Necessary People

by Anna Pitoniak

  “You don’t get to choose them,” he said, but his bashful smile showed real pride.

  The week before I started at KCN, Stella’s mother asked me to meet her at the apartment to discuss the—as she put it—“arrangement.”

  It was a gorgeous two-bedroom on a leafy block in the West Village. A chef’s kitchen, a wood-burning fireplace, a terrace, a doorman. Anne and Thomas Bradley had their waterfront mansion in Rye, but they were looking ahead to retirement, to eventually wanting a pied-à-terre in the city. At least, this was their excuse for buying Stella the apartment. Even the wealthy feel pressure to justify these kinds of decisions.

  “Violet,” Anne said, kissing my cheek. The kitchen was empty except for her Birkin bag, resting on the white marble counter. “So nice to see you.”

  Living with Stella was the only way I could afford to be in New York. After graduation, Stella planned to travel with friends for an indefinite stretch. She was in Cannes, then Lake Como, then wherever the wind took her. “But so what?” Stella had said. “Obviously you should move in right away. That’s what the apartment’s there for, isn’t it?”

  Anne Bradley seemed to see things differently. From her bag she pulled a folder, and from the folder a stapled document. “We took the liberty of drawing up an agreement,” Anne said. “Just to formalize things.”

  “Okay,” I said. There were several pages filled with dense clauses and subclauses. As I attempted to decipher the first paragraph, Anne slid a pen across the counter.

  “Could I read the whole thing through?” I said. “Just to be sure.”

  “Oh,” Anne said. Then she smiled. “Take all the time you need.”

  From what I could tell, it looked like a standard tenant agreement. But on the last page, a number jumped out: fifteen hundred dollars per month in rent, to be paid no later than the first of the month, by check or wire transfer to Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Bradley.

  I swallowed. When her parents first came up with this idea and I’d asked Stella how much my rent would be, she’d shrugged and said, “I don’t know. Nothing, probably.” I should have known, by now, that Stella’s assurances were worthless. Her parents controlled the money, not her. Or maybe, to her, fifteen hundred was nothing. But still, the price came as a shock.

  “Everything okay?” Anne said. The pen was in my hand but hadn’t yet touched paper.

  I took a deep breath. “Mrs. Bradley, I’ll be honest. I can’t afford this. After taxes, I’m only bringing home about fourteen hundred a month with this internship.”

  “Oh!” she said. “Oh, Violet, I didn’t realize. We’ll change it, of course.”

  “Thank you,” I said. “I really appreciate your understanding.”

  “What would work for you? Let’s see. What if we halved it to seven hundred fifty?”

  I ran through the mental calculation. Seven hundred fifty on rent, plus two hundred on student loans. That left four hundred and fifty to live on. Fifteen dollars a day. I’d walk to work; I’d eat cheap. Tight, but I could manage.

  “That would be great,” I said.

  “Oh, good,” Anne said. “Phew.”

  “Should I just cross this out?” I said, pointing at the number. “And write in seven fifty?”

  “Well.” Her smile slackened. “Actually, why don’t you give me that. I’ll have our lawyer type up a new version. It’s more official that way.”

  But the process dragged out. Anne e-mailed me with updates. Just waiting for our lawyer to revise the agreement, she wrote. Then, I have the agreement! Thomas wants to look it over one more time. And then, I’m sorry for the bother, Violet, but could you please send us your employment letter from KCN?

  Can you talk for a sec? I texted Stella. By this point I was staying at the apartment, in a sleeping bag on the floor, but Anne and Thomas probably only agreed to this because I had nowhere else to go. An employment letter? Did they think I was scamming them? I felt mildly panicked. If the Bradleys decided to pull the plug, I had no other plan.

  Stella would reassure me. She would laugh and say that her parents were crazy, we just had to humor them. You know how rich people are, she’d say. Obsessed with every dollar. If she ever texted me back, that is—which she didn’t. She often forgot to check her phone, and while she was frolicking in Europe, who could blame her? But her silence stung a little.

