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Chapter Seven The House in Bethesda

Chapter Seven

The House in Bethesda

There is a kind of house in and around D.C. that is very nice, very well kept, spacious, fully updated, and gorgeous from the street, but carries a horse-chokingly high price that still seems impossible to justify. When Molly and Pete had been looking, sometimes an app would send her one of these houses as a suggestion, and she would send it to me with a series of exclamation points under it.

Eliza Cassidy lived in this kind of house.

It wasn’t convenient to public transit (they often aren’t), so on Sunday morning, I took a cab. When the driver pulled into the driveway, he said, “House looks haunted.” I tipped him, thanked him, and climbed out with my kit and my bag.

It did not look haunted to me, except maybe by capitalism. It was a great big colonial with a wide garage at the end of the driveway and a porch that spanned the front of the house and surrounded an elaborate entrance. The landscaping was all trimmed as precisely as a prize poodle, with a stretch of red flowers planted along the walkway to the front door. A black door knocker in the shape of a heart was surrounded by a dried-flower wreath. I knocked.

Eliza opened the door, and she looked the same as the first time I saw her, except without the ponytail and the cap. Yoga pants, slouchy sweatshirt, perfect makeup, instant smile. “Hi hi hi,” she said. “Good morning! Come on in! Take off your shoes!”

This was the whitest house I had ever seen. Her entry and kitchen floors were white. Her walls and her fireplace were white. Her rugs were white. Her couches were white. Her accent color, used on a few pillows and a chair, was gray.

On one of the walls of the entrance hall, there was a wedding photo the size of a movie poster. On the wall opposite, she’d hung framed copies of three magazine covers on which she was featured. It was her very own Museum of the Self, an exhibit of her successes—greatest among them, her marriage. I suppose if you had a business based on your ability to, say, bake cakes, you might decorate with a picture of one of your towering creations covered with buttercream flowers and sculpted fondant.

“Let’s sit in the nook,” she said. “It’s sunny in there.” I had seen houses with breakfast nooks before, but I wasn’t sure I’d ever heard anybody call one “the nook.” We passed through her enormous kitchen—white, white, white, and white with white trim—to a light wood table with a bench on one side and chairs on the other. It was the nookiest nook I had ever seen, with giant windows that really did pour sun through the whole space. She picked up a remote, and a translucent blind whirred halfway down until we didn’t have glare in our eyes. “Cool, huh?” she said with a little grin. She already had a French press of coffee sitting on the table. “Have a seat, I’ll get some milk and stuff.”

She came back and set down a little pitcher. “It’s oat, I hope that’s okay. I love oat milk. I used to like soy, and then I switched to almond, but I think oat is my favorite. Do you like oat?”

“Anything that makes it beige is fine,” I said.

“I like your flexibility,” she said as she poured two mugs of coffee and pushed one toward me. “So.”

“Your house is really beautiful,” I said. “I couldn’t keep a house this clean if my life depended on it.”

“Oh, I couldn’t either,” she said. “We have a team. They come in as soon as we leave for New York and they do everything, so by the time we get back, I feel like we’re checking in to a hotel. I love it.”

“Is it hard to keep everything like this? The white couches and stuff?”

She laughed and pushed her hair behind her ear on one side. “No pets, no kids, no shoes. And we don’t drink anything in the living room but clear liquids. Only white wine indoors.” She pointed at a wine fridge built into the kitchen island. “Red wine is only for outside on the deck.”

My mind went to the time I had tripped in my own living room while holding a glass of merlot and a takeout container of baked ziti, both of which I then spent an hour cleaning out of the upholstery and the carpet. Was this how other people did it? Were they just made this way? It was hard to believe she had ever tripped over anything, with or without wine in her hands. “Well,” I said, “it’s all gorgeous.”

“Thank you. Are you excited to get started?”

“I am,” I said. “I’m nervous, but I figure you can’t do any worse at this than I’m doing.”

She nodded. “I’ll tell you what I tell every client at the beginning of the process. I’m in your corner, I’m on your team, I’m with you. There’s nothing wrong with wanting love. We all want love. I’m no different. I wanted love, and I worked hard to get it, and I did. I found somebody who shares my goals and affirms me and wants the same things out of life that I want.”

