“You didn’t even bother to ask,” she said, turning abruptly.
“Ask what?” I said, following her across the hall and into her room.
“This!” she said, flinging her arms wide. “All my shit!”
There were skirts and dresses scattered across the bed from last night, shoes arrayed on the floor. My stomach twisted into a knot. Pure sloppiness on my part.
“Shit,” I said. “I’m so sorry, Stell. I should have asked. But there was this work party last night, and it was an emergency, I had nothing to wear, and—”
“You’re making it worse,” she snapped. She started shoving everything back into the closet. “Are you trying to make me feel stingy? Well, I’m sorry, but this creeps me out. Like, I have no idea what you’ve been doing this whole time. Do you do this every day? Do you dress up like me?”
“Stella,” I said. When she didn’t turn around, too intent on jamming her high heels back into the shoe rack, I said louder, “Stella Evelyn Bradley.”
It was an old joke, our way of puncturing a petty argument. You triple-named me, we’d say, laughing. No fair. For some reason, the mock sternness always worked.
She whipped around. There was a twitch in her upper lip. “Really?” she said. “We’ve only been together five minutes and you have to pull that out?”
“Give it up,” I said. “You’re not actually mad. You’re just hungry, right?”
Her veneer of annoyance receded, and then dropped completely. She laughed and said, “God, Violet. You know what I like about you? None of those bitches I’ve been hanging out with ever have enough to eat. We go to dinner and we split, like, two salads.”
I laughed, too, although there was a subtle sting in that comment.
Stella flopped down on the bed and began rummaging through her purse. Her moods had a liquid quality. She was now fixated on something else, muttering to herself. “I’m out,” she said. “Where’s my phone?”
When she found it, she pressed it to her ear as she walked into the bathroom. “Hiii,” she said sweetly. “It’s Stella Bradley. Remember me?”
The conversation was short and cryptic. After, she tossed the phone onto the bed. “That’s what I like about New York,” she said. “People never leave.”
“Who was that?”
“This guy,” she said. “Don’t worry. He just helps me get Adderall.”
I furrowed my brow. “I thought you had a prescription.”
“Well, yeah, but they’re so stingy with it. You know, you should really get a prescription. It’s amazing. And if you don’t like it you can give it to me.” She was now on her knees, emptying her suitcase, piling clothes on the floor. “I really need to do laundry. Do you send it out somewhere?”
“So what’s the story?” I said. “Are you back for good?”
“I don’t know,” she said, sitting back on her heels. “But it’s Christmas next week. I can’t ditch my family at Christmas. Do you think they’re pissed I’ve been gone so long?”
“Let’s do this over breakfast,” I said. “Come on. I’ll cook.”
She had no plan beyond the present moment. Maybe she was back for good. Maybe she’d leave again after the holidays. The only thing she knew was that she needed some rest. A break from the cycle of travel and party-hopping, and the relentless performance of fun. A few weeks of peace and quiet—was that too much to ask?
“But that won’t satisfy Anne,” I said. “She’ll want specifics.”
“Anne is a pain in my ass,” Stella said. “This is good. What is this?”
“Parmesan and thyme.” Simple omelets were a staple. On a budget, eggs were a miracle. “See, I could tell that was just the low blood sugar talking.”
She laughed. “I missed you.”
“So stay,” I said, with a surge of hope. “Remember the plan? The two of us, together in the big city?”
She wrinkled her nose, folded her napkin into a careful rectangle, stood up and started rinsing our plates. Neat behavior was her method of avoidance. Stella once scrubbed our entire dorm bathroom to postpone breaking up with a clingy boyfriend.
“Or not,” I said. “That’s cool, too.”
“I just don’t know what I want,” she said. She stood at the dishwasher, plates in hand. Instead of slotting them at the edge, she put them in the middle of the empty bottom rack. This was the behavior of a sociopath, or someone who grew up with housekeeping staff. “You’re lucky,” she added. “You always knew.”
“Lucky?” I said. “I’m barely making minimum wage.”
