight in the morning to go to some pain-in-the-ass
job every day.
Nevertheless, I once again felt like I was missing out on
something. I mean, every time you meet someone new, the
first question they always ask is, “What do you do?” I could
only be a “party girl” for so long. After I hit twenty two, it just
looked sad. I needed a career, if only for appearance’ sake.
My friend Diane hired me for a high-paying copywriting
position at an Internet start-up some rich dude had put
her in charge of. Of course, they were fucking, so she could
do whatever she wanted, and I could do whatever I wanted
because I was good friends with my boss.
Diane met Naomi and me when we were interns at MTV
Networks the summer before my sophomore year. Diane
was the one who took us to Twilo for the first time. Naomi
and I weren’t into the club scene back then. We didn’t understand
what all the hype was about. Twilo was just a big
black room with a disco ball, filled with sweaty people and
thumping trance music. If you were sober, it was a living hell.
Then Diane gave us our first hits of ecstasy, and we understood
everything. About a half hour after dropping, Twilo
suddenly became Heaven on Earth, and Diane became our
new best friend.
Naomi eventually left her shit-paying job at Mademoiselle
to join Diane and me at the dot-com, so it was the three
of us, working and partying together again. We were paid
huge salaries to nurse each other’s hangovers in the morning
and shop for party outfits at Century 21 in the afternoon.
And we ran a Web site, when we weren’t too busy.
During the dot-com era, there were IPO parties every
night of the week on Wall Street. I eventually met my fiancé
at one such party. He thought I was a waitress because I was
carrying a tray full of drinks, but I was really stocking up before
the open bar ended. I gave him a vodka gimlet from my
tray, and he gave me a twenty-dollar tip, which I thought was
very nice. I gave the twenty back to him, shoving it down his
pants. He invited me to his table, and we hit it off right away.
Mike was a boy from Woodside, Queens, a son of a cop
who had made good on Wall Street. With his big blue eyes, I
found him absolutely adorable, and he wasn’t an asshole or
a pervert, like most of the Wall Street guys I had met. I felt
very lucky to have found a normal guy in New York and believed
that Mike was the man I would marry. He was a great
catch.
Diane’s dot-com inevitably went bankrupt and the rich
guy dumped her. We lost our cushy jobs, putting an end to
all the fun we were having. The party was over, and we had
to get real jobs in the real world. But I was able to put off my
job search indefinitely when Mike asked me to move in
with him. He paid all of the bills and gave me a shopping
allowance, which begged the question: Why bother working
when I can be a wealthy housewife?
I had plenty of leisure time to work on my backhand,
read every Harry Potter book in print, and try the recipes in
the New York Times Magazine. Mike took very good care of me.
It was my reward for looking pretty, smiling all the time, and
cooperating in the bedroom.
I was ready to marry young and retire from the Fly Life. I
already had the typical “when- I-was-young-and-crazy-and-lived
in-New-York” experience that included excessive drug
use, group sex, crazy boyfriends, and lots of dancing. At this
point in my life, cooking spaghetti dinners and renting
movies with Mike every Saturday night felt good, like I was in
rehab or something. I wasn’t fighting hangovers every day or
waking up in strange places anymore, and I pitied my single
friends who still spent their Saturday nights waiting on line
for hours to get into Twilo.
But as the months passed, I started to feel like a mental
patient, watching television and reading magazines all day.
Naomi and Diane had settled down with careers and pseudo-husbands
of their own, so I had nobody to go out with anymore.
I asked Mike to take me out, but he hated the club
scene. He was an awful dancer and drugs frightened him.
My nightlife was ruined and it was all Mike’s fault. He was
obviously robbing me of all the fun I deserved to have as a
young, gorgeous female in Manhattan, so I began acting
out: I stopped cleaning and the apartment turned to squalor;
I quit cooking and insisted on eating out every night; I
made him watch Gone With the Wind with me instead of the
Super Bowl.
I guess I knew that I could get away with all of this because
Mike loved me so much, but I was really in no position
to pick any fights with him. I had no money of my own, no
prospects, and a growing employment gap on my resume. I
had no security until we made it legal. Therefore. I had to get
him to marry me.
And what year was this? Couldn’t I get a job? Sure, I just
didn’t want to. Remember, I had my heart set on becoming a
wealthy housewife. Ever since we started living together,
everyone kept asking me when the “Big Day” was. Apparently,
when you’re female, your wedding day is the big moment
that your entire life is leading up to. So I waited for
Mike to propose.
I waited and waited. Finally, he did, while we were on
vacation in the Virgin Islands. (Where he could buy my engagement
ring tax-free.) But I wasn’t waiting all this time to
get engaged. I wanted to get married: run down to City Hall,
fill out the forms, and move on with our lives. But no, we had
to plan a wedding, my Big Day. But to me, an engagement
was just a way of stalling, and the four-carat ring on my finger
was just Mike’s way of buying himself more time: time to
bail out on me, time to change his mind. I cradled myself in
resentment toward him for making me wait.
While I was busy stewing in my own juices, life was
passing me by. I hadn’t been to Twilo in months. Then the
city shut down the club suddenly one Saturday night. I
heard it on 1010 WINS the morning after, while I was making
breakfast for Mike. It was the end of an era, the official
end of my young adulthood. The greatest megaclub that
New York had ever seen was closed forever, and I would
never drop E beneath its big disco ball again. From now on,
I would spend my Saturday nights watching DVDs, going to
bed before midnight, and having mediocre sex with the
same person. Was that what my entire life had been leading
up to?
The months passed, and I was still unmarried, still unemployed.
I felt myself getting old, my youth and beauty
fading. I was twenty-five years old and had nothing to show
for it. There had to be more than this, or I was going to end
up killing myself by the time I turned thirty.
So when Kevin, an ex-boyfriend from college, called
me unexpectedly, I agreed to meet him, out of melancholy
nostalgia.
Kevin and I had had an ongoing flirtation via e-mail
since graduation, which was culminating in this visit.
Continues…
Excerpted from THE Washingtonienne
by Jessica Cutler
Copyright © 2005 by Jessica Cutler.
Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
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Copyright © 2005
Jessica Cutler
All right reserved.
ISBN: 1-4013-0200-9
