Necessary People

by Anna Pitoniak

  Ginny was as red as a tomato. Or a choking victim.

  “So you’d rather keep up appearances. You’d rather not admit to anyone just how much you hate me. That would be so—unbecoming.”

  “You are nasty,” she spat. “You are a nasty, evil girl.”

  “True,” I said. “But it’s gotten me this far, hasn’t it?”

  “One phone call!” Ginny shouted, as I stepped into the elevator. The tweed suit, the pearl necklace, the coiffed bob—but her eyes were wild and panicked. She was an animal caught in a trap, nothing like the composed businesswoman people believed her to be. That’s the thing about perfection. Remove one card, and the whole house crumbles.

  The gap between the doors was narrowing. “Don’t think I won’t do it!” she shrieked.

  Part Four

  Chapter Twenty-One

  it takes so little to uproot a life. A phone call to the Bradleys to let them know I was leaving. My personal mail forwarded to KCN until I found an apartment. One box of winter clothing, sent on the slow boat because it was July, and two suitcases for the plane. On the day of my flight, after checking the apartment one last time, I left the keys with the doorman. He nodded politely, but there was no tearful farewell.

  None of this had ever really belonged to me, anyway.

  The airplane took off from JFK in the thick heat of a summer night and landed at Heathrow in a morning of autumnal gloom. Low gray skies, cool temperatures, intermittent drizzle. The cab driver told me this was unusual for July, that the weather would improve soon enough. I told him I didn’t mind, that in fact I preferred this weather.

  “Where are you from, miss?” he said, catching my eye in the rearview mirror.

  “I flew in from New York.”

  “New York!” he said. “You’ll see there’s quite a lot of New Yorkers here. London is a big city. You’ll feel right at home.”

  “Well, I’m not really from there,” I said. “I’m from Florida.”

  “Florida.” He sounded disappointed. Then his eyes brightened. “Like Disney World?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Like Disney World.”

  The hotel was in Soho, just a few blocks away from KCN’s office. The driver was right: London did feel like New York, at least this part of it. It could have been the West Village, with the jumbled streets and white-walled coffee shops and narrow restaurants. But when we turned a corner, the street opened into a quiet green square, lined soldierlike with elegant Regency houses. London had history that made the Bradleys look like new money.

  The driver stopped in front of the hotel. My door was opened for me from the outside. I was distracted, searching for a tip, so it wasn’t until he laughed and said, “You’re not even going to say hello?” that I looked up.

  Jamie, with a big smile on his face.

  Two weeks earlier, in London, Ashley Fong asked if I had really thought about this.

  “It’s not like the New York office,” she said. “We’re tiny, compared to them. And every year we have to do more with less.”

  “That’s the appeal,” I said. “I’d like to try something different.”

  “You’ve been with Rebecca and Eliza for how long?”

  “Four years.”

  “And you’re ready to get out of there.”

  Trish, the executive producer in Washington, had been unsurprised by my back-channel phone call. This was a lesson learned from producing: never let a door close. After we expressed mutual disappointment that we wouldn’t be working together, Trish called me a few days later with an idea. Her friend Ashley Fong, the head of KCN’s London bureau, was hiring. If I was interested, Trish would put in a good word.

  In fact, the London bureau was hiring for multiple roles. Ashley needed two senior producers. The TV screens in her office were tuned to the BBC and CNN International and Sky News. Jamie sat in the office next door, interviewing with Ashley’s deputy. Later, Jamie and I would switch places, a silent smile flashing between us in the hallway.

  “I am,” I said, in answer to her question. “And so is Jamie.”

  “I take it you two are a package deal?”

  “We’ve just about reached the point of finishing each other’s sentences.”

  “Good,” she said. “But I’ll be honest with you. We’re in a major jam right now.”

  “How so?”

  “We’re short a reporter. How hard should it be to convince someone to move to London? Very, apparently. The bosses keep sending us these twenty-three-year-old kids. Who know nothing about the world. Not great for a foreign correspondent. They wash out after a few months, and we’re back to square one.”

