Necessary People

by Anna Pitoniak

  It had taken me months to feel secure in the newsroom, to stop automatically reminding people of my name, to stop apologizing reflexively when they didn’t remember it—like it was my fault. Being a young intern or assistant, it was safer to assume that people saw you as an interchangeable part in the machine. Because, in fact, that’s what you were. But from day one, Stella assumed that people knew her name.

  And the thing is, they did. Her haplessness only enhanced her charm, especially among men. Right away, she was the most popular intern in the newsroom.

  On Sunday morning of that week, Stella called me.

  “Can you come uptown?” she said. “I don’t have my wallet.”

  “Isn’t your lover picking up the bill?” I said. Stella called him that as a joke, but it stuck. Her lover, the older man, married but getting a divorce. “Can’t you just borrow money from him?”

  “He had to go to the emergency room. His kid broke his arm.”

  I sighed, turning off the kettle that I’d just started for tea. “I’ll get on the subway now.”

  Stella was waiting in the hotel lobby when I arrived thirty minutes later. “Thank God,” she said, springing to her feet. “The concierge has been giving me the weirdest looks.”

  She turned around and smiled at the serious man behind the ornate wooden desk. She waved her monogrammed wallet and said loudly, “See? Nothing to worry about. I told you I wasn’t going to run out on the bill.”

  “Unlike lover man,” I said. “I’m surprised he stuck you with this.”

  “He’s weirdly cheap,” she said, as she slid her credit card across the desk. “He always talks about how hard he works for his money. Whereas I’m just a spoiled princess. Born with a silver spoon in my mouth.”

  “He says that?”

  She laughed. “He doesn’t have to.”

  The hotel where they met on weekends was on Madison Avenue in the seventies, chosen for luxury and relative distance from the man’s family, who lived downtown. He was a hedge fund type, a loft in Tribeca and a house in East Hampton, three kids in rapid succession, crazy rich but still covetous: next he wanted a ski house, a Gulfstream. He’d do anything to close the deal—flowers, jewelry, whatever it took—but he grew neglectful once the ink dried. Recently, his wife had looked at her prenup and decided the payout was better than a life of obedience to this man. But she was still his wife, and the mother of his children, and when one of his children broke a bone on the playground, it was his paternal duty to rush downtown and, in a harried-rich-man way, question the competence of the doctors.

  Stella had met him the year before, when she was working in fashion. They saw each other a few times a week. When I asked her why she liked him, she shrugged and said, “I don’t know. Something about him, it’s a turn-on. The sex is great.” He was worldly and successful, and handsome. He often promised to make her wife number two, not that Stella would ever agree to it. But the relationship was mutually exciting. She got to act like a sexy spy, sneaking in and out of luxury hotels. He got to fantasize about a hot new wife.

  “I’m hungry,” Stella said, after she signed the bill. “Let’s get food. I’ll treat.”

  Across Madison Avenue from the hotel was an Italian restaurant, the type of place where young women like Stella flocked. Wide windows, flattering golden light, dramatic floral arrangements, an overpriced menu. After Stella ordered the omelet and I ordered the spaghetti carbonara, I shook my head and said, “How many times have we done this?”

  “Done what?” she said.

  “The morning after,” I said. “Your wild night on the town, and my quiet night at home, and then I come get you when something goes wrong.”

  She smiled. “You know how much I love you, right?”

  “Sure.”

  “I need you,” she said. “You know that.”

  Even after years of friendship, even after the countless times Stella had purchased my patience and forgiveness with those words, and cheapened them in the process, they still meant something to me. I was loved, I was needed. Isn’t that all anyone wants?

  “Okay,” I said. “I have to ask the inevitable. When are you going to end it with this guy?”

  She sipped her cappuccino. “If I wanted to, I could marry him and retire tomorrow.”

  I laughed. “One whole month of work. You must be exhausted.”

  “I know,” she said. “But still. Sometimes I think about it.”

