“Stop,” I said, putting my hand over Stella’s. “The window. Everything’s getting wet.”
She raised an eyebrow. “What’s it to you?” Then she opened it again.
I met the driver’s gaze in the mirror. Sorry, I mouthed. He frowned.
“Why couldn’t they have the party on—I don’t know—a Tuesday? Don’t old people love throwing parties during the week? And I can’t believe you agreed to come to this.” Stella glared at me. She was in a bad mood, bored in this moment and bored in general. “I mean, they’re my parents. I have to be there. But if Anne hadn’t literally given birth to me? Forget it.”
The cab dropped us off at Rockefeller Center. Stella paid, but she left a stingy tip. I wanted to slip the driver something, but I only had a twenty-dollar bill in my wallet, which I couldn’t afford to part with. The windows on the ground floor of 30 Rock were lined with posters of NBC’s biggest stars: the anchors, the morning-show hosts, the late-night comedians, looming beneficently over the sidewalks. We were inside the atrium, shaking the rain from our umbrellas, when Stella said abruptly, “She’s not that pretty.”
“Who?” I said.
“That woman, what’s her name.” She gestured vaguely. “The lady on the news. I mean, she’s okay. But she’s very plain-looking.”
“Believe it or not,” I said, as we stepped into the elevator that would whisk us up to the Rainbow Room. “It’s not entirely about looks.”
Stella snorted. “Oh, please. Then why don’t you see any ugly women on TV? I read somewhere that, like, half of all the women on TV started off as beauty pageant winners.”
“Well, the other half went to law school.” I frowned. “And where did you read that?”
“Who cares?” Stella said. “You’re just annoyed because I know something about the TV business that you don’t know.”
When we arrived, Anne was frustrated. “This is awful!” she said, pointing at the rain-streaked windows and thick gray clouds. “Of course the one day it rains this month is during our party. I timed this whole thing around sunset. But it seems like the weather had other plans.” She spat out the word like the weather was an uncooperative vendor who was violating their contract.
“It still looks beautiful,” I said. The room sparkled, like a jewel nestled in the gray cottony clouds. “And so do you, Mrs. Bradley,” I added.
“Well, thanks, Violet. You’re sweet. Do you mind terribly getting me a martini? The waiters seem to be neglecting this corner of the room.”
“Oh, sure. Of course.”
“Stella, sweetie, do you want Violet to get you anything from the bar?”
Stella looked up from her phone. Anne often dispatched me for her little tasks, treating me like a hybrid of family friend and hired help. But if this was what it took to keep my rent at $750 a month, so be it. “Vodka soda,” Stella said, then went back to texting.
By the bar, I found Oliver with a whiskey in one hand and his phone in the other. “You and your sister are exactly alike,” I said, bumping my shoulder against him.
“Violet!” He kissed me on the cheek. “So nice to see you.”
“Although I’m guessing you’re attending to more serious matters.” I nodded at his phone. “Not texting your dealer, like Stella.”
Oliver looked horrified.
“I’m just joking!” I said. “Completely joking.” I wasn’t, though. It continued to surprise me, how little Stella’s family knew about her life.
“Oh. Well.” He smiled tightly.
I ordered three drinks from the bartender, and said, “Don’t worry, they’re not all for me.”
“Honestly, I wouldn’t blame you,” Oliver said.
“You know, you and Stella might think these parties are boring, but I’m pretty impressed.”
He smiled, this time more genuine. “I’ve been meaning to ask you,” he said. “Remember that thing you called me about? It was a long time ago. You had some question about NDAs at—Danner Pharmaceuticals, right?”
“Yeah. I’m surprised you remembered,” I said.
“So what happened with that?”
“I got in touch with some of the people they sued, a few janitors and security guards, but they didn’t want to talk. I mean, they couldn’t. That’s why they’d been sued in the first place.”
“Aren’t you curious, though?”