  “That must be frustrating.”

  “But when I try to hire a more senior reporter, guess what? The reporters want to stay in New York. How are you going to suck up to the executives when you’re all the way across the Atlantic?” She made a face, then shook her head. “That sounds petty, but it’s true.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “A lot of backstabbing goes on.”

  “You have no idea. A few years ago, I was on deck to oversee the morning lineup. But at the last minute, Ginny intervened. Instead she wanted me to head up the Hong Kong bureau. Know why?” Ashley gestured at herself. “She’s a racist.”

  “Really?”

  “She wasn’t explicit about it,” Ashley said. “But she thought I didn’t have the right sensibility for morning. That someone like me—who looks like me—couldn’t connect with real America. Couldn’t cut into Fox’s base. Like she understands it so well? Guess what, bitch. We’re both from New York. We both went to Spence.”

  I laughed.

  “Well,” Ashley said, “it worked out. Hong Kong and London were like a trip to the spa after New York. It’s liberating. You’ll see. You’ll love it.”

  “Does this mean I have the job?” I said.

  Ashley smiled. “Very direct. That’s why Ginny doesn’t like you, right?”

  “Ginny hates me. I’ve never known why.”

  “Welcome to the club,” she said. “Unfortunately, we still need her. She has to convince someone to come over here and take this correspondent job.”

  “Actually,” I said, “I might have another idea.”

  The day after returning from that first trip to London, Corey agreed to meet me for lunch.

  “You must really love Cuban food.” He slid into the booth across from me. “Otherwise there’s no good reason to drag me out to Tenth Avenue.”

  “It’s the best ropa vieja in the city,” I said. “But, more importantly, no one from KCN comes here.”

  “Ah,” he said. “That kind of lunch. So what? You’re ready to jump ship?”

  “Nope. I already have a new ship. And I want you to join it.”

  As I started talking, Corey laughed and tried to interrupt: he had just started at CNN, he was happy there. When I told him to be quiet and listen, he looked surprised. Then he looked bemused, then serious. The plan, as I laid it out, didn’t sound crazy. It sounded kind of perfect. By the time our food arrived, Corey was chewing a thumbnail, thinking hard.

  “You wanted a fast track to a foreign correspondent job,” I said, lifting a forkful of rice and beans. “Doesn’t get faster than this.”

  “This feels too good to be true,” Corey said. “There has to be a catch.”

  “Well, for one thing, CNN won’t want to let you out of your contract. That’ll be an ugly fight. But so what? Make your agent earn his percentage.”

  “What about this Ashley Fong? Do you like her?”

  “I like her enough.” I shrugged. “Look, Corey. I’m being selfish. I like you, I know you, and I think we’d work well together. My colleague Jamie Richter is coming to London, too. He’s one of Eliza’s original protégés. Our mandate is to remake the place. We want the new face of the bureau to be someone really good. Who makes us look good, in turn.”

  “It’s tempting.” He had a dreamy look in his eyes. “London, huh?”

  “They call this
a win-win,” I said.

  Oliver wouldn’t look at me. In his apartment, he was staring at the floor, pouty and embarrassed, like a small child being punished.

  But defiant. A child who doesn’t feel he’s done anything wrong—now, or ever.

  “I don’t get it,” he said. “Why do you want to leave so badly?”

  “I already told you. I need a fresh start.”

  “If you loved me, you would stay.”

  “But I don’t,” I said. “I’m sorry, Oliver.”

  He finally looked up. “There’s no one left,” he said. “Stella. My mother, my father, they’ve basically gone crazy. I’m completely alone. You must understand that.”

  His words were pathetic, but his eyes were angry. Those words weren’t a plea. They were an imperative. He was commanding me to feel his pain, and to nurse him through it. And if this had been four years earlier, I might have. The fancy homes, the vacations, the life of luxury: once upon a time, that would have been sufficient compensation for this kind of emotional labor. But it wasn’t four years earlier. I knew better, by now.

