Doug speeds down Rock Creek Parkway, the remains of Oak Hill Cemetery climbing the hills above him, passing hundred-year-old tombstones, stone crosses, weeping angels, cenotaphs, and mausoleums. One day I will be buried there, he often thinks—with the generals, mayors, bankers, and senators who came before him. Famous men! With the Corcorans and the Grahams! Doug is completely unaware of his delusions of grandeur, just like most people he encounters. He is only certain that he was born a “well-mannered” southern boy, son of the district attorney of Durham, North Carolina. His mother ran the local Sunday school while his father was busy locking up Black and brown people. (Doug doesn’t really get this, of course.)
As Doug slows down to look for the entrance he’s seeking, he remembers his older brother, Ken. Ken was born blind, and Doug blames his mother: despite her religious beliefs, she loved a dirty martini, a Marlboro Red, and Elvis. But Doug’s mother blamed the doctors. During a difficult labor, Ken was pulled out with metal tongs, crushing his soft head. This is the story his mother told, but he never tells. Ken died just before his eighteenth birthday after numerous health problems. His organs were weak. The memory of his mother’s phone call flutters through Doug’s brain—the sound of her rocking on her knees, her sobbing groans letting him know, “He’s dead, he’s dead”—as it often does while he’s alone, driving in his car. The rage he holds for his mother rises in his chest. Ken’s death, the neglect Doug suffered as a child, his father’s empty bottles of bourbon are the instruments of his so-called intimacy issues, Doug’s undying need for power, achievement, and attention from women. The problem was first addressed long before he married Betsy. When Doug was seventeen and he discovered that his mother was having an affair, he decided to fuck the family housekeeper. Days later, his father’s name and paycheck sent her back across the Atlantic to her family in Ghana. They never spoke of it again. And neither did Doug.
He looks down at the address in his phone, then squints at the gold numbers clinging to the side of a redbrick post anchoring two arches of a towering wrought iron gate. Wait a minute. He knows this property! A Vanderbilt, a Mellon—he can’t remember, but it’s tucked high above the park where various gruesome and innocuous things have happened: the rotted flesh of a White House intern found, rape, impassioned lovers, tourists, the laughter of schoolchildren running around Peirce Mill, an old flower plantation where Black people were enslaved and later escaped. The horror and the glamour feed off each other in some diseased symbiosis necessary for making the town of Washington all at once riveting and disturbing.
Doug’s Porsche follows the beaming headlights to the front of the estate, beckoning him as if it were the solution. Tim stands illuminated in between enormous Doric columns with his arms folded: gold Rolex, boat shoes, argyle sweater. Doug parks, gets out, walks up, and shakes his hand. Tim pats him on the back as he leads him inside.
The walls of this mansion are covered in law books, encyclopedia collections, and photographs of foreign diplomats, kings, queens, and presidents—and Jeff Bezos. An original Chagall hangs above the library’s green marble fireplace, near which seven men are seated in Chippendale chairs that form a circle. The men are hard to differentiate from each other, rich white men who are undoubtedly power players. But you’d have to know what kind of car each one drives or the neighborhood in which he lives to truly know who he is: Kalorama, McLean, Chevy Chase, Georgetown. You probably wouldn’t find any of them in Silver Spring, Bethesda, Arlington, or Old Town; those neighborhoods are for the average man at the Pentagon, or worse, the Chamber of Commerce. You might find one in Potomac or Great Falls, but only on acres of land on the cliffs above the Potomac River, and he’s retired and well into his seventies and refuses to admit he’s lost all his money and will soon file for bankruptcy and settle for a condo in Reston, Virginia.
More than half sit in J. Press suits, others in polos and khakis, maybe a red sweater tied around the shoulders. Glasses or mustache or clean-shaven—all have their legs spread, rubbing their hands up and down their knees.
They look up at Doug. “Welcome,” a few mutter, some nodding to acknowledge his existence because he’s important enough to be there. The hero, the lawyer! The man who, before taking office, bailed out the economy (AIG specifically), the man who saved their bonuses! Hear! Hear! The man who knows they’ll return the favor with political funding.
But Doug can’t believe he’s back in this room, and the self-hatred consumes him. His cheeks turn the color of his Nantucket-red pants that are folded in his wife’s cedar closet. He sits in an open Chippendale chair. There’s a book resting on it for him with the engraved initials SAA. But the first thing Doug notices is the tufted ottoman in the center of the circle with various pamphlets fanned out on top of it. It’s the same ottoman his wife circled for him to review in the Kellogg Collection catalogue earlier that morning. He’d forgotten. It was supposed to be confirmed for the dinner they’re hosting tonight. The dinner. Doug panics. The meeting begins.
Jeff, late fifties, gray comb-over, puts his round spectacles on and reads from a binder: “Hi. My name is Jeff, and I am a sex addict. I will be the leader for tonight’s meeting. The focus of this meeting is the eleventh step, which states: ‘Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out.’ ”
Doug glances up from his phone to assure that no one is watching him eviscerate his secretary for not