“Of course. But you can’t overthink it. You’ll start convincing yourself there’s a story when there isn’t.” I shrugged. “In Danner’s case, an overly litigious company that takes itself too seriously? Annoying, maybe, but not a capital crime.”
Oliver lifted his glass toward me. “I heard about your promotion, by the way.”
“Stella told you?”
“She told my mom, and my mom told me. Congratulations.”
“Oh—well, thank you.”
“We’re proud of you, Violet,” Oliver said. “You’re a credit to the Bradley name.”
It was delicate work, maneuvering through the crowd with three drinks in hand. I supposed it was nice to hear that from Oliver. The Bradleys’ affection was contingent and changeable, and I liked knowing where I stood with them. The music, the laughter, the tuxedos and gowns and glittering lights: this world was hard to earn, easy to fall in love with. But sometimes I wanted to run in the opposite direction. What if I didn’t want to be a credit to the Bradley name? What if I wanted to be a credit to my own name?
“There you are,” Anne said. “Thank you, Violet. I’m parched.”
Anne was holding court with a group of women who looked just like her: moisturized, fastidiously slender, impeccably preserved from the disappointments of middle age. In a low voice, Stella said to me, “I’m dying, Violet. Literally dying.”
I laughed. “Should I call 9-1-1?”
“Honestly, I’d rather ride around New York in an ambulance than stay here all night. At least that’s exciting. Do you realize we’re the youngest people in this room by twenty years?”
“Except for Oliver,” I said.
Stella snorted. “Oliver’s the oldest person here. Look. He’s turning into our father.”
Oliver and Thomas Bradley were standing together at the bar, surveying the room. And it was true: they had the same serious mien, the same aristocratic height, like an English peer and the son who would someday inherit his title. Although if you looked at Stella and Anne side by side, you might say the same thing. Stella maintained that she was the black sheep, but with each passing year she grew into the family resemblance, like a tree bending to the sun.
“How long do you think we have to stay?” Stella said.
“No idea. Your family, not mine.”
“Can you pretend to be sick? Say you have to go to the hospital and I’ll come—”
“Wait a second, is that Ginny Grass?” I said, spotting a familiar face across the room.
Stella swatted me on the arm. “Rude. Don’t interrupt.”
“See that woman in the blue dress? Is she friends with your parents?”
Stella squinted. “Oh yeah,” she said. “Ginny. She’s an old family friend. She has a place down the road from my grandparents, in Maine. How do you know her?”
“She’s the president of KCN. My boss’s boss’s boss.”
“Huh.” Stella tilted her head. Gears seemed to be turning. “You wanna go say hi?”
“Oh God, no. I have no idea what I’d say.”
But Stella had already started pulling me across the room. “What are you so scared of? She’s just a normal person.”
“To you, maybe.”
“Ginny!” Stella said loudly, from a dozen feet away.
Ginny turned, and exclaimed, “Stella!” She kissed her on the cheek. “You look beautiful, my dear. You never change.”
“Neither do you,” Stella said. “You have to tell me your secret. And, oh my goodness, I love your earrings. Where are they from?”
Ginny touched the diamonds dangling from her earlobes. The most remarkab
le thing about Stella’s charm wasn’t just the force of it; it was the way she turned it on from zero to sixty in a second flat. No one could have guessed her bad mood of moments ago.
After a while, Ginny noticed that I was hovering awkwardly. With a practiced smile, she turned to me. “Hello,” she said, extending her hand. “Are you a friend of Stella’s?”
A small part of my chest collapsed. A pinprick, air hissing out. Stella looked too amused to offer clarification. “Violet Trapp,” I said, keeping my head high and voice steady. “Actually, we’ve met before. I’m an associate producer at Frontline.”
“Oh!” Ginny said. “Of course. Of course, you look very familiar. But you two are friends?” She touched Stella on the forearm. “What a small world.”
“Violet always makes her work at KCN sound so interesting,” Stella said. “Much more interesting than my job.”
“It’s a calling, really,” Ginny said, nodding.