  In the end, it was fine. I signed the revised agreement and handed it to Anne. She nodded, her lips set in a tight line. “Thanks for your patience, Violet,” she said, tucking the papers into her bag. “You see, Thomas pointed out that it’s a…somewhat unusual arrangement.”

  I wrinkled my brow, offered a vague smile of puzzlement.

  “Stella isn’t living here, after all,” Anne said. “It’s a bit odd, don’t you see?”

  “But she’ll be back soon,” I said.

  “You’re practically like a second daughter, of course. But still. It’s a big expenditure. The maintenance alone! Well, you know what it’s like in New York.”

  It’s official, I texted Stella that night. I am a tenant of Anne and Thomas Bradley.

  Lol, she texted back. Now you know how I feel.

  Where are you, anyway? I wrote, hoping to catch her while her phone was still in her hand. But there was no response. Not that day, or the next day, or the day after.

  In September, one of Frontline’s senior producers quit. The gossip was that he had waited until Rebecca returned to give notice, in the hopes that she would make some grand gesture to counter his offer from another network. Instead she told him goodbye and good luck. Rebecca valued loyalty.

  This created a ripple effect. Jamie was promoted to senior producer. Someone was promoted to fill his old job. It resulted in an opening for an assistant, a job with a real salary and benefits and security. To say that each of us interns wanted that job was like saying that America wanted to beat the USSR during the Cold War. It was a question of existential purpose.

  “Are you busy right now?” I said, stopping by Jamie’s desk one afternoon. There were several rungs between us, but I still went to him with my constant questions. Plus, we were becoming something like friends.

  “Always,” he said, typing on his phone. “What’s up?”

  “I need some career advice.” I lowered my voice and glanced around. The newsroom was competitive but not cutthroat, so you couldn’t be too blatant. “I want that assistant job.”

  He laughed. “Oh? I never would have guessed.”

  “What can I do to make sure I get it?”

  He put his phone down. “Memorize the difference between a cappuccino and a cortado. The other interns just don’t seem to get it.”

  “Very funny.”

  “Partly it’s luck. But you should try to make yourself indispensable. It needs to be you that producers think of when they need something done, not someone else.”

  The vacant desk sat there like a shiny prize. There was no urgency in making a decision. At this point, several of us interns were capable of carrying out the work of an assistant. There was script-running and lunch-fetching, but there were also the complex systems that we had finally mastered: searching the archive, pulling stock images, monitoring alerts in iNews. Every minute of programming required a staggering amount of technical work. It wasn’t hard, but it was finicky, and a lot of it trickled down to us.

  The lack of timeline drove some of the interns crazy. A few of them quit. That just showed they weren’t cut out for the work. If you wanted predictability, this was the wrong business.

  “Is it a test?” I asked Jamie, at one point. “Like, Survivor: Newsroom Edition?”

  He laughed. “Really? There’s a hurricane in the gulf and two wars in the Middle East and wildfires in California. You think the bosses have time to think about the interns?”

  “Fair enough,” I said.

  One day I walked past the empty desk and noticed that the phone was ringing. No one else made a move to answer it, so I sat down and picked up. “KCN, this i
s Violet speaking.”

  “Who?” the voice shouted. “Never mind. We’ve got a big problem. I’ve got the camera crew here and I’ve got this lady mic’d and lit but she’s getting cold feet.” His voice was familiar: one of the field producers. “Major problem. We’re going to have to scrap this from the rundown.”

  “Don’t hang up,” I said. “I’m going to put you on hold, okay?”

  I sprinted to find the senior producer for the segment. Her eyebrows shot up when I relayed the message. “What else did he say?” she said. “What were the exact words?”

  “I’ve got him on line three,” I said, pointing at her blinking phone.

  “Oh!” she said. “Nice. Thank you.”