“But you love it. I can tell.”
“How?”
“Come here,” she said, and dragged me into the living room, where a mirror hung above the mantelpiece. We stood in front of it, side by side. “Look. Your skin is clear. You lost weight. You’re not biting your nails. You look tired and you need some concealer for those under-eye circles, but that’s easy to fix.”
In the mirror, I saw that she was right. I hadn’t noticed it myself. Stella and I had always existed at distant ends of the continuum. Roughly the same height and the same coloring, but she was a hundred times more beautiful. Exquisite features and perfect blond hair, compared to my plainness and dirty-blond hues. A vast gulf remained, but the past five months had brought us slightly closer together.
“Well?” she said. “You must be happy there, right?”
“I guess so.”
“See?” She cocked an eyebrow. “And therefore I have to hate you.”
In the afternoon, a guy showed up at our door: the person Stella had called that morning. He was tall and preppy, a cable-knit sweater beneath his faded Barbour jacket. Stella explained that they’d gone to Rye Country Day together, and now he worked in finance. “This is Violet,” she said to him. “Don’t worry. She’s cool.”
Stella dipped a key into the bag of white powder, sampling the wares. She sniffed a bump of cocaine, smiled, and widened her eyes. The preppy guy lined up several small plastic bags on the coffee table, along with half a dozen orange pill containers. After counting Stella’s money, he looked satisfied and impressed with his own efficiency.
“Men have it so easy,” Stella said, after he left. “Did you see him? Everyone trusts a guy who looks like that. That’s why it’s so easy for him to get refills.”
“Really,” I said, watching as she cut a line of cocaine. “Is that the story.”
“Plus both of his parents are doctors. I would kill for that. Easy access.”
I laughed. “Your father literally runs a pharmaceutical company, Stell.”
It wasn’t that I was innocent to her habits. She’d done plenty of this in college—at parties, to sober up, to help her endure all-nighters. But it wasn’t even 3 p.m., the living room bright with sunlight. Whatever her reasons, it didn’t seem like she was doing this for fun.
“Stop it,” she said, wiping her nose as she sat up.
“Stop what?”
“Stop giving me that look. You’re so judgmental, Violet. Has anyone ever told you that?”
“You have, plenty of times.”
“Do you know what our problem is?” She went into the kitchen, filled a glass with water and ice, and took a long drink. “Violet, do you know what it is? I just realized it. Take a guess.”
“I have no idea.”
She pointed a long index finger. “You’ve got the dirt on me, but I don’t have any on you.”
“Oh, come on.”
“I’m serious,” she said, her color rising. “You see me doing bad things, but what about you? You’re so perfect. You never do anything bad. You could blackmail me if you wanted. But I could never do that to you. This is fucked up, Violet. The power dynamic is all fucked up.”
This was Stella on the upswing of a buzz. She drew connections between disparate dots and then got excited by her own intelligence. It was like a game to her. My job wasn’t to be offended. My job was to play along. I kept a straight face, because if I smiled she would think I was mock
ing her. But I was happy. This dynamic felt strangely like home.
“Explain it to me,” I said. “Between the two of us, you’re the one without any power?”
“Yes,” she said. “Yes, yes, that’s exactly right.”
“Even though your family is worth, like, a billion dollars?”
“That’s not the point.” She tipped the last of the water into her mouth, crunching on an ice cube. Her phone vibrated. She scanned the screen, then glanced out the window. “Actually, this is perfect,” she said. “The weather is perfect, and we have time to walk.”
“To where?”
“Dinner,” she said. “My friend who lives in Brooklyn Heights. He’s having a dinner party and we’re going. We can walk across the bridge. Just in time for sunset.”
“I’m not sure,” I said. “It’s a school night.”
“What?” Stella squinted, like I was speaking another language.
“Work tomorrow. I have stuff to catch up on tonight.”
“You said they barely pay you minimum wage. You can’t be that important.”
I laughed. “Harsh.”