“You know, I’ve been thinking,” Stella said. “Fashion has been fun, but it’s not really for me. I’ve been considering a career change. Maybe getting into news.”
“You have?” I said, my hand jerking, nearly spilling my glass of wine.
“What a splendid idea!” Ginny clapped her hands. “Oh, you’d be perfect for it.”
Stella looked like a cat that ate not just one canary, but an entire cage of them. “Do you really think so?” she said in a saccharine voice, her eyes fixed on Ginny.
They spent most of the night sequestered in the corner, their heads tilted together. When the party ended, Stella slipped her arm through mine. As we rode the elevator down and hailed a cab on Fifth Avenue, she said, “Don’t be mad at me.”
“Why would I be mad at you?” I said, but I closed the car door harder than I needed to.
“Don’t be like that. You should be flattered. You heard what I said.”
“Why haven’t you mentioned this before?”
She shrugged, muting the TV in the back of the cab. “It never came up.”
“That’s awfully convenient.”
“And,” she said. “You don’t exactly have the power to hire me.”
“What?”
“Ginny set it up. I have an interview on Monday. What should I wear?” She got a faraway look in her eye. “I should go shopping tomorrow.”
“Stella, this is crazy. Have you even thought about this?”
“Why can’t you be happy for me? This is fun. We’re going to work together!”
What I wanted to say was you don’t have the job yet. But that wasn’t really true. With Ginny as her backer, Stella’s hiring was basically guaranteed. The interview, the résumé, the references, it was just a paper trail. Plausible deniability against charges of nepotism.
“Aren’t you coming?” I said to Stella, when the cab stopped at our apartment.
“We’ll be making a second stop,” she said to the driver. “I’m meeting some friends downtown. Let’s have brunch or something tomorrow, though?”
“I’m busy,” I said, and this time I slammed the door before she could respond.
The alarm clock glowed red in the darkness. The raindrops struck the air conditioner in my window with a pinging pebble-like noise. I was too hot with the duvet, too cold without it. I couldn’t sleep. Eventually, around three thirty, I got up.
The apartment was dark, Stella’s bedroom empty. She often spent the night elsewhere, in the bachelor pads of the men she slept with, or with friends whose parents had housekeepers to cook them breakfast. I thought this was abnormal, but sometimes I wondered if I had it backwards. We lived in an elegant prewar building on one of the few quiet blocks between Union Square and Washington Square. It was some of the most expensive real estate in the world—and yet I rarely saw the other residents of our building. Passing through the lobby, it was often just me and the doorman. I’d never seen another person taking out the trash, carrying groceries, fumbling with keys. When I walked down our block at night, most of the windows were dark. The richest parts of Manhattan were emptier than they appeared.
In my childhood home, I’d hated the thin walls, the sound of my father snoring at night. My mother’s bleached hair collecting on the floor and clogging the shower drain. I’d hated how the kitchen was constantly infested with carpenter ants, and the bathroom was always damp, and cars backfired on the street outside. But too much quiet could be just as exhausting as too little.
When I was restless with insomnia, I liked to bake. Bread, cakes, cookies, anything. In those 3 a.m. and 4 a.m. hours, I could look at the clock on the oven and imagine that I was doing this for a reason. Rising early with the invisible fellowship of other bakers, so that the world could have their muffins and scones ready in time for breakfast.
That night, I made soda bread. I measured and mixed the ingredients, kneaded the stretchy dough, brushed the rounded loaf with milk. The waiting, the actual baking, was my favorite part. Here was the only thing I had to worry about: sitting on a stool in front of the warm oven, the timer ticking, watching to be sure the bread didn’t burn. Music playing in the background (Billie Holiday, that night), the dishwasher swishing quietly. Cooking was improvisational, but baking was precise and predictable. The sweet, life-giving scent of bread was a product of my own two hands. It was rare to feel this way—to stand still and enjoy it, for a minute.