  And besides, he tried to fuck up my career. That was unforgivable.

  “I have to go,” I said. “I have a lot to do.”

  Oliver punched a button on his phone and held it to his ear. “I’m calling Ginny.”

  “That won’t work. She doesn’t oversee the London bureau.”

  He frowned. “No answer. Never mind. I’m going to leave a message.”

  “Do whatever you want,” I said. “And take care of yourself, okay?”

  “Ginny,” he shouted into the phone. “This is Oliver Bradley. Can you please—”

  But I closed the door behind me, blocking the sound of Oliver’s voice.

  I left New York on Saturday, arrived in London on Sunday, and would begin the new job on Monday. Ashley said we could take more time—adjust to the jet lag, find a place to live—but none of us cared about that. We wanted to get to work. Later that week, Corey would be reporting from Baghdad on their parliamentary elections. Jamie would be field-producing for him. My plate was full, too: there was a G8 summit happening in Germany, the conclusion of the Tour de France, a new encyclical from the Pope. The first week would be intense.

  It was a strange feeling, walking around a new city, imagining what shape my life might take here. Charmingly crooked streets, lush green squares, tall red buses: one day, these novel things would become familiar. I spent that Sunday wandering alone, getting pleasantly lost. The clouds cleared in the late afternoon. The sky was bright and the air was rinsed clean. Latitude and season meant that the sun wouldn’t set until after 9 p.m.

  There was a pub around the corner from our hotel, which Jamie and I had passed on our way to breakfast that morning. A heavy wooden door, white walls and green shutters, old-fashioned lettering on the facade. “Check it out,” Jamie said, peering through the window. “There’s a fireplace. And a bed for a dog.”

  As if on cue, a springer spaniel ambled toward us. The dog’s snout had gone white with age. Jamie squatted down and extended a hand. The dog sniffed, then licked Jamie’s palm a few times before disappearing through the propped-open back door to the pub. Jamie stood and brushed his hand on his pants, looking wistful.

  “We can come back tonight,” I said. Jamie’s family had springer spaniels when he was a kid, dogs trained for duck hunting in the low country of South Carolina. It was one of the things he missed most about home.

  The evening sky was still light when I arrived at the pub, but it was cool enough that there was a fire crackling behind the grate. The room smelled musty and old, in a good way. The springer spaniel was asleep in front of the fire, hind leg twitching. The young woman behind the bar put down her book and said, “What can I get you, love?”

  I had arrived early. Jamie and Corey were coming straight from dinner with one of the legal scholars who had helped draft the Iraqi constitution, getting briefed in advance of that week’s elections. Ashley was delighted by this. Taking initiative, what a concept!!! she had e-mailed me. Honestly it is depressing how happy this makes me.

  The table closest to the fire was occupied by an elderly couple, the man with his pint and the woman her glass of wine, each of them reading a newspaper, occasionally sighing in disapproval. “Dreadful news these days,” the woman said, setting the paper aside. “Quite enough for one night. Come on. Off to bed.”

  I took the table after they left. Among the papers was a copy of the New York Times International Edition, carefully refolded. I scanned the front page, curious if the story merited international coverage. The sensational headlines had mostly died down after the police and coroner made it clear that they suspected no foul play. Still—the media loved cataloging turmoil in their own world.

  It was tragic, everyone agreed on that. According to the coroner, the heart attack happened in the earliest hours of Saturday morning, not long after she returned from the office, but it took several days before the super finally broke into the apartment and discovered the body sprawled across the bedroom carpet. Her death was an eerie echo of her sister’s: the wealthy woman who lives alone, her absence unnoticed for far too long. The defibrillator in her bedroom was only ten feet away from where she collapsed, but no one was there to administer it or to call 9-1-1. And she was susceptible; she had a weak ventricle. The stories reveled in the details, the minutes and hours and days that ticked by before someone finally thought to ask, where is she?

  There was a lengthy obituary, a star-studded funeral on the Upper East Side. By now, the story had migrated to the business section.

