Medium Rare, page 2
My own relative position was harder to parse. Fundraisers—we who rule the events, who plan the literal political parties—glide along a parallel track, one that largely shields us from Washington’s cruelest humiliations, if also limits our rise. Mine specifically, with my reputation for well-nigh perfect events comingling with that of overstepping my role overseeing them; for having the sort of outspoken integrity that can pose a liability to loyalty, valued over truth in Washington as a whole. Rumors of my literary pursuits did nothing to ease such concerns, painting me attentionally divided at best and a flight risk at worst. My client list was, accordingly, a bit of a revolving door. Yet there were always new Bosses clamoring to work with me. Even the most senior members of Congress rely on fundraisers, know the value of a good one. That it’s we who connect them to copacetic lobby pocketbooks (like Phil’s and lavisher), filling their reelection coffers while we fill their bellies. We set ourselves apart by bringing the rest of Washington together—and there is real power in our work, in guest lists and seating charts; in tuna tartare and filet mignon. Our pretty little decisions birth alliances and whip votes and above all offer or withhold opportunities for everyone else’s positional reshuffling. Phil was not insensible to this; he was humbled by my power, even as he dismissed my ways and means, and this sharpened a social surface on which his shoulder was already inclined to chip.
He tested what my presence in the elevator foretold—but not on me. Phil readdressed Will instead:
—Do I…take it your Boss will be dropping in at the DEMO-W PAC event next week?
I cut in before Will could answer:
—Will the AASSS double-max if she does?
Even if I hadn’t pronounced it ass, this would not have been particularly kind of me. The American Association of Stone, Sand, and Shale was hardly a plum agency. I doubted Phil had the funds to so much as consider this level of donation. Alas, I had my own incentives like everyone else. Lobbyists pay to attend fundraising events via their political contributions, while members merely bestow the honor of their presence. I’d recently parted ways with a powerful boomer congressman due to “stylistic incompatibility,” saw Maria as a potential client, and wanted Will to understand my event would be well worth her time.
I’ve said Maria was a freshman, and this is true, but it’s important to understand Maria Muñoz was not your average freshman congresswoman. For starters: She was twenty-nine, younger than any of us, and controversial—boldly progressive, with transformational policy proposals. While I hesitate to veer to the physical, to the standards by which even the most brilliant young women are so absurdly, firstly judged, her vision and charisma inevitably benefitted from her beauty. I’m not saying she was a starlet or anything, but on the Hill? If she didn’t have a million followers on Instagram already—if she hadn’t been so immediately, singularly recognizable as her—she would likely have been mistaken for one of us. For a fundraiser, like me.
Go ahead and object. Accuse me of stereotyping, of reinforcing patriarchal norms, of—that most feminine sin—superficiality. The reality is that most stereotypes, like most politicians, harness their power less from abject falsehood than partial truth. In our fear that uncomfortable facts will run wildly away, it becomes taboo merely to observe them: that most fundraisers, on both sides of the aisle, are conventionally attractive women from affluent backgrounds; that this tendency springs not only from mimicry and exclusion from Congress itself, but from a well-groomed competitive advantage: We are uncommonly adept at throwing exquisite parties for powerful men.
I knew Phil’s answer to my double-max bait would be noncommittal yet face-saving, a falsely nonchalant maybe, leaving the donation door ajar, even if just a crack, in Will’s mind.
—Maybe, said Phil. We do like the Green New Deal’s investment in infrastructure.
—Everyone likes infrastructure, I said. That’s why significant bills for it almost never pass.
—I don’t think that’s the reason, said Will, not without humor.
—Yeah, that makes no sense, Phil agreed, with less.
How grating to be dismissed for even the most innocuous insight! But in their shared disbelief, I could see Will coming to reevaluate the AASSS anyway, even if his eyes were presently more focused on mine. I let them travel, my looks subtly reinforcing my event’s appeal in the way I theoretically loathed yet practically cultivated. My suit had all the outward markers of (sartorial) conservatism, but blazers are so ruthlessly unflattering on most women, having been originally designed with men’s bodies in mind, that the act of looking good in one amounts to a disproportionate achievement. That’s the irony of dress codes: They’re intended to be this great equalizer, but ultimately only enhance beauty’s advantage.
Will would see what he could do re: the DEMO-W PAC event. Maria was wary of lobbyists, of big donations; she’d legitimately won her seat through grassroots support, against a powerful incumbent in the primary. The calling card of her campaign was “authenticity”—though what is more authentic to American politics than corporate lobbying, I do not know. But then my event, in support of electing Democratic women to Congress, was as aligned to her brand as a PAC mission could be; Sheila Campau, a fairly senior senator from Michigan and longtime client of mine, was sure to be there, and the only thing that eclipsed Maria’s authenticity was her ambition. She wouldn’t have hired a career staffer like Will van der Wende to run her office otherwise.
Phil soured visibly at being sidelined, the palliative effects of his drive gone before the start of his first meeting. Regressing to a personal topic after broaching business risked feeling desperate, but it was the only plausible move Phil had left.
—Fill out your bracket yet? he asked Will.