Like a perfectly white living room that requires you to drink broth and apple juice like you’re prepping for a colonoscopy, I did not say.

“People want to know what makes me the right person to do all this,” she went on. “I just tell them: look around.” She paused. She actually looked around. “And they get it. That’s why I post a lot of pictures of me and Cody. It’s why he’s in my videos. That’s why I’m everywhere on my site. We all are walking demos of whether what we’re doing is working. And what I’m doing is working. Like I said, I’m not any more special than you are. You’re a special person, I can tell. So I know it can work for you, too.”

I could see over her shoulder into the hall. I could see her wedding picture. She was standing on the beach barefoot, her head thrown back laughing, lifting her skirt above the sand. Cody faced her, leaning toward her laugh, grinning with a champagne flute in one hand, ready to splash bubbles onto the ground. They weren’t touching, but they looked joined by the laugh and the smile. I could see to the refrigerator, where more photos of them were hung with magnets—they were at dinner, they were at a party, they were with a bunch of other, less glamorous people. He was working out, she was working out, they were embracing.

“I’m ready,” I said. “Let’s do it.” When I looked down at my coffee, I saw grounds floating on top. But nobody is good at everything.

—

As she led me up the wide staircase, she told me the house had five bedrooms, and I counted them in my head. There had to be a large primary suite in a house like this; a stand-up shower and double sinks, maybe a soaker tub, too, and probably his-and-hers skincare fridges. There would be a guest bedroom, although if I ever stayed in this house as a guest, I would have to wear a hazmat suit the whole time to avoid smudging anything. There had to be a gym. There had to be an office, a place she could park a laptop and go over sponsorship deals. That left one, and of course, it was the content studio.

It was a big room, bigger than the bedrooms in any house I’d lived in. The walls were a warm white, and on two sides they were covered in gray foam acoustic panels. Ring lights and softboxes were on stands in one corner, flanking a fat blue sofa I recognized from her YouTube videos. Over the sofa was a light-up sign in script that said Choose You . A white desk sat near a window, with another set of lights nearby. There was a set of shelves behind the desk that had room for plants, a plaque she’d been sent for having so many followers, and a framed ECFitness logo. “I don’t record everything here,” she said. “I also sometimes use a studio over in Silver Spring. But I can do a lot without even leaving the house.”

One corner was closed in with room dividers, and when I peeked in, there were two chairs. Two mics on stands. “That’s the podcast studio,” she said. “That’s where I made mine when I had it,” she said.

“But you stopped?”

“Yeah, it was Nowheresville compared to video, video’s the future,” she said flatly. “No offense.”

“Oh, none taken,” I said. “I wouldn’t have lasted a week in this job if I got offended when people thought it was Nowheresville.” Troublingly, Toby often said similar things, that video was the future, and I feared that this meant I would eventually be transported over to the blue sofa against my will. Away from my comfortable home in Nowheresville.

We settled into the tiny den. She had good mics that were sitting unused, so I plugged them into my recorder, put on my headphones, and checked our levels. She was much better at levels than Miles; she might have been a relative newbie, but she’d had enough experience with some real producer somewhere that she claimed to have had pizza, a parfait, and a shamrock shake for breakfast. I stopped talking and stopped breathing, and I turned up the volume in my headphones to make sure I couldn’t hear a refrigerator, or an air conditioner, or a hum or a buzz or a whoosh or a hiss. I started rolling.

“Tell me your name and what you do.” This was my go-to first question for anybody who was going to talk to me about their work. I wasn’t sure what she would even list as her job until the words “I’m Eliza Cassidy, and I’m an author, a content creator, and a romantic life coach” came out of her mouth. It made her sound like she consulted on Valentine’s Day gifts or planned dates for The Bachelor. Or, honestly, like she really was a sex coach.

“I’m not sure people know exactly what a romantic life coach is,” I said.

“In my case, I work with women who want more love in their lives. I give them support and training to be the best version of themselves, and then I arrange some dates for them to help reset their idea of what kind of person might be right for them.”

