Anna Pitoniak - Necessary People

“Did you just bow to her?” I said, after he came over.

“I don’t know,” he said. “These parties are confusing, okay?”

“Who is she?”

“Kind of famous, I think. I didn’t catch her name. But she’s a designer. She was friends with Andy Warhol, once upon a time.”

I laughed.

“What?” Jamie said.

“Nothing,” I said. “I just love that at this party, with a room full of models, you wind up talking to the only octogenarian.”

He smiled. “She’s the most interesting person here. Present company excluded.”

Outside the hotel, we were greeted by a cool September night. Even though it was past 2 a.m., I felt awake and alert, and strangely relieved. My two worlds had collided, and it wasn’t that bad. I took a deep, satisfied breath.

“Walk with me for a little while?” I said. “It’s such a nice night.”

As we made our way east, after a long silence, Jamie said, “So that was Stella.”

“That was Stella.”

“She’s something, isn’t she?”

“That depends on what the meaning of something is.”

“Ha ha, Bill Clinton.” He elbowed me. “Is she always like that? She’s so on. ”

“She loves an audience,” I said. “Especially a brand-new audience. You don’t know her tricks. And you’re not her friend yet. So she’ll try harder to impress you.”

“But why does she care what I think?”

“Okay, it’s like this. One time in college she was worrying about her new haircut. I told her it looked great, which it did, by the way. But she didn’t care. She said, ‘Your opinion doesn’t mean anything to me, Violet. Of course you think it looks good. You love me.’”

“Ah,” Jamie said.

“But the upside,” I said, “is that, when you get to know her, she stops trying to impress you. Because what’s the point? And then she’s a lot more fun to be around.”

After another stretch of silence, Jamie said, “Know who she reminds me of? Rebecca.”

“Rebecca Carter? ”

“It’s that energy. Rebecca’s more polished now, but she wasn’t always like that.”

“Are we talking about the same Rebecca Carter? The one who once dodged bullets in Sierra Leone?”

“You’d be surprised. You drop Stella Bradley into a war zone, I bet she does pretty well.”

It seemed like an absurd thought, on its face. Stella, a journalist?

“Her ego is already big enough. Don’t ever tell her that.” I was laughing like it was a joke. But then why did I feel a distinct ping of panic, somewhere deep in my brain?

I promised Jamie a nightcap in exchange for walking me home. Upstairs, I studied the contents of our liquor cabinet and called into the other room, “Any preferences?”

“I’ll have whatever you’re having,” he said.

When I carried two glasses of wine into the living room, Jamie was studying the photographs on the mantelpiece. Like the rest of the décor, these were selected by Anne. She’d included a few photos of me and Stella from college, but mostly the images were of the Bradley family. Jamie squinted at a towheaded Stella, aged three or four, her arms wrapped around the family’s old golden retriever. “Cute kid,” he said.

“Do you want to sit?” I said, nodding at the couch.

After we sat down, Jamie lifted his wineglass, the red liquid remaining level as his glass tilted toward mine. “To your promotion,” he said.

“God,” I said. “I’d almost forgotten.”

“It’s been a long night.”

I set my glass on the coffee table. “Thank you for coming with me,” I said. “You didn’t have to do that.”

“Are you kidding? And miss a chance to see the famous Boom Boom Room?”

Jamie set his wineglass down, too. He shifted, angling his body toward me. His knee brushed against mine. “Although it is kind of nice,” he said. “Just the two of us.”

“Oh,” I said. Suddenly seeing what was happening.

Jamie leaned in, his face growing more detailed. His freckles, his unkempt eyebrows. As he kissed me, his hand cupped the back of my head. It was gentle but deliberate, as if to show he’d been thinking about this for a long time.

It’s not that the kiss wasn’t nice. It’s not that I hadn’t occasionally considered it, given how close we’d become. But in that brief moment, his hair smelling like the cold outdoors, his lips tasting faintly of red wine, the kiss was just a kiss. Nothing more. No spark of chemistry, no jolt of excitement. An ending, rather than a beginning.

After a second, Jamie sat back. “Too fast?” he said.

I shook my head, stared at my lap. Looking him in the eye felt cruel.

“Oh,” he said. “Oh, God, Violet, I’m so sorry. Did I totally misread the situation?”

“I’m not good at this stuff,” I said.

Jamie took his hand off my knee. I wanted to be honest, but how? Because the real truth blaring through my mind, the real calculation underneath, was your career is more important than this. At best, being with Jamie would be a distraction. At worst, it would fuck everything up.

“I mean,” I continued, staring at my hands, as if the answer lay there. “We work together. And you’re one of my best friends. I’d have no clue how to navigate that.”

When I finally looked up, Jamie was shaking his head and smiling. “You’re right,” he said, a note of palpable relief in his voice. “You’re completely right. This is ironic. I always suspected you were too smart for me, and this proves it.”

“So we’re okay, then?”

“Of course,” he said.

I didn’t really have to ask. Jamie was an awful liar, and if he had been upset or embarrassed, it would have been obvious.

“Good,” I said. “Because I mean it. About being one of my best friends.”

After we said good night—Jamie texted me a simple “thank-you” from his cab—I felt a stinging flash of loss. The knowledge of what I’d just given up, of the door I had just closed. There would have been simple ways to navigate the conflict. We could tell HR. One of us could transfer to another show.

But that would mean putting my ambition second. I wanted to succeed, to prove that I could do this. I wanted that more badly than I’d ever wanted anything. The world is shaped by powerful forces—politics, finance, media—from which most people live distantly, feeling the ripple effects but never understanding the origin. In the past year, I had finally crossed a crucial threshold. I was standing on the side of actor, not acted-upon. I sensed myself getting stronger, sharper, better. But I also sensed how desire fed on itself. It ballooned inside of me, until it squeezed out room for anything else. Sometimes I wondered whether it was deforming me.

But maybe that was backwards. Maybe you had to be deformed in the first place to be capable of such blistering want. Things weren’t getting pushed out. It was that there’d never been anything else in there. Just a void, waiting to be filled.

ON A SATURDAY night in late October, Anne and Thomas had a party to celebrate their thirtieth wedding anniversary. Anne didn’t like birthdays—“They make me feel so old, ” she said, wrinkling her nose—but she did like throwing big parties. For this one, they spared no expense: they rented out the Rainbow Room, hired a twenty-piece band, and invited a hundred friends.

Stella and I were in a cab crawling north along Sixth Avenue. It would have been faster to take the subway, but after ten months of living in New York, Stella no longer believed in taking the subway. It wasn’t for her, she said, with the same dismissive conviction that her mother took toward birthdays.

“I can’t believe this is my Saturday night,” Stella said. She kept rolling the window up and down, over and over. It was raining, and I could see the cab driver flinching every time she did it.