—Shit, no, thanks for the reminder. Georgetown is so bad this year, I haven’t really been paying attention. Who do you have winning?
—My Cavaliers, obviously, said Phil, smiling harder to hide the sting of Will’s lapse undercutting his victory.
—Oh right, I forgot you went to Virginia.
—I went there, too, I said.
The conversation halted, Will’s lip half upturning.
—Yeah, right, he said. Everyone knows you went to Harvard.
—That was for my masters. Do you seriously think I don’t know my own bio?
—I can vouch, said Phil. We were at UVa together.
—Oh, okay, said Will, my résumé suddenly clarified.
The elevator stopped.
—By the way, Cassandra, Phil said as he got off, a note of self-congratulation moistening his tongue. Happy Women’s History Month.
He didn’t ask about my bracket, though. Neither of them did, which I’m sure I would have found more offensive had I bothered to fill one out.
* * *
My thoughts about basketball prior to that March, insofar as I thought about basketball at all, hovered somewhere between apathy and condescension. It was not exactly the sport of choice on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, where I grew up. Nor at my boarding school, where crew reigned supreme and most rowers swam in winter. Basketball neither required expensive equipment nor issued cute uniforms. It lacked the invigorating speed of hockey and the psychological appeal of my choice, squash—certainly winter’s most literary sport, with its tennis adjacency and deuce-ly theoretical infinitude.
If several of these points seem like euphemisms for snobbery, for a correlative if not causal sense that basketball could be a bit, mm, lower class, that’s because they are. But none of them had been the foremost absenting force in my lack of interest, either. (Just add it to the list of my image problems.) What I couldn’t abide about basketball was simply the immense advantage it conveyed to being tall. My young mind—having marinated from birth in false meritocracy, the privileged worldview that conveniently attributes material fortune to individual virtue—could not fathom the value of a system placing such great emphasis on something so obviously, so visibly, the result of sheer luck. You can’t teach height, as they say—and what on earth, at five-foot-six, was there to gain from pursuing something one could not learn?
My indifference to play naturally extended to an indifference to watch, an indifference to both collegiate and professional ball. On television, there were too many games for any one to matter; too many games to care. The Knicks were rarely any good, overshadowed by the Giants, let alone the Yankees. Not that I had any great affinity for the Giants or the Yankees either. In the false binary that is sports versus the arts, I had naively declared almost from birth for the latter, my childhood thirst for spectacle quenched not at Madison Square Garden but at Lincoln Center, my competitive impulses already aimed at the page.
No, it was only later that I understood, appreciated, the University of Virginia men’s basketball strategy in 2019, entirely in keeping with head coach Tony Bennett’s signature style of play. That their vicious pack-line defense had the texture of a coloratura soprano’s staccatos, that their long, drawn-out offensive possessions unspooled like paragraphs of Proust. The beauty of good passing; efficiency; patience. Teamwork. Was De’Andre Hunter a superstar, destined to be a top-five NBA draft pick? Undoubtedly. Did his sidelining wrist fracture the previous season fuel UMBC’s historic upset? It couldn’t have helped. But Kyle Guy still averaged slightly more points and steals in 2019, while Ty Jerome had more than twice the assists, disproportionately valued at Virginia. All three of them, I eventually learned, had offensive KenPom ratings above 119. This was a team’s team, and even with Hunter on the court, they were susceptible to the fatal flaw underpinning Bennett’s historical over-performance, to finding themselves on the other side of the protracted narrative grandiosity from which they so often benefit. Namely: that in dramatically slowing the pace, in minimizing the number of shots, the number of possessions, Bennett not only ensured his team could stay in the game with and upset anybody, but—as he attracted increasingly elite talent himself, those handsome Davidian eyes masking a Goliath, a 29–3 regular season, another number-one seed—well, anybody could also upset them.
* * *
—
And so it was not without reason that Phil’s left knee shook violently under the Union Pub’s bar the afternoon following our elevator run-in. He wouldn’t have put it this way, but Virginia’s greatness was also their weakness; their pace a tragic flaw. Ten minutes into their first-round matchup against sixteen-seed Gardner-Webb, and they were already down ten. Gardner-Webb? At least UMBC, even if he’d never heard of it, had the plausible ring of a university; Gardner-Webb sounded like an under-resourced public elementary school. Mamadi Diakite made a layup with his customary grace, offering the psychological assurance of a return to single digits, but three minutes later: disaster. 28–14.
Phil had already correctly predicted Murray State’s win over Marquette—he’d picked three twelve-seeds over fives, actually, a famously treacherous perch for the favorites; he’d called the Minnesota upset (his cousin went there); that Maryland would hang on. He’d had LSU over Yale, of course—Phil did not trust the Ivy League in anything, let alone sports—and powerhouse wins for Michigan State, Purdue, Duke, and their ilk. Twenty final scores, twenty points, twenty little green checkmarks in the app. Maximum possible score: a perfect 192. Ranked first not just in his Republican National Committee and AASSS pools, but—in a 166-way tie—the entire Daedalus Industries NCAA March Madness men’s bracket challenge. None of it would matter if Virginia lost this game. Not only would that hypothetical 192 instantly flip to 129 (his bracket, at this stage, was of secondary consideration); not only would it destroy his enjoyment of the entire tournament. As a man of middling employment and hijacked political party, of tepid performative religion and few other hobbies, whose wife had largely divergent interests, and whose first child’s estimated arrival was still six weeks away—UVa basketball formed a disproportionate share of Phil’s true spiritual identity. He’d already felt the unprecedented pain of losing to a sixteen-seed the year before: the alarmingly personal humiliation of it, the devout shame. He still hadn’t quite recovered. To lose to a sixteen-seed twice? It was unthinkable. It would decimate his pride.