  I wound up as the go-between all day, bringing scribbled messages to the senior producer when she was in meetings, relaying precise instructions back to the field producer. It was such a scramble that when the editor was cutting the tape, the producer asked me to record the scratch track, the narration that the reporter—who was en route back from the field—would later replace with his own voice. In the end, the interview was salvaged. Hours of frenzy were distilled into a neat three-minute package in the C block. After the broadcast, the senior producer thanked me and said, “It’s Violet, right? Good work today.”

  The next week, the job was mine.

  What’s our address? Stella texted me one morning that fall.

  It was a busy day at work, and by evening I had forgotten about the text, or what her reason for it might be. When I got home, the lights were on. A pair of ballet flats and a quilted jacket were discarded near the front door. “Stella?” I called out.

  A girl emerged from the kitchen. A brunette, who I didn’t recognize. “Are you the roommate?” she said. “Stella mentioned you might be here.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “But who are you?”

  “A friend of hers,” she said. She was wearing an oversize button-down and, apparently, no pants. There was a cigarette between her fingers, with a delicate column of ash. “She said I could crash for the night.”

  “You can’t smoke in here,” I said automatically, thinking of paragraph 5, subparagraph B, in my agreement with the Bradleys.

  She took another drag. “Seriously?” she said, stretching out the word. Bad vocal fry.

  “It’s their apartment, not mine,” I said.

  “I can see that.” She stared at me appraisingly, like she was sizing up an untagged item at the flea market. I followed her into the kitchen, where she flicked her cigarette into the sink and opened the refrigerator. “Don’t you have anything to drink?” she said, scanning the shelves. “Don’t you live here?”

  “How do you even know Stella?” I said.

  “Isn’t Stella the best?” she said. Her purse had spilled its contents across the kitchen counter. Lipstick, eyeliner, crumpled bills, matchbooks. She lit another cigarette. There were always girls like this, blasé and affectedly cool, who buzzed around Stella like flies around rotting fruit. They made me feel prickly, territorial. Stella was mine, not theirs.

  The girl said she was only spending one night. But that turned into two nights, and three. I couldn’t help texting Stella to vent. Not that I had any grounds to complain; she’d invited this girl, after all. And this was her apartment. But that night my phone rang.

  “Is she still there?” Stella said, the connection clear despite the ocean between us.

  “Yup,” I said. From down the hall came the smell of cigarette smoke and the tinny sound of a TV show playing on her computer.

  “What the fuck?” Stella said. “Go get her. Put me on speaker.”

  “Oh,” the girl said, startling when I opened the door.

  “Hey,” Stella said. “I said you could stay one night. One. Why are you still here?”

  The girl glanced back and forth between me and the phone in my outstretched hand. Her eyes went wide. Her mouth opened and closed, swallowing her panic.

  “Hel-lo?” Stella said. “Can anyone hear me?”

  “We’re here,” I said. “But it seems our friend is at a loss for words.”

  “You told on me?” the girl hissed.

  “Violet happens to be honest,” Stella said. “She happens to be a good person. The kind of friend who warns you about shady shit like this.”

  “You should really pack your things,” I said, almost laughing at the look on this girl’s face. “I’ll ask the doorman to get you a cab.”

  “See how nice she is?” Stella said. “I would’ve just thrown your crap out the window.”

  Stella insisted on staying on the phone until the girl had gone. “Chop-chop,” she kept saying, her voice beaming through the black screen. When the front door finally closed behind the girl, both of us burst out laughing.

  “God,” I said. “Thank you.”

  “Are you kidding?” Stella said. “That was fun.”

  “She was the worst.”

  “The worst. I mean, I barely know her. She was in Cap d’Antibes a month ago, same time as me. I owed her one.”

  “Owed her for what?”

  “We were on this guy’s yacht. He was a creep. He wouldn’t leave me alone. She made an excuse so that we could leave.”

  “Ah,” I said. “That trick. Instant case of food poisoning?”

  Stella laughed. “It’s just not the same without you, Violet.”

