It went on like that for a few weeks, us getting drunk with the team, then making out in bars, until I told him we had to knock it off because he had a girlfriend. He broke up with her a couple days later, and he hasn’t left my side since.
My phone buzzes in the cupholder as I come to a stop at a light. A text from Ginny:Left a voicemail. Will be in touch as soon as I hear anything.
You’d think by now I’d be numb to the agony of waiting. But this is more barbaric than an upper-lip wax after a sunburn. I’ve been circling the block for fifteen minutes looking for a parking spot when she finally calls back. (The garage fee in our building is insaneand every dollar counts when you’re saving for a down payment.) I pull over in front of a fire hydrant to take the call.
“Ginny? Tell me everything.”
She lets out a long sigh.
Fuck me.
“I’m sorry, kiddo. We knew this was a long shot. They wanna take it to the open market. But the good news is they’re gonna list it soon and it sounds like it’ll be in your budget… though maybe just barely.”
I mute the phone and scream. A guy walking a French bulldog jumps back from the car.
I take a deep breath and unmute. “Then you know that means we won’t get it. It’ll get bid up. Especially with that kitchen.”
“You’ve seen the kitchen?”
Shit.
“Well, no, but you said your sister-in-law thinks it’s stunning.”
“She could be wrong! You know what I always say, kiddo. If it’s meant to be, it’ll work out.”
Yeah, and look where that strategy has gotten us. It’s time to get creative.
“Maybe I’ll feel more hopeful if I focus on getting to know the neighborhood a little better, you know, sort of like manifesting that I’ll live there one day?” I say, as if I couldn’t draw a map of it from memory. “Where did you say your sister-in-law did yoga? Maybe I’ll check out a class.”
“That’s the spirit, kiddo. Gosh, I can’t remember. Grace something or other?”
“That’s okay, I’ll figure it out. Talk to you later, Ginny.”
I Google “grace yoga grovemont bethesda.” There it is: Power + Grace Yoga, less than five minutes from my dream home.
3
Obviously, I can’t go in cold.
I may have been a flack for the last decade but I still know how to do my research. As soon as I ditch the Prius, I dash back to my tiny desk in our tiny living room and pull up the database of Maryland property records. In the drop-down menu, I select “search by street address.”
Curtis Bradshaw and Jack Lombardi have owned the dream house since 2015—when they paid $730,000 for it. They’re about to make a killing.
Their names are unusual enough that the rest should be easy. I find Curtis’s faculty profile first—he’s an economics professor at Georgetown University, who looks a little like Stanley Tucci. Balding, with severe, black-framed glasses. Good-looking in a nerdy way. Jack, I can tell from his LinkedIn page, is the one I met earlier. He’s in commercial furniture sales.
What happens when I search their names together? Excellent. ANew York Timeswedding announcement from June 2012. They’re about a decade older than me and Ian. Curtis was forty-two when they got married, he’s from Greenwich, and his dad runs a hedge fund (probably explains how they got into theNYT). Jackwas thirty-nine. On the sidewalk this morning, I never would’ve guessed he was almost fifty. He must spend a fortune on skin care. He’s from a small town in Ohio, and his parents were public-school teachers. Good for him. Self-made, just like me.
Okay, on to social media.
This is interesting. Curtis has more than ten thousand Twitter followers. But why? He’s not terribly active or original on the platform—he mostly seems to retweet places like theWall Street JournalandBloomberg.Maybe it’s because of the book he touts in his bio,Falling Apart: How Globalization Kills Quality.He links to the Amazon page: 239 ratings, 3.5 stars.
It came out more than three years ago, in January 2019. I scroll down a ways, and, yep, this must be the reason he amassed a following. He appears to have done a fair amount of press around it, and he clearly has no qualms about self-promotion. In February that year, he tweeted:Smart, incisive convo about Falling Apart with my dear friend Andrew Ross Sorkin on Squawk Box. Give it a watch!with a link to the video.
“Dear friend,” yeah right. Also, “smart” and “incisive” basically mean the same thing.
I click play. “Frankly, somebody should have beaten me to the punch on writing this,” he tells his bestie, Andrew. “All I did was explore a question that every single one of us has probably considered—why does nothing last these days? Everything from our clothes to our furniture feels disposable, and the reason, of course, is global economics.”
I don’t really want to give him a sale, but I add the book to my cart anyway.
