The List Read Free Page A

magazine in
     Boston that I believe was the most popular rag at America’s maximum-security prisons.
     Besides porn, obviously.
    “No! Like everyone on the Hill,” Elsa assured me. “Everyone. And plus, their reporters
     are on TV all the time. You’ll definitely be on Larry King.”
    “He retired.”
    “Whatever. Take the job.”
    I already had.
    When I first arrived at Town & Country after slogging at a regional magazine for two years, I would have tattooed “I heart T&C ” on a number of different body parts, not that the esteemed magazine would have approved
     such a tacky move. But I would have. It was such a fascinating place. The women were
     like smart, polished, walking, talking Barneys mannequins. They knew how to set a
     table for a ten-course meal, traded stories about summers in Cap d’Antibes and winters
     in Cape Town, but could also write delightful articles comparing Gilbert andSullivan to Lil Wayne without breaking a sweat. Not that anyone at T&C ever broke a sweat—that’s why God invented armpit Botox. I was in awe and the awe
     lasted for years.
    I can’t pinpoint the exact time when my devotion started to crack, but I think it
     was while dating a PhD student named Ilya who was obsessed with Russian literature.
     His name wasn’t actually Ilya, it was Brett Olney, but he made everyone call him Ilya
     for obvious reasons.
    On our first date we sat in Central Park and he read to me from a book called The Master and Margarita, which I said sounded like a smutty Mexican telenovela. He stopped reading after I
     made that comment but I was so hot for him that I faked an obsession with Russian
     literature to try to get in his pants. The downside of this BS obsession was that
     I agreed to go to a lecture on the Russian Revolution of 1917, which I had stupidly
     said changed my perspective on history, never mind the fact that my knowledge of Russian
     history extended to ballet and caviar. The weekend before the daunting lecture I locked
     myself in my apartment with a five-hundred-page tome on that pesky war, a Rachmaninov
     playlist, and a bottle of Smirnoff, and had my own little holiday in St. Petersburg,
     or Petrograd as I soon started calling it. I only got halfway through the book, but
     I remember putting the thing down and thinking, Wowyzowy, I’m insanely wasted . After I ate a loaf of bread to sober up, my next thought was, I haven’t penned anything of substance since college .
    I wanted to write about something other than luxury vacations and eccentric heiresses.
     Maybe history. Maybe politics. I soon realized that only senior citizens who can spell
     the word Smithsonian backward read history publications. Plus, the only part of that big book that held
     my attention was the description of Nicholas II’s lavish palace, complete with a hydraulic
     lift and a movie theater.
    Politics won.
    The first thing I had to do after I decided to ditch New York living was make a really
     depressing phone call to my parents asking if I could squat with them in Middleburg,
     Virginia, until I figured out how to maneuver a D.C. that had become far more expensive
     than the one I left behind in high school. I was taking a 25 percent pay cut to become
     one of those reporters who was on TV all the time. I had thought about alternatives:
     living in a houseboat on the Potomac River, living with a bunch of unknown roommates
     who ate cat for dinner, or dwelling in Washington’s seedy Ward 8, where I could afford
     an apartment with an actual bedroom. On my budget, it turned out the houseboat would
     be an inflatable raft, the Craigslist apartment ad I answered had the words “Wiccan
     witch circle” in tiny print at the bottom, and when I looked at the number of violent
     crimes in Ward 8, I decided that as exciting as a drive-by shooting might sound on
     my résumé, it was probably not something I wanted to endure.
    My twenty-eight-year-old fingers dialed the first phone number I ever knew, and