“Where do you find the men you arrange these dates with?”

“I have a network,” she said. “That’s where most of them come from. People I know, people I’ve worked with, people I meet at events. But I’ll sometimes walk up to guys I see at the gym or while I’m out around the city. And then once I have the lead, I vet people before I do anything. They’re all screened personally byme.”

“And what are you screening for?”

“Qualities,” she said. I kept looking at her, waiting for her to continue, name a few of these qualities. But she didn’t. Instead, she said, “Now tell me who you are and what you do.” It was effortless the way she turned it, like she was flipping a fish filet.

“My name is Cecily, I’m an audio editor and producer, and I live in D.C.”

“Are you in a relationship?”

“I’m single.”

“When did your last relationship end?”

“I broke up with my boyfriend about four years ago. I know that’s a really long time. We’d been together for about five years. Since then, nothing I’d call a relationship.”

“How about not-relationships? People you went out with more than once. When was the last time?”

“April. April fifteenth.” Possibly I shouldn’t have had that date at the very top of my mind, but there it was.

“And how did it end?”

Ben and I had been set up by a friend of his who worked at Palmetto. We’d gone out four times. He took me to an axe-throwing bar on our first date, and he was very good at axe-throwing, which I suppose impressed me, because you never know when you might need a guy who can kill a monster in a cartoon dungeon. Every time we went out, it was benevolent but weapons-adjacent—we played paintball with his friends, he tried to teach me archery, and we went to an exhibit of historical swords. I sensed a theme that wasn’t quite right for me and was about to pull the plug, but on April 15 he announced that he didn’t think we were well suited to each other. It was tax day, and he said paying his taxes always made him think about the future.

Here is what I said to Eliza: “He took me axe-throwing, and then he said he didn’t think we were well suited to each other.”

“Okay. Tell me about another one.”

Keith, another one I had gone out with four times. This was a short story: He happened to catch me at a very stressful time at work, and I bored him to death talking about podcasts. The ones I worked on, the ones I didn’t, the ways they should be better, the ways that the economic model was broken, the future of the industry. He had noticed, he said, that one of my main interests seemed to be discussing shows that would be better if I worked on them. I maintain, by the way, that every show I told him I could have improved, I in fact could have improved. He ghosted me. It’s my fault I know how to cut interview tape?

I told her, “He was put off by my attachment to my job.”

“Okay, who else?”

Molly had set me up with Logan. He had gone to college with Pete. He was kind and smart, he was attentive and had interesting things to say, and we went out four times. But then we had sex, and I didn’t enjoy sex with him at all. It wasn’t some specific move that I was getting or that I wasn’t getting. It was the whole thing; it was not sexy. I felt dutiful. Molly pleaded with me not to give up quite yet; she thought maybe I wasn’t turned on by him because he was so nice, and if I gave it time, I’d get over my unmovedness. But I don’t really believe in bad sex. If choosing to have sex with someone should give them confidence in anything, it should be that you are happy about it.

“I ended that one, just incompatibility,” I said. “They’re all like that. Just little things, things that don’t work. It’s happened a bunch of times.”

“Okay. I get the gist. Tell me about the boyfriend.”

I pretended to search my mind, like I barely remembered it.

—

When I was working in radio at a station in New York after college, Justin had the cube next to mine. We were both production assistants who had started as interns, and I would hear him on the phone trying to book interviews for pieces reporters were working on. He’d swear in frustration while he was cutting tape, which we all did, but he did it very softly and very creatively. One day he was having trouble with an edit, and I heard him say, “Oh, smack a wet turtle.” I laughed, and he heard me from over the cube wall and apologized sheepishly. I called out that it was no problem, and then we were friends.

He’d come by my desk and linger, asking for help with his time card or our buggy digital publishing system. Or, as time went on, he would bring me a problem he was trying to solve in a story. Who to call, how to get them on the phone, how to recover a file he thought he might have lost. In my first real job, my one retail job, I’d been the only one who knew how to fix the register tape. Now I was the only one who knew how to repair his corrupted files so he could import them.