“Come on,” she said, tugging my arm. “I’ll let you borrow something to wear.”
Stella’s friend lived in a brownstone that backed up onto the Brooklyn Heights promenade. The older woman who owned the building liked that this young man was an artist, that he reminded her of her bohemian days. He rented the top floor, with its gabled windows and creaky floors and spectacular views of Manhattan, for a pittance.
While Stella made the rounds, kissing the cheeks of friends-of-friends, I wandered into the kitchen to get glasses of wine. The counter looked like an old master still life: verdant vegetables, a pile of lemons, bundles of rosemary, a chicken on the cutting board. The host was in the other room, talking about his new work. Dinner was still hours away.
These friends knew me, dimly, as the girl who lived with Stella. They were polite enough, but I always found the conversation slippery and difficult. The usual questions—where you live, what you do—went nowhere. You couldn’t effort your way into their world. But even though Stella had been away for months, her reabsorption into the group was instant. No one at the party bothered her with the tedious details: What’s the plan? Are you back for good? What are you going to do? To them, it didn’t matter. Their intimacy was elastic. Stella was Stella, no matter where she was in the world.
“You stayed at Le Sirenuse when you were in Positano?” one girl asked.
“Of course she did,” another girl responded. “I told her she had to.”
“Loved it,” Stella said.
“What about Morocco? Did you make it to Marrakech?”
Stella nodded as she refilled her wineglass, and mine. She was wearing a loose silk tunic with a vibrant tropical pattern that should have been all wrong for December but was somehow perfect. As the dinner party coursed around her, Stella brimmed with a serene worldliness, like an advertisement for the restorative power of globe-trotting.
“La Mamounia or the Royal Mansour?” the host asked.
“Both,” she said. “Three nights at each.”
He clinked his glass against hers. “That’s my girl.”
As the conversation moved on to other geographies, I said quietly to Stella, “I thought he was a struggling artist.”
“He is,” she said. “And apparently a struggling cook. Where’s dinner? I’m starving.”
“Then how can he afford to travel like that?”
She laughed. “You heard his last name. Take one guess.”
“Oh,” I said. “Oh.”
The shabby apartment, the rickety table and chairs, his boasts of cheap rent, his paint-stained T-shirt and frayed jeans: they had fooled me. When Stella reminded me who he was—more to the point, who his parents were—suddenly it made sense.
“Isn’t it depressing?” Stella said. “Fast-forward ten years and all these people will be having the exact same conversation. Nothing will change.”
“I thought you liked them,” I said.
“I do like them. The trick is you can’t think about it too much.”
I’d missed her more than I realized. Stella was so good at these parties. I let her fill my wineglass, again and again. She’d touch my arm, she’d catch my eye, she’d laugh at anything. She was at ease in this world, but she hadn’t made the mistake of so many: she hadn’t forgotten that this world was finite. That other people lived across the border. She could lean her head close to mine, with a perfect sotto voce observation, and suddenly she was back in my world.
We didn’t eat until 10 p.m. The meal was long and leisurely, and there were no movements toward the door. A countdown ran in the back of my mind: in ten hours, I’ll be at the office. In nine hours. In eight. There was dessert, more wine, cigarettes by the gabled windows, cold air from the December night. The festive feeling of a weekend, even though it was Sunday. Around 1 a.m.—seven hours, creeping panic—I said to Stella, “I really have to go.”
“Aren’t you having fun?” she said.
“I have to get some sleep,” I said. “You can stay.”
“No, it’s fine.” She sighed. “I’ll come with you.”
When I woke up the next morning, my alarm blaring at 7 a.m., I had a pressing headache. My mouth was foul and cottony from the wine, my eyes gritty from exhaustion. While I was waiting for the shower to warm up, there was a knock on the door.
“Gatorade,” Stella said, handing me a bottle. “And Advil.”
“Why are you awake?” I said, twisting off the lid. Lemon-lime flavor—my favorite.
“Jet lag,” she said. “I’ve been up for an hour.”