  “You’d lose your mind,” I said. “You’d be so bored.”

  Her smile turned into a frown as she stared at the milky foam of her cappuccino gradually dissolving into the tan liquid. “I’m not sure people at KCN like me,” she said.

  “That’s not true,” I said, startled. Glimpsing the softer side of Stella was rare enough that, sometimes, I forgot that part existed. “Of course people like you.”

  “No,” she said, shaking her head. “Like, in that meeting the other day. The way people were looking at you, Violet. The way they were listening to you. I don’t have that.”

  I smiled, gently. “That’s not because they like me. That’s because they respect me.”

  “Well, fine,” she said. Irritation crept into her voice. “Whatever.”

  The waiter placed our food before us. Stella cut into her omelet, and I twirled the pasta around my fork. The smoky pancetta, the rich coating of egg. It was overpriced and unoriginal, but it tasted good. It tasted great, in fact. I took a deep breath. Even with Stella at KCN, maybe everything would be okay.

  “It took me a long time to get there,” I said. “And, you know, it’s still not exactly easy. I’m still not sure if I’m actually any good at this.”

  “What do you mean?” Stella said.

  “I keep striking out,” I said. “They haven’t liked any of my pitches. Not a single one. I don’t know if I’ll ever manage to get an idea through.”

  “Well, that’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard.”

  I laughed, confused. “What?”

  “It’s obvious they think you’re smart,” Stella said, pointing at me with her fork. “So what if they haven’t liked your ideas? They’ll like the next one. Or the one after that.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  “But that’s the way the system works, isn’t it? Or, what, do you think every producer above you has some magical special talent that you don’t have?” Stella reached her fork across the table and twisted pasta around it. “I’m planning to eat at least half of this,” she said. “Carbs don’t count when they’re on someone else’s plate, right?”

  Partway through the meal, Stella spotted a friend. They air-kissed and traded pleasantries, and the whole time, Stella looked radiantly beautiful. Her hair in the perfect messy bun, her smile relaxed and confident. The thorny romance, the insecurities we’d just been talking about: none of that was visible. For Stella, a restaurant like this was a clubhouse. It was a place to be among her own kind, but that also meant she couldn’t show a single crack. These people would notice.

  It was places like this, this stretch of Madison Avenue on the Upper East Side, that made me keenly aware of how different our lives were. Restaurants served food that was too expensive for anyone but the one percent. Stores sold goods that theoretically served a practical purpose—baby clothes, candles, bed linens—but wealthy shoppers insensitive to price had caused these objects to attenuate into pure signals of luxury. Walking to the restaurant, we had passed stores selling leather jackets for toddlers, sheets too delicate to sleep on. There was one time my mother came home with a new handbag, and when my father found out what it cost, he went ballistic. “You spent fifty dollars on a bag? A goddamn bag?” he sputtered, right before she slammed the bedroom door in his face. At the boutique across the street, handbags started at seven thousand dollars.

  So how was it possible, the two of us coming from such different worlds, that Stella often had exactly the right answers to my questions? That’s the way the system works. It was a key slipped ri
ght into a lock. This was her strange intelligence. Stella tended to be terrible with the details. But, maybe as a result, she saw other things. She saw the connections that the rest of us missed.

  The next week, Stella came by my desk with a paper in hand, looking worried. I was on a phone call, taking hasty notes. After several seconds of my ignoring her, she waved the paper at me. “Hello? Violet?”

  Jamie sprang to his feet. I half listened as he said, “She’s busy. What’s up?”

  “Oh,” Stella said. “The archive. Do you know how to use it?”

  “I think I can remember,” Jamie said. “Show me what you need.”

  Last week, when I’d snapped—you want to take a turn helping her? Be my guest—I hadn’t meant for Jamie to take the suggestion literally. After hanging up, I watched the two of them across the newsroom: Stella at her computer, Jamie standing behind her, pointing over her shoulder. Jamie was a senior producer, and therefore way too valuable to spend time teaching an intern the ropes. But he was also a nice guy, and he genuinely liked helping people.