—Sure hope you don’t shit the bed again, said Will van der Wende, sliding onto the stool next to him.
In any other circumstance, Phil would have delighted in the gesture, taken it as a harbinger of professional growth and social ascension. It would have buoyed his entire weekend. Had the Cavaliers been up, Phil might even have cherished the insult, that you indicative of Will’s improving memory and brimming with implicit inclusion. As it stood, however, his crumbling hope in the five talented eighteen- to twenty-two-year-olds on the screen in front of them had taxed his self-control to perilous levels, and Phil wanted to hit him.
—I’m not going to start freaking out until the second half, he said instead.
—Good, because I wanted to see how serious you were about the double-A triple-S backing Maria.
—Uh—yes!
Ty Jerome had hit a jumper, but Gardner-Webb swiftly countered.
Phil was in the sort of rapt psychological distress that is often more visible from across the room than within the confines of a conversation. Indeed, Will seemed to mistake Phil’s genuine distraction as some coy tactic, a feigned imperviousness to his political overture that Will, while privately congratulating himself on seeing through, nonetheless had to admire. Ironically, had Phil been more on his game, he likely would have bumbled through another equivocal non-answer, come off as simultaneously evasive and desperate, and been written off by Will entirely—a disappointment that would not have been wholly avoidable. Maria was a high-risk, high-reward alliance even for me, even for a Democrat. While her support could lend Phil disproportionate visibility to crucial AASSS interests, her status in the court of public opinion far eclipsed her actual political power. And it was only ever in Congress, not in the court of public opinion, that infrastructure lacked support. Personally, Phil had even less to gain. As much as he might have liked to meet the freshman congresswoman for its novelty and clout, it made little sense for him to spend any more time and resources hobnobbing with Democrats than was strictly, AASSS-wise, necessary. The next year was an election year, and, where it was all the same to his employer (or frankly, even close enough), Phil would certainly have preferred to court moderate Republicans. Members and staff of whom he could later conceivably beg a better job.
Phil wasn’t weighing any of this, though, and said nothing—often the very smartest thing a person can say. It was at least the luckiest, in this case. As Kyle Guy hit a three, Will emptied out:
—I hadn’t really thought about it until yesterday, but weirdly, it sort of works. There’s the public works angle, for starters, obviously, but also maybe a union play. Maria’s all about working-class support, and—
Ty Jerome missed a free throw but managed the second. Kyle Guy made two, and Phil started to breathe.
—look, I can’t entirely promise anything because Maria takes unusual control over her calendar, but—
The game went to commercial.
—What? said Phil.
—she is gonna drop by the DEMO-W fundraiser next Wednesday, and if you’re there and can avoid saying anything too moronic, I think I can get you a direct meet.
Phil swiveled toward Will, a tentative smile on his face. This time, he didn’t miss a beat:
—That’d be great.
* * *
—
Virginia cut the lead to six by half and won comfortably by fifteen.
ROUND 2
VIRGINIA (1) VS. OKLAHOMA (9)
When I say I “knew” Phil and Raleigh Fayeton in college, I mean I was technically, and rather against my will, aware of their existence. Admittedly, my collegiate will is less a reflection of their characters than of mine. (Prophets are not infallible; it is only false prophets who claim otherwise.) Raleigh and I were in the same pledge class of the same sorority, which again suggests a closeness that did not exist. Kappa Rho Epsilon consisted of two equally powerful factions in the mid-aughts, united mostly by good orthodontia and trendy jeans. Half of the girls were much like me: temperamentally charismatic, tonally ironic, politically liberal, and disproportionately majoring in art history. The other half coalesced into a glossy-haired Christian hydra, all immaculate fingernails and unrelenting kindness. Several of them, like Raleigh, were in the nursing school, which, however unfairly, had a reputation for being the backdoor into UVa for pretty girls to earn their “MRS” degrees. Every year, two or three of them would get engaged at graduation—though Raleigh didn’t. The practice was generally restricted to those who had made especially public promises to Jesus concerning their virginity, and with Raleigh this was only ever vaguely implied.
Everything about this second KRE contingent was highly disconcerting to me—even the kindness, which I associated at the time with a lack of intellectual rigor—and I remember recoiling, almost to the point of de-pledging, at the thought of my formal association. But then, many of the other girls in my faction felt similarly and were really very fun—and KRE was the only “top-tier” sorority at UVa I could convince myself was not a low-key white supremacist organization. So I stayed, and regularly found myself on the other side of the room at the same social functions as Raleigh and, starting in our second year, her boyfriend Phil Fayeton.
