Anna Pitoniak - Necessary People

“Who is that?” Thomas Bradley appeared in the doorway. “Oh,” he said. His disappointment matched Anne’s. “Let’s go inside, everyone. No need to put on a show for the neighbors.”

The kitchen was aromatic, saucepans on the stove and casserole dishes in the oven, Christmas music playing softly in the background. At the counter, Stella’s older brother, Oliver, was flipping through the Wall Street Journal and drinking a glass of milk. Milk! Somewhere inside my brain, I could hear Stella snorting with laughter.

Oliver smiled, smarmily. “I’m sorry your delightful friend isn’t here to greet you.”

“Oliver, please,” Thomas said.

“What? It’s true. Someone needs to apologize for her awful manners.”

“I’m still not sure what’s going on,” I said.

“They got in a fight,” Oliver said. “And then she ran away.”

Anne sighed. “She was very upset. She needed some space.”

“That was around lunchtime,” Thomas said. “Violet, we were hoping you might have heard from her. She’s not at the apartment, either. The doorman promised to call if she shows up.”

“I talked to her this morning,” I said. “Around ten, I guess? But not since then.”

“No texts? Nothing?” Anne said.

I shook my head.

The timer on the stove beeped. Anne hurried over, releasing the smell of rosemary and caramelized vegetables from the oven, and Thomas looked at his watch. “Almost seven thirty,” he said. “Our guests will be here any minute.”

“Violet, honey, you’ll want to freshen up?” Anne said, over her shoulder.

“I’m a little surprised your parents are going through with dinner,” I said to Oliver as we walked upstairs. I thought my outfit looked okay—work clothes, black pants and a cardigan—but to Anne, “freshen up” meant “put in more of an effort.”

Oliver laughed. “I thought you were more insightful than that, Violet.”

“So what exactly happened?” I said, stopping outside the guest bedroom.

“She’s a brat. What else?”

“Let’s stick to the facts,” I said. “No editorializing.”

“Well, the fact is that my parents are tired of her traveling the world and spending their money. Do you know what her credit card bill was in October? Twenty thousand dollars.”

“In one month? ”

“So they finally decided, enough. Time for Stella to settle down and get a job. The plan was for the four of us to have a civilized conversation about it over lunch. Stella saw it from a mile away. She freaked out. She said she wasn’t going to be bullied by us. And then she left.”

“Just like that?” I said. But it made sense. She hated being backed into a corner, hated being told what to do.

“My father set up an alert in case she uses her credit card. My mother is finding out whether the cell phone carrier can track her location.”

“And if that fails, they’ll get the CIA to track her down,” I said.

Oliver chuckled. “I wouldn’t put anything past my parents.”

Despite all of this, dinner was remarkably smooth. To their guests, Anne and Thomas didn’t betray that anything was wrong. “Stella decided to spend Christmas in Paris with her friends,” Anne said, as she poured the wine. “We miss her, of course, but I can’t blame her. Paris is so romantic at this time of year.”

I’d learned this during my time with the Bradley family: cognitive dissonance came easy to the wealthy. Thomas Bradley was the CEO of Bradley Pharmaceuticals, a massively profitable company founded by his grandfather, and the Bradleys had more money than they could spend in a lifetime. And yet they complained about the tax rate and the price of gasoline. They donated to Democratic candidates, but they left stingy tips for bad service when the waitress was making five bucks an hour. Wealth was not something to be spent. It was to be protected by trusts and lawyers and tax havens so that it could endure for generations to come. Part of me admired Stella’s ballsiness, in going against this. She took the money at face value: a liquid asset, meaningless in itself, that ought to be used to pursue pleasure in this lifetime.

But the truth about Stella—her hot temper and impulsive spirit—that was too coarse for dinner. The lie was better suited to the festive spirit of Christmas Eve. Anne directed the conversation like a maestro. At one point she asked me to tell the guests about my fascinating job. They leaned forward as I shared a few juicy but anonymized tidbits from KCN. The guests around the dinner table were rich and successful, but our TV stars were in a different realm: they were famous. When they died, their names would outlast them. The value I brought, as a guest, was an ability to induce a delicious feeling of schadenfreude in the Bradleys and their ilk. They loved hearing about these more famous people losing their tempers, or screwing up an interview, or slipping in the ratings.

Over time, I realized that the Bradleys may have liked me as an individual, but they loved me for what I represented. People who came from nothing, who busted their asses to get college scholarships, who hustled into a winning career. Look at me, climbing the ladder at KCN: I was a perfect example of that bootstrappy, self-reliant, equal-opportunity American spirit. (Never mind the various advantages I’d had: my skin color, my good health, my friendship with an heiress.) It allowed the Bradleys to sleep easy at night. To believe that the meritocracy functioned as it was supposed to. Their generosity was real, but Anne and Thomas took a calculated kind of pride in me, like I was proof of a successful charitable experiment, excellent ROI on the money they’d spent.

The next morning, Anne decided that enough was enough. She was calling the police.

A few hours later, the doorbell rang. There was a tall man in a dark overcoat, his face weary and rumpled as if he’d just awoken from a nap. “Detective Fazio,” he said, shaking hands with Anne and Thomas. The police had been reluctant to come, but the Bradleys loomed large in town, with their sizable annual donations to the police memorial fund.

The five of us sat in the living room. In the distance, through the wide windows, the skyline of the city rose from the gray waters of Long Island Sound. The presents beneath the twinkling tree were untouched. It felt nothing like Christmas morning.

“Mrs. Bradley, one more time, walk me through what happened yesterday,” Detective Fazio said. From the breast pocket of his coat, he took a pen and notebook.

Anne, visibly pleased by this attentiveness, repeated the story: the conversation with Stella, how she’d gotten annoyed and then angry, how she’d grabbed the car keys and bolted. Fazio nodded along. “So what should we do?” Anne said, after she’d finished.

“Just a few more questions,” Fazio said. “Has this kind of thing happened before?”

“What do you mean?” Anne said.

“Has she ever run off without telling you where she’s going?”

Thomas cleared his throat. “Yes,” he said. “A few times.”

Anne glared at her husband, but he continued. “Two or three times she ran off in high school,” Thomas said. “Always after an argument. She’d spend the night with a friend and turn up the next day. That may be what’s happening here.”

Anne shook her head. “This was different.”

“You said your name was Violet Trapp?” Fazio said to me. “One ‘p’ or two?”

“Two.”

“And you were her roommate in college?”

“That’s right.”

“And in college, did she ever run off without telling you where she went?”

“Well, there were a few times.” Fazio gestured for me to continue. “She’d disappear for the weekend with a guy she was dating. Or she’d go into the city. Usually I’d find out after the fact, when she’d call me to come get her.” The room was intensely quiet, and I was aware of how suggestible the direction of the conversation was. “But I think she just forgets,” I added. “To tell people her plans, I mean. She gets caught up in the moment.”