Especially in New York, especially in this business, getting ahead was the cost of entry. Working was a way of being. Time not spent in pursuit of a larger ambition was time wasted. When asked whether I liked my job at KCN, I always said yes, but I thought, Why are you asking that question? Why is liking the metric? The job was both more than that and less than that. It wasn’t a source of peace and contentment, that was for sure. But it was my means of survival. It paid for rent and food and clothing. It propelled me further and further from the life I’d known before.
The timer went off, and I slid the loaf onto a rack to cool. There was the misery of having too little, but there was also the misery of living among those who believed there was no such thing as too much. Surely there was an in-between. If I were a different kind of person, maybe this could have been my life. Live in a village in the French countryside, apprentice with a local baker, eventually open my own B&B, where I’d bake bread to serve with soft cheese and wine, and keep bundles of lavender in every room. I’d learn to be content with the simple pleasures of life itself, not tortured by the notion that I wasn’t keeping up. This, by the way, is the fantasy of every person who has spent too many late nights at the office under buzzing fluorescent lights.
Perhaps Stella suffered from the inverse fantasy. She had spent the past year living the dreamy life of a glossy magazine. She stayed out late, she slept in, she met friends for languorous meals. She spent money like it was water, her bank account one small tributary that flowed into the coursing river of Manhattan commerce. Taxis, bottles of wine, bouquets of flowers, new dresses, new shoes, massages, facials, haircuts, highlights, spin classes. And those were just the basics. Her days were a chick-lit fantasy come alive.
A lot of my mental space was taken up by the slicing and dicing of my paycheck into rent and loan payments, groceries, occasional savings. But look how frictionless it was for Stella. Look at how much spare time she had to think. To let her mind wander. To plan her next move.
Of you, Oliver had said, last Christmas. Stella is jealous of you.
You couldn’t beat Stella Bradley at her own game. So I had found a separate game, one where we wouldn’t compete with each other.
It hadn’t occurred to me that Stella could look at my life—the long hours, the grunt work—and actually feel something like envy. But that was my own stupidity. Everyone wants what they don’t have. Everyone wants more.
Part Two
Chapter Eight
stella started as an intern at KCN in the new year. When she got her first paycheck in January, she came over to my desk and said, “Am I supposed to do something with this?”
<
br /> “You’re supposed to deposit it,” I said.
She furrowed her forehead. “But what are all these things? Social Security? Does this look normal to you?” She thrust the check toward me. When I registered the dollar amount, there was the momentary satisfaction of seeing how much bigger my salary was than hers. I had to take my victories where I could get them.
“Perfectly normal,” I said. My phone started ringing, but as I moved to answer it, Stella said, “Can I ask you something else?”
“I have to take this call.”
“Please, Violet? I need your help.”
“Fine.” I watched the call go to voice mail, imagined my source annoyed at having to leave a message, the apologizing I’d have to do when I called back. “What is it?”
She led me to the copy room, where a red light was flashing on the copy machine. There was a crumpled, ink-stained piece of paper jammed into the feeder. With wide eyes, Stella said, “I think I broke it.”
“This is what you need help with? Why didn’t you ask another intern?”
She frowned. “Because you’re my friend.”
“I’m also a producer, and in case you can’t tell, I’m a little busy. Ask one of the interns or assistants.” Walking away, I added, “I haven’t even used that machine in months.”
“You look pissed,” Jamie said, when I returned. “What is it this time?”
I sighed and dropped into my chair. “The copy machine is jammed.”
“Have a little sympathy for her. She’s still new.”
“You want to take a turn helping her? Be my guest.”
Jamie had been witness to my bad mood all month. I could sense him hesitating, holding back advice that, honestly, I could have used: get over yourself, or you’re wasting energy on being mad. But Jamie was practiced in the art of self-preservation, and knew better than to get between us.
When Stella applied to KCN, there were two internship openings: one on the morning show, and one on Frontline. “Well, obviously I’m choosing Frontline,” she’d said. “Waking up at 3 a.m.? No thank you.” At first, I’d held out hope that Stella might lose interest. This was grinding, grueling work. How long could she possibly last?
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