  “Jamie,” I said, walking over to Stella’s desk. The two of them looked at me in unison. “I can help her with this. You don’t have to.”

  “I got this,” he said. “I needed a break, anyways.”

  “And you’re a good teacher,” Stella said, twisting in her seat to look up at him.

  “Um, okay,” I said. They looked so cozy, Stella pleased to have his attention. “Don’t forget we have that meeting in ten minutes. Eliza wants new pitches from everyone.”

  “I’m finally getting somewhere on that Medal of Honor story,” Jamie said.

  “The guy whose brother defected to Russia?”

  “Two brothers, working for two enemies. Can’t you see the movie already?”

  “This sounds interesting,” Stella said. “Can I come?”

  “Sorry,” I said. “It’s for producers only.”

  Her eyebrows arched. The hardness in my voice caught both of us by surprise.

  “You can come,” Jamie said, and then he looked at me. “What? She can come. I need help on this story, anyway. It’s going to take a lot of legwork. You’re okay with that?”

  “Of course!” Stella said.

  “Well, good. Then you should be in the room when I tell Eliza about it.”

  Later, after the meeting ended and Jamie and I returned to our desks, Jamie said, “It’s nothing I didn’t do for you, too, you know. I brought you along to those high-level meetings, back when you were an intern. Don’t you remember?”

  “That was different.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I take this job seriously.”

  “And she doesn’t?”

  I thought about Stella sipping her cappuccino, kidding-but-not-kidding about her early retirement. “How about this? Ten bucks says she’s not working here at this time next year.”

  Jamie shook my hand. “You’re on.”

  “You seem awfully confident,” I said.

  “I’m imagining how I’m going to spend that money.”

  Stella was now across the room, talking to a male assistant who, like most of the guys at Frontline, had an obvious crush on her. She leaned back against his desk, her long legs emphasized by her heeled boots and short dress. He propped his feet on his desk. The two of them were laughing, indifferent to the mounting chaos that occurred every afternoon as we approached airtime. Our show was a well-oiled machine, and it was impossible that this machine wouldn’t chew her up and spit her out. “What are you seeing that I’m not?” I said.

  Jamie glanced up from his computer and followed my gaze. “I’m seeing the exact same thing as you,” he said. “I’m just more realistic about it.”

  Chapter Nine

  so much of the first two years of climbing the ladder in cable news was simply about surviving. The elimination burned slowly but consistently. I was the only person who remained from my class of interns. Most of the old assistants were gone, too. The ranks thinned as one moved up. There were fewer producers than assistants, and fewer senior producers than producers, and at the very top there were just two people: Rebecca, the star, and Eliza, the executive producer.

  Climbing that ladder, I began to have a sense of my strengths and weaknesses. What I was good at: I was detail-oriented, thorough, consistent, reliable. My assignments got more interesting because I was trusted to carry them out. What I was okay at: I was still shy about networking and developing sources. It took a delicate touch, and more than anything, it took time. Jamie always reminded me of this. Trust was our currency with sources, and to gain that trust, you needed to put in the time. Weeks and months, not minutes and hours.

  “It can’t feel transactional,” Jamie said once. “A source won’t just hand you a story. You can’t just call them when you need something. Like your Danner story”—Jamie was my sounding board on this, as on all things—“they’re nervous. They’re not ready to talk. But if you keep in touch, maybe someday they’ll get there.”

  Trust was a thing we talked about a lot. It was a buzzword, part of the KCN brand, crucial to our relationship with our audience. At our biannual corporate town halls, the bosses talked about the importance of our mission. We were journalists. We had a role to play. In order to have a healthy democracy, one that shared objective truths, people like us were essential.