After I’d showered and dressed, I found Stella in the kitchen. She spread her arms and said, “I made breakfast! Well, I bought it. Same thing.” There was coffee, and a bagel wrapped in wax paper. “Milk, no sugar. Everything, toasted, with cream cheese. Did I get that right?”
“You’re my hero,” I said. “Seriously. Thank you.”
While I unwrapped the bagel, still warm and fragrant from the toaster, Stella removed a stray hair from the sleeve of my sweater, straightened my necklace so the clasp was at the back. These tiny, attentive gestures meant she was about to ask for something. “Do you really have to go to work?” she said.
“That’s pretty much the deal.”
She pouted. “But I’m gonna be so bored.”
By the time I got to the office, the headache had loosened its grip only slightly. There was also the nausea, and the general malaise. Enduring the next twelve hours with this hangover seemed impossible. Jamie saw me and said, “Late night?”
“Is it that obvious?” I said.
I was off my game. It took forever to complete a routine fact-check. I brought the wrong script to Rebecca and had to sprint upstairs to get the right one. I hated doing shoddy work, I resented the fact that I wasn’t myself. At the end of the day, I’d missed several calls and a dozen texts from Stella. She wanted to make plans for that night—a late dinner, drinks? No, I texted back. I’m dead from last night. Going straight to bed.
She wrote back right away. PLEASE?
Some of us have to work in the morning, I wrote.
It was an unnecessarily mean thing to say, an eruption of irritation after a long and shitty day. But it was true, and it worked. She didn’t bother me again.
Chapter Five
the plan was for Stella, who had been home in Rye a few days already, to pick me up from the station on Christmas Eve. When the train left Harlem, the buildings along the track blurring as we accelerated, I texted Stella to remind her. She didn’t respond, but I wasn’t worried. We’d talked just that morning.
“Hurry up and get here,” she’d said. “They’re driving me insane.”
“They’re your parents,” I’d said, my work phone pinned between ear and shoulder. Using the landline at my desk made it look like I was busy with actual work, even when I was just talking to Stella. “That’s what they�
��re supposed to do. Anyways, cheer up. It’s Christmas.”
“Christmas is a fucking sham.”
Stella’s mood had worsened since she returned to New York. She kept pestering me to go out with her, to stop being so lame, and I kept saying no. Lesson learned from that hungover Monday: Stella and I couldn’t revert to old ways if I actually wanted to succeed in my job. “Yeah, yeah, I get it,” she interrupted, when I tried to explain. She didn’t care. She only saw it as an obstacle.
“It is a sham,” I said. “But it’s our job to play along with it.”
“I hate it when you get like this,” she’d said.
“Rational, you mean?”
“It’s the worst. Okay, whatever, see you at six thirty.”
But it was 6:30, and soon the crowds and cars at the Rye train station dissipated, with no sign of Stella. I could imagine the possibilities—Stella waylaid because she’d picked a fight with Anne, criticizing the dinner menu, refusing to change into nice clothing for the guests. In the previous week, when Stella made it clear that she preferred to spend her time in the city rather than the suburbs with her parents, Anne came to her. But their day of lunching and shopping devolved, like always, into argument. What did Stella and Anne have to fight about? They had everything they could possibly want. Their misery was of their own invention.
By 7 p.m., with the night getting colder and Stella failing to answer my calls or texts, I decided to take a cab to the Bradleys’. There were twinkling lights in the shrubbery along the driveway, and bright red poinsettias framing the front door. It was perfect, which is what I’d come to expect from Anne Bradley.
But when she opened the front door, her face fell. “It’s only you?” Anne said.
“I’m afraid so,” I said.
She stepped outside and peered down the driveway. “I mean, Stella isn’t with you?”
“I took a cab from the station,” I said. “I couldn’t get hold of her.”
“It’s been hours,” Anne said. Her voice was hoarse, on the verge of breaking. “I have no idea where she is. Are you sure you don’t know?”
“What do you mean?”
Necessary People Page 7