  In Wake of Executive’s Death, a Shake-Up

  People in the office were sad, but not upset. There’s a difference. Solemn faces, teary eyes, lowered voices. But no one doubted that the ship of KCN would continue to run smoothly with Eliza Davis at the helm. Maybe even better than it had before. Big changes like this always happened suddenly. But within days, people forgot that it had ever been different.

  The article described Eliza’s long tenure at KCN. She was known as an uncompromising journalist, a beloved mentor, the secret mastermind of Rebecca Carter’s career. She would be the first African-American president of KCN, or any cable news network. In her statement, Eliza said the right things: Ginny had left big shoes to fill. In the wake of this awful tragedy, she wasn’t in any rush to make sweeping changes.

  It seemed Mr. King was, though. He appointed Eliza to King Media’s board of directors, a position Ginny had never held. Eliza was both glamorous and down-to-earth. Her husband was the chief of pediatric oncology at Columbia and they lived in a brownstone in Morningside Heights—things I never knew, and which I learned by reading the paper. Mr. King loved her. The media loved her. She was their new star. Everyone was rooting for her.

  A jingle from the front door drew my gaze. “Sorry we’re late,” Corey said.

  “Was it helpful?” I asked.

  “Very,” he said. “Everyone’s drinking beer, right?”

  While Corey went to the bar, Jamie crouched down and scratched behind the spaniel’s ears. “That’s a good girl,” he said. “Hey, so Corey’s no slouch.”

  “Not just a pretty face, right?”

  “I like him a lot.”

  I smiled. “I knew you would.”

  Corey came back with his hands triangled around three brimming pints, setting them down on the table among us. “What do we owe you?” Jamie said, taking out his wallet. But Corey waved a hand. “Never mind,” he said. “It’ll even out over the long haul.”

  “I’m getting the next round, then,” Jamie said.

  “And then me,” I said.

  Corey lifted his beer. “Who would have thought? Three rednecks like us in London. We’ve come a long way.”

  A long way. But there were still nights when I woke up in a cold sweat. Stalked by memories as vivid as reality. The slosh of waves against the boat, the arm reaching for the surface. I could soothe myself back to sleep with the thought tha
t she’d done it to herself. Repeat it like a mantra: she did it to herself. She was sloppy drunk, standing on the bow in rough ocean waters, wild with agitation. I had merely done what I should have done much earlier: stand back and let her suffer the consequences of her actions.

  But even I didn’t believe that. I had made an active decision that night on the boat, a horrifically cruel decision: that Stella didn’t deserve to be saved. That the world was better off without her. I was better off without her. In that moment, playing God, I had finally decided that there was no more room for forgiveness, that this was the last of her nine lives.

  The perverse thing was, she would have been proud of me. Finally standing up for yourself. I could imagine the bemusement in her voice. Didn’t think you had it in you. My mother, too. Violence was something she could respect. Letting Stella drown: I thought that it would cleave me from the past, distance me from the person I had been before. But sometimes I feared that it had only brought me closer to my dark, twisted roots.

  I watched Jamie and Corey talking excitedly about their upcoming trip to Baghdad, and thought about what they had done to get here. Jamie had given up a show he loved, a chance to become Rebecca’s EP after Eliza’s ascension. Corey had divorced his wife, moved from city to city, torn up a brand-new contract. It was naive to think that other people were perfectly happy. That other people didn’t feel compromise, or conflict, or sadness.

  There were things they didn’t know about me. Things they could never know about me. But they knew me better than anyone else in the world. This was how I comforted myself. If it had been Jamie on the boat that night—or Corey, or Rebecca, or Eliza—I would have hauled him out of the water immediately. I would have administered CPR, raced back to land, called 9-1-1. I would have done anything to save him.

  Food, water, warmth, shelter. These things are necessary to survive. It had taken me time to realize that people fit into this equation, too. Love fits into this equation, too. Jamie, in the empty office, holding me while I sobbed. Eliza, on my last day in New York, telling me how proud she was. There are people you cannot live without. To remember this is to remember your humanity.