Anna Pitoniak - Necessary People

“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.

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?”