  And this was what I feared I’d always be bad at: believing in that mission. It’s not that others were Pollyannas and I was a cynic. They were all cynics, but only to a point. Sure, the world could be an unjust and cruel place, but if you told the story, if you presented the facts, if you delivered the truth—that would help correct the balance. A fair outcome wasn’t guaranteed, but it was possible. There was still a fundamental optimism at work.

  And how could I not agree with that? I was the case in point: a girl from a poor family, the first to go to college, now living in New York City and working as an associate producer at KCN, steadily climbing the ladder. No wonder the Bradleys loved me.

  There were times I’d come close to believing it. If I played by the rules, if I did the right thing, if I put my trust in the mechanism of meritocracy and if I worked hard enough, I could do anything. This was America, after all.

  But any trajectory can be interrupted. And my problem was Stella.

  In June of that year, after dozens of shoddy pitches that gradually got stronger, my first story aired. The business beat had become my domain at Frontline, because it played to my strengths: I could spend hours combing through documents and financial statements, invigorated rather than bored by the dry facts at hand. When the story aired, I felt relieved: I could really do this, after all.

  The next morning, Stella was in the kitchen, already showered and dressed and drinking a mug of coffee. The night before, when our group went to the bar and toasted me—Rebecca had also given me a special shout-out, after the broadcast—I’d been giddy with success, and Stella had been in a bad mood, sulking over her vodka soda. Now she held a yellow highlighter, which she ran over an article in the Wall Street Journal. Scattered across the counter were copies of the New York Times, the New York Post, and the FT.

  “You’re up early,” I said. Pouring myself coffee, I thought, Stella knows how to use the coffee machine? “What are you doing? Is this for work?”

  Stella nodded, staring at the paper. It seemed like an affect picked up from an old movie, this ink-and-paper highlighting in an age when everyone read the news online.

  “I don’t get it,” I said. “Is this an assignment?”

  She looked up, annoyed. “Do you not think I’m capable of taking initiative?”

  I held up my hands. “Sorry. I was just curious.”

  “I’m trying to get better at this.” She sighed, capping the highlighter. “It’s like,” she said, “everyone just knows everything. In a meeting the other day, someone said—what was it—a tax holiday. And everyone in the room was like, ‘oh yes, of course, a tax holiday.’ What the fuck doe
s that mean? Where do you even learn this stuff?”

  She seemed genuinely irritated, which irritated me in turn. What I wanted to say was you learn this stuff by paying attention, Stella. You pay attention because you have to pay attention. The world isn’t going to unfurl itself for you. You have to pry it open. I wanted to say a tax holiday is a simple concept. The meaning is encoded in the phrase itself, and your ignorance is your own fault.

  Instead, I smiled and said, “Don’t worry. You’ll pick it up over time.”

  Stella’s initiative wouldn’t last. I was certain of that. It was a reaction to that brief moment when everyone was looking at me, not her. Her earnest newspaper-reading, the newly alert way she answered the phone, the speediness with which she ran scripts to the control room: it was a performance for my benefit, wasn’t it? Sometimes our relationship felt like one long game in which we were constantly keeping score. This was just another way for Stella to rack up a few points. She could be the eager-to-please intern that I had once been, too.

  But I was wrong. Stella was putting on a performance, but it wasn’t for me.

  The story of our friendship was always the story of opposites. Yin and yang in every regard. The pretty one and the plain one; the rich girl and the poor girl; the social butterfly and the bookish nerd. For every possible measurement, we stood at far ends of the spectrum. And there was one particular metric that clocked a vast gulf between us, that, for years, had allowed us to exist in harmony.

  Ambition.

  Every decision I made was designed to distance me from my origins. Stella, on the other hand, always knew that she belonged. When you already have everything you could ever want, what good is ambition? Stella never had to think about how to dress, what to say, where to put her hands, whether to laugh or smile, whether to act smart or play dumb. It came naturally, like breathing. It was like that famous line. A fish, asked how the water is, responds, “This is water?” That was life, to Stella. A medium one could move through without even considering what the medium was, or how that medium might feel to other people.