It’s tempting to say, in retrospect, that this was why he liked me or why we started dating, that he was taking advantage of me and letting me do his work for him. But we were well-matched in a way I’d never been with anyone. He was at ease with strangers, which I wasn’t. I was detail-oriented and organized, which he wasn’t. He wanted enormous things for himself, master-of-the-universe stuff I wouldn’t have even been able to visualize. And back then, I knew how to put one foot in front of the other to get the next apartment, the next assignment, or the next ticket to the next show in a way that he was too impatient, too eager to stomp on the gas pedal already, to work out. And at the time, whatever we could hear in headphones was the whole world, to us both.

One night after work, we went to dinner, we got a little tipsy, I went back to his apartment, and then we were a couple. We were the same obsessives as always. We went to talks about the future of audio in the evening, we went to networking events, and we went to listening parties and launch parties for new shows, where he’d work the room while I stood by the bar and checked my phone.

When my lease ended, he asked me if I wanted to move into his apartment, which he complained constantly was too expensive and only getting more so by the day. I said yes. We both ended up getting laid off about a year later, and by then, Rob and Toby had started Palmetto down in D.C., and Rob recruited me. At around the same time, one of the D.C. news operations was ramping up its podcasting, and Justin managed to get a job with them, so we left New York and came down and got an apartment in Logan Circle.

One night when his brother was in town, the two of them were talking about how they couldn’t get their dad, who was bored and in his late sixties, to give up his obsession with his police scanner. He would sit for hours just listening to it, and whenever his sons called him, they’d end up hearing a series of tales about this neighbor who had a break-in, or this chase that went down the middle of the street near the bank.

After his brother had left, I was brushing my teeth in our bathroom while Justin played something noisy on the PS4, and I said, “I wonder if that’s a show. The police scanner.” And so we bought one.

Our idea was that each episode would spring from our own listening at our apartment. We would use something we heard as the beginning, and then we’d spin from there. We’d do it on our own time, so we could control it. And so we started, just the two of us, doing everything ourselves.

The more unimportant the story seemed, the more we loved finding the curious details. We split the work pretty evenly at first, but then he was promoted, and his day job took up more time. So I worked the most brutal schedule I’d ever worked in my life, doing a lot of the reporting on evenings and weekends, crisscrossing the neighborhoods of D.C. and Maryland and Virginia, talking to people about bar fights and domestic arguments and break-ins.

I hated my voice at the time. One voice coach wrote to me after I did an on-air story, insisting she could fix several things she said were wrong with it. In all the time I was working with Justin, nobody ever said anything about his voice at all.

So when we got serious about writing scripts and turning all the reporting for Scanner Stories into a show, we decided that he would be the host. Scanner Stories became, to the people who heard it, Scanner Stories with Justin Dash. And that was how it began. “This is Scanner Stories, I’m Justin Dash.” It came out at the precise moment when the right combustible combination of audio weirdos and media nibbles could launch you into a surprising level of admittedly niche success, and that’s exactly what happened. A year after we started, he was interviewed by The New York Times. I was not.

I feel compelled to explain how very much I loved him, and how very happy I was living with him, and how very confidently I assumed that we were going to get married and become the first couple of independent podcasting. Because if I don’t explain that, it’s impossible to explain why I allowed him to say in the credits, “Produced and edited by Justin Dash, with production help from Cecily Foster.” He thanked his buddy who wrote the music, he thanked our friends who threw in a little bit of extra editing advice or engineering. And he thanked me. When I first saw his script, I wanted to tell him he could not say, “production help.” I needed to be listed as the editor, not to mention a reporter; it had never occurred to me that I wouldn’t be.

But I loved him very much, and I believed, in that way that you sometimes do when someone has nursed you through sickness and cheered you up on your worst days, that our successes inured to the benefit of us both. I believed we were standing together inside a small circle, and the benefits of this labor of love would puff into the air like flower petals and blanket us equally. There wasn’t any reason to make a fuss about it.

The show grew. I wanted to take it to Palmetto, see if they could do anything with it, but Justin was adamant that we keep control of it. So we stayed independent, and we did about as well as you could do that way. By the time the third season started, Justin had created a new company called Dot Dash, complete with new business cards and a new logo made from two interlocked D s. But I was long gone by then, because it was at the end of making the second season that he had said, “I don’t think I love you anymore.”