  We talked for a long time that night. Stella was a natural storyteller, and traveling had given her plenty of material. The jealousy that had accrued over the past few days, listening to this girl talk about Stella (they were so much alike, they were always on the same wavelength, you know?), washed away. This was just the long-distance phase of our relationship—that’s what Stella said. We knew couples from college who had moved to different cities on opposite coasts, determined that nothing would change. “They can do it, why can’t we?” she said. “It’s only temporary.” I didn’t want to point out how much work it took. How rare it was that both people put equal energy into maintaining the relationship.

  “Wait, so where are you? In France?” I asked.

  “Paris,” she said. “Currently lingering on the balcony, avoiding the world’s dullest dinner party. Guess what I’m looking at right now.”

  “The Eiffel Tower?”

  She laughed. “How did you know? What about you, what are you doing?”

  I looked down at my pajamas, at the sponge in my hand, which I was using to wipe down the kitchen counters. It was immensely satisfying to have the apartment to myself again, to restore order to it. “Cleaning the kitchen,” I said.

  “That’s my girl,” she said.

  It could have been a split screen in a movie, two women in opposite settings. Both of us had been itching to graduate, bored with school for different reasons. But even as Stella told me more about Paris, the shopping and the beautiful people and the dinner parties that began at midnight, it struck me that I didn’t want to be there. I missed her, but I was happy with this life in New York, this sense of succeeding on my own terms.

  She wasn’t sure when she was coming home. She wasn’t sure if she was coming home. The European lifestyle suited her. This she said jokingly, but also not. Climbing into bed that night, I thought of Anne Bradley handing me the paperwork. An unusual arrangement. Luck can vanish as suddenly as it appears. If Stella never came back, would they keep subsidizing this apartment just for me?

  “She wants a hard copy of the script in front of her,” one of the producers said. “Run it down to the studio, will you?”

  “Rebecca does?” I said.

  “Who else!” the producer barked. “Pronto.”

  In the weeks since her return, I’d only seen Rebecca from afar, through the glass walls of the conference room, or coming and going from her corner office. When I pushed open the swinging door to Studio B, where she was sitting at the anchor desk, she looked up from her phone right away. “Who is that? Is that my script?”

  It was hot under the bright stage
lights. “Here you are, Ms. Carter.”

  She had intense green eyes, the color of spring. “It’s Rebecca. Never Ms. Carter, got that? Ms. Carter makes me sound like a middle school principal.”

  “Sorry. Rebecca.”

  “You’re new, aren’t you? What’s your name?”

  “Violet Trapp.”

  “Violet, could you be a hero and get me a tea? The throat-coat kind they have in the green room. I keep telling them to tone it down with the air-conditioning, but they won’t listen to me. Even though my name is on the damn set—isn’t that right, Hank?”

  “That’s right.” Hank, the floor director, nodded. “Buncha assholes.”

  When I returned a few minutes later, Rebecca was marking up the script. Her eye flicked to the tea I slid in front of her, but she didn’t look up. She was in the zone. “Thank you,” she murmured.

  “Thirty seconds!” Hank shouted. He turned to me. “It’s you again, huh?”

  “Is it okay if I stay and watch?”

  He shrugged. “You know the drill.”

  Rebecca straightened her papers, nodded at whatever Eliza was saying in her earpiece, tucked her phone and her tea beneath the desk. After the cold open (“Tonight, on Frontline,” Rebecca’s previously recorded voice narrated) and the slick theme music, Rebecca followed Hank’s gesture to Camera One. “Good evening,” she said. “We begin tonight in the Caribbean, where Tropical Storm Lyle has officially become Hurricane Lyle. The storm is predicted to hit the Carolinas next week, and millions of Americans could be affected. For the latest we turn to our meteorologist—”

  Rebecca had many things in common with Terrance, the substitute anchor: a warm facial expression that merged curiosity and concern, a beautiful low voice, an easy chemistry with the reporters in the field. But I couldn’t take my eyes off Rebecca. That hadn’t been remotely true when Terrance was anchoring.

  “I can’t figure it out,” I said to Jamie, later that same night.

  “Ah,” Jamie said. “Everyone remembers their first time.”