DC By the Book

Excerpt: The Guards was dimly lit, with brass sconces set in velvety red walls. There were white tablecloths to the floor and no prices on my menu. It felt like a place in a movie, exactly the kind of place where a man would bring a woman who’s not his wife.

Excerpt: My apartment building was a modest brick mid-rise, remarkable only for its location across the street from the new Soviet Embassy compound. It was like living in a shack outside the walls of Emerald City. The Soviets had been allowed to build their embassy on the highest hill in Washington. Only the National Cathedral had a better vantage point for spying. The embassy was currently unoccupied, because of all the bugs found in the walls of the new American embassy that was under construction in Moscow. Our embassy had to be torn out and rebuilt, and until it was done, bug-free, the Soviets were barred from occupying theirs. Even so, it was “monitored” twenty-four hours a day by men with coiled wires trailing out of their ears. Secret Service, they told me when I asked. I saw them whenever I came and went, including that night, when I got out of the cab under the security lights at my building’s entrance. They waved.

Excerpt: A tall fence will at best deter the deer who mistake my backyard for Rock Creek park, and at worst annoy my neighbors, with their split rail that won’t stop a rabbit. As if they’re on a ranch instead of our tidy enclave tucked between DC’s largest urban park and one of its primary avenues. Our sedate street lined with old oaks could trick you into thinking of suburbia. The detached houses are set farther apart than in some other neighborhoods, and it’s mostly quiet. The traffic - commuters from the actual suburbs passing on their way to and from the business district - sounds more like the tides on a beach, dampened by the stately apartment buildings that overlook the avenue. But the trees’ roots raise and crack the sidewalks, and their branches interfere with power lines that criss-cross among our neat brick houses like a botched game of cat’s cradle. And they city, invisible though it may be from here, does come to us. The neighbors may like to imagine they’re home on the range, but they’ve made one concession to reality - there are bars on their basement windows.

Excerpt: Wesley and Kim lived in a row house near Dumbarton Oaks. Wesley’s father built golf courses for a living. I don’t think Wesley did anything at all. The room where they invited us to sit was called the “parlor.” It was formal and full of antiques. There were coasters with green felt on the bottom and pictures of horses and riders in pinks on the top. Wesley and Kim were dressed casually, and all of us seemed out of place, as if at any moment a docent would appear to take us on a guided tour of the house and its furnishings.