I was numb when this happened, I was empty, I was lost. I felt like I was made of dried leaves that would crumble if touched. I wanted to get away from him, never think about him again, never remember him.

About a week after I moved out, he released a new episode we’d been working on. Published it by himself, put it out there, and that was it. And there was no part of me that had either the will or the ability to challenge his assumption that the show would go with him and not with me. We had no formal arrangement. I had kept working a day job to support us after he quit his job to concentrate on it. He had signed the contracts. He knew the business guys. To me, it had always been ours, but to him, it had always been his, and when it couldn’t be ours anymore, I had lost before I even knew there was a fight to have. I was deleted from the best and most successful work I had ever done.

—

“Well, my longest relationship was with somebody I worked with. We were together for about five years. But it just didn’t work out. We had worked together some, and that’s always hard. But I’m not sure I have a specific explanation.”

She nodded and clearly did not believe me, which admittedly was to her credit, since I was not telling the truth. “How did the end of that relationship affect you?”

“It was very difficult.” There was a long pause that I resisted the urge to fill.

“Okay. Maybe we’ll come back to it. Are your parents still together?”

“Mm, they’re together-ish,” I said. “They travel a lot. And these days, a lot of the time, it’s not to the same places. But they end up back at home every time, so yes, I suppose they are still together.”

“In terms of what’s right for you, what are you looking for in a relationship? What does love look like?”

“I think I want a lot of the things that everybody wants, which is part of what makes it so hard. I want a sense of humor. Intelligence. Kindness. Some concern about the world. Some sense that he’s passionate about things.” And not too much interest in weapons. And no self-referential tattoos. And don’t get mad at me because I think about my job in the middle of the night.

“Nothing for you?” she said.

“What do you mean?”

“Well, I asked you what love looks like to you, and you described a person. You said he would be funny, smart, kind, and passionate about things. But you didn’t describe the relationship itself. You didn’t say how he would treat you, or what being together would look like. Do you see what I mean? You described a person you see yourself loving, but not what it would look like for them to love you.”

Well, hell. “I guess I want someone I can talk to,” I said. “Someone I like spending time with who’s interested in at least some of the same things I am.”

“Okay. But that’s also how you’d describe a friend, right?”

“In some ways.”

“So how, specifically, do you want romantic love to feel when you’re together? How do you want it to make you feel?”

I shifted in my seat. “Sexy.”

“Okay, good start. What else?”

“Special. Happy.”

“Safe?”

“Of course.”

“Treasured?”

I winced. “That is a weird word. Valued, maybe.”

“What’s wrong with being treasured?”

“There’s nothing wrong with it,” I said. “It just makes me feel like a…shiny thing.”

“You have a sister, right?”

“Yes.”

“Would you say you treasure your sister?”

“Yes.”

“Does that mean you’re treating her like a shiny thing?”

“Well, no.”

“Why is it okay for her to be treasured and not you?”

This—not just that she said it, but that I felt splayed open like a dissected frog and I was tempted to thank her—was the moment when I understood why Eliza Cassidy had a five-bedroom house in Bethesda and an apartment in Manhattan.

—

I left her house with about an hour and a half of tape, which I sent to Abby, who had worked on Otter Tail for Toby and knew all about what he was looking for. Two hours later, she wrote me back in the way only a terrific producer can: She’s great. It’s boring in the parts where she’s trying to get you to talk and you’re stonewalling her, but she knows her stuff. Great talker. Looking forward to more.

The next morning, I was on the bus to work when I saw a headline: Is Audio Dead?

It was just a clickbait headline, I told myself. It was an overreaction to normal amounts of contraction that followed any boom. But as I skimmed it for names I knew, I crashed into one sentence like a train into the side of a mountain. Rumors of layoffs are particularly loud at Palmetto Media, which produced the very popular Otter Tail and Cheats, but has been struggling lately. “We desperately need a hit,” said one Palmetto exec, noting that hopes are high for a project coming in the spring aimed at a younger female audience.

Inside my head, a